She herself was inspired to help. So she had the two girls for an hour
a day, teaching them to read, to sew, to draw. Maria wanted to learn
to read: that she did want. For the rest, they began well. But soon,
the regularity and the slight insistence of Kate on their attention
made them take again that peculiar invisible jeering tone, something
peculiar to the American Continent. A quiet, invisible, malevolent
mockery, a desire to wound. They would press upon her, trespassing upon
her privacy, and with a queer effrontery, doing all they could to walk
over her. With their ugly little wills, trying to pull her will down.
“No, don’t lean on me, Concha. Stand on your own feet.”
The slight grin of malevolence on Concha’s face, as she stood on her
own feet. Then:
“Do you have lice in your hair, Niña?”
The question asked with a peculiar, subtle, Indian insolence.
“No!” said Kate, suddenly angry. “And now go! Go! Go away from me!
Don’t come near me.”
They slunk out, abject. So much for educating them.
Kate had visitors from Guadalajara--great excitement. But while the
visitors were drinking tea with Kate on the verandah, at the other side
of the patio, full in view, Juana, Concha, Maria, and Felipa, a cousin
of about sixteen, squatted on the gravel with their splendid black hair
down their backs, displaying themselves as they hunted in each other’s
hair for lice. They wanted to be full in view. And they were it. They
wanted the basic fact of lice to be thrust under the noses of those
white people.
Kate strode down the verandah.
“If you must pick lice,” she said in a shaking voice to Juana, shaking
with anger, “pick them there, in your own place, where you can’t be
seen.”
One instant, Juana’s black inchoate eyes gleamed with a malevolent
ridicule, meeting Kate’s. The next instant, humble and abject, the four
with their black hair down their backs slunk into the recess out of
sight.
But it pleased Juana that she had been able to make Kate’s eyes blaze
with anger. It pleased her. She felt a certain low power in herself.
True, she was a little afraid of that anger. But that was what she
wanted. She would have no use for a Niña of whom she was not a bit
afraid. And she wanted to be able to provoke that anger, of which she
felt a certain abject twinge of fear.
Ah the dark races! Kate’s own Irish were near enough, for her to have
glimpsed some of the mystery. The dark races belong to a bygone cycle
of humanity. They are left behind in a gulf out of which they have
never been able to climb. And on to the particular white man’s levels
they never will be able to climb. They can only follow as servants.
While the white man keeps the impetus of his own proud, onward march,
the dark races will yield and serve, perforce. But let the white man
once have a misgiving about his own leadership, and the dark races will
at once attack him, to pull him down into the old gulfs. To engulf him
again.
Which is what is happening. For the white man, let him bluster as he
may, is hollow with misgiving about his own supremacy.
Full speed ahead, then, for the débâcle.
But once Kate had been roused to a passion of revulsion from these
lice-picking, down-dragging people, they changed again, and served her
with a certain true wistfulness that could not but touch her. Juana
cared really about nothing. But just that last thread of relationship
that connected her with Kate and the upper world of daylight and fresh
air, she didn’t want to break. No, no, she didn’t want finally to drive
her Niña away. No no, the only one thing she did want, ultimately, was
to serve her Niña.
But at the same time, she cherished a deep malevolent grudge against
rich people, white people, superior people. Perhaps the white man has
finally betrayed his own leadership. Who knows! But it is a thing of
the brave, on-marching soul, and perhaps this has been betrayed already
by the white man. So that the dark are rising upon him.
Juana would come to Kate, telling her stories from the past. And the
sinister mocking film would be on her black eyes, and her lined copper
face would take on its reptile mask as she would continue: “Usted sabe,
Niña, los gringos, los gringitos llevan todo--you know, Niña, the
_gringos_ and the _gringitos_ take away everything...?”
The _gringos_ are the Americans. But Kate herself was included by Juana
in the _gringitos_: the white foreigners. The woman was making another
sliding, insolent attack.
“It is possible,” said Kate coldly. “But tell me what I take away from
Mexico.”
“No, Niña, No!” The subtle smile of satisfaction lurked under the
bronze tarnish of Juana’s face. She had been able to get at the other
woman, touch the raw. “I don’t speak of you, Niña!” But there was too
much protest in it.
Almost, they wanted to drive her away: to insult her and drag her down
and make her want to go away. They couldn’t help it. Like the Irish,
they could cut off their nose to spite their face.
The backward races!
At the same time there was a true pathos about them. Ezequiel had
worked for a man for two months, building a house, when he was a boy of
fourteen, in order to get a serape. At the end of the two months, the
man had put him off, and he had not got the serape: had never got it. A
bitter disappointment.
But then, Kate was not responsible for that. And Juana seemed almost to
make her so.
A people without the energy of _getting on_, how could they fail to be
hopelessly exploited. They had been hopelessly and cruelly exploited,
for centuries. And their backbones were locked in malevolent resistance.
“But,” as Kate said to herself, “I don’t want to exploit them. Not a
bit. On the contrary, I am willing to give more than I get. But that
nasty insinuating insultingness is not fair in the game. I never insult
them. I am so careful not to hurt them. And then they _deliberately_
make these centipede attacks on me, and are pleased when I am hurt.”
But she knew her own Irish at the game. So she was able to put Juana
and the girls away from her, and isolate herself from them. Once they
were put away, their malevolence subsided and they remembered what Kate
wanted. While she stayed amiable, they forgot. They forgot to sweep the
patio, they forgot to keep themselves clean. Only when they were shoved
back, into isolation, did they remember again.
The boy, Ezequiel, seemed to her to have more honour than the women. He
never made these insidious attacks.
And when her house was clean and quiet and the air seemed cleaned
again, the soul renewed, her old fondness for the family came back.
Their curious flitting, coming and going, like birds: the busy
clap--clap--clapping of tortillas, the excited scrunching of tomatoes
and chile on the metate, as Juana prepared sauce. The noise of the
bucket in the well. Jesús, come to water the garden.
The game, the game of it all! Everything they did must be fun, or they
could not do it. They could not abstract themselves to a routine.
Never. Everything must be fun, must be variable, must be a bit of an
adventure. It was confusion, but after all, a living confusion, not
a dead, dreary thing. Kate remembered her English servants in the
English kitchens: so mechanical and somehow inhuman. Well, this was the
other extreme.
Here there was no discipline nor method at all. Although Juana and
her brats really wanted to do the things Kate wished, they must
do them their own way. Sometimes Kate felt distracted: after all,
the mechanical lines are so much _easier_ to follow. But as far as
possible, she let the family be. She had to get used, for example, to
the vagaries of her dining table: a little round table that always
stood on the verandah. At breakfast time it would be discreetly set
under the _plantas_ by the salon; for dinner, at one o’clock, it would
have travelled way down the verandah; for tea it might be under a
little tree on the grass. And then Juana would decide that the Niña
must take supper, two eggs, _rancheros_, in the dining-room itself,
isolated at the corner of the long dining-table meant for fourteen
people.
The same with the dishes. Why they should, after washing up in the big
bowls in the kitchen for several days, suddenly struggle way down to
the lake with the unwashed pots in a basket on Concha’s shoulder, Kate
never knew. Except for the fun of the thing.
Children! But then, not at all children. None of the wondering
insouciance of childhood. Something dark and cognisant in their souls
all the time: some heavy weight of resistance. They worked in fits and
starts, and could be very industrious; then came days when they lay
about on the ground like pigs. At times they were merry, seated round
on the ground in groups, like Arabian nights, and laughing away. Then
suddenly resisting even merriment in themselves, relapsing into the
numb gloom. When they were busily working, suddenly for no reason,
throwing away the tool, as if resenting having given themselves.
Careless in their morals, always changing their loves, the men at least
resisted all the time any real giving of themselves. They didn’t want
the thing they were pursuing. It was the women who drew them on. And
a young man and a girl going down the road from the lake in the dark,
teasing and poking each other in excitement, would startle Kate because
of their unusualness--the men and women never walked their sex abroad,
as white people do. And the sudden, sexual laugh of the man, so strange
a sound of pain and desire, obstinate reluctance and helpless passion,
a noise as if something tearing in his breast, was a sound to remember.
Kate felt her household a burden. In a sense, they were like parasites,
they wanted to live on her life, and pull her down, pull her down.
Again, they were so generous with her, so good and gentle, she felt
they were wonderful. And then once more she came up against that
unconscious, heavy, reptilian indifference in them, indifference and
resistance.
Her servants were the clue to all the native life, for her. The men
always together, erect, handsome, balancing their great hats on the
top of their heads and sitting, standing, crouching with a snake-like
impassivity. The women together separately, soft, and as if _hidden_,
wrapped tight in their dark rebozos. Men and women seemed always to be
turning their backs on one another, as if they didn’t want to see one
another. No flirting, no courting. Only an occasional quick, dark look,
the signal of a weapon-like desire, given and taken.
The women seemed, on the whole, softly callous and determined to go
their own way: to change men if they wished. And the men seemed not to
care very profoundly. But it was the women who wanted the men.
The native women, with their long black hair streaming down their full,
ruddy backs, would bathe at one end of the beach, usually wearing their
chemise, or a little skirt. The men took absolutely no notice. They
didn’t even look the other way. It was the women bathing, that was all.
As if it were, like the charales swimming, just a natural part of the
lake life. The men just left that part of the lake to the women. And
the women sat in the shallows of the lake, isolated in themselves like
moor-fowl, pouring water over their heads and over their ruddy arms
from a gourd scoop.
The quiet, unobtrusive, but by no means down-trodden women of the peon
class. They went their own way, enveloped in their rebozos as in their
own darkness. They hurried nimbly along, their full cotton skirts
swinging, chirping and quick like birds. Or they sat in the lake with
long hair streaming, pouring water over themselves: again like birds.
Or they passed with a curious slow inevitability up the lake-shore,
with a heavy red jar of water perched on one shoulder, one arm over the
head, holding the rim of the jar. They had to carry all water from
the lake to their houses. There was no town supply. Or, especially on
Sunday afternoons, they sat in their doorways lousing one another. The
most resplendent _belles_, with magnificent black wavy hair, were most
thoroughly loused. It was as if it were a meritorious public act.
The men were the obvious figures. They assert themselves on the air.
They are the dominant. Usually they are in loose groups, talking
quietly, or silent: always standing or sitting apart, rarely touching
one another. Often a single man would stand alone at a street corner in
his serape, motionless for hours, like some powerful spectre. Or a man
would lie on the beach as if he had been cast up dead from the waters.
Impassive, motionless, they would sit side by side on the benches of
the plaza, not exchanging a word. Each one isolated in his own fate,
his eyes black and quick like a snake’s, and as blank.
It seemed to Kate that the highest thing this country might produce
would be some powerful relationship of man to man. Marriage itself
would always be a casual thing. Though the men seemed very gentle and
protective to the little children. Then they forgot them.
But sex itself was a powerful, potent thing, not to be played with or
paraded. The one mystery. And a mystery greater than the individual.
The individual hardly counted.
It was strange to Kate to see the Indian huts on the shore, little
holes built of straw or corn-stalks, with half-naked children squatting
on the naked earth floor, and a lousy woman-squalor around, a litter of
rags and bones, and a sharp smell of human excrement. The people have
no noses. And standing silent and erect not far from the hole of the
doorway, the man, handsome and impassive. How could it be, that such a
fine-looking human male should be so absolutely indifferent, content
with such paltry squalor?
But there he was, unconscious. He seemed to have life and passion in
him. And she knew he was strong. No men in the world can carry heavier
loads on their backs, for longer distances, than these Indians. She had
seen an Indian trotting down a street with a piano on his back: holding
it, also, by a band round his forehead. From his forehead, and on his
spine he carried it, trotting along. The women carry with a brand round
the breast.
So there is strength. And _apparently_, there is passionate life. But
no energy. Nowhere in Mexico is there any sign of energy. This is, as
it were, switched off.
Even the new artizan class, though it imitates the artizan class of
the United States, has no real energy. There are workmen’s clubs. The
workmen dress up and parade a best girl on their arm. But somehow, it
seems what it is, only a weak imitation.
Kate’s family was increased, without her expecting it. One day there
arrived from Ocotlan a beautiful ox-eyed girl of about fifteen, wrapped
in her black cotton rebozo, and somewhat towny in her Madonna-meekness:
Maria del Carmen. With her, Julio, a straight and fierce young man of
twenty-two. They had just been married, and had come to Sayula for a
visit. Julio was Juana’s cousin.
Might they sleep in the patio with herself and the girls, was Juana’s
request. They would stay only two days.
Kate was amazed. Maria del Carmen must have had some Spanish blood, her
beauty was touched with Spain. She seemed even refined and superior.
Yet she was to sleep out on the ground like a dog, with her young
husband. And he, so erect and proud-looking, possessed nothing in the
world but an old serape.
“There are three spare bedrooms,” said Kate. “They may sleep in one of
those.”
The beds were single beds. Would they need more blankets? she asked
Juana.
No! They would manage with the one serape of Julio’s.
The new family had arrived. Julio was a bricklayer. That is to say, he
worked building the adobe walls of the little houses. He belonged to
Sayula, and had come back for a visit.
The visit continued. Julio would come striding in at mid-day and at
evening; he was looking for work. Maria del Carmen, in her one black
dress, would squat on the floor and pat tortillas. She was allowed to
cook them in Juana’s kitchen hole. And she talked and laughed with the
girls. At night, when Julio was home, he would lie on the ground with
his back to the wall, impassive, while Maria del Carmen fondled his
thick black hair.
They were in love. But even now, he was not yielding to his love.
She wanted to go back to Ocotlan, where she was at home, and more a
señorita than here in Sayula. But he refused. There was no money: the
young ménage lived on about five American cents a day.
Kate was sewing. Maria del Carmen, who didn’t even know how to put a
chemise together, watched with great eyes. Kate taught her, and bought
a length of cotton material. Maria del Carmen was sewing herself a
dress!
Julio had got work at a peso a day. The visit continued. Kate thought
Julio wasn’t very nice with Maria del Carmen: his quiet voice was so
overbearing in command when he spoke to her. And Maria del Carmen, who
was a bit towny, did not take it well. She brooded a little.
The visit stretched into weeks. And now Juana was getting a bit tired
of her relative.
But Julio had got a bit of money. He had rented a little one-room adobe
house, at one peso fifty per week. Maria del Carmen was going to move
into her own home.
Kate saw the new outfit got together. It consisted of one straw mat,
three cooking plates of earthenware, five bits of native crockery, two
wooden spoons, one knife and Julio’s old blanket. That was all. But
Maria del Carmen was moving in.
Kate presented her with a large old eiderdown, whose silk was rather
worn, a couple of bowls, and a few more bits of crockery. Maria del
Carmen was set up. _Good! Good! Oh Good!_ Kate heard her voice down the
patio. _I have got a coverlet! I have got a coverlet!_
In the rainy season, the nights can be very cold, owing to evaporation.
Then the natives lie through the small hours like lizards, numb and
prostrate with cold. They are lying on the damp earth on a thin straw
mat, with a corner of an old blanket to cover them. And the same
terrible inertia makes them endure it, without trying to make any
change. They could carry in corn husks or dry banana leaves for a bed.
They could even cover themselves with banana leaves.
But no! On a thin mat on damp cold earth they lie and tremble with
cold, night after night, night after night, night after night.
But Maria del Carmen was a bit towny. _Oh good! Oh good! I’ve got a
coverlet!_
CHAP: X. DON RAMÓN AND DOÑA CARLOTA.
Kate had been in Sayula ten days before she had any sign from Don
Ramón. She had been out in a boat on the lake, and had seen his house,
round the bend of the western point. It was a reddish-and-yellow
two-storey house with a little stone basin for the boats, and a mango
grove between it and the lake. Among the trees, away from the lake,
were the black adobe huts, two rows, of the peons.
The hacienda had once been a large one. But it had been irrigated from
the hills, and the revolutions had broken all the aqueducts. Only a
small supply of water was available. Then Don Ramón had had enemies in
the Government. So that a good deal of his land was taken away to be
divided among the peons. Now, he had only some three hundred acres.
The two hundred acres along the lake shore were mostly lost to him. He
worked a few acres of fruit land round the house, and in a tiny valley
just in the hills, he raised sugar cane. On the patches of the mountain
slope, little patches of maize were to be seen.
But Doña Carlota had money. She was from Torreon, and drew still a good
income from the mines.
A mozo came with a note from Don Ramón: might he bring his wife to call
on Kate.
Doña Carlota was a thin, gentle, wide-eyed woman, with a slightly
startled expression, and soft, brownish hair. She was pure European in
extraction, of a Spanish father and French mother: very different from
the usual stout, overpowdered, ox-like Mexican matron. Her face was
pale, faded, and without any make-up at all. Her thin, eager figure had
something English about it, but her strange, wide brown eyes were not
English. She spoke only Spanish--or French. But her Spanish was so slow
and distinct and slightly plaintive, that Kate understood her at once.
The two women understood one another quickly, but were a little
nervous of one another. Doña Carlota was delicate and sensitive like a
Chihuahua dog, and with the same slightly prominent eyes. Kate felt she
had rarely met a woman with such a doglike finesse of gentleness. And
the two women talked. Ramón, large and muted, kept himself in reserve.
It was as if the two women rushed together to unite against his silence
and his powerful, different significance.
Kate knew at once that Doña Carlota loved him, but with a love that was
now nearly all _will_. She had worshipped him, and she had had to leave
off worshipping him. She had had to question him. And she would never
now cease from questioning.
So he sat apart, a little constrained, his handsome head hanging a
little, and his dark, sensitive hands dangling between his thighs.
“I had such a wonderful time!” Kate said suddenly to him. “I danced a
dance round the drum with the Men of Quetzalcoatl.”
“I heard,” he said, with a rather stiff smile.
Doña Carlota understood English, though she would not speak it.
“You danced with the men of Quetzalcoatl!” she said in Spanish, in a
pained voice. “But, Señora, why did you do such a thing? Oh why?”
“I was fascinated,” said Kate.
“No, you must not be fascinated. No! No! It is not good. I tell you,
I am _so sorry_ my husband interests himself in this thing. I am so
sorry.”
Juana was bringing a bottle of vermouth: all that Kate had to offer her
visitors, in the morning.
“You went to see your boys in the United States?” said Kate to Doña
Carlota. “How were they?”
“Oh, better, thank you. They are well; that is, the younger is very
delicate.”
“You didn’t bring him home?”
“No! No! I think they are better at school. Here--here--there are so
many things to trouble them. No! But they will come home next month,
for the vacation.”
“How nice!” said Kate. “Then I shall see them. They will be here, won’t
they?--on the lake?”
“Well!--I am not sure. Perhaps for a little while. You see I am so busy
in Mexico with my Cuna.”
“What is a Cuna?” said Kate; she only knew it was the Spanish for
cradle.
It turned out to be a foundlings’ home, run by a few obscure Carmelite
sisters. And Doña Carlota was the director. Kate gathered that Don
Ramón’s wife was an intense, almost exalted Catholic. She exalted
herself in the Church, and in her work for the Cuna.
“There are so many children born in Mexico,” said Doña Carlota, “and so
many die. If only we could save them, and equip them for life. We do a
little, all we can.”
It seemed, the waste, unwanted babies could be delivered in at the door
of the Cuna, like parcels. The mother had only to knock, and hand in
the little living bundle.
“It saves so many mothers from neglecting their babies, and letting
them die,” said Doña Carlota. “Then we do what we can. If the mother
doesn’t leave a name, I name the child. Very often I do. The mothers
just hand over a little naked thing, sometimes without a name or a rag
to cover it. And we never ask.”
The children were not all kept in the Home. Only a small number. Of
the others, some decent Indian woman was paid a small sum to take the
child into her home. Every month she must come with the little one to
the Cuna, to receive her wage. The Indians are so very rarely unkind to
children. Careless, yes. But rarely, rarely unkind.
In former days, Doña Carlota said, nearly every well-born lady in
Mexico would receive one or more of these foundlings into her home,
and have it brought up with the family. It was the loose, patriarchal
generosity innate in the bosoms of the Spanish-Mexicans. But now, few
children were adopted. Instead, they were taught as far as possible
to be carpenters or gardeners or house-servants, or, among the girls,
dressmakers, even school-teachers.
Kate listened with uneasy interest. She felt there was so much real
human feeling in this Mexican charity: she was almost rebuked. Perhaps
what Doña Carlota was doing was the best that could be done, in this
half-wild, helpless country. At the same time, it was such a forlorn
hope, it made one’s heart sink.
And Doña Carlota, confident as she was in her good works, still had
just a bit the look of a victim; a gentle, sensitive, slightly startled
victim. As if some secret enemy drained her blood.
Don Ramón sat there impassive, listening without heeding; solid and
unmoving _against_ the charitable quiver of his wife’s emotion. He let
her do as she would. But against her work and against her flow he was
in silent, heavy, unchanging opposition. She knew this, and trembled
in her nervous eagerness, as she talked to Kate about the Cuna, and
won Kate’s sympathy. Till it seemed to her that there was something
cruel in Don Ramón’s passive, masked poise. An impassive male cruelty,
changeless as a stone idol.