THE GARDEN OF SOLITUDE
Benicia O’Donoju by the side of the big Papago Quelele and with the
twin towns on the Line behind her--ahead the unlimned immensity of
the wilderness--gave herself to the exhilaration of flight. For the
skimming and dipping of the little car over the wave crests of the
desert was like the flight of the desert quail, who rarely lifts
himself above the height of the mesquite in his unerring dartings from
bush to bush. On its partially deflated tires, provision against sand
traps and the expansion of imprisoned air under heat, the skeleton
thing reeled off its twenty miles an hour with snortings.
The final incident at the Arizora station--little Colonel Urgo and
his unceremonious jettisoning--left no abiding impression with the
spirited desert girl. His struttings and posings, his humorously
impetuous wooing, resumed at the El Paso station after the two years’
interruption of her stay in the States, were for her no more than
the high stepping of some barnyard Lothario. Benicia, little given to
the morbid business of self-analysis, was not sensible of how exactly
the dual strain of blood in her had reacted to Urgo’s advances; how
it had been the swift thrust of Spanish temper which had prompted her
to resort to the pronged weapon from her hair at El Paso even as the
persistent Irish humour tang inherent in the O’Donoju name had flashed
out in the dumping of the suitor at Arizora.
No, Hamilcar Urgo’s dapper figure was as evanescent as the mirage, but
there was another which appeared to replace it. A man with the figure
of an athlete and a forthright way of looking at one--perhaps the least
bit too self-assured, perhaps inviting rebuke did one but feel in the
humour of rebuking. One of those quick-witted Americans, ever ready
on a hair trigger of resourcefulness yet seeming to carry a situation
as if no situation existed. Nice eyes, yes. A pleasant laugh, rich in
humour. But so New Yorkish! He thought the desert a place where no
one lived willingly. Amusing conceit! And his name was--? Ah, yes,
Hickman--Grant Hickman. One would try to remember that name.
Retrospect could not long hold Benicia’s mind against the joy of the
homing journey. For the desert she loved spoke to her a welcome long
dreamed in the stifling precincts of cities. There was the sky she
had yearned for, something of infinite depths which did not shut down
over the earth like an inverted cup; rather an impalpable sea wherein
the earth swam free. Morning gold still tinted it. And the mountains
that rose sheer from the desert floor with no lesser foothill heights:
under the sun they were blue in the east and where slant rays fell upon
western barriers a tawny strength of naked rock clothed them. Between
the feet of the mountain stretched the level desert plain far and far
beyond the power of eye to compass; grey with the grey of saltbush and
greasewood, overtones of green where the first leaves of the mesquite
and ironwood answered the call of the spring sun.
Quelele had turned the machine onto a westward wending road once the
Line was crossed at Sonizona. A few straggling ranches near the border
town, then the unsullied desert. Westward and southward sped the
machine, deep into the greatest stretch of unpeopled wilderness between
the Barren Grounds of the Dominion and Panama.
The Desert of Altar lies there. From the Line south to the Yaqui
River and from the Gulf of California, once called the Sea of Cortez,
eastward to the Sierra Madre:--here is the terra incognita of Sonora;
here is the dominion of thirst. A territory large as New England and
with a population smaller than the average New England mill town. A
vast graveyard of vanished peoples, who left behind them mountains
terraced with fortifications laid in unbroken breastworks of porphyry
and rocks pictured with their annals of life and death. Rain comes only
with occasional summer thunder storms up from the Gulf, storms which
wake dead rivers into furious flood. So precious is this water from the
sky that the primitive peoples weave mystic rain symbols into their
basketry for a fetish, and their songs are all of thunderheads and
croaking frogs.
Here in the Desert of Altar the impossible becomes commonplace. A man
caught in a river bed by the spearhead of a freshet drowns in sand made
mud and irresistibly rushing. Cattle drink no water for months on end
but are sustained by munching cactus whose spines can penetrate sole
leather. In the furnace heat of summer furious rain storms occur in the
higher air but the moisture is sucked up by the sun before it touches
earth. Gold lies scattered on the surface of the desert and water must
be mined. The desert kind slay after the manner of the ages but declare
a truce at the waterhole. Death of all life is ever-present, yet grant
so much as a permanent trickle of the life-giving fluid and the dust is
covered with a glory of green.
For its devotees the desert holds mysteries potent beyond comprehension
of folk in a softer land. The venturing padres of an elder day called
it the Hand of God; they walked in the hand of God and were not afraid.
Divinity, force, original cause--whatever may be your term for that
power which jewels the grass with dew and swings the suns in their
courses--this is very close in the desert. In great cities man has
driven the Presence far from him by his silly rackets of steam and
electricity, by his farcical reproductions of cliffs and pinnacles. In
the Desert of Altar he walks in silence and with God. The very air is
kinetic with the energy that brought forth life on a cooled planet.
The desert had been Benicia’s teacher; had moulded her spirit to its
own pattern of elemental strength. Born the last of the O’Donojus in
the desert oasis that was the ultimate remnant of the once kingly
Rancho del Refugio--grant of a Spanish Philip to her ancestor--she
had been reared in the asperities of the land, had absorbed into her
bone and tissue the rigours and simple verities of a wilderness.
Because there was no son in the Casa O’Donoju and because, too, this
only daughter came into the world with the inheritance of a spirit
impetuous and errant as a desert bird, Don Padraic, her father, gave
over all attempts at imposing on her the straight decorum that shackles
the Spanish maiden of gentle blood. With the death of her mother when
Benicia was still in short skirts came this loosening of the bonds.
Instead of growing to maturity a shy creature who must never quit the
sight of a duenna and whose eyes shall tell no secrets, the girl warmed
to a wonderful companionship with her father, lived the life of a boy.
Her flaming red hair bobbed about the fringe of milling cores of wild
cattle at the round-up. At _Sahuaro_ feasts of the Papagoes, Mo Vopoki
(Lightning Hair) added her shrill soprano to the chorus of the Frog
Doctor Song. She learned where gold lay in shallow pockets and winnowed
it from the sands in the Indian fashion. She brought home a mewing,
spitting kitten she had taken from a bobcat’s litter. Her doll was
discarded for a rifle before her strength could shoulder it.
Schooling came in her father’s library, filled with books in three
languages. English and music, the music of the great harp, became her
passions. The harp had been her great-grandmother’s; Don Padraic could
make the mesh of strings sing with the sound of rain on flowers. He was
her first teacher. Then, when twenty years were hers and Don Padraic
realized something besides the wild desert life was needed to round out
the full beauty of his daughter’s soul, he had urged further studies
on the harp as the excuse for Benicia’s two years in the cities of the
States. Those two years had served well to overlay upon the rugged
handiwork of the wild the softness and subtleties of culture.
Benicia believed she possessed all her father’s confidences. So she
did--all but one. She did not know that when she came into the world
with tiny head furry in burning red Donna Francisca, her mother, had
cried herself into hysteria and Don Padraic’s heart had gone cold. Nor
was she ever told that her flaming hair marked her with the finger of
Nemesis.
This day of the return from exile no premonition of the inheritance
of fate arose to disturb the singing heart of the girl. She rattled
on to the stoical Papago at the wheel unending questions concerning
her father and the most humble of the Indian retainers living on the
rancherias about the oasis, Don Padraic’s fief in the waste lands.
She told the credulous Quelele stories of the cities she had seen; of
white men’s wickiups climbing as high as the hill of La Nariz; of water
so plentiful that it was launched at a burning house out of a long
serpent’s mouth; how men lifted themselves above the earth in machines
like the king condor and flew hundreds of miles between sun and sun.
To all of which big Quelele, never lifting his eyes from the thin rut
lines in the sand, answered with a single monosyllable “Hi,” wherein
was compounded all his capacity for wonder.
South and west about the skirts of the Pajarito they went, and then
into the old road up from Caborca, the ancient highway called the Road
of the Dead Men which swings north parallel with the Line, cutting the
tails of numerous ranges that are great in Arizona. And so, when the
day was hardly more than half spent, the little car crawled to the
height called the Nose of the Devil, and Benicia saw below her land of
desire.
Fists of the mountains grudgingly opened out to permit a broad basin
running from east to west, and there against the savage baldness of
sentinel ranges showed a ribbon of green. Green of precious gems it
was. So vivid in the setting of the drought land. So cyclonic its
assault of colour against the eye inured to the duns and greys of a
hundred miles of parched terrain. And in the midst of the oasis the
shining white dot, which was the house of the O’Donoju; of Benicia’s
father and his fathers before him back to the day of a royal favourite
baptized Michael O’Donohue. The Casa O’Donoju in El Jardin de
Soledad--the Garden of Solitude.
Indian women, in skirts of orange and cerise and with gay mantles over
their sleek hair, lined the way to the avenue of royal date palms
which led from the bridge over the Rio Dulce straight to the white
single-story house of ’dobe, heavy walled and loopholed like a fort.
They waved and sent shouts of welcome to the mistress of the casa as
she passed.
Benicia knew her father would not be outside the house to greet her;
their love was not for the servants to see. Rather he would be waiting
in their own trysting place, the place where he had given her farewell
two years before. The girl leaped from the car before the heavy
studded oak door breaking the solid white front of the house at its
centre. It was opened to her by old ’Cepcion, feminine major domo of
the household servants. Benicia paused to give the parchment cheeks a
kiss, then she danced down a flagged hall to the flare of green marking
the patio garden in the centre of the house.
Here was a place of beauty and a fragrant cave of coolness--the very
secret heart of the Garden of Solitude. Open to the sky and with
cloistered dimness of the four sides of the house all about, the patio
was a tiny jungle of climbing things, all green and riotous blossoms.
A stately date palm reigned in the centre behind the little basin of
the fountain; curtains of purple bougainvillea draped themselves down
its shaggy ribs; lavender water-hyacinths sailed their little barques
in the pool; geraniums flamed in living fire against the pillars of the
arcades.
There in the garden waited a man all in white. Snow white his heavy
hair and beard, though the life in his deep-set eyes and the vigorous
set of his shoulders belied age; white were his thin garments of silk
and flannel.
He caught the flash of a red head through the greenery, saw an eager,
breathless face turned questioningly.
“’Nicia, heart of my heart--!”
Then she ran to him, paused just an instant to lift swift fingers
under his chin and tilt his head. Their eyes measured each the love
that welled brimming in the soul’s windows. Then the father drew his
daughter close to his heart and his lips brushed her forehead.
“’Nicia, my strong one, your father has great need of you.”