‘Quetzalcoatl is just a living word, for these people, no more. All I want them to do is to find the beginnings of the way to their own manhood, their own womanhood. Men are not yet men in full, and women are not yet women. They are all half and half, incoherent, part horrible, part pathetic, part good creatures. Half arrived. — I mean you as well, Carlota. I mean all the world. — But these people don’t assert any righteousness of their own, these Mexican people of ours. That makes me think that grace is still with them. And so, having got hold of some kind of clue to my own whole manhood, it is part of me now to try with them.’
‘You will fail.’
‘I shan’t. Whatever happens to me, there will be a new vibration, a new call in the air, and a new answer inside some men.’
‘They will betray you. — Do you know what even your friend Toussaint said of you? — Ramón Carrasco’s future is just the past of mankind.’
‘A great deal of it is the past. Naturally Toussaint sees that part.’
‘But the boys don’t believe in you. Instinctively, they disbelieve. Cyprian said to me, when I went to see him: “Is father doing any more of that silly talk about old gods coming back, mother? I wish he wouldn’t. It would be pretty nasty for us if he got himself into the newspapers with it.’“
Ramón laughed.
‘Little boys,’ he said, ‘are like little gramophones. They only talk according to the record that’s put into them.’
‘You don’t believe out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,’ said Carlota bitterly.
‘Why, Carlota, the babes and sucklings don’t get much chance. Their mothers and their teachers turn them into little gramophones from the first, so what can they do, but say and feel according to the record the mother and teacher puts into them? Perhaps in the time of Christ babes and sucklings were not so perfectly exploited by their elders.’
Suddenly, however, the smile went off his face. He rose up, and pointed to the door.
‘Go away,’ he said in a low tone. ‘Go away! I have smelt the smell of your spirit long enough.’
She sat on the bed, spell-bound, gazing at him with frightened, yet obstinate, insolent eyes, wincing from his outstretched arm as if he had threatened to strike her.
Then again the fire went out of his eyes, and his arm sank. The still, far-away look came on his face.
‘What have I to do with it!’ he murmured softly.
And taking up his blouse and his hat, he went silently out on to the terrace, departing from her in body and in soul. She heard the soft swish of his sandals. She heard the faint resonance of the iron door to the terrace, to which he alone had access. And she sat like a heap of ash on his bed, ashes to ashes, burnt out, with only the coals of her will still smouldering.
Her eyes were very bright, as she went to join Kate and Cipriano.
After breakfast, Kate was rowed home down the lake. She felt a curious depression at leaving the hacienda: as if, for her, life now was there, and not anywhere else.
Her own house seemed empty, banal, vulgar. For the first time in her life, she felt the banality and emptiness even of her own milieu. Though the Casa de las Cuentas was not purely her own milieu.
‘Ah, Niña, how good! How good that you have come! Ay, in the night, how much water! Much! Much! But you were safe in the hacienda, Niña. Ah, how nice, that hacienda of Jamiltepec. Such a good man, Don Ramón — isn’t he, Niña? He cares a great deal for his people. And the Señora, ah, how sympathetic she is!’
Kate smiled and was pleasant. But she felt more like going into her room and saying: For God’s sake, leave me alone, with your cheap rattle.
She suffered again from the servants. Again that quiet, subterranean insolence against life, which seems to belong to modern life. The unbearable note of flippant jeering, which is underneath almost all modern utterance. It was underneath Juana’s constant cry. — Niña! Niña!
At meal-times Juana would seat herself on the ground at a little distance from Kate, and talk, talk in her rapid mouthfuls of conglomerate words with trailing, wistful endings: and all the time watch her mistress with those black, unseeing eyes on which the spark of light would stir with the peculiar slow, malevolent jeering of the Indian.
Kate was not rich — she had only her moderate income.
‘Ah, the rich people — !’ Juana would say.
‘I am not rich,’ said Kate.
‘You are not rich, Niña?’ came the singing, caressive bird-like voice: ‘Then, you are poor?’ — this was indescribable irony.
‘No, I am not poor either. I am not rich, and I am not poor,’ said Kate.
‘You are not rich, and you are not poor, Niña!’ repeated Juana, in her bird-like voice, that covered the real bird’s endless, vindictive jeering.
For the words meant nothing to her. To her, who had nothing, could never have anything, Kate was one of that weird class, the rich. And, Kate felt, in Mexico it was a crime to be rich, or to be classed with the rich. Not even a crime, really, so much as a freak. The rich class was a freak class, like dogs with two heads or calves with five legs. To be looked upon, not with envy, but with the slow, undying antagonism and curiosity which ‘normals’ have towards ‘freaks.’ The slow, powerful, corrosive Indian mockery, issuing from the lava-rock Indian nature, against anything which strives to be above the grey, lava-rock level.
‘Is it true, Niña, that your country is through there?’ Juana asked, jabbing her finger downward, towards the bowels of the earth.
‘Not quite!’ said Kate. ‘My country is more there — ’ and she slanted her finger at the earth’s surface.
‘Ah — that way!’ said Juana. And she looked at Kate with a subtle leer, as if to say: what could you expect from people who came out of the earth sideways, like sprouts of camote!
‘And is it true that over there, there are people with only one eye — here!’ Juana punched herself in the middle of her forehead.
‘No. That isn’t true. That is just a story.’
‘Ah!’ said Juana. ‘Isn’t it true! Do you know? Have you been to the country where they are, these people?’
‘Yes,’ said Kate. ‘I have been to all the countries, and there are no such people.’
‘Verdad! Verdad!’ breathed Juana awestruck. ‘You have been to all the countries, and there are no such people! — But in your country, they are all gringos? Nothing but gringos?’
She meant, no real people and salt of the earth like her own Mexican self.
‘They are all people like me,’ said Kate coldly.
‘Like you, Niña? And they all talk like you?’
‘Yes! Like me.’
‘And there are many?’
‘Many! Many!’
‘Look now!’ breathed Juana, almost awestruck to think that there could be whole worlds of these freak, mockable people.
And Concha, that young, belching savage, would stare through her window-grating at the strange menagerie of the Niña and the Niña’s white visitors. Concha, slapping tortillas, was real.
Kate walked down towards the kitchen. Concha was slapping the masa, the maize dough which she bought in the plaza at eight centavos a kilo.
‘Niña!’ she called in her raucous voice. ‘Do you eat tortillas?’
‘Sometimes,’ said Kate.
‘Eh?’ shouted the young savage.
‘Sometimes.’
‘Here! Eat one now!’ And Concha thrust a brown paw with a pinkish palm, and a dingy-looking tortilla, at Kate.
‘Not now,’ said Kate.
She disliked the heavy plasters that tasted of lime.
‘Don’t you want it? Don’t you eat it?’ said Concha, with an impudent, strident laugh. And she flung the rejected tortilla on the little pile.
She was one of those who won’t eat bread: say they don’t like it, that it is not food.
Kate would sit and rock on her terrace, while the sun poured in the green square of the garden, the palm-tree spread its great fans translucent at the
light, the hibiscus dangled great double-red flowers, rosy red, from its very dark tree, and the dark green oranges looked as if they were sweating as they grew.
Came lunch time, madly hot: and greasy hot soup, greasy rice, splintery little fried fishes, bits of boiled meat and boiled egg-plant vegetables, a big basket piled with mangoes, papayas, zapotes — all the tropical fruits one did not want, in hot weather.
And the barefoot little Maria, in a limp, torn, faded red frock, to wait at table. She was the loving one. She would stand by Juana as Juana bubbled with talk, like dark bubbles in her mouth, and she would stealthily touch Kate’s white arm; stealthily touch her again. Not being rebuked, she would stealthily lay her thin little black arm on Kate’s shoulder, with the softest, lightest touch imaginable, and her strange, wide black eyes would gleam with ghostly black beatitude, very curious, and her childish, pock-marked, slightly imbecile face would take on a black, arch, beatitudinous look. Then Kate would quickly remove the thin, dark, pock-marked arm, the child would withdraw half a yard, the beatitudinous look foiled, but her very black eyes still shining exposed and absorbedly, in a rapt, reptilian sort of ecstasy.
Till Concha came to hit her with her elbow, making some brutal, savage remark which Kate could not understand. So the glozing black eyes of the child would twitch, and Maria would break into meaningless tears, Concha into a loud, brutal, mocking laugh, like some violent bird. And Juana interrupted her black and gluey flow of words to glance at her daughters and throw out some ineffectual remark.
The victim, the inevitable victim, and the inevitable victimizer.
The terrible, terrible hot emptiness of the Mexican mornings, the weight of black ennui that hung in the air! It made Kate feel as if the bottom had fallen out of her soul. She went out to the lake, to escape that house, that family.
Since the rains, the trees in the broken gardens of the lake front had flamed into scarlet, and poured themselves out into lavender flowers. Rose red, scarlet and lavender, quick, tropical flowers. Wonderful splashes of colour. But that was all: splashes! They made a splash, like fireworks.
And Kate thought of the blackthorn puffing white, in the early year, in Ireland, and hawthorn with coral grains, in a damp still morning in the lanes, and foxgloves by the bare rock, and tufts of ling and heather, and a ravel of harebells. And a terrible, terrible longing for home came over her. To escape from these tropical brilliancies and meaninglessnesses.
In Mexico, the wind was a hard draught, the rain was a sluice of water, to be avoided, and the sun hit down on one with hostility, terrific and stunning. Stiff, dry, unreal land, with sunshine beating on it like metal. Or blackness and lightning and crashing violence of rain.
No lovely fusion, no communion. No beautiful mingling of sun and mist, no softness in the air, never. Either hard heat or hard chill. Hard, straight lies and zigzags, wounding the breast. No soft, sweet smell of earth. The smell of Mexico, however subtle, suggested violence and things in chemical conflict.
And Kate felt herself filled with an anger of resentment. She would sit under a willow-tree by the lake, reading a Pío Baroja novel that was angry and full of No! No! No! — ich bin der Geist der stets verneint! But she herself was so much angrier and fuller of repudiation than Pío Baroja. Spain cannot stand for No! as Mexico can.
The tree hung fleecy above her. She sat on the warm sand in the shadow, careful not to let even her ankles lie in the biting shine of the sun. There was a faint, old smell of urine. The lake was so still and filmy as to be almost invisible. In the near distance, some dark women were kneeling on the edge of the lake, dressed only in their long wet chemises in which they had bathed. Some were washing garments, some were pouring water over themselves, scooping it up in gourd scoops and pouring it over their black heads and ruddy-dark shoulders, in the intense pressure of the sunshine. On her left were two big trees, and a cane fence, and little straw huts of Indians. There the beach itself ended, and the little Indian plots of land went down to the lake-front.
Glancing around in the great light, she seemed to be sitting isolated in a dark core of shadow, while the world moved in inconsequential specks through the hollow glare. She noticed a dark urchin, nearly naked, marching with naked, manly solemnity down to the water’s edge. He would be about four years old, but more manly than an adult man. With sex comes a certain vulnerability which these round-faced, black-headed, stiff-backed infant men have not got. Kate knew the urchin. She knew his tattered rag of a red shirt, and the weird rags that were his little man’s white trousers. She knew his black round head, his stiff, sturdy march of a walk, his round eyes, and his swift, scuttling run, like a bolting animal.
‘What’s the brat got?’ she said to herself, gazing at the moving little figure within the great light.
Dangling from his tiny outstretched arm, held by the webbed toe, head down and feebly flapping its out-sinking wings, was a bird, a water-fowl. It was a black mud-chick with a white bar across the under-wing, one of the many dark fowl that bobbed in little flocks along the edge of the sun-stunned lake.
The urchin marched stiffly down to the water’s edge, holding the upside-down bird, that seemed big as an eagle in the tiny fist. Another brat came scuttling after. The two infant men paddled a yard into the warm, lapping water, under the great light, and gravely stooping, like old men, set the fowl on the water. It floated, but could hardly paddle. The lift of the ripples moved it. The urchins dragged it in, like a rag, by a string tied to its leg.
So quiet, so still, so dark, like tiny, chubby little infant men, the two solemn figures with the rag of a bird!
Kate turned uneasily to her book, her nerves on edge. She heard the splash of a stone. The bird was on the water, but apparently the string that held it by the leg was tied to a stone. It lay wavering, a couple of yards out. And the two little he-men, with sober steadfastness and a quiet, dark lust, were picking up stones, and throwing them with the fierce Indian aim at the feebly fluttering bird: right down upon it. Like a little warrior stood the mite in the red rag, his arm upraised, to throw the stone with all his might down on the tethered bird.
In a whiff, Kate was darting down the beach.
‘Ugly boys! Ugly children! Go! Go away, ugly children, ugly boys!’ she said on one breath, with quiet intensity.
The round-headed dot gave her one black glance from his manly eyes, then the two of them scuttled up the beach into invisibility.
Kate went into the water, and lifted the wet, warm bird. The bit of coarse fibre-string hung from its limp, greenish, waterfowl’s ankle. It feebly tried to bite her.
She rapidly stepped out of the water and stood in the sun to unfasten the string. The bird was about as big as a pigeon. It lay in her hand with the absolute motionlessness of a caught wild thing.
Kate stooped and pulled off her shoes and stockings. She looked round. No sign of life from the reed huts dark in the shadow of the trees. She lifted her skirts and staggered out barefoot in the hot shallows of the water, almost falling on the cruel stones under the water. The lake-side was very shallow. She staggered on and on, in agony, holding up her skirts in one hand, holding the warm, wet, motionless bird in the other. Till at last she was up to her knees. Then she launched the greeny-black bird, and gave it a little push to the uprearing expanse of filmy water, that was almost dim, invisible with the glare of light.
It lay wet and draggled on the pale, moving sperm of the water, like a buoyant rag.
‘Swim then! Swim!’ she said, trying to urge it away into the lake.
Either it couldn’t or wouldn’t. Anyhow it didn’t.
But it was out of reach of those urchins. Kate struggled back from those stones, to her tree, to her shade, to her book, away from the rage of the sun. Silent with slow anger, she kept glancing up at the floating bird, and sideways at the reed huts of the Indians in the black shadow.
Yes, the bird was dipping its beak in the water, and shaking its head. It was coming to itself. But it did not paddle. It let i
tself be lifted, lifted on the ripples, and the ripples would drift it ashore.
‘Fool of a thing!’ said Kate nervously, using all her consciousness to make it paddle away into the lake.
Two companions, two black dots with white specks of faces, were coming out of the pale glare of the lake. Two mud-chicks swam busily forward. The first swam up and poked its beak at the inert bird, as if to say Hello! What’s up? Then immediately it turned away and paddled in complete oblivion to the shore, its companion following.
Kate watched the rag of feathered misery anxiously. Would it not rouse itself? wouldn’t it follow?
No! There it lay, slowly, inertly drifting on the ripples, only sometimes shaking its head.
The other two alert birds waded confidently, busily among the stones.
Kate read a bit more.
When she looked again, she could not see her bird. But the other two were walking among the stones, jauntily.
She read a bit more.
The next thing was a rather loutish youth of eighteen or so, in overall trousers, running with big strides towards the water, and the stiff little man-brat scuttling after with determined bare feet. Her heart stood still.
The two busy mud-chicks rose in flight and went low over the water into the blare of light. Gone!
But the lout in the big hat and overall trousers and those stiff Indian shoulders she sometimes hated so much was peering among the stones. She, however, was sure her bird had gone.
No! Actually no! The stiff-shoulder lout stooped and picked up the damp thing. It had let itself drift back.
He turned, dangling it like a rag from the end of one wing, and handed it to the man-brat. Then he stalked self-satisfied up the shore.
Ugh! and that moment how Kate hated these people: their terrible lowness, à terre, à terre. Their stiff broad American shoulders, and high chests, and above all, their walk, their prancing, insentient walk. As if some motor-engine drove them at the bottom of their back.
Stooping rather forward and looking at the ground so that he could turn his eyes sideways to her, without showing her his face, the lout returned to the shadow of the huts. And after him, diminutive, the dot of a man marched stiffly, hurriedly, dangling the wretched bird, that stirred very feebly, downwards from the tip of one wing. And from time to time turning his round, black-eyed face in Kate’s direction, vindictively, apprehensively, lest she should swoop down on him again. Black, apprehensive male defiance of the great, white weird female.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 449
