physical sounds. The first man lay sprawling in a ghastly fashion, his
evil face fixed above a pool of blackening blood.
“Watch the stairs!” said Ramón in Spanish to her, glancing at her with
farouche eyes, from some far remote jungle. Yet still the glint of
recognition sparked furtively out of the darkness.
He crept to the turret, and stealthily looked out. Then he crept back,
with the same stealth, and dragged the nearest dead man to the parapet,
raising the body till the head looked over. There was no sound. Then he
raised himself, and peeped over. No sign, no sound.
He looked at the dead body as he let it drop. Then he went to Kate, to
look down the stairs.
“You grazed that man with your first shot, you only stunned him I
believe,” he said.
“Are there any more?” she asked, shuddering.
“I think they are all gone.”
He was pale, almost white, with that same pristine clear brow, like a
boy’s, a sort of twilight changelessness.
“Are you much hurt?” she said.
“I? No!” and he put his fingers round to his back, to feel the slowly
welling wound, with his bloody fingers.
The afternoon was passing towards yellow, heavy evening.
He went again to look at the terrible face of the first dead man.
“Did you know him?” she said.
He shook his head.
“Not that I am aware,” he said. Then; “Good that he is dead. Good that
he is dead.--Good that we killed them both.”
He looked at her with that glint of savage recognition from afar.
“Ugh! No! It’s terrible!” she said shuddering.
“Good for me that you were there! Good that we killed them between us!
Good they are dead.”
The heavy, luxurious yellow light from below the clouds gilded the
mountains of evening. There was the sound of a motor-car honking its
horn.
Ramón went in silence to the parapet, the blood wetting his pantaloons
lower and lower, since they stuck to him when he bent down. Rich yellow
light flooded the blood-stained roof. There was a terrible smell of
blood.
“There is a car coming,” he said.
She followed, frightened, across the roof.
She saw the hills and lower slopes inland swimming in gold light like
lacquer. The black huts of the peons, the lurid leaves of bananas
showed up uncannily, the trees green-gold stood up, with boughs of
shadow. And away up the road was a puther of dust, then the flash of
glass as the automobile turned.
“Stay here,” said Ramón, “while I go down.”
“Why didn’t your peons come and help you?” she said.
“They never do!” he replied. “Unless they are armed on purpose.”
He went, picking up his blouse and putting it on. And immediately the
blood came through.
He went down. She listened to his steps. Below, the courtyard was all
shadow, and empty, save for two dead white-clothed bodies of men, one
near the zaguan, one against a pillar of the shed.
The motor-car came sounding its horn wildly all the way between the
trees. It lurched into the zaguan. It was full of soldiers, soldiers
standing on the running-boards, hanging on.
“Don Ramón! Don Ramón!” shouted the officer, leaping out of the car.
“Don Ramón!” He was thundering at the doors of the inner zaguan.
Why did not Ramón open? Where was he?
She leaned over the parapet and screamed like a wild bird:
“Viene! Viene Don Ramón! El viene!”
The soldiers all looked up at her. She drew back in terror. Then, in a
panic, she turned downstairs, to the terrace. There was blood on the
stone stairs, at the bottom, a great pool. And on the terrace near the
rocking-chairs, two dead men in a great pool of blood.
One was Ramón! For a moment she went unconscious. Then slowly she crept
forward. Ramón had fallen, reeking with blood from his wound, his arms
round the body of the other man, who was bleeding too. The second man
opened his eyes, wildly, and in a rattling voice, blind and dying, said:
“_Patrón!_”
It was Martin, Ramón’s own mozo. He was stiffening and dying in Ramón’s
arms. And Ramón, lifting him, had made his own wound gush with blood,
and had fainted. He lay like dead. But Kate could see the faintest
pulse in his neck.
She ran blindly down the stairs, and fought to get the great iron bars
from across the door, screaming all the time:
“Come! Somebody! Come to Don Ramón! He will die.”
A terrified boy and a woman appeared from the kitchen quarters.
The door was opened, just as six horse-soldiers galloped into the
courtyard. The officer leaped from his horse and ran like a hare, his
revolver drawn, his spurs flashing, straight through the doors and
up the stairs, like a madman. When Kate got up the stairs again, the
officer was standing with drawn revolver, gazing down at Ramón.
“He is dead?” he said, stupefied, looking at Kate.
“No!” she said. “It is only loss of blood.”
The officers lifted Ramón and laid him on the terrace. Then quickly
they got off his blouse. The wound was bleeding thickly in the back.
“We’ve got to stop this wound,” said the lieutenant. “Where is Pablo?”
Instantly there was a cry for Pablo.
Kate ran into a bedroom for water, and she switched an old linen sheet
from the bed. Pablo was a young doctor among the soldiers. Kate gave
him the bowl of water, and the towel, and was tearing the sheet into
bands. Ramón lay naked on the floor, all streaked with blood. And the
light was going.
“Bring light!” said the young doctor.
With swift hands he washed the wound, peering with his nose almost
touching it.
“It is not much!” he said.
Kate had prepared bandages and a pad. She crouched to hand them to the
young man. The woman-servant set a lamp with a white shade on the floor
by the doctor. He lifted it, peering again at the wound.
“No!” he said. “It is not much.”
Then glancing up at the soldiers who stood motionless, peering down,
the light on their dark faces.
“_Té!_” he said, making a gesture.
Quickly the lieutenant took the lamp, holding it over the inert body,
and the doctor, with Kate to help, proceeded to staunch and bind the
wound. And Kate, as she touched the soft, inert flesh of Ramón, was
thinking to herself: This too is he, this silent body! And that face
that stabbed the throat of the bandit was he! And that twilit brow, and
those remote eyes, like a death-virgin, was he. Even a savage out of
the twilight! And the man that knows me, where is he? One among these
many men, no more! Oh God! give the man his soul back, into this bloody
body. Let the soul come back, or the universe will be cold for me and
for many men.
The doctor finished his temporary bandage, looked at the wound in the
arm, swiftly wiped the blood off the loins and buttocks and legs, and
said:
“We must put him in bed. Lift his head.”
Quickly Kate lifted the heavy, inert head. The eyes were half open. The
doctor pressed the closed lips, under the sparse black moustache. But
the teeth were firmly shut.
The doctor shook his head.
“Bring a mattress,” he said.
The wind was suddenly roaring, the lamp was leaping with a long, smoky
needle of flame, inside its chimney. Leaves and dust flew rattling on
the terrace, there was a splash of lightning. Ramón’s body lay there
uncovered and motionless, the bandage was already soaked with blood,
under the darkening, leaping light of the lamp.
And again Kate saw, vividly, how the body is the flame of the soul,
leaping and sinking upon the invisible wick of the soul. And now the
soul, like a wick, seemed spent, the body was a sinking, fading flame.
“Kindle his soul again, oh God!” she cried to herself.
All she could see of the naked body was the terrible absence of the
living soul of it. All she wanted was for the soul to come back, the
eyes to open.
They got him upon the bed and covered him, closing the doors against
the wind and the rain. The doctor chafed his brow and hands with
cognac. And at length the eyes opened; the soul was there, but standing
far back.
For some moments Ramón lay with open eyes, without seeing or moving.
Then he stirred a little.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“Keep still, Don Ramón,” said the doctor, who with his slim dark hands
was even more delicate than a woman. “You have lost much blood. Keep
still.”
“Where is Martin?”
“He is outside.”
“How is he?”
“He is dead.”
The dark eyes under the black lashes were perfectly steady and
changeless. Then came the voice:
“Pity we did not kill them all. Pity we did not kill them all. We have
got to kill them all.--Where is the Señora Inglesa?”
“Here she is.”
His black eyes looked up at Kate. Then more of his consciousness came
back.
“Thank you for my life,” he said, closing his eyes. Then: “Put the lamp
aside.”
Soldiers were tapping at the glass pane, for the lieutenant. A black
little fellow entered, wiping the rain from his black face and pushing
his thick black hair back.
“There are two more dead on the azotea,” he announced to his officer.
The lieutenant rose, and followed him out. Kate too went on to the
terrace. In the early darkness the rain was threshing down. A lantern
was coming down from the roof: it came along the terrace to the stairs,
and after it two soldiers in the pouring rain, carrying a dead body,
then behind, two more, with the other body. The huaraches of the
soldiers clicked and shuffled on the wet terrace. The dismal cortège
went downstairs.
Kate stood on the terrace facing the darkness, while the rain threshed
down. She felt uneasy here, in this house of men and of soldiers. She
found her way down to the kitchen, where the boy was fanning a charcoal
fire, and the woman was crushing tomatoes on the metate, for a sauce.
“Ay, Señora!” cried the woman. “Five men dead, and the _Patrón_ wounded
to death! Ay! Ay!”
“Seven men dead!” said the boy. “Two on the azotea!”
“Seven men! Seven men!”
Kate sat on her chair, stunned, unable to hear anything but the
threshing rain, unable to feel anything more. Two or three peons
came in, and two more women, the men wrapped to their noses in their
blankets. The women brought masa, and began a great clapping of
tortillas. The people conversed in low, rapid tones, in the dialect,
and Kate could not listen.
At length the rain began to abate. She knew it would leave off
suddenly. There was a great sound of water running, gushing, splashing,
pouring into the cistern. And she thought to herself: The rain will
wash the blood off the roof and down the spouts into the cistern. There
will be blood in the water.
She looked at her own blood-smeared white frock. She felt chilly. She
rose to go upstairs again, into the dark, empty, masterless house.
“Ah, Señora! You are going upstairs? Go, Daniel, carry the lantern for
the Señora!”
The boy lit a candle in a lantern, and Kate returned to the upper
terrace. The light shone out of the room where Ramón was. She went into
the salon and got her hat and her brown shawl. The lieutenant heard
her, and came to her quickly, very kindly and respectful.
“Won’t you come in, Señora?” he said, holding the door to the room
where Ramón lay; the guest-room.
Kate went in. Ramón lay on his side, his black, rather thin moustache
pushed against the pillow. He was himself.
“It is very unpleasant for you here, Señora Caterina,” he said. “Would
you like to go to your house? The lieutenant will send you in the
motor-car.”
“Is there nothing I can do here?” she said.
“Ah no! Don’t stay here! It is too unpleasant for you.--I shall soon
get up, and I shall come to thank you for my life.”
He looked at her, into her eyes. And she saw that his soul had come
back to him, and with his soul he saw her and acknowledged her; though
always from the peculiar remoteness that was inevitable in him.
She went downstairs with the young lieutenant.
“Ah, what a horrible affair! They were not bandits, Señora!” said the
young man, with passion. “They didn’t come to rob. They came to murder
Don Ramón, you know, Señora! simply to murder Don Ramón. And but for
your being here, they would have done it!--Ah, think of it, Señora!
Don Ramón is the most precious man in Mexico. It is possible that in
the world there is not a man like him. And personally, he hasn’t got
enemies. As a man among men, he hasn’t got enemies. No Señora. Not one!
But do you know who it will be? the priests, and the Knights of Cortes.”
“Are you sure?” said Kate.
“Sure, Señora!” cried the lieutenant indignantly. “Look! There are
seven men dead. Two were the mozos with guns, watching in the zaguan.
One was Don Ramón’s own mozo Martin!--ah, what a faithful man, what a
brave one! Never will Don Ramón pardon his death. Then moreover, the
two men killed on the azotea, and two men in the courtyard, shot by Don
Ramón. Besides these, a man whom Martin wounded, who fell and broke his
leg, so we have got him. Come and see them, Señora.”
They were down in the wet courtyard. Little fires had been lighted
under the sheds, and the little, black, devil-may-care soldiers were
crouching round them, with a bunch of peons in blankets standing round.
Across the courtyard, horses stamped and jingled their harness. A boy
came running with tortillas in a cloth. The dark-faced little soldiers
crouched like animals, sprinkled salt on the tortillas, and devoured
them with small, white, strong teeth.
Kate saw the great oxen tied in their sheds, lying down, the wagons
standing inert. And a little crowd of asses was munching alfalfa in a
corner.
The officer marched beside Kate, his spurs sparking in the firelight.
He went to the muddy car, that stood in the middle of the yard; then to
his horse. From a saddle-pocket he took an electric torch, and led Kate
across to the end shed.
There he suddenly flashed his light upon seven dead bodies, laid side
by side. The two from the roof were wet. Ramón’s dead man lay with
his dark, strong breast bare, and his blackish, thick, devilish face
sideways; a big fellow. Kate’s man lay rigid. Martin had been stabbed
in the collar bone; he looked as if he were staring at the roof of
the shed. The others were two more peons, and two fellows in black
boots and grey trousers and blue overall jackets. They were all inert
and straight and dead, and somehow, a little ridiculous. Perhaps it
is clothing that makes dead people gruesome and absurd. But also, the
grotesque fact that the bodies are vacant, is always present.
“Look!” said the lieutenant, touching a body with his toe. “This is
a chauffeur from Sayula; this is a boatman from Sayula. These two
are peons from San Pablo. This man--” the lieutenant kicked the dead
body--“we don’t know.” It was Ramón’s dead man. “But this man--” he
kicked her dead man, with the tall domed head--“is from Ahuajijic,
and he was married to the woman that now lives with a peon here.--You
see, Señora! A chauffeur and a boatman from Sayula--they are
Knights-of-Cortes men; and those two peons from San Pablo are priests’
men.--These are not bandits. It was an attempt at assassination. But
of course they would have robbed everything, everything, if they had
killed Don Ramón.”
Kate was staring at the dead men. Three of them were handsome; one,
the boatman, with a thin line of black beard framing his shapely face,
was beautiful. But dead, with the mockery of death in his face. All of
them men who had been in the flush of life. Yet dead, they did not even
matter. They were gruesome, but it did not matter that they were dead
men. They were vacant. Perhaps even in life there had been a certain
vacancy, nothingness, in their handsome physique.
For a pure moment, she wished for men who were not handsome as these
dark natives were. Even their beauty was suddenly repulsive to her;
the dark beauty of half-created, half-evolved things, left in the old,
reptile-like smoothness. It made her shudder.
The soul! If only the soul in man, in woman, would speak to her, not
always this strange, perverse materialism, or a distorted animalism. If
only people were souls, and their bodies were gestures from the soul!
If one could but forget both bodies and facts, and be present with
strong, living souls!
She went across the courtyard, that was littered with horse-droppings,
to the car. The lieutenant was choosing the soldiers who should stay
behind. The horse-soldiers would stay. A peon on a delicate speckled
horse, a flea-bitten roan, came trotting past the soldiers in the
zaguan. He had been to Sayula for doctor’s stuff, and to give messages
to the Jefe.
At last the car, with little soldiers clinging on to it all round,
moved slowly out of the courtyard. The lieutenant sat beside Kate. He
stopped the car again at the big white barn under the trees, to talk to
two soldiers picketed there.
Then they moved slowly on, under the wet trees, in the mud that
crackled beneath the wheels, up the avenue to the highroad, where were
the little black huts of the peons. Little fires were flapping in front
of one or two huts, women were baking tortillas on the flat earthenware
plates, upon the small wood fires. A woman was going to her hut with
a blazing brand, like a torch, to kindle her fire. A few peons in
dirty-white clothes squatted silent against the walls of their houses,
utterly silent. As the motor-car turned its great glaring head-lights
upon the highroad, little sandy pigs with short, curly hair started up
squealing, and faces and figures stood out blindly, as in a searchlight.
There was a hut with a wide opening in the black wall, and a grey old
man was standing inside. The car stopped for the lieutenant to call to
the peons under the wall. They came to the car with their black eyes
glaring and glittering apprehensively. They seemed very much abashed,
and humble, answering the lieutenant.
Meanwhile Kate watched a boy buy a drink for one centavo and a piece of
rope for three centavos, from the grey old man at the dark hole, which
was a shop.
The car went on, the great lights glaring unnaturally upon the hedges
of cactus and mesquite and palo blanco trees, and upon the great pools
of water in the road. It was a slow progress.
CHAP: XX. MARRIAGE BY QUETZALCOATL.
Kate hid in her own house, numbed. She could not bear to talk to
people. She could not bear even Juana’s bubbling discourse. The common
threads that bound her to humanity seemed to have snapped. The little
human things didn’t interest her any more. Her eyes seemed to have gone
dark, and blind to individuals. They were all just individuals, like
leaves in the dark, making a noise. And she was alone under the trees.
The egg-woman wanted six centavos for an egg.
“And I said to her--I said to her--we buy them at five centavos!” Juana
went on.
“Yes!” said Kate. She didn’t care whether they were bought at five or
fifty, or not bought at all.
She didn’t care, she didn’t care, she didn’t care. She didn’t even
care about life any more. There was no escaping her own complete
indifference. She felt indifferent to everything in the whole world,
almost she felt indifferent to death.
“Niña! Niña! Here is the man with the sandals! Look! Look how nicely he
has made them for you, Niña! Look what Mexican huaraches the Niña is
going to wear!”
She tried them on. The man charged her too much. She looked at him with
her remote, indifferent eyes. But she knew, in the world one must live,
so she paid him less than he asked, though more than he really would
have accepted.
She sat down again in her rocking-chair in the shade of the room. Only
to be alone! Only that no one should speak to her. Only that no one
should come near her! Because in reality her soul and spirit were gone,
departed into the middle of some desert, and the effort of reaching
across to people to effect an apparent meeting, or contact, was almost
more than she could bear.
Never had she been so alone, and so inert, and so utterly without
desire; plunged in a wan indifference, like death. Never had she passed
her days so blindly, so unknowingly, in stretches of nothingness.
Sometimes, to get away from her household, she sat under a tree by
the lake. And there, without knowing it, she let the sun scorch her
foot and burn her face inflamed. Juana made a great outcry over her.
The foot blistered and swelled, her face was red and painful. But it
all seemed to happen merely to her shell. And she was wearily, wanly
indifferent.
Only at the very centre of her sometimes a little flame rose, and she
knew that what she wanted was for her soul to live. The life of days
and facts and happenings was dead on her, and she was like a corpse.
But away inside her a little light was burning, the light of her
innermost soul. Sometimes it sank and seemed extinct. Then it was there
again.
Ramón had lighted it. And once it was lighted the world went hollow and
dead, all the world-activities were empty weariness to her. Her soul!
Her frail, innermost soul! She wanted to live _its_ life, not her own
life.
The time would come again when she would see Ramón and Cipriano, and
the soul that was guttering would kindle again in her, and feel strong.
Meanwhile she only felt weak, weak, weak, weak as the dying. She felt
that afternoon of bloodshed had blown all their souls into the twilight
of death, for the time. But they would come back. They would come back.
Nothing to do but to submit, and wait. Wait, with a soul almost dead,
and hands and heart of uttermost inert heaviness, indifference.
Ramón had lost much blood. And she, too, in other ways, had been
drained of the blood of the body. She felt bloodless and powerless.
But wait, wait, wait, the new blood would come.
One day Cipriano came. She was rocking in her salon, in a cotton
housedress, and her face red and rather swollen. She saw him, in
uniform, pass by the window. He stood in the doorway on the terrace, a
dark, grave, small, handsome man.
“Do come in,” she said with effort.
Her eyelids felt burnt. He looked at her with his full black eyes, that
always had in them so many things she did not understand. She felt she
could not look back at him.
“Have you chased all your rebels?” she said.
“For the present,” he replied.
He seemed to be watching, watching for something.
“And you didn’t get hurt?”
“No, I didn’t get hurt.”
She looked away out of the door, having nothing to say in the world.
“I went to Jamiltepec yesterday evening,” he said.
“How is Don Ramón?”
“Yes, he is better.”
“Quite better?”
“No. Not quite better. But he walks a little.”
“Wonderful how people heal.”
“Yes. We die very easily. But we also come quickly back to life.”
“And you? Did you fight the rebels, or didn’t they want to fight?”
“Yes, they wanted to. We fought once or twice; not very much.”
“Men killed?”
“Yes! Some! Not many, no? Perhaps a hundred. We can never tell, no?
Maybe two hundred.”
He waved his hand vaguely.
“But you had the worst rebellion at Jamiltepec, no?” he said suddenly,
with heavy Indian gravity, gloom, suddenly settling down.
“It didn’t last long, but it was rather awful while it did.”
“Rather awful, no?--If I had known! I said to Ramón, won’t you keep
the soldiers?--the guard, no? He said they were not necessary. But
here--you never know, no?”
“Niña!” cried Juana, from the terrace. “Niña! Don Antonio says he is
coming to see you.”
“Tell him to come to-morrow.”
“Already he is on the way!” cried Juana, in helplessness. Don Antonio
was Kate’s fat landlord; and, of course, Juana’s permanent master, more
important in her eyes, then, even than Kate.
“Here he is!” she cried, and fled.
Kate leaned forward in her chair, to see the stout figure of her
landlord on the walk outside the window, taking off his cloth cap and
bowing low to her. A cloth cap!--She knew he was a great Fascista, the
reactionary Knights of Cortes held him in great esteem.
Kate bowed coldly.
He bowed low again, with the cloth cap.
Kate said not a word.
He stood on one foot, then on the other, and then marched forward up
the gravel walk, towards the kitchen quarters, as if he had not seen
either Kate or General Viedma. In a few moments he marched back, as if
he could not see either Kate or the General, through the open door.
Cipriano looked at the passing stout figure of Don Antonio in a cloth
cap as if it were the wind blowing.
“It is my landlord!” said Kate. “I expect he wants to know if I am
taking on the house for another three months.”
“Ramón wanted me to come and see you--to see how you are, no?--and to
ask you to come to Jamiltepec. Will you come with me now? The car is
here.”
“Must I?” said Kate, uneasily.
“No. Not unless you wish. Ramón said, not unless you wished. He said,
perhaps it would be painful to you, no?--to go to Jamiltepec again--so
soon after--”
How curious Cipriano was! He stated things as if they were mere bare
facts with no emotional content at all. As for its being painful to
Kate to go to Jamiltepec, that meant nothing to him.