Ramón?” said Doña Carlota. “The house is very poor and rough. It is no
longer what it used to be. But it is your house if you will come.”
Kate accepted, and said she would prefer to walk out. It was only four
miles, and surely she would be safe, with Juana.
“I will send a man to come with you,” said Don Ramón. “It might not be
quite safe.”
“Where is General Viedma?” asked Kate.
“We shall try to get him out when you come,” replied Doña Carlota. “I
am so very fond of Don Cipriano, I have known him for many years, and
he is the god-father of my younger son. But now he is in command of the
Guadalajara division, he is not very often able to come out.”
“I wonder why he is a general?” said Kate. “He seems to me too human.”
“Oh, but he is very human too. But he is a general; yes, yes, he wants
to be in command of the soldiers. And I tell you, he is very strong.
He has great power with his regiments. They believe in him, oh, they
believe in him. He has that power, you know, that some of the higher
types of Indians have, to make many others want to follow them and
fight for them. You know? Don Cipriano is like that. You can never
change him. But I think a woman might be wonderful for him. He has
lived so without any woman in his life. He won’t care about them.”
“What does he care about?” asked Kate.
“Ah!” Doña Carlota started as if stung. Then she glanced quickly,
involuntarily at her husband, as she added: “I don’t know. Really, I
don’t know.”
“The Men of Quetzalcoatl,” said Don Ramón heavily, with a little smile.
But Doña Carlota seemed to be able to take all the ease and the banter
out of him. He seemed stiff and a bit stupid.
“Ah, there! There! There you have it! The Men of Quetzalcoatl--that
is a nice thing for him to care about! A nice thing, I say,” fluttered
Doña Carlota, in her gentle, fragile, scolding way. And it was evident
to Kate that she adored both the men, and trembled in opposition to
their wrongness, and would never give in to them.
To Ramón it was a terrible burden, his wife’s quivering, absolute,
blind opposition, taken in conjunction with her helpless adoration.
A man-servant appeared at nine o’clock one morning, to accompany Kate
to the hacienda, which was called Jamiltepec. He had a basket, and
had been shopping in the market. An elderly man, with grey in his
moustache, he had bright young eyes and seemed full of energy. His bare
feet in the huaraches were almost black with exposure, but his clothes
were brilliantly white.
Kate was glad to be walking. The one depressing thing about life in
the villages was that one could not walk out into the country. There
was always the liability to be held up or attacked. And she had walked
already, as far as possible, in every direction, in the neighbourhood
of the village, accompanied usually by Ezequiel. Now she was beginning
to feel a prisoner.
She was glad, then, to be setting off. The morning was clear and hot,
the pale brown lake quite still, like a phantom. People were moving on
the beach, in the distance tiny, like dots of white: white dots of men
following the faint dust of donkeys. She wondered often why humanity
was like specks in the Mexican landscape; just specks of life.
They passed from the lake shore to the rough, dusty road going west,
between the steep slope of the hills and the bit of flat by the lake.
For almost a mile there were villas, most of them shut up fast, some
of them smashed, with broken walls and smashed windows. Only flowers
bloomed in masses above the rubble.
In the empty places were flimsy straw huts of the natives, haphazard,
as if blown there. By the road under the hill, were black-grey adobe
huts, like boxes, and fowls running about, and brown pigs or grey pigs
spotted with black careered and grunted, and half naked children, dark
orange-brown, trotted or lay flat on their faces in the road, their
little naked posteriors hunched up, fast asleep. Already asleep again.
The houses were many of them being re-thatched, or the tiled roofs were
being patched by men who assumed a great air of importance at having
undertaken such a task. They were pretending to hurry, too, because the
real rains might begin any day. And in the little stony levels by the
lake, the land was being scratch-ploughed by a pair of oxen and a lump
of pointed wood.
But this part of the road Kate knew. She knew the fine villa on the
knoll, with its tufts of palms, and the laid-out avenues that were
laid out, indeed, as the dead are, to crumble back again. She was
glad to be past the villas, where the road came down to the lake
again, under big shady trees that had twisted, wriggly beans. On the
left was the water, the colour of turtle doves, lapping the pale fawn
stones. At a water-hole of a stream in the beach, a cluster of women
were busily washing clothes. In the shallows of the lake itself two
women sat bathing, their black hair hanging dense and wet. A little
further along, a man was wading slowly, stopping to throw his round net
skilfully upon the water, then slowly stooping and gathering it in,
picking out the tiny, glittery fish called charales. Strangely silent
and remote everything, in the gleaming morning, as if it were some
distant period of time.
A little breeze was coming from the lake, but the deep dust underfoot
was hot. On the right the hill rose precipitous, baked and yellowish,
giving back the sun and the intense dryness, and exhaling the faint,
dessicated, peculiar smell of Mexico, that smells as if the earth had
sweated itself dry.
All the time strings of donkeys trotted laden through the dust, their
drivers stalking erect and rapid behind, watching with eyes like black
holes, but always answering Kate’s salute with a respectful _Adios!_
And Juana echoed her laconic _Adiosn!_ She was limping, and she thought
it horrible of Kate to walk four miles, when they might have struggled
out in an old hired motor-car, or gone in a boat, or even ridden
donkey-back.
But to go on foot! Kate could hear all her criada’s feelings in the
drawled, sardonic _Adiosn!_ But the man behind strode bravely and
called cheerfully. His pistol was prominent in his belt.
A bluff of yellow rock came jutting at the road. The road wound round
it, and into a piece of flat open country. There were fields of dry
stone, and hedges of dusty thorn and cactus. To the left the bright
green of the willows by the lake-shore. To the right the hills swerved
inland, to meet the sheer, fluted sides of dry mountains. Away ahead,
the hills curved back at the shore, and a queer little crack or niche
showed. This crack in the hills led from Don Ramón’s shore-property to
the little valley where he grew the sugar cane. And where the hills
approached the lake again, there was a dark clustering of mango trees,
and the red upper-storey of the hacienda house.
“There it is!” cried the man behind. “Jamiltepec, Señorita. La hacienda
de Don Ramón!”
And his eyes shone as he said the name. He was a proud peon, and he
really seemed happy.
“Look! How far!” cried Juana.
“Another time,” said Kate, “I shall come alone, or with Ezequiel.”
“No, Niña! Don’t say so. Only my foot hurts this morning.”
“Yes. Better not to bring you.”
“No, Niña! I like to come, very much!”
The tall windmill fan for drawing up water from the lake was spinning
gaily. A little valley came down from the niche in the hills, and at
the bottom a little water running. Towards the lake, where this valley
flattened out, was a grove of banana plants, screened a little from
the lake breeze by a vivid row of willow-trees. And on the top of the
slope, where the road ran into the shade of mango trees, were the two
rows of adobe huts, like a village, set a little back from the road.
Women were coming up between the trees, on the patch from the lake,
with jars of water on their shoulders; children were playing around
the doors, squatting with little naked posteriors in deep dust; and
here and there a goat was tethered. Men in soiled white clothes were
lounging, with folded arms and one leg crossed in front of the other,
against the corner of a house, or crouching under the walls. Not by any
means _dolce far niente_. They seemed to be waiting, eternally waiting
for something.
“That way, Señorita!” called the man with the basket, running to her
side and indicating the smoother road sloping down between some big
trees, towards the white gate of the hacienda. “We are here!”
Always he spoke with pleased delight, as if the place were a
wonder-place to him.
The big doors of the zaguan, the entrance, stood open, and in the shade
of the entrance-way a couple of little soldiers were seated. Across
the cleared, straw-littered space in front of the gates two peons were
trotting, each with a big bunch of bananas on his head. The soldiers
said something, and the two peons halted in their trotting, and slowly
turned under their yellow-green load, to look back at Kate and Juana
and the man Martin, approaching down the road. Then they turned again
and trotted into the courtyard, barefoot.
The soldiers stood up. Martin, trotting at Kate’s side again, ushered
her into the arched entrance, where the ox-wagons rumbling through had
worn deep ruts. Juana came behind, making a humble nose.
Kate found herself in a big, barren yard, that seemed empty. There
were high walls on the three sides, with sheds and stables. The fourth
side, facing, was the house, with heavily-barred windows looking on to
the courtyard, but with no door. Instead, there was another zaguan, or
passage with closed doors, piercing the house.
Martin trotted ahead to knock on the closed doors. Kate stood looking
round at the big yard. In a shed in one corner, four half-naked men
were packing bunches of bananas. A man in the shade was sawing poles,
and two men in the sun were unloading tiles from a donkey. In a corner
was a bullock wagon, and a pair of big black-and-white oxen standing
with heads pressed down, waiting.
The big doors opened, and Kate entered the second zaguan. It was a
wide entrance way, with stairs going up on one side, and Kate lingered
to look through the open iron gates in front of her, down a formal
garden hemmed in with huge mango trees, to the lake, with its little
artificial harbour where two boats were moored. The lake seemed to give
off a great light, between the dark walls of mango.
At the back of the newcomers the servant woman closed the big doors on
to the yard, then waved Kate to the stairs.
“Pass this way, Señorita.”
A bell tinkled above. Kate climbed the stone stairs. And there
above her was Doña Carlota, in white muslin and with white shoes and
stockings, her face looking curiously yellow and faded by contrast.
Her soft brown hair was low over her ears, and she held out her thin
brownish arms with queer effusiveness.
“So, you have come! And you have walked, walked all the way? Oh,
imagine walking in so much sun and dust! Come, come in and rest.”
She took Kate’s hands and led her across the open terrace at the top of
the stairs.
“It is beautiful here,” said Kate.
She stood on the terrace, looking out past the mango trees at the lake.
A distant sailing canoe was going down the breeze, on the pallid,
unreal water. Away across rose the bluish, grooved mountains, with the
white speck of a village: far away in the morning it seemed, in another
world, in another life, in another mode of time.
“What is that village?” Kate asked.
“That one? That one there? It is San Ildefonso,” said Doña Carlota, in
her fluttering eagerness.
“But it is beautiful here!” Kate repeated.
“Hermoso--si! Si, bonito!” quavered the other woman uneasily, always
answering in Spanish.
The house, reddish and yellow in colour, had two short wings towards
the lake. The terrace, with green plants on the terrace wall, went
round the three sides, the roof above supported by big square pillars
that rose from the ground. Down below, the pillars made a sort of
cloisters around the three sides, and in the little stone court was a
pool of water. Beyond, the rather neglected formal garden with strong
sun and deep mango-shade.
“Come, you will need to rest!” said Doña Carlota.
“I would like to change my shoes,” said Kate.
She was shown into a high, simple, rather bare bedroom with red-tiled
floor. There she changed into the shoes and stockings Juana had
carried, and rested a little.
As she lay resting, she heard the dulled thud-thud of the tom-tom drum,
but, save the crowing of a cock in the distance, no other sound on the
bright, yet curiously hollow Mexican morning. And the drum, thudding
with its dulled, black insistence, made her uneasy. It sounded like
something coming over the horizon.
She rose, and went into the long, high salon where Doña Carlota
was sitting talking to a man in black. The salon, with its three
window-doors open on to the terrace, its worn, red floor tiled with
old square bricks, its high walls colour-washed a faint green, and the
many-beamed ceiling whitewashed; and with its bareness of furniture;
seemed like part of the out-of-doors, like some garden-arbour put for
shade. The sense, which houses have in hot climates, of being just
three walls wherein one lingers for a moment, then goes away again.
As Kate entered the room, the man in black rose and shook hands with
Doña Carlota, bowing very low and deferential. Then with a deferential
sideways sort of bow to Kate, he vanished out of doors.
“Come!” said Doña Carlota to Kate. “Are you sure now you are rested?”
And she pulled forward one of the cane rocking-chairs that had poised
itself in the room, en route to nowhere.
“Perfectly!” said Kate. “How still it seems here! Except for the drum.
Perhaps it is the drum that makes it seem so still. Though I always
think the lake _makes_ a sort of silence.”
“Ah, the drum!” cried Doña Carlota, lifting her hand with a gesture of
nervous, spent exasperation. “I cannot hear it. No, I cannot, I cannot
bear to hear it.”
And she rocked herself in a sudden access of agitation.
“It does hit one rather below the belt,” said Kate. “What is it?”
“Ah, do not ask me! It is my husband.”
She made a gesture of despair, and rocked herself almost into
unconsciousness.
“Is Don Ramón drumming?”
“Drumming?” Doña Carlota seemed to start. “No! Oh no! He is not
drumming, himself. He brought down two Indians from the north to do
that.”
“Did he!” said Kate, non-committal.
But Doña Carlota was rocking in a sort of semi-consciousness. Then she
seemed to pull herself together.
“I _must talk_ to somebody, I must!” she said, suddenly straightening
herself in her chair, her face creamy and creased, her soft brown hair
sagging over her ears, her brown eyes oddly desperate. “May I talk to
you?”
“Do!” said Kate, rather uneasy.
“You know what Ramón is doing?” she said, looking at Kate almost
furtively, suspiciously.
“Does he want to bring back the old gods?” said Kate vaguely.
“Ah!” cried Doña Carlota, again with that desperate, flying jerk of
her hand. “As if it were _possible_! As if it were possible! The old
gods! Imagine it, Señora! The old gods! Why what are they? Nothing but
dead illusions. And ugly, repulsive illusions! Ah! I always thought my
husband such a clever man, so superior to me! Ah, it is terrible to
have to change one’s idea! This is such _nonsense_. How dare he! How
dare he take such nonsense seriously! How does he dare!”
“Does he believe in it himself?” asked Kate.
“Himself? But, Señora--” and Doña Carlota gave a pitiful, pitying smile
of contempt. “How could he! As if it were possible. After all he is an
educated man! How could he believe in such nonsense!”
“Then why does he do it?”
“Why? Why?” There was a tone of unspeakable weariness in Doña Carlota’s
voice. “I wish I knew. I think he has gone insane, as Mexicans do.
Insane like Francisco Villa, the bandit.”
Kate thought of the pug-faced notorious Pancho Villa in wonder, unable
to connect him with Don Ramón.
“All the Mexicans, as soon as they rise above themselves, go that way,”
said Doña Carlota. “Their pride gets the better of them. And then they
understand nothing, nothing but their own foolish will, their will to
be very, very important. It is just the male vanity. Don’t you think,
Señora, that the beginning and the end of a man is his vanity? Don’t
you think it was just against this danger that Christ came, to teach
men a proper humility. To teach them the sin of pride. But that is why
they hate Christ so much, and His teaching. First and last, they want
their own vanity.”
Kate had often thought so herself. Her own final conclusion about men
was that _they_ were the vanity of vanities, nothing but vanity. They
must be flattered and made to feel great: Nothing else.
“And now, my husband wants to go to the other extreme of Jesus. He
wants to exalt pride and vanity higher than God. Ah, it is terrible,
terrible! And foolish like a little boy! Ah, what is a man but a little
boy who needs a nurse and a mother! Ah, Señora, I can’t bear it.”
Doña Carlota covered her face with her hand, as if swooning.
“But there is something wonderful, too, about Don Ramón,” said Kate
coaxingly: though at the moment she hated him.
“Wonderful! Ah yes, he has gifts. He has great gifts! But what are
gifts to a man who perverts them!”
“Tell me what you think he really wants,” said Kate.
“Power! Just power! Just foolish, wicked power. As if there had
not been enough horrible, wicked power let loose in this country.
But he--he--he wants to be beyond them all. He--he--he wants to be
worshipped. To be worshipped! To be worshipped! A God! He, whom I’ve
held, I’ve held in my arms! He is a child, as all men are children. And
now he wants--to be worshipped--!” She went off into a shrill, wild
laughter, covering her face with her hands, and laughing shrilly, her
laughter punctuated by hollow, ghastly sobs.
Kate sat in absolute dismay, waiting for the other woman to recover
herself. She felt cold against these hysterics, and exerted all her
heavy female will to stop them.
“After all,” she said, when Doña Carlota became quiet, her face in her
hands, “it isn’t your fault. We can’t be responsible, even for our
husbands. I know _that_, since my husband died, and I couldn’t prevent
him dying. And then--then I learned that no matter how you love another
person, you can’t really do anything, you are helpless when it comes
to the last things. You have to leave them to themselves, when they
want to die: or when they want to do things that seem foolish, so, so
foolish, to a woman.”
Doña Carlota looked up at the other woman.
“You loved your husband very much--and he died?” she said softly.
“I _did_ love him. And I shall never, never love another man. I
couldn’t. I’ve lost the power.”
“And why did he die?”
“Ah, even that was really his own fault. He broke his own soul and
spirit, in those Irish politics. I knew it was wrong. What does
Ireland matter, what does nationalism and all that rubbish matter,
really! And revolutions! They are so, so stupid and _vieux jeu_. Ah! It
would have been _so_ much better if Joachim had been content to live
his life in peace, with me. It could be so jolly, so lovely. And I
tried and tried and tried with him. But it was no good. He _wanted_ to
kill himself with that beastly Irish business, and I tried in vain to
prevent him.”
Doña Carlota stared slowly at Kate.
“As a woman _must_ try to prevent a man, when he is going wrong,” she
said. “As I try to prevent Ramón. As he will get himself killed, as
surely as they all do, down to Francisco Villa. And when they are dead,
what good is it all?”
“When they _are_ dead,” said Kate, “then you _know_ it’s no good.”
“You do! Oh, Señora, if you think you can help me with Ramón, _do_ help
me, _do_! For it means the death either of me or him. And _I_ shall
die, though he is wrong. Unless he gets killed.”
“Tell me what he wants to do,” said Kate. “What does he _think_ he
wants to do, anyhow?--Like my husband thought he wanted to make a free
Ireland and a great Irish people. But I knew all the time, the Irish
aren’t a great people any more, and you _can’t_ make them free. They
are only good at destroying--just mere stupid destroying. How can you
make a people free, if they _aren’t_ free. If something inside them
compels them to go on destroying!”
“I know! I know! And that is Ramón. He wants to destroy even Jesus and
the Blessed Virgin, for this people. Imagine it! To destroy Jesus and
the Blessed Virgin! the last thing they’ve got!”
“But what does he say himself, that he wants to do?”
“He says he wants to make a new connection between the people and God.
He says himself, God is always God. But man loses his connection with
God. And then he can never recover it again, unless some new Saviour
comes to give him his new connection. And every new connection is
different from the last, though God is always God. And now, Ramón says,
the people have lost God. And the Saviour cannot lead them to Him any
more. There must be a new Saviour with a new vision. But ah, Señora,
that is not true for me. God is love, and if Ramón would only submit
to love, he would know that he had found God. But he is perverse. Ah,
if we could be together, quietly loving, and enjoying the beautiful
world, and _waiting in the love of God_! Ah, Señora, _why_, why, why
can’t he see it? Oh, why can’t he see it! Instead of doing all these--”
The tears came to Doña Carlota’s eyes, and spilled over her cheeks.
Kate also was in tears, mopping her face.
“It’s no good!” she said, sobbing. “I know it’s no good, no matter
what we do. They don’t _want_ to be happy and peaceful. They _want_
this strife and these other false, horrible connections. It’s no good
whatever we do! That’s what’s so bitter, so bitter!”
The two women sat in their bent-wood rocking-chairs and just sobbed.
And as they sobbed, they heard a step coming along the terrace, the
faint swish of the sandals of the people.
It was Don Ramón, drawn unconsciously by the emotional disturbance of
the two women.
Doña Carlota hastily dabbed her eyes and her sniffing nose, Kate blew
her nose like a trumpet, and Don Ramón stood in the doorway.
He was dressed in white, dazzling, in the costume of the peons, the
white blouse jacket and the white, wide pantaloon trousers. But the
white was linen, slightly starched, and brilliant, almost unnatural
in its whiteness. From under his blouse, in front, hung the ends of a
narrow woollen sash, white, with blue and black bars, and a fringe of
scarlet. And on his naked feet were the plaited huaraches, of blue and
black strips of leather, with thick, red-dyed soles. His loose trousers
were bound round the ankles with blue, red and black woollen braids.
Kate glanced at him as he stood in the sun, so dazzlingly white, that
his black hair and dark face looked like a hole in the atmosphere. He
came forward, the ends of his sash swinging against his thighs, his
sandals slightly swishing.
“I am pleased to see you,” he said, shaking hands with Kate. “How did
you come?”
He dropped into a chair, and sat quite still. The two women hung their
heads, hiding their faces. The presence of the man seemed to put their
emotion out of joint. He ignored all the signs of their discomfort,
overlooking it with a powerful will. There was a certain strength in
his presence. They all cheered up a bit.
“You didn’t know my husband had become one of the people--a real
peon--a Señor Peon, like Count Tolstoy became a Señor Moujik?” said
Doña Carlota, with an attempt at raillery.
“Anyway it suits him,” said Kate.
“There!” said Don Ramón. “Give the devil his dues.”
But there was something unyielding, unbending about him. He laughed and
spoke to the women only from a surface self. Underneath, powerful and
inscrutable, he made no connection with them.
So it was at lunch. There was a flitting conversation, with intervals
of silence. It was evident that Ramón was thinking in another world,
in the silence. And the ponderous stillness of his will, working in
another sphere, made the women feel overshadowed.
“The Señora is like me, Ramón,” said Doña Carlota. “She cannot bear the
sound of that drum. Must it play any more this afternoon?”
There was a moment’s pause, before he answered:
“After four o’clock only.”
“_Must_ we have that noise to-day?” Carlota persisted.
“Why not to-day like other days!” he said. But a certain darkness was
on his brow, and it was evident he wanted to leave the presence of the
two women.