Then he looked away into the distance, with a certain hauteur and
insolence.
“Very different, no?” he said. “But in some ways, the same. He knows
better what is Mexico. He knows better what I am. Bishop Severn did not
know the real Mexico: how could he, he was a sincere Catholic! But Don
Ramón knows the real Mexico, no?”
“And what is the real Mexico?” she asked.
“Well--you must ask Don Ramón. I can’t explain.”
She asked Cipriano about going to the lake.
“Yes!” he said. “You can go! You will like it. Go first to Orilla,
no?--you take a ticket on the railway to Ixtlahuacan. And in Orilla
is an hotel with a German manager. Then from Orilla you can go in a
motor-boat, in a few hours, to Sayula. And there you will find a house
to live in.”
He wanted her to do this, she could tell.
“How far is Don Ramón’s hacienda from Sayula?” she asked.
“Near! About an hour in a boat. He is there now. And at the beginning
of the month I am going with my division to Guadalajara: now there is a
new Governor. So I shall be quite near too.”
“That will be nice,” she said.
“You think so?” he asked quickly.
“Yes,” she said, on her guard, looking at him slowly. “I should be
sorry to lose touch with Don Ramón and you.”
He had a little tension on his brow, haughty, unwilling, conceited, and
at the same time, yearning and desirous.
“You like Don Ramón very much?” he said. “You want to know him more?”
There was a peculiar anxiety in his voice.
“Yes,” she said. “One knows so few people in the world nowadays, that
one can respect--and fear a little. I am a little afraid of Don Ramón:
and I have the _greatest_ respect for him--” she ended on a hot note of
sincerity.
“It is good!” he said. “It is very good. You may respect him more than
any other man in the world.”
“Perhaps that is true,” she said, turning her eyes slowly to his.
“Yes! Yes!” he cried impatiently. “It is true. You will find out later.
And Ramón likes you. He told me to ask you to come to the lake. When
you come to Sayula, when you are coming, write to him, and no doubt he
can tell you about a house, and all those things.”
“Shall I?” she said, hesitant.
“Yes. Yes! of course, we say what we mean.”
Curious little man, with his odd, inflammable hauteur and conceit,
something burning inside him, that gave him no peace. He had an almost
childish faith in the other man. And yet she was not sure that he did
not, in some corner of his soul, resent Ramón somewhat.
Kate set off by the night train for the west, with Villiers. The one
Pullman coach was full: people going to Guadalajara and Colima and
the coast. There were three military officers, rather shy in their
new uniforms, and rather swaggering at the same time, making eyes at
the empty air, as if they felt they were conspicuous, and sitting
quickly in their seats, as if to obliterate themselves. There were
two country farmers or ranchers, in tight trousers and cartwheel hats
stitched with silver. One was a tall man with a big moustache, the
other was smaller, grey man. But they both had the handsome, alive
legs of the Mexicans, and the rather quenched faces. There was a
widow buried in crape, accompanied by a criada, a maid. The rest were
townsmen, Mexicans on business, at once shy and fussy, unobtrusive and
self-important.
The Pullman was clean and neat, with its hot green-plush seats. But,
full of people, it seemed empty compared with a Pullman in the United
States. Everybody was very quiet, very soft and guarded. The farmers
folded their beautiful sarapes and laid them carefully on the seats,
sitting as if their section were a lonely little place. The officers
folded their cloaks and arranged dozens of little parcels, little
cardboard hatboxes and heterogeneous bundles, under the seats and on
the seats. The business men had the oddest luggage, canvas hold-alls
embroidered in wool, with long, touching mottoes.
And in all the crowd, a sense of guardedness and softness and
self-effacement: a curious soft _sensibilité_, touched with fear. It
was already a somewhat conspicuous thing to travel in the Pullman, you
had to be on your guard.
The evening for once was grey: the rainy season really approaching.
A sudden wind whirled dust and a few spots of rain. The train drew
out of the formless, dry, dust-smitten areas fringing the city, and
wound mildly on for a few minutes, only to stop in the main street of
Tacubaya, the suburb-village. In the grey approach of evening the train
halted heavily in the street, and Kate looked out at the men who stood
in groups, with their hats tilted against the wind and their blankets
folded over their shoulders and up to their eyes, against the dust,
motionless standing like sombre ghosts, only a glint of eyes showing
between the dark sarape and the big hat-brim; while donkey-drivers
in a dust-cloud ran frantically, with uplifted arms like demons,
uttering short, sharp cries to prevent their donkeys from poking in
between the coaches of the train. Silent dogs trotted in-and-out under
the train, women, their faces wrapped in their blue rebozos, came to
offer tortillas folded in a cloth to keep them warm, or pulque in
an earthenware mug, or pieces of chicken smothered in red, thick,
oily sauce; or oranges or bananas or pitahayas, anything. And when
few people bought, because of the dust, the women put their wares
under their arm, under the blue rebozo, and covered their faces and
motionless watched the train.
It was about six o’clock. The earth was utterly dry and stale. Somebody
was kindling charcoal in front of a house. Men were hurrying down the
wind, balancing their great hats curiously. Horsemen on quick, fine
little horses, guns slung behind, trotted up to the train, lingered,
then trotted quickly away again into nowhere.
Still the train stood in the street. Kate and Villiers got down. They
watched the sparks blowing from the charcoal which a little girl was
kindling in the street, to cook tortillas.
The train had a second-class coach and a first-class. The second class
was jam-full of peasants, Indians, piled in like chickens with their
bundles and baskets and bottles, endless things. One woman had a fine
peacock under her arm. She put it down and in vain tried to suppress it
beneath her voluminous skirts. It refused to be suppressed. She took it
up and balanced it on her knee, and looked round again over the medley
of jars, baskets, pumpkins, melons, guns, bundles and human beings.
In the front was a steel car with a guard of little scrubby soldiers in
their dirty cotton uniforms. Some soldiers were mounted on top of the
train with their guns: the look-out.
And the whole train, seething with life, was curiously still, subdued.
Perhaps it is the perpetual sense of danger which makes the people
so hushed, without clamour or stridency. And with an odd, hushed
politeness among them. A sort of demon-world.
At last the train moved on. If it had waited forever, no one would have
been deeply surprised. For what might not be ahead? Rebels, bandits,
bridges blown up--anything.
However, quietly, stealthily, the train moved out and along the great
weary valley. The circling mountains, so relentless, were invisible
save near at hand. In a few broken adobe huts, a bit of fire sparked
red. The adobe was grey-black, of the lava dust, depressing. Into the
distance the fields spread dry, with here and there patches of green
irrigation. There was a broken hacienda with columns that supported
nothing. Darkness was coming, dust still blew in the shadow; the valley
seemed encompassed in a dry, stale, weary gloom.
Then there came a heavy shower. The train was passing a pulque
hacienda. The rows of the giant maguey stretched bristling their
iron-black barbs in the gloom.
All at once, the lights came on, the Pullman attendant came swiftly
lowering the blinds, so that the brilliance of the windows should
attract no bullets from the dark outside.
There was a poor little meal at exorbitant prices, and when this was
cleared away, the attendant came with a clash to make the beds, pulling
down the upper berths. It was only eight o’clock, and the passengers
looked up in resentment. But no good. The pug-faced Mexican in
charge, and his small-pox-pitted assistant insolently came in between
the seats, inserted the key overhead, and brought down the berth
with a crash. And the Mexican passengers humbly crawled away to the
smoking-room or the toilet, like whipped dogs.
At half-past eight everybody was silently and with intense discretion
going to bed. None of the collar-stud-snapping bustle and “homely”
familiarity of the United States. Like subdued animals they all crept
in behind their green serge curtains.
Kate hated a Pullman, the discreet indiscretion, the horrible nearness
of other people, like so many larvae in so many sections, behind the
green serge curtains. Above all, the horrible intimacy of the noise
of going to bed. She hated to undress, struggling in the oven of her
berth, with her elbow butting into the stomach of the attendant who was
buttoning up the green curtain outside.
And yet, once she was in bed and could put out her light and raise
the window blind, she had to admit it was better than a _wagon-lit_
in Europe: and perhaps the best that can be done for people who must
travel through the night in trains.
There was a rather cold wind, after the rain, up there on that high
plateau. The moon had risen, the sky was clear. Rocks, and tall organ
cactus, and more miles of maguey. Then the train stopped at a dark
little station on the rim of the slope, where men swathed in dark
sarapes held dusky, ruddy lanterns that lit up no faces at all, only
dark gaps. Why did the train stay so long? Was something wrong?
At last they were going again. Under the moon she saw beyond her a long
downslope of rocks and cactus, and in the distance below, the lights
of a town. She lay in her berth watching the train wind slowly down the
wild, rugged slope. Then she dozed.
To wake at a station that looked like a quiet inferno, with dark faces
coming near the windows, glittering eyes in the half-light, women
in their rebozos running along the train balancing dishes of meat,
tamales, tortillas on one hand, black-faced men with fruit and sweets,
and all calling in a subdued, intense, hushed hubbub. Strange and
glaring, she saw eyes at the dark screen of the Pullman, sudden hands
thrusting up something to sell. In fear, Kate dropped her window. The
wire screen was not enough.
The platform below the Pullman all was dark. But at the back of the
train she could see the glare of the first-class windows, on the dark
station. And a man selling sweetmeats--_Cajetas! Cajetas! La de Celaya!_
She was safe inside the Pullman, with nothing to do but to listen to
an occasional cough behind the green curtains, and to feel the faint
bristling apprehension of all the Mexicans in their dark berths. The
dark Pullman was full of a subdued apprehension, fear lest there might
be some attack on the train.
She went to sleep and woke at a bright station: probably Queretaro.
The green trees looked theatrical in the electric light. _Opales!_ she
heard the men calling softly. If Owen had been there he would have got
up in his pyjamas to buy opals. The call would have been too strong.
She slept fitfully, in the shaken saloon, vaguely aware of stations and
the deep night of the open country. Then she started from a complete
sleep. The train was dead still, no sound. Then a tremendous jerking as
the Pullman was shunted. It must be Irapuato, where they branched to
the west.
She would arrive at Ixtlahuacan soon after six in the morning. The
man woke her at daybreak, before the sun had risen. Dry country with
mesquite bushes, in the dawn: then green wheat alternating with ripe
wheat. And men already in the pale, ripened wheat reaping with sickles,
cutting short little handfuls from the short straw. A bright sky, with
a bluish shadow on earth. Parched slopes with ragged maize stubble.
Then a forlorn hacienda and a man on horseback, in a blanket, driving
a silent flock of cows, sheep, bulls, goats, lambs, rippling a bit
ghostly in the dawn, from under a tottering archway. A long canal
beside the railway, a long canal paved with bright green leaves from
which poked the mauve heads of the lirio, the water hyacinth. The sun
was lifting up, red. In a moment, it was the full, dazzling gold of a
Mexican morning.
Kate was dressed and ready, sitting facing Villiers, when they came to
Ixtlahuacan. The man carried out her bags. The train drifted in to a
desert of a station. They got down. It was a new day.
In the powerful light of morning, under a turquoise blue sky, she gazed
at the helpless-looking station, railway lines, some standing trucks,
and a remote lifelessness. A boy seized their bags and ran across
the lines to the station yard, which was paved with cobble stones,
but overgrown with weeds. At one side stood an old tram-car with two
mules, like a relic. One or two men, swathed up to the eyes in scarlet
blankets, were crossing on silent white legs.
“Adonde?” said the boy.
But Kate went to see her big luggage taken out. It was all there.
“Orilla Hotel,” said Kate.
The boy said they must go in the tram-car, so in the tram-car they
went. The driver whipped his mules, they rolled in the still, heavy
morning light away down an uneven, cobbled road with holes in it,
between walls with falling mortar and low, black adobe houses, in
the peculiar _vacuous_ depression of a helpless little Mexican town,
towards the plaza. The strange emptiness, everything empty of life!
Occasional men on horseback clattered suddenly by, occasional big men
in scarlet sarapes went noiselessly on their own way, under the big
hats. A boy on a high mule was delivering milk from red globe-shaped
jars slung on either side his mount. The street was stony, uneven,
vacuous, sterile. The stones seemed dead, the town seemed made of dead
stone. The human life came with a slow, sterile unwillingness, in spite
of the low-hung power of the sun.
At length they were in the plaza, where brilliant trees flowered in a
blaze of pure scarlet, and some in pure lavender, around the basins of
milky-looking water. Milky-dim the water bubbled up in the basins, and
women, bleary with sleep, uncombed, came from under the delapidated
arches of the portales, and across the broken pavement, to fill their
water-jars.
The tram stopped and they got down. The boy got down with the bags, and
told them they must go to the river to take a boat.
They followed obediently down the smashed pavements, where every moment
you might twist your ankle or break your leg. Everywhere the same weary
indifference and brokenness, a sense of dirt and of helplessness,
squalor of far-gone indifference, under the perfect morning sky, in the
pure sunshine and the pure Mexican air. The sense of life ebbing away,
leaving dry ruin.
They came to the edge of the town, to a dusty, humped bridge, a broken
wall, a pale-brown stream flowing full. Below the bridge a cluster of
men.
Each one wanted her to hire his boat. She demanded a motor-boat: the
boat from the hotel. They said there wasn’t one. She didn’t believe it.
Then a dark-faced fellow with his black hair down his forehead, and a
certain intensity in his eyes, said: Yes, yes; The Hotel had a boat,
but it was broken. She must take a row-boat. In an hour and a half he
would row her there.
“How long?” said Kate.
“An hour and a half.”
“And I am so hungry!” cried Kate. “How much do you charge?”
“Two pesos.” He held up two fingers.
Kate said yes, and he ran down to his boat. Then she noticed he was a
cripple with inturned feet. But how quick and strong!
She climbed with Villiers down the broken bank to the river, and in a
moment they were in the boat. Pale green willow trees fringed from the
earthen banks to the fuller-flowing, pale-brown water. The river was
not very wide, between deep banks. They slipped under the bridge, and
past a funny high barge with rows of seats. The boatman said it went
up the river to Jocotlan: and he waved his hand to show the direction.
They were slipping down-stream, between lonely banks of willow-trees.
The crippled boatman was pulling hard, with great strength and energy.
When she spoke to him in her bad Spanish and he found it hard to
understand, he knitted his brow a little, anxiously. And when she
laughed he smiled at her with such a beautiful gentleness, sensitive,
wistful, quick. She felt he was naturally honest and truthful, and
generous. There was a beauty in these men, a wistful beauty and a great
physical strength. Why had she felt so bitterly about the country?
Morning was still young on the pale buff river, between the silent
earthen banks. There was a blue dimness in the lower air, and black
water-fowl ran swiftly, unconcernedly back and forth from the river’s
edge, on the dry, baked banks that were treeless now, and wider.
They had entered a wide river, from the narrow one. The blueness and
moistness of the dissolved night seemed to linger under the scattered
pepper-trees of the far shore.
The boatman rowed short and hard upon the flimsy, soft, sperm-like
water, only pausing at moments swiftly to smear the sweat from his face
with an old rag he kept on the bench beside him. The sweat ran from his
bronze-brown skin like water, and the black hair on his high-domed,
Indian head, smoked with wetness.
“There is no hurry,” said Kate, smiling to him.
“What does the Señorita say?”
“There is no hurry,” she repeated.
He paused, smiling, breathing deeply, and explained that now he was
rowing against stream. This wider river flowed out of the lake, full
and heavy. See! even as he rested a moment, the boat began to turn and
drift! He quickly took his oars.
The boat moved slowly, in the hush of departed night, upon the soft,
full-flowing buff water, that carried little tufts of floating
water-hyacinth. Some willow-trees stood near the edge, and some pepper
trees of most delicate green foliage. Beyond the trees and the level of
the shores, big hills rose up to high, blunt points, baked incredibly
dry, like biscuit. The blue sky settled against them nakedly, they
were leafless and lifeless save for the iron-green shafts of the organ
cactus, that glistered blackly, yet atmospherically, in the ochreous
aridity. This was Mexico again, stark-dry and luminous with powerful
light, cruel and unreal.
On a flat near the river a peon, perched on the rump of his ass, was
slowly driving five luxurious cows towards the water to drink. The big
black-and-white animals stepped in a dream-pace past the pepper-trees
to the bank, like moving pieces of light-and-shade: the dun cows
trailed after, in the incredible silence and brilliance of the morning.
Earth, air, water were all silent with new light, the last blue of
night dissolving like a breath. No sound, even no life. The great
light was stronger than life itself. Only, up in the blue, some
turkey-buzzards were wheeling with dirty-edged wings, as everwhere in
Mexico.
“Don’t hurry!” Kate said again to the boatman, who was again mopping
his face, while his black hair ran sweat. “We can go slowly.”
The man smiled deprecatingly.
“If the Señorita will sit in the back,” he said.
Kate did not understand his request at first. He had rowed in towards
a bend in the right bank, to be out of the current. On the left bank
Kate had noticed some men bathing: men whose wet skins flashed with the
beautiful brown-rose colour and glitter of the naked natives, and one
stout man with the curious creamy-biscuit skin of the city Mexicans.
Low against the water across-stream she watched the glitter of naked
men, half-immersed in the river.
She rose to step back into the stern of the boat, where Villiers was.
As she did so, she saw a dark head and the flashing ruddy shoulders of
a man swimming towards the boat. She wavered--and as she was sitting
down, the man stood up in the water and was wading near, the water
washing at the loose little cloth he had round his loins. He was smooth
and wet and of a lovely colour, with the rich smooth-muscled physique
of the Indians. He was coming towards the boat, pushing back his hair
from his forehead.
The boatman watched him, transfixed, without surprise, a little subtle
half-smile, perhaps of mockery, round his nose. As if he had expected
it!
“Where are you going?” asked the man in the water, the brown river
running softly at his strong thighs.
The boatman waited a moment for his patrons to answer, then, seeing
they were silent, replied in a low, unwilling tone:
“Orilla.”
The man in the water took hold of the stern of the boat, as the boatman
softly touched the water with the oars to keep her straight, and he
threw back his longish black hair with a certain effrontery.
“Do you know whom the lake belongs to?” he asked, with the same
effrontery.
“What do you say?” asked Kate, haughty.
“If you know whom the lake belongs to?” the young man in the water
repeated.
“To whom?” said Kate, flustered.
“To the old gods of Mexico,” the stranger said. “You have to make a
tribute to Quetzalcoatl, if you go on the lake.”
The strange calm effrontery of it! But truly Mexican.
“How?” said Kate.
“You can give me something,” he said.
“But why should I give something to you, if it is a tribute to
Quetzalcoatl?” she stammered.
“I am Quetzalcoatl’s man, I,” he replied, with calm effrontery.
“And if I don’t give you anything?” she said.
He lifted his shoulders and spread his free hand, staggering a little,
losing his footing in the water as he did so.
“If you wish to make an enemy of the lake!--” he said, coolly, as he
recovered his balance.
And then for the first time he looked straight at her. And as he did
so, the demonish effrontery died down again, and the peculiar American
tension slackened and left him.
He gave a slight wave of dismissal with his free hand, and pushed the
boat gently forward.
“But it doesn’t matter,” he said, with a slight insolent jerk of his
head sideways, and a faint, insolent smile. “We will wait till the
Morning Star rises.”
The boatman softly but powerfully pulled the oars. The man in the water
stood with the sun on his powerful chest, looking after the boat in
half-seeing abstraction. His eyes had taken again the peculiar gleaming
far-awayness, suspended between the realities, which, Kate suddenly
realised, was the central look in the native eyes. The boatman, rowing
away, was glancing back at the man who stood in the water, and his
face, too, had the abstracted, transfigured look of a man perfectly
suspended between the world’s two strenuous wings of energy. A look
of extraordinary, arresting beauty, the silent, vulnerable centre of
all life’s quivering, like the nucleus gleaming in tranquil suspense,
within a cell.
“What does he mean,” said Kate, “by ‘We will wait till the Morning Star
rises?’”
The man smiled slowly.
“It is a name,” he said.
And he seemed to know no more. But the symbolism had evidently the
power to soothe and sustain him.
“Why did he come and speak to us?” asked Kate.
“He is one of those of the god Quetzalcoatl, Señorita.”
“And you? are you one too?”
“Who knows!” said the man, putting his head on one side. Then he added:
“I think so. We are many.”
He watched Kate’s face with that gleaming, intense semi-abstraction,
a gleam that hung unwavering in his black eyes, and which suddenly
reminded Kate of the morning star, or the evening star, hanging perfect
between night and the sun.
“You have the morning star in your eyes,” she said to the man.
He flashed her a smile of extraordinary beauty.
“The Señorita understands,” he said.
His face changed again to a dark-brown mask, like semi-transparent
stone, and he rowed with all his might. Ahead, the river was widening,
the banks were growing lower, down to the water’s level, like shoals
planted with willow trees and with reeds. Above the willow trees a
square white sail was standing, as if erected on the land.
“Is the lake so near?” said Kate.
The man hastily mopped his running wet face.
“Yes, Señorita! The sailing boats are waiting for the wind, to come
into the river. We will pass by the canal.”