And no! She refused to take the hotel manager’s estimate of
Quetzalcoatl. How should a hotel manager judge?--even if he was not
really an hotel manager, but a ranch-overseer. She had seen Ramón
Carrasco, and Cipriano. And they were men. They wanted something
beyond. She would believe in them. Anything, anything rather than this
sterility of nothingness which was the world, and into which her life
was drifting.
She would send Villiers away, too. He was nice, she liked him. But he,
too, was widdershins, unwinding the sensations of disintegration and
anti-life. No, she must send him away. She must, she must free herself
from these mechanical connections.
Every one of them, like Villiers, was like a cog-wheel in contact with
which all one’s workings were reversed. Everything he said, everything
he did, reversed her real life flow, made her go against the sun.
And she did not want to go against the sun. After all, in spite of the
horrors latent in Mexico, when you got these dark-faced people away
from wrong contacts like agitators and socialism, they made one feel
that life was vast, if fearsome, and death was fathomless.
Horrors might burst out of them. But something must burst out,
sometimes, if men are not machines.
_No! no! no! no! no!_ she cried to her own soul. _Let me still believe
in some human contact. Let it not be all cut off for me!_
But she made up her mind, to be alone, and to cut herself off from all
the mechanical widdershin contacts. Villiers must go back to his United
States. She would be alone in her own milieu. Not to be touched by any,
any of the mechanical cog-wheel people. To be left alone, not to be
touched. To hide, and be hidden, and never really be spoken to.
Yet at the same time, with her blood flowing softly sunwise, to let the
sunwise sympathy of unknown people steal in to her. To shut doors of
iron against the mechanical world. But to let the sunwise world steal
across to her, and add its motion to her, the motion of the stress
of life, with the big sun and the stars like a tree holding out its
leaves.
She wanted an old Spanish house, with its inner patio of flowers and
water. Turned inwards, to the few flowers walled in by shadow. To turn
one’s back on the cog-wheel world. Not to look out any more on to
that horrible machine of the world. To look at one’s own quiet little
fountain and one’s own little orange trees, with only heaven above.
So, having soothed her heart, she wrote Don Ramón again, that she was
coming to Sayula to look for a house. She sent Villiers away. And the
next day she set off with a man-servant, in the old motor-boat of the
hotel, down to the village of Sayula.
It was thirty-five miles to travel, down the long lake. But the moment
she set off, she felt at peace. A tall dark-faced fellow sat in the
stern of the boat, steering and attending to the motor. She sat on
cushions in the middle. And the young man-servant perched in the prow.
They started before sunrise, when the lake was bathed in motionless
light. Odd tufts of water-hyacinth were travelling on the soft spermy
water, holding up a green leaf like a little sail of a boat, and
nodding a delicate, mauve blue flower.
_Give me the mystery and let the world live again for me!_ Kate cried
to her own soul. _And deliver me from man’s automatism._
The sun rose, and a whiteness of light played on the tops of the
mountains. The boat hugged the north shore, turning the promontory on
which the villas had started so jauntily, twenty years ago, but now
were lapsing back to wilderness. All was still and motionless in the
light. Sometimes, on the little bare patches high up on the dry hills
were white specks; birds? No, men in their white cotton, peons hoeing.
They were so tiny and so distinct, they looked like white birds settled.
Round the bend were the hot springs, the church, the inaccessible
village of the pure Indians, who spoke no Spanish. There were some
green trees, under the precipitous, dry mountain-side.
So on and on, the motor-boat chugging incessantly, the man in the bows
coiled up like a serpent, watching; the fish-milk water gleaming and
throwing off a dense light, so that the mountains away across were
fused out. And Kate, under the awning, went into a kind of sleep.
They were passing the island, with its ruins of fortress and prison.
It was all rock and dryness, with great broken walls and the shell
of a church among its hurtful stones and its dry grey herbage. For a
long time the Indians had defended it against the Spaniards. Then the
Spaniards used the island as a fortress against the Indians. Later, as
a penal settlement. And now the place was a ruin, repellant, full of
scorpions, and otherwise empty of life. Only one or two fishermen lived
in the tiny cove facing the mainland, and a flock of goats, specks of
life creeping among the rocks. And an unhappy fellow put there by the
Government to register the weather.
No, Kate did not want to land. The place looked too sinister. She took
food from the basket, and ate a little lunch, and dozed.
In this country, she was afraid. But it was her soul more than her body
that knew fear. She had realised, for the first time, with finality
and fatality, what was the illusion she laboured under. She had
thought that each individual had a complete self, a complete soul, an
accomplished I. And now she realised as plainly as if she had turned
into a new being, that this was not so. Men and women had incomplete
selves, made up of bits assembled together loosely and somewhat
haphazard. Man was not created ready-made. Men to-day were half-made,
and women were half-made. Creatures that existed and functioned with
certain regularity, but which ran off into a hopeless jumble of
inconsequence.
Half-made, like insects that can run fast and be so busy and suddenly
grow wings, but which are only winged grubs after all. A world full
of half-made creatures on two legs, eating food and degrading the one
mystery left to them, sex. Spinning a great lot of words, burying
themselves inside the cocoons of words and ideas that they spin
round themselves, and inside the cocoons, mostly perishing inert and
overwhelmed.
Half-made creatures, rarely more than half-responsible and
half-accountable, acting in terrible swarms, like locusts.
Awful thought! And with a collective insect-like will, to avoid the
responsibility of achieving any more perfected being or identity.
The queer, rabid hate of being urged on into purer self. The morbid
fanaticism of the non-integrate.
In the great seething light of the lake, with the terrible blue-ribbed
mountains of Mexico beyond, she seemed swallowed by some grisly
skeleton, in the cage of his death-anatomy. She was afraid, mystically,
of the man crouching there in the bows with his smooth thighs and
supple loins like a snake, and his black eyes watching. A half-being,
with a will to disintegration and death. And the tall man behind
her at the tiller, he had the curious smoke-grey phosphorus eyes
under black lashes, sometimes met among the Indians. Handsome, he
was, and quiet and seemingly self-contained. But with that peculiar
devilish half-smile lurking under his face, the half jeering look of a
part-thing, which knows its power to destroy the purer thing.
And yet, Kate told herself, both these men were manly fellows. They
would not molest her, unless she communicated the thought to them, and
by a certain cowardliness, prompted them. Their souls were nascent,
there was no fixed evil in them, they could sway both ways.
So in her soul she cried aloud to the greater mystery, the higher power
that hovered in the interstices of the hot air, rich and potent. It
was as if she could lift her hands and clutch the silent, stormless
potency that roved everywhere, waiting. “Come then!” she said, drawing
a long slow breath, and addressing the silent life-breath which hung
unrevealed in the atmosphere, waiting.
And as the boat ran on, and her fingers rustled in the warm water of
the lake, she felt the fulness descend into her once more, the peace,
and the power. The fulfilment filling her soul like the fulness of ripe
grapes. And she thought to herself: “Ah, how wrong I have been, not to
turn sooner to the other presence, not to take the life-breath sooner!
How wrong to be afraid of these two men.”
She did what she had been half-afraid to do before; she offered them
the oranges and sandwiches still in the basket. And each of the men
looked at her, the smoke-grey eyes looked her in the eyes, and the
black eyes looked her in the eyes. And the man with the smoke-grey
eyes, who was cunninger than the other man, but also prouder, said to
her with his eyes: _We are living! I know your sex, and you know mine.
The mystery we are glad not to meddle with. You leave me my natural
honour, and I thank you for the grace._
In his look; so quick and proud, and in his quiet _Muchas grazias!_ she
heard the touch of male recognition, a man glad to retain his honour,
and to feel the communion of grace. Perhaps it was the Spanish word
_Grazias!_ But in her soul she was thinking of the communion of grace.
With the black-eyed man it was the same. He was humbler. But as he
peeled his orange and dropped the yellow peel on the water, she could
see the stillness, the humility, and the pathos of grace in him;
something very beautiful and truly male, and very hard to find in a
civilised white man. It was not of the spirit. It was of the dark,
strong, unbroken blood, the flowering of the soul.
Then she thought to herself: After all, it is good to be here. It
is very good to be in this boat on this lake with these two silent,
semi-barbarous men. They can receive the gift of grace, and we can
share it like a communion, they and I. I am very glad to be here. It
is so much better than love: the love I knew with Joachim. This is the
fullness of the vine.
“Sayula!” said the man in the bows, pointing ahead.
She saw, away off, a place where there were green trees, where the
shore was flat, and a biggish building stood out.
“What is the building?” she asked.
“The railway station.”
She was suitably impressed, for it was a new-looking imposing structure.
A little steamer was smoking, lying off from a wooden jetty in the
loneliness, and black, laden boats were poling out to her, and merging
back to shore. The vessel gave a hoot, and slowly yet busily set off
on the bosom of the water, heading in a slanting line across the lake,
to where the tiny high white twin-towers of Tuliapan showed above the
water-line, tiny and far-off, on the other side.
They had passed the jetty, and rounding the shoal where the willows
grew, she could see Sayula; white fluted twin-towers of the church,
obelisk shaped above the pepper trees; beyond, a mound of a hill
standing alone, dotted with dry bushes, distinct and Japanese looking;
beyond this, the corrugated, blue-ribbed, flat-flanked mountains of
Mexico.
It looked peaceful, delicate, almost Japanese. As she drew nearer she
saw the beach with the washing spread on the sand; the fleecy green
willow trees and pepper-trees, and the villas in foliage and flowers,
hanging magenta curtains of bougainvillea, red dots of hibiscus, pink
abundance of tall oleander trees; occasional palm-trees sticking out.
The boat was steering round a stone jetty, on which, in black letters,
was painted an advertisement for motor-car tyres. There were a few
seats, some deep fleecy trees growing out of the sand, a booth for
selling drinks, a little promenade, and white boats on a sandy beach. A
few women sitting under parasols, a few bathers in the water, and trees
in front of the few villas deep in green or blazing scarlet blossoms.
“This is very good,” thought Kate. “It is not too savage, and not over
civilised. It isn’t broken, but it is rather out of repair. It is in
contact with the world, but the world has got a very weak grip on it.”
She went to the hotel, as Don Ramón had advised her.
“Do you come from Orilla? You are Mrs Leslie? Don Ramón Carrasco sent
us a letter about you.”
There was a house. Kate paid her boatmen and shook hands with them. She
was sorry to be cut off from them again. And they looked at her with a
touch of regret as they left. She said to herself:
“There is something rich and alive in these people. They want to be
able to breathe the Great Breath. They are like children, helpless.
And then they’re like demons. But somewhere, I believe, they want the
breath of life and the communion of the brave, more than anything.”
She was surprised at herself, suddenly using this language. But her
weariness and her sense of devastation had been so complete, that the
Other Breath in the air, and the bluish dark power in the earth had
become, almost suddenly, more real to her than so-called reality.
Concrete, jarring, exasperating reality had melted away, and a soft
world of potency stood in its place, the velvety dark flux from the
earth, the delicate yet supreme life-breath in the inner air. Behind
the fierce sun the dark eyes of a deeper sun were watching, and between
the bluish ribs of the mountains a powerful heart was secretly beating,
the heart of the earth.
Her house was what she wanted; a low L-shaped, tiled building with
rough red floors and deep verandah, and the other two sides of the
patio completed by the thick, dark little mango-forest outside the low
wall. The square of the patio, within the precincts of the house and
the mango trees, was gay with oleanders and hibiscus, and there was a
basin of water in the seedy grass. The flower-pots along the verandah
were full of flowering geranium and foreign flowers. At the far end of
the patio, the chickens were scratching under the silent motionlessness
of ragged banana trees.
There she had it; her stone, cool, dark house, every room opening on to
the verandah; her deep, shady verandah, or piazza, or corridor, looking
out to the brilliant sun, the sparkling flowers and the seed-grass, the
still water and the yellowing banana trees, the dark splendour of the
shadow-dense mango trees.
With the house went a Mexican Juana with two thick-haired daughters and
one son. This family lived in a den at the back of the projecting bay
of the dining-room. There, half screened, was the well and the toilet,
and a little kitchen and a sleeping room where the family slept on mats
on the floor. There the paltry chickens paddled, and the banana trees
made a chitter as the wind came.
Kate had four bedrooms to choose from. She chose the one whose low,
barred window opened on the rough, grass and cobble-stone street,
closed her doors and windows, and went to sleep, saying to herself as
she lay down: Now I am alone. And now I have only one thing to do; not
to get caught up into the world’s cog-wheels any more, and not to lose
my hold on the hidden greater thing.
She was tired with a strange weariness, feeling she could make no
further effort. She woke up at tea-time, but there was no tea. Juana
hastened off to the hotel to buy a bit.
Juana was a woman of about forty, rather short, with full dark face,
centreless dark eyes, untidy hair, and a limping way of walking. She
spoke rapidly, a rather plum-in-the-mouth Spanish, adding “n” to all
her words. Something of a sloven, down to her speech.
“_No, Niña, no hay masn_”--_masn_ instead of _mas_. And calling Kate,
in the old Mexican style, _Niña_, which means _child_. It is the
honourable title for a mistress.
Juana was going to be a bit of a trial. She was a widow of doubtful
antecedents, a creature with passion, but not much control, strong
with a certain indifference and looseness. The hotel owner assured
Kate that she was honest, but that if Kate would rather find another
_criada_, all well and good.
There was a bit of a battle to be fought between the two women. Juana
was obstinate and reckless; she had not been treated very well by the
world. And there was a touch of bottom-dog insolence about her.
But also, sudden touches of passionate warmth and the peculiar selfless
generosity of the natives. She would be honest out of rough defiance
and indifference, so long as she was not in a state of antagonism.
As yet, however, she was cautiously watching her ground, with that
black-eyed touch of malice and wariness to be expected. And Kate felt
that the cry: _Niña_--child! by which she was addressed, held in it a
slight note of malevolent mockery.
But there was nothing to do but to go ahead and trust the dark-faced,
centreless woman.
The second day, Kate had the energy to cast out one suite of bent-wood
and cane furniture from her salon, remove pictures and little stands.
If there is one social instinct more dreary than all the other social
instincts in the world, it is the Mexican. In the centre of Kate’s
red-tiled salon were two crescents: a black bent-wood cane settee
flanked on each side by two black bent-wood cane chairs, exactly
facing a brown bent-wood cane settee flanked on each side by two
brown bent-wood cane chairs. It was as if the two settees and the
eight chairs were occupied by the ghosts of all the Mexican banalties
ever uttered, sitting facing one another with their knees towards one
another, and their feet on the terrible piece of green-with-red-roses
carpet, in the weary centre of the salon. The very sight of it was
frightening.
Kate shattered this face-to-face symmetry, and had the two girls,
Maria and Concha, assisted by the ironic Juana, carrying off the brown
bent-wood chairs and the bamboo stands into one of the spare bedrooms.
Juana looked on cynically, and assisted officiously. But when Kate had
her trunk, and fished out a couple of light rugs and a couple of fine
shawls and a few things to make the place human, the criada began to
exclaim:
“_Que bonita! Que bonita, Niña! Mire que bonita!_”
CHAP: VII. THE PLAZA.
Sayula was a little lake resort; not for the idle rich, for Mexico has
few left; but for tradespeople from Guadalajara, and week-enders. Even
of these, these were few.
Nevertheless, there were two hotels, left over, really, from the safe
quiet days of Don Porfirio, as were most of the villas. The outlying
villas were shut up, some of them abandoned. Those in the village lived
in a perpetual quake of fear. There were many terrors, but the two
regnant were bandits and bolshevists.
Bandits are merely men who, in the outlying villages, having very often
no money, no work, and no prospects, take to robbery and murder for a
time--occasionally for a life-time--as a profession. They live in their
wild villages until troops are sent after them, when they retire into
the savage mountains, or the marshes.
Bolshevists, somehow, seem to be born on the railway. Wherever the iron
rails run, and passengers are hauled back and forth in railway coaches,
there the spirit of rootlessness, of transitoriness, of first and
second class in separate compartments, of envy and malice, and of iron
and demonish panting engines, seems to bring forth the logical children
of materialism, the bolshevists.
Sayula had her little branch of railway, her one train a day. The
railway did not pay, and fought with extinction. But it was enough.
Sayula also had that real insanity of America, the automobile. As men
used to want a horse and a sword, now they want a car. As women used
to pine for a home and a box at the theatre, now it is a “machine.”
And the poor follow the middle class. There was a perpetual rush of
“machines,” motor-cars and motor-buses--called camions--along the one
forlorn road coming to Sayula from Guadalajara. One hope, one faith,
one destiny; to ride in a camion, to own a car.
There was a little bandit scare when Kate arrived in the village, but
she did not pay much heed. At evening she went into the plaza, to be
with the people. The plaza was a square with big trees and a disused
bandstand in the centre, a little promenade all round, and then the
cobbled streets where the donkeys and the camions passed. There was a
further little section of real market-place, on the north side.
The band played no more in Sayula, and the _elegancia_ strolled no
more on the inner pavement around the plaza, under the trees. But the
pavement was still good, and the benches were still more-or-less sound.
Oh Don Porfirio’s day! And now it was the peons and Indians, in their
blankets and white clothes, who filled the benches and monopolised the
square. True, the law persisted that the peons must wear trousers in
the plaza, and not the loose great floppy drawers of the fields. But
then the peons also _wanted_ to wear trousers, instead of the drawers
that were the garb of their humble labour.
The plaza now belonged to the peons. They sat thick on the benches, or
slowly strolled round in their sandals and blankets. Across the cobbled
road on the north side, the little booths selling soup and hot food
were crowded with men, after six o’clock; it was cheaper to eat out, at
the end of a day’s work. The women at home could eat tortillas, never
mind the _caldo_, the soup or the meat mess. At the booths which sold
tequila, men, women, and boys sat on the benches with their elbows on
the board. There was a mild gambling game, where the man in the centre
turned the cards, and the plaza rang to his voice: _Cinco de Spadas!
Rey de Copas!_ A large, stout, imperturbable woman, with a cigarette on
her lip and danger in her lowering black eye, sat on into the night,
selling tequila. The sweet-meat man stood by his board and sold sweets
at one centavo each. And down on the pavement, small tin torch-lamps
flared upon tiny heaps of mangoes or nauseous tropical red plums,
two or three centavos the little heap, while the vendor, a woman in
the full wave of her skirt, or a man with curious patient humility,
squatted waiting for a purchaser, with that strange fatal indifference
and that gentle sort of patience so puzzling to a stranger. To have
thirty cents’ worth of little red plums to sell; to pile them on the
pavement in tiny pyramids, five in a pyramid; and to wait all day and
on into the night, squatting on the pavement and looking up from the
feet to the far-off face of the passer-by and potential purchaser,
this, apparently, is an occupation and a living. At night by the flare
of the tin torch, blowing its flame on the wind.
Usually there would be a couple of smallish young men with guitars
of different sizes, standing close up facing one another like two
fighting cocks that are uttering a long, endless swansong, singing in
tense subdued voices the eternal ballads, not very musical, mournful,
endless, intense, audible only within close range; keeping on and
on till their throats were scraped. And a few tall, dark men in red
blankets standing around, listening casually, and rarely, very rarely
making a contribution of one centavo.
In among the food booths would be another trio, this time two guitars
and a fiddle, and two of the musicians blind; the blind ones singing at
a high pitch, full speed, yet not very audible. The very singing seemed
secretive, the singers pressing close in, face to face, as if to keep
the wild, melancholy ballad re-echoing in their private breasts, their
backs to the world.
And the whole village was in the plaza, it was like a camp, with the
low, rapid sound of voices. Rarely, very rarely a voice rose above
the deep murmur of the men, the musical ripple of the women, the
twitter of children. Rarely any quick movement; the slow promenade
of men in sandals, the sandals, called huaraches, making a slight
cockroach shuffle on the pavement. Sometimes, darting among the trees,
bare-legged boys went sky-larking in and out of the shadow, in and out
of the quiet people. They were the irrepressible boot-blacks, who swarm
like tiresome flies in a barefooted country.
At the south end of the plaza, just across from the trees and
cornerwise to the hotel, was a struggling attempt at an out-door café,
with little tables and chairs on the pavement. Here, on week days, the
few who dared flaunt their prestige would sit and drink a beer or a
glass of tequila. They were mostly strangers. And the peons, sitting
immobile on the seats in the background, looked on with basilisk eyes
from under the great hats.