Part 27

As they went on foot past the post-office square, where the modern scribes at little tables under the arches sat tapping out letters on their typewriters for the poor and illiterate, who waited with their few centavos to have their messages turned into florid Castilian, Ramón and Cipriano met with an almost startled respect.

“Why talk to the Bishop?--he doesn’t exist any more. I hear his Knights of Cortes had a big dinner the other evening, and it is said--I don’t believe it--that they drank oaths in blood to have my life and yours. But I think the oaths of the Catholic Dames would frighten me more. Why, if a man stops to unfasten his trousers to make water, the Knights of Cortes run for their lives, thinking the pistol is pointed at them. Don’t think about them, man! Don’t try to conciliate them. They will only puff up and become insolent, thinking you are afraid of them. Six soldiers will trample down all that dirt,” said the General.

It was the city, and the spirit of the city.

Cipriano had a suite in the big Palace on the Plaza de Armas.

“If I marry,” he said, as they passed into the stone patio, where soldiers stood at attention, “I shall take a house in the colony, to be more private.”

Cipriano in town was amusing. He seemed to exude pride and arrogant authority as he walked about. But his black eyes, glancing above his fine nose and that little goat beard, were not to be laughed at. They seemed to get everything, in the stab of a glance. A demoniacal little fellow.

CHAP: XVIII. AUTO DA FE.

Ramón saw Carlota and his boys in the city, but it was a rather fruitless meeting. The elder boy was just uncomfortable in the presence with his father, but the younger, Cyprian, who was delicate and very intelligent, had a rather lofty air of displeasure with his parent.

“Do you know what they sing, papa?” he said.

“Not all the things they sing,” said Ramón.

“They sing--” the boy hesitated. Then, in his clear young voice, he piped up, to the tune of _La Cucaracha_:

“Don Ramón don’t drink, don’t smoke. Doña Carlota wished he would. He’s going to wear the sky-blue cloak That he’s stole from the Mother of God.”

“No, I’m not,” said Ramón, smiling. “Mine’s got a snake and a bird in the middle, and black zigzags and a red fringe. You’d better come and see it.”

“No, papa! I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to be mixed up in this affair. It makes us all look ridiculous.”

“But how do you think you look, anyhow, in your striped little sailor suit and your little saintly look? We’d better dress you as the Infant Jesus.”

“No, papa! You are in bad taste. One doesn’t say those things.”

“Now you’ll have to confess to a fib. You say one doesn’t say those things, when I, who am your father, said them only a moment ago, and you heard me.”

“I mean good people don’t. Decent people.”

“Now you’ll have to confess again, for calling your father indecent.--Terrible child!”

The child flushed, and tears rose to his eyes. There was silence for a while.

“So you don’t want to come to Jamiltepec?” said Ramón, to his boys.

“Yes!” said the elder boy, slowly. “I want to come and bathe in the lake, and have a boat. But--they say it is impossible.”

“Why?”

“They say you make yourself a peon, in your clothes.”--The boy was shy.

“They’re very nice clothes, you know. Nicer than those little breeches of yours.”

“They say, also, that you pretend to be the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl.”

“Not at all. I only pretend that the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl is coming back to the Mexicans.”

“But, papa, it is not true.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it is impossible.”

“Why?”

“There never was any Quetzalcoatl, except idols.”

“Is there any Jesus, except images?”

“Yes, papa.”

“Where?”

“In heaven.”

“Then in heaven there is also Quetzalcoatl. And what is in heaven is capable of coming back to earth. Don’t you believe me?”

“I can’t.”

“Then go unbelieving,” said the father, laughing at them and rising to leave them.

“It is very bad that they sing songs about you, and put mama in; like about Pancho Villa,” said the younger boy. “It hurts me very much.”

“Rub it with _Vapor-rub_, my pet,” said Ramón. “Rub it with _Vapor-rub_, where it hurts you.”

“What a real bad man you are, papa!”

“What a real good child are you, my son! Isn’t that so?”

“I don’t know, papa. I only know you are bad.”

“Oh! Oh! Is that all they teach thee at thy American school?”

“Next term,” said Ciprianito, “I want to change my name. I don’t want to be called Carrasco any more. When thou art in the newspapers, they will laugh at us.”

“Oh! Oh! I am laughing at thee _now_, little frog! What name wilt thou choose then? Espina, perhaps. Thou knowest Carrasco is a wild bush, on the moors in Spain, where we come from. Wilt thou be the little thorn on the bush? Call thyself Espina, thou art a sprig of the old tree. Entonces, Adios! Señor Espina Espinita!”

“Adios!” said the boy abruptly, flushing with rage.

Ramón took a motor-car to Sayula, for there was a made road. But already the rains were washing it away. The car lurched and bumped in the great gaps. In one place, a camion lay on its back, where it had overturned.

On the flat desert, there were already small smears of water, and the pink cosmos flowers, and the yellow, were just sprouting their tufts of buds. The hills in the distance were going opaque, as leaves came out on the invisible trees and bushes. The earth was coming to life.

Ramón called in Sayula at Kate’s house. She was out, but the wild Concha came scouring across the beach, to fetch her.--“There is Don Ramón! There is Don Ramón!”

Kate hurried home, with sand in her shoes.

She thought Ramón looked tired, and, in his black suit, sinister.

“I didn’t expect you,” she said.

“I am on my way back from town.”

He sat very still, with that angry look on his creamy dark face, and he kept pushing back his black moustache from his closed, angry lips.

“Did you see anybody in town?” she asked.

“I saw Don Cipriano--and Doña Carlota, and my boys!”

“Oh, how nice for you! Are they quite well?”

“In excellent health, I believe.”

She laughed suddenly.

“You are still cross,” she said. “Is it about the monkeys still?”

“Señora,” he said, leaning forward, so that his black hair dropped a little on his brow, “in monkeydom, I don’t know who is prince. But in the kingdom of fools, I believe it is I.”

“Why?” she said.

And as he did not answer, she added:

“It must be a comfort to be a prince, even of fools.”

He looked daggers at her, then burst into a laugh.

“Oh, Señora mia! What ails us men, when we are always wanting to be _good_?”

“Are you repenting of it?” she laughed.

“Yes!” he said. “I am a prince of fools! Why have I started this Quetzalcoatl business? Why? Pray tell me why?”

“I suppose you wanted to.”

He pondered for a time, pushing up his moustache.

“Perhaps it is better to be a monkey than a fool. I object to being called a monkey, nevertheless. Carlota is a monkey, no more; and my two boys are prize young monkeys in sailor suits. And I am a fool. Yet what is the difference between a fool and a monkey?”

“Quien sabe?” said Kate.

“One wants to be good, and the other is sure he is good. So I make a fool of myself. They are sure they are always good, so that makes monkeys of them. Oh, if only the world would blow up like a bomb!”

“It won’t!” said Kate.

“True enough.--Ah, well!”

He drew himself erect, pulling himself together.

“Do you think, Señora Caterina, you might marry our mutual General?” Ramón had put himself aside again.

“I--I don’t know!” stammered Kate. “I hardly think so.”

“He is not sympathetic to you at all?”

“Yes. He is. He is alive, and there is even a certain fascination about him.--But one shouldn’t try marrying a man of another race, do you think, even if he were more sympathetic?”

“Ah!” sighed Ramón. “It’s no good generalising. It’s no good marrying anybody, unless there will be a real fusion somewhere.”

“And I feel there wouldn’t,” said Kate. “I feel he just wants something of me; and perhaps I just want something of him. But he would never meet me. He would never come forward himself, to meet me. He would come to take something from me and I should have to let him. And I don’t want merely that. I want a man who will come half-way, just half-way, to meet me.”

Don Ramón pondered, and shook his head.

“You are right,” he said. “Yet, in these matters, one never knows what is half-way, nor where it is. A woman who just wants to be taken, and then to cling on, is a parasite. And a man who wants just to take, without giving, is a creature of prey.”

“And I’m afraid Don Cipriano might be that,” said Kate.

“Possibly,” said Ramón. “He is not so with me. But perhaps he would be, if we did not meet--perhaps it is our half-way--in some physical belief that is at the very middle of us, and which we recognise in one another. Don’t you think there might be that between you and him?”

“I doubt if he’d feel it necessary, with a woman. A woman wouldn’t be important enough.”

Ramón was silent.

“Perhaps!” he said. “With a woman, a man always wants to let himself go. And it is precisely with a woman that he should never let himself go. It is precisely with a woman that he should never let himself go, but stick to his innermost belief, and meet her just there. Because when the innermost belief coincides in them both, if it’s physical, there, and then, and nowhere else, they can meet. And it’s no good unless there is a meeting. It’s no good a man ravishing a woman, and it’s absolutely no good a woman ravishing a man. It’s a sin, that is. There is such a thing as sin, and that’s the centre of it. Men and women keep on ravishing one another. Absurd as it may sound, it is not I who would ravish Carlota. It is she who would ravish me. Strange and absurd and a little shameful, it is true.--Letting oneself go, is either ravishing or being ravished. Oh, if we could only abide by our own souls, and meet in the abiding place.--Señora, I have not a very great respect for myself. Woman and I have failed with one another, and it is a bad failure to have in the middle of oneself.”

Kate looked at him in wonder, with a little fear. Why was he confessing to her? Was he going to love her? She almost suspended her breathing. He looked at her with a sort of sorrow on his brow, and in his dark eyes, anger, vexation, wisdom, and a dull pain.

“I am sorry,” he went on, “that Carlota and I are as we are with one another. Who am I, even to talk about Quetzalcoatl, when my heart is hollow with anger against the woman I have married and the children she bore me.--We never met in our souls, she and I. At first I loved her, and she wanted me to ravish her. Then after a while a man becomes uneasy. He can’t keep on wanting to ravish a woman, the same woman. He has revulsions. Then she loved me, and she wanted to ravish me. And I liked it for a time. But she had revulsions too. The eldest boy is really my boy, when I ravished her. And the youngest is her boy, when she ravished me. See how miserable it is! And now we can never meet; she turns to her crucified Jesus, and I to my uncrucified and uncrucifiable Quetzalcoatl, who at least cannot be ravished.”

“And I’m sure you won’t make him a ravisher,” she said.

“Who knows? If I err, it will be on that side. But you know, Señora, Quetzalcoatl is to me only the symbol of the best a man may be, in the next days. The universe is a nest of dragons, with a perfectly unfathomable life-mystery at the centre of it. If I call the mystery the Morning Star, surely it doesn’t matter! A man’s blood can’t beat in the abstract. And man is a creature who wins his own creation inch by inch from the nest of the cosmic dragons. Or else he loses it little by little, and goes to pieces. Now we are all losing it, in the ravishing and ravished disintegration. We must pull ourselves together, hard, both men and women, or we are all lost.--We must pull ourselves together, hard.”

“But are you a man who needs a woman in his life?” she said.

“I am a man who yearns for the sensual fulfilment of my soul, Señora,” he said. “I am a man who has no belief in abnegation of the blood desires. I am a man who is always on the verge of taking wives and concubines to live with me, so deep is my desire for that fulfilment. Except that now I know that is useless--not momentarily useless, but in the long run--my ravishing a woman with hot desire. No matter how much she is in love with me and desires me to ravish her. It is no good, and the very inside of me knows it is no good. Wine, woman, and song--all that--all that game is up. Our insides won’t really have it any more. Yet it is hard to pull ourselves together.”

“So that you really want a woman to be with you?” said Kate.

“Ah, Señora! If I could trust myself; and trust her! I am no longer a young man, who can afford to make mistakes. I am forty-two years old, and I am making my last--and perhaps in truth, my first great effort as a man. I hope I may perish before I make a big mistake.”

“Why should you make a mistake? You needn’t?”

“I? It is very easy for me to make a mistake. Very easy, on the one hand, for me to become arrogant and a ravisher. And very easy, on the other hand, for me to deny myself, and make a sort of sacrifice of my life. Which is being ravished. Easy to let myself, in a certain sense, be ravished. I did it to a small degree even yesterday, with the Bishop of Guadalajara. And it is bad. If I had to end my life in a mistake, Señora, I had rather end it in being a ravisher, than in being ravished. As a hot ravisher, I can still slash and cut at the disease of the other thing, the horrible pandering and the desire men have to be ravished, the hateful, ignoble desire they have.”

“But why don’t you do as you say, stick by the innermost soul that is in you, and meet a woman there, meet her, as you say, where your two souls coincide in their deepest desire? Not always that horrible unbalance that you call ravishing.”

“Why don’t I? But which woman can I meet in the body, without that slow degradation of ravishing, or being ravished, setting in? If I marry a Spanish woman or a dark Mexican, she will give herself up to me to be ravished. If I marry a woman of the Anglo-Saxon or any blonde northern stock, she will want to ravish me, with the will of all the ancient white demons. Those that want to be ravished are parasites on the soul, and one has revulsions. Those that want to ravish a man are vampires. And between the two, there is nothing.”

“Surely there are _some_ really good women?”

“Well, show me them. They are all potential Carlotas or--or--yes, Caterinas. I am sure you ravished your Joachim till he died. No doubt he wanted it; even more than you wanted it. It is not just sex. It lies in the will. Victims and victimisers. The upper classes, craving to be victims to the lower classes; or else craving to make victims of the lower classes. The politicians, craving to make one people victims to another. The Church, with its evil will for turning the people into humble, writhing things that shall crave to be victimised, to be ravished.--I tell you, the earth is a place of shame.”

“But if _you_ want to be different,” said Kate, “surely a few other people do--really.”

“It may be,” he said, becoming calm. “It may be. I wish I kept myself together better. I must keep myself together, keep myself within the middle place, where I am still. My Morning Star. Now I am ashamed of having talked like this to you, Señora Caterina.”

“Why?” she cried. And for the first time, the flush of hurt and humiliation came into her face.

He saw it at once, and put his hand on hers for a moment.

“No,” he said. “I am not ashamed. I am relieved.”

She flushed deeply at his touch, and was silent. He rose hastily, to leave, craving to be alone again with his own soul.

“On Sunday,” he said, “will you come into the plaza, in the morning, when the drum sounds? Will you come?”

“What for?” she said.

“Well! Come, and you will see.”

He was gone in a flash.

There were many soldiers in the village. When she went to the post-office, she saw the men in their cotton uniforms lying about in the entrance to the military station. There must have been fifty or more, little men, not the tall soldiers in slouched hats. These were little, quick, compact men, like Cipriano, and they talked in a strange Indian language, very subdued. They were very rarely seen in the streets. They kept out of sight.

But at night, everyone was requested to be indoors by ten o’clock, and through the darkness Kate heard the patrols of horse-soldiers riding round.

There was an air of excitement and mystery in the place. The parish priest, a rather overbearing, fat man of fifty or so, had preached a famous Saturday evening sermon against Ramón and Quetzalcoatl, forbidding the heathen name to be mentioned, threatening with all the penalties any parishioner who read the Hymns, or even listened.

So, of course, he was attacked when he left the church, and had to be rescued by soldiers who were in the doorway. They marched him safely home. But his criada, the old woman who served him, was told by more women than one that the next time the padre opened his mouth against Quetzalcoatl, he would have a few inches of machete in his fat guts.

So his reverence stayed at home, and a curate officiated.

Practically all the people who came over the lake in boats on Saturdays, went to mass in Sayula church. The great doors stood open all the day. Men as they passed to and fro to the lake, took off their big hats, with a curious cringing gesture, as they went by the gateway of the church. All day long, scattered people were kneeling in the aisles or among the benches, the men kneeling erect, their big hats down by their knees, their curious tall-shaped Indian heads with the thick black hair also erect; only the kneeling legs, close together, humble. The women hooded themselves in their dark rebozos and spread their elbows as they kneeled at a bench, in a slack sort of voluptuousness.

On Saturday night, a great ruddy flickering of many candle-points, away down the dark cavern of the church; and a clustering of dark men’s heads, a shuffling of women, a come and go of men arriving from the lake, of men departing to the market. A hush, not exactly of worship, but of a certain voluptuous admiration of the loftiness and glitter, a sensual, almost victimised self-abandon to the god of death, the Crucified streaked with blood, or to the pretty white woman in a blue mantle, with her little doll’s face under her crown, Mary, the doll of dolls, Niña of Niñas.

It was not worship. It was a sort of numbness and letting the soul sink uncontrolled. And it was a luxury, after all the week of unwashed dullness in their squalid villages of straw huts. But it irritated Kate.

The men got up and tiptoed away in their sandals, crossing themselves front and back, on the navel and on the back of the head, with holy water. And their black eyes shone with a loose, sensuous look. Instead of having gathered themselves together and become graver, stronger, more collected and deep in their own integrity, they emerged only the more loose and sloppy and uncontrolled.

Oh, if there is one thing men need to learn, but the Mexican Indians especially, it is to collect each man his own soul together deep inside him, and to abide by it. The Church, instead of helping men to this, pushes them more and more into a soft, emotional helplessness, with the unpleasant sensuous gratification of feeling themselves victims, victimised, victimised, but at the same time with the lurking sardonic consciousness that in the end a victim is stronger than the victimiser. In the end, the victims pull down their victimiser, like a pack of hyænas on an unwary lion. They know it. Cursed are the falsely meek, for they are inheriting the earth.

On Sunday morning there was early mass at sunrise, another mass at seven o’clock, another at nine, another at eleven. Then there was a little band of violins and ’cellos, playing old-fashioned dance music; there was, especially early in the morning, a solid mass of peons and women, kneeling on the floor; and a flapping of dusky candles, a smell of the exhaust air of candles, a heavy, rolling fume of incense, and the heavy choir of men’s voices, solid, powerful, impressive, from the gallery.

And the people went away in sensuous looseness, which soon turned, in the market, to hate, the old, unfathomable hate which lies at the bottom of the Indian heart, and which always rises black and turbid when they have swayed awhile in sensuous gratification.

The church inside was a dead interior, like all Mexican churches, even the gorgeous Puebla cathedral. The interior of almost any Mexican church gives the impression of cynical barrenness, cynical meaninglessness, an empty, cynical, mocking shell. The Italian churches are built much in the same style, and yet in them lingers a shadow and stillness of old, mysterious holiness. The hush.

But not in Mexico. The churches outside are impressive. Inside, and it is curious to define it, they are blatant; void of sound and yet with no hush, simple, and yet completely vulgar, barren, sterile. More barren than a bank or a schoolroom or an empty concert-hall, less mysterious than any of these. You get a sense of plaster, of mortar, of whitewash, of smeared blue-wash or grey-wash; and of gilt laid on and ready to peel off. Even in the most gorgeous churches, the gilt is hatefully gilt, never golden. Nothing is soft nor mellow.