Part 23

“It seems to me true,” said Kate.

“Señora!” yelled Concha. “Is it true that heaven is up there, and you come down steps like clouds to the edge of the sky, like the steps from the mole into the lake? Is it true that El Señor comes and stands on the steps and looks down at us like we look down into the lake to see the charales?”

Concha shoved up her fierce swarthy face, and shook her masses of hair, glaring at Kate, waiting for an answer.

“I don’t know everything,” laughed Kate. “But it seems to me true.”

“She believes it,” said Concha, turning her face to her mother.

“And is it true,” asked Juana, “that El Señor, El Cristo del Mundo, is a gringo, and that He comes from your country, with His Holy Mother?”

“Not from my country, but from a country near.”

“Listen!” exclaimed Juana, awestruck. “El Señor is a gringito, and His Holy Mother is a gringita. Yes, one really knows. Look! Look at the feet of the Niña! Pure feet of the Santísima! Look!” Kate was barefoot, wearing sandals with a simple strap across the foot. Juana touched one of the Niña’s white feet, fascinated. “Feet of the Santísima. And She, the Holy Mary is a gringita. She came over the sea, like you, Niña?”

“Yes, she came over the sea!”

“Ah! You know it?”

“Yes. We know that.”

“Think of it! The Santísima is a gringita, and She came over the Sea like the Niña, from the countries of the Niña!” Juana spoke in a wicked wonder, horrified, delighted, mocking.

“And the Lord is a Gringito--pure Gringito?” barked Concha.

“And Niña--It was the gringos who killed El Señor? It wasn’t the Mexicans? It was those other gringos who put Him on the Cross?”

“Yes!” said Kate. “It wasn’t the Mexicans.”

“The gringos?”

“Yes, the gringos.”

“And He Himself was a Gringo?”

“Yes!” said Kate, not knowing what else to say.

“Look!” said Juana, in her hushed, awed, malevolent voice. “He was a Gringo, and the gringos put him on the Cross.”

“But a long time ago,” said Kate hastily.

“A long time ago, says the Niña,” echoed Juana, in her awed voice.

There was a moment of silence. The dark faces of the girls and men seated on the ground were turned up to Kate, watching her fixedly, in the half light, counting every word. In the outer air, thunder muttered in different places.

“And now, Niña,” came the cool, clear voice of Maria del Carmen, “El Señor is going back again to His Father, and our Quetzalcoatl is coming back to us?”

“And the Santísima is leaving us?” put in the hurried voice of Juana. “Think of it! The Santísima is leaving us, and this Quetzalcoatl is coming! He has no mother, he!”

“Perhaps he has a wife,” said Kate.

“Quien sabe!” murmured Juana.

“They say,” said the bold Concha, “that in Paradise he has grown young.”

“Who?” asked Juana.

“I don’t know how they call him,” muttered Concha, ashamed to say the word.

“Quetzalcoatl!” said Ezequiel, in his barking strong young voice. “Yes, he is young. He is a god in the flower of life, and finely built.”

“They say so! They say so!” murmured Juana. “Think of it!”

“Here it says so!” cried Ezequiel. “Here it is written. In the second Hymn.”

“Read it then, Julio.”

And Julio, now nothing loth, took out a second paper.

“I, Quetzalcoatl, of Mexico, I travelled the longest journey.

“Beyond the blue outer wall of heaven, beyond the bright place of the Sun, across the plains of darkness where the stars spread out like trees, like trees and bushes, far away to the heart of all the worlds, low down like the Morning Star.

“And at the heart of all the worlds those were waiting whose faces I could not see. And in voices like bees they murmured among themselves: _This is Quetzalcoatl whose hair is white with fanning the fires of life. He comes alone, and slowly._

“Then with hands I could not see, they took my hands, and in their arms that I could not see, at last I died.

“But when I was dead, and bone, they cast not my bones away, they did not give me up to the four winds, nor to the six. No, not even to the wind that blows down to the middle of earth, nor to him that blows upward like a finger pointing, did they give me.

“_He is dead_, they said, _but unrelinquished_.

“So they took the oil of the darkness, and laid it on my brow and my eyes, they put it in my ears and nostrils and my mouth, they put it on the two-fold silence of my breasts, and on my sunken navel, and on my secret places, before and behind: and in the palms of my hands, and on the mounds of my knees, and under the tread of my feet.

“Lastly, they anointed all my head with the oil that comes out of the darkness. Then they said: He is sealed up. Lay him away.

“So they laid me in the fountain that bubbles darkly at the heart of the worlds, far, far behind the sun, and there lay I, Quetzalcoatl, in warm oblivion.

“I slept the great sleep, and dreamed not.

“Till a voice was calling: Quetzalcoatl!

“I said: Who is that?

“No one answered, but the voice said: Quetzalcoatl!

“I said: Where art thou?

“So! he said. I am neither here nor there. I am thyself. Get up.

“Now all was very heavy upon me, like a tomb-stone of darkness.

“I said: Am I not old? How shall I roll this stone away?

“How art thou old, when I am new man? I will roll away the stone. Sit up!

“I sat up, and the stone went rolling, crashing down the gulfs of space.

“I said to myself: I am new man. I am younger than the young and older than the old. Lo! I am unfolded on the stem of time like a flower, I am at the midst of the flower of my manhood. Neither do I ache with desire, to tear, to burst the bud; neither do I yearn away like a seed that floats into heaven. The cup of my flowering is unfolded, in its middle the stars float balanced with array. My stem is in the air, my roots are in all the dark, the sun is no more than a cupful within me.

“Lo! I am neither young nor old, I am the flower unfolded, I am new.

“So I rose and stretched my limbs and looked around. The sun was below me in a daze of heat, like a hot humming-bird hovering at mid-day over the worlds. And his beak was long and very sharp, he was like a dragon.

“And a faint star was hesitating wearily, waiting to pass.

“I called aloud, saying: ‘Who is that?’

_My name is Jesus, I am Mary’s son. I am coming home. My mother the Moon is dark._

_Brother, Quetzalcoatl, Hold back the wild hot sun. Bind him with shadow while I pass. Let me come home._

“I caught the sun and held him, and in my shade the faint star slipped past, going slowly into the dark reaches beyond the burning of the sun. Then on the slope of silence he sat down and took off his sandals, and I put them on.

“‘How do they wear the wings of love, Jesus, the Mexican people?’

“‘The souls of the Mexican people are heavy for the wings of love, they have swallowed the stone of despair.’

“‘Where is your Lady Mother in the mantle of blue, she with comfort in her lap?’

“‘Her mantle faded in the dust of the world, she was weary without sleep, for the voices of people cried night and day, and the knives of the Mexican people were sharper than the pinions of love, and their stubbornness was stronger than hope. Lo! the fountain of tears dries up in the eyes of the old, and the lap of the aged is comfortless, they look for rest. Quetzalcoatl, Sir, my mother went even before me, to her still white bed in the moon.’

“‘She is gone, and thou are gone, Jesus, the Crucified. Then what of Mexico?’

“‘The images stand in their churches, Oh Quetzalcoatl, they don’t know that I and my Mother have departed. They are angry souls, Brother, my Lord! They vent their anger. They broke my Churches, they stole my strength they withered the lips of the Virgin. They drove us away, and we crept away like a tottering old man and a woman, tearless and bent double with age. So we fled while they were not looking. And we seek but rest, to forget forever the children of men who have swallowed the stone of despairs.’

“Then said I: It is good, pass on. I, Quetzalcoatl, will go down. Sleep thou the sleep without dreams. Farewell at the cross-roads, Brother Jesus.

“He said: Oh, Quetzalcoatl! They have forgotten thee. The feathered snake! The serpent--silent bird! They are asking for none of thee.

“I said: Go thy way, for the dust of earth is in thy eyes and on thy lips. For me the serpent of middle-earth sleeps in my loins and my belly, the bird of the outer air perches on my brow and sweeps her bill across my breast. But I, I am lord of two ways. I am master of up and down. I am as a man who is a new man, with new limbs and life, and the light of the Morning Star in his eyes. Lo! I am I! The lord of both ways. Thou wert lord of the one way. Now it leads thee to the sleep. Farewell!

“So Jesus went on towards the sleep. And Mary the Mother of Sorrows lay down on the bed of the white moon, weary beyond any more tears.

“And I, I am on the threshold. I am stepping across the border. I am Quetzalcoatl, lord of both ways, star between day and the dark.”

There was silence as the young man finished reading.

CHAP: XVI. CIPRIANO AND KATE.

On Saturday afternoons the big black canoes with their large square sails came slowly approaching out of the thin haze across the lake, from the west, from Tlapaltepec, with big straw hats and with blankets and earthenware stuff, from Ixtlahuacan and Jaramay and Las Zemas with mats and timber and charcoal and oranges, from Tuliapan and Cuxcueco and San Cristobal with boatloads of dark-green, globular water-melons, and piles of red tomatoes, mangoes, vegetables, oranges: and boatloads of bricks and tiles, burnt red, but rather friable; then more charcoal, more wood, from the stark dry mountains over the lake.

Kate nearly always went out about five o’clock, on Saturdays, to see the boats, flat-bottomed, drift up to the shallow shores, and begin to unload in the glow of the evening. It pleased her to see the men running along the planks with the dark-green melons, and piling them in a mound on the rough sand, melons dark-green like creatures with pale bellies. To see the tomatoes all poured out into a shallow place in the lake, bobbing about while the women washed them, a bobbing scarlet upon the water.

The long, heavy bricks were piled in heaps along the scrap of demolished breakwater, and little gangs of asses came trotting down the rough beach, to be laden, pressing their little feet in the gravelly sand, and flopping their ears.

The cargadores were busy at the charcoal boats, carrying out the rough sacks.

“Do you want charcoal, Niña?” shouted a grimy cargador, who had carried the trunks from the station on his back.

“At how much?”

“Twenty-five reales the two sacks.”

“I pay twenty reales.”

“At twenty reales then, Señorita. But you give me two reales for the transport?”

“The owner pays the transport,” said Kate. “But I will give you twenty centavos.”

Away went the man, trotting bare-legged, barefoot, over the stony ground, with two large sacks of charcoal on his shoulders. The men carry huge weights, without seeming ever to think they are heavy. Almost as if they liked to feel a huge weight crushing on their iron spines, and to be able to resist it.

Baskets of spring guavas, baskets of sweet lemons called limas, baskets of tiny green and yellow lemons, big as walnuts; orange-red and greenish mangoes, oranges, carrots, cactus fruits in great abundance, a few knobby potatoes, flat, pearl-white onions, little calabasitas and speckled green calabasitas like frogs, camotes cooked and raw--she loved to watch the baskets trotting up the beach past the church.

Then, rather late as a rule, big red pots, bulging red ollas for water-jars, earthenware casseroles and earthenware jugs with cream and black scratched pattern in glaze, bowls, big flat earthenware discs for cooking tortillas--much earthenware.

On the west shore, men were running up the beach wearing twelve enormous hats at once, like a trotting pagoda. Men trotting with finely woven huaraches and rough strip sandals. And men with a few dark serapes, with gaudy rose-pink patterns, in a pile on their shoulders.

It was fascinating. But at the same time, there was a heavy, almost sullen feeling on the air. These people came to market to a sort of battle. They came, not for the joy of selling, but for the sullen contest with those who wanted what they had got. The strange, black resentment always present.

By the time the church bells clanged for sunset, the market had already begun. On all the pavements round the plaza squatted the Indians with their wares, pyramids of green water-melons, arrays of rough earthenware, hats in piles, pairs of sandals side by side, a great array of fruit, a spread of collar-studs and knick-knacks, called _novedades_, little trays with sweets. And people arriving all the time out of the wild country, with laden asses.

Yet never a shout, hardly a voice to be heard. None of the animation and the frank wild clamour of a Mediterranean market. Always the heavy friction of the will; always, always, grinding upon the spirit, like the grey-black grind of lava-rock.

When dark fell, the vendors lighted their tin torch-lamps, and the flames wavered and streamed as the dark-faced men squatted on the ground in their white clothes and big hats, waiting to sell. They never asked you to buy. They never showed their wares. They didn’t even look at you. It was as if their static resentment and indifference would hardly let them sell at all.

Kate sometimes felt the market cheerful and easy. But more often she felt an unutterable weight slowly, invisibly sinking on her spirits. And she wanted to run. She wanted above all, the comfort of Don Ramón and the Hymns of Quetzalcoatl. This seemed to her the only escape from a world gone ghastly.

There was talk of revolution again, so the market was uneasy and grinding the black grit into the spirit. Foreign-looking soldiers were about, with looped-hats, and knives and pistols, and savage northern faces: tall, rather thin figures. They would loiter about in pairs, talking in a strange northern speech, and seeming more alien even than Kate herself.

The food-stalls were brilliantly lighted. Rows of men sat at the plank boards, drinking soup and eating hot food with their fingers. The milkman rode in on horseback, his two big cans of milk slung before him, and he made his way slowly through the people to the food-stalls. There, still sitting unmoved on horseback, he delivered bowls of milk from the can in front of him, and then, on horseback like a monument, took his supper, his bowl of soup, and his plate of tamales, or of minced, fiery meat spread on tortillas. The peons drifted slowly round. Guitars were sounding, half-secretly. A motor-car worked its way in from the city, choked with people, girls, young men, city papas, children, in a pile.

The rich press of life, above the flare of torches upon the ground! The throng of white-clad, big-hatted men circulating slowly, the women with dark rebozos slipping silently. Dark trees overhead. The doorway of the hotel bright with electricity. Girls in organdie frocks, white, cherry-red, blue, from the city. Groups of singers singing inwardly. And all the noise subdued, suppressed.

The sense of strange, heavy suppression, the dead black power of negation in the souls of the peons. It was almost pitiful to see the pretty, pretty slim girls from Guadalajara going round and round, their naked arms linked together, so light in their gauzy, scarlet, white, blue, orange dresses, looking for someone to look at them, to take note of them. And the peon men only emitting from their souls the black vapor of negation, that perhaps was hate. They seemed, the natives, to have the power of blighting the air with their black, rock-bottom resistance.

Kate almost wept over the slim, eager girls, pretty as rather papery flowers, eager for attention, but thrust away, victimised.

Suddenly there was a shot. The market-place was on its feet in a moment, scattering, pouring away into the streets and the shops. Another shot! Kate, from where she stood, saw across the rapidly-emptying plaza a man sitting back on one of the benches, firing a pistol into the air. He was a lout from the city, and he was half drunk. The people knew what it was. Yet any moment he might lower the pistol and start firing at random. Everybody hurried silently, melting away, leaving the plaza void.

Two more shots, pap-pap! still into the air. And at the same moment a little officer in uniform darted out of the dark street where the military station was, and where now the big hats were piled on the ground; he rushed straight to the drunkard, who was spreading his legs and waving the pistol: and before you could breathe, _slap!_ and again _slap!_ He had slapped the pistol-firer first on one side of the face, then on the other, with slaps that resounded almost like shots. And in the same breath he seized the arm that held the pistol and wrested the weapon away.

Two of the strange soldiers instantly rushed up and seized the man by the arms. The officer spoke two words, they saluted and marched off their prisoner.

Instantly the crowd was ebbing back into the plaza, unconcerned. Kate sat on a bench with her heart beating. She saw the prisoner pass under a lamp, streaks of blood on his cheek. And Juana, who had fled, now came scuttling back and took Kate’s hand, saying:

“Look! Niña! It is the General!”

She rose startled to her feet. The officer was saluting her.

“Don Cipriano!” she said.

“The same!” he replied. “Did that drunken fellow frighten you?”

“Not much! Only startled me. I didn’t _feel_ any evil intention behind it.”

“No, only drunk.”

“But I shall go home now.”

“Shall I walk with you?”

“Would you care to?”

He took his place at her side, and they turned down by the church, to the lake shore. There was a moon above the mountain and the air was coming fresh, not too strong, from the west. From the Pacific. Little lights were burning ruddy by the boats at the water’s edge, some outside, and some inside, under the roof-tilt of the boat’s little inward shed. Women were preparing a mouthful of food.

“But the night is beautiful,” said Kate, breathing deep.

“With the moon clipped away just a little,” he said.

Juana was following close on her heels: and behind, two soldiers in slouched hats.

“Do the soldiers escort you?” she said.

“I suppose so,” said he.

“But the moon,” she said, “isn’t lovely and friendly as it is in England or Italy.”

“It is the same planet,” he replied.

“But the moonshine in America isn’t the same. It doesn’t make one feel glad as it does in Europe. One feels it would like to hurt one.”

He was silent for some moments. Then he said:

“Perhaps there is in you something European, which hurts our Mexican Moon.”

“But I come in good faith.”

“European good faith. Perhaps it is not the same as Mexican.”

Kate was silent, almost stunned.

“Fancy your Mexican moon objecting to me!” she laughed ironically.

“Fancy your objecting to our Mexican moon!” said he.

“I wasn’t,” said she.

They came to the corner of Kate’s road. At the corner was a group of trees, and under the trees, behind the hedge, several reed huts. Kate often laughed at the donkey looking over the dry-stone low wall, and at the black sheep with curved horns, tied to a bitten tree, and at the lad, naked but for a bit of a shirt, fleeing into the corner under the thorn screen.

Kate and Cipriano sat on the verandah of the House of the Cuentas. She offered him vermouth, but he refused.

They were still. There came the faint pip!-pip! from the little electric plant just up the road, which Jesús tended. Then a cock from beyond the bananas crowed powerfully and hoarsely.

“But how absurd!” said Kate. “Cocks don’t crow at this hour.”

“Only in Mexico,” laughed Cipriano.

“Yes! Only here!”

“He thinks your moon is the sun, no?” he said, teasing her.

The cock crowed powerfully, again and again.

“This is very nice, your house, your patio,” said Cipriano.

But Kate was silent.

“Or don’t you like it?” he said.

“You see,” she answered, “I have nothing to _do_! The servants won’t let me do anything. If I sweep my room, they stand and say _Que Niña! Que Niña!_ As if I was standing on my head for their benefit. I sew, though I’ve no interest in sewing.--What is it, for a life?”

“And you read!” he said, glancing at the magazines and books.

“Ah, it is all such stupid, lifeless stuff, in the books and papers,” she said.

There was a silence. After which he said:

“But what would you like to do? As you say, you take no interest in sewing. You know the Navajo women, when they weave a blanket, leave a little place for their soul to come out, at the end: not to weave their soul into it.--I always think England has woven her soul into her fabrics, into all the things she has made. And she never left a place for it to come out. So now all her soul is in her goods, and nowhere else.”

“But Mexico _has_ no soul,” said Kate. “She’s swallowed the stone of despair, as the hymn says.”

“Ah! You think so? I think not. The soul is also a thing you make, like a pattern in a blanket. It is very nice while all the wools are rolling their different threads and different colours, and the pattern is being made. But once it is finished--then finished it has no interest any more. Mexico hasn’t started to weave the pattern of her soul. Or she is only just starting: with Ramón. Don’t you believe in Ramón?”

Kate hesitated before she answered.

“Ramón, yes! I do! But whether it’s any good trying here in Mexico, as he is trying--” she said slowly.

“He is in Mexico. _He_ tries here. Why should not you?”

“I?”

“Yes! You! Ramón doesn’t believe in womanless gods, he says. Why should you not be the woman in the Quetzalcoatl pantheon? If you will, the goddess!”

“I, a goddess in the Mexican pantheon?” cried Kate, with a burst of startled laughter.

“Why not?” said he.

“But I am not Mexican,” said she.

“You may easily be a goddess,” said he, “in the same pantheon with Don Ramón and me.”