camions and motor-cars came in lurching and hissing. And, like strange
birds alighting, you had slim and charming girls in organdie frocks
and face powder and bobbed hair, fluttering into the plaza. There they
strolled, arm in arm, brilliant in red organdie and blue chiffon and
white muslin and pink and mauve and tangerine frail stuffs, their black
hair bobbed out, their dark slim arms interlaced, their dark faces
curiously macabre in the heavy make-up; approximating to white, but the
white of a clown or a corpse.
In a world of big, handsome peon men, these flappers flapped with
butterfly brightness and an incongruous shrillness, manless. The
supply of fifis, the male young elegants who are supposed to equate
the flappers, was small. But still, fifis there were, in white flannel
trousers and white shoes, dark jackets, correct straw hats, and
canes. Fifis far more ladylike than the reckless flappers; and far
more nervous, wincing. But fifis none the less, gallant, smoking a
cigarette with an elegant flourish, talking elegant Castilian, as near
as possible, and looking as if they were going to be sacrificed to some
Mexican god within a twelvemonth; when they were properly plumped and
perfumed. The sacrificial calves being fattened.
On Saturday, the fifis and the flappers and the motor-car people from
town--only a forlorn few, after all--tried to be butterfly-gay, in
sinister Mexico. They hired the musicians with guitars and fiddle, and
the jazz music began to quaver, a little too tenderly, without enough
kick.
And on the pavement under the trees of the alameda--under the trees
of the plaza, just near the little tables and chairs of the café,
the young couples began to gyrate _à la mode_. The red and the pink
and the yellow and the blue organdie frocks were turning sharply
with all the white flannel trousers available, and some of the white
flannel trousers had smart shoes, white with black strappings or with
tan brogue bands. And some of the organdie frocks had green legs and
green feet, some had legs _à la nature_, and white feet. And the slim,
dark arms went around the dark blue fifi shoulders--or dark blue with
a white thread. And the immeasurably soft faces of the males would
smile with a self-conscious fatherliness at the whitened, pretty,
reckless little faces of the females; soft, fatherly, sensuous smiles,
suggestive of a victim’s luxuriousness.
But they were dancing on the pavement of the plaza, and on this
pavement the peons were slowly strolling, or standing in groups
watching with black, inscrutable eyes the uncanny butterfly twitching
of the dancers. Who knows what they thought?--whether they felt any
admiration and envy at all, or only just a silent, cold, dark-faced
opposition. Opposition there was.
The young peons in their little white blouses, and the scarlet serape
folded jauntily on one shoulder, strolled slowly on under their big,
heavy, poised hats, with a will to ignore the dancers. Slowly, with
a heavy, calm balance, they moved irresistibly through the dance, as
if the dance did not exist. And the fifis in white trousers, with
organdie in their arms, steered as best they might, to avoid the heavy
relentless passage of the young peons, who went on talking to one
another, smiling and flashing powerful white teeth, in a black, heavy
sang-froid that settled like a blight even on the music. The dancers
and the passing peons never touched, never jostled. In Mexico you do
not run into people accidentally. But the dance broke against the
invisible opposition.
The Indians on the seats, they too watched the dancers for a while.
Then they turned against them the heavy negation of indifference, like
a stone on the spirit. The mysterious faculty of the Indians, as they
sit there, so quiet and dense, for killing off any ebullient life, for
quenching any light and colourful effervescence.
There was indeed a little native dance-hall. But it was shut apart
within four walls. And the whole rhythm and meaning was different,
heavy, with a touch of violence. And even there, the dancers were
artizans and mechanics or railway-porters, the half-urban people. No
peons at all--or practically none.
So, before very long, the organdie butterflies and the flannel-trouser
fifis gave in, succumbed, crushed once more beneath the stone-heavy
passivity of resistance in the demonish peons.
The curious, radical opposition of the Indians to the thing we call
the spirit. It is spirit which makes the flapper flap her organdie
wings like a butterfly. It is spirit, which creases the white flannel
trousers of the fifi and makes him cut his rather pathetic dash. They
try to talk the elegancies and flippancies of the modern spirit.
But down on it all, like a weight of obsidian, comes the passive
negation of the Indian. He understands soul, which is of the blood.
But spirit, which is superior, and is the quality of our civilisation,
this, in the mass, he darkly and barbarically repudiates. Not until he
becomes an artizan or connected with machinery does the modern spirit
get him.
And perhaps it is this ponderous repudiation of the modern spirit which
makes Mexico what it is.
But perhaps the automobile will make roads even through the
inaccessible soul of the Indian.
Kate was rather sad, seeing the dance swamped. She had been sitting at
a little table, with Juana for dueña, sipping a glass of absinthe.
The motor-cars returning to town left early, in a little group. If
bandits were out, they had best keep together. Even the fifis had a
pistol on their hips.
But it was Saturday, so some of the young “elegance” was staying on,
till the next day; to bathe and flutter in the sun.
It was Saturday, so the plaza was very full, and along the cobble
streets stretching from the square, many torches fluttered and wavered
upon the ground, illuminating a dark salesman and an array of straw
hats, or a heap of straw mats called petates, or pyramids of oranges
from across the lake.
It was Saturday, and Sunday morning was market. So, as it were
suddenly, the life in the plaza was dense and heavy with potency. The
Indians had come in from all the villages, and from far across the
lake. And with them they brought the curious heavy potency of life
which seems to hum deeper and deeper when they collect together.
In the afternoon, with the wind from the south, the big _canoas_,
sailing-boats with black hulls and one huge sail, had come drifting
across the waters, bringing the market-produce and the natives to their
gathering ground. All the white specks of villages on the far shore,
and on the far-off slopes, had sent their wild quota to the throng.
It was Saturday, and the Indian instinct for living on into the night,
once they are gathered together, was now aroused. The people did not go
home. Though market would begin at dawn, men had no thought of sleep.
At about nine o’clock, after the fifi dance was shattered, Kate heard
a new sound, the sound of a drum, or tom-tom, and saw a drift of the
peons away to the dark side of the plaza, where the side market would
open to-morrow. Already places had been taken, and little stalls set
up, and huge egg-shaped baskets, big enough to hold two men, were
lolling against the wall.
There was a rippling and a pulse-like thudding of the drum, strangely
arresting on the night air, then the long note of a flute playing
a sort of wild, unemotional melody, with the drum for a syncopated
rhythm. Kate, who had listened to the drums and the wild singing of the
Red Indians in Arizona and New Mexico, instantly felt that timeless,
primeval passion of the prehistoric races, with their intense and
complicated religious significance, spreading on the air.
She looked inquiringly at Juana, and Juana’s black eyes glanced back at
her furtively.
“What is it?” said Kate.
“Musicians, singers,” said Juana evasively.
“But it’s _different_,” said Kate.
“Yes, it is new.”
“New?”
“Yes, it has only been coming for a short time.”
“Where does it come from?”
“Who knows!” said Juana, with an evasive shrug of her shoulders.
“I want to hear,” said Kate.
“It’s purely men,” said Juana.
“Still, one can stand a little way off.”
Kate moved towards the dense, silent throng of men in big hats. They
all had their backs to her.
She stood on the step of one of the houses, and saw a little clearing
at the centre of the dense throng of men, under the stone wall over
which bougainvillea and plumbago flowers were hanging, lit up by the
small, brilliantly flaring torches of sweet-smelling wood, which a boy
held in his two hands.
The drum was in the centre of the clearing, the drummer standing facing
the crowd. He was naked from the waist up, wore snow-white cotton
drawers, very full, held round the waist by a red sash, and bound at
the ankles with red cords. Round his uncovered head was a red cord,
with three straight scarlet feathers rising from the back of his head,
and on his forehead, a turquoise ornament, a circle of blue with a
round blue stone in the centre. The flute player was also naked to
the waist, but over his shoulder was folded a fine white sarape with
blue-and-dark edges, and fringe. Among the crowd, men with naked
shoulders were giving little leaflets to the onlookers. And all the
time, high and pure, the queer clay flute was repeating a savage,
rather difficult melody, and the drum was giving the blood-rhythm.
More and more men were drifting in from the plaza. Kate stepped from
her perch and went rather shyly forward. She wanted one of the papers.
The man gave her one without looking at her. And she went into the
light to read. It was a sort of ballad, but without rhyme, in Spanish.
At the top of the leaflet was a rough print of an eagle within the ring
of a serpent that had its tail in its mouth; a curious deviation from
the Mexican emblem, which is an eagle standing on a nopal, a cactus
with great flat leaves, and holding in its beak and claws a writhing
snake.
This eagle stood slim upon the serpent, within the circle of the snake,
that had black markings round its back, like short black rays pointing
inwards. At a little distance, the emblem suggested an eye.
“In the place of the west
In peace, beyond the lashing of the sun’s bright tail,
In the stillness where waters are born
Slept I, Quetzalcoatl.
In the cave which is called Dark Eye,
Behind the sun, looking through him as a window
Is the place. There the waters rise,
There the winds are born.
On the waters of the after-life
I rose again, to see a star falling, and feel a breath on my face.
The breath said: Go! And lo!
I am coming.
The star that was falling was fading, was dying.
I heard the star singing like a dying bird;
_My name is Jesus, I am Mary’s Son.
I am coming home.
My mother the Moon is dark.
Oh brother, Quetzalcoatl
Hold back the dragon of the sun,
Bind him with shadow while I pass
Homewards. Let me come home._
I bound the bright fangs of the Sun
And held him while Jesus passed
Into the lidless shade,
Into the eye of the Father,
Into the womb of refreshment.
And the breath blew upon me again.
So I took the sandals of the Saviour
And started down the long slope
Past the mount of the sun.
Till I saw beneath me
White breast-tips of my Mexico
My bride.
Jesus the Crucified
Sleeps in the healing waters
The long sleep.
Sleep, sleep, my brother, sleep.
My bride between the seas
Is combing her dark hair,
Saying to herself: Quetzalcoatl.”
There was a dense throng of men gathered now, and from the centre, the
ruddy glow of ocote torches rose warm and strong, and the sweet scent
of the cedar-like resin was on the air. Kate could see nothing, for the
mass of men in big hats.
The flute had stopped its piping, and the drum was beating a slow,
regular thud, acting straight on the blood. The incomprehensible hollow
barking of the drum was like a spell on the mind, making the heart
burst each stroke, and darkening the will.
The men in the crowd began to subside, sitting and squatting on the
ground, with their hats between their knees. And now it was a little
sea of dark, proud heads leaning a little forward above the soft,
strong male shoulders.
Near the wall was a clear circle, with the drum in the centre. The
drummer with the naked torso stood tilting his drum towards him, his
shoulders gleaming smooth and ruddy in the flare of light. Beside him
stood another man holding a banner that hung from a light rod. On the
blue field of the banneret was the yellow sun with a black centre, and
between the four greater yellow rays, four black rays emerging, so
that the sun looked like a wheel spinning with a dazzling motion.
The crowd having all sat down, the six men with naked torsos, who had
been giving out the leaflets and ordering the crowd, now came back and
sat down in a ring, of which the drummer, with the drum tilted between
his knees as he squatted on the ground, was the key. On his right hand
sat the banner-bearer, on his left the flautist. They were nine men in
the ring, the boy, who sat apart watching the two ocote torches, which
he had laid upon a stone supported on a long cane tripod, being the
tenth.
The night seemed to have gone still. The curious seed-rattling hum
of voices that filled the plaza was hushed. Under the trees, on the
pavements, people were still passing unconcerned, but they looked
curiously lonely, isolated figures drifting in the twilight of the
electric lamps, and going about some exceptional business. They seemed
outside the nucleus of life.
Away on the north side, the booths were still flaring, people were
buying and selling. But this quarter too, looked lonely, and outside
the actual reality, almost like memory.
When the men sat down, the women began to drift up shyly, and seat
themselves on the ground at the outer rim, their full cotton skirts
flowering out around them, and their dark rebozos drawn tight over
their small, round, shy heads, as they squatted on the ground. Some,
too shy to come right up, lingered on the nearest benches of the
plaza. And some had gone away. Indeed, a good many men and women had
disappeared as soon as the drum was heard.
So that the plaza was curiously void. There was the dense clot of
people round the drum, and then the outer world, seeming empty and
hostile. Only in the dark little street that gave on to the darkness
of the lake, people were standing like ghosts, half lit-up, the men
with their sarapes over their faces, watching erect and silent and
concealed, from the shadow.
But Kate, standing back in the doorway, with Juana sitting on the
doorstep at her feet, was fascinated by the silent, half-naked ring
of men in the torchlight. Their heads were black, their bodies soft
and ruddy with the peculiar Indian beauty that has at the same time
something terrible in it. The soft, full, handsome torsos of silent men
with heads softly bent a little forward; the soft, easy shoulders,
that are yet so broad, and which balance upon so powerful a backbone;
shoulders drooping a little, with the relaxation of slumbering,
quiescent power; the beautiful ruddy skin, gleaming with a dark
fineness; the strong breasts, so male and so deep, yet without the
muscular hardening that belongs to white men; and the dark, closed
faces, closed upon a darkened consciousness, the black moustaches and
delicate beards framing the closed silence of the mouth; all this was
strangely impressive, moving strange, frightening emotions in the
soul. Those men who sat there in their dark, physical tenderness, so
still and soft, they looked at the same time frightening. Something
dark, heavy, and reptilian in their silence and their softness. Their
very naked torsos were clothed with a subtle shadow, a certain secret
obscurity. White men sitting there would have been strong-muscled and
frank, with an openness in their very physique, a certain ostensible
presence. But not so these men. Their very nakedness only revealed
the soft, heavy depths of their natural secrecy, their eternal
invisibility. They did not belong to the realm of that which comes
forth.
Everybody was quite still; the expectant hush deepened to a kind of
dead, night silence. The naked-shouldered men sat motionless, sunk into
themselves, and listening with the dark ears of the blood. The red sash
went tight round their waists, the wide white trousers, starched rather
stiff, were bound round the ankles with red cords, and the dark feet in
the glare of the torch looked almost black, in huaraches that had red
thongs. What did they want then, in life, these men who sat so softly
and without any assertion, yet whose weight was so ponderous, arresting?
Kate was at once attracted and repelled. She was attracted, almost
fascinated by the strange _nuclear_ power of the men in the circle.
It was like a darkly glowing, vivid nucleus of new life. Repellant
the strange heaviness, the sinking of the spirit into the earth, like
dark water. Repellant the silent, dense opposition to the pale-faced
spiritual direction.
Yet here and here alone, it seemed to her, life burned with a deep
new fire. The rest of life, as she knew it, seemed wan, bleached and
sterile. The pallid wanness and weariness of her world! And here, the
dark, ruddy figures in the glare of a torch, like the centre of the
everlasting fire, surely this was a new kindling of mankind!
She knew it was so. Yet she preferred to be on the fringe, sufficiently
out of contact. She could not bear to come into actual contact.
The man with the banner of the sun lifted his face as if he were going
to speak. And yet he did not speak. He was old; in his sparse beard
were grey hairs, grey hairs over his thick dark mouth. And his face had
the peculiar thickness, with a few deep-scored lines, of the old among
these people. Yet his hair rose vigorous and manly from his forehead,
his body was smooth and strong. Only, perhaps, a little smoother,
heavier, softer than the shoulders of the younger men.
His black eyes gazed sightless for some time. Perhaps he was really
blind; perhaps it was a heavy abstraction, a sort of heavy memory
working in him, which made his face seem sightless.
Then he began, in a slow, clear, far-off voice, that seemed strangely
to echo the vanished barking of the drum:
“Listen to me, men! Listen to me, women of these men! A long time ago,
the lake started calling for men, in the quiet of the night. And there
were no men. The little charales were swimming round the shore, looking
for something, and the bágari and the other big fish would jump out of
the water, to look around. But there were no men.
“So one of the gods with hidden faces walked out of the water, and
climbed the hill--” he pointed with his hand in the night towards the
invisible round hill at the back of the village--“and looked about.
He looked up at the sun, and through the sun he saw the dark sun, the
same that made the sun and the world, and will swallow it again like a
draught of water.
“He said: _Is it time?_ And from behind the bright sun the four dark
arms of the greater sun shot out, and in the shadow men arose. They
could see the four dark arms of the sun in the sky. And they started
walking.
“The man on the top of the hill, who was a god, looked at the mountains
and the flat places, and saw men very thirsty, their tongues hanging
out. So he said to them: Come! Come here! Here is my sweet water!
“They came like dogs running with their tongues out, and kneeled on
the shore of the lake. And the man on the top of the hill heard them
panting with having drunk much water. He said to them: Have you drunk
too much into yourselves? Are your bones not dry enough?
“The men made houses on the shore, and the man on the hill, who was a
god, taught them to sow maize and beans, and build boats. But he said
to them: No boat will save you, when the dark sun ceases to hold out
his dark arms abroad in the sky.
“The man on the hill said: I am Quetzalcoatl, who breathed moisture
on your dry mouths. I filled your breasts with breath from beyond the
sun. I am the wind that whirls from the heart of the earth, the little
winds that whirl like snakes round your feet and your legs and your
thighs, lifting up the head of the snake of your body, in whom is your
power. When the snake of your body lifts its head, beware! It is I,
Quetzalcoatl, rearing up in you, rearing up and reaching beyond the
bright day, to the sun of darkness beyond, where is your home at last.
Save for the dark sun at the back of the day-sun, save for the four
dark arms in the heavens, you were bone, and the stars were bone, and
the moon an empty sea-shell on a dry beach, and the yellow sun were an
empty cup, like the dry thin bone of a dead coyote’s head. So beware!
“Without me you are nothing. Just as I, without the sun that is back of
the sun, am nothing.
“When the yellow sun is high in the sky, then say: Quetzalcoatl will
lift his hand and screen me from this, else I shall burn out, and the
land will wither.
“For, say I, in the palm of my hand is the water of life, and on the
back of my hand is the shadow of death. And when men forget me, I lift
the back of my hand, farewell! Farewell, and the shadow of death.
“But men forgot me. Their bones were moist, their hearts weak. When the
snake of their body lifted its head, they said: This is the tame snake
that does as we wish. And when they could not bear the fire of the sun,
they said: The sun is angry. He wants to drink us up. Let us give him
blood of victims.
“And so it was, the dark branches of shade were gone from heaven, and
Quetzalcoatl mourned and grew old, holding his hand before his face, to
hide his face from men.
“He mourned and said: Let me go home. I am old, I am almost bone. Bone
triumphs in me, my heart is a dry gourd. I am weary in Mexico.
“So he cried to the Master-Sun, the dark one, of the unuttered name: I
am withering white like a perishing gourd-vine. I am turning to bone. I
am denied of these Mexicans. I am waste and weary and old. Take me away.
“Then the dark sun reached an arm, and lifted Quetzalcoatl into the
sky. And the dark sun beckoned with a finger, and brought white men
out of the east. And they came with a dead god on the Cross, saying:
Lo! This is the Son of God! He is dead, he is bone! Lo, your god is
bled and dead, he is bone. Kneel and sorrow for him, and weep. For your
tears he will give you comfort again, from the dead, and a place among
the scentless rose-trees of the after-life, when you are dead.
“Lo! His mother weeps, and the waters of the world are in her hands.
She will give you drink, and heal you, and lead you to the land of God.
In the land of God you shall weep no more. Beyond the gates of death,
when you have passed from the house of bone, into the garden of white
roses.
“So the weeping Mother brought her Son who was dead on the Cross to
Mexico, to live in the temples. And the people looked up no more,
saying: The Mother weeps. The Son of her womb is bone. Let us hope for
the place of the west, where the dead have peace among the scentless
rose-trees, in the Paradise of God.
“For the priests would say: It is beautiful beyond the grave.
“And then the priests grew old, and the tears of the Mother were
exhausted, and the Son on the Cross cried out to the dark sun far
beyond the sun: _What is this that is done to me? Am I dead for ever,
and only dead? Am I always and only dead, but bone on a Cross of bone?_
“So this cry was heard in the world, and beyond the stars of the night,
and beyond the sun of the day.
“Jesus said again: _Is it time? My Mother is old like a sinking moon,
the old bone of her can weep no more. Are we perished beyond redeem?_
“Then the greatest of the great suns spoke aloud from the back of the
sun: I will take my Son to my bosom, I will take His Mother on my lap.
Like a woman I will put them in My womb, like a mother I will lay them
to sleep, in mercy I will dip them in the bath of forgetting and peace
and renewal.
“That is all. So hear now, you men, and you women of these men.
“Jesus is going home, to the Father, and Mary is going back, to sleep
in the belly of the Father. And they both will recover from death,
during the long long sleep.
“But the Father will not leave us alone. We are not abandoned.