by Anya Seton
So busy was she with her pleasant thoughts that she didn’t hear the approach of Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Bray, who came to a stop behind the girl.
‘Gracious!’ said the latter, ‘but isn’t the little thing dirty! And that hair! I don’t suppose they even own a comb.’
Fey stiffened. She had had no contact with the Americans during her years with the Torres and this woman’s voice had an intonation quite different from her father’s, but after a second she understood.
She put the pan down, wiped her muddy hands on her skirt, and stood up silently gazing at the two gringa ladies in hoopskirts.
Mrs. Bray cleared her throat; what little Spanish she knew always deserted her when she needed it, but her friend knew none at all. ‘Buenos dias, muchacha—’ she began uncertainly; it always paid to be polite to them. ‘Es—I mean, esta tu madre——Mercy, how the child stares at us!’ she cried, breaking down entirely.
‘What queer light eyes she has for a Mexican,’ agreed Mrs. Wilson, inspecting Fey. ‘Somehow she doesn’t look quite——’
‘Ah, my love——’ said Mrs. Bray, pursing her lips. ‘Evidently another sad example—our American soldiers—you know what I mean—the father——’
Mrs. Wilson turned pink; really dear Maud was sometimes so coarse.
Fey also, after a bewildered moment, caught Mrs. Bray’s meaning. She did not turn pink; she whitened until the dirt stood out like a fresco on her small face. Her eyes blazed, and she took one violent step toward the ladies.
‘I’m as well-bor-rn as you or anybody in this land!’ she said, with concentrated fury.
The appalled ladies retreated a step.
‘Heavens!’ whispered Mrs. Wilson, clutching her friend’s arm, ‘she speaks English!’
Mrs. Bray recovered herself. ‘Well, that’s fine,’ she said weakly. She decided to ignore the unfortunate allusion, went on in a rush, ‘Then, little girl, perhaps you can tell us of some woman who might——’
‘Váyase!’ cried Fey in a tense, choked voice. ‘Get out!’
‘But little girl——’ said Mrs. Bray placatingly.
‘Go! ’ shouted Fey, glaring at the smooth, smug faces. As they still didn’t move, but stood staring at her like two billowing images, Fey reached down to the pan and grabbed a handful of mud.
The ladies, emitting a dual squeak of horror, were galvanized. They turned and fled, scuttling down the road, their hoops swaying and bumping as they ran. ‘These disgusting, dreadful greasers!’ panted Mrs. Wilson, and her friend wheezily agreed. Both ladies were too much shattered to pursue their errand. They limped back across the river, and, upon reaching their snug quarters in the garrison, solaced themselves with cup after cup of strong, expensive tea.
Fey stood perfectly still, her arm upraised, and watched the flight. Then her muscles suddenly relaxed, and the mud ball fell from her hand to the ground. Her head drooped. She walked slowly into the house and sat down on the pile of goatskins. After a few minutes she touched her cheeks in a dazed way. They were wet. She mopped her eyes with a corner of the muddy skirt, then stared at the stains on the flannel skirt which had once been turkey red but was now a filthy pinkish-gray.
She got up and, going out to their com patch, peered into the little irrigation ditch. This acequia was nearly dry and she could not catch her reflection in it.
The Brios had a looking-glass, the only one in the Analco. La Gertrudis, Manuel Brio’s woman, had been a popular Burro Alley courtesan in her younger days and she still had her vanities.
Fey walked a little way along the road up towards the canon. Past Garcia Street she came to the Brios’. La Gertrudis stood in the doorway watching for her Manuel to come home. She was smoking a tiny black cigarette, her dark heavy-lidded eyes halfclosed as she inhaled voluptuously. Her thick hair was well oiled and over one ear she wore a pink hollyhock blossom.
‘God keep you in good health, Feyita,’ she greeted the girl with lazy politeness. ‘Are you going up the mountain to pick chamiza?’
‘May Our Lady of Sorrows lighten all yours,’ responded Fey in the conventional courtesy. ‘I was coming to see you, Gertrudis.’ .
‘Bueno,’ said the woman, smiling. ‘ My house is yours, niña. I will make you a cup of chocolate.’ She smiled at the girl and moved to one side so that Fey might enter.
On the far wall in the place of honor hung the looking-glass. It had a frame of carved and gilded curlicues and, though its surface was fly-specked, it was a good mirror. It had come from New Orleans and then over the Trail, and one of Gertrudis’s rico lovers had bought it for her.
Fey walked straight toward it and stood silently staring at her reflection.
She saw a small, peaked face with a smooch of mud across the chin. Her neck and frayed chemise were filmed with dust. The fine matted black hair straggled into two frowzy braids from a crooked center part. The Torres owned one coarse wooden comb amongst them, but it was usually mislaid, and anyway the rebozo was always worn over the head when one went out, so why bother about the hair?
Gertrudis saw the girl’s face contract, and she laughed. ‘ Come, little one, it’s not as bad as that. There’s some young man whom you wish for a sweetheart, I suppose? I’ll tell you how to get him.’
Fey did not hear. She turned from the mirror. ‘ Those gringa señoras were right,' she said, in a small voice. ‘I am dirty and I look like a bastard.’
‘Jesús María!’ cried Gertrudis, still amused. ‘What a thing to say! I remember that at your age everything is a tragedy, but if your sweetheart is so fastidious we can soon clean you up.’
Fey raised her chin, and her gray eyes, somber now and quiet, rested on the woman’s rouged face. ‘There’s no young man, no sweetheart,’ she said. ‘It’s for myself—for me —Santa Fe Cameron. Do you understand, Gertrudis? ’
Gertrudis did not understand this surcharged intensity over such a trivial matter. In her extensive experience only one thing made a girl worry about her looks. But she suddenly remembered, Feyita was not a Torres, was even, if the old long-forgotten story were true, half gringa, and therefore totally unpredictable. Still, thought Gertrudis, who had a good heart, she is certainly very dirty like all the Torres, and it makes her unhappy, so I will help her.
‘Here, drink this good chocolate,’ said Gertrudis, in a soothing voice, pouring a frothing brown stream from a pitcher, ‘and then we’ll wash your hair, chiquita. It happens that I have a whole olla full of amole root soaking behind the house.’
Fey accepted her hostess’s ministrations with passionate gratitude. While she had never been mistreated at the Torres’, she had never received active love or interest either. She had been allowed to grow as did the other children, unfettered and unguided. In the cluttered promiscuity in which they lived, there had been no impulse toward recognition of personality, and no caresses. There had been no one to love.
‘You’re good to me, Tula,’ she said softly, when the shampooing was finished, and she stood naked and clean before the fire while the woman patiently combed out the tangles of hair.
Gertrudis laughed her rich laugh. She w‹ts enjoying herself, beginning to take pride in her handiwork. Who would have thought that the little thing would have such fine white skin, and the hair—soft and black as a crow’s breast. ‘You’ll go far with this hair, Feyita,’ she said, with a touch of envy. ‘The men will like it. So long—to your knees almost, and curly. It must be,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘that you have no Indian blood.’ She herself and ninety per cent of the inhabitants of New Mexico had an Indian strain, and on the whole they were proud of it. At any rate, it was better than gringo blood, thought Gertrudis pityingly. That made one restless and discontented, always wanting more and more of everything, money, women, whiskey. She had had several American lovers.
‘No,’ said Fey, ‘I have no Indian blood.’ And she felt forlorn and lost. All these years she had thought herself a Torres, but she wasn’t. She knew now how different she was from them, and she no
longer wished to be like them, but after this revelation had come a stab of the devastating loneliness which she had not suffered since the night her father died.
‘Now,’ said Gertrudis affectionately, having braided Fey’s hair and patted musk-scented pomatum into it, ‘ I’ll lend you a skirt, chemise, and rebozo until yours are dry.’ She brought the garments from a chest, and when Fey was dressed, Gertrudis backed off, hands on hips, and surveyed the girl, smiling.
Fey smiled back and was astonished to see the carmined mouth tremble and the heavy eyes fill with tears.
‘Oh, what is it, Gertrudis?’ she cried.
‘Nothing,’ said the woman immediately, tossing her head. ‘Except that standing there in my clothes you make me feel as if you’re my daughter. The child I never had.’ She gave a brittle laugh and patted the hollyhock blossom above her ear.
Fey, decked in Gertrudis’s finery, stood in the middle of the floor and stared at her friend. A shaft of light seemed to strike through her mind, and beneath the other’s flouncing, vulgarly coquettish gestures she saw an aching sorrow. The light expanded, reaching out until it touched Gertrudis.
‘Feyita—you look so strange,’ said the woman, backing off.
Fey shut her eyes, and as in that episode so long ago with her father, the love, the pity, and the glowing clarity fused into compulsion.
‘You will have a baby,’ said Fey. ‘Even now it is a tiny growing seed inside your womb. I can see it.’
‘Madre de Dios!’ whispered Gertrudis, crossing herself. ‘What’s the matter with you!’
‘It’s true,’said Fey. ‘You will see.’ She opened her eyes and sighed, for the force flowed out of her leaving her empty and tired.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, nina,’ said Gertrudis, recovered now from a momentary thrill of awe and wild hope. For here was nothing but the little Torres girl whom she had just washed. ‘You meant well, I know, but I’m too old. Already the monthly signs of fertility are slackening, and I’ve always been barren.’
‘It makes no difference,’ said Fey. ‘It will happen,’ though she no longer felt the certainty and the exaltation, but only its memory.
‘Well,’ said Gertrudis, laughing gustily, ‘if such a miracle should happen, then you must be a bruja—eh?’ and she bent and kissed her, at the same time spanking her playfully.
For the Analco was as terrified of witches as the distant mountain dwellers at Abiquiu or Truchas, and to make a joke about them lessened their power. Therefore, too, though Gertrudis was duly delivered of a son nine months later, out of affection for the girl she never mentioned Fey’s prophecy to anyone, not even to her Manuel. They would think in the Barrio Analco that the biggest Torres girl was somehow in league with the devil, and Gertrudis knew that, however Feyita had performed her witchcraft, it had not sprung from badness, but from gratitude and a wish to comfort.
Fey herself gave little attention to that moment of in-seeing. It had come and it had gone—nor, except for emotional intensity, did it feel less natural than the occasional flashes she thought of vaguely as ‘the other thing.’
These flashes were moments when she glimpsed a thought in someone’s mind. This was like gazing into a shadowed mountain trout pool, and seeing the clear silvery outline dart through a sun ray and disappear.
Once, when Domingo had tearfully reported the loss of three pesos to his father, Fey had seen beneath her foster-brother’s frightened excuses, and known that the loss was not three pesos, but six, and that they had not somehow fallen through a hole in his pants, but had been gambled away in a surreptitious game of monte. She had, of course, said nothing, Pedro was angry enough already, and she had learned to keep these certainties to herself. One or two earlier experiences had taught her that mention of them brought only disbelief and annoyance. And the moments came seldom. In all other ways she had been as much like the Torres as possible until the afternoon with La Gertrudis. And she returned to them then because there was no other place to go, but now she was dully unhappy.
According to their separate natures the Torres resented her fierce attempts to keep herself clean. The younger children thought all this washing and combing very tiresome, because Feyita wouldn’t play with them any more. Ramona shrugged her shoulders, said, ‘Hoy por ti, mañana por mi—— You’ll make yourself skinnier than you are already with all this useless work.’
As for Pedro, he openly jeered at the girl. ‘So La Gertrudis has been teaching you some of her lewd tricks. You think to set up business in Burro Alley, no doubt, little fool!’ His attitude did not stem from moral principle, but from resentment toward Gertrudis and her angry refusal to lie with him after she had first moved to the Analco. Actually he thought that it might be a good thing if Fey went out to earn her living in the only way which really paid. But she was still too childish, and who would have her? thought Pedro, eyeing her with distaste. Little bag of bones and those ugly light eyes that stared straight at one. A man wanted warm brown curves to hold, and black eyes that narrowed and beckoned in bold promise. Even Ramona, old and fat as she had become, was better. He turned his sullen, lowering gaze on his wife, who stood by the fireplace as usual, stirring chile with a stick.
He lumbered over to her and, giving her a slap on her backside, grunted to the children, ‘Andale cochinitos! Pronto!’
Without interest they all obeyed this command as they had a hundred times before, and scrambled out of the back room, while Pedro yanked down the goatskin which served imperfectly as curtain over the doorway. Maria and Pepita immediately continued an interrupted squabble in the other room over a ribbon they had found on the Pecos road. Little Juanito pelted away toward the plaza to see a scheduled cockfight. Only Fey understood what was going on in the back room, and a shamed curiosity battled disgust so violent that she ran out to the com patch and, lying flat amongst the tender green stalks, fought off nausea.
After a while the dizziness passed. The sun was warm on her back, and the air was fragrant with juniper and the lighter, fruitful smell of the ripening corn. She sat up and carefully dusted her skirt. I’ve got to get away, she thought. But how and to what? There was no answer.
She turned her head to the east and her eyes fell on Atalaya, the sharp high peak, nearest foothill of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It guarded the town, and in the days before the Spaniards came, the Indians had thought it a sacred mountain; then the Spaniards themselves had used it for a watch-tower. Fey loved the peak; she had often climbed it and found peace and exhilaration on its summit. There from the topmost rock one could look miles across the Rio Grande Valley, and houses in the Barrio Analco, even the whole town of Santa Fe far below, dwindled to the size of massed pebbles. .
I’ll go to Atalaya, thought Fey; perhaps it will tell me what to do. She rose to her knees and this familiar position of worship released a different impulse. Against the neighboring adobe house there grew a carefully cherished hollyhock. Flowers were scarce in Santa Fe, the precious water could not be wasted on ornaments. But the hollyhock had religious sanction, for was it not Saint Joseph’s staff? When the blessed saints were gathered together to see upon which would fall the honor of being spouse to Our Lady, Joseph’s old wooden staff had turned green and burst into flower as a heavenly sign. This staff was the hollyhock, and Fey, looking at the pink blossoms, was reminded of her duty.
Perhaps Saint Joseph would help her. And it was wicked to think of asking Atalaya—a heathen notion worthy only of the unconverted Indians. It was to a padre that she must go.
She wrapped her rebozo around her head and started off across the footbridge for the Parroquia. This chief church of Santa Fe stood a little to the east of the plaza; it was built like a mud fortress surmounted by two pierced towers, and it was Bishop Lamy’s as yet unrealized dream to erect in its place a cathedral worthy of the New Mexican capital. Fey, however, who had never known anything else, admired the Parroquia. She experienced a mystical devoutness in the cool, dark interior. Above the f
lickering points of light in ruby glass, the faces of the saints seemed to smile and welcome her, and the subdued chants mingled with incense to give her a hazy sensual pleasure.
This afternoon a priest whom she did not know was in the confessional, a French padre with a queer name, Etienne. She saw that the ladies who preceded her in line were for the most part ricas. They wore silk which rustled and gave forth waves of perfume; their heads were covered, not by rebozos, but by black lace mantillas, and around their necks gleamed the dull gold of carved crucifixes. Fey shrank nervously, twisting her bare feet under the bench. They didn’t have bare feet; they had kid slippers and fine cotton stockings, and their small plump hands were white as goat’s milk.
The pain and rebellion grew stronger in Fey’s heart. She clasped her hands, fixing beseeching eyes on the image of the Virgin in the far transept. ‘Dear Mother of God,’ she prayed, ‘please let me be like them. Let me have a silk dress and shoes. I want to be somebody.’
The lady ahead of Fey stood up and rustled into the confessional. Fey watched her from the depths of envy and hopelessness. Suddenly she straightened. My own mother was like that, she thought, in a flooding excitement.
She had always vaguely known this, of course, but now for a moment it was real.
The courage it gave her swept her into the confessional, determined to make the padre understand that she must get away from the Barrio Analco.
But Father Etienne’s Spanish was still imperfect; he had spent a weary afternoon straining to understand the venal trivialities murmured at him by the pampered donas this and that. He was tired, and, though he was a conscientious priest, Fey’s incoherent and passionate whispers conveyed nothing to him except that here was a rebellious child, feeling herself misunderstood and wickedly thinking of running away.
