“It is strange to me,” she replied, wondering and a little awed by the
night.
“Good, no?” he said, in an exultant tone.
“A little scaring,” she replied, with a slight laugh.
“When you are used to it,” he said, “it seems natural, no? It seems
natural so--as it is. And when you go to a country like England, where
all is so safe and ready-made, then you miss it. You keep saying to
yourself: ‘What am I missing? What is it that is not here?’”
He seemed to be gloating in his native darkness. It was curious, that
though he spoke such good English, it seemed always foreign to her,
more foreign than Doña Carlota’s Spanish.
“I can’t understand that people want to have everything, all life,
no?--so safe and ready-made as in England and America. It is good to be
_awake_. On the _qui vive_, no?”
“Perhaps,” she said.
“So I like it,” he said, “when Ramón tells the people the earth is
alive, and the sky has a big bird in it, that you don’t see. I think it
is true. Certainly! And it is good to know it, because then one is on
the _qui vive_, no?
“But it’s tiring to be always on the _qui vive_,” she said.
“Why? Why tiring? No, I think, on the contrary, it is refreshing.--Ah,
you should marry, and live in Mexico. At last, I am sure, you would
like it. You would keep waking up more and more to it.”
“Or else going more and more deadened,” she said. “That is how most
foreigners go, it seems to me.”
“Why deadened?” he said to her. “I don’t understand. Why deadened? Here
you have a country where night is night, and rain comes down and you
know it. And you have a people with whom you must be on the _qui vive_
all the time, all the time. And that is very good, no? You don’t go
sleepy. Like a pear! Don’t you say a pear goes sleepy, no?--cuando sé
echa a perder?”
“Yes!” she said.
“And here you have also Ramón. How does Ramón seem to you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to say anything. But I do think he is
almost too much: too far.--And I _don’t_ think he is Mexican.”
“Why not? Why not Mexican? He is Mexican.”
“Not as you are.”
“How not as I am? He is Mexican.”
“He seems to me to belong to the old, old Europe,” she said.
“And he seems to me to belong to the old, old Mexico--and also to the
new,” he added quickly.
“But you don’t believe in him.”
“How?”
“You--yourself. You don’t believe in him. You think it is like
everything else, a sort of game. Everything is a sort of game, a put-up
job, to you Mexicans. You don’t _really_ believe, in anything.”
“How not believe? I not believe in Ramón?--Well, perhaps not, in that
way of kneeling before him and spreading out my arms and shedding
tears on his feet. But I--I believe in him, too. Not in your way, but
in mine. I tell you why. Because he has the power to compel me. If he
hadn’t the power to _compel_ me, how should I believe?”
“It is a queer sort of belief that is compelled,” she said.
“How else should one believe, except by being compelled? I like Ramón
for that, that he can compel me. When I grew up, and my god-father
could not compel me to believe, I was very unhappy. It made me very
unhappy.--But Ramón _compels_ me, and that is very good. It makes me
very happy, when I know I can’t escape. It would make you happy too.”
“To know I could not escape from Don Ramón?” she said ironically.
“Yes, that also. And to know you could not escape from Mexico. And even
from such a man, as me.”
She paused in the dark before she answered, sardonically:
“I don’t think it would make me happy to feel I couldn’t escape from
Mexico. No, I feel, unless I was sure I could get out any day, I
couldn’t bear to be here.”
In her mind she thought: And perhaps Ramón is the only one I couldn’t
quite escape from, because he really touches me somewhere inside. But
from you, you little Cipriano, I should have no need even to escape,
because I could not be caught by you.
“Ah!” he said quickly. “You think so. But then you don’t know. You
can only think with American thoughts. It is natural. From your
education, you have only American thoughts, U.S.A. thoughts, to
think with. Nearly all women are like that: even Mexican women of
the Spanish-Mexican class. They are all thinking nothing but U.S.A.
thoughts, because those are the ones that go with the way they dress
their hair. And so it is with you. You think like a modern woman,
because you belong to the Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic world, and dress your
hair in a certain way, and have money, and are altogether free.--But
you only think like this because you have had these thoughts put in
your head, just as in Mexico you spend centavos and pesos, because that
is the Mexican money you have put in your pocket. It’s what they give
you at the bank.--So when you say you are free, you are _not_ free. You
are compelled all the time to be thinking U.S.A. thoughts--_compelled_,
I must say. You have not as much choice as a slave. As the peons must
eat tortillas, tortillas, tortillas, because there is nothing else, you
must think these U.S.A. thoughts, about being a woman and being free.
Every day you must eat those tortillas, tortillas.--Till you don’t know
how you would like something else.”
“What else should I like?” she said, with a grimace at the darkness.
“Other thoughts, other feelings.--You are afraid of such a man as
me, because you think I should not treat you _à l’américaine_. You
are quite right. I should not treat you as an American woman must be
treated. Why should I? I don’t wish to. It doesn’t seem good to me.”
“You would treat a woman like a real old Mexican, would you? Keep her
ignorant, and shut her up?” said Kate sarcastically.
“I could not keep her ignorant if she did not start ignorant. But what
more I had to teach her wouldn’t be in the American style of teaching.”
“What then?”
“Quien sabe! Ça reste à voir.”
“Et continuera a y rester,” said Kate, laughing.
CHAP: XIV. HOME TO SAYULA.
The morning came perfectly blue, with a freshness in the air and a blue
luminousness over the trees and the distant mountains, and birds so
bright, absolutely like new-opened buds sparking in the air.
Cipriano was returning to Guadalajara in the automobile, and Carlota
was going with him. Kate would be rowed home on the lake.
To Ramón, Carlota was still, at times, a torture. She seemed to have
the power still to lacerate him, inside his bowels. Not in his mind or
spirit, but in his old emotional, passional self: right in the middle
of his belly, to tear him and make him feel he bled inwardly.
Because he had loved her, he had cared for her: for the affectionate,
passionate, whimsical, sometimes elfish creature she had been. He had
made much of her, and spoiled her, for many years.
But all the while, gradually, his nature was changing inside him. Not
that he ceased to care for her, or wanted other women. That she could
have understood. But inside him was a slow, blind imperative, urging
him to cast his emotional and spiritual and mental self into the slow
furnace, and smelt them into a new, whole being.
But he had Carlota to reckon with. She loved him, and that, to her, was
the outstanding factor. She loved him, emotionally. And spiritually,
she loved mankind. And mentally, she was sure she was quite right.
Yet as time went on, he had to change. He had to cast that emotional
self, which she loved, into the furnace, to be smelted down to another
self.
And she felt she was robbed, cheated. Why couldn’t he go on being
gentle, good, and loving, and trying to make the whole world more
gentle, good, and loving?
He couldn’t, because it was borne in upon him that the world had gone
as far as it could go in the good, gentle, and loving direction, and
anything further in that line meant perversity. So the time had come
for the slow, great change to something else--what, he didn’t know.
The emotion of love, and the greater emotion of liberty for mankind
seemed to go hard and congeal upon him, like the shell on a chrysalis.
It was the old caterpillar stage of Christianity evolving into
something else.
But Carlota felt this was all she had, this emotion of love, for her
husband, her children, for her people, for the animals and birds and
trees of the world. It was her all, her Christ, and her Blessed Virgin.
How could she let it go?
So she continued to love him, and to love the world, steadily,
pathetically, obstinately and devilishly. She prayed for him, and she
engaged in works of charity.
But her love had turned from being the spontaneous flow, subject to the
unforseen comings and goings of the Holy Ghost, and had turned into
will. She loved now with her _will_: as the white world now tends to
do. She became filled with charity: that cruel kindness.
Her winsomeness and her elvishness departed from her, she began to
wither, she grew tense. And she blamed him, and prayed for him. Even as
the spontaneous mystery died in her, the will hardened, till she was
nothing but a will: a lost will.
She soon succeeded in drawing the life of her young boys all to
herself, with her pathos and her subtle will. Ramón was too proud and
angry to fight for them. They were her children. Let her have them.
They were the children of his old body. His new body had no children:
would probably never have any.
“But remember,” he said to her, with southern logic, “you do not love,
save with your will. I don’t like the love you have for your god: it is
an assertion of your own will. I don’t like the love you have for me:
it is the same. I don’t like the love you have for your children. If
ever I see in them a spark of desire to be saved from it, I shall do my
best to save them. Meanwhile have your love, have your will. But you
know I dislike it. I dislike your insistence. I dislike your monopoly
of one feeling, I dislike your charity works. I disapprove of the whole
trend of your life. You are weakening and vitiating the boys. You do
_not_ love them, you are only putting your love-will over them. One day
they will turn and hate you for it. Remember I have said this to you.”
Doña Carlota had trembled in every fibre of her body, under the shock
of this. But she went away to the chapel of the Annunciation Convent,
and prayed. And, praying for his soul, she seemed to gain a victory
over him, in the odour of sanctity. She came home in frail, pure
triumph, like a flower that blooms on a grave: his grave.
And Ramón henceforth watched her in her beautiful, rather fluttering,
rather irritating gentleness, as he watched his closest enemy.
Life had done its work on one more human being, quenched the
spontaneous life and left only the will. Killed the god in the woman,
or the goddess, and left only charity, with a will.
“Carlota,” he had said to her, “how happy you would be if you could
wear deep, deep mourning for me.--I shall not give you this happiness.”
She gave him a strange look from her hazel-brown eyes.
“Even that is in the hands of God,” she had replied, as she hurried
away from him.
And now, on this morning after the first rains, she came to the door of
his room as he was sitting writing. As yesterday, he was naked to the
waist, the blue-marked sash tied round his middle confined the white
linen, loose trousers--like big, wide pyjama trousers crossed in front
and tied round his waist.
“May I come in?” she said nervously.
“Do!” he replied, putting down his pen and rising.
There was only one chair--he was offering it her, but she sat down on
the unmade bed, as if asserting her natural right. And in the same way
she glanced at his naked breast--as if asserting her natural right.
“I am going with Cipriano after breakfast,” she said.
“Yes, so you said.”
“The boys will be home in three weeks.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you want to see them?”
“If they want to see me.”
“I am sure they do.”
“Then bring them here.”
“Do you think it is pleasant for me?” she said, clasping her hands.
“You do not make it pleasant for me, Carlota.”
“How can I? You know I think you are wrong. When I listened to you
last night--there is something so beautiful in it all--and yet so
monstrous. So _monstrous_!--Oh! I think to myself: What is this man
doing? This man of all men, who might be such a blessing to his country
and mankind--”
“Well,” said Ramón. “And what is he instead?”
“You know! You know! I can’t bear it.--It _isn’t_ for you to save
Mexico, Ramón. Christ has already saved it.”
“It seems to me not so.”
“He has! He has! And He made you the wonderful being that you are, so
that you should _work out_ the salvation, in the name of Christ and of
love. Instead of which--”
“Instead of which, Carlota, I try something else.--But believe me, if
the real Christ has not been able to save Mexico,--and He hasn’t--then
I am sure, the white Anti-Christ of Charity, and socialism, and
politics, and reform, will only succeed in finally destroying her.
That, and that alone makes me take my stand.--You, Carlota, with your
charity works and your _pity_: and men like Benito Juarez, with their
Reform and their Liberty: and the rest of the benevolent people,
politicians and socialists and so forth, surcharged with pity for
living men, in their mouths, but really with hate--the hate of the
materialist _have-nots_ for the materialist _haves_: they are the
Anti-Christ. The old world, that’s just the world. But the new world,
that wants to save the People, this is the Anti-Christ. This is Christ
with real poison in the communion cup.--And for this reason I step
out of my ordinary privacy and individuality. I don’t want everybody
poisoned. About the great mass I don’t care. But I don’t want everybody
poisoned.”
“How can you be so sure that you yourself are not a poisoner of the
people?--I think you are.”
“Think it then. I think of you, Carlota, merely that you have not been
able to come to your complete, final womanhood: which is a different
thing from the old womanhoods.”
“Womanhood is always the same.”
“Ah, no it isn’t! Neither is manhood.”
“But what do you think you can do? What do you think this Quetzalcoatl
nonsense amounts to?”
“Quetzalcoatl is just a living word, for these people, no more.
All I want them to do is to find the beginnings of the way to their
own manhood, their own womanhood. Men are not yet men in full, and
women are not yet women. They are all half and half, incoherent, part
horrible, part pathetic, part good creatures. Half arrived.--I mean you
as well, Carlota. I mean all the world.--But these people don’t assert
any righteousness of their own, these Mexican people of ours. That
makes me think that grace is still with them. And so, having got hold
of some kind of clue to my own whole manhood, it is part of me now to
try with them.”
“You will fail.”
“I shan’t. Whatever happens to me, there will be a new vibration, a new
call in the air, and a new answer inside some men.”
“They will betray you.--Do you know what even your friend Toussaint
said of you?--Ramón Carrasco’s future is just the past of mankind.”
“A great deal of it is the past. Naturally Toussaint sees that part.”
“But the boys don’t believe in you. Instinctively, they disbelieve.
Cyprian said to me, when I went to see him: ‘Is father doing any more
of that silly talk about old gods coming back, mother? I wish he
wouldn’t. It would be pretty nasty for us if he got himself into the
newspapers with it.’”
Ramón laughed.
“Little boys,” he said, “are like little gramaphones. They only talk
according to the record that’s put into them.”
“_You_ don’t believe out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,” said
Carlota bitterly.
“Why Carlota, the babes and sucklings don’t get much chance. Their
mothers and their teachers turn them into little gramaphones from the
first, so what can they do, but say and feel according to the record
the mother and teacher puts into them. Perhaps in the time of Christ,
babes and sucklings were not so perfectly exploited by their elders.”
Suddenly, however, the smile went off his face. He rose up, and pointed
to the door.
“Go away,” he said in a low tone. “Go away! I have smelt the smell of
your spirit long enough.”
She sat on the bed, spell-bound, gazing at him with frightened, yet
obstinate, insolent eyes, wincing from his outstretched arm as if he
had threatened to strike her.
Then again the fire went out of his eyes, and his arm sank. The still,
far-away look came on his face.
“What have I to do with it!” he murmured softly.
And taking up his blouse and his hat, he went silently out on to the
terrace, departing from her in body and in soul. She heard the soft
swish of his sandals. She heard the faint resonance of the iron door to
the terrace, to which he alone had access. And she sat like a heap of
ash on his bed, ashes to ashes, burnt out, with only the coals of her
will still smouldering.
Her eyes were very bright, as she went to join Kate and Cipriano.
After breakfast, Kate was rowed home down the lake. She felt a curious
depression at leaving the hacienda: as if, for her, life now was there,
and not anywhere else.
Her own house seemed empty, banal, vulgar. For the first time in her
life, she felt the banality and emptiness even of her own milieu.
Though the Casa de las Cuentas was not purely her own milieu.
“Ah Niña, how good! How good that you have come! Ay, in the night,
how much water! Much! Much! But you were safe in the hacienda, Niña.
Ah, how nice, that hacienda of Jamiltepec. Such a good man, Don
Ramón--isn’t he, Niña? He cares a great deal for his people. And the
Señora, ah, how sympathetic she is!”
Kate smiled and was pleasant. But she felt more like going into her
room and saying: For God’s sake, leave me alone, with your cheap rattle.
She suffered again from the servants. Again that quiet, subterranean
insolence against life, which seems to belong to modern life. The
unbearable note of flippant jeering, which is underneath almost all
modern utterance. It was underneath Juana’s constant cry.--Niña! Niña!
At meal-times Juana would seat herself on the ground at a little
distance from Kate, and talk, talk in her rapid mouthfuls of
conglomerate words with trailing, wistful endings: and all the time
watch her mistress with those black, unseeing eyes on which the spark
of light would stir with the peculiar slow, malevolent jeering of the
Indian.
Kate was not rich--she had only her moderate income.
“Ah, the rich people--!” Juana would say.
“I am not rich,” said Kate.
“You are not rich, Niña?” came the singing, caressive bird-like voice:
“Then, you are poor?”--this was indescribable irony.
“No, I am not poor either. I am not rich, and I am not poor,” said Kate.
“You are not rich, and you are not poor, Niña!” repeated Juana, in
her bird-like voice, that covered the real bird’s endless, vindictive
jeering.
For the words meant nothing to her. To her, who had nothing, _could_
never have anything, Kate was one of that weird class, the rich. And,
Kate felt, in Mexico it was a crime to be rich, or to be classed with
the rich. Not even a crime, really, so much as a freak. The rich class
was a freak class, like dogs with two heads or calves with five legs.
To be looked upon, not with envy, but with the slow, undying antagonism
and curiosity which “normals” have towards “freaks.” The slow,
powerful, corrosive Indian mockery, issuing from the lava-rock Indian
nature, against anything which strives to be above the grey, lava-rock
level.
“Is it true, Niña, that your country is through there?” Juana asked,
jabbing her finger downward, towards the bowels of the earth.
“Not quite!” said Kate. “My country is more there--” and she slanted
her finger at the earth’s surface.
“Ah--that way!” said Juana. And she looked at Kate with a subtle leer,
as if to say: what could you expect from people who came out of the
earth sideways, like sprouts of camote!
“And is it true, that over there, there are people with only one
eye--here!” Juana punched herself in the middle of her forehead.
“No. That isn’t true. That is just a story.”
“Ah!” said Juana. “Isn’t it true! Do you know? Have you been to the
country where they are, these people?”
“Yes,” said Kate. “I have been to all the countries, and there are no
such people.”
“Verdad! Verdad!” breathed Juana, awestruck. “You have been to all the
countries, and there are no such people!--But in your country, they are
all _gringos_? Nothing but _gringos_?”
She meant, no real people and salt of the earth like her own Mexican
self.
“They are all people like me,” said Kate coldly.
“Like you, Niña? And they all talk like you?”
“Yes! Like me.”
“And there are many?”
“Many! Many!”
“Look now!” breathed Juana, almost awestruck to think that there could
be whole worlds of these freak, mockable people.
And Concha, that young, belching savage, would stare through her
window-grating at the strange menagerie of the Niña and the Niña’s
white visitors. Concha, slapping tortillas, was real.
Kate walked down towards the kitchen. Concha was slapping the _masa_,
the maize dough which she bought in the plaza at eight centavos a kilo.
“Niña!” she called in her raucous voice. “Do you eat tortillas?”
“Sometimes,” said Kate.
“Eh?” shouted the young savage.
“Sometimes.”
“Here! Eat one now!” And Concha thrust a brown paw with a pinkish palm,
and a dingy-looking tortilla, at Kate.
“Not now,” said Kate.
She disliked the heavy plasters that tasted of lime.
“Don’t you want it? Don’t you eat it?” said Concha, with an impudent,
strident laugh. And she flung the rejected tortilla on the little pile.
She was one of those who won’t eat bread: say they don’t like it, that
it is not food.
Kate would sit and rock on her terrace, while the sun poured in the
green square of the garden, the palm-tree spread its great fans
translucent at the light, the hibiscus dangled great double-red
flowers, rosy red, from its very dark tree, and the dark green oranges
looked as if they were sweating as they grew.
Came lunch time, madly hot: and greasy hot soup, greasy rice,
splintery little fried fishes, bits of boiled meat and boiled egg-plant
vegetables, a big basket piled with mangoes, papayas, zapotes--all the
tropical fruits one did not want, in hot weather.
And the barefoot little Maria, in a limp, torn, faded red frock, to
wait at table. She was the loving one. She would stand by Juana as
Juana bubbled with talk, like dark bubbles in her mouth, and she would
stealthily touch Kate’s white arm; stealthily touch her again. Not
being rebuked, she would stealthily lay her thin little black arm on
Kate’s shoulder, with the softest, lightest touch imaginable, and her
strange, wide black eyes would gleam with ghostly black beatitude, very
curious, and her childish, pock-marked, slightly imbecile face would
take on a black, arch, beatitudinous look. Then Kate would quickly
remove the thin, dark, pock-marked arm, the child would withdraw half
a yard, the beatitudinous look foiled, but her very black eyes still
shining exposed and absorbedly, in a rapt, reptilian sort of ecstasy.
Till Concha came to hit her with her elbow, making some brutal, savage
remark which Kate could not understand. So the glotzing black eyes of
the child would twitch, and Maria would break into meaningless tears,
Concha into a loud, brutal, mocking laugh, like some violent bird. And
Juana interrupted her black and gluey flow of words to glance at her
daughters and throw out some ineffectual remark.
The victim, the inevitable victim, and the inevitable victimiser.
The terrible, terrible hot emptiness of the Mexican mornings, the
weight of black _ennui_ that hung in the air! It made Kate feel as if
the bottom had fallen out of her soul. She went out to the lake, to
escape that house, that family.
Since the rains, the trees in the broken gardens of the lake front had
flamed into scarlet, and poured themselves out into lavender flowers.
Rose red, scarlet and lavender, quick, tropical flowers. Wonderful
splashes of colour. But that was all: splashes! They made a splash,
like fireworks.
And Kate thought of the black-thorn puffing white, in the early year,
in Ireland, and hawthorn with coral grains, in a damp still morning
in the lanes, and foxgloves by the bare rock, and tufts of ling and
heather, and a ravel of harebells. And a terrible, terrible longing for
home came over her. To escape from these tropical brilliancies and
meaninglessnesses.
In Mexico, the wind was a hard draught, the rain was a sluice of water,
to be avoided, and the sun hit down on one with hostility, terrific and
stunning. Stiff, dry, unreal land, with sunshine beating on it like
metal. Or blackness and lightning and crashing violence of rain.