A Heart for the Gods of Mexico

by Conrad Aiken

  “It’s very beautiful English!”

  “And you may not know it, but the Passion Flower, or Maypop—don’t you like Maypop?—was selected by the State Horticultural Society of Tennessee as its representative flower. It bears a fruit as large as an egg and very sweet, whose taste pleases exceedingly or repels very strongly.”

  “Well, which?”

  “And surely the sunflower can’t be, as it says here, the only genuine American flower——what about goldenrod, Noni? what about Indian pipes? what about the lady’s slipper——?”

  “Just the same, it’s a very pretty plate, and I like the magnolias, even if they do look like water lilies——”

  She was smiling down at the plate, her two hands laid at either side of it, she was smiling, but now she was looking very tired, very white, and it seemed odd that Gil should not have noticed it—or had he? It was absurd, the whole thing was crazy, saving money like this—sitting up all night for three nights—just in order that she might die, and perhaps even hastening it by the very economy. It was cruel. And it was not the less cruel for being self-imposed by Noni herself. He said:

  “And now it’s San Anton. And then it’s Laredo. And then it’s Mexico. All I can say is I hope to God there’ll be a letter from Hambo telling us how to get there, and all about the lawyers. And gosh, how I wish we spoke Spanish! Noni, if you’d only spent less time on Bach and more on education——”

  They finished the Scotch: they finished the bourbon. The paper cups leaked, even when doubled and trebled, they fell from the window sills and rolled on the floor, to be swept up by the porter with a reproachful eye. “The Megha Duta is throughout in the measure called Mandakranta, from the word ‘Manda,’ slow, and ‘kram,’ advance; in fact, it may be rendered by ‘Slow Coach’ in English. The following is the extract above alluded to: ‘If the four first syllables at the beginning of the verse (O thou sweet lotus-smelling little flirt), then the tenth, eleventh, and afterwards the two which come after the twelfth, and the two others which are last, are long, with a caesura after the fourth, sixth, seventh syllables, the best poets (my plump little darling), call it a MANDAKRANTA.’” A Mandakranta to Mexico, Noni said, a winding Mandakranta. And what sentences! “The women there are with the lotus in the hand.… In the locks is interlaced the new-blown jasmine; the beauty of the face is colored a pale white with the pollen-bearing Lodra; the fresh Kuravaka is twined in the luxuriant hair; behind the pretty ear is placed the Sarisha; and, at the hair-parting, the Nipas, which spring up at thy approach.… Where, having women for companions, the Yakshas revel on palace terraces inlaid with precious stones, so bright with stones indeed that they look as if they were paved with flowers; where, in the starlight, they grow drunk on the aphrodisiac juice of the kalpa tree, while drums, soft and deep as thine, are gently beaten; there—O Cloud!—by the Mandara blossoms fallen from the hair in agitation, by the golden lotus broken in pieces and dropped from the ear, by the pearls on their bright breasts, and the necklaces, at the rising of the sun are disclosed the nightly ways of loving women.… In vain do they, covered with shame, throw a handful of churna on the jewel lamps with lofty flames.…”

  “When you take a taxi in Mexico City, you say toston to the driver and you get it for half price——”

  “Must be a superstition——”

  “And the Hotel Canada, or there’s another cheap one, near the station——”

  “Maybe they’ll meet us——?”

  “In the month of the diminishing of waters! Isn’t that nice? The month of the diminishing of waters. A procession of priests with music of flutes and trumpets, carrying on plumed litters infants with painted faces, in gay clothing, with colored paper wings, to be sacrificed on the mountains or in a whirlpool in the lake. It is said that the people wept as they passed by; but if so——”

  “Mounted the stairs, breaking an earthenware flute against each step——”

  “Then seized by the priests, his heart torn out, and held up to the sun, his head spitted on the tzompantli——”

  “Tzompantli?”

  “Tzompantli. My God, what a people; the whole land bathed in blood——!”

  The flat lands, the cotton lands, mule teams on the long flat roads, cotton gins and cotton warehouses, and the interminable fields, stretching away to the sea, the gulf, the waters of the barracuda and the sea trout—time became a meaningless embroidery which unfolded and folded again its gliding greens and grays, a bizarre arrangement of light and sound. Noni was asleep with her cheek against the windowpane; Noni was awake, and holding a book, but without seeing it; Noni was coming back slowly along the littered aisle with a paper drinking cup held steadily in her hand against the lurch of the car. At San Anton, when they crossed the platform to the funny new little train, with its Jim Crow car, she walked painfully, slowly, with her hand against her side; she was biting her lips. At Laredo, after dark, he turned again, as they carried the bags forward to the Mexican car, to see with what careful slowness she followed them, the feeble ceiling lights emphasizing the hollows under her eyes, her hand resting on each chair back in turn as she entered the new world. Mexico! And then the sudden squalling and chattering rush of Indians into the dirty car, the slamming of bags and boxes, the overturning of chair backs, the human uprush as of a dark current from the underworld, inimical, violent, and hot—and Noni lying back indifferent and inert in her corner, but as if somehow really pleased—her face now a little flushed again—and after a little the inspection of the Tourist Cards——

  Whoooo—whoooo—whoo—whoo——!

  The train cried as it climbed, its voice whirling through the brown and blood-soaked sierras of this dark nocturnal Spain. At every station—Anahuac—Lampazos—Villaldama—the lighted platforms were crowded, swarming, violent with fruit vendors, vendors of cakes, trays of green leaves on which were small messes of food, trays of little pottery jugs, trays of drinks; the aisle of the car became jammed with purposeless going and coming, suitcases and boxes were shoved out of hastily opened windows, dramatic and feverish farewells were taken, tearful farewells, groups of soiled men hurrying forward to the crowded car ahead, where drinks seemed to be sold, and then the prolonged shrilling of the conductor’s whistle, the sudden laughing stampede of visitors out of the car, vying with one another to see which could be the last to get off, as the train once more gathered speed for its climb into the mountain darkness. Sleep was out of the question—sleep was the last thing any of these Indians would think of, when they had the good fortune to ride on anything so exciting as a train. The conversations on all sides rose at times positively to a scream, as if the idea were to dominate, if possible, the sound of the train itself, or at any rate to assist it in conquering the dreadful silence of the wilderness that lay outside. Derisive and demoniacal laughter, full of fierce and abandoned hatred, the pride of pridelessness, the arrogance of the self-condemned; and the often-turning reptile-lidded eyes, which slowly and malevolently scrutinized the three strange Americans, the gringos—with what a loving and velvety pansy-darkness of murderousness they glowed at these natural victims! How they laughed for pure hate of this helpless and comical and so naked but nevertheless so dangerous awareness! They looked and laughed, looked and laughed again, openly, softly, mockingly, with every hope of reducing the interchange as quickly as possible to that level of frank enmity in which the more quickly and absorbedly animal of the two natures would have all the advantage. Gil was already angry and distressed, he blushed and stared back, he had become acutely self-conscious. Ah, the advantage of being a Jew, dark-skinned and impervious, as inscrutable in its way as this Indian darkness——! More so, in fact; for it was a fluid and directible thing, could flow around and into any other kind of awareness, like the starfish on the oyster. But what about Noni? What about poor Noni? This violence of life, this sheer violence——

  The Indian girl who sat stiffly beside him, in her pink cotton blouse, with her hands folded on the dirty wicker basket, wa
s careful not to touch him, leaned carefully away from him, and pretended elaborately not to be looking, but nevertheless eyed the timetable (which he had opened once more) with obvious fascination. And especially the outline map, which gave in profile the altitudes from Laredo to Mexico City. They had already, it seemed, been climbing mountains; but this as yet was nothing, absolutely nothing. Nobody had warned them about it—not a soul. At Monterey they would be almost half a mile up; by morning, they would be a mile. As drawn on the little map, the ascent from Monterey to Saltillo was practically perpendicular, it was up a precipice. And Mexico City itself a mile and a half above sea level—but wasn’t this bad for a bad heart? Had nobody warned Noni? Not even the doctor? It seemed impossible that no one should have thought to tell her. But then, perhaps everybody, like himself, had simply not stopped to think. One thought of Mexico as a jungle; and if one thought of mountains, too, one didn’t think of them as anything very formidable. Or, if high, as not having the ordinary attributes of height.… Was that it?…

  At Monterey, the car half empty—everybody having rushed out to the platform to eat and drink, and the Indian girl gone with her basket, after a last long inquisitorial stare for the purpose of storing her memory—Gil came wearily, sat sidelong, turning the unshaven blond face, the heavy eyes. It was like a dream; he must have been asleep; for a moment he couldn’t listen to what Gil was saying. A half starved dog hurried along the aisle, foraging. A pretty blonde girl, a Mexican, had sat down opposite, and the smart young man with the cowboy hat had quite obviously and unnecessarily taken the seat beside her to pick her up.

  “—a little alarmed!”

  “What?”

  “—frightened. Had you known of anything?…”

  “No, Gil! What do you mean?”

  “Just after we changed at San Antonio, she said. I knew there was something—she was such a long time in the lavatory—and perhaps you didn’t notice—I think you were in the smoking car—but when she came back she looked like the very devil, she was white as a sheet, and she seemed to be weak and in pain. And ever since, have you noticed——”

  “I thought at Laredo she walked—when we were coming from the other car forward to this one, you know—in a rather odd way——”

  “Yes.”

  Gil’s face was drawn, tired; he was nodding quite unnecessarily, without meaning; suddenly it was impossible not to feel very sorry for him. The fatigue had somehow emphasized the essential goodness of Gil’s face; he had time to think, vaguely and quickly, that of course it was this that Noni loved, this essential helplessness. He was like a child.

  “But I don’t suppose it could be anything serious? Have you talked to her about it, Gil?”

  “I asked her if there was anything wrong; yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Frankly, Blom, I thought she was a little evasive. It’s that that scared me. She just said she was tired, and that perhaps it had upset her a little——”

  He stopped, as if himself so tired that he could hardly remember what he was saying, or give it the importance he remembered its deserving. He was frowning down at the fingernails of his left hand, and the onyx signet ring on the fourth finger.

  “Has she been sleeping?”

  “Yes, a little.”

  “I daresay she’ll be all right. You know, we’re climbing very fast, and that might affect her—it does some people.”

  “Oh. That might be. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  He looked unconvinced. A little.

  “Well, don’t worry. It won’t be long now!”

  “No, it won’t be long now.”

  And he was gone again, smiling faintly; and the train was once more pouring itself through space; or no, not that, but climbing, crying and climbing, climbing snail-like up the face of the rock of night, climbing moonlike up the smooth mirror of the sky. The blonde girl had withdrawn as near to the window as she could get, shrinking angrily away from the young man in the cowboy hat, who was looking down at her knees. Behind them, in the two corner seats, facing each other, three Indian women with babies talked in a steady birdlike rush of Spanish, a shrill and endless flood of sound, punctuated now and then with screams of laughter. Nobody wanted to sleep, there would never be any sleep again. He tried his legs to one side, then to the other, the feet wedged down against the footrail, his forehead pressed into the corner of the windowpane, the vibration of the warm glass deep in the bone, deep in the very brain. Whoooo-whooooo-whoo-whoo—the powerful oil-burning engine was shouting again for a crossing—but what crossing, save the eagle’s, could there possibly be here? Or the cloud’s? Or the buzzard’s? The blonde girl had said something: very short and severe. The young man had said something: very ingratiating and suggestive, apologetic. The sleeve of Noni’s blue jacket was dangling over the edge of the rack, empty, like the sleeve of a one-armed man, a mute protest at horror and injustice, and Gil’s fair head was just visible, the top of it, over the back of the seat. The man with the tray of beer bottles again: he seemed to be semiofficial. The young man bought one, drank the beer out of the bottle: the blonde girl stared out of the window with fiercely averted face. Monterey to Saltillo—a half mile straight upward, as the crow flies; and after that it was practically child’s play, of course, to get to Mexico City. And with all these sinister looking Indians, too, these lynx-eyed cut-throats, looking at Noni like that, with that look that stripped a woman down to sex and nothing else, exactly as you’d flay a fox! Jesus! What madness it had been, how in God’s name had they ever dreamed they could do it, and what an astonishing thing that as if by a sort of instinct Noni should have projected herself—with her consciousness of death, death as immediate as a hand at the throat—into a scene of such basic fertility and filth and cruel vitality! There was something terribly right in it; it was a marriage. A marriage of what? The beer man again, he seemed now a little drunk, or was it the train only; and then he was gone and back again, and again gone.… And Noni was saying, close at hand, her voice so close to his ear that it might have been, but wasn’t, a dream:

  “Are you awake, Blom dear?”

  She was leaning toward him, her two hands (one on top of the other) resting in the arm of his seat, the gold braids across the top of her head shining in the pale lamplight. For a moment they looked at each other without a word, motionless, Noni still leaning on the arm of the seat, himself turning his face from the corner where his head still rested against the window; an exchange oddly serene and unsearching, as if they had not bothered even to assume expressions, expressions of any sort. There was no guard up between them, there never had been; and it was like Noni, now, to let him see, for all her serenity, and the faint beginnings of an affectionate smile, the trace of beginning tears as well.

  “Yes, Noni,” he said, “sit down.”

  “I will, for a little. Gil’s fast asleep. I’m glad.”

  “Yes, he was looking all in. And what about you, my lamb?”

  “Oh, I’m all right.”

  “No, Noni.”

  “Yes, Blom.”

  Sitting beside him, with her fair head turned calmly toward him, she smiled as if with an extraordinary and quite deliberate sense of security, and put her hand on his. How ill she looked, he thought—he noted all the physical signs, one after another, at the same time thinking how little it matters, when one loves, whether the known face looks ill or well. That she looked ill, in fact, even perhaps deepened his feeling for her, sharpened his feeling of what was essential in her. The bracelet of bright hair about the bone! He said, firmly:

  “You’re a bad liar! Gil told me.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That you were ill after the change at San Antonio.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “Noni!”

  “No, really, Blom, it was nothing.”

  “Noni, you aren’t telling me the truth.”

  “It was all right, Blom, dear, it was only a little one—and I have somethin
g I can take—no Blom, truly, it wasn’t bad——!”

  She had clutched his hand, she was shaking it almost fiercely, as if it were of passionate importance that she should convince him. And she was laughing a little in a way that he didn’t like at all, hurried and anxious, breathless, a little insincere. He said:

  “Tell me, please, Noni—was this the first?”

  She drew back a little, was still for a second or two, her eyes all the while on his—he noted now how wide and dark were the pupils—then very slowly, and almost imperceptibly, she shook her head. She withdrew her hand, folded it with the other in her lap. At once, awkwardly, he patted her knee, smiling, and said:

  “All right, darling; that’s all I want to know. I don’t want to know a thing more about it, or a thing more than you want, of course, to tell me; all I want to feel sure of—and absolutely sure, confound you!—is that you’ll let me and Gil take all the strain off you that we possibly can. That’s understood.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And now what about holding my hand, like the naughty gal you are, and trying to get a little nap. And if I snore, I give you permission to leave me flat.”

  “That would be lovely. Yes.”

  “Incidentally, I told Gil——”

  “What?”

  “That it was the altitude. Quite forgetting that at San Antonio there wasn’t any altitude! And incidentally, what about the altitude?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It won’t matter.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, go to sleep. In two hours, we’ll be at Saltillo. And in the twinkling of an eye——”

  “At Mexico City!”

  “How’d you guess it! Sleep tight!”

  “Good night.”

  She gave him her hand and settled herself, leaning just a little against his arm and shoulder, he saw that she had put her head back and closed her eyes, her other hand lay relaxed and half open on her knee, stirring a little with the everlasting motion of the train. Time with a hundred hands, time with a thousand mouths! The blonde girl had again said something short and severe to the young man in the cowboy hat: the young man in the cowboy hat had again said something apologetic and insinuating to the blonde girl. Blah—blah—blah—blah. What is man that thou art mindful of him? And was it today or yesterday that he had written to Clint? Far away and long ago; way back there in Arkansas. And now Noni was in Mexico, Noni was climbing the great circle to the mountain altar, Noni was trying to sleep in this infernal clamor of confusion and speed, while her hand lay in his, warm and alive. What was she thinking? She lay at peace beside him, of that he was certain; she was happy with Gil and himself, happy to be doing what she was doing. And perhaps that was all that mattered. But did she think about it at all? Did she take the trouble or the time to formulate it? No, she was allowing herself, simply—he felt absolutely sure of this—to be carried like a leaf down the torrent, lost herself in the last swift rush of living, without terror or gratitude, as also without forethought: with nothing, in fact, but a kind of pure acceptance. She was living—and the thought made him tighten ever so gently his hold on the hand that lay in his own—she was living—as how few people dare!—her death. She was living her own death.…