came clothed in his own free flame, it was not _will_ that clothed him.
Let him be a general, an executioner, what he liked, in the world. The
flame of their united lives was a naked bud of flame. Their marriage
was a young, vulnerable flame.
So he sat in silence on his throne, holding her hand in silence, till
the years reeled away from her in fleeing circles, and she sat, as
every real woman can sit, no matter at what age, a girl again, and for
him, a virgin. He held her hand in silence, till she was Malintzi, and
virgin for him, and when they looked at one another, and their eyes
met, the two flames rippled in oneness. She closed her eyes, and was
dark.
Then later, when she opened her eyes and saw the bud of flame just
above her, and the black idol invisibly crouching, she heard his
strange voice, the voice of a boy hissing in naïve ecstasy, in Spanish:
“Miel! Miel de Malintzi!--Honey of Malintzi!”
And she pressed him to her breast, convulsively. His innermost flame
was always virginal, it was always the first time. And it made her
again always a virgin girl. She could feel their two flames flowing
together.
How else, she said to herself, is one to begin again, save by
re-finding one’s virginity? And when one finds one’s virginity, one
realizes one is among the gods. He is of the gods, and so am I. Why
should I judge him!
So, when she thought of him and his soldiers, tales of swift cruelty
she had heard of him: when she remembered his stabbing the three
helpless peons, she thought: Why should I judge him? He is of the gods.
And when he comes to me he lays his pure, quick flame to mine, and
every time I am a young girl again, and every time he takes the flower
of my virginity, and I his. It leaves me insouciant like a young girl.
What do I care if he kills people? His flame is young and clean. He
is Huitzilopochtli, and I am Malintzi. What do I care, what Cipriano
Viedma does or doesn’t do? Or even what Kate Leslie does or doesn’t do?
CHAP: XXV. TERESA.
Ramón somewhat surprised Kate by marrying again, a couple of months or
so after the death of Doña Carlota. The new bride was a young woman
of about twenty-eight, called Teresa. There was a very quiet civil
wedding, and Ramón brought his new wife to Jamiltepec.
He had known her since she was a child, for she was the daughter of the
famous hacienda of Las Yemas, some twelve miles inland from Jamiltepec.
Don Tomas, her father, had been a staunch friend of the Carrascos.
But Don Tomas had died a year ago, leaving the large, flourishing
tequila hacienda to his three children, to be administrated by Teresa.
Teresa was the youngest. Her two brothers had reverted to the usual
wasteful, spendthrift, brutal Mexican way. Therefore Don Tomas, in
order to save the hacienda from their destructive hands, had especially
appointed Teresa _administrador_, and had got the brothers’ consent
to this. After all, they were shiftless neer-do-wells, and had never
shown the slightest desire to help in the rather burdensome business
of managing a large tequila hacienda, during their father’s life-time.
Teresa had been the one. And during her father’s illness the whole
charge had devolved on her, while her brothers wasted themselves and
their substance in the squashy prostitution-living of Mexicans of their
class, away in the cities.
No sooner was the father dead, however, and Teresa in charge, than home
came the two brothers, big with their intention to be hacendados. By
simple brute force they ousted their sister, gave orders over her head,
jeered at her, and in crushing her united for once with each other.
They were putting her back into her place as a woman--that is to say,
back into a secluded sort of prostitution, to which, in their eyes,
women belonged.
But they were bullies, and, as bullies, cowards. And like so many
Mexicans of that class, soft and suicidal towards themselves. They made
friends with judges and generals. They rode about in resplendent charro
dress, and had motor-loads of rather doubtful visitors.
Against their soft, sensuous brutality Teresa could do nothing, and
she knew it. They were all soft and sensual, or sensuous, handsome
in their way, open-handed, careless, but bullies, with no fear at the
middle of them.
“Make yourself desirable, and get a husband for yourself,” they said to
her.
In their eyes, her greatest crime was that she did not make herself
desirable to men of their sort. That she had never had a man, that she
was not married, made her almost repulsive to them. What was woman for,
but for loose, soft, prostitutional sex?
“Do you want to wear the trousers?” they jeered at her. “No, Señorita!
Not while there are two men on the place, you are not going to wear the
trousers. No, Señorita! The trousers, the men wear them. The women keep
under their petticoats that which they are women for.”
Teresa was used to these insults. But they made her soul burn.
“You, do you want to be an American woman?” they said to her. “Go off
to America, then, and bob your hair and wear breeches. Buy a ranch
there, and get a husband to take your orders. Go!”
She went to her lawyers, but they held up their hands. And she went to
Ramón, whom she had known since she was a child.
It would have meant a hopeless and ruinous law-suit, to get the
brothers ejected from the hacienda. It would have meant the rapid
ruin of the estate. Ramón instead asked Teresa to marry him, and he
carefully arranged her dowry, so that she should always have her own
provision.
“It is a country where men despise sex, and live for it,” said Ramón.
“Which is just suicide.”
Ramón came with his wife, to see Kate. Teresa was rather small,
pale, with a lot of loose black hair and big, wide black eyes. Yet
in her quiet bearing and her well-closed mouth there was an air of
independence and authority. She had suffered great humiliation at the
hands of her brothers, there was still a certain wanness round her
eyes, the remains of tears of anger and helpless indignation, and the
bitterness of insulted sex. But now she loved Ramón with a wild, virgin
loyalty. That, too, was evident. He had saved her sex from the insult,
restored it to her in its pride and its beauty. And in return, she felt
an almost fierce reverence for him.
But with Kate she was shy and rather distant: a little afraid of the
travelled, experienced, rather assertive white-skinned woman, the woman
of the other race. She sat in Kate’s salon in her simple white dress
with a black gauze rebozo, her brown hands motionless in her lap, her
dark neck erect, her dark, slender, well-shaped cheek averted. She
seemed, Kate thought, rather like a little sempstress.
But Kate was reckoning without that strange quiescent power of
authority which Teresa also possessed, in her slight, dark body. And
without the black, flashing glances which rested on her from time
to time, from Teresa’s eyes, full of searching fierceness and fiery
misgiving. A fiery soul, in such a demure, slight, dark body. Sometimes
a muted word came from her mouth, and a constrained smile moved her
lips. But her burning eyes never changed. She did not even look at
Ramón.
“How much do you charge per word, Chica?” he asked her, with a sort of
soft fondness.
Then her dark eyes flashed at him, and her mouth gave a little smile.
It was evident she was hopelessly in love with him, in a sort of trance
or muse of love. And she maintained such a cold sort of blankness
towards Kate.
“She despises me,” thought Kate, “because I can’t be in love as she is.”
And for one second Kate envied Teresa. The next second, she despised
her. “The harem type--”
Well, it was Ramón’s nature to be a sort of Sultan. He looked very
handsome in his white clothes, very serene and pasha-like in his
assurance, yet at the same time, soft, pleasant, something boyish also
in his physical well-being. In his soft yet rather pasha-like way, he
was mixing a cocktail of gin and vermouth and lime. Teresa watched him
from the corner of her eye. And at the same time, she watched Kate, the
potential enemy, the woman who talked with men on their own plane.
Kate rose to get spoons. At the same moment, he stepped back from the
low table where he was squeezing a lime, so that he came into slight
collision with her. And Kate noticed again, how quick and subtle was
his physical evasion of her, the soft, almost liquid, hot quickness of
sliding out of contact with her. His natural voluptuousness avoided her
as a flame leans away from a draught.
She flushed slightly. And Teresa saw the quick flush under the
fair, warm-white skin, the leap of yellow light, almost like anger,
into Kate’s grey-hazel eyes. The moment of evasion of two different
blood-streams.
And Teresa rose and went to Ramón’s side, bending over and looking in
the tumblers, asking, with that curious affected childishness of dark
women:
“What do you put in?”
“Look!” said Ramón. And with the same curious male childishness of dark
men, he was explaining the cocktail to her, giving her a little gin in
a spoon, to taste.
“It is an impure tequila,” she said naively.
“At eight pesos a bottle?” he laughed.
“So much! It is much!”
She looked into his eyes for a second, and saw all his face go darker,
warmer, as if his flesh were fusing soft towards her. Her small head
poised the prouder. She had got him back.
“Harem tricks!” said Kate to herself. And she was somewhat impatient,
seeing the big, portentous Ramón enveloped in the toils of this little
dark thing. She resented being made so conscious of his physical
presence, his full, male body inside his thin white clothes, the
strong, yet soft shoulders, the full, rich male thighs. It was as if
she herself, also, being in the presence of this Sultan, should succumb
as part of the harem.
What a curious will the little dark woman had! What a subtle female
power inside her rather skinny body! She had the power to make him into
a big, golden full glory of a man. Whilst she herself became almost
inconspicuous, save for her big black eyes lit with a tigerish power.
Kate watched in wonder. She herself had known men who made her feel a
queen, who made her feel as if the sky rested on her bosom and her head
was among the stars. She knew what it was to rise grander and grander,
till she filled the universe with her womanhood.
Now she saw the opposite taking place. This little bit of a black-eyed
woman had an almost uncanny power, to make Ramón great and gorgeous in
the flesh, whilst she herself became inconspicuous, almost _invisible_,
save for her great black eyes. Like a sultan, he was, like a full
golden fruit in the sun, with a strange and magnificent presence,
glamour. And then, by some mysterious power in her dark little body,
the skinny Teresa held him most completely.
And this was what Ramón wanted. And it made Kate angry, angry. The big,
fluid male, gleaming, was somewhat repulsive to her. And the tense
little female with her pale-dark face, wan under her great, intense,
black eyes, having all her female being tense in an effort to exalt
this big glistening man, this enraged Kate. She could not bear the
glistening smile in Ramón’s dark eyes, a sort of pasha satisfaction.
And she could not bear the erect, tense little figure of the dark
woman, using her power in this way.
This hidden, secretive power of the dark female! Kate called it
harem, and self-prostitution. But was it? Yes, surely it was the
_slave_ approach. Surely she wanted nothing but sex from him, like a
prostitute! The ancient mystery of the female power, which consists in
glorifying the blood-male.
Was it right? Kate asked herself. Wasn’t it degrading for a woman? And
didn’t it make the man either soft and sensuous, or else hatefully
autocratic?
Yet Kate herself had convinced herself of one thing, finally: that
the clue to all living and to all moving-on into new living lay in
the vivid blood-relation between man and woman. A man and a woman
in this togetherness were the clue to all present living and future
possibility. Out of this clue of togetherness between a man and a
woman, the whole of the new life arose. It was the quick of the whole.
And the togetherness needed a balance. Surely it needed a balance! And
did not this Teresa throw herself entirely into the male balance, so
that all the weight was on the man’s side?
Ramón had not wanted Kate. Ramón had got what he wanted--this black
little creature, who was so servile to him and so haughty in her own
power. Ramón had never wanted Kate: except as a friend, a clever
friend. As a woman, no!--He wanted this little viper of a Teresa.
Cipriano wanted Kate. The little general, the strutting little soldier,
he wanted Kate: just for moments. He did not really want to marry her.
He wanted the moments, no more. She was to give him his moments, and
then he was off again, to his army, to his men. It was what he wanted.
It was what she wanted too. Her life was her own! It was not her
métier to be fanning the blood in a man, to make him almighty and
blood-glamorous. Her life was her own!
She rose and went to her bedroom to look for a book she had promised
Ramón. She could not bear the sight of him in love with Teresa any
longer. The heavy, mindless smile on his face, the curious glisten of
his eyes, and the strange, heavy, lordly _aplomb_ of his body affected
her like a madness. She wanted to run.
This was what they were, these people! Savages, with the impossible
fluid flesh of savages, and that savage way of dissolving into an awful
black mass of desire. Emerging with the male conceit and haughtiness
swelling his blood and making him feel endless. While his eyes
glistened with a haughty blackness.
The trouble was, that the power of the world, which she had known
until now only in the eyes of blue-eyed men, who made queens of their
women--even if they hated them for it in the end--was now fading in the
blue eyes, and dawning in the black. In Ramón’s eyes at this moment was
a steady, alien gleam of pride, and daring, and power, which she knew
was masterly. The same was in Cipriano’s quick looks. The power of the
world was dying in the blond men, their bravery and their supremacy was
leaving them, going into the eyes of the dark men, who were rousing at
last.
Joachim, the eager, clever, fierce, sensitive genius, who could look
into her soul, and laugh into her soul, with his blue eyes: he had died
under her eyes. And her children were not even his children.
If she could have fanned his blood as Teresa now fanned the blood of
Ramón, he would never have died.
But it was impossible. Every dog has his day.--And every race.
Teresa came tapping timidly.
“May I come?”
“Do!” said Kate, rising from her knees and leaving little piles of
books all round the book-trunk.
It was a fairly large room, with doors opening on to the patio and the
sun-hard garden, smooth mango-trees rising like elephant’s trunks out
of the ground, green grass after the rains, chickens beneath the ragged
banana leaves. A red bird splashed in the basin of water, opening and
shutting brown wings above his pure scarlet, vivid.
But Teresa looked at the room, not out of doors. She smelt the smell of
cigarettes and saw the many cigarette stumps in the agate tray by the
bed. She saw the littered books, the scattered jewellery, the brilliant
New-Mexican rugs on the floor, the Persian curtain hung behind the bed,
the handsome, coloured bedcover, the dresses of dark silk and bright
velvet flung over a trunk, the folded shawls with their long fringe,
the scattered shoes, white, grey, pale-brown, dark-brown, black, on the
floor, the tall Chinese candlesticks. The room of a woman who lived her
own life, for her own self.
Teresa was repelled, uneasy, and fascinated.
“How nice this is!” she said, touching the glowing bedcover.
“A friend made it for me, in England.”
Teresa looked with wonder at everything, especially at the tangle of
jewellery on the dressing-table.
“Don’t you like those red stones!” said Kate, kneeling again to put
the books back, and looking at the brown neck bent absolvedly over the
jewels. Thin shoulders, with a soft, dark skin, in a bit of a white
dress! And loosely folded masses of black hair held by tortoise-shell
pins.--An insignificant little thing, humble, Kate thought to herself.
But she knew really that Teresa was neither insignificant nor humble.
Under that soft brown skin, and in that stooping female spine was a
strange old power to call up the blood in a man, and glorify it, and,
in some way, keep it for herself.
On the sewing-table was a length of fine India muslin which Kate had
bought in India, and did not know what to do with. It was a sort of
yellow-peach colour, beautiful, but it did not suit Kate. Teresa was
fingering the gold-thread selvedge.
“It is not organdie?” she said.
“No, muslin. Hand-made muslin from India.--Why don’t you take it. It
doesn’t suit me. It would be perfect for you.”
She rose and held the fabric against Teresa’s dark neck, pointing to
the mirror. Teresa saw the warm-yellow muslin upon herself, and her
eyes flashed.
“No!” she said. “I couldn’t take it.”
“Why not? It doesn’t suit me. I’ve had it lying about for a year now,
and was wondering whether to cut it up for curtains. Do have it.”
Kate could be imperious, almost cruel in her giving.
“I can’t take it from you!”
“Of course you can!”
Ramón appeared in the doorway, glancing round the room, and at the two
women.
“Look!” said Teresa, rather confused. “The Señora wants to give me this
India muslin.”--She turned to him shyly, with the fabric held to her
throat.
“You look very well in it,” he said, his eyes resting on her.
“The Señora ought not to give it to me.”
“The Señora would not give it you unless she wished to.”
“Then!” said Teresa to Kate. “Many thanks! But many thanks!”
“It is nothing,” said Kate.
“But Ramón says it suits me.”
“Yes, doesn’t it suit her!” cried Kate to him. “It was made in India
for someone as dark as she is. It _does_ suit her.”
“Very pretty!” said Ramón.
He had glanced round the room, at the different attractive things
from different parts of the world, and at the cigarette ends in the
agate bowl: the rather weary luxury and disorder, and the touch of
barrenness, of a woman living her own life.
She did not know what he was thinking. But to herself she thought: This
is the man I defended on that roof. This is the man who lay with a hole
in his back, naked and unconscious under the lamp. He didn’t look like
a Sultan then.
Teresa must have divined something of her thought, for she said,
looking at Ramón:
“Señora! But for you Ramón would have been killed. Always I think of
it.”
“Don’t think of it,” said Kate. “Something else would have happened.
Anyhow it wasn’t I, it was destiny.”
“Ah, but you were the destiny!” said Teresa.
“Now there is a hostess, won’t you come and stay some time at
Jamiltepec?” said Ramón.
“Oh, do! Do come!” cried Teresa.
“But do you really want me?” said Kate, incredulous.
“Yes! Yes!” cried Teresa.
“She needs a woman-friend,” said Ramón gently.
“Yes, I do!” she cried. “I have never had a true, _true_ woman-friend:
only when I was at school, and we were girls.”
Kate doubted very much her own capacity for being a true, true
woman-friend to Teresa. She wondered what the two of them saw in her.
As what did they see her?
“Yes, I should like to come for a few days,” she replied.
“Oh, yes!” cried Teresa. “When will you come?”
The day was agreed.
“And we will write the Song of Malintzi,” said Ramón.
“Don’t do that!” cried Kate quickly.
He looked at her, in his slow, wondering way. He could make her feel,
at moments, as if she were a sort of child and as if he were a ghost.
Kate went to Jamiltepec, and before the two women knew it, almost,
they were making dresses for Teresa, cutting up the pineapple-coloured
muslin. Poor Teresa, for a bride she had a scanty wardrobe: nothing but
her rather pathetic black dresses that somehow made her look poor, and
a few old white dresses. She had lived for her father--who had a good
library of Mexicana and was all his life writing a history of the State
of Jalisco--and for the hacienda. And it was her proud boast that Las
Yemas was the only hacienda, within a hundred miles range, which had
not been smashed at all during the revolutions that followed the flight
of Porfirio Diaz.
Teresa had a good deal of the nun in her. But that was because she was
deeply passionate, and deep passion tends to hide within itself, rather
than expose itself to vulgar contact.
So Kate pinned the muslin over the brown shoulders, wondering again at
the strange, uncanny softness of the dark skin, the heaviness of the
black hair. Teresa’s family, the Romeros, had been in Mexico since the
early days of the Conquest.
Teresa wanted long sleeves.
“My arms are so thin!” she murmured, hiding her slender brown arms with
a sort of shame. “They are not beautiful like yours.”
Kate was a strong, full-developed woman of forty, with round, strong
white arms.
“No!” she said to Teresa. “Your arms are not thin: they are exactly
right for your figure, and pretty and young and brown.”
“But make the sleeves long, to the wrist,” pleaded Teresa.
And Kate did so, realizing it became the other woman’s nature better.
“The men here don’t like little thin women,” said Teresa, wistfully.
“One doesn’t care what _the men_ like,” said Kate. “Do you think Don
Ramón wishes you were a plump partridge?”
Teresa looked at her with a smile in her dark, big bright eyes, that
were so quick, and in many ways so unseeing.
“Who knows!” she said. And in her quick, mischievous smile it was
evident she would like also, sometimes, to be a plump partridge.
Kate now saw more of the hacienda life than she had done before. When
Ramón was at home, he consulted his overseer, or administrator, every
morning. But already Teresa was taking this work off his hands. She
would see to the estate.
Ramón was a good deal absent, either in Mexico or in Guadalajara, or
even away in Sonora. He was already famous and notorious throughout the
country, his name was a name to conjure with. But underneath the rather
ready hero-worship of the Mexicans, Kate somehow felt their latent
grudging. Perhaps they took more satisfaction in ultimately destroying
their heroes, than in temporarily raising them high. The real perfect
moment was when the hero was downed.
And to Kate, sceptic as she was, it seemed much more likely that they
were sharpening the machete to stick in Ramón’s heart, when he got a
bit too big for them, than anything else. Though, to be sure, there was
Cipriano to reckon with. And Cipriano was a little devil whom they
quite rightly feared. And Cipriano, for once, was faithful. He was,
to himself, Huitzilopochtli, and to this he would maintain a demonish
faith. He was Huitzilopochtli, Ramón was Quetzalcoatl. To Cipriano this
was a plain and living fact. And he kept his army keen as a knife.
Even the President would not care to run counter to Cipriano. And the
President was a brave man too.
“One day,” he said, “we will put Quetzalcoatl in Puebla Cathedral, and
Huitzilopochtli in Mexico Cathedral and Malintzi in Guadalupe. The day
will come, Ramón.”
“We will see that it comes,” Ramón replied.
But Ramón and Montes suffered alike from the deep, devilish animosity
the country sent out in silence, against them. It was the same, whoever
was in power: the Mexicans seemed to steam with invisible, grudging
hate, the hate of demons foiled in their own souls, whose only motive
is to foil everything, everybody, in the everlasting hell of cramped
frustration.
This was the dragon of Mexico, that Ramón had to fight. Montes, the
President, had it to fight the same. And it shattered his health.
Cipriano also had it up against him. But he succeeded best. With his
drums, with his dances round the fire, with his soldiers kept keen as
knives he drew real support from his men. He grew stronger and more
brilliant.
Ramón also, at home in his own district, felt the power flow into him
from his people. He was their chief, and by his effort and his power he
had almost overcome their ancient, fathomless resistance. Almost he had
_awed_ them back into the soft mystery of living, awed them until the
tension of their resistant, malevolent wills relaxed. At home, he would
feel his strength upon him.