She fused into a molten unconsciousness, her will, her very self
gone, leaving her lying in molten life, like a lake of still fire,
unconscious of everything save the eternality of the fire in which she
was gone. Gone in the fadeless fire, which has no death. Only the fire
can leave _us_, and we can die.
And Cipriano the master of fire. The Living Huitzilopochtli, he had
called himself. The living firemaster. The god in the flame; the
salamander.
One cannot have one’s own way, and the way of the gods. It has to be
one or the other.
When she went out into the next room, he was sitting alone, waiting for
her. He rose quickly, looking at her with black, flashing eyes from
which dark flashes of light seemed to play upon her. And he took her
hand, to touch her again.
“Will you come to eat at the little restaurant?” he said.
In the uncanny flashing of his eyes she saw a gladness that frightened
her a little. His touch on her hand was uncannily soft and inward. His
words said nothing; would never say anything. But she turned aside her
face, a little afraid of that flashing, primitive gladness, which was
so impersonal and beyond her.
Wrapping a big yellow-silk shawl around her, Spanish fashion, against
the heat, and taking her white sunshade lined with green, she stepped
out with him past the bowing Jefe and the lieutenant, and the saluting
soldiers. She shook hands with the Jefe and the lieutenant. They were
men of flesh and blood, they understood her presence, and bowed low,
looking up at her with flashing eyes. And she knew what it was to be a
goddess in the old style, saluted by the real fire in men’s eyes, not
by their lips.
In her big, soft velour hat of jade green, her breast wrapped round
with the yellow brocade shawl, she stepped across the sun-eaten plaza,
a sort of desert made by man, softly, softly beside her Cipriano, soft
as a cat, hiding her face under her green hat and her sunshade, keeping
her body secret and elusive. And the soldiers and the officers and
clerks of the Jefatura, watching her with fixed black eyes, saw, not
the physical woman herself, but the inaccessible, voluptuous mystery of
man’s physical consummation.
They ate in the dusky little cavern of a _fonda_ kept by a queer old
woman with Spanish blood in her veins. Cipriano was very sharp and
imperious in his orders, the old woman scuffled and ran in a sort of
terror. But she was thrilled to her soul.
Kate was bewildered by the new mystery of her own elusiveness. She was
elusive even to herself. Cipriano hardly talked to her at all; which
was quite right. She did not want to be talked to, and words addressed
straight at her, without the curious soft veiling which these people
knew how to put into their voices, speaking only to the unconcerned,
third person in her, came at her like blows. Ah, the ugly blows of
direct, brutal speech! She had suffered so much from them. Now she
wanted this veiled elusiveness in herself, she wanted to be addressed
in the third person.
After the lunch they went to look at the sarapes which were being spun
for Ramón. Their two soldiers escorted them a few yards up a broken,
sun-wasted wide street of little, low black houses, then knocked at big
doors.
Kate entered the grateful shade of the zaguan. In the dark shade of the
inner court, or patio, where sun blazed on bananas beyond, was a whole
weaver’s establishment. A fat, one-eyed man sent a little boy to fetch
chairs. But Kate wandered, fascinated.
In the zaguan was a great heap of silky white wool, very fine, and
in the dark corridor of the patio all the people at work. Two boys
with flat square boards bristling with many little wire bristles were
carding the white wool into thin films, which they took off the boards
in fine rolls like mist, and laid beside the two girls at the end of
the shed.
These girls stood by their wheels, spinning, standing beside the
running wheel, which they set going with one hand, while with the other
hand they kept a long, miraculous thread of white wool-yarn dancing
at the very tip of the rapidly-spinning spool-needle, the filmy rolls
of the carded wool just touching the point of the spool, and at once
running out into a long, pure thread of white, which wound itself on to
the spool, and another piece of carded wool was attached. One of the
girls, a beautiful oval-faced one, who smiled shyly at Kate, was very
clever. It was almost miraculous the way she touched the spool and drew
out the thread of wool almost as fine as sewing cotton.
At the other end of the corridor, under the black shed, were two looms,
and two men weaving. They treddled at the wooden tread-looms, first
with one foot and then the other, absorbed and silent, in the shadow of
the black mud walls. One man was weaving a brilliant scarlet sarape,
very fine, and of the beautiful cochineal red. It was difficult work.
From the pure scarlet centre zigzags of black and white were running in
a sort of whorl, away to the edge, that was pure black. Wonderful to
see the man, with small bobbins of fine red and white yarn, and black,
weaving a bit of the ground, weaving the zigzag of black up to it,
and, up to that, the zigzag of white, with deft, dark fingers, quickly
adjusting his setting needle, quick as lightning threading his pattern,
then bringing down the beam heavily to press it tight. The sarape was
woven on a black warp, long fine threads of black, like a harp. But
beautiful beyond words the perfect, delicate scarlet weaving in.
“For whom is that?” said Kate to Cipriano. “For you?”
“Yes,” he said. “For me!”
The other weaver was weaving a plain white sarape with blue and
natural-black ends, throwing the spool of yarn from side to side,
between the white harp-strings, pressing down each thread of his woof
heavily, with the wooden bar, then treddling to change the long, fine
threads of the warp.
In the shadow of the mud shed, the pure colours of the lustrous wool
looked mystical, the cardinal scarlet, the pure, silky white, the
lovely blue, and the black, gleaming in the shadow of the blackish
walls.
The fat man with the one eye brought sarapes, and two boys opened them
one by one. There was a new one, white, with close flowers of blue on
black stalks, and with green leaves, forming the borders, and at the
_boca_, the mouth, where the head went through, a whole lot of little,
rainbow-coloured flowers, in a coiling blue circle.
“I love that!” said Kate. “What is that for?”
“It is one of Ramón’s; they are Quetzalcoatl’s colours, the blue and
white and natural black. But this one is for the day of the opening
of the flowers, when he brings in the goddess who will come,” said
Cipriano.
Kate was silent with fear.
There were two scarlet sarapes with a diamond at the centre, all black,
and a border-pattern of black diamonds.
“Are these yours?”
“Well, they are for the messengers of Huitzilopochtli. Those are my
colours: scarlet and black. But I myself have white as well, just as
Ramón has a fringe of my scarlet.”
“Doesn’t it make you afraid?” she said to him, looking at him rather
blenched.
“How make me afraid?”
“To do this. To be the living Huitzilopochtli,” she said.
“I _am_ the living Huitzilopochtli,” he said. “When Ramón dares to be
the living Quetzalcoatl, I dare to be the living Huitzilopochtli. I
_am_ he.--Am I not?”
Kate looked at him, at his dark face with the little hanging tuft of
beard, the arched brows, the slightly slanting black eyes. In the
round, fierce gaze of his eyes there was a certain silence, like
tenderness, for her. But beyond that, an inhuman assurance, which
looked far, far beyond her, in the darkness.
And she hid her face from him, murmuring:
“I know you are.”
“And on the day of flowers,” he said, “you, too, shall come, in a green
dress they shall weave you, with blue flowers at the seam, and on your
head the new moon of flowers.”
She hid her face, afraid.
“Come and look at the wools,” he said, leading her across the patio
to the shade where, on a line, the yarn hung in dripping tresses of
colour, scarlet and blue and yellow and green and brown.
“See!” he said. “You shall have a dress of green, that leaves the arms
bare, and a white under-dress with blue flowers.”
The green was a strong apple-green colour.
Two women under the shed were crouching over big earthenware vessels,
which sat over a fire which burned slowly in a hole dug in the ground.
They were watching the steaming water. One took dried, yellow-brown
flowers, and flung them in her water as if she were a witch brewing
decoctions. She watched as the flowers rose, watched as they turned
softly in the boiling water. Then she threw in a little white powder.
“And on the day of flowers you, too, will come. Ah! If Ramón is the
centre of a new world, a world of new flowers shall spring up round
him, and push the old world back. I call you the First Flower.”
They left the courtyard. The soldiers had brought the black Arab
stallion for Cipriano, and for her the donkey, on which she could perch
sideways, like a peasant woman. So they went through the hot, deserted
silence of the mud-brick town, down the lane of deep, dark-grey dust,
under vivid green trees that were bursting into flower, again to the
silent shore of the lake-end, where the delicate fishing nets were hung
in long lines and blowing in the wind, loop after loop striding above
the shingle and blowing delicately in the wind, as away on the low
places the green maize was blowing, and the fleecy willows shook like
soft green feathers hanging down.
The lake stretched pale and unreal into nowhere; the motor-boat rode
near in, the black _canoas_ stood motionless a little further out. Two
women, tiny as birds, were kneeling on the water’s edge, washing.
Kate jumped from her donkey on to the shingle.
“Why not ride through the water to the boat?” said Cipriano.
She looked at the boat, and thought of the donkey stumbling and
splashing.
“No,” she said. “I will wade again.”
He rode his black Arab to the water. It sniffed, and entered with
delicate feet into the warm shallows. Then, a little way in, it stood
and suddenly started pawing the water, as a horse paws the ground, in
the oddest manner possible, very rapidly striking the water with its
fore-foot, so that little waves splashed up over its black legs and
belly.
But this splashed Cipriano too. He lifted the reins and touched
the creature with his spurs. It jumped, and went half-stumbling,
half-dancing through the water, prettily, with a splashing noise.
Cipriano quieted it, and it waded gingerly on through the shallows of
the vast lake, bending its black head down to look, to look in a sort
of fascination at the stony bottom, swaying its black tail as it moved
its glossy, raven haunches gingerly.
Then again it stood still, and suddenly, with a rapid beating of
its fore-paw, sent the water hollowly splashing up, till its black
belly glistened wet like a black serpent, and its legs were shiny wet
pillars. And again Cipriano lifted its head and touched it with the
spurs, so the delicate creature danced in a churn of water.
“Oh, it looks so pretty! It looks so pretty when it paws the water!”
cried Kate from the shore. “Why does it do it?”
Cipriano turned in the saddle and looked back at her with the sudden,
gay Indian laugh.
“It likes to be wet--who knows?” he said.
A soldier hurried wading through the water and took the horse’s bridle.
Cipriano dismounted neatly from the stirrup, with a little backward
leap into the boat, a real savage horseman. The barefoot soldier leaped
into the saddle, and turned the horse to shore. But the black horse,
male and wilful, insisted on stopping to paw the waters and splash
himself, with a naïve, wilful sort of delight.
“Look! Look!” cried Kate. “It’s so pretty.”
But the soldier was perching in the saddle, drawing up his legs like a
monkey, and shouting at the horse. It would wet its fine harness.
He rode the Arab slanting through the water, to where an old woman,
sitting in her own silence and almost invisible before, was squatted in
the water with brown bare shoulders emerging, ladling water from a half
gourd-shell over her matted grey head. The horse splashed and danced,
the old woman rose with her rag of chemise clinging to her, scolding in
a quiet voice and bending forward with her calabash cup; the soldier
laughed, the black horse joyfully and excitedly pawed the water and
made it splash high up, the soldier shouted again.--But the soldier
knew he could make Cipriano responsible for the splashings.
Kate waded slowly to the boat, and stepped in. The water was warm, but
the wind was blowing with strong, electric heaviness. Kate quickly
dried her feet and legs on her handkerchief, and pulled on her
biscuit-coloured silk stockings and brown shoes.
She sat looking back, at the lake-end, the desert of shingle, the
blowing, gauzy nets, and, beyond them, the black land with green maize
standing, a further fleecy green of trees, and the broken lane leading
deep into the rows of old trees, where the soldiers from Jaramay were
now riding away on the black horse and the donkey. On the right there
was a ranch, too; a long, low black building and a cluster of black
huts with tiled roofs, empty gardens with reed fences, clumps of banana
and willow trees. All in the changeless, heavy light of the afternoon,
the long lake reaching into invisibility, between its unreal mountains.
“It is beautiful here!” said Kate. “One could almost live here.”
“Ramón says he will make the lake the centre of a new world,” said
Cipriano. “We will be the gods of the lake.”
“I’m afraid I am just a woman,” said Kate.
His black eyes came round at her swiftly.
“What does it mean, just a woman?” he said, quickly, sternly.
She hung her head. What did it mean? What indeed did it mean? Just a
woman! She let her soul sink again into the lovely elusiveness where
everything is possible, even that oneself is elusive among the gods.
The motor-boat, with waves slapping behind, was running quickly along
the brownish pale water. The soldiers, who were in the front, for
balance, crouched on the floor with the glazed, stupefied mask-faces
of the people when they are sleepy. And soon they were a heap in the
bottom the boat, two little heaps lying in contact.
Cipriano sat behind her, his tunic removed, spreading his white-sleeved
arms on the back of his seat. The cartridge-belt was heavy on his hips.
His face was completely expressionless, staring ahead. The wind blew
his black hair on his forehead, and blew his little beard. He met her
eyes with a far-off, remote smile, far, far down his black eyes. But it
was a wonderful recognition of her.
The boatman in the stern sat tall and straight, watching with pale eyes
of shallow, superficial consciousness. The great hat made his face
dark, the chin-ribbon fell black against his cheek. Feeling her look at
him, he glanced at her as if she were not there.
Turning, she pushed her cushion on to the floor and slid down.
Cipriano got up, in the running, heaving boat, and pulled her another
seat-cushion. She lay, covering her face with her shawl, while the
motor chugged rapidly, the awning rattled with sudden wind, the
hurrying waves rose behind, giving the boat a slap and throwing her
forward, sending spray sometimes, in the heat and silence of the lake.
Kate lost her consciousness, under her yellow shawl, in the silence of
men.
She woke to the sudden stopping of the engine, and sat up. They were
near shore; the white towers of San Pablo among near trees. The
boatman, wide-eyed, was bending over the engine, abandoning the tiller.
The waves pushed the boat slowly round.
“What is it?” said Cipriano.
“More gasoline, Excellency!” said the boatman.
The soldiers woke and sat up.
The breeze had died.
“The water is coming,” said Cipriano.
“The rain?” said Kate.
“Yes--” and he pointed with his fine black finger, which was pale on
the inside, to where black clouds were rushing up behind the mountains,
and in another place farther off, great heavy banks were rising with
strange suddenness. The air seemed to be knitting together overhead.
Lightning flashed in various places, muffled thunder spoke far away.
Still the boat drifted. There was a smell of gasoline. The man pottered
with the engine. The motor started again, only to stop again in a
moment.
The man rolled up his trousers, and, to Kate’s amazement, stepped into
the lake, though they were a mile from the shore. The water was not up
to his knees. They were on a bank. He slowly pushed the boat before
him, wading in the silence.
“How deep is the lake further in?” asked Kate.
“There, Señorita, where the birds with the white breasts are swimming,
it is eight and a half metres,” he said, pointing as he waded.
“We must make haste,” said Cipriano.
“Yes, Excellency!”
The man stepped in again, with his long, handsome brown legs. The motor
spluttered. They were under way, running fast. A new chill wind was
springing up.
But they rounded a bend, and saw ahead the flat promontory with the
dark mango-trees, and the pale yellow upper story of the hacienda house
of Jamiltepec rising above the trees. Palm-trees stood motionless, the
bougainvillea hung in heavy sheets of magenta colour. Kate could see
huts of peons among the trees, and women washing, kneeling on stones at
the lake side where the stream ran in, and a big plantation of bananas
just above.
A cool wind was spinning round in the heavens. Black clouds were
filling up. Ramón came walking slowly down to the little harbour as
they landed.
“The water is coming,” he said in Spanish.
“We are in time,” said Cipriano.
Ramón looked them both in the face, and knew. Kate, in her new
elusiveness, laughed softly.
“There is another flower opened in the garden of Quetzalcoatl,” said
Cipriano in Spanish.
“Under the red cannas of Huitzilopochtli,” said Ramón.
“Yes, there, Señor,” said Cipriano. “Pero una florecita tan zarca! Y
abrió en mi sombra, amigo.”
“Seis hombre de la alta fortuna.”
“Verdad!”
It was about five in the afternoon. The wind hissed in the leaves, and
suddenly the rain was streaming down in a white smoke of power. The
ground was a solid white smoke of water, the lake was gone.
“You will have to stay here to-night,” said Cipriano to Kate, in
Spanish, in the soft, lapping Indian voice.
“But the rain will leave off,” she said.
“You will have to stay here,” he repeated, in the same Spanish phrase,
in a curious voice like a breath of wind.
Kate looked at Ramón, blushing. He looked back at her, she thought,
very remote, as if looking at her from far, far away.
“The bride of Huitzilopochtli,” he said, with a faint smile.
“Thou, Quetzalcoatl, thou wilt have to marry us,” said Cipriano.
“Do you wish it?” said Ramón.
“Yes!” she said. “I want you to marry us, only you.”
“When the sun goes down,” said Ramón.
And he went away to his room. Cipriano showed Kate to her room, then
left her and went to Ramón.
The cool water continued to come down, rushing with a smoke of speed
down from heaven.
As the twilight came through the unceasing rain, a woman-servant
brought Kate a sleeveless dress or chemise of white linen, scalloped at
the bottom and embroidered with stiff blue flowers upside-down on the
black stalks, with two stiff green leaves. In the centre of the flowers
was the tiny Bird of Quetzalcoatl.
“The Patrón asks that you put this on!” said the woman, bringing also a
lamp and a little note.
The note was from Ramón, saying in Spanish: “Take the dress of the
bride of Huitzilopochtli, and put it on, and take off everything but
this. Leave no thread nor thing that can touch you from the past. The
past is finished. It is the new twilight.”
Kate did not quite know how to put on the slip, for it had no sleeves
nor arm-holes, but was just a straight slip with a running string.
Then she remembered the old Indian way, and tied the string over her
left shoulder; rather, slipped the tied string over her left shoulder,
leaving her arms and part of her right breast bare, the slip gathered
full over her breasts. And she sighed. For it was but a shirt with
flowers upturned at the bottom.
Ramón, barefoot, in his white clothes, came for her and took her in
silence downstairs into the garden. The zaguan was dark, the rain fell
steadily in the twilight, but was abating. All was dark twilight.
Ramón took off his blouse and threw it on the stairs. Then with naked
breast he led her into the garden, into the massive rain. Cipriano came
forward, barefoot, with naked breast, bareheaded, in the floppy white
pantaloons.
They stood barefoot on the earth, that still threw back a white smoke
of waters. The rain drenched them in a moment.
“Barefoot on the living earth, with faces to the living rain,” said
Ramón in Spanish, quietly; “at twilight, between the night and the day;
man, and woman, in presence of the unfading star, meet to be perfect in
one another. Lift your face, Caterina, and say: _This man is my rain
from heaven._”
Kate lifted her face and shut her eyes in the downpour.
“This man is my rain from heaven,” she said.
“This woman is the earth to me--say that, Cipriano,” said Ramón,
kneeling on one knee and laying his hand flat on the earth.
Cipriano kneeled and laid his hand on the earth.
“This woman is the earth to me,” he said.
“I, woman, kiss the feet and the heels of this man, for I will be
strength to him, throughout the long twilight of the Morning Star.”
Kate kneeled and kissed the feet and heels of Cipriano, and said her
say.
“I, man, kiss the brow and the breast of this woman, for I will be her
peace and her increase, through the long twilight of the Morning Star.”
Cipriano kissed her, and said his say.
Then Ramón put Cipriano’s hand over the rain-wet eyes of Kate, and
Kate’s hand over the rain-wet eyes of Cipriano.
“I, a woman, beneath the darkness of this covering hand, pray to this
man to meet me in the heart of the night, and never deny me,” said
Kate. “But let it be an abiding place between us, for ever.”
“I, a man, beneath the darkness of this covering hand, pray to this
woman to receive me in the heart of the night, in the abiding place
that is between us for ever.”
“Man shall betray a woman, and woman shall betray a man,” said Ramón,
“and it shall be forgiven them, each of them. But if they have met as
earth and rain, between day and night, in the hour of the Star; if the
man has met the woman with his body and the star of his hope, and the
woman has met the man with her body and the star of her yearning, so
that a meeting has come to pass, and an abiding place for the two where
they are as one star, then shall neither of them betray the abiding
place where the meeting lives like an unsetting star. For if either
betray the abiding place of the two, it shall not be forgiven, neither
by day nor by night nor in the twilight of the star.”
The rain was leaving off, the night was dark.
“Go and bathe in the warm water, which is peace between us all. And put
oil on your bodies, which is the stillness of the Morning Star. Anoint
even the soles of your feet, and the roots of your hair.”
Kate went up to her room and found a big earthenware bath with steaming
water, and big towels. Also, in a beautiful little bowl, oil, and a
soft bit of white wool.
She bathed her rain-wet body in the warm water, dried and anointed
herself with the clear oil, that was clear as water. It was soft, and
had a faint perfume, and was grateful to the skin. She rubbed all her
body, even among her hair and under her feet, till she glowed softly.
Then she put on another of the slips with the inverted blue flowers,
that had been laid on the bed for her, and over that a dress of green,
hand-woven wool, made of two pieces joined openly together down the
sides, showing a bit of the white, full under-dress, and fastened on
the left shoulder. There was a stiff flower, blue, on a black stem,
with two black leaves, embroidered at the bottom, at each side. And her
white slip showed a bit at the breast, and hung below the green skirt,
showing the blue flowers.
It was strange and primitive, but beautiful. She pushed her feet into
the plaited green huaraches. But she wanted a belt. She tied a piece of
ribbon round her waist.
A mozo tapped to say supper was ready.
Laughing rather shyly, she went along to the salon.
Ramón and Cipriano were both waiting, in silence, in their white
clothes. Cipriano had his red serape loosely thrown over his shoulders.