with its trees and villages and white church towers.
Men who had come in boats crowded on the rocks of the little
amphitheatre. In silence, Ramón kindled shreds of cane and ocote,
with a burning glass. Little hasty flames like young snakes arose
in the solid sunlight, with vapor of smoke. He set fire to the
carefully-arranged pyramid of faggots beneath the grill-table of the
images.
There was a crackling, and a puffing of whitish smoke, the sweet scent
of ocote, and orange-red tongues of half-substantial flame were leaping
up in the hot white air. Hot breaths blew suddenly, sudden flames
gushed up, and the ocote, full of sweet resin, began to roar. The glass
of the great box emitted strange, painful yelps as it splintered and
fell tinkling. Between the iron bars, brownish flames pushed up among
the images, which at once went black. The little vestments of silk and
satin withered in a moment to blackness, the caked wounds of paint
bubbled black.
The young priest took off his linen vestment, his stole and his
chasuble, and with flushed face flung them in the flame. Then he
stripped off his black cassock, and emerged in the white cotton of the
men of Quetzalcoatl, his white drawers rolled up to the knee. He threw
his cassock in the fire. Someone handed him a big hat, and a white
sarape with blue ends.
There was a smell of burning paint, and wool, and ocote. The fire
rushed in a dusky mass upon the blackened, flickering images, till
nothing was to be seen but a confused bush of smoke and brown-red
flames, puthering, reeking, roaring. The flaming crucifix slipped
aside, and fell. A man seized it and pushed it into the fire, under the
images. Men in a sort of ecstasy threw on more of the heavy, resinous
wood, that almost exploded into flame. Rocks cracked and exploded like
guns. Everybody drew back from that roaring tree of flame, which rose
ever higher and higher, its dark smoke and its sparks unfolding into
heaven.
One of the supporting stones burst with a bang, bars of iron and
blazing stumps of images tumbled in a confused roar. The glass case
had disappeared, but ribbons of iron waved, then curled over red, into
the torrent of the sudden fire. Strange rods of iron appeared out of
nowhere, protruding from solid red coals.
And soon, all that was left was a fierce glow of red coals of wood,
with a medley of half-fused iron.
Ramón stood aside and watched in silence, his dark brow quite
expressionless.
Then, when only the last bluish flames flickered out of a tumble of red
fire, from the eminence above, rockets began to shoot into the air with
a swish, exploding high in the sightless hot blue, with a glimmer of
bluish showers, and of gold.
The people from the shore had seen the tree of smoke with its trunk
of flame. Now they heard the heavy firing of the rockets, they
looked again, exclaiming, half in dismay, half in the joyful lust of
destruction:
“Señor! Señor! La Purisima! La Santísima!”
The flame and the smoke and the rockets melted as if by miracle, into
nothingness, leaving the hot air unblemished. The coals of fire were
shovelled and dropped down a steep hole.
As the _canoa_ sailed back, the side of the lake, through filmy air,
looked brownish and changeless. A cloud was rising in the south-west,
from behind the dry, silent mountains, like a vast white tail, like the
vast white fleecy tail of some squirrel, that had just dived out of
sight behind the mountains. This wild white tail fleeced up and up, to
the zenith, straight at the sun. And as the _canoa_ spread her sail to
tack back, already a delicate film of shadow was over the chalk-white
lake.
Only on the low end of the isle of Scorpions, hot air still quivered.
Ramón returned in one of the motor-boats. Slowly the sky was clouding
for the thunder and the rain. The _canoa_, unable to make her way
across, was sailing for Tuliapan. The little boats hurried in silence.
They landed before the wind rose. Ramón went and locked the doors of
the church.
The crowd scattered in the wind, rebozos waving wildly, leaves torn,
dust racing. Sayula was empty of God, and, at heart, they were glad.
CHAP: XIX. THE ATTACK ON JAMILTEPEC.
Suddenly, nearly all the soldiers disappeared from the village, there
was a “rebellion” in Colima. A train had been held up, people killed.
And somebody, Generals Fulano and Tulano, had “pronounced” against the
government.
Stir in the air, everybody enjoying those periodical shivers of fear!
But for these shivers, everything much the same as usual. The church
remained shut up, and dumb. The clock didn’t go. Time suddenly fell
off, the days walked naked and timeless, in the old, uncounted manner
of the past. The strange, old, uncounted, unregistered, unreckoning
days of the ancient heathen world.
Kate felt a bit like a mermaid trying to swim in a wrong element. She
was swept away in some silent tide, to the old, antediluvian silence,
where things moved without contact. She moved and existed without
contact. Even the striking of the hours had ceased. As a drowning
person sees nothing but the waters, so Kate saw nothing but the face of
the timeless waters.
So, of course, she clutched at her straw. She couldn’t bear it.
She ordered an old, ricketty Ford car, to take her bumping out to
Jamiltepec, over the ruinous roads in the afternoon.
The country had gone strange and void, as it does when these
“rebellions” start. As if the life-spirit were sucked away, and only
some empty, anti-life void, remained in the wicked hollow countryside.
Though it was not far to Jamiltepec, once outside the village, the
chauffeur and his little attendant lad began to get frightened, and to
go frog-like with fear.
There is something truly mysterious about the Mexican quality of fear.
As if man and woman collapsed and lay wriggling on the ground like
broken reptiles, unable to rise. Kate used all her will, against this
cringing nonsense.
They arrived without ado at Jamiltepec. The place seemed quiet, but
normal. An oxen wagon stood empty in the courtyard. There were no
soldiers on guard. They had all been withdrawn, against the rebellion.
But several peons were moving round, in a desultory fashion. The
day was a fiesta, when not much work was doing. In the houses of the
peons, the women were patting tortillas, and preparing hot chile sauce,
grinding away on the metates. A fiesta! Only the windmill that pumped
up water from the lake was spinning quickly, with a little noise.
Kate drove into the yard in silence, and two mozos with guns and belts
of cartridges came to talk in low tones to the chauffeur.
“Is Doña Carlota here?” asked Kate.
“No Señora. The patrona is not here.”
“Don Ramón?”
“Si Señora! Està.”
Even as she hesitated, rather nervous, Ramón came out of the inner
doorway of the courtyard, in his dazzling white clothes.
“I came to see you,” said Kate. “I don’t know if you’d rather I hadn’t.
But I can go back in the motor-car.”
“No,” he said. “I am glad. I was feeling deserted, I don’t know why.
Let us go upstairs.”
“_Patrón!_” said the chauffeur, in a low voice. “Must I stay?”
Ramón said a few words to him. The chauffeur was uneasy, and didn’t
want to stay. He said he had to be back in Sayula at such and such a
time. Excuses, anyhow. But it was evident he wanted to get away.
“Then best let him go,” said Ramón to Kate. “You do not mind going home
in the boat?”
“I don’t want to give you trouble.”
“It is least trouble to let this fellow go, and you can leave by boat
just whenever you wish to. So we shall all be more free.”
Kate paid the chauffeur, and the Ford started rattling. After rattling
a while, it moved in a curve round the courtyard, and lurched through
the zaguan, disappearing as fast as possible.
Ramón spoke to his two mozos with the guns. They went to the outer
doorway, obediently.
“Why do you have to have armed men?” she said.
“Oh, they’re afraid of bandits,” he said. “Whenever there’s a rebellion
anywhere, everybody is afraid of bandits. So of course that calls
bandits into life.”
“But where do they come from?” said Kate, as they passed into the inner
doorways.
“From the villages,” he said, closing the heavy door of that entrance
behind him, and putting the heavy iron bars across, from wall to wall.
The inner archway was now a little prison, for the strong iron gates
at the lake end of the passage were shut fast. She looked through, at
the little round pond. It had some blue water-lilies on it. Beyond, the
pallid lake seemed almost like a ghost, in the glare of the sun.
A servant was sent to the kitchen quarters, Ramón and Kate climbed the
stone stairs to the upper terrace. How lonely, stonily lonesome and
forlorn the hacienda could feel! The very stone walls could give off
emptiness, loneliness, negation.
“But which villages do the bandits come from?” she insisted.
“Any of them. Mostly, they say, from San Pablo or from Ahuajijic.”
“Quite near!” she cried.
“Or from Sayula,” he added. “Any of the ordinary men in big hats you
see around the plaza, may possibly be bandits, when banditry pays, as a
profession, and isn’t punished with any particular severity.”
“It is hard to believe!” she said.
“It is so obvious!” he said, dropping into one of the rocking-chairs
opposite her, and smiling across the onyx table.
“I suppose it is!” she said.
He clapped his hands, and his mozo Martin came up. Ramón ordered
something, in a low, subdued tone. The man replied in an even lower,
more subdued tone. Then the master and man nodded at one another, and
the man departed, his huaraches swishing a little on the terrace.
Ramón had fallen into the low, crushed sort of voice so common in
the country, as if everyone were afraid to speak aloud, so they
murmured guardedly. This was unusual, and Kate noticed it in him with
displeasure. She sat looking past the thick mango-trees, whose fruit
was changing colour like something gradually growing hot, to the
ruffled, pale-brown lake. The mountains of the opposite shore were very
dark. Above them lay a heavy, but distant black cloud, out of which
lightning flapped suddenly and uneasily.
“Where is Don Cipriano?” she asked.
“Don Cipriano is very much General Viedma at the moment,” he replied.
“Chasing rebels in the State of Colima.”
“Will they be very hard to chase?”
“Probably not. Anyhow Cipriano will enjoy chasing them. He is Zapotec,
and most of his men are Zapotecans, from the hills. They love chasing
men who aren’t.”
“I wondered why he wasn’t there on Sunday when you carried away the
images,” she said. “I think it was an awfully brave thing to do.”
“Do you?” he laughed. “It wasn’t. It’s never half so brave, to carry
something off, and destroy it, as to set a new pulse beating.”
“But you have to destroy those old things, first.”
“Those frowsty images--why, yes. But it’s no good until you’ve got
something else moving, from the inside.”
“And have you?”
“I think I have. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, a little doubtful.
“I think I have,” he said. “I feel there’s a new thing moving inside
me.” He was laughing at her, for her hesitation. “Why don’t you come
and join us?” he added.
“How?” she said. “By being married off to Don Cipriano?”
“Not necessarily. Not necessarily. Not necessarily by being married to
anybody.”
“What are you going to do next?” she said.
“I? I am going to re-open the church, for Quetzalcoatl to come in. But
I don’t like lonely gods. There should be several of them, I think, for
them to be happy together.”
“Does one need gods?” she said.
“Why yes. One needs manifestations, it seems to me.”
Kate sat in unwilling silence.
“One needs goddesses too. That is also a dilemma,” he added, with a
laugh.
“How I would _hate_,” said Kate, “to have to be a goddess for people.”
“For the monkeys?” he said, smiling.
“Yes! Of course.”
At that moment, he sat erect, listening. There had been a shot, which
Kate had heard, but which she had hardly noticed; to her ears, it might
have been a motor-car back-firing, or even a motor-boat.
Suddenly, a sharp little volley of shots.
Ramón rose swiftly, swift as a great cat, and slammed to the iron door
at the top of the stairway, shooting the bars.
“Won’t you go into that room?” he said to her, pointing to a dark
doorway. “You will be all right there. Just stay a few minutes till I
come back.”
As he spoke, there came a shriek from the courtyard at the back, and a
man’s death-voice yelled _Patrón_!
Ramón’s eyes dilated with terrible anger, the anger of death. His
face went pale and strange, as he looked at her without seeing her,
the black flame filling his eyes. He had drawn a long-barreled steel
revolver from his hip.
Still without seeing her, he strode rapidly, soft and catlike along
the terrace, and leaped up the end staircase on to the roof. The soft,
eternal passion of anger in his limbs.
Kate stood in the doorway of the room, transfixed. The light of day
seemed to have darkened before her face.
“Holá! You there!” she heard his voice from the roof, in such anger it
was almost a laugh, from far away.
For answer, a confused noise from the courtyard, and several shots. The
slow, steady answer of shots!
She started as a rushing hiss broke on the air. In terror she waited.
Then she saw it was a rocket bursting with a sound like a gun, high
over the lake, and emitting a shower of red balls of light. A signal
from Ramón!
Unable to go into the dark room, Kate waited as if smitten to death.
Then something stirred deep in her, she flew along the terrace and up
the steps to the roof. She realised that she didn’t mind dying so long
as she died with that man. Not alone.
The roof was glaring with sunshine. It was flat, but its different
levels were uneven. She ran straight out into the light, towards the
parapet wall, and had nearly come in sight of the gateway of the
courtyard below, when something gave a slight smack, and bits of
plaster flew in her face and her hair. She turned and fled back like a
bee to the stairway.
The stairs came up in a corner, where there was a little sort of stone
turret, square, with stone seats. She sank on one of these seats,
looking down in terror at the turn of the stairs. It was a narrow
little stone stairway, between the solid stone walls.
She was almost paralysed with shock and with fear. Yet something within
her was calm. Leaning and looking out across calm sunshine of the level
roof, she could not believe in death.
She saw the white figure and the dark head of Ramón within one of the
small square turrets across the roof. The little tower was open, and
hardly higher than his head. He was standing in a corner, looking
sideways down a loop-hole, perfectly motionless. Snap! went his
revolver, deliberately. There was a muffled cry below, and a sudden
volley of shots.
Ramón stood away from the loop-hole and took off his white blouse, so
that it should not betray him. Above his sash was a belt of cartridges.
In the shadow of the turret, his body looked curiously dark, rising
from the white of his trousers. Again he took his stand quietly at the
side of the long, narrow, slanting aperture. He lifted his revolver
carefully, and the shots, one, two, three, slow and deliberate,
startled her nerves. And again there was a volley of shots from below,
and bits of stone and plaster smoking against the sky. Then again,
silence, long silence. Kate pressed her hands against her body, as she
sat.
The clouds had shifted, the sun shone yellowish. In the heavier light,
the mountains beyond the parapet showed a fleece of young green, smoky
and beautiful.
All was silent. Ramón in the shadow did not move, pressing himself
against the wall, and looking down. He commanded, she knew, the big
inner doors.
Suddenly, however, he shifted. With his revolver in his hand he stooped
and ran, like some terrible cat, the sun gleaming on his naked back as
he crouched under the shelter of the thick parapet wall, running along
the roof to the corresponding front turret.
This turret was roofless, and it was nearer to Kate, as she sat
spell-bound, in a sort of eternity, on the stone seat at the head of
the stairs, watching Ramón. He pressed himself against the wall, and
lifted his revolver to the slit. And again, one, two, three, four,
five, the shots exploded deliberately. Some voice below yelled _Ay-ee!
Ay-ee! Ay-ee!_ in yelps of animal pain. A voice was heard shouting
command. Ramón kneeled on one knee, re-loading his revolver. Then he
struck a match, and again Kate almost started out of her skin, as a
rocket rushed ferociously up into the sky, exploded like a gun, and let
fall the balls of red flame that lingered as if loth to die away, in
the high, remote air.
She sighed, wondering what it all was. It was death, she knew. But
so strange, so vacant. Just these noises of shots! And she could see
nothing outside. She wanted to see what was in the courtyard.
Ramón was at his post, pressing himself close to the wall, looking
down, with bent head, motionless. There were shots, and a spatter of
lead from below. But he did not move. She could not see his face,
only part of his back; the proud, heavy, creamy-brown shoulders, the
black head bent a little forward, in concentration, the cartridge-belt
dropping above his loins, over the white, floppy linen of the trousers.
Still and soft in watchful concentration, almost like silence itself.
Then with soft, diabolic swiftness in his movements, he changed his
position, and took aim.
He was utterly unaware of her; even of her existence. Which was as it
should be, no doubt. She sat motionless, waiting. Waiting, waiting,
waiting, in that yellowish sunlight of eternity, with a certain
changeless suspense of stillness inside her. Someone would come from
the village. There would be an end. There would be an end.
At the same time, she started every time he fired, and looked at him.
And she heard his voice saying: “One needs manifestations, it seems to
me.” Ah, how she hated the noise of shots.
Suddenly she gave a piercing shriek, and in one leap was out of her
retreat. She had seen a black head turning the stairs.
Before she knew it, Ramón jumped past her like a great cat, and two men
clashed in mid-air, as the unseen fellow leaped up from the stairs. Two
men in a crash went down on the floor, a revolver went off, terrible
limbs were writhing.
Ramón’s revolver was on the floor. But again there was a shot from the
tangled men, and a redness of blood suddenly appearing out of nowhere,
on the white cotton clothing, as the two men twisted and fought on the
floor.
They were both big men. Struggling on the ground, they looked huge.
Ramón had the bandit’s revolver-hand by the wrist. The bandit, with
a ghastly black face with rolling eyes and sparse moustache, had got
Ramón’s naked arm in his white teeth, and was hanging on, showing his
red gums, while with his free hand he was feeling for his knife.
Kate could not believe that the black, ghastly face with the sightless
eyes and biting mouth was conscious. Ramón had him clasped round the
body. The bandit’s revolver fell, and the fellow’s loose black hand
scrabbled on the concrete, feeling for it. Blood was flowing over his
teeth. Yet some blind super-consciousness seemed to possess him, as if
he were a devil, not a man.
His hand nearly touched Ramón’s revolver. In horror Kate ran and
snatched the weapon from the warm concrete, running away as the bandit
gave a heave, a great sudden heave of his body, under the body of
Ramón. Kate raised the revolver. She hated that horrible devil under
Ramón as she had never hated in her life. Yet she dared not fire.
Ramón shouted something, glancing at her. She could not understand. But
she ran round, to be able to shoot the man under Ramón. Even as she
ran, the bandit twisted with a great lunge of his body, heaved Ramón
up, and with his short free hand got Ramón’s own knife from the belt at
the groin, and stabbed.
Kate gave a cry! Oh, how she wanted to shoot! She saw the knife strike
sideways, slanting in a short jab into Ramón’s back. At the same moment
there was a stumble on the stairs, and another black-headed man was
leaping on to the roof from the turret.
She stiffened her wrist and fired without looking, in a sudden second
of pure control. The black head came crashing at her. She recoiled in
horror, lifted the revolver and fired again, and missed. But even as
it passed her, she saw red blood among the black hairs of that head.
It crashed down, the buttocks of the body heaving up, the whole thing
twitching and jerking along, the face seeming to grin in a mortal grin.
Glancing from horror to horror, she saw Ramón, his face still as
death, blood running down his arm and his back, holding down the head
of the bandit by the hair and stabbing him with short stabs in the
throat, one, two, while blood shot out like a red projectile; there
was a strange sound like a soda-syphon, a ghastly bubbling, one final
terrible convulsion from the loins of the stricken man, throwing Ramón
off, and Ramón lay twisted, still clutching the man’s hair in one hand,
the bloody knife in the other, and gazing into the livid, distorted
face, in which ferocity seemed to have gone frozen, with a steady,
intent, inhuman gaze.
Then, without letting go his victim’s hair, he looked up, cautiously.
To see Kate’s man, with black hair wet with blood, and blood running
down into his glazed, awful eyes, slowly rising to his knees. It
was the strangest face in the world; the high, domed head with
blood-soddened hair, blood running in several streams down the narrow,
corrugated brow and along the black eyebrows above the glazed, black,
numb eyes, in which the last glazing was of ferocity, stranger even
than wonder, the glazed and absolute ferocity which the man’s last
consciousness showed.
It was a long, thin, handsome face, save for those eyes of glazed
ferocity, and for the longish white teeth under the sparse moustache.
The man was reduced to his last, blank term of being; a glazed and
ghastly ferocity.
Ramón dropped the hair of his victim, whose head dropped sideways with
a gaping red throat, and rose to a crouching position. The second
bandit was on his knees, but his hand already clasped his knife.
Ramón crouched. They were both perfectly still. But Ramón had got his
balance, crouching between his feet.
The bandit’s black, glazed eyes of blank ferocity took a glint of
cunning. He was stretching. He was going to leap to his feet for his
stroke.
And even as he leaped, Ramón shot the knife, that was all bright red
as a cardinal bird. It flew red like a bird, and the drops of Ramón’s
handful of blood flew with it, splashing even Kate, who kept her
revolver ready, watching near the stairway.
The bandit dropped on his knees again, and remained for a moment
kneeling as if in prayer, the red pommel of the knife sticking out
of his abdomen, from his white trousers. Then he slowly bowed over,
doubled up, and went on his face again, once more with his buttocks in
the air.
Ramón still crouched at attention, almost supernatural, his dark eyes
glittering with watchfulness, in pure, savage attentiveness. Then he
rose, very smooth and quiet, crossed the blood-stained concrete to the
fallen man, picked up the clean, fallen knife that belonged to the
fellow, lifted the red-dripping chin, and with one stroke drove the
knife into the man’s throat. The man subsided with the blow, not even
twitching.
Then again, Ramón turned to look at the first man. He gazed a moment
attentively. But that horrible black face was dead.
And then Ramón glanced at Kate, as she stood near the stairs with the
revolver. His brow was like a boy’s, very pure and primitive, and the
eyes underneath had a certain primitive gleaming look of virginity. As
men must have been, in the first awful days, with that strange beauty
that goes with pristine rudimentariness.
For the most part, he did not recognise her. But there was one remote
glint of recognition.
“Are they both dead?” she asked, awestruck.
“_Creo que si!_” he replied in Spanish.
He turned to look once more, and to pick up the pistol that lay on
the concrete. As he did so, he noticed that his right hand was bright
red, with the blood that flowed still down his arm. He wiped it on the
jacket of the dead man. But his trousers on his loins were also sodden
with blood, they stuck red to his hips. He did not notice.
He was like a pristine being, remote in consciousness, and with far,
remote sex.