“I said: Who is that?
“No one answered, but the voice said: Quetzalcoatl!
“I said: Where art thou?
“So! he said. I am neither here nor there. I am thyself. Get up.
“Now all was very heavy upon me, like a tomb-stone of darkness.
“I said: Am I not old? How shall I roll this stone away?
“How art thou old, when I am new man? I will roll away the stone. Sit
up!
“I sat up, and the stone went rolling, crashing down the gulfs of space.
“I said to myself: I am new man. I am younger than the young and older
than the old. Lo! I am unfolded on the stem of time like a flower, I
am at the midst of the flower of my manhood. Neither do I ache with
desire, to tear, to burst the bud; neither do I yearn away like a seed
that floats into heaven. The cup of my flowering is unfolded, in its
middle the stars float balanced with array. My stem is in the air, my
roots are in all the dark, the sun is no more than a cupful within me.
“Lo! I am neither young nor old, I am the flower unfolded, I am new.
“So I rose and stretched my limbs and looked around. The sun was below
me in a daze of heat, like a hot humming-bird hovering at mid-day over
the worlds. And his beak was long and very sharp, he was like a dragon.
“And a faint star was hesitating wearily, waiting to pass.
“I called aloud, saying: ‘Who is that?’
_My name is Jesus, I am Mary’s son.
I am coming home.
My mother the Moon is dark._
_Brother, Quetzalcoatl,
Hold back the wild hot sun.
Bind him with shadow while I pass.
Let me come home._
“I caught the sun and held him, and in my shade the faint star slipped
past, going slowly into the dark reaches beyond the burning of the sun.
Then on the slope of silence he sat down and took off his sandals, and
I put them on.
“‘How do they wear the wings of love, Jesus, the Mexican people?’
“‘The souls of the Mexican people are heavy for the wings of love, they
have swallowed the stone of despair.’
“‘Where is your Lady Mother in the mantle of blue, she with comfort in
her lap?’
“‘Her mantle faded in the dust of the world, she was weary without
sleep, for the voices of people cried night and day, and the knives
of the Mexican people were sharper than the pinions of love, and their
stubbornness was stronger than hope. Lo! the fountain of tears dries up
in the eyes of the old, and the lap of the aged is comfortless, they
look for rest. Quetzalcoatl, Sir, my mother went even before me, to her
still white bed in the moon.’
“‘She is gone, and thou are gone, Jesus, the Crucified. Then what of
Mexico?’
“‘The images stand in their churches, Oh Quetzalcoatl, they don’t know
that I and my Mother have departed. They are angry souls, Brother, my
Lord! They vent their anger. They broke my Churches, they stole my
strength they withered the lips of the Virgin. They drove us away, and
we crept away like a tottering old man and a woman, tearless and bent
double with age. So we fled while they were not looking. And we seek
but rest, to forget forever the children of men who have swallowed the
stone of despairs.’
“Then said I: It is good, pass on. I, Quetzalcoatl, will go down. Sleep
thou the sleep without dreams. Farewell at the cross-roads, Brother
Jesus.
“He said: Oh, Quetzalcoatl! They have forgotten thee. The feathered
snake! The serpent--silent bird! They are asking for none of thee.
“I said: Go thy way, for the dust of earth is in thy eyes and on thy
lips. For me the serpent of middle-earth sleeps in my loins and my
belly, the bird of the outer air perches on my brow and sweeps her bill
across my breast. But I, I am lord of two ways. I am master of up and
down. I am as a man who is a new man, with new limbs and life, and the
light of the Morning Star in his eyes. Lo! I am I! The lord of both
ways. Thou wert lord of the one way. Now it leads thee to the sleep.
Farewell!
“So Jesus went on towards the sleep. And Mary the Mother of Sorrows lay
down on the bed of the white moon, weary beyond any more tears.
“And I, I am on the threshold. I am stepping across the border. I am
Quetzalcoatl, lord of both ways, star between day and the dark.”
There was silence as the young man finished reading.
CHAP: XVI. CIPRIANO AND KATE.
On Saturday afternoons the big black canoes with their large square
sails came slowly approaching out of the thin haze across the lake,
from the west, from Tlapaltepec, with big straw hats and with blankets
and earthenware stuff, from Ixtlahuacan and Jaramay and Las Zemas with
mats and timber and charcoal and oranges, from Tuliapan and Cuxcueco
and San Cristobal with boatloads of dark-green, globular water-melons,
and piles of red tomatoes, mangoes, vegetables, oranges: and boatloads
of bricks and tiles, burnt red, but rather friable; then more charcoal,
more wood, from the stark dry mountains over the lake.
Kate nearly always went out about five o’clock, on Saturdays, to see
the boats, flat-bottomed, drift up to the shallow shores, and begin
to unload in the glow of the evening. It pleased her to see the men
running along the planks with the dark-green melons, and piling them in
a mound on the rough sand, melons dark-green like creatures with pale
bellies. To see the tomatoes all poured out into a shallow place in the
lake, bobbing about while the women washed them, a bobbing scarlet upon
the water.
The long, heavy bricks were piled in heaps along the scrap of
demolished breakwater, and little gangs of asses came trotting down the
rough beach, to be laden, pressing their little feet in the gravelly
sand, and flopping their ears.
The cargadores were busy at the charcoal boats, carrying out the rough
sacks.
“Do you want charcoal, Niña?” shouted a grimy cargador, who had carried
the trunks from the station on his back.
“At how much?”
“Twenty-five reales the two sacks.”
“I pay twenty reales.”
“At twenty reales then, Señorita. But you give me two reales for the
transport?”
“The owner pays the transport,” said Kate. “But I will give you twenty
centavos.”
Away went the man, trotting bare-legged, barefoot, over the stony
ground, with two large sacks of charcoal on his shoulders. The men
carry huge weights, without seeming ever to think they are heavy.
Almost as if they liked to feel a huge weight crushing on their iron
spines, and to be able to resist it.
Baskets of spring guavas, baskets of sweet lemons called limas, baskets
of tiny green and yellow lemons, big as walnuts; orange-red and
greenish mangoes, oranges, carrots, cactus fruits in great abundance,
a few knobby potatoes, flat, pearl-white onions, little calabasitas
and speckled green calabasitas like frogs, camotes cooked and raw--she
loved to watch the baskets trotting up the beach past the church.
Then, rather late as a rule, big red pots, bulging red ollas for
water-jars, earthenware casseroles and earthenware jugs with cream and
black scratched pattern in glaze, bowls, big flat earthenware discs for
cooking tortillas--much earthenware.
On the west shore, men were running up the beach wearing twelve
enormous hats at once, like a trotting pagoda. Men trotting with finely
woven huaraches and rough strip sandals. And men with a few dark
serapes, with gaudy rose-pink patterns, in a pile on their shoulders.
It was fascinating. But at the same time, there was a heavy, almost
sullen feeling on the air. These people came to market to a sort of
battle. They came, not for the joy of selling, but for the sullen
contest with those who wanted what they had got. The strange, black
resentment always present.
By the time the church bells clanged for sunset, the market had already
begun. On all the pavements round the plaza squatted the Indians
with their wares, pyramids of green water-melons, arrays of rough
earthenware, hats in piles, pairs of sandals side by side, a great
array of fruit, a spread of collar-studs and knick-knacks, called
_novedades_, little trays with sweets. And people arriving all the time
out of the wild country, with laden asses.
Yet never a shout, hardly a voice to be heard. None of the animation
and the frank wild clamour of a Mediterranean market. Always the heavy
friction of the will; always, always, grinding upon the spirit, like
the grey-black grind of lava-rock.
When dark fell, the vendors lighted their tin torch-lamps, and the
flames wavered and streamed as the dark-faced men squatted on the
ground in their white clothes and big hats, waiting to sell. They never
asked you to buy. They never showed their wares. They didn’t even look
at you. It was as if their static resentment and indifference would
hardly let them sell at all.
Kate sometimes felt the market cheerful and easy. But more often she
felt an unutterable weight slowly, invisibly sinking on her spirits.
And she wanted to run. She wanted above all, the comfort of Don Ramón
and the Hymns of Quetzalcoatl. This seemed to her the only escape from
a world gone ghastly.
There was talk of revolution again, so the market was uneasy and
grinding the black grit into the spirit. Foreign-looking soldiers were
about, with looped-hats, and knives and pistols, and savage northern
faces: tall, rather thin figures. They would loiter about in pairs,
talking in a strange northern speech, and seeming more alien even than
Kate herself.
The food-stalls were brilliantly lighted. Rows of men sat at the plank
boards, drinking soup and eating hot food with their fingers. The
milkman rode in on horseback, his two big cans of milk slung before
him, and he made his way slowly through the people to the food-stalls.
There, still sitting unmoved on horseback, he delivered bowls of milk
from the can in front of him, and then, on horseback like a monument,
took his supper, his bowl of soup, and his plate of tamales, or of
minced, fiery meat spread on tortillas. The peons drifted slowly round.
Guitars were sounding, half-secretly. A motor-car worked its way in
from the city, choked with people, girls, young men, city papas,
children, in a pile.
The rich press of life, above the flare of torches upon the ground!
The throng of white-clad, big-hatted men circulating slowly, the women
with dark rebozos slipping silently. Dark trees overhead. The doorway
of the hotel bright with electricity. Girls in organdie frocks, white,
cherry-red, blue, from the city. Groups of singers singing inwardly.
And all the noise subdued, suppressed.
The sense of strange, heavy suppression, the dead black power of
negation in the souls of the peons. It was almost pitiful to see the
pretty, pretty slim girls from Guadalajara going round and round, their
naked arms linked together, so light in their gauzy, scarlet, white,
blue, orange dresses, looking for someone to look at them, to take note
of them. And the peon men only emitting from their souls the black
vapor of negation, that perhaps was hate. They seemed, the natives,
to have the power of blighting the air with their black, rock-bottom
resistance.
Kate almost wept over the slim, eager girls, pretty as rather papery
flowers, eager for attention, but thrust away, victimised.
Suddenly there was a shot. The market-place was on its feet in
a moment, scattering, pouring away into the streets and the
shops. Another shot! Kate, from where she stood, saw across the
rapidly-emptying plaza a man sitting back on one of the benches, firing
a pistol into the air. He was a lout from the city, and he was half
drunk. The people knew what it was. Yet any moment he might lower the
pistol and start firing at random. Everybody hurried silently, melting
away, leaving the plaza void.
Two more shots, pap-pap! still into the air. And at the same moment
a little officer in uniform darted out of the dark street where the
military station was, and where now the big hats were piled on the
ground; he rushed straight to the drunkard, who was spreading his legs
and waving the pistol: and before you could breathe, _slap!_ and again
_slap!_ He had slapped the pistol-firer first on one side of the face,
then on the other, with slaps that resounded almost like shots. And in
the same breath he seized the arm that held the pistol and wrested the
weapon away.
Two of the strange soldiers instantly rushed up and seized the man by
the arms. The officer spoke two words, they saluted and marched off
their prisoner.
Instantly the crowd was ebbing back into the plaza, unconcerned. Kate
sat on a bench with her heart beating. She saw the prisoner pass under
a lamp, streaks of blood on his cheek. And Juana, who had fled, now
came scuttling back and took Kate’s hand, saying:
“Look! Niña! It is the General!”
She rose startled to her feet. The officer was saluting her.
“Don Cipriano!” she said.
“The same!” he replied. “Did that drunken fellow frighten you?”
“Not much! Only startled me. I didn’t _feel_ any evil intention behind
it.”
“No, only drunk.”
“But I shall go home now.”
“Shall I walk with you?”
“Would you care to?”
He took his place at her side, and they turned down by the church, to
the lake shore. There was a moon above the mountain and the air was
coming fresh, not too strong, from the west. From the Pacific. Little
lights were burning ruddy by the boats at the water’s edge, some
outside, and some inside, under the roof-tilt of the boat’s little
inward shed. Women were preparing a mouthful of food.
“But the night is beautiful,” said Kate, breathing deep.
“With the moon clipped away just a little,” he said.
Juana was following close on her heels: and behind, two soldiers in
slouched hats.
“Do the soldiers escort you?” she said.
“I suppose so,” said he.
“But the moon,” she said, “isn’t lovely and friendly as it is in
England or Italy.”
“It is the same planet,” he replied.
“But the moonshine in America isn’t the same. It doesn’t make one feel
glad as it does in Europe. One feels it would like to hurt one.”
He was silent for some moments. Then he said:
“Perhaps there is in you something European, which hurts our Mexican
Moon.”
“But I come in good faith.”
“European good faith. Perhaps it is not the same as Mexican.”
Kate was silent, almost stunned.
“Fancy your Mexican moon objecting to me!” she laughed ironically.
“Fancy your objecting to our Mexican moon!” said he.
“I wasn’t,” said she.
They came to the corner of Kate’s road. At the corner was a group of
trees, and under the trees, behind the hedge, several reed huts. Kate
often laughed at the donkey looking over the dry-stone low wall, and at
the black sheep with curved horns, tied to a bitten tree, and at the
lad, naked but for a bit of a shirt, fleeing into the corner under the
thorn screen.
Kate and Cipriano sat on the verandah of the House of the Cuentas. She
offered him vermouth, but he refused.
They were still. There came the faint pip!-pip! from the little
electric plant just up the road, which Jesús tended. Then a cock from
beyond the bananas crowed powerfully and hoarsely.
“But how absurd!” said Kate. “Cocks don’t crow at this hour.”
“Only in Mexico,” laughed Cipriano.
“Yes! Only here!”
“He thinks your moon is the sun, no?” he said, teasing her.
The cock crowed powerfully, again and again.
“This is very nice, your house, your patio,” said Cipriano.
But Kate was silent.
“Or don’t you like it?” he said.
“You see,” she answered, “I have nothing to _do_! The servants won’t
let me do anything. If I sweep my room, they stand and say _Que Niña!
Que Niña!_ As if I was standing on my head for their benefit. I sew,
though I’ve no interest in sewing.--What is it, for a life?”
“And you read!” he said, glancing at the magazines and books.
“Ah, it is all such stupid, lifeless stuff, in the books and papers,”
she said.
There was a silence. After which he said:
“But what would you like to do? As you say, you take no interest in
sewing. You know the Navajo women, when they weave a blanket, leave
a little place for their soul to come out, at the end: not to weave
their soul into it.--I always think England has woven her soul into her
fabrics, into all the things she has made. And she never left a place
for it to come out. So now all her soul is in her goods, and nowhere
else.”
“But Mexico _has_ no soul,” said Kate. “She’s swallowed the stone of
despair, as the hymn says.”
“Ah! You think so? I think not. The soul is also a thing you make,
like a pattern in a blanket. It is very nice while all the wools
are rolling their different threads and different colours, and the
pattern is being made. But once it is finished--then finished it has no
interest any more. Mexico hasn’t started to weave the pattern of her
soul. Or she is only just starting: with Ramón. Don’t you believe in
Ramón?”
Kate hesitated before she answered.
“Ramón, yes! I do! But whether it’s any good trying here in Mexico, as
he is trying--” she said slowly.
“He is in Mexico. _He_ tries here. Why should not you?”
“I?”
“Yes! You! Ramón doesn’t believe in womanless gods, he says. Why should
you not be the woman in the Quetzalcoatl pantheon? If you will, the
goddess!”
“I, a goddess in the Mexican pantheon?” cried Kate, with a burst of
startled laughter.
“Why not?” said he.
“But I am not Mexican,” said she.
“You may easily be a goddess,” said he, “in the same pantheon with Don
Ramón and me.”
A strange, inscrutable flame of desire seemed to be burning on
Cipriano’s face, as his eyes watched her glittering. Kate could not
help feeling that it was a sort of intense, blind _ambition_, of which
she was partly an object: a passionate object also: which kindled the
Indian to the hottest pitch of his being.
“But I don’t feel like a goddess in a Mexican pantheon,” she said.
“Mexico is a bit horrible to me. Don Ramón is _wonderful_: but I’m so
afraid they will destroy him.”
“Come, and help to prevent it.”
“How?”
“You marry me. You complain you have nothing to do. Then marry me.
Marry me, and help Ramón and me. We need a woman, Ramón says, to be
with us. And you are the woman. There is a great deal to do.”
“But can’t I help without marrying anybody?” said Kate.
“How can you?” he said simply.
And she knew it was true.
“But you see,” she said, “I have no _impulse_ to marry you, so how can
I?”
“Why?” he said.
“You see, Mexico is _really_ a bit horrible to me. And the black eyes
of the people really make my heart contract, and my flesh shrink.
There’s a bit of horror in it. And I don’t want horror in my soul.”
He was silent and unfathomable. She did not know in the least what he
was thinking, only a black cloud seemed over him.
“Why not?” he said at last. “Horror is real. Why not a bit of horror,
as you say, among all the rest?”
He gazed at her with complete, glittering earnestness, something heavy
upon her.
“But----” she stammered in amazement.
“You feel a bit of horror for me too--But why not? Perhaps I feel a bit
of horror for you too, for your light-coloured eyes and your strong
white hands. But that is good.”
Kate looked at him in amazement. And all she wanted was to flee, to
flee away beyond the bounds of this gruesome continent.
“Get used to it,” he said. “Get used to it that there must be a bit of
fear, and a bit of horror in your life. And marry me, and you will find
many things that are not horror. The bit of horror is like the sesame
seed in the nougat, it gives the sharp wild flavour. It is good to have
it there.”
He sat watching her with black, glittering eyes, and talking with
strange, uncanny reason. His desire seemed curiously impersonal,
physical, and yet not personal at all. She felt as if, for him, she had
some other name, she moved within another species. As if her name were,
for example, Itzpapalotl, and she had been born in unknown places, and
was a woman unknown to herself.
Yet surely, surely he was only putting his will over her?
She was breathless with amazement, because he had made her see the
physical possibility of marrying him: a thing she had never even
glimpsed before. But surely, surely it would not be _herself_ who could
marry him. It would be some curious female within her, whom she did not
know and did not own.
He was emanating a dark, exultant sort of passion.
“I can’t believe,” she said, “that I could do it.”
“Do it,” he said. “And then you will know.”
She shuddered slightly, and went indoors for a wrap. She came out
again in a silk Spanish shawl, brown, but deeply embroidered in
silver-coloured silk. She tangled her fingers nervously in the long
brown fringe.
Really, he seemed sinister to her, almost repellant. Yet she hated to
think that she merely was afraid: that she had not the courage. She
sat with her head bent, the light falling on her soft hair and on the
heavy, silvery-coloured embroidery of her shawl, which she wrapped
round her tight, as the Indian women do their rebozos. And his black
eyes watched her, and watched the rich shawl, with a peculiar intense
glitter. The shawl, too, fascinated him.
“Well!” he said suddenly. “When shall it be?”
“What?” she said, glancing up into his black eyes with real fear.
“The marriage.”
She looked at him, almost hypnotised with amazement that he should have
gone so far. And even now, she had not the power to make him retreat.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Will you say in August? On the first of August?”
“I won’t say any time,” she said.
Suddenly the black gloom and anger of the Indians came over it. Then
again he shook it off, with a certain callous indifference.
“Will you come to Jamiltepec to-morrow to see Ramón?” he asked. “He
wants to speak with you.”
Kate also wanted to see Ramón: she always did.
“Shall I?” she said.
“Yes! Come with me in the morning in the automobile. Yes?”
“I would like to see Don Ramón again,” she said.
“You are not afraid of him, eh? Not the bit of horror, eh?” he said,
smiling peculiarly.
“No. But Don Ramón isn’t really Mexican,” she said.
“Not really Mexican?”
“No!--He feels European.”
“Really! To me he is--Mexico.”
She paused and gathered herself together.
“I will row in a boat to Jamiltepec to-morrow, or I will take Alonso’s
motor-boat. I will come about ten o’clock.”
“Very good!” said Cipriano, rising to leave.
When he had gone, she heard the sound of the drum from the plaza. It
would be another meeting of the men of Quetzalcoatl. But she had not
the desire nor the courage to set out afresh that day.
Instead, she went to bed, and lay breathing the inner darkness. Through
the window-cracks she saw the whiteness of the moon, and through the
walls she heard the small pulse of the drum. And it all oppressed her
and made her afraid. She lay forming plans to escape. She must escape.
She would hurriedly pack her trunks and disappear: perhaps take the
train to Manzanillo, on the coast, and thence sail up to California, to
Los Angeles or to San Francisco. Suddenly escape, and flee away to a
white man’s country, where she could once more breathe freely. How good
it would be!--Yes, this was what she would do.
The night grew late, the drum ceased, she heard Ezequiel come home
and lie down on the mattress outside her door. The only sound was
the hoarse crowing of cocks in the moonlit night. And in her room,
like someone striking a match, came the greenish light of a firefly,
intermittent, now here, now there.
Thoroughly uneasy and cowed, she went to sleep. But then she slept
deeply.
And curiously enough, she awoke in the morning with a new feeling of
strength. It was six o’clock, the sun was making yellow pencils through
her shutter-cracks. She threw open her window to the street, and looked
through the iron grating at the little lane with deep shadow under the
garden wall, and above the wall, banana leaves fraying translucent
green, and shaggy mops of palm-trees perching high, towards the twin
white tower-tips of the church, crowned by the Greek cross with four
equal arms.
In the lane it was already motion: big cows marching slowly to the
lake, under the bluish shadow of the wall, and a small calf, big-eyed
and adventurous, trotting aside to gaze through her gate at the green
watered grass and the flowers. The silent peon, following, lifted
his two arms with a sudden swoop upwards, noiselessly, and the calf
careered on. Only the sound of the feet of calves.
Then two boys vainly trying to urge a young bull-calf to the lake. It
kept on jerking up its sharp rump, and giving dry little kicks, from
which the boys ran away. They pushed its shoulder, and it butted them
with its blunt young head. They were in the state of semi-frenzied
bewilderment which the Indians fall into when they are opposed and
frustrated. And they took the usual recourse of running to a little
distance, picking up heavy stones, and hurling them viciously at the
animal.