dawn sweep over thee, and wash me away on the flood!
“And say to thy sorrow: Axe, thou art cutting me down!
“Yet did a spark fly from out of thy edge and my wound!
“Cut then, while I cover my face, father of the Star.
“And say to thy strength: Lo, the night is foaming up my feet and my
loins, day is foaming down from my eyes and my mouth to the sea of my
breast. Lo, they meet! My belly is a flood of power, that races in down
the sluice of bone at my back, and a star hangs low on the flood, over
a troubled dawn.
“And say to thy death: Be it so! I, and my soul, we come to thee,
Evening Star. Flesh, go thou into the night. Spirit, farewell, ’tis thy
day. Leave me now. I go in last nakedness now to the nakedest Star.”
CHAP: XII. THE FIRST WATERS.
The men had risen and covered themselves, and put on their hats, and
covered their eyes for a second, in salute before Ramón, as they
departed down the stone stair. And the iron door at the bottom had
clanged, the doorkeeper had returned with the key, laid it on the drum,
and softly, delicately departed.
Still Ramón sat on his serape, leaning his naked shoulders on the
wall, and closing his eyes. He was tired, and in that state of extreme
separateness which makes it very hard to come back to the world. On the
outside of his ears he could hear the noises of the hacienda, even the
tinkle of tea-spoons, and the low voice of women, and later, the low,
labouring sound of a motor-car struggling over the uneven road, then
swirling triumphantly into the courtyard.
It was hard to come back to these things. The noise of them sounded on
the outside of his ears, but inside them was the slow, vast, inaudible
roar of the cosmos, like in a sea-shell. It was hard to have to bear
the contact of commonplace daily things, when his soul and body were
naked to the cosmos.
He wished they would leave him the veils of his isolation awhile. But
they would not: especially Carlota. She wanted him to be present to
her: in familiar contact.
She was calling: “Ramón! Ramón! Have you finished? Cipriano is here.”
And even so, in her voice was fear, and an over-riding temerity.
He pushed back his hair and rose, and very quickly went out, as he
was, with naked torso. He didn’t want to dress himself into everyday
familiarity, since his soul was unfamiliar.
They had a tea-table out on the terrace, and Cipriano, in uniform, was
there. He got up quickly, and came down the terrace with outstretched
arms, his black eyes gleaming with an intensity almost like pain, upon
the face of the other man. And Ramón looked back at him with wide,
seeing, yet unchanging eyes.
The two men embraced, breast to breast, and for a moment Cipriano laid
his little blackish hands on the naked shoulders of the bigger man,
and for a moment was perfectly still on his breast. Then very softly,
he stood back and looked at him, saying not a word.
Ramón abstractly laid his hand on Cipriano’s shoulder, looking down at
him with a little smile.
“Que tal?” he said, from the edge of his lips. “How goes it?”
“Bien! Muy bien!” said Cipriano, still gazing into the other man’s face
with black, wondering, childlike, searching eyes, as if he, Cipriano,
were searching for _himself_, in Ramón’s face. Ramón looked back into
Cipriano’s black, Indian eyes with a faint, kind smile of recognition,
and Cipriano hung his head as if to hide his face, the black hair,
which he wore rather long and brushed sideways, dropping over his
forehead.
The women watched in absolute silence. Then, as the two men began
slowly to come along the terrace to the tea-table, Carlota began to
pour tea. But her hand trembled so much, the teapot wobbled as she held
it, and she had to put it down and clasp her hands in the lap of her
white muslin dress.
“You rowed on the lake?” said Ramón abstractedly, coming up.
“It was lovely!” said Kate. “But hot when the sun came.”
Ramón smiled a little, then pushed his hand through his hair. Then,
leaning one hand on the parapet of the terrace wall, he turned to look
at the lake, and a sigh lifted his shoulders unconsciously.
He stood thus, naked to the waist, his black hair ruffled and splendid,
his back to the women, looking out at the lake. Cipriano stood
lingering beside him.
Kate saw the sigh lift the soft, quiescent, cream-brown shoulders. The
soft, cream-brown skin of his back, of a smooth, _pure_ sensuality,
made her shudder. The broad, square, rather high shoulders, with neck
and head rising steep, proudly. The full-fleshed, deep chested, rich
body of the man made her feel dizzy. In spite of herself, she could not
help imagining a knife stuck between those pure, male shoulders. If
only to break the arrogance of their remoteness.
That was it. His nakedness was so aloof, far-off and intangible, in
another day. So that to _think_ of it was almost a violation, even
to look at it with prying eyes. Kate’s heart suddenly shrank in her
breast. This was how Salome had looked at John. And this was the beauty
of John, that he had had; like a pomegranate on a dark tree in the
distance, naked, but not undressed! Forever still and clothe-less, and
with another light about it, of a richer day than our paltry, prying,
sneak-thieving day.
The moment Kate had imagined a knife between his shoulders, her
heart shrank with grief and shame, and a great stillness came over
her. Better to take the hush into one’s heart, and the sharp, prying
beams out of one’s eyes. Better to lapse away from one’s own prying,
assertive self, into the soft, untrespassing self, to whom nakedness
is neither shame nor excitement, but clothed like a flower in its own
deep, soft consciousness, beyond cheap awareness.
The evening breeze was blowing very faintly. Sailing boats were
advancing through the pearly atmosphere, far off, the sun above had a
golden quality. The opposite shore, twenty miles away, was distinct,
and yet there seemed an opalescent, spume-like haze in the air, the
same quality as in the filmy water. Kate could see the white specks of
the far-off church towers of Tuliapan.
Below, in the garden below the house, was a thick grove of mango trees.
Among the dark and reddish leaves of the mangoes, scarlet little birds
were bustling, like suddenly-opening poppy-buds, and pairs of yellow
birds, yellow underneath as yellow butterflies, so perfectly clear,
went skimming past. When they settled for a moment and closed their
wings, they disappeared, for they were grey on top. And when the
cardinal birds settled, they too disappeared, for the outside of their
wings was brown, like a sheath.
“Birds in this country have all their colour below,” said Kate.
Ramón turned to her suddenly.
“They say the word _Mexico_ means _below this_!” he said, smiling, and
sinking into a rocking chair.
Doña Carlota had made a great effort over herself, and with eyes fixed
on the tea-cups, she poured out the tea. She handed him his cup without
looking at him. She did not trust herself to look at him. It made her
tremble with a strange, hysterical anger: she, who had been married to
him for years, and knew him, ah, knew him: and yet, and yet, had not
got him at all. None of him.
“Give me a piece of sugar, Carlota,” he said, in his quiet voice.
But at the sound of it, his wife stopped as if some hand had suddenly
grasped her.
“Sugar! Sugar!” she repeated abstractedly to herself.
Ramón sat forward in his rocking-chair, holding his cup in his hand,
his breasts rising in relief. And on his thighs the thin linen seemed
to reveal him almost more than his own dark nakedness revealed him. She
understood why the cotton pantaloons were forbidden on the plaza. The
living flesh seemed to emanate through them.
He was handsome, almost horribly handsome, with his black head poised
as it were without weight, above his darkened, smooth neck. A pure
sensuality, with a powerful purity of its own, hostile to her sort of
purity. With the blue sash round his waist, pressing a fold in the
flesh, and the thin linen seeming to gleam with the life of his hips
and his thighs, he emanated a fascination almost like a narcotic,
asserting his pure, fine sensuality against her. The strange, soft,
still sureness of him, as if he sat secure within his own dark aura.
And as if this dark aura of his militated against her presence, and
against the presence of his wife. He emitted an effluence so powerful,
that it seemed to hamper her consciousness, to bind down her limbs.
And he was utterly still and quiescent, without desire, soft and
unroused, within his own _ambiente_. Cipriano going the same, the pair
of them so quiet and dark and heavy, like a great weight bearing the
women down.
Kate knew now how Salome felt. She knew now how John the Baptist had
been, with his terrible, aloof beauty, inaccessible yet so potent.
“Ah!” she said to herself. “Let me close my eyes to him, and open
only my soul. Let me close my prying, _seeing_ eyes, and sit in dark
stillness along with these two men. They have got more than I, they
have a richness that I haven’t got. They have got rid of that itching
of the eye, and the desire that works through the eye. The itching,
prurient, _knowing_, imagining eye, I am cursed with it, I am hampered
up in it. It is my curse of curses, the curse of Eve. The curse of Eve
is upon me, my eyes are like hooks, my knowledge is like a fish-hook
through my gills, pulling me in spasmodic desire. Oh, who will free
me from the grappling of my eyes, from the impurity of sharp sight!
Daughter of Eve, of greedy vision, why don’t these men save me from the
sharpness of my own eyes!”
She rose and went to the edge of the terrace. Yellow as daffodils
underneath, two birds emerged out of their own invisibility. In the
little shingle bay, with a small breakwater, where the boat was pulled
up and chained, two men were standing in the water, throwing out a big,
fine round net, catching the little silvery fish called _charales_,
which flicked out of the brownish water sometimes like splinters of
glass.
“Ramón!” Kate heard Doña Carlota’s voice. “Won’t you put something on?”
The wife had been able to bear it no more.
“Yes! Thank you for the tea,” said Ramón, rising.
Kate watched him go down the terrace, in his own peculiar silence, his
sandals making a faint swish on the tiles.
“Oh, Señora Caterina!” came the voice of Carlota. “Come and drink your
tea. Come!”
Kate returned to the table, saying:
“It seems so wonderfully peaceful here.”
“Peaceful!” echoed Carlota. “Ah, I do not find it peaceful. There is a
horrible stillness, which makes me afraid.”
“Do you come out very often?” said Kate, to Cipriano.
“Yes. Fairly often. Once a week. Or twice,” he replied, looking at her
with a secret consciousness which she could not understand, lurking in
his black eyes.
These men wanted to take her _will_ away from her, as if they wanted to
deny her the light of day.
“I must be going home now,” she said. “The sun will be setting.”
“_Ya va?_” said Cipriano, in his soft, velvety Indian voice, with a
note of distant surprise and reproach. “Will you go already?”
“Oh, no, Señora!” cried Carlota. “Stay until to-morrow. Oh, yes, stay
until to-morrow, with me.”
“They will expect us home,” she said, wavering.
“Ah, no! I can send a boy to say you will come to-morrow. Yes? You will
stay? Ah, good, good!”
And she laid her hand caressively on Kate’s arm, then rose to hurry
away to the servants.
Cipriano had taken out his cigarette case. He offered it to Kate.
“Shall I take one?” she said. “It is my vice.”
“Do take one,” he said. “It isn’t good, to be perfect.”
“It isn’t, is it?” she laughed, puffing her cigarette.
“Now would you call it peace?” he asked with incomprehensible irony.
“Why?” she cried.
“Why do white people always want peace?” he asked.
“Surely peace is natural! Don’t all people want it? Don’t you?”
“Peace is only the rest after war,” he said. “So it is not more natural
than fighting: perhaps not so natural.”
“No, but there is another peace: the peace that passes all
understanding. Don’t you know that?”
“I don’t think I do,” he said.
“What a pity!” she cried.
“Ah!” he said. “You want to teach me! But to me it is different. Each
man has two spirits in him. The one is like the early morning in the
time of rain, very quiet, and sweet, moist, no?--with the mocking-bird
singing, and birds flying about, very fresh. And the other is like the
dry season, the steady, strong hot light of the day, which seems as if
it will never change.”
“But you like the first better,” she cried.
“I don’t know!” he replied. “The other lasts longer.”
“I am sure you like the fresh morning better,” she said.
“I don’t know! I don’t know!” He smiled a crumpled sort of smile, and
she could tell he really did _not_ know. “In the first time, you can
feel the flowers on their stem, the stem very strong and full of sap,
no?--and the flower opening on top like a face that has the perfume of
desire. And a woman might be like that.--But this passes, and the sun
begins to shine very strong, very hot, no? Then everything inside a man
changes, goes dark, no! And the flowers crumple up, and the breast of a
man becomes like a steel mirror. And he is all darkness inside, coiling
and uncoiling like a snake. All the flowers withered up on shrunk
stems, no? And then women don’t exist for a man. They disappear like
the flowers.”
“And then what does he want?” said Kate.
“I don’t know. Perhaps he wants to be a very big man, and master all
the people.”
“Then why doesn’t he?” said Kate.
He lifted his shoulders.
“And you,” he said to her. “You seem to me like that morning I told you
about.”
“I am just forty years old,” she laughed shakily.
Again he lifted his shoulders.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It is the same. Your body seems to me
like the stem of the flower I told you about, and in your face it will
always be morning, of the time of the rains.”
“Why do you say that to me?” she said, as an involuntary strange
shudder shook her.
“Why not say it!” he replied. “You are like the cool morning, very
fresh. In Mexico, we are the end of the hot dry day.”
He watched her, with a strange lingering desire in his black eyes, and
what seemed to her a curious, lurking sort of insolence. She dropped
her head to hide from him, and rocked in her chair.
“I would like to marry you,” he said; “if ever you will marry. I would
like to marry you.”
“I don’t think I shall _ever_ marry again,” she flashed, her bosom
heaving like suffocation, and a dark flush suffusing over her face,
against her will.
“Who knows!” said he.
Ramón was coming down the terrace, his fine white serape folded over
his naked shoulder, with its blue-and-dark pattern at the borders, and
its long scarlet fringe dangling and swaying as he walked. He leaned
against one of the pillars of the terrace, and looked down at Kate and
Cipriano. Cipriano glanced up with that peculiar glance of primitive
intimacy.
“I told the Señora Caterina,” he said, “if ever she wanted to marry a
man, she should marry me.”
“It is plain talk,” said Ramón, glancing at Cipriano with the same
intimacy, and smiling.
Then he looked at Kate, with a slow smile in his brown eyes, and a
shadow of curious knowledge on his face. He folded his arms over his
breast, as the natives do when it is cold and they are protecting
themselves; and the cream-brown flesh, like opium, lifted the bosses of
his breast, full and smooth.
“Don Cipriano says that white people always want peace,” she said,
looking up at Ramón with haunted eyes. “Don’t you consider yourselves
white people?” she asked, with a slight, deliberate impertinence.
“No whiter than we are,” smiled Ramón. “Not lily-white, at least.”
“And don’t you want peace?” she asked.
“I? I shouldn’t think of it. The meek have inherited the earth,
according to prophecy. But who am I, that I should envy them their
peace! No, Señora. Do I look like a gospel of peace?--or a gospel of
war either? Life doesn’t split down that division, for me.”
“I don’t know what you want,” said she, looking up at him with haunted
eyes.
“We only half know ourselves,” he replied, smiling with changeful eyes.
“Perhaps not so much as half.”
There was a certain vulnerable kindliness about him, which made her
wonder, startled, if she had ever realised what real fatherliness
meant. The mystery, the nobility, the inaccessibility, and the
vulnerable compassion of man in his separate fatherhood.
“You don’t like brown-skinned people?” he asked her gently.
“I think it is beautiful to look at,” she said. “But”--with a faint
shudder--“I am glad I am white.”
“You feel there could be no contact?” he said, simply.
“Yes!” she said. “I mean that.”
“It is as you feel,” he said.
And as he said it, she knew he was more beautiful to her than any blond
white man, and that, in a remote, far-off way, the contact with him was
more precious than any contact she had known.
But then, though he cast over her a certain shadow, he would never
encroach on her, he would never seek any close contact. It was the
incompleteness in Cipriano that sought her out, and seemed to trespass
on her.
Hearing Ramón’s voice, Carlota appeared uneasily in a doorway. Hearing
him speak English, she disappeared again, on a gust of anger. But after
a little while, she came once more, with a little vase containing the
creamy-coloured, thick flowers that are coloured like freesias, and
that smell very sweet.
“Oh, how nice!” said Kate. “They are temple flowers! In Ceylon the
natives tiptoe into the little temples and lay one flower on the table
at the foot of the big Buddha statues. And the tables of offering are
all covered with these flowers, all put so neatly. The natives have
that delicate oriental way of putting things down.”
“Ah!” said Carlota, setting the vase on the table. “I did not bring
them for any gods, especially strange ones. I brought them for you,
Señora. They smell so sweet.”
“Don’t they!” said Kate.
The two men went away, Ramón laughing.
“Ah, Señora!” said Carlota, sitting down tense at the table. “Could you
follow Ramón? Could _you_ give up the Blessed Virgin?--I could sooner
die!”
“Ha!” said Kate, with a little weariness. “Surely we don’t want any
_more_ gods.”
“More gods, Señora!” said Doña Carlota, shocked. “But how is it
possible!--Don Ramón is in mortal sin.”
Kate was silent.
“And he wants to lead more and more people into the same,” continued
Carlota. “It is the sin of pride. Men wise in their own conceit!--The
cardinal sin of men. Ah, I have told him.--And I am so glad, Señora,
that you feel as I feel. I am so afraid of American women, women like
that. They wish to have men’s minds, so they accept all the follies and
wickedness of men.--You are Catholic, Señora?”
“I was educated in a convent,” said Kate.
“Ah, of course! Of course!--Ah, Señora, as if a woman who had ever
known the Blessed Virgin could ever part from her again. Ah, Señora,
what woman would have the heart to put Christ back on the Cross, to
crucify him twice! But men, men! This Quetzalcoatl business! What
buffoonery, Señora; if it were not horrible sin! And two clever,
well-educated men! Wise in their own conceit!”
“Men usually are,” said Kate.
It was sunset, with a big level cloud like fur overhead, only the sides
of the horizon fairly clear. The sun was not visible. It had gone down
in a thick, rose-red fume behind the wavy ridge of the mountains. Now
the hills stood up bluish, all the air was a salmon-red flush, the fawn
water had pinkish ripples. Boys and men, bathing a little way along the
shore, were the colour of deep flame.
Kate and Carlota had climbed up to the azotea, the flat roof, from the
stone stairway at the end of the terrace. They could see the world:
the hacienda with its courtyard like a fortress, the road between deep
trees, the black mud huts near the broken highroad, and little naked
fires already twinkling outside the doors. All the air was pinkish,
melting to a lavender blue, and the willows on the shore, in the pink
light, were apple-green and glowing. The hills behind rose abruptly,
like mounds, dry and pinky. Away in the distance, down the lake,
the two white obelisk towers of Sayula glinted among the trees, and
villas peeped out. Boats were creeping into the shadow, from the outer
brightness of the lake.
And in one of these boats was Juana, being rowed, disconsolate, home.
CHAP: XIII. THE FIRST RAIN.
Ramón and Cipriano were out by the lake. Cipriano also had changed
into the white clothes and sandals, and he looked better than when in
uniform.
“I had a talk with Montes when he came to Guadalajara,” Cipriano said
to Ramón. Montes was the President of the Republic.
“And what did he say?”
“He is careful. But he doesn’t like his colleagues. I think he feels
lonely. I think he would like to know you better.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps that you could give him your moral support. Perhaps that you
might be Secretary, and President when Montes’ term is up.”
“I like Montes,” said Ramón. “He is sincere and passionate. Did you
like him?”
“Yes!” said Cipriano. “More or less. He is suspicious, and jealous for
fear anyone else might want to share in his power. He has the cravings
of a dictator. He wanted to find out if I would stick to him.”
“You let him know you would?”
“I told him that all I cared for was for you and for Mexico.”
“What did he say?”
“Well, he is no fool. He said: ‘Don Ramón sees the world with different
eyes from mine. Who knows which of us is right. I want to save my
country from poverty and unenlightenment, he wants to save its soul. I
say, a hungry and ignorant man has no place for a soul. An empty belly
grinds upon itself, so does an empty mind, and the soul doesn’t exist.
Don Ramón says, if a man has no soul, it doesn’t matter whether he is
hungry or ignorant. Well, he can go his way, and I mine. We shall never
hinder one another, I believe. I give you my word I won’t have him
interfered with. He sweeps the patio and I sweep the street.’”
“Sensible!” said Ramón. “And honest in his convictions.”
“Why should you not be Secretary in a few months’ time? And follow to
the Presidency?” said Cipriano.
“You know I don’t want that. I must stand in another world, and act in
another world.--Politics must go their own way, and society must do as
it will. Leave me alone, Cipriano. I know you want me to be another
Porfirio Diaz, or something like that. But for me that would be failure
pure and simple.”
Cipriano was watching Ramón with black, guarded eyes, in which was an
element of love, and of fear, and of trust, but also incomprehension,
and the suspicion that goes with incomprehension.
“I don’t understand, myself, _what_ you want,” he muttered.
“Yes, yes, you do. Politics, and all this _social_ religion that Montes
has got is like washing the outside of the egg, to make it look clean.
But I, myself, I want to get inside the egg, right to the middle, to
start it growing into a new bird. Ay! Cipriano! Mexico is like an old,
old egg that the bird of Time laid long ago; and she has been sitting
on it for centuries, till it looks foul in the nest of the world. But
still, Cipriano, it is a good egg. It is not addled. Only the spark of
fire has never gone into the middle of it, to start it.--Montes wants
to clean the nest and wash the egg. But meanwhile, the egg will go cold
and die. The more you save these people from poverty and ignorance, the
quicker they will die: like a dirty egg that you take from under the
hen-eagle, to wash it. While you wash the egg, it chills and dies. Poor
old Montes, all his ideas are American and European. And the old Dove
of Europe will never hatch the egg of dark-skinned America. The United
States can’t die, because it isn’t alive. It is a nestful of china
eggs, made of pot. So they can be kept clean.--But here, Cipriano,
here, let us hatch the chick before we start cleaning up the nest.”
Cipriano hung his head. He was always testing Ramón, to see if he could
change him. When he found he couldn’t, then he submitted, and new
little fires of joy sprang up in him. But meanwhile, he had to try, and
try again.
“It is no good, trying to mix the two things. At this stage of affairs,
at least, they won’t mix. We have to shut our eyes and sink down, sink
away from the surface, away, like shadows, down to the bottom. Like
the pearl divers. But you keep bobbing up like a cork.”
Cipriano smiled subtly. He knew well enough.
“We’ve got to open the oyster of the cosmos, and get our manhood out of
it. Till we’ve got the pearl, we are only gnats on the surface of the
ocean,” said Ramón.
“My manhood is like a devil inside me,” said Cipriano.