“But why do you go away?” he asked her, after a silence.
“You don’t care, do you?” she said.
There was a dead pause.
“Yes, I care,” he said.
“But why?”
Again it was some time before he answered.
“You are one of us, we need you,” he said.
“Even when I don’t do anything?--and when I get a bit bored with living
Quetzalcoatls--and the rest, and wish for a simple Don Ramón?” she
replied.
He laughed suddenly.
“What is a simple Don Ramón?” he said. “A simple Don Ramón has a living
Quetzalcoatl inside him. But you help all the same.”
“You go ahead so grandly, one would not think you needed help:
especially from a mere woman who--who after all is only the wife of
your friend.”
They were sitting on a bench under a red-flowering poinsettia whose
huge scarlet petal-leaves spread out like sharp plumes.
“The wife of my friend!” he said. “What could you be better?”
“Of course,” she said, more than equivocal.
He was leaning his arms on his knees, and looking out to the lake,
abstract, and remote. There was a certain worn look on his face, and
the vulnerability which always caught at Kate’s heart. She realized
again the isolation and the deadly strain his effort towards a new way
of life put upon him. Yet he had to do it.
This again gave her a feeling of helplessness, a woman’s utter
helplessness with a man who goes out to the beyond. She had to stifle
her resentment, and her dislike of his “abstract” efforts.
“Do you feel awfully sure of yourself?” she said.
“Sure of myself?” he re-echoed. “No! Any day I may die and disappear
from the face of the earth. I not only know it, I _feel_ it. So why
should I be sure of _myself_?”
“Why should you die?” she said.
“Why should anybody ever die?--even Carlota!”
“Ah!--her hour had come!”
“Can you set one’s hour as one sets an alarm clock?”
Kate paused.
“And if you’re not sure of yourself, what are you sure of?” she
challenged.
He looked at her with dark eyes which she could not understand.
“I am sure--sure--” his voice tailed off into vagueness, his face
seemed to go grey and peaked, as a dead man’s, only his eyes watched
her blackly, like a ghost’s. Again she was confronted with the
suffering ghost of the man. And she was a woman, powerless before this
suffering ghost which was still in the flesh.
“You don’t think you are wrong, do you?” she asked, in cold distress.
“No! I am not wrong. Only maybe I can’t hold out,” he said.
“And then what?” she said, coldly.
“I shall go my way, alone.” There seemed to be nothing left of him but
the black, ghostly eyes that gazed on her. He began to speak Spanish.
“It hurts me in my soul, as if I were dying,” he said.
“But why?” she cried. “You are not ill?”
“I feel as if my soul were coming undone.”
“Then don’t let it,” she cried, in fear and repulsion.
But he only gazed with those fixed, blank eyes. A sudden deep stillness
came over her; a sense of power in herself.
“You should forget for a time,” she said gently, compassionately
laying her hand on his. What was the good of trying to understand him
or wrestle with him? She was a woman. He was a man, and--and--and
therefore not quite real. Not true to life.
He roused himself suddenly from her touch, as if he had come awake,
and he looked at her with keen, proud eyes. Her motherly touch had
roused him like a sting.
“Yes!” he said. “It is true!”
“Of course it is!” she replied. “If you want to be so--so abstract and
Quetzalcoatlian, then bury your head sometimes, like an ostrich in the
sand, and forget.”
“So!” he said, smiling. “You are angry again!”
“It’s not so simple,” she said. “There is a conflict in me. And you
won’t let me go away for a time.”
“We can’t even prevent you,” he said.
“Yes, but you are against my going--you don’t let me go in peace.”
“Why must you go?” he said.
“I must,” she said. “I must go back to my children, and my mother.”
“It is a necessity in you?” he said.
“Yes!”
The moment she had admitted the necessity, she realised it was a
certain duplicity in herself. It was as if she had two selves: one, a
new one, which belonged to Cipriano and to Ramón, and which was her
sensitive, desirous self: the other hard and finished, accomplished,
belonging to her mother, her children, England, her whole past. This
old accomplished self was curiously invulnerable and insentient,
curiously hard and “free.” In it, she was an individual and her own
mistress. The other self was vulnerable, and organically connected with
Cipriano, even with Ramón and Teresa, and so was not “free” at all.
She was aware of a duality in herself, and she suffered from it. She
could not definitely commit herself, either to the old way of life,
or to the new. She reacted from both. The old was a prison, and she
loathed it. But in the new way she was not her own mistress at all, and
her egoistic will recoiled.
“That’s just it!” she said. “It _is_ a necessity in me, and you want to
prevent me.”
“No! No!” said Ramón. “I hope not.”
“Yes! You put a weight on me, and paralyse me, to prevent me from
going,” she said.
“We must not do that,” he said. “We must leave you, and not come near
you for a time, if you feel it is so.”
“Why? Why can’t you be friendly? Why can’t you be _with_ me in my
going? Why can’t you _want_ me to go, since I must go?”
He looked at her with dispassionate eyes.
“I can’t do that,” he said. “I don’t believe in your going. It is
a turning back: there is something renegade in it.--But we are all
complicated. And if you _feel_ you must go back for a time, go! It
isn’t terribly important. You have chosen, really. I am not afraid for
you.”
It was a great relief to her to hear this: because she was terribly
afraid for herself. She could never be sure, never be _whole_ in her
connection with Cipriano and Ramón. Yet she said, mocking slightly:
“Why _should_ you be afraid for me?”
“Aren’t you sometimes afraid for yourself?” he asked.
“Never!” she said. “I’m absolutely sure about myself.”
They had been sitting in the garden of the Villa Aragon, under the
poinsettia tree with the huge scarlet petal-leaves, like soft red quill
feathers. The morning was becoming hot. The lake had gone still, with
the fallen wind. Everything was still. Save the long scarlet of the
poinsettia.
Christmas was coming! The poinsettia reminded Kate of it.
Christmas! Holly-berries! England! Presents! Food!--If she hurried, she
could be in England for Christmas. It felt so safe, so familiar, so
normal, the thought of Christmas at home, in England, with her mother.
And all the exciting things she could tell to the people at home! And
all the exciting gossip she could hear! In the distance, it looked very
attractive.--She still had a qualm as to what the actual return would
be like.
“One can have too much of a good thing,” she said to Ramón.
“What good thing in particular?” he asked her.
“Oh--Quetzalcoatl and all that!” she said. “One can have too much of
it.”
“It may be,” he said, rising and going quietly away; so quietly, he was
gone before she knew. And when she realised he had gone like that, she
flushed with anger. But she sat on under the poinsettia tree, in the
hot, still November sun, looking with anger at the hedge of jasmine,
with its pure white flowers, and its sere, withered flowers, and its
pinkish buds among the dark leaves. Where had she heard something about
jasmine? “And the jasmine flowers between us!”
Oh! how tired she was of all that!
Teresa came down the garden slope.
“You are still sitting here?” she exclaimed.
“Where else should I be?” Kate answered.
“I don’t know.--Ramón has gone to Sayula, to see the Jefe. He wouldn’t
wait for us, to come with us in the boat.”
“I suppose he was in a hurry,” said Kate.
“How fine these Noche Buenas are!” said Teresa looking at the brilliant
spread of the red poinsettias.
“They are your Christmas flower, aren’t they?” said Kate.
“Yes--the flowers of the Noche Buena--”
“How awful, Christmas with hibiscus and poinsettia! It makes me long to
see mistletoe among the oranges, in a fruiterer’s shop in Hampstead.”
“Why that?” laughed Teresa.
“Oh!” Kate sighed petulantly. “To get back to simple life. To see the
’buses rolling on the mud in Piccadilly, on Christmas Eve, and the wet
pavements crowded with people under the brilliant shops.”
“Is that life, to you?” asked Teresa.
“Yes! Without all this abstraction, and _will_. Life is good enough for
me if I am allowed to live and be myself.”
“It is time Cipriano should come home,” said Teresa.
But this made Kate rise from her seat, with sudden impatience. She
would not have this thing put over her! She would break free, and show
them!
She went with Teresa to the village. The air seemed mysteriously alive,
with a new Breath. But Kate felt out of it. The two women sat under a
tree on the beach at Sayula, talking a little, and watching the full
expanse of the dove-pale lake.
A black boat with a red-painted roof and a tall mast was moored to the
low breakwater-wall, which rose about a yard high, from the shallow
water. On the wall stood loose little groups of white-clad men, looking
into the black belly of the ship. And perched immobile in silhouette
against the lake, was a black-and-white cow, and a huge monolithic
black-and-white bull. The whole silhouette frieze motionless, against
the far water that was coloured brown like turtle doves.
It was near, yet seemed strange and remote. Two peons fixed a plank
gangway up to the side of the boat. Then they began to shove the cow
towards it. She pawed the new broad planks tentatively, then, with that
slow Mexican indifference, she lumbered unwillingly on to the gangway.
They edged her slowly to the end, where she looked down into the boat.
And at last, she dropped neatly into the hold.
Now the group of men broke into motion, for the huge and spangled bull.
A tall old Mexican, in fawn, skin-tight trousers and little leather
jacket, and a huge felt hat heavily embroidered with silver, gently
took the ring in the bull’s nose, gently lifted the wedge of the bull’s
head, so the great soft throat was uplifted. A peon behind put his head
down, and with all his might began shoving the mighty, living flanks
of the bull. The slim-legged, high hatted old Mexican pulled evenly
at the nose-ring. And with a calm and weighty poise, the bull stepped
along the crest of the wall, delicately and impassively, to the plank
gangway. There he stopped.
The peons began to re-group. The one behind, with his red sash tied
so determinedly over his white hips, ceased to shove, the slim-legged
Mexican let go the ring.
Then two peons passed a rope loosely round the haunches of the bull.
The high-hatted farmer stepped on to the planks, and took the nose-ring
again, very gently. He pulled softly. The bull lifted its head, but
held back. It struck the planks with an unwilling foot. Then it stood,
spangled with black on its whiteness, like a piece of the sky, immobile.
The farmer pulled once more at the ring. Two men were pulling the rope,
pressing in the flanks of the immoveable, passive, spangled monster.
Two peons, at the back, with their heads down and their red-sashed,
flexible loins thrust out behind, shoved with all their strength in the
soft flanks of the mighty creature.
And all was utterly noiseless and changeless; against the fullness of
the pale lake, this silent, monumental group of life.
Then the bull stepped slowly, imperturbably, yet against its will, on
to the loose planks, and was edged slowly along, to the brink of the
boat. There he waited.
He stood huge and silvery, dappled like the sky, with black snake
markings down his haunches, looming massive above the red roof of the
_canoa_. How would he ever duck to that roof, and drop under, into the
darkness of the ship?
He lowered his head, and looked into the hold. The men behind shoved
his living flanks. He took no heed, but lowered his head and looked
again. The men pushed with all their might, in the dense Mexican
silence.
Slowly, carefully, the bull crouched himself, made himself small, and
with a quick, massive little movement dropped his forefeet down into
the body of the boat, leaving his huge hind-quarters heaved up behind.
There was a shuffle and a little stagger down below, then the soft thud
as his hind-feet leaped down. He had gone.
The planks were taken away. A peon ran to unfasten the mooring rope
from the stones of the shore. There was a strange thudding of soft feet
within the belly of the boat. Men in the water were pushing the ship’s
black stern, to push her off. But she was heavy. Slowly, casually they
pulled the stones from under her flat bottom, and flung them aside.
Slowly she edged, swayed, moved a little, and was afloat.
The men climbed in. The two peons on the ship’s rims were poling her
out, pressing their poles and walking heavily till they reached the
stern, then lifting their poles and running to the high prow. She slid
slowly out, on to the lake.
Then quickly they hoisted the wide white sail. The sail thrust up her
horn and curved in a whorl to the wind. The ship was going across the
waters, with her massive, sky-spangled cargo of life invisible.
All so still and soft and remote.
“And will Ramón want you to sit beside him in the church as the bride
of Quetzalcoatl--with some strange name?” Kate asked of Teresa.
“I don’t know,” said Teresa. “Later, he says, when the time comes for
them to have a goddess.”
“And will you mind?”
“For myself, I am afraid of it. But I understand that Ramón wants it.
He says it is accepting the greater responsibility of one’s existence.
And I think that is true. If there is God in me, and God as woman,
then I must accept this part of myself also, and put on the green
dress, and be for the time the God-woman, since it is true of me also.
I think it is true. Ramón says we must make it manifest. When I think
of my brothers, I know we must. So I shall think of the God that beats
invisible, like the heart of all the world. So when I have to wear
the green dress, and sit before all the people in the church, I shall
look away to the heart of all the world, and try to be my sacred self,
because it is necessary, and the right thing to do. It is right. I
would not do it if I thought it was not right.”
“But I thought the green dress was for the Bride of Huitzilopochtli!”
said Kate.
“Ah yes!” Teresa caught herself up. “Mine is the black dress with the
white edges, and the red clouds.”
“Would you rather have the green?” Kate asked. “Have it if you would. I
am going away.”
Teresa glanced up at her quickly.
“The green is for the wife of Huitzilopochtli,” she said, as if numbed.
“I can’t see that it matters,” said Kate.
Teresa looked at her with quick, dark eyes.
“Different men must have different wives,” she said. “Cipriano would
never want a wife like me.”
“And different women must have different husbands,” said Kate. “Ramón
would always be too abstract and overbearing for me.”
Teresa flushed slowly, looking down at the ground.
“Ramón needs far too much submission from a woman, to please me,” Kate
added. “He takes too much upon himself.”
Teresa looked up quickly, and raised her head proudly, showing her
brownish throat like a rearing, crested snake.
“How do you know that Ramón needs submission from a woman?” she said.
“How do you know? He has not asked any submission from you.--And you
are wrong. He does not ask submission from me. He wants me to give
myself gently to him. And then he gives himself back to me far more
gently than I give myself to him. Because a man like that is more
gentle than a woman. He is not like Cipriano. Cipriano is a soldier.
But Ramón is gentle. You are mistaken in what you say.”
Kate laughed a little.
“And you are a soldier among women, fighting all the time,” Teresa
continued. “I am not such. But some women must be soldiers in their
spirit, and they need soldier husbands. That is why you are Malintzi,
and your dress is green. You would always fight. You would fight with
yourself, if you were alone in the world.”
It was very still by the lake. They were waiting for Ramón.
A man was stripping palm-stalks, squatting in silence under a tree, in
his white clothes, his black head bent forward. Then he went to wet his
long strips in the lake, returning with them dangling.
Then he sat down again, and deftly, silently, with the dark, childlike
absorption of the people, took up his work. He was mending a chair
bottom. When Kate watched him, he glanced up with a flash of black
eyes, saluting her. And she felt a strange power surge in her limbs,
from the flash of living recognition and deference in his eyes. As if
his deference were a sort of flame of life, rich in him when he saw her.
A roan horse speckled with white was racing prancing along the shore,
neighing frantically. His mane flowed in the wind, his feet struck
the pebbles as he ran, and again he opened his long nose and neighed
anxiously. Away up the shore he ran. What had he lost?
A peon had driven a high-wheeled wagon, drawn by four mules, deep
into the lake, till the water was above the high axles of the wheels,
almost touching the bed of the cart. It looked like a dark square boat
drawn by four soft, dark sea-horses which slowly waved their long dark
ears like leaves, while the peon, in white with his big hat proudly
balanced, stood erect. The mules deep in the water stepped gently,
curving to the shore.
It was winter, but like spring by the lake. White and yellow calves,
new and silky, were skipping, butting up their rear ends, lifting
their tails, trotting side by side down to the water, to sniff at it
suspiciously.
In the shadow of a great tree a mother-ass was tethered, and her foal
lay in the shadow, a little thing black as ink, curled up, with fluffy
head erect and great black ears spreading up, like some jet-black hare
full of witch-craft.
“How many days?” called Kate to the peon, who had come out of the straw
hut.
He gave her the flash of his dark eyes, in a sort of joy of deference.
And she felt her breast surge with living pride.
“Last night, _Patróna_!” he smiled in answer.
“So new! So new! He doesn’t get up, can’t he?”
The peon went round, put his arm under the foal and lifted it to its
feet. There it straddled on high, in amaze, upon its black legs like
bent hair-pins.
“How nice it is!” cried Kate in delight, and the peon laughed at her
with a soft, grateful flame, touched with reverence.
The ink-black ass-foal did not understand standing up. It rocked on its
four loose legs, and wondered. Then it hobbled a few steps, to smell at
some green, growing maize. It smelled and smelled and smelled, as if
all the dark aeons were stirring awake in its nostrils.
Then it turned, and looked with its bushy-velvet face straight at
Kate, and put out a pink tongue at her. She laughed aloud. It stood
wondering, dazed. Then it put out its tongue again. She laughed at it.
It gave an awkward little skip, which surprised its own self very much.
Then it ventured forward again, and all unexpectedly even to itself,
exploded into another little skip.
“Already it dances!” cried Kate. “And it came into the world only last
night.”
“Yes, already it dances!” reiterated the peon.
After bethinking itself for a time, the ass-foal walked uncertainly
towards the mother. She was a well-liking grey-and-brown she-ass,
rather glossy and self-assured. The ass-foal straight found the udder,
and was drinking.
Glancing up, Kate met again the peon’s eyes, with their black, full
flame of life heavy with knowledge and with a curious re-assurance.
The black foal, the mother, the drinking, the new life, the mystery
of the shadowy battlefield of creation; and the adoration of the
full-breasted, glorious woman beyond him: all this seemed in the
primitive black eyes of the man.
“Adios!” said Kate to him, lingeringly.
“Adios, Patróna!” he replied, suddenly lifting his hand high, in the
Quetzalcoatl salute.
She walked across the beach to the jetty, feeling the life surging
vivid and resistant within her. “It is sex,” she said to herself. “How
wonderful sex can be, when men keep it powerful and sacred, and it
fills the world! Like sunshine through and through one!--But I’m not
going to submit, even there. Why should one give in, to anything!”
Ramón was coming down towards the boat, the blue symbol of Quetzalcoatl
in his hat. And at that moment the drums began to sound for mid-day,
and there came the mid-day call, clear and distinct, from the tower.
All the men on the shore stood erect, and shot up their right hands
to the sky. The women spread both palms to the light. Everything was
motionless, save the moving animals.
Then Ramón went on to the boat, the men saluting him with the
Quetzalcoatl salute as he came near.
“It is wonderful, really,” said Kate, as they rowed over the water,
“how--how splendid one can feel in this country! As if one were still
genuinely of the nobility.”
“Aren’t you?” he said.
“Yes, I am. But everywhere else it is denied. Only here one feels the
full force of one’s nobility. The natives still worship it.”
“At moments,” said Ramón. “Later, they will murder you and violate you,
for having worshipped you.”
“Is it inevitable?” she said flippantly.
“I think so,” he replied. “If you lived here alone in Sayula, and
queened it for a time, you would get yourself murdered--or worse--by
the people who had worshipped you.”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“I know,” he replied.
“Why?” she said, obstinate.
“Unless one gets one’s nobility from the gods and turns to the middle
of the sky for one’s power, one will be murdered at last.”
“I do get my nobility that way,” she said.
But she did not quite believe it. And she made up her mind still more
definitely, to go away.
She wrote to Mexico City, and engaged a berth from Vera Cruz to
Southampton: she would sail on the last day of November. Cipriano
came home on the seventeenth, and she told him what she had done. He
looked at her with his head a little on one side, with a queer boyish
judiciousness, but she could not tell at all what he felt.
“You are going already?” he said in Spanish.
And then she knew, at last, that he was offended. When he was offended
he never spoke English at all, but spoke Spanish just as if he were
addressing another Mexican.
“Yes,” she said. “On the 30th.”
“And when do you come back?” he asked.
“Quien sabe!--Who knows!” she retorted.
He let his black eyes rest on her face for some minutes, watching her,
unchanging and incomprehensible. He was thinking, superficially, that
if he liked, he could use the law and have her prevented from leaving
the country--or even from leaving Sayula--since she was legally married
to him. There was the old fixity of Indian anger, glinting fixed and
relentless in the depths of his eyes. And then the almost invisible
change in his face, as the hidden emotion sank down and the stoic
indifference, the emotionlessness of centuries, and the stoic kind of
tolerance came over him. She could almost feel the waves of successive
shadow and coldness go through his blood, his mind hardly aware at all.
And again a fear of losing his contact melted her heart.
It was somehow, to her, beautiful, to feel shadows, and cold gleams,
and a hardness like stone, then the strange heavy inertia of the
tropical mid-day, the stupor of the sun, moving upon him while he
stood motionless, watching her. In the end it was that weird, sultry,
tropical stupor of the hot hours, a heat-swoon of sheer indifference.
“Como quieres tu!” he said. “As you wish.”
And she knew he had already released her, in the dark, sultry stupor of
his blood. He would make no further effort after her. This also was the
doom of his race.
He took a boat and went down to Jamiltepec, to Ramón: as she knew he
would.
She was alone, as usual. It occurred to her, that she herself willed
this aloneness. She could not relax and be with these people. She could
not relax and be with anybody. She always had to recoil upon her own
individuality, as a cat does.
Sex, sexual correspondence, did it matter so very much to her? It might
have mattered more, if she had not had it. But she had had it--and
very finally and consummately, with Cipriano. So she knew all about
it. It was as if she had conquered another territory, another field of
life. The conqueress! And now she would retire to the lair of her own
individuality, with the prey.