was listening intensely, with a clutch of horror. She could not control
her heart. It seemed wrenched out of place, and really hurt her. She
was, as she had never been before, absolute physically afraid, blood
afraid. Her blood was wrenched in a paralysis of fear.
In England, in Ireland, during the war and the revolution she had
known _spiritual_ fear. The ghastly fear of the rabble; and during the
war, nations were nearly all rabble. The terror of the rabble that,
mongrel-like, wanted to break the free _spirit_ in individual men and
women. It was the cold, collective lust of millions of people, to break
the spirit in the outstanding individuals. They wanted to break this
spirit, so that they could start the great downhill rush back to old
underworld levels, old gold worship and murder lust. The rabble.
In those days, Kate had known the agony of cold social fear, as if a
democracy were a huge, huge cold centipede which, if you resisted it,
would dig every claw into you. And the flesh would mortify around every
claw.
That had been her worst agony of fear. And she had survived.
Now she knew the real heart-wrench of blood fear. Her heart seemed
pulled out of place, in a stretched pain.
She dozed, and wakened suddenly, at a small noise. She sat up in bed.
Her doors on to the verandah had shutters. The doors themselves were
fastened, but the shutters were open for air, leaving the upper space,
like the window of the door, open. And against the dark grey of the
night she saw what looked like a black cat crouching on the bottom of
the panel-space.
“What is that?” she said automatically.
Instantly, the thing moved, slid away, and she knew it was the arm of a
man that had been reaching inside to pull the bolt of the door. She lay
for a second paralysed, prepared to scream. There was no movement. So
she leaned and lit a candle.
The curious panic fear was an agony to her. It paralysed her and
wrenched her heart out of place. She lay prostrate in the anguish of
night-terror. The candle blazed duskily. There was a far-off mutter of
thunder. And the night was horrible, horrible, Mexico was ghastly to
her beyond description.
She could not relax, she could not get her heart into place. “Now,” she
thought to herself, “I am at the mercy of this thing, and I have lost
myself.” And it was a terrible feeling, to be lost, scattered, as it
were, from herself in a horror of fear.
“What can I do?” she thought, summoning her spirit. “How can I help
myself?” She knew she was all alone.
For a long time she could do nothing. Then a certain relief came to
her as she thought: “I am believing in evil. I musn’t believe in evil.
Panic and murder never start unless the leading people let slip the
control. I don’t really believe in evil. I don’t believe the old Pan
can wrench us back into the old, evil forms of consciousness, unless
we wish it. I do believe there is a greater power, which will give us
the greater strength, while we keep the faith in it, and the spark of
contact. Even the man who wanted to break in here, I don’t think he
really had the power. He was just trying to be mean and wicked, but
something in him would have to submit to a greater faith and a greater
power.”
So she re-assured herself, till she had the courage to get up and
fasten her door-shutters at the top. After which she went from room to
room, to see that all was made fast. And she was thankful to realise
that she was afraid of scorpions on the floor, as well as of the panic
horror.
Now she had seen that the five doors and the six windows of her wing of
communicating rooms were fast. She was sealed inside the darkness, with
her candle. To get to the other part of the house, the dining-room and
kitchen, she had to go outside on the verandah.
She grew quieter, shut up with the dusky glow of her candle. And her
heart, still wrenched with the pain of fear, was thinking: “Joachim
said that evil was the lapsing back to old life-modes that have been
surpassed in us. This brings murder and lust. But the drums of Saturday
night are the old rhythm, and that dancing round the drum is the old
savage form of expression. Consciously reverting to the savage. So
perhaps it is evil.”
But then again her instinct to believe came up.
“No! It’s not a helpless, panic reversal. It is conscious, carefully
chosen. We must go back to pick up old threads. We must take up the
old, broken impulse that will connect us with the mystery of the cosmos
again, now we are at the end of our own tether. We must do it. Don
Ramón is right. He must be a great man, really. I thought there _were_
no really great men any more: only great financiers and great artists
and so on, but no great _men_. He must be a great man.”
She was again infinitely re-assured by this thought.
But again, just as she had blown out the candle, vivid flares of white
light spurted through all the window-cracks, and thunder broke in great
round balls, smashing down. The bolts of thunder seemed to fall on her
heart. She lay absolutely crushed, in a kind of quiescent hysterics,
tortured. And the hysterics held her listening and tense and abject,
until dawn. And then she was a wreck.
In the morning came Juana, also looking like a dead insect, with the
conventional phrase: “How have you passed the night, Niña?”
“Badly!” said Kate. Then she told the story of the black cat, or the
man’s arm.
“_Mire!_” said Juana, in a hushed voice. “The poor innocent will be
murdered in her bed. No, Niña, you must go and sleep in the hotel. No
no, Niña, you can’t leave your window shutter open. No, no, impossible.
See now, will you go to the hotel to sleep? The other señora does it.”
“I don’t want to,” said Kate.
“You don’t want to, Niña? Ah! _Entonces! Entonces_, Niña, I will tell
Ezequiel to sleep here outside your door, with his pistol. He has a
pistol, and he will sleep outside your door, and you can leave your
shutter open, for air in the hot night. Ah, Niña, we poor women, we
need a man and a pistol. We ought not to be left alone all the night.
We are afraid, the children are afraid. And imagine it, that there was
a robber trying to open the bolt of your door! Imagine it to yourself!
No, Niña, we will tell Ezequiel at mid-day.”
Ezequiel came striding proudly in, at mid-day. He was a wild, shy
youth, very erect and proud, and half savage. His voice was breaking,
and had a queer resonance.
He stood shyly while the announcement was being made to him. Then he
looked at Kate with flashing black eyes, very much the man to the
rescue.
“Yes! Yes!” he said. “I will sleep here on the corridor. Don’t have any
fear. I shall have my pistol.”
He marched off, and returned with the pistol, an old long-barrelled
affair.
“It has five shots,” he said, showing the weapon. “If you open the
door in the night, you must say a word to me first. Because if I see
anything move, I shall fire five shots. _Pst! Pst!_”
She saw by the flash of his eyes _what_ satisfaction it would give him
to fire five shots at something moving in the night. The thought of
shots being fired at _him_ gave him not the least concern.
“And Niña,” said Juana, “If you come home late, after the light is out,
you must call _Ezequiel_! Because if not, _Brumm! Brumm!_--and who
knows who will be killed!”
Ezequiel slept on a straw mat on the brick verandah outside Kate’s
door, rolled up in his blanket, and with the pistol at his side. So
she could leave her shutter open for air. And the first night she was
kept awake once more by his fierce snoring. Never had she heard such
a tremendous resonant sound! What a chest that boy must have! It was
sound from some strange, savage other world. The noise kept her awake,
but there was something in it which she liked. Some sort of wild
strength.
CHAP: IX. CASA DE LA CUENTAS.
Kate was soon fond of the limping, untidy Juana, and of the girls.
Concha was fourteen, a thick, heavy, barbaric girl with a mass of black
waving hair which she was always scratching. Maria was eleven, a shy,
thin bird-like thing with big eyes that seemed almost to absorb the
light round her.
It was a reckless family. Juana admitted a different father for Jesús,
but to judge from the rest, one would have suspected a different father
for each of them. There was a basic, sardonic carelessness in the face
of life, in all the family. They lived from day to day, a stubborn,
heavy, obstinate life of indifference, careless about the past,
careless about the present, careless about the future. They had even no
interest in money. Whatever they got they spent in a minute, and forgot
it again.
Without aim or purpose, they lived absolutely _à terre_, down on the
dark, volcanic earth. They were not animals, because men and women and
their children _cannot_ be animals. It is not granted us. _Go, for once
gone, thou never canst return!_ says the great Urge which drives us
creatively on. When man tries brutally to return to the older, previous
levels of evolution, he does so in the spirit of cruelty and misery.
So in the black eyes of the family, a certain vicious fear and wonder
and misery. The misery of human beings who squat helpless outside their
own unbuilt selves, unable to win their souls out of the chaos, and
indifferent to all other victories.
White people are becoming soulless too. But they have conquered the
lower worlds of metal and energy, so they whizz around in machines,
circling the void of their own emptiness.
To Kate, there was a great pathos in her family. Also a certain
repulsiveness.
Juana and her children, once they accepted their Niña as their own,
were honest with intensity. Point of honour, they were honest to the
least little plum in the fruit bowl. And almost intensely eager to
serve.
Themselves indifferent to their surroundings, they would live in
squalor. The earth was the great garbage bowl. Everything discarded was
flung on the earth and they did not care. Almost they liked to live in
a milieu of fleas and old rags, bits of paper, banana skins and mango
stones. Here’s a piece torn off my dress! Earth, take it. Here’s the
combings of my hair! Earth, take them!
But Kate could not bear it. She cared. And immediately, the family was
quite glad, thrilled that _she_ cared. They swept the patio with the
twig broom till they swept the very surface of the earth away. Fun! The
Niña had feelings about it.
She was a source of wonder and amusement to them. But she was never
a class superior. She was a half-incomprehensible, half-amusing
wonder-being.
The Niña wanted the _aquador_ to bring two _botes_ of hot water, quick,
from the hot springs, to wash herself all over every morning. Fun! Go,
Maria, tell the aquador to _run_ with the Niña’s water.
Then they almost resented it that she shut herself off to have her
bath. She was a sort of goddess to them, to provide them with fun and
wonder; but she ought always to be accessible. And a god who is forever
accessible to human beings has an unenviable time of it, Kate soon
discovered.
No, it was no sinecure, being a Niña. At dawn began the scrape-scrape
of the twig broom outside. Kate stayed on in bed, doors fastened but
shutters open. Flutter outside! Somebody wanted to sell two eggs.
Where is the Niña. She is sleeping! The visitor does not go. Continual
flutter outside.
The _aquador_! Ah, the water for the Niña’s bath! She is sleeping,
she is sleeping. “No!” called Kate, slipping into a dressing-gown and
unbolting the door. In come the children with the bath tub, in comes
the aquador with the two square kerosene cans full of hot water. Twelve
centavos! Twelve centavos for the _aquador_! _No hay!_ We haven’t got
twelve centavos. Later! Later! Away trots the aquador, pole over his
shoulder. Kate shuts her doors and shutters and starts her bath.
“Niña? Niña?”
“What do you want?”
“Eggs boiled or fried or rancheros? Which do you want?”
“Boiled.”
“Coffee or chocolate?”
“Coffee.”
“Or do you want tea?”
“No, coffee.”
Bath proceeds.
“Niña?”
“Yes.”
“There is no coffee. We are going to buy some.”
“I’ll take tea.”
“No, Niña! I am going. Wait for me.”
“Go then.”
Kate comes out to breakfast on the verandah. The table is set, heaped
with fruit and white bread and sweet buns.
“Good morning, Niña. How have you passed the night? Well! Ah, praised
be God! Maria, the coffee. I’m going to put the eggs in the water.
Oh, Niña, that they may not be boiled hard!--Look, what feet of the
Madonna! Look! _Bonitos!_”
And Juana stooped down fascinated to touch with her black finger Kate’s
white soft feet, that were thrust in light sandals, just a thong across
the foot.
The day had begun. Juana looked upon herself as dedicated entirely
to Kate. As soon as possible she shooed her girls away, to school.
Sometimes they went: mostly they didn’t. The Niña said they must go to
school. Listen! Listen now! Says the Niña that you must go to school!
Away! Walk!
Juana would limp back and forth down the long verandah from kitchen to
the breakfast table, carrying away the dishes one by one. Then, with a
great splash, she was washing up.
Morning! Brilliant sun pouring into the patio, on the hibiscus flowers
and the fluttering yellow and green rags of the banana trees. Birds
swiftly coming and going, with tropical suddenness. In the dense shadow
of the mango-grove, white clad Indians going like ghosts. The sense
of fierce sun and almost more impressive, of dark, intense shadow. A
twitter of life, yet a certain heavy weight of silence. A dazzling
flicker and brilliance of light, yet the feeling of weight.
Kate would sit alone, rocking on her verandah, pretending to sew.
Silently appears an old man with one egg held up mysteriously, like
some symbol. Would the patrons buy it for five centavos. La Juana only
gives four centavos. All right? Where is Juana?
Juana appears from the plaza with more purchases. The egg! The four
centavos! The account of the spendings. _Entonces! Entonces! Luego!
Luego! Ah, Niña, no tengo memoria!_ Juana could not read nor write.
She scuffled off to the market with her pesos, bought endless little
things at one or two centavos each, every morning. And every morning
there was a reckoning up. Ah! Ah! Where are we? I have no memory. Well
then--ah--yes--I bought ocote for three centavos! How much? How much,
Niña? How much is it now?
It was a game which thrilled Juana to the marrow, reckoning up the
centavos to get it just right. If she was a centavo short in the
change, she was paralysed. Time after time she would re-appear. _There
is a centavo short, Niña? Ah, how stupid I am? But I will give you one
of mine!_
“Don’t bother,” said Kate. “Don’t think of it any more.”
“But yes. But yes!” and away she limped in distraction.
Till an hour later, loud cry from the far end of the house. Juana
waving a scrap of greenery.
“Mire! Niña! Compré perjil a un centavo--I bought parsley for one cent.
Is it right?”
“It is right,” said Kate.
And life could proceed once more.
There were two kitchens, the one next the dining-room, belonging to
Kate, and the narrow little shed under the banana trees, belonging
to the servants. From her verandah Kate looked away down to Juana’s
kitchen shed. It had a black window hole.
_Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap!_ Why I thought Concha was at school! said Kate
to herself.
No!--there, in the darkness of the window hole was Concha’s swarthy
face and mane, peering out like some animal from a cave, as she made
the tortillas. Tortillas are flat pancakes of maize dough, baked dry
on a flat earthenware plate over the fire. And the making consists
of clapping a bit of new dough from the palm of one hand to the
other, till the tortilla is of the requisite thinness, roundness, and
so-called lightness.
Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap! It was as inevitable as the
tick of some spider, the sound of Concha making tortillas in the heat
of the morning, peering out of her dark window hole. And some time
after mid-day, the smoke would be coming out of the window hole; Concha
was throwing the raw tortillas on the big earthen plate over the slow
wood fire.
Then Ezequiel might or might not stride in, very much the man, serape
poised over one shoulder and big straw hat jauntily curled, to eat the
mid-day tortillas. If he had work in the fields at any distance, he
would not appear till nightfall. If he appeared, he sat on the doorstep
and the women served him his tortillas and fetched him his drink of
water as if he was a king, boy though he might be. And his rough,
breaking voice was heard in quiet command.
Command was the word. Though he was quiet and gentle, and very
conscientious, there was calm, kingly command in his voice when he
spoke to his mother or sisters. The old male prerogative. Somehow, it
made Kate want to ridicule him.
Came her own meal: one of her trials. Hot, rather greasy soup.
Inevitable hot, greasy, rather peppery rice. Inevitable meat in hot,
thick, rather greasy sauce. Boiled calabacitas or egg-plant, salad,
perhaps some dulce made with milk--and the big basket of fruit.
Overhead, the blazing tropical sun of late May.
Afternoon, and greater heat. Juana set off with the girls and the
dishes. They would do the washing up in the lake. Squatting on the
stones, they would dabble the plates one by one, the spoons and the
forks one by one in the filmy water of the lake, then put them in the
sun to dry. After which Juana might wash a couple of towels in the lake
and the girls might bathe. Sauntering the day away--sauntering the day
away.
Jesús, the eldest son, a queer, heavy, greasy fellow, usually appeared
in the afternoon, to water the garden. But he ate his meals at the
hotel, and really lived there, had his home there. Not that he had any
home, any more than a zopilote had a home. But he ran the _planta_,
and did odd jobs about the hotel, and worked every day in the year
till half past ten at night, earning twenty-two pesos, eleven dollars,
a month. He wore a black shirt, and his thick, massive black hair
dropped over his low brow. Very near to an animal. And though, to
order, he wore a black Fascisti shirt, he had the queer, animal jeering
of the socialists, an instinct for pulling things down.
His mother and he had a funny little intimacy of quiet and indifferent
mutual taunting of one another. He would give her some money if she
were in a strait. And there was a thin little thread of blood-bondage
between them. Apart from that, complete indifference.
Ezequiel was a finer type. He was slender and so erect that he almost
curved backwards. He was very shy, farouche. Proud also, and more
responsible to his family. He would not go to work in an hotel. No. He
was a worker in the fields, and he was proud of it. A man’s work. No
equivocal sort of half-service for him.
Though he was just a hired labourer, yet, working on the land he never
felt he was working for a master. It was the land he worked for.
Somewhere inside himself he felt that the land was his, and he belonged
in a measure to it. Perhaps a lingering feeling of tribal, communal
land-ownership and service.
When there was work, he was due to earn a peso a day. There was often
no work: and often only seventy-five centavos a day for wage. When the
land was dry, he would try to get work on the road, though this he did
not like. But he earned his peso a day.
Often, there was no work. Often, for days, sometimes for weeks, he
would have to hang about, nothing to do, nothing to do. Only, when
the Socialist Government had begun giving the peasants bits of land,
dividing up the big haciendas, Ezequiel had been allotted a little
piece outside the village. He would go and gather the stone together
there, and prepare to build a little hut. And he would break the earth
with a hoe, his only implement, as far as possible. But he had no blood
connection with this square allotment of unnatural earth, and he could
not get himself into relations with it. He was fitful and diffident
about it. There was no incentive, no urge.
On workdays he would come striding in about six o’clock, shyly greeting
Kate as he passed. He was a gentleman in his barbarism. Then, away in
the far recess, he would rapidly fold tortilla after tortilla, sitting
on the floor with his back to the wall, rapidly eating the leathery
things that taste of mortar, because the maize is first boiled with
lime to loosen the husk, and accepting another little pile, served
on a leaf, from the cook, Concha. Juana, cook for the Niña, would no
longer condescend to cook for her own family. And sometimes there was a
mess of meat and chile for Ezequiel to scoop up out of the earthenware
casserole, with his tortillas. And sometimes there was not. But always,
he ate with a certain blind, rapid indifference, that also seems to be
Mexican. They seem to _eat_ even with a certain hostile reluctance, and
have a strange indifference to what or when they eat.
His supper finished, as a rule he was off again like a shot, to the
plaza, to be among men. And the women would sit desultorily about, on
the ground. Sometimes Kate would come in at nine o’clock to an empty
place--Ezequiel in the plaza, Juana and Maria disappeared somewhere or
other, and Concha lying asleep like a heap of rags on the gravel of
the patio. When Kate called her, she would raise her head, stupefied
and hopeless; then get up like a dog and crawl away to the gate. The
strange stupor of boredom and hopelessness that was always sinking upon
them would make Kate’s heart stand still with dread.
The peculiar indifference to everything, even to one another. Juana
washed a cotton shirt and a pair of cotton trousers for each of her
sons, once a week, and there her maternal efforts ended. She saw hardly
anything of them, and was often completely unaware of what Ezequiel was
doing, where he was working, or at what. He had just gone off to work,
no more.
Yet again, sometimes she had hot, fierce pangs of maternal
protectiveness, when the boy was unjustly treated, as he often was. And
if she thought he were ill, a black sort of fatalistic fear came over
her. But Kate had to rouse her into getting some simple medicine.
Like animals, yet not at all like animals. For animals are complete
in their isolation and their insouciance. With them it is not
indifference. It is completeness in themselves. But with the family
there was always a kind of bleeding of incompleteness, a terrible
stupor of boredom settling down.
The two girls could not be apart: they must always be running after one
another. Yet Concha continually teased the big-eyed, naïve simpleton
of a Maria. And Maria was always in tears. Or the two were suddenly
throwing stones at one another. But with no real aim to hit. And Juana
was abusing them with sudden vehemence, that flickered in a minute to
complete indifference again.
Queer, the savage ferocity with which the girls would suddenly be
throwing stones at one another. But queerer still, they always aimed
_just to miss_. Kate noticed the same in the savage attacks the boys
made on one another, on the beach; hurling large stones with intense,
terrible ferocity. But almost always, aiming with a curious cast in the
eyes, just to miss.
But sometimes not. Sometimes hitting with a sharp cut. And then the
wounded one would drop right down, with a howl, as if dead. And the
other boys would edge away, in a silent kind of dread. And the wounded
boy would be prostrate, not really much hurt, but as if he was killed.
Then, maybe, suddenly he would be up, with a convulsion of murder in
his face, pursuing his adversary with a stone. And the adversary would
abjectly flee.
Always the same thing among the young: a ceaseless, endless taunting
and tormenting. The same as among the Red Indians. But the Pueblo
Indians rarely lapsing from speech into violence. The Mexican boys
almost always. And almost always, one boy in murderous rage, pursuing
his taunter till he had hurt him: then an abject collapse of the one
hurt. Then, usually, a revival of the one hurt, the murderous frenzy
transferred to him, and the first attacker fleeing abjectly, in terror.
One or the other always abject.