when the drum sounds? Will you come?”
“What for?” she said.
“Well! Come, and you will see.”
He was gone in a flash.
There were many soldiers in the village. When she went to the
post-office, she saw the men in their cotton uniforms lying about in
the entrance to the military station. There must have been fifty or
more, little men, not the tall soldiers in slouched hats. These were
little, quick, compact men, like Cipriano, and they talked in a strange
Indian language, very subdued. They were very rarely seen in the
streets. They kept out of sight.
But at night, everyone was requested to be indoors by ten o’clock, and
through the darkness Kate heard the patrols of horse-soldiers riding
round.
There was an air of excitement and mystery in the place. The parish
priest, a rather overbearing, fat man of fifty or so, had preached
a famous Saturday evening sermon against Ramón and Quetzalcoatl,
forbidding the heathen name to be mentioned, threatening with all the
penalties any parishioner who read the Hymns, or even listened.
So, of course, he was attacked when he left the church, and had to be
rescued by soldiers who were in the doorway. They marched him safely
home. But his criada, the old woman who served him, was told by more
women than one that the next time the padre opened his mouth against
Quetzalcoatl, he would have a few inches of machete in his fat guts.
So his reverence stayed at home, and a curate officiated.
Practically all the people who came over the lake in boats on
Saturdays, went to mass in Sayula church. The great doors stood open
all the day. Men as they passed to and fro to the lake, took off
their big hats, with a curious cringing gesture, as they went by the
gateway of the church. All day long, scattered people were kneeling
in the aisles or among the benches, the men kneeling erect, their
big hats down by their knees, their curious tall-shaped Indian heads
with the thick black hair also erect; only the kneeling legs, close
together, humble. The women hooded themselves in their dark rebozos
and spread their elbows as they kneeled at a bench, in a slack sort of
voluptuousness.
On Saturday night, a great ruddy flickering of many candle-points, away
down the dark cavern of the church; and a clustering of dark men’s
heads, a shuffling of women, a come and go of men arriving from the
lake, of men departing to the market. A hush, not exactly of worship,
but of a certain voluptuous admiration of the loftiness and glitter,
a sensual, almost victimised self-abandon to the god of death, the
Crucified streaked with blood, or to the pretty white woman in a blue
mantle, with her little doll’s face under her crown, Mary, the doll of
dolls, Niña of Niñas.
It was not worship. It was a sort of numbness and letting the soul
sink uncontrolled. And it was a luxury, after all the week of unwashed
dullness in their squalid villages of straw huts. But it irritated Kate.
The men got up and tiptoed away in their sandals, crossing themselves
front and back, on the navel and on the back of the head, with holy
water. And their black eyes shone with a loose, sensuous look. Instead
of having gathered themselves together and become graver, stronger,
more collected and deep in their own integrity, they emerged only the
more loose and sloppy and uncontrolled.
Oh, if there is one thing men need to learn, but the Mexican Indians
especially, it is to collect each man his own soul together deep
inside him, and to abide by it. The Church, instead of helping men to
this, pushes them more and more into a soft, emotional helplessness,
with the unpleasant sensuous gratification of feeling themselves
victims, victimised, victimised, but at the same time with the lurking
sardonic consciousness that in the end a victim is stronger than the
victimiser. In the end, the victims pull down their victimiser, like a
pack of hyænas on an unwary lion. They know it. Cursed are the falsely
meek, for they are inheriting the earth.
On Sunday morning there was early mass at sunrise, another mass at
seven o’clock, another at nine, another at eleven. Then there was a
little band of violins and ’cellos, playing old-fashioned dance music;
there was, especially early in the morning, a solid mass of peons and
women, kneeling on the floor; and a flapping of dusky candles, a smell
of the exhaust air of candles, a heavy, rolling fume of incense, and
the heavy choir of men’s voices, solid, powerful, impressive, from the
gallery.
And the people went away in sensuous looseness, which soon turned,
in the market, to hate, the old, unfathomable hate which lies at the
bottom of the Indian heart, and which always rises black and turbid
when they have swayed awhile in sensuous gratification.
The church inside was a dead interior, like all Mexican churches,
even the gorgeous Puebla cathedral. The interior of almost any
Mexican church gives the impression of cynical barrenness, cynical
meaninglessness, an empty, cynical, mocking shell. The Italian churches
are built much in the same style, and yet in them lingers a shadow and
stillness of old, mysterious holiness. The hush.
But not in Mexico. The churches outside are impressive. Inside, and
it is curious to define it, they are blatant; void of sound and yet
with no hush, simple, and yet completely vulgar, barren, sterile. More
barren than a bank or a schoolroom or an empty concert-hall, less
mysterious than any of these. You get a sense of plaster, of mortar,
of whitewash, of smeared blue-wash or grey-wash; and of gilt laid on
and ready to peel off. Even in the most gorgeous churches, the gilt is
hatefully gilt, never golden. Nothing is soft nor mellow.
So the interior of Sayula church; and Kate had often been in. The white
exterior was charming, and so valuable in the landscape, with the twin
white pagoda-towers peering out of the green willow trees. But inside,
it seemed nothing but whitewash, stencilled over with grey scroll-work
decorations. The windows were high, and many, letting in the light
as into a schoolroom. Jesus, streaked with blood, was in one of the
transepts, and the Virgin, a doll in faded satin, stood startled inside
a glass case. There were rag flowers and paper flowers, coarse lace and
silver that looked like tin.
Nevertheless, it was quite clean, and very much frequented.
The Month of Mary had gone by, the blue and white paper ribbons were
all taken down, the palm trees in pots were all removed from the aisle,
the little girls in white dresses and little crowns of flowers no
longer came with posies in their hand, at evening. Curious, the old
gentle ceremonials of Europe, how trashy they seem in Mexico, just a
cheap sort of charade.
The day of Corpus Christi came, with high mass and the church full
to the doors with kneeling peons, from dawn till noon. Then a feeble
little procession of children within the church, because the law
forbids religious processions outside. But all, somehow, for nothing.
Just so that the people could call it a fiesta, and so have an excuse
to be more slack, more sloshy and uncontrolled than ever. The one
Mexican desire; to let themselves go in sloppy inertia.
And this was the all-in-all of the religion. Instead of doing as it
should, collecting the soul into its own strength and integrity, the
religious day left it all the more decomposed and degenerate.
However, the weeks passed, the crowd in the church seemed the same
as ever. But the crowd in the church one hour was the crowd of
Quetzalcoatl the next hour. Just a sensation.
Till the more socialistic Readers mingled a little anti-clerical
bitterness in their reading. And all the peons began to say: was El
Señor a gringo, and the Santísima, was she nothing but a gringita?
This provoked retaliation on the part of the priests, first mere
admonitions, then at last the loud denunciations and threat of that
sermon. Which meant war.
Everybody waited for Saturday. Saturday came, and the church remained
shut. Saturday night, the church was dark and closed. Sunday, the
church was silent and the doors blank fastened.
Something like consternation spread through the market host. They had
nowhere to go!--But among the consternation was a piqued curiosity.
Perhaps something exciting was going to happen.
Things had happened before. In the revolutions, many of the churches in
Mexico have been used for stables and for barracks. And churches are
turned into schools, and concert halls, and cinematograph theatres.
The convents and the monasteries are most of them barracks for the
rag-tag-and-bobtail soldiers. The world changes, is bound to change.
The second Saturday of the closed church was, as it happened, a big
market. Much fruit and stuff had come up the lake, from the south from
far distances, even from Colima. There were men with lacquer wooden
bowls, and women with glazed pottery. And as usual, men crouching in
guard over twenty centavos worth of nauseous tropical plums, or chiles,
or mangoes, in tiny pyramids along the roadway.
A crowded market, with the much and the little of the Indians. And the
church doors shut and locked, the church bells silent, even the clock
stopped. True, the clock was always stopping. But not with such a final
arrest.
No mass, no confession, no little orgy of incense and slack emotion!
The low rumble of murmuring tones, the quick, apprehensive glances
around. Vendors by the causeway squatted tight, as if to make
themselves dense and small, squatting down on their haunches with their
knees up to their shoulders, like the Aztec idols. And soldiers in twos
and threes sprinkled everywhere. And Señoras and Señoritas, in their
black gauze scarves or mantillas, tripping to the church for mass and
shrilling round the gateway of the church, all a bubble and a froth of
chatter; though they had known quite well the church was shut.
But it was Sunday morning, and something was due to happen.
At about half-past ten, a boat appeared, and men in snow-white clothes
got out, one carrying a drum. They marched quickly through the people,
under the old trees on the sand, across to the church. They passed
through the broken iron gates into the stone courtyard in front of the
church.
At the church doors, which were still shut, they took off their
blouses, and stood in a ring, with dark naked shoulders and the
blue-and-black sashes of Quetzalcoatl round their waists.
The drum began to beat, with a powerful, pounding note, as the men
stood bareheaded and bare-breasted in a circle outside the church
doors; a strange ring of lustrous, bluey-black heads and dark
shoulders, above the snowy white pantaloons. Monotonously the drum
beat, on and on. Then the little clay flute with the husky sound
wheezed a clear melody.
The whole market pressed densely towards the gateways of the church.
But there, soldiers stood guard. And on the inside of the stone yard in
front of the church, soldiers quietly guarded the low walls, letting
nobody mount. So that outside, under the old willow and pepper trees,
in the hot morning sun, the dense crowd stood gazing at the church
doors. They were mostly men in big hats; but some townsmen were there,
and some women, and Kate with a parasol lined with dark blue. A close,
silent, tense throng under the spangled shade, pressing round the
trunks of the palm trees, climbing on the roots of the pepper trees.
And behind were the camions and the motor-cars drawn up.
The drum shuddered and went still, and the earthen flute was silent.
The lake could be heard lapping, and a clink of glasses and a sound
of chauffeurs’ voices at the little cantina-booth. For the rest, the
silent breathing of the crowd.--Soldiers were quickly distributing a
few leaflets among the crowd. A strong, far-carrying male voice began
to sing to the softened thud of the drum.
Jesus’ Farewell.
Farewell, Farewell, _Despedida_!
The last of my days is gone.
To-morrow Jesus and Holy Mary
Will be bone.
It is a long, long way
From Mexico to the Pool of Heaven.
Look back the last time, Mary Mother
Let us call the eleven.
James, and John, and Mark,
Felipe and San Cristobal,
All my saints, and Anna, Teresa,
Guadalupe whose face is oval.
Come then, now, it is finished for all of us.
Let us all be gone.
Follow me now up the ladders of sparks,
Every one.
Joaquin, Francis, and Anthony
And many-named Maria,
Purisima, Refugio, and Soledad
Follow here.
Ho! all my saints and my Virgins
Troop out of your shrines,
After your master, the Crucified;
Bring all your signs.
Run up the flames, and with feet on the sparks
Troop into the sky.
Once more following the Master,
Back again now, on high.
Farewell, let all be forgotten
In Mexico.
To the pool of peace and forgetting in heaven
We go.
While this was singing, another boat had arrived, and soldiers made
way through the crowd for Ramón, in his white sarape with the blue
edges and scarlet fringe, and a young priest of the church in a
black cassock, and six men in dark sarapes with the blue borders of
Quetzalcoatl. This strange procession marched through the crowd and
through the gateways of the yard.
As they approached, the ring of men round the drum opened, and spread
into a crescent. Ramón stood tall behind the drum, the six men in dark
sarapes divided and went to the wings of the crescent, the young, slim
priest in a black cassock stood alone, in front of the crescent, facing
the crowd.
He lifted his hand; Ramón took off his hat; all the men in the crowd
took off their hats.
The priest turned, met Ramón at the centre of the crescent, and, across
the drum, handed him the key of the church. Then the priest waited.
Ramón unlocked the church doors and flung them open. The men in front
of the crowd kneeled down suddenly, seeing the church dark like a
cavern, but a trembling blaze of many candles, away, seemingly far down
the mysterious darkness, shuddering with dark, rippling flame, like the
Presence of the burning bush.
The crowd swayed and rustled, and subsided, kneeling. Only here and
there a labourer, a chauffeur or a railway man stood erect.
The priest raised his hand a little higher, returning towards the
people.
“My children,” he said; and as he spoke the lake seemed to rustle; “God
the Almighty has called home His Son, and the Holy Mother of the Son.
Their days are over in Mexico. They go back to the Father.
“Jesus, the Son of God, bids you farewell.
Mary, the Mother of God, bids you farewell.
For the last time they bless you, as they leave you.
Answer _Adios!_
Say _Adios!_ my children.”
The men in the circle said a deep _Adios!_ And from the soldiers, and
from the kneeling crowd, a ragged, muttered, strange repeating of
_Adios!_ again and again, like a sort of storm.
Suddenly, in a blast, down the darkness of the church into which the
kneeling people were staring, the burning bush of candles was gone,
there was only darkness. Across the sunshine, lit here and there by a
frail light of a taper, was a cave of darkness.
Men in the crowd exclaimed and groaned.
Then the drum softly touched, and two men in the crescent began to
sing, in magnificent, terrible voices, the Farewell Hymn again. They
were men whom Ramón, or his followers, had found in low drinking dens
in Mexico City, men with trained and amazing voices, the powerful
Mexican tenor that seemed to tear the earth open. Men whom the “times”
have reduced to singing in low city dives. And now they sang with all
the terrible desperation that was in them, the hopeless, demonish
recklessness.
When they finished, the priest again lifted his hand, and gave the
benediction; adding in a quiet voice:
“And now, with all the saints, let Me go, saith Jesus. For I go back to
my Father which is in heaven, and I lead my Mother in my right hand,
home to peace.”
He turned and went into the church. Ramón followed. Then slowly, all
the men of the crescent. Overhead the church bell rang a little while,
on the deathly silence. It ceased.
And in a moment, from the depths of the church sounded a drum, with a
remote, fearsome thud, and a slow monotony.
The priest, in his white vestments with rich lace, appeared in the
doorway of the church, bearing a tall crucifix. He hesitated, then came
into the sun. The kneeling people clasped their hands.
Candles in the dark church were clustering towards the door, lonely
flames. Don Ramón came out of the dark, naked to the waist, his sarape
over one shoulder, bearing the front pole of the great bier whereon
lies, within a glass case, the lifelike, terrible dead Christ of Holy
Week. A tall, dark man, naked to the waist, held the other end of the
pole on his shoulder. The crowd moaned and crossed themselves. The
lifelike Dead Christ seemed really dead, as he passed the gates. As He
entered the crowd, kneeling men and women lifted sightless faces and
flung their arms wide apart, and so remained, arms rigid and outflung,
in an unspeakable ecstasy of fear, supplication, acknowledgement of
death.
After the bier of the Dead Christ, a slow procession of men naked to
the waist, carrying litter after litter. First the terrible scourged
Christ, with naked body striped like a tiger with blood. Then the image
of the Saviour of the Sacred Heart, the well-known figure from the side
altar, with long hair and outstretched hands. Then the image of Jesus
of Nazareth, with a crown of Thorns.
Then the Virgin with the blue mantle and lace, and the golden crown.
The women began to moan as she emerged rather trashily into the blazing
sunlight. Behind her, in the church, the candles were one by one going
out.
Then came brown Saint Anthony of Padua, with a child in his arms. Then
Saint Francis, looking strangely at a cross in his hand. Then Saint
Anna. And last, Saint Joaquin. And as he emerged, the last candles in
the dark church went out, there were only open doors upon a darkness.
The images on the shoulders of the brown-skinned men rode rather
childishly out through the blazing sun, into the shadow of trees. The
drum followed last, slowly thudding. On the glass case of the big Dead
Christ the sun flashed with startling flashes, as the powerful men
carrying it turned towards the water. The crowd murmured and swayed
on its knees. Women cried: _Purisima! Purisima! Don’t leave us!_ and
some men ejaculated in strangled anguish, over and over again: _Señor!
Señor! Señor!_
But the strange procession made its way slowly under the trees, to the
coarse sands, and descended again into the great light towards the
lake. There was a little breeze under a blaze of sun. Folded sarapes on
naked, soft shoulders swung unevenly, the images rocked and tottered a
little. But onwards to the edge of the water went the tall crucifix,
then the flashing glass box. And after, came Jesus in a red silk robe,
fluttering, then a wooden Jesus all paint and streaks, then Jesus in
white with a purple mantle that blew like a kerchief, Mary in lace that
fluttered upon stiff white and blue satin. But the saints were only
painted; painted wood.
The slim, lace-smocked priest staggered down the sand under the heavy
crucifix, which had a white Christ Crucified stretched aloft, facing
the lake. By the little wall was a large black _canoa_, sailing boat,
with a broad plank gangway up to her stern. Two bare-legged, white-clad
men walked by the slim priest, whose white sleeves blew like flags as
he slowly climbed the gangway to the ship. Men helped him on board, and
he walked away to the prow, where at length he stood the big crucifix,
with the Christ still facing outwards.
The ship was open, without deck or hatches, but with fixed tables for
the images. Slowly Ramón ascended and descended into the boat, the
great glass case was laid down on its rest, the two men could wipe
their wet brows and their hot, black hair. Ramón put on his blanket and
his hat, against the sun. The boat heaved very slightly. The wind was
from the west. The lake was pale and unreal, sun-blinded.
One after another the images rose over the stern of the boat, against
the sky, then descended into the vessel, to be set down on their rests,
where they rose above the black sides of the _canoa_, in view of the
throng on the shore.
It was a strange and tawdry collection of images. And yet, each image
had a certain pathos of its own, and a certain touch of horror, as they
were grouped together for their last ride, upon the trestle-supports
within the vessel. By each image stood the bearers, in hats and
sarapes, keeping a steady hand on the poles.
There was a little line of soldiers on the shore, and three motor-boats
with soldiers waited by the big _canoa_. The shore was covered with a
mass of people. Many row-boats came rowing inquisitively round, like
fishes. But none came too near.
Bare-legged sailors began to pole the ship from the shore. They leaned
heavily on the poles, and walked along the rims of the vessel. Slowly
she began to move upon the waters, in the shallows. Slowly, she was
leaving the shore, and the throng.
Two other sailors swiftly began to hoist the huge, square white sail.
Quickly, yet heavily it rose in the air, and took the wind. It had the
great sign of Quetzalcoatl, the circling blue snake and the blue eagle
upon a yellow field, at the centre, like a great eye.
The wind came from the west, but the boat was steering south-east, for
the little Island of the Scorpions, which rose like a small dim hummock
from the haze of the lake. So the sail reached out, and the great eye
seemed to be glancing back, at the village with the green willows and
the empty white church, the throng on the shore.
Motor-boats circled the huge, slow canoe, small boats like insects
followed and ranged round at a distance, never coming too close. The
running water clucked and spoke, the men by the images steadied the
poles with one hand, their hats with the other, the great eye on the
sail ever looked back at the land, the sweep of the white canvas
sweeping low above the glass case of death, the Christ caked with gore,
the images in their fluttering mantles.
On the shore, the people wandered away, or sat on the sands waiting and
watching in a sort of dumb patience that was half indifference. The
canoe grew smaller, more inconspicuous, lapsing into the light, the
little boats circled around it like mere dots. The lake tired the eyes
with its light.
Away under the trees, in a half silence, a half vacancy, a woman bought
a dark water-melon, smashed it open on a stone, and gave the big pinky
fragments to her children. In silence, men sprinkled salt on the thick
slice of cucumber sold by the woman under the tree. In silence they
wandered into the church, past the soldiers on guard at the door.
The church was absolutely dark, save for the light that entered the
doorway, and absolutely bare; walls, floor, altar, transepts, all stark
bare and empty. The people wandered away again, in silence.
It was noon, and a hot day. The _canoa_ slowly ranged to the small
hummock of the island amid the waters, where lived one family of
Indians--fishers, with a few goats and one dry little place where they
grew a few beans and heads of maize. For the rest, the island was all
dry rock and thorny bushes, and scorpions.
The vessel was poled round to the one rocky bay. Slowly she drew near
the island. The motor-boats and the little boats hurried ahead. Already
brown, naked men were bathing among the rocks.
The great sail sank, the _canoa_ edged up to the rocky shore, men
sprang from her into the water, the images were lowered and slowly
carried on to the rocks. There they waited for the bearers.
Slowly the procession went again up the bank of the dishevelled island,
past the couple of huts, where a red cock was crowing among the litter,
and over to rocks, beyond the bushes, on the far side.
The side facing Sayula was all rock, naked and painful to tread on.
In a rocky hollow at the waters’ edge, tall stones had been put up on
end, with iron bars across the top, like a grill. Underneath, a pile of
faggots ready; and at the side, a pile of faggots.
The images, the glass box of the great Dead Christ, were laid on
the iron bars of the grill, in a pathetic cluster all together. The
crucifix was leaned against them. It was noon, the heat and the light
were fierce and erect. But already down the lake clouds were pushing up
fantastically.