Part 22

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.”

A strange, inscrutable flame of desire seemed to be burning on Cipriano’s face, as his eyes watched her glittering. Kate could not help feeling that it was a sort of intense, blind _ambition_, of which she was partly an object: a passionate object also: which kindled the Indian to the hottest pitch of his being.

“But I don’t feel like a goddess in a Mexican pantheon,” she said. “Mexico is a bit horrible to me. Don Ramón is _wonderful_: but I’m so afraid they will destroy him.”

“Come, and help to prevent it.”

“How?”

“You marry me. You complain you have nothing to do. Then marry me. Marry me, and help Ramón and me. We need a woman, Ramón says, to be with us. And you are the woman. There is a great deal to do.”

“But can’t I help without marrying anybody?” said Kate.

“How can you?” he said simply.

And she knew it was true.

“But you see,” she said, “I have no _impulse_ to marry you, so how can I?”

“Why?” he said.

“You see, Mexico is _really_ a bit horrible to me. And the black eyes of the people really make my heart contract, and my flesh shrink. There’s a bit of horror in it. And I don’t want horror in my soul.”

He was silent and unfathomable. She did not know in the least what he was thinking, only a black cloud seemed over him.

“Why not?” he said at last. “Horror is real. Why not a bit of horror, as you say, among all the rest?”

He gazed at her with complete, glittering earnestness, something heavy upon her.

“But----” she stammered in amazement.

“You feel a bit of horror for me too--But why not? Perhaps I feel a bit of horror for you too, for your light-coloured eyes and your strong white hands. But that is good.”

Kate looked at him in amazement. And all she wanted was to flee, to flee away beyond the bounds of this gruesome continent.

“Get used to it,” he said. “Get used to it that there must be a bit of fear, and a bit of horror in your life. And marry me, and you will find many things that are not horror. The bit of horror is like the sesame seed in the nougat, it gives the sharp wild flavour. It is good to have it there.”

He sat watching her with black, glittering eyes, and talking with strange, uncanny reason. His desire seemed curiously impersonal, physical, and yet not personal at all. She felt as if, for him, she had some other name, she moved within another species. As if her name were, for example, Itzpapalotl, and she had been born in unknown places, and was a woman unknown to herself.

Yet surely, surely he was only putting his will over her?

She was breathless with amazement, because he had made her see the physical possibility of marrying him: a thing she had never even glimpsed before. But surely, surely it would not be _herself_ who could marry him. It would be some curious female within her, whom she did not know and did not own.

He was emanating a dark, exultant sort of passion.

“I can’t believe,” she said, “that I could do it.”

“Do it,” he said. “And then you will know.”

She shuddered slightly, and went indoors for a wrap. She came out again in a silk Spanish shawl, brown, but deeply embroidered in silver-coloured silk. She tangled her fingers nervously in the long brown fringe.

Really, he seemed sinister to her, almost repellant. Yet she hated to think that she merely was afraid: that she had not the courage. She sat with her head bent, the light falling on her soft hair and on the heavy, silvery-coloured embroidery of her shawl, which she wrapped round her tight, as the Indian women do their rebozos. And his black eyes watched her, and watched the rich shawl, with a peculiar intense glitter. The shawl, too, fascinated him.

“Well!” he said suddenly. “When shall it be?”

“What?” she said, glancing up into his black eyes with real fear.

“The marriage.”

She looked at him, almost hypnotised with amazement that he should have gone so far. And even now, she had not the power to make him retreat.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Will you say in August? On the first of August?”

“I won’t say any time,” she said.

Suddenly the black gloom and anger of the Indians came over it. Then again he shook it off, with a certain callous indifference.

“Will you come to Jamiltepec to-morrow to see Ramón?” he asked. “He wants to speak with you.”

Kate also wanted to see Ramón: she always did.

“Shall I?” she said.

“Yes! Come with me in the morning in the automobile. Yes?”

“I would like to see Don Ramón again,” she said.

“You are not afraid of him, eh? Not the bit of horror, eh?” he said, smiling peculiarly.

“No. But Don Ramón isn’t really Mexican,” she said.

“Not really Mexican?”

“No!--He feels European.”

“Really! To me he is--Mexico.”

She paused and gathered herself together.

“I will row in a boat to Jamiltepec to-morrow, or I will take Alonso’s motor-boat. I will come about ten o’clock.”

“Very good!” said Cipriano, rising to leave.

When he had gone, she heard the sound of the drum from the plaza. It would be another meeting of the men of Quetzalcoatl. But she had not the desire nor the courage to set out afresh that day.

Instead, she went to bed, and lay breathing the inner darkness. Through the window-cracks she saw the whiteness of the moon, and through the walls she heard the small pulse of the drum. And it all oppressed her and made her afraid. She lay forming plans to escape. She must escape. She would hurriedly pack her trunks and disappear: perhaps take the train to Manzanillo, on the coast, and thence sail up to California, to Los Angeles or to San Francisco. Suddenly escape, and flee away to a white man’s country, where she could once more breathe freely. How good it would be!--Yes, this was what she would do.

The night grew late, the drum ceased, she heard Ezequiel come home and lie down on the mattress outside her door. The only sound was the hoarse crowing of cocks in the moonlit night. And in her room, like someone striking a match, came the greenish light of a firefly, intermittent, now here, now there.

Thoroughly uneasy and cowed, she went to sleep. But then she slept deeply.

And curiously enough, she awoke in the morning with a new feeling of strength. It was six o’clock, the sun was making yellow pencils through her shutter-cracks. She threw open her window to the street, and looked through the iron grating at the little lane with deep shadow under the garden wall, and above the wall, banana leaves fraying translucent green, and shaggy mops of palm-trees perching high, towards the twin white tower-tips of the church, crowned by the Greek cross with four equal arms.

In the lane it was already motion: big cows marching slowly to the lake, under the bluish shadow of the wall, and a small calf, big-eyed and adventurous, trotting aside to gaze through her gate at the green watered grass and the flowers. The silent peon, following, lifted his two arms with a sudden swoop upwards, noiselessly, and the calf careered on. Only the sound of the feet of calves.

Then two boys vainly trying to urge a young bull-calf to the lake. It kept on jerking up its sharp rump, and giving dry little kicks, from which the boys ran away. They pushed its shoulder, and it butted them with its blunt young head. They were in the state of semi-frenzied bewilderment which the Indians fall into when they are opposed and frustrated. And they took the usual recourse of running to a little distance, picking up heavy stones, and hurling them viciously at the animal.

“No!” cried Kate from her window. “Don’t throw stones. Drive it sensibly!”

They started as if the skies had opened, dropped their stones, and crept very much diminished after the see-sawing bull-calf.

An ancient crone appeared at the window with a plate of chopped-up young cactus leaves, for three centavos. Kate didn’t like cactus vegetable, but she bought it. An old man was thrusting a young cockerel through the window-bars.

“Go,” said Kate, “into the patio.”

And she shut her window on the street, for the invasion had begun.

But it had only changed doors.

“Niña! Niña!” came Juana’s voice. “Says the old man that you buy this chicken?”

“At how much?” shouted Kate, slipping on a dressing gown.

“At ten reales.”

“Oh, No!” said Kate, flinging open her patio doors, and appearing in her fresh wrap of pale pink cotton crêpe, embroidered with heavy white flowers. “Not more than a peso!”

“A peso and ten centavos!” pleaded the old man, balancing the staring-eyed red cock between his hands. “He is nice and fat, Señorita. See!”

And he held out the cock for Kate to take it and balance it between her hands, to try its weight. She motioned to him to hand it to Juana. The red cock fluttered, and suddenly crowed in the transfer. Juana balanced him, and made a grimace.

“No, only a peso!” said Kate.

The man gave a sudden gesture of assent, received the peso, and disappeared like a shadow. Concha lurched up and took the cock, and instantly she bawled in derision:

“Está muy flaco! He is very thin.”

“Put him in the pen,” said Kate. “We’ll let him grow.”

The patio was liquid with sunshine and shadows. Ezequiel had rolled up his mattress and gone. Great rose-coloured hibiscus dangled from the tips of their boughs, there was a faint scent from the half-wild, creamy roses. The great mango trees were most sumptuous in the morning, like cliffs, with their hard green fruits dropping like the organs of some animal from the new bronze leaves, so curiously heavy with life.

“Está muy flaco!” the young Concha was bawling still in derision as she bore off the young cock to the pen under the banana trees. “He’s very scraggy.”

Everybody watched intent while the red cock was put in among the few scraggy fowls. The grey cock, elder, retreated to the far end of the pen, and eyed the newcomer with an eye of thunder. The red cock, _muy flaco_, stood diminished in a dry corner. Then suddenly he stretched himself and crowed shrilly, his red gills lifted like an aggressive beard. And the grey cock stirred around, preparing the thunders of his vengeance. The hens took not the slightest notice.

Kate laughed, and went back to her room to dress, in the powerful newness of the morning. Outside her window the women were passing quietly, the red water-jar on one shoulder, going to the lake for water. They always put one arm over their head, and held the jar on the other shoulder. It had a contorted look, different from the proud way the women carried water in Sicily.

“Niña! Niña!” Juana was crying outside.

“Wait a minute,” said Kate.

It was another of the hymn-sheets, with a Hymn of Quetzalcoatl.

“See, Niña, the new hymn from last evening.”

Kate took the leaflet and sat upon her bed to read it.

Quetzalcoatl Looks Down on Mexico.

Jesus had gone far up the dark slope, when he looked back. Quetzalcoatl, my brother! he called. Send me my images, And the images of my mother, and the images of my saints. Send me them by the swift way, the way of the sparks, That I may hold them like memories in my arms when I go to sleep.

And Quetzalcoatl called back: I will do it.

Then he laughed, seeing the sun dart fiercely at him. He put up his hand, and held back the sun with his shadow.

So he passed the yellow one, who lashed like a dragon in vain. And having passed the yellow one, he saw the earth beneath. And he saw Mexico lying like a dark woman with white breast-tips.

Wondering he stepped nearer, and looked at her, At her trains, at her railways and her automobiles, At her cities of stone and her huts of straw. And he said: Surely this looks very curious!

He sat within the hollow of a cloud, and saw the men that worked in the fields, with foreign overseers. He saw the men that were blind, reeling with aguardiente. He saw the women that were not clean. He saw the hearts of them all, that were black, and heavy, with a stone of anger at the bottom.

Surely, he said, this is a curious people I have found!

So leaning forward on his cloud, he said to himself: I will call to them. _Holá! Holá! Mexicanos! Glance away a moment towards me. Just turn your eyes this way, Mexicanos!_

They turned not at all, they glanced not one his way.

_Holálá! Mexicanos! Holálá!_

They have gone stone deaf! he said.

So he blew down on them, to blow his breath in their faces. But in the weight of their stupefaction, none of them knew.

_Holálá! What a pretty people! All gone stupefied!_

A falling star was running like a white dog over a plain. He whistled to it loudly, twice, till it fell to his hand. In his hand it lay and went dark. It was the Stone of Change.

This is the stone of change! he said.

So he tossed it awhile in his hand, and played with it. Then suddenly he spied the old lake, and he threw it in. It fell in. And two men looked up.

_Holálá!_ he said. _Mexicanos!_ Are there two of you awake? So he laughed, and one heard him laughing.

Why are you laughing? asked the first man of Quetzalcoatl.

I hear the voice of my First Man ask me why I am laughing? _Holálá, Mexicanos!_ It is funny! To see them so glum and so lumpish!

_Hey! First Man of my name! Hark here!_ Here is my sign. Get a place ready for me.

Send Jesus his images back, Mary and the saints and all. Wash yourself, and rub oil in your skin. On the seventh day, let every man wash himself, and put oil on his skin; let every woman. Let him have no animal walk on his body, nor through the shadow of his hair. Say the same to the women. Tell them they all are fools, that I’m laughing at them.

The first thing I did when I saw them, was to laugh at the sight of such fools. Such lumps, such frogs with stones in their bellies. Tell them they are like frogs with stones in their bellies, can’t hop! Tell them they must get the stones out of their bellies, Get rid of their heaviness, Their lumpishness, Or I’ll smother them all.

I’ll shake the earth, and swallow them up, with their cities. I’ll send fire and ashes upon them, and smother them all. I’ll turn their blood like sour milk rotten with thunder, They will bleed rotten blood, in pestilence. Even their bones shall crumble.

Tell them so, First Man of my Name.