When coffee was served she lit a small cigar then, after she had smoked for a while, she smiled at him and said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask me to dance?’
‘I should love to,’ he gave her an uneasy glance, ‘but I’m afraid I’m not a very good dancer.’
‘I wonder. Have you ever danced with a girl as tall as I am?’
‘No, I don’t think I have; not that I can remember.’
‘Then that may be the answer. Come on; let’s try.’
Chela proved right. Adam was so tall that almost invariably when he was talking to his dancing partners he had to stoop awkwardly over them, which made it difficult for him to steer. But he could hold Chela firmly while still remaining upright and, as they went smoothly round without bumping into people, he really enjoyed a dance for the first time in his life.
Afterwards, out of politeness, he danced with several of the other women in the party; but with them, as usual, his height proved a handicap and both he and his partners were relieved when he could take them back to the table.
Later, he danced with Chela again and when the band stopped she said, ‘It’s a lovely night. Let’s go out for a stroll in the park and look at the stars.’
With a happy laugh he agreed then, after a moment, said a trifle hesitantly, ‘But would it be safe? I mean, in London I wouldn’t take a girl for a walk in Hyde Park after dark. Too many hoodlums about who might cause trouble.’
She smiled at him. ‘With anyone else I would think twice about it. But gangsters keep to their own quarters of the city. At worst, we might come upon some poor wretch made desperate by hunger, and he would not dare attack a big man like you. Wait for me at the entrance while I go to the cloakroom and fetch something to put round my shoulders.’
When she rejoined him he had expected that she would be wearing the beautiful chinchilla coat in which she had arrived at the restaurant. Instead, she had draped round her a voluminous wrap of fine muslin spangled with gold signs of the Zodiac.
‘What a lovely thing,’ he remarked.
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ she laughed. ‘It’s not mine, though. It belongs to one of my friends. I borrowed it because I thought my coat would be too heavy.’
Outside, the night was dark but the sky clear and the stars brilliant. For a while they walked almost in silence, exchanging only an occasional remark. They had taken a side path that wound its way among trees and bushes. Adam could feel his heart hammering. Chela’s hand lay lightly on his arm, he was breathing in the heady scent she was wearing and was intoxicated by her nearness. They had met no-one and the place was so deserted that they might have been alone in another world. He felt an almost irresistible desire to take her in his arms and kiss her. That she had suggested the walk could possibly be taken as an invitation to do so. But until that night they had hardly known each other. Mexicans’ ideas about behaviour might be different from those current in England. Perhaps she looked on him only as a new friend who could be trusted. If he took advantage of their being alone together she might resent it intensely. Then there would be a premature end to this wonderful companionship. He dared not risk that. Yet if he did not seize this chance she might think him only half a man, lose interest in him and never give him another opportunity.
He was still wrestling with the question when he heard a rustle in the bushes behind him. He had only half turned when a ragged figure sprang out with a knife raised high to stab him in the back.
Chela had turned at the same moment. In one swift movement she pulled the muslin wrap from her shoulders and swept it forward so that it entangled the knife and the arm of the man who had been about to stab Adam. Leaping back a pace, Adam raised his fist, lunged forward and hit the man hard in the face. With a loud moan he went over backwards, dropped his knife, rolled sideways, scrambled to his feet and made off into the bushes.
Adam took a stride to go after him, but Chela grabbed his arm and pulled him back. ‘No!’ she exclaimed. ‘Let the poor devil go. If I had been with any other man he would only have demanded money from us. It was because you are so big that he hadn’t the courage to face up to you.’
A little reluctantly Adam said, ‘All right then. But he might have given me a nasty wound. I owe it to your presence of mind that he didn’t, and I’m very grateful. But for that I might now be lying here a bloody mess while you were being raped by that desperado.’
She gave a low laugh. ‘I don’t think so. You see, I was rather hoping that something like this might happen, just to find out how you would behave. And as I had decided before we left the apartment to take you out for a walk, I came prepared for trouble.’ As she spoke she lifted one side of her long, full, satin gown, displaying a lovely, long leg up to the thigh. Strapped to the outside of it was a blue velvet holster containing a small, flat automatic.
‘Good Lord alive!’ Adam exclaimed. ‘Do Mexican girls usually tote guns?’
‘They do when they expect to find themselves faced with unpredictable situations.’
He grinned. ‘I’ve come across ladies who carry guns only in thrillers, and they always keep them in their handbags. I’d have thought they were easier to get at quickly than under a skirt.’
‘On the contrary.’ She had let her skirt fall. Now she slid her hand through a placket hole in its folds above her hip. In a second she had whipped out the small pistol and had him covered with it. Giving him an amused smile, she said, ‘You see. That’s much quicker than having to open a bag.’
He willingly conceded the point, at the same time thinking, ‘What a wicked piece of loveliness. She could have done that before, but she wanted to show me that glorious leg.’
Slipping the pistol back, she went on, ‘Our men nearly always keep a pistol in their cars. Tempers here are quick and there have been occasions when a dispute about the right of the road has been settled by an exchange of bullets.’
With a smile he said, ‘I see I’ve a lot to learn yet about Mexico.’
She made a graceful curtsey. ‘It will be my pleasure, sir, to be your instructress. And now, I think, we will go back to the restaurant.’
Retrieving the long muslin wrap, Adam disentangled the knife from it and put it in his pocket as a souvenir. Then, as he draped the wrap about her, he planted a light kiss on one of her splendid shoulders. She took no exception to that, but at once set off at a walk and began to talk about places she meant to take him to. A quarter of an hour later they rejoined her father’s party.
It was nearly four o’clock in the morning before Adam got to bed. Snuggling down, he sighed with contentment. It had been a marvellous evening, and what a girl Chela was. He had not meant to let himself become entangled again with a woman, but he knew that he had fallen for her, hook, line and sinker. Recently he had thought a lot, with nostalgic longing, about Mirolitlit. But she had been dead for close on a thousand years, whereas Chela was here in Mexico City, alive, warm flesh and blood, and had not disguised her desire to see a lot more of him.
But there was more to it than that. He knew now that, although the physical appearance of the two girls was so different, the indefinable likeness he had sensed between their personalities was not a coincidence. The gesture that Chela had made with her wrap to save him from being knifed was precisely the same as that Mirolitlit had made when saving him from the knife of the Chichimec bearer. Now he had not the least doubt that Chela was a reincarnation of Mirolitlit.
5
Out of the Past
In Spite of the late hour at which Adam got to bed, he had had himself called at nine o’clock because it had been arranged that Chela should call for him at eleven. A swim in the pool on the ground floor of the hotel thoroughly revived him and he breakfasted heartily off an omelette, delicious hot, white rolls and tropical fruit. Then, dressed in a smart grey, lightweight suit of terylene and worsted, he went down to face the day, bursting with renewed vitality.
Chela was only half an hour late. She arrived in a long, low, open car, dressed in primrose tweeds a
nd wearing over her hair a bright-red scarf, the ends of which streamed out behind her. As he climbed into the car, he said gaily:
‘I hope you’ve got your gun; because I’ve a hunch that you plan to drop me off among a gang of Mexican bandits, just to watch my reactions, and I’m not used to dealing with that sort of situation.’
‘Not today,’ she laughed. ‘We’ll save that for later, when you are a little more acclimatised.’
Turning out of the Reforma, she took another six-lane motorway, the Avenida Insurgentes, which led south to Acapulco. Adam had never owned a car until two months earlier he had bought his Jaguar and hired a chauffeur-valet to drive it. That had been a very pleasant experience; but here, in the centre of Mexico City, he found driving with anyone terrifying. Unlike many modern cities, it did not consist mainly of parallel streets enclosing square blocks, but had many focal points from which, like the rays of a star, the streets led in all directions, cutting across others at sharp angles. There were innumerable traffic lights, the working of which it was difficult to decipher, and, very frequently, the Mexicans ignored them. They seemed, too, to be a speed-crazed people; for, in their determination to get ahead, they constantly left one line of traffic without warning, to cut in across the front of a car in another. The number of cars with bent bumpers and dented sides testified to the very real danger of entering this packed mechanical jungle.
Wedged in the fast-moving stream, his fear tempered only by admiration, Adam sat tight as Chela drove with superb self-confidence, at never less than forty and sometimes up to eighty miles an hour, past heavily-laden lorries and other less speedy vehicles. Then, as they approached a great complex of lofty buildings, she slowed down and said:
‘This is our University City. It occupies five hundred and fifty acres of what was formerly waste land; over a hundred and fifty of our best architects and engineers worked for four years to build it, and it cost three hundred million pesos.’
Adam could well believe that, as they ran slowly past block after block of steel and glass suspended, apparently miraculously, on rows of tall, slender concrete pillars. Facing the campus was the fifteen-storey administrative building, to one side of it the thousand-foot-long Arts Centre and on the other the huge library, its solid walls covered in intricate designs in colourful mosaic, symbolically depicting the rise of Mexican culture from the earliest times. There was a vast stadium, squash and tennis courts, swimming pools, car parks to hold thousands of vehicles, all interspersed with gardens, lakes and wooded areas.
‘Your students are lucky,’ Adam remarked, ‘and with their every need catered for like this, they can hardly fail to do well.’
Chela made a grimace. ‘They could, if they gave all their time to study; but like students everywhere these days they waste a large part of it getting themselves steamed up about politics.’
‘I’d have thought that, with a one-party government, that would not have been allowed. Or are a lot of them anti-the-bomb-ers?’
‘No. The bomb has not yet become a sufficient threat to Mexico for them to concern themselves about that. I was referring to university politics. You see, in 1929 the passion for making everything democratic led to a decree that half the governing body of the University should be elected by the faculty and the other half by the students; and the governors were given the power to hire or fire any professor. That meant that all the professors became dependent on the goodwill of their students. If one of them was accused of inefficiency by a pupil he had to defend himself; and if he wanted promotion he had to go canvassing. Naturally, some students favoured one prof, and others another. Every time there is an election books are thrown aside, scores of impassioned speeches are made and the campus often becomes a battlefield.’
While Chela had been talking she was driving north-east-ward away from the University and soon they entered the district of El Pedregal. It was an area many square miles in extent that, until quite recently, had been entirely desolate; old lava flow. Now its uneven waves of stone had disappeared, large quantities of it having been cut into blocks to build several hundred houses. But this was no ordinary housing estate. Each house differed: some were in the old colonial style, others of the large villa type and others again fantastic creations by the most advanced architects of the day. All stood in at least an acre of garden that had been expensively landscaped, had swimming pools, sun parlours, tennis courts or rockeries and were gay with newly-planted flowering trees and shrubs. Adam estimated that in England these delightful properties would have cost their owners anything from thirty to sixty thousand pounds.
‘Here,’ Chela remarked, ‘you see how some of our rich live. Later, I will take you to see where the poor struggle to survive.’
Her tone was decidedly acid and Adam was both interested and a little surprised to find that the lovely, wealthy playgirl should concern herself with such matters. After a moment, he said:
‘I had the idea that Mexico was a Welfare State?’
‘In a way it is; but only in a way that our clever government has devised to keep itself in power. There are other housing estates unlike this one. They are only row upon row of little four-room bungalows, but they have electricity and modern sanitation, so they are palaces compared to the places in which most of the people who have them used to live. Many of them—families of six or eight—used to be crammed into a two-room tenement without even water laid on. The people who get these bungalows pay only a nominal rent, so they are in clover. But they are very carefully selected, and it is no use applying for one unless you are a white-collar worker, a tradeunion official or a schoolmaster. Can you guess why?’
‘I think so,’ Adam replied. ‘It is because it is always the underpaid Civil Servants, self-educated mechanics and that type of man who create revolutions.’
‘You’ve got it. The really poor and the ignorant masses are helpless without leaders; so the government suborns the class that might give them trouble by pandering to it.’
‘That is certainly a cynical attitude, but I don’t suppose they could afford to house anything like the number of families that need better homes. And at least it is a start in the right direction. Things will improve as time goes on.’
She shrugged. ‘I doubt it. Mexico has always been a land of extraordinary contrasts. Vast areas of barren useless land and occasional valleys rich in fertility. The very rich and the very poor. In the cities there has never been such wealth as there is today, but in purchasing power the peasants earn less than they did a generation ago. Their state is pitiful; but they will never be better off until they have been organised to bring about a real revolution.’
The car had been heading back westwards towards the University City. Passing through the northern outskirts, Chela drove on into an entirely different district of narrow, cobbled lanes and big old houses behind high stone walls.
‘This,’ she said, ‘is San Angel. Many wealthy families of Spanish descent have had their homes here for generations. I’m taking you to an old monastery which is now a restaurant. It is very good and lots of people drive out here for lunch.’
A few minutes later they pulled up and went into the building. The spacious restaurant was crowded with well-dressed people and a big centre table was loaded with cold dishes and delicacies of every kind. They went through to a courtyard, the walls of which were covered with jasmine, passion-vines and bougainvillaea, had drinks there and afterwards ate a meal the cost of which would have fed a poor family for a fortnight. As Adam paid the bill he wondered if Chela ever gave such extravagance a thought. But he was enjoying himself too much to concern himself about that.
Afterwards she drove him back to his hotel, dropped him there and said that she had engagements she had made before they met for that evening, but would call for him at the same time the next day.
That evening he went again to the Anthropological Museum, which was open until ten o’clock, and gazed fascinated at a number of the ancient Toltec exhibits that seemed so familiar to
him, then he had a light meal in the hotel and went early to bed.
The following morning Chela drove him northwards through the city to show him one of the government housing estates, then on for twenty-odd miles to Teotihuacán, the ceremonial capital of the Toltecs, from which they had been driven late in the tenth century.
It was the largest centre of religion that the world has ever known: eight square miles of courts and pyramids dominated by those of the Moon and the Sun, the latter being in bulk and area even larger than the great pyramid of Egypt.
They parked the car outside the museum with its adjacent wings of shops that sold every variety of Indian antique and souvenir, then spent two hours walking round the ruins. Up to the Pyramid of the Moon there was a broad mile-long open space with rows of ruins on either side, from the steps of which many thousands of spectators must have watched the colourful processions of befeathered priests and nobles.
Grouped about the foot of the big pyramid were several smaller ones, connected by little courts and passages. At the entrance to this maze they engaged a guide who explained to Adam that the pyramids consisted of many layers, as their builders had believed that every fifty-second year the world entered a new cycle, they had encased the pyramid in a new covering of stone blocks, making its area and height ever greater.
On one side of the pyramid an excavation had been made showing all these layers and, descending a ramp, they passed through a narrow gallery off which there were a number of small, dark rooms deep in the base of the giant structure. The guide said that they had been used for storing treasure, but, as Adam peered into one of them, he was suddenly almost overcome by an attack of nausea. He felt certain they were cells and that in an earlier incarnation he had been imprisoned in one of them. The memory of the fears that had afflicted him during that terrible experience brought him out in a cold sweat. Half choking, he muttered to Chela that he was suffering from claustrophobia; then pushed past her, stumbled up two flights of broken stone stairs and out into the sunlight. It was not until he had been breathing in the fresh air for some moments that he ceased trembling and managed to pull himself together.
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