_Walk to Huayapa_
Curious is the psychology of Sunday. Humanity enjoying itself is on
the whole a dreary spectacle, and holidays are more disheartening than
drudgery. One makes up one’s mind: On Sundays and on _fiestas_ I will
stay at home, in the hermitage of the _patio_, with the parrots and
Corasmin and the reddening coffee-berries. I will avoid the sight of
people “enjoying themselves”--or try to, without much success.
Then comes Sunday morning, with the peculiar looseness of its sunshine.
And even if _you_ keep mum, the better-half says: Let’s go somewhere.
But, thank God, in Mexico at least one can’t set off in the “machine.”
It is a question of a meagre horse and a wooden saddle; or a donkey;
or what we called, as children, “Shanks’ pony”--the shanks referring
discourteously to one’s own legs.
We will go out of the town. “Rosalino, we are going for a walk to San
Felipe de las Aguas. Do you want to go, and carry the basket?”
“_Come no, Señor?_”
It is Rosalino’s inevitable answer, as inevitable as the parrot’s
“Perro!” “_Come no, Señor?_”--“How not, Señor?”
The Norte, the north-wind, was blowing last night, rattling the
worm-chewed window-frames.
“Rosalino, I am afraid you will be cold in the night.”
“_Come no, Señor?_”
“Would you like a blanket?”
“_Come no, Señor?_”
“With this you will be warm?”
“_Come no, Señor?_”
But the morning is perfect; in a moment we are clear out of the town.
Most towns in Mexico, saving the capital, end in themselves, at once.
As if they had been lowered from heaven in a napkin, and deposited,
rather foreign, upon the wild plain. So we walk round the wall of the
church and the huge old monastery enclosure that is now barracks for
the scrap-heap soldiery, and at once there are the hills.
“I will lift up my eyes until the hills, whence cometh my strength.”
At least one can always do _that_, in Mexico. In a stride, the town
passes away. Before us lies the gleaming, pinkish-ochre of the valley
flat, wild and exalted with sunshine. On the left, quite near,
bank the stiffly pleated mountains, all the foot-hills, that press
savannah-coloured into the savannah of the valley. The mountains are
clothed smokily with pine, _ocote_, and, like a woman in a gauze
_rebozo_, they rear in a rich blue fume that is almost cornflower-blue
in the clefts. It is their characteristic, that they are darkest-blue
at the top. Like some splendid lizard with a wavering, royal-blue crest
down the ridge of his back, and pale belly, and soft, pinky-fawn claws,
on the plain.
Between the pallor of the claws, a dark spot of trees, and white dots
of a church with twin towers. Further away, along the foot-hills, a few
scattered trees, white dot and stroke of a _hacienda_, and a green,
green square of sugar-cane. Further off still, at the mouth of a cleft
of a canyon, a dense little green patch of trees, and two spots of
proud church.
“Rosalino, which is San Felipe?”
“_Quien sabe, Señor?_” says Rosalino, looking at the villages beyond
the sun of the savannah with black, visionless eyes. In his voice is
the inevitable flat resonance of aloofness, touched with resignation,
as if to say: It is not becoming to a man to know these things.--Among
the Indians it is not becoming to know anything, not even one’s own
name.
Rosalino is a mountain boy, an Indian from a village two days’ walk
away. But he has been two years in the little city, and has learnt his
modicum of Spanish.
“Have you never been to any of these villages?”
“No, Señor, I never went.”
“Didn’t you want to?”
“_Come no, Señor?_”
The Americans would call him a dumb-bell.
We decide for the farthest speck of a village in a dark spot of trees.
It lies so magical, alone, tilted on the fawn-pink slope, again as if
the dark-green napkin with a few white tiny buildings had been lowered
from heaven and left, there at the foot of the mountains, with the
deep groove of a canyon slanting in behind. So alone and, as it were,
detached from the world in which it lies, a spot.
Nowhere more than in Mexico does human life become isolated, external
to its surroundings, and cut off tinily from the environment. Even as
you come across the plain to a big city like Guadalajara, and see the
twin towers of the cathedral peering around in loneliness like two lost
birds side by side on a moor, lifting their white heads to look around
in the wilderness, your heart gives a clutch, feeling the pathos, the
isolated tininess of human effort. As for building a church with one
tower only, it is unthinkable. There must be two towers, to keep each
other company in this wilderness world.
The morning is still early, the brilliant sun does not burn too much.
To-morrow is the shortest day. The savannah valley is shadeless,
spotted only with the thorny ravel of _mesquite_ bushes. Down the
trail that has worn grooves in the turf--the rock is near the
surface--occasional donkeys with a blue-hooded woman perched on top
come tripping in silence, twinkling, a shadow. Just occasional women
taking a few vegetables to market. Practically no men. It is Sunday.
Rosalino, prancing behind with the basket, plucks up his courage to
speak to one of the women passing on a donkey. “Is that San Felipe
where we are going?”--“No, that is not San Felipe.”--“What, then, is it
called?”--“It is called Huayapa.”--“Which, then, is San Felipe?”--“That
one”--and she points to her right.
They have spoken to each other in half-audible, crushed tones, as they
always do, the woman on the donkey and the woman with her on foot
swerving away from the basket-carrying Rosalino. They all swerve away
from us, as if we were potential bold brigands. It really gets one’s
pecker up. The presence of the Señora only half reassures them. For the
Señora, in a plain hat of bluey-green woven grass, and a dress of white
cotton with black squares on it, is almost a monster of unusualness.
_Prophet art thou, bird, or devil?_ the women seem to say, as they look
at her with keen black eyes. I think they choose to decide she is more
of the last.
The women look at the woman, the men look at the man. And always with
that same suspicious, enquiring, wondering look, the same with which
Edgar Allen Poe must have looked at his momentous raven:
“_Prophet art thou, bird, or devil?_”
_Devil, then, to please you!_ one longs to answer, in a tone of
_Nevermore_.
Ten o’clock, and the sun getting hot. Not a spot of shade, apparently,
from here to Huayapa. The blue getting thinner on the mountains, and an
indiscernible vagueness, of too much light, descending on the plain.
The road suddenly dips into a little crack, where runs a creek. This
again is characteristic of these parts of America. Water keeps out
of sight. Even the biggest rivers, even the tiny brooks. You look
across a plain on which the light sinks down, and you think: Dry! Dry!
Absolutely dry! You travel along, and suddenly come to a crack in the
earth, and a little stream is running in a little walled-in valley bed,
where is a half-yard of green turf, and bushes, the _palo-blanco_ with
leaves, and with big white flowers like pure white, crumpled cambric.
Or you may come to a river a thousand feet below, sheer below you. But
not in this valley. Only the stream.
“Shade!” says the Señora, subsiding under a steep bank.
“_Mucho calor!_” says Rosalino, taking off his extra-jaunty straw hat,
and subsiding with the basket.
Down the slope are coming two women on donkeys. Seeing the terrible
array of three people sitting under a bank, they pull up.
“_Adios!_” I say, with firm resonance.
“_Adios!_” says the Señora, with diffidence.
“_Adios!_” says the reticent Rosalino, his voice the shadow of ours.
“_Adios! Adios! Adios!_” say the women, in suppressed voices, swerving,
neutral, past us on their self-contained, sway-eared asses.
When they have passed, Rosalino looks at me to see if I shall laugh.
I give a little grin, and he gives me back a great explosive grin,
throwing back his head in silence, opening his wide mouth and showing
his soft pink tongue, looking along his cheeks with his saurian black
eyes, in an access of _farouche_ derision.
A great hawk, like an eagle, with white bars at the end of its wings,
sweeps low over us, looking for snakes. One can hear the hiss of its
pinions.
“_Gabilan_,” says Rosalino.
“What is it called in the _idioma_?”
“_Psia!_”--He makes the consonants explode and hiss.
“Ah!” says the Señora. “One hears it in the wings. _Psia!_”
“Yes,” says Rosalino, with black eyes of incomprehension.
Down the creek, two native boys, little herdsmen, are bathing,
stooping with knees together and throwing water over themselves,
rising, gleaming dark coffee-red in the sun, wetly. They are very dark,
and their wet heads are so black, they seem to give off a bluish light,
like dark electricity.
The great cattle they are tending slowly plunge through the bushes,
coming up-stream. At the place where the path fords the stream, a great
ox stoops to drink. Comes a cow after him, and a calf, and a young
bull. They all drink a little at the stream, their noses delicately
touching the water. And then the young bull, horns abranch, stares
fixedly, with some of the same Indian wonder-and-suspicion stare, at us
sitting under the bank.
Up jumps the Señora, proceeds uphill, trying to save her dignity. The
bull, slowly leaning into motion, moves across-stream like a ship
unmoored. The bathing-lad on the bank is hastily fastening his calico
pantaloons round his ruddy-dark waist. The Indians have a certain rich
physique, even this lad. He comes running short-step down the bank,
uttering a bird-like whoop, his dark hair gleaming bluish. Stooping
for a moment to select a stone, he runs athwart the bull, and aims the
stone sideways at him. There is a thud, the ponderous, adventurous
young animal swerves docilely round towards the stream. “_Becerro!_”
cries the boy, in his bird-like, piping tone, selecting a stone to
throw at the calf.
We proceed in the blazing sun up the slope. There is a white line
at the foot of the trees. It looks like water running white over a
weir. The supply of the town water comes this way. Perhaps this is a
reservoir. A sheet of water! How lovely it would be, in this country,
if there was a sheet of water with a stream running out of it! And
those dense trees of Huayapa behind.
“What is that white, Rosalino? Is it water?”
“_El blanco? Si, agua, Señora_,” says that dumb-bell.
Probably, if the Señora had said: Is it milk? he would have replied in
exactly the same way: _Si, es leche, Señora!_--Yes, it’s milk.
Hot, silent, walking only amidst a weight of light, out of which one
hardly sees, we climb the spurs towards the dark trees. And as we draw
nearer, the white slowly resolves into a broken, whitewashed wall.
“Oh!” exclaims the Señora, in real disappointment. “It isn’t water!
It’s a wall!”
“_Si, Señora. Es panteón._” (They call a cemetery a _panteón_, down
here.)
“It is a cemetery,” announces Rosalino, with a certain ponderous,
pleased assurance, and without afterthought. But when I suddenly laugh
at the absurdity, he also gives a sudden broken yelp of laughter.--They
laugh as if it were against their will, as if it hurt them, giving
themselves away.
It was nearing midday. At last we got into a shady lane, in which
were puddles of escaped irrigation-water. The ragged semi-squalor of
a half-tropical lane, with naked trees sprouting into spiky scarlet
flowers, and bushes with biggish yellow flowers, sitting rather wearily
on their stems, led to the village.
We were entering Huayapa. _Iª Calle de las Minas_, said an old notice.
_Iª Calle de las Minas_, said a new, brand-new, notice, as if in
confirmation. _First Street of the Mines._ And every street had the
same old and brand-new notice: 1st. Street of the Magnolia: 4th Street
of Enriquez Gonzalez: very fine!
But the First Street of the Mines was just a track between the stiff
living fence of organ cactus, with _poinsettia_ trees holding up
scarlet mops of flowers, and mango trees, tall and black, stonily
drooping the strings of unripe fruit. The Street of the Magnolia was
a rocky stream-gutter, disappearing to nowhere from nowhere, between
cactus and bushes. The Street of the Vasquez was a stony stream-bed,
emerging out of tall, wildly tall reeds.
Not a soul anywhere. Through the fences, half-deserted gardens of trees
and banana plants, each enclosure with a half-hidden hut of black adobe
bricks crowned with a few old tiles for a roof, and perhaps a new wing
made of twigs. Everything hidden, secret, silent. A sense of darkness
among the silent mango trees, a sense of lurking, of unwillingness.
Then actually some half-bold curs barking at us across the stile of
one garden, a forked bough over which one must step to enter the
chicken-bitten enclosure. And actually a man crossing the proudly
labelled: Fifth Street of the Independence.
If there were no churches to mark a point in these villages, there
would be nowhere at all to make for. The sense of nowhere is intense,
between the dumb and repellent living fence of cactus. But the
Spaniards, in the midst of these black, mud-brick huts, have inevitably
reared the white twin-towered magnificence of a big and lonely,
hopeless church; and where there is a church there will be a _plaza_.
And a _plaza_ is a _zocalo_, a hub. Even though the wheel does not go
round, a hub is still a hub. Like the old Forum.
So we stray diffidently on, in the maze of streets which are only
straight tracks between cactuses, till we see _Reforma_, and at the end
of _Reforma_, the great church.
In front of the church is a rocky _plaza_ leaking with grass, with
water rushing into two big, oblong stone basins. The great church
stands rather ragged, in a dense forlornness, for all the world like
some big white human being, in rags, held captive in a world of ants.
On the uphill side of the _plaza_, a long low white building with a
shed in front, and under the shed, crowding, all the short-statured men
of the _pueblo_, in their white cotton clothes and big hats. They are
listening to something: but the silence is heavy, furtive, secretive.
They stir like white-clad insects.
Rosalino looks sideways at them, and sheers away. Even we lower our
voices to ask what is going on. Rosalino replies, _sotto voce_,
that they are making _asuntos_. But what business? we insist. The
dark faces of the little men under the big hats look round at us
suspiciously, like dark gaps in the atmosphere. Our alien presence,
in this vacuous village, is like the sound of a drum in a churchyard.
Rosalino mumbles unintelligibly. We stray across the forlorn yard into
the church.
Thursday was the day of the Virgin of the Soledad, so the church is
littered with flowers, sprays of wild yellow flower trailing on the
floor. There is a great Gulliver’s Travels fresco picture of an angel
having a joy-ride on the back of a Goliath. On the left, near the altar
steps, is seated a life-size Christ--undersized; seated upon a little
table, wearing a pair of woman’s frilled knickers, a little mantle of
purple silk dangling from His back, and His face bent forward gazing
fatuously at His naked knee, which emerges from the needlework frill
of the drawers. Across from Him a living woman is half-hidden behind a
buttress, mending something, sewing.
We sit silent, motionless, in the whitewashed church ornamented with
royal blue and bits of gilt. A barefoot Indian with a high-domed head
comes in and kneels with his legs close together, his back stiff, at
once very humble and resistant. His cotton jacket and trousers are
long-unwashed rag, the colour of dry earth, and torn, so that one sees
smooth pieces of brown thigh, and brown back. He kneels in a sort of
intense fervour for a minute, then gets up and childishly, almost
idiotically, begins to take the pieces of candle from the candlesticks.
He is the Verger.
Outside, the gang of men is still pressing under the shed. We insist on
knowing what is going on. Rosalino, looking sideways at them, plucks up
courage to say plainly that the two men at the table are canvassing for
votes: for the Government, for the State, for a new governor, whatever
it may be. Votes! Votes! Votes! The farce of it! Already on the wall
of the low building, on which one sees, in blue letters, the word
_Justizia_, there are pasted the late political posters, with the loud
announcement: Vote For This Mark [Illustration: Two concentric circles
with center dot]. Or another: Vote For This Mark [Illustration: Circle
with center dot].
My dear fellow, this is when democracy becomes real fun. You vote for
one red ring inside another red ring, and you get a Julio Echegaray.
You vote for a blue dot inside a blue ring, and you get a Socrate
Ezequiel Tos. Heaven knows what you get for the two little red circles
on top of one another [Illustration: Two circles arranged vertically].
Suppose we vote, and try. There’s all sorts in the lucky bag. There
might come a name like Peregrino Zenon Cocotilla.
Independence! Government by the People, of the People, for the People!
We all live in the Calle de la Reforma, in Mexico.
On the bottom of the _plaza_ is a shop. We want some fruit. “_Hay
frutas?_ Oranges or bananas?”--“No, Señor.”--“No fruits?”--“_No
hay!_”--“Can I buy a cup?”--“_No hay._”--“Can I buy a _jicara_, a
gourd-shell that we might drink from?” “_No hay._”
_No hay_ means _there isn’t any_, and it’s the most regular sound made
by the prevailing dumb-bells of the land.
“What is there, then?” A sickly grin. There are, as a matter of fact,
candles, soap, dead and withered chiles, a few dried grasshoppers,
dust, and stark, bare wooden pigeon-holes. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Next-door is another little hole of a shop. _Hay frutas?_--_No
hay._--_Qué hay?_--_Hay tepache!_
“_Para borracharse_,” says Rosalino, with a great grin.
_Tepache_ is a fermented drink of pineapple rinds and brown sugar: to
get drunk on, as Rosalino says. But mildly drunk. There is probably
_mescal_ too, to get brutally drunk on.
The village is exhausted in resource. But we insist on fruit. Where,
_where_ can I buy oranges and bananas? I see oranges on the trees, I
see banana plants.
“Up there!” The woman waves with her hand as if she were cutting the
air upwards.
“That way?”
“Yes.”
We go up the Street of Independence. They have got rid of us from the
_plaza_.
Another black hut with a yard, and orange-trees beyond.
“_Hay frutas?_”
“_No hay._”
“Not an orange, nor a banana?”
“_No hay._”
We go on. _She_ has got rid of us. We descend the black rocky steps to
the stream, and up the other side, past the high reeds. There is a yard
with heaps of maize in a shed, and tethered bullocks: and a bare-bosom,
black-browed girl.
“_Hay frutas?_”
“_No hay._”
“But yes! There are oranges--there!”
She turns and looks at the oranges on the trees at the back, and
imbecilely answers:
“_No hay._”
It is a choice between killing her and hurrying away.
We hear a drum and a whistle. It is down a rocky black track that calls
itself The Street of Benito Juarez: the same old gent who stands for
all this obvious Reform, and Vote for [Illustration: Two concentric
circles].
A yard with shade round. Women kneading the maize dough, _masa_, for
_tortillas_. A man lounging. And a little boy beating a kettledrum
sideways, and a big man playing a little reedy wooden whistle, rapidly,
endlessly, disguising the tune of _La Cucuracha_. They won’t play a
tune unless they can render it almost unrecognisable.
“_Hay frutas?_”
“_No hay._”
“Then what is happening here?”
A sheepish look, and no answer.
“Why are you playing music?”
“It is a _fiesta_.”
My God, a feast! That weary _masa_, a millstone in the belly. And for
the rest, the blank, heavy, dark-grey barrenness, like an adobe brick.
The drum-boy rolls his big Indian eyes at us, and beats on, though
filled with consternation. The flute man glances, is half appalled and
half resentful, so he blows harder. The lounging man comes and mutters
to Rosalino, and Rosalino mutters back, four words.
Four words in the _idioma_, the Zapotec language. We retire, pushed
silently away.
“What language do they speak here, Rosalino?”
“The _idioma_.”
“You understand them? It is Zapoteca, same as your language?”
“Yes, Señor.”
“Then why do you always speak in Spanish to them?”
“Because they don’t speak the _idioma_ of my village.”
He means, presumably, that there are dialect differences. Anyhow, he
asserts his bit of Spanish, and says _Hay frutas?_
It was like a _posada_. It was like the Holy Virgin on Christmas Eve,
wandering from door to door looking for a lodging in which to bear her
child: Is there a room here? _No hay!_
The same with us. _Hay frutas?_ _No hay!_ We went down every straight
ant-run of that blessed village. But at last we pinned a good-natured
woman. “Now tell us, _where_ can we buy oranges? We see them on the
trees. We want them to eat.”
“Go,” she said, “to Valentino Ruiz. He has oranges. Yes, he has
oranges, and he sells them.” And she cut the air upwards with her hand.
From black hut to black hut went we, till at last we got to the house
of Valentino Ruiz. And lo! it was the yard with the _fiesta_. The
lounging man was peeping out of the gateless gateway, as we came, at us.
“It is the same place!” cried Rosalino, with a laugh of bashful agony.
But we don’t belong to the ruling race for nothing. Into the yard we
march.
“Is this the house of Valentino Ruiz? _Hay naranjas?_ Are there
oranges?”
We had wandered so long, and asked so often, that the _masa_ was made
into _tortillas_, the _tortillas_ were baked, and a group of people
were sitting in a ring on the ground, eating them. It was the _fiesta_.
At my question up jumped a youngish man, and a woman, as if they had
been sitting on a scorpion each.
“Oh, Señor,” said the woman, “there are few oranges, and they are not
ripe, as the Señor would want them. But pass this way.”
We pass up to the garden, past the pink roses, to a little orange-tree,
with a few yellowish-green oranges.
“You see, they are not ripe as you will want them,” says the youngish
man.
“They will do.” Tropical oranges are always green. These, we found
later, were almost insipidly sweet.
Even then, I can only get three of the big, thick-skinned, greenish
oranges. But I spy sweet limes, and insist on having five or six of
these.
He charges me three cents apiece for the oranges: the market price is
two for five cents: and one cent each for the _limas_.
“In my village,” mutters Rosalino when we get away, “oranges are five
for one cent.”
Never mind! It is one o’clock. Let us get out of the village, where the
water will be safe, and eat lunch.
In the _plaza_, the men are just dispersing, one gang coming down the
hill. They watch us as if we were coyote, a zopilote, and a white
she-bear walking together in the street.
“_Adios!_”
“_Adios!_” comes the low roll of reply, like a roll of cannon shot.
The water rushes downhill in a stone gutter beside the road. We climb
up the hill, up the Street of the Camomile, alongside the rushing
water. At one point it crosses the road unchannelled, and we wade
through it. It is the village drinking supply.
At the juncture of the roads, where the water crosses, another silent
white gang of men. Again: _Adios!_ and again the low, musical, deep
volley of _Adios!_
Up, up wearily. We must get above the village to be able to drink the
water without developing typhoid.
At last, the last house, the naked hills. We follow the water across
a dry maize-field, then up along a bank. Below is a quite deep gully.
Across is an orchard, and some women with baskets of fruit.
“_Hay frutas?_” calls Rosalino, in a half-voice. He is getting bold.
“_Hay_,” says an old woman, in the curious half-voice. “But not ripe.”
Shall we go down into the gully into the shade? No; someone is bathing
among the reeds below, and the aqueduct water rushes along in the
gutter here above. On, on, till we spy a wild guava tree over the
channel of water. At last we can sit down and eat and drink, on a bank
of dry grass, under the wild guava tree.
We put the bottle of lemonade in the aqueduct to cool. I scoop out a
big half-orange, the thick rind of which makes a cup.
“Look, Rosalino! The cup!”
“_La taza!_” he cries, soft-tongued, with a bark of laughter and
delight.
And one drinks the soft, rather lifeless, warmish Mexican water. But it
is pure.
Over the brink of the water-channel is the gully, and a noise--chock,
chock! I go to look. It is a woman, naked to the hips, standing washing
her other garments upon a stone. She has a beautiful full back, of a
deep orange colour, and her wet hair is divided and piled. In the water
a few yards up-stream two men are sitting naked, their brown-orange
giving off a glow in the shadow, also washing their clothes. Their
wet hair seems to steam blue-blackness. Just above them is a sort of
bridge, where the water divides, the channel-water taken from the
little river, and led along the top of the bank.
We sit under the wild guava tree in silence, and eat. The old woman
of the fruit, with naked breast and coffee-brown naked arms, her
under-garment fastened on one shoulder, round her waist an old striped
_sarape_ for a skirt, and on her head a blue _rebozo_ piled against the
sun, comes marching down the aqueduct with black bare feet, holding
three or four _chirimoyas_ to her bosom. _Chirimoyas_ are green
custard-apples.
She lectures us, in slow, heavy Spanish:
“This water, here, is for drinking. The other, below, is for washing.
This, you drink, and you don’t wash in it. The other, you wash in, and
you don’t drink it.” And she looked inquisitively at the bottle of
lemonade, cooling.
“Very good. We understand.”
Then she gave us the _chirimoyas_. I asked her to change the _peso_: I
had no change.
“No, Señor,” she said. “No, Señor. You don’t pay me. I bring you these,
and may you eat well. But the _chirimoyas_ are not ripe: in two or
three days they will be ripe. Now, they are not. In two or three days
they will be. Now, they are not. You can’t eat them yet. But I make a
gift of them to you, and may you eat well. Farewell. Remain with God.”
She marched impatiently off along the aqueduct.
Rosalino waited to catch my eye. Then he opened his mouth and showed
his pink tongue and swelled out his throat like a cobra, in a silent
laugh after the old woman.
“But,” he said in a low tone, “the _chirimoyas_ are not good ones.”
And again he swelled in the silent, delighted, derisive laugh.
He was right. When we came to eat them, three days later, the
custard-apples all had worms in them, and hardly any white meat.
“The old woman of Huayapa,” said Rosalino, reminiscent.
However, she had got the bottle. When we had drunk the lemonade,
we sent Rosalino to give her the empty wine-bottle, and she made
him another sententious little speech. But to her the bottle was a
treasure.
And I, going round the little hummock behind the wild guava tree, to
throw away the papers of the picnic, came upon a golden-brown young man
with his shirt just coming down over his head, but over no more of him.
Hastily retreating, I thought again what beautiful, suave, rich skins
these people have; a sort of richness of the flesh. It goes, perhaps,
with the complete absence of what we call “spirit.”
We lay still for a time, looking at the tiny guavas and the perfect,
soft, high blue sky overhead, where the hawks and the ragged-winged
_zopilotes_ sway and diminish. A long, hot way home. But _mañana es
otro dia_. To-morrow is another day. And even the next five minutes are
far enough away, in Mexico, on a Sunday afternoon.