Ashley, except for Dr. van Domelen, was the youngest in the club room. It gave the twenty-two engineers pleasure to look down on his youth, to raise their eyebrows knowingly at his beginner’s enthusiasm and enterprise, and to sneer at the duties he performed. They regarded him as the “housekeeper.” He was one degree above the Chinese cook.
Why did the men remain at Rocas Verdes? At the turn of the century mines all over the world were advertising frantically for engineers. Nineteen months later, when the great friendship had begun, Ashley put the question to Mrs. Wickersham.
“Well, mining engineers are an odd lot. They love ore and nothing else. They may think that they love the wealth that it promises to bring them, but no! they love the metal. They love the act of extracting it from the groaning, shrieking mountain. Now, Rocas Verdes is a small mine; it’s at a killing altitude, but . . . ? the copper there is the best quality in all the Andes. Your friends up there are sour men, Mr. Tolland, but they’re proud in their very guts to be working in a mine that produces beautiful stuff. Everyone in the world strains to be associated with what’s best in its kind. It’s a miners’ mine. Dr. MacKenzie is known throughout the Andes as having a wonderful sense for knowing where the bloody copper is hidden and how to get it out. He could be governor of El Teniente, if he wanted to be; but he likes it at Rocas Verdes. Mining engineers are an odd lot; they like it to be difficult. Mr. Tolland, at my own table I’ve seen men behave in Dr. MacKenzie’s presence as though they were self-conscious schoolboys in their first corduroy pants—and they were earning four and five times what he does. They work in vast millionaires’ mines. They have wives and children with them, and butlers, and hot shower baths—”
“We have hot shower baths now, Mrs. Wickersham.”
“And whiskey-and-sodas. But they’re not really miners any more. They’re merely bookkeepers. Their mines run like shoe factories. A true miner is taciturn, unsocial, single-minded. Generally, their wives have left them, as Dr. MacKenzie’s did. Mind you, they don’t know all these things. They think they’re like other men, only better. Just as they deceive themselves about the money in it. Notice how clever your company is—automatically raising a man’s salary every four years. It’s like a bundle of hay in front of a donkey’s nose. It gives him the illusion of getting rich. In my opinion, the real reason why the men stay there is because it’s the aristocrat of mines; it’s so damned unendurable, detestable, and impossible; and the copper’s first class.”
There was everywhere evidence of his predecessor’s sloth. By the end of the second week he had cleaned the kitchen and improved the system supplying hot water. He made a friend of the cook and interested himself in the peculiarities of kitchen chemistry at high altitudes. He busied himself with doors and windows in the engineers’ huts. He was again improvising as he had done in Coaltown. He turned over old lumber and broken chairs and perforated saucepans and rejected blankets. Presumably his predecessor had been shy of requesting material from the Antofagasta office. No Ashley was ever shy. John Ashley’s monthly letters to Andrew Smith were filled with varied demands and the material began ascending the mountains. The men had been fed on salt pork and corned beef. He obtained permission to order meat and vegetables from Manantiales—a possibility that had not presented itself to sloth. Apples and pineapples appeared on the table. Araucanian rugs replaced Manchester drugget.
He was happiest in the miners’ villages, the Chilean and the Indian. The assistants assigned to him were Bolivian Indians. He was invited to the christening of a daughter. After the banquet he asked to see the mother and child again. This was not in the customs of the tribe, but the mother and baby were brought before him. He had not held an infant in his arms for fifteen years, but his fatherhood was patent.
Dr. van Domelen was seldom called to the native villages, least of all to the Indians’. They were stoical by nature and possessed their own means of relieving extreme pain. Illness and death were less intimidating than his potions, his gleaming instruments, the brandy on his breath, and the contempt in his eyes. He had two children in the Indian village; their mother glided into his hut when he hung a lamp over his door.
Ashley saw signs of rickets. Though it was not in his province, he ordered cod liver oil from Andrew Smith by telegraph. He received permission—Indian life is surrounded with all the formality of a Spanish court—to enter their homes. He pondered ventilation, diet, and sanitation. He recommended and rebuked. In the lanes:
“Buenos, Antonio!”
“Buenos, Don Jaime!”
“Buenos, Tecla!”
“Buenos, Don Jaime!”
“Ta-hili, Xebu!”
“Ta-hili, Clez-u!”
“Ta-hili, Bexa-Mi!”
“Ta-hili, Clez-u!”
Time did what Ashley asked of it: It sped. Mrs. Hodge had said, “Seven years.”
The engineers hated him. No word of appreciation was ever expressed for the improvements he had brought about in their living conditions. He was undermining the somber pleasure they derived from the rigor of their existence. They begrudged the hours when he descended into the mines in his effort to learn their profession. He seldom joined their card games after dinner, nor did Dr. MacKenzie. The managing director rose from table, bowed formally to the men, wished them good night, and went to his hut. He alone on the mountain had a hobby. He was a reader and read far into the night. He ordered the books from Princes Street, Edinburgh; they came to him around the Horn or were carried by railroad across the fens of Panama. He was interested in the religions of the ancient world. He read the Bible in Hebrew, The Book of the Dead in French, the Koran in German. He knew some Sanskrit. His days were filled with thoughts of copper, his nights with the comforting or terrifying visions of mankind. He was old and ugly, but on closer view and longer acquaintance less old and ugly than he first appeared to be. His nose had been broken, perhaps several times; he limped; his eyes and mouth were severe, but occasionally surprised the observer with some expression of deeply buried mirth or irony. He watched all the men; he watched Ashley.
One afternoon he returned to his hut to find Ashley cleaning the flue of his fireplace.
“Ah! Good afternoon, Tolland.”
“Good afternoon, Dr. MacKenzie. These briquets clog up a flue in no time.”
“Yes . . . ? yes . . . ? eh, Tolland, what are those tin sheets you’ve put up beside the latrines?”
“Well, sir, I’ve been thinking about solar heat. I’ve been trying to direct some rays on those spurs of ice—might fill a washing trough for the women in the village. The water would freeze overnight, but we could take an axe to it when the sun’s up.”
“Yes . . . ? hmm . . . ? I think I remember an article about collecting solar heat in some old engineering journals I have. I’ll look it up. Come around after dinner tonight. Bring a cup with you and we’ll make some tea.”
That was the first of many cups of tea in Dr. MacKenzie’s hut. These visits were an administrative error on his part and he knew it. The engineers respected their managing director as much as they hated one another. His hospitality to Ashley was without precedent. They were jealous.
One night during his sixth month on the hill, Ashley learned that a child had died in the Chilean village. On the previous evening there had been a small celebration of some miner’s name day. The women and children had sat crowded together in one corner of the hut while the men drank chicha. The ban on alcohol brought some measure of interest into the miners’ lives. During the singing and dancing and horseplay a gourd of hot chicha had been spilled over Martín Ramírez’s week-old son. Dr. van Domelen had worked over the baby for several hours in vain. Ashley knew the parents and went to their two-family hut. He knocked at the door and entered. There were five or six women in the room, their shawls over their heads, and some children. All the men in the village were away at work, except Martín Ramírez, who sat in a corner, more angry than sorrowful. Babies die every day. Women’s fuss. The baby lay on the floor
wrapped in his mother’s coat.
“Buenos!”
There was a murmur of greeting from the women and children. Ashley stood with his back to the door waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the half-light. Soundlessly the visitors left the room to him, leaving the parents, and one old woman. He pressed a greeting from the father.
“Buenos, Martín!”
“Buenos, Don Jaime!”
“Come and sit here, Ana.” Ana was a mere girl. She had long since lost the use of one eye. Timidly she sat down on the bed beside him. “What’s the little boy’s name?”
“Señor . . . ? the priest has not been here. He has no name.”
The priest came once a fortnight or once a month from the larger mines to the north.
“Yes, but he has a name. You know his name.”
“. . . ? e . . . ? e . . . ?” Ana’s eye moved hesitantly toward her husband. “I think . . . ? Martín.” She began to tremble. “Señor, he is not a Christian.”
Ashley remembered that Latin Americans barely hear what is said to them unless one touches them with one’s hand. He put his fingers lightly on her wrist and spoke with surprise and reproach. “But, Ana, my daughter! You don’t believe such foolish things!”
She glanced up at him quickly.
“Your Martinito has not sinned!”
“No! No, señor.”
“You—Ana! You are not going to tell me that God-the-Eternal punishes babies who have not sinned!”
She did not answer.
“Didn’t you hear that the Holy Pope in Rome went up to his golden chair and said to the whole world that that was a very wrong thought? He said that God was sorrowful that anyone would believe a thing like that.” Ashley went on at some length about this. Ana’s eye was fixed upon his face. Ashley was smiling. “Martinito is not here, Ana.”
“Where is he, señor?”
“In happiness.” Ashley held out his hands as though he were holding a baby. “In the greatest happiness.”
Ana murmured something.
“What are you saying, mi hija?”
“He could not speak. His eyes were open, but he could not speak.”
“Ana, I have four children. I know all about babies. You know that they can speak to us—to us fathers and mothers. You know that.”
“Yes, señor . . . ? He said, ‘Why?’”
Ashley put his hand firmly on her wrist. “You are right. He said, ‘Why?’ And he said something else, too.”
“What, señor?”
“‘Remember me!’”
Ana became very agitated. She said quickly, “Oh, señor, I shall never forget Martinito, never, never.”
“We do not know why we suffer. We do not know why millions and millions of people suffer. But we know one thing. You have suffered. Only those who have suffered ever come to have a heart that is wise.”
“What, señor?”
He repeated the words in a low voice. Ana looked about the room, lost. She had understood Don Jaime up to that point. But this idea was too difficult to grasp. Ashley went on. “You will have other children—boys and girls. You will become an old woman. And someday your children and your grandchildren will be all around you on your name day. They will say, ‘Mamita Ana, you treasure!’ ‘Mamita Ana, tu de oro!’ and you will remember Martinito. The only people in the world who are really loved—really loved, Ana—are those with hearts that are wise. You will not forget Martinito?”
“No, señor.”
“You will never forget Martinito?”
“Never, never, señor.”
He rose to go. With a glance and the slightest gesture of a hand toward the baby she asked something of him. She asked a rite. He came from the world of great people who were rich, who ate at tables, who could read and write—who had been favored by GOD and who carried magic within them. Ashley was not certain that he could make the sign of the cross correctly. He had hated everything about the Coaltown church during his seventeen years’ attendance there, but above everything he had hated the prayers. Out of the children’s hearing he had once muttered to Beata, “Prayers should be in Chinese.” He now recited the Gettysburg Address twice, first in a low voice, then ringingly. Ana slid to the floor on her knees. He recited, “Under the spreading chestnut tree, The village smithy stands.” He started off on a fragment from Shakespeare that Lily spoke so beautifully: “The quality of mercy is not strained,” but he got lost. He talked to Roger and then to Sophia. “I must count on you to take care of your mother. We cannot understand now what has happened to us. Let us live as though we believed there were some meaning in it. Sophia, let us live as though we believed. Forget me. Put me out of your minds, and live. Live. Amen! Amen!”
He returned to his room. He was overcome with a great weakness. He could barely drag his feet. Closing the door behind him he fell full length upon the floor. His head struck the corner of the fireplace. When he awoke four hours later he could scarcely pass his comb through his hair. The blood had dried into a mat.
Ashley drank tea in Dr. MacKenzie’s hut several evenings a month. He hoped that the managing director would discuss the problems of mining, but his host made it quite clear that he put copper out of his thoughts at sunset. By tacit consent they refrained from talking about their colleagues; neither wished to talk about himself. The walls were lined with books; there remained little to discuss except the subjects proposed by their titles—the religions of the ancient world and of the East. Ashley was ready and even eager to hear about them, but he soon learned that he was to receive neither profit nor pleasure there. Dr. MacKenzie looked upon all human activities—except mining—with irony and detachment. Ashley never employed irony and did not understand it; nor was he prepared to view with detachment those beliefs with which so many millions of men had consoled or tormented themselves. It made him uncomfortable to hear accounts of human sacrifice delivered with a remote and superior smile—maidens immolated in Carthage, babies roasted before Baal, widows burned on pyres. Ashley wanted to understand such practices; he did not even shrink from trying to imagine under what circumstances he would have participated in them. These were not smiling matters. Another thing made Ashley uneasy during these conversations. At each session, Dr. MacKenzie—with the regularity of one pursuing a system—asked him a question which both men knew to be impermissible. By time-honored convention, uprooted men in far places may occasionally volunteer a piece of information about their past lives; they may not ask for any. Dr. MacKenzie broke this law: “May I ask, Mr. Tolland—have you ever been married?” “Were both your parents born in Canada?” Ashley lied roundly and returned the conversation to the ancient religions.
He heard how every Egyptian for well over ten thousand years believed with passionate conviction that on his death, with merit earned, he might become the god Osiris. Yes, that his soul—“MacKenzie-Osiris” or “Tolland-Osiris”—descended the Nile in his death boat to the hall of judgment. There, if it had escaped the snapping crocodile and the snapping jackal, it was weighed on a balance. Ashley listened spellbound to the awful Negative Confession (“I have not diverted water from where it should flow,” “I have not . . . ?”) He heard of how countless Indians believed, and were now believing, that they were reborn into the world millions of times and that, with merit earned, they would ultimately become a Bodhisattva, a Buddha. Ashley did not find these thoughts and images very strange. He seemed to be momentarily on the threshold of believing them. What he found strange was Dr. MacKenzie’s way of presenting them. Question after question rose in his mind, but he did not put them to his host. He listened. He borrowed some books and read in them desultorily; he found them unrewarding. But then, he had never been a reader. Beata was the reader. One evening he ventured a question.
“Dr. MacKenzie, you say so often that the Greeks were a great people. Why did they have so many gods?”
“Well, first there’s the easy answer—the one they teach us at school. Whenever a new migration poured into the co
untry or whenever they conquered another city-state or entered into a close alliance, they made a place for the foreigners’ gods among their own. Or they combined one with one of their own. Sheer hospitality. On the whole they tried to keep the principal gods down to twelve, although it wasn’t always the same twelve. But I think we have to look deeper than that. Wonderful people, the Greeks.”
Occasionally, as now, Dr. MacKenzie dropped his ironical tone. It was a sign of earnestness that he resorted to long pauses. Ashley waited.
“The twelve gods represent twelve different types of human beings. They looked at themselves. They looked at you and me. They looked at their wives and mothers and aunts. They made gods out of the various types of human personality. They put themselves on the altar. Look at their goddesses—mother and guardian of the hearth; lover; virgin; witch out of hell; guardian of civilization and friend of man—”
“What? What’s that last, sir?”
“Athene. Pallas Athene. Minerva to the Romans. She doesn’t give a damn about Hera’s cooking and diapers, or about Aphrodite’s perfumes and cosmetics. She gave Greece the olive; some say she gave it the horse. She wanted her city to be a lighthouse on a hill for all peoples and, by God, she did it. She’s a friend to good men. Mothers are no help; wives are no help; mistresses are no help. They want to possess the man. They want him to serve their interests. Athene wants a man to surpass himself.”
Ashley held his breath in amazement. “What color eyes did she have, sir?”
“Color eyes? . . . ? Hmm . . . ? Let me think: “Then the grey-eyed Athene appeared to the far-voyaging Odysseus as an old woman, and he knew her not. “Buck up,” she said. “What are you doing sniveling by the salt sea? Get some heart into you, boy, and do what I tell you. You shall yet return to your dear wife and your homeland!”’ Grey eyes.—She often gets discouraged, I think.”
The Eighth Day Page 17
