The men had risen and covered themselves, and put on their
hats, and covered their eyes for a second, in salute before
Ramón, as they departed down the stone stair. And the
iron door at the bottom had clanged, the doorkeeper had
returned with the key, laid it on the drum, and softly,
delicately departed.
Still Ramón sat on his serape, leaning his naked shoulders
on the wall, and closing his eyes. He was tired, and in that
state of extreme separateness which makes it very hard to
come back to the world. On the outside of his ears he could
hear the noises of the hacienda, even the tinkle of tea-spoons,
and the low voice of women, and later, the low, labouring
sound of a motor-car struggling over the uneven road, then
swirling triumphantly into the courtyard.
It was hard to come back to these things. The noise of
them sounded on the outside of his ears, but inside them
was the slow, vast, inaudible roar of the cosmos, like in a
sea-shell. It was hard to have to bear the contact of commonplace
daily things, when his soul and body were naked
to the cosmos.
He wished they would leave him the veils of his isolation
awhile. But they would not: especially Carlota. She
wanted him to be present to her: in familiar contact.
She was calling: “Ramón! Ramón! Have you finished?
Cipriano is here.” And even so, in her voice was fear, and
an over-riding temerity.
He pushed back his hair and rose, and very quickly went
out, as he was, with naked torso. He didn’t want to dress
himself into everyday familiarity, since his soul was unfamiliar.
They had a tea-table out on the terrace, and Cipriano, in
uniform, was there. He got up quickly, and came down the
terrace with outstretched arms, his black eyes gleaming
with an intensity almost like pain, upon the face of the
other man. And Ramón looked back at him with wide, seeing,
yet unchanging eyes.
The two men embraced, breast to breast, and for a moment
Cipriano laid his little blackish hands on the naked shoulders
of the bigger man, and for a moment was perfectly still on
his breast. Then very softly, he stood back and looked at
him, saying not a word.
Ramón abstractly laid his hand on Cipriano’s shoulder,
looking down at him with a little smile.
“Que tal?” he said, from the edge of his lips. “How
goes it?”
“Bien! Muy bien!” said Cipriano, still gazing into the
other man’s face with black, wondering, childlike, searching
eyes, as if he, Cipriano, were searching for himself, in
Ramón’s face. Ramón looked back into Cipriano’s black,
Indian eyes with a faint, kind smile of recognition, and
Cipriano hung his head as if to hide his face, the black hair,
which he wore rather long and brushed sideways, dropping
over his forehead.
The women watched in absolute silence. Then, as the
two men began slowly to come along the terrace to the tea-table,
Carlota began to pour tea. But her hand trembled so
much, the teapot wobbled as she held it, and she had to put
it down and clasp her hands in the lap of her white muslin
dress.
“You rowed on the lake?” said Ramón abstractedly,
coming up.
“It was lovely!” said Kate. “But hot when the sun
came.”
Ramón smiled a little, then pushed his hand through his
hair. Then, leaning one hand on the parapet of the terrace
wall, he turned to look at the lake, and a sigh lifted his
shoulders unconsciously.
He stood thus, naked to the waist, his black hair ruffled
and splendid, his back to the women, looking out at the lake.
Cipriano stood lingering beside him.
Kate saw the sigh lift the soft, quiescent, cream-brown
shoulders. The soft, cream-brown skin of his back, of a
smooth, pure sensuality, made her shudder. The broad,
square, rather high shoulders, with neck and head rising
steep, proudly. The full-fleshed, deep chested, rich body
of the man made her feel dizzy. In spite of herself, she
could not help imagining a knife stuck between those pure,
male shoulders. If only to break the arrogance of their
remoteness.
That was it. His nakedness was so aloof, far-off and intangible,
in another day. So that to think of it was almost a
violation, even to look at it with prying eyes. Kate’s heart
suddenly shrank in her breast. This was how Salome had
looked at John. And this was the beauty of John, that he
had had; like a pomegranate on a dark tree in the distance,
naked, but not undressed! Forever still and clothe-less,
and with another light about it, of a richer day than our
paltry, prying, sneak-thieving day.
The moment Kate had imagined a knife between his
shoulders, her heart shrank with grief and shame, and a
great stillness came over her. Better to take the hush into
one’s heart, and the sharp, prying beams out of one’s eyes.
Better to lapse away from one’s own prying, assertive self,
into the soft, untrespassing self, to whom nakedness is
neither shame nor excitement, but clothed like a flower in
its own deep, soft consciousness, beyond cheap awareness.
The evening breeze was blowing very faintly. Sailing boats
were advancing through the pearly atmosphere, far off, the
sun above had a golden quality. The opposite shore, twenty
miles away, was distinct, and yet there seemed an opalescent,
spume-like haze in the air, the same quality as in the
filmy water. Kate could see the white specks of the far-off
church towers of Tuliapan.
Below, in the garden below the house, was a thick grove
of mango trees. Among the dark and reddish leaves of the
mangoes, scarlet little birds were bustling, like suddenly-opening
poppy-buds, and pairs of yellow birds, yellow underneath
as yellow butterflies, so perfectly clear, went skimming
past. When they settled for a moment and closed
their wings, they disappeared, for they were grey on top.
And when the cardinal birds settled, they too disappeared,
for the outside of their wings was brown, like a sheath.
“Birds in this country have all their colour below,” said
Kate.
Ramón turned to her suddenly.
“They say the word Mexico means below this!” he said,
smiling, and sinking into a rocking chair.
Doña Carlota had made a great effort over herself, and
with eyes fixed on the tea-cups, she poured out the tea.
She handed him his cup without looking at him. She did
not trust herself to look at him. It made her tremble with
a strange, hysterical anger: she, who had been married to
him for years, and knew him, ah, knew him: and yet, and
yet, had not got him at all. None of him.
“Give me a piece of sugar, Carlota,” he said, in his quiet
voice.
But at the sound of it, his wife stopped as if some hand
had suddenly grasped her.
“Sugar! Sugar!” she repeated abstractedly to herself.
Ramón sat forward in his rocking-chair, holding his cup
in his hand, his breasts rising in relief. And on his thighs
the thin linen seemed to reveal him almost more than his
own dark nakedness revealed him. She understood why
the cotton pantaloons were forbidden on the plaza. The
living flesh seemed to emanate through them.
He was handsome, almost horribly handsome, with his
black head poised as it were without weight, above his
darkened, smooth neck. A pure sensuality, with a powerful
purity of its own, hostile to her sort of purity. With the
blue sash round his waist, pressing a fold in the flesh, and
the thin linen seeming to gleam with the life of his hips and
his thighs, he emanated a fascination almost like a narcotic,
asserting his pure, fine sensuality against her. The strange,
soft, still sureness of him, as if he sat secure within his own
dark aura. And as if this dark aura of his militated against
her presence, and against the presence of his wife. He
emitted an effluence so powerful, that it seemed to hamper
her consciousness, to bind down her limbs.
And he was utterly still and quiescent, without desire,
soft and unroused, within his own ambiente. Cipriano going
the same, the pair of them so quiet and dark and heavy,
like a great weight bearing the women down.
Kate knew now how Salome felt. She knew now how John
the Baptist had been, with his terrible, aloof beauty, inaccessible
yet so potent.
“Ah!” she said to herself. “Let me close my eyes to
him, and open only my soul. Let me close my prying,
seeing eyes, and sit in dark stillness along with these two
men. They have got more than I, they have a richness that
I haven’t got. They have got rid of that itching of the eye,
and the desire that works through the eye. The itching,
prurient, knowing, imagining eye, I am cursed with it, I am
hampered up in it. It is my curse of curses, the curse of
Eve. The curse of Eve is upon me, my eyes are like hooks,
my knowledge is like a fish-hook through my gills, pulling
me in spasmodic desire. Oh, who will free me from the
grappling of my eyes, from the impurity of sharp sight!
Daughter of Eve, of greedy vision, why don’t these men
save me from the sharpness of my own eyes!”
She rose and went to the edge of the terrace. Yellow as
daffodils underneath, two birds emerged out of their own
invisibility. In the little shingle bay, with a small breakwater,
where the boat was pulled up and chained, two men
were standing in the water, throwing out a big, fine round
net, catching the little silvery fish called charales, which
flicked out of the brownish water sometimes like splinters
of glass.
“Ramón!” Kate heard Doña Carlota’s voice. “Won’t
you put something on?”
The wife had been able to bear it no more.
“Yes! Thank you for the tea,” said Ramón, rising.
Kate watched him go down the terrace, in his own peculiar
silence, his sandals making a faint swish on the tiles.
“Oh, Señora Caterina!” came the voice of Carlota.
“Come and drink your tea. Come!”
Kate returned to the table, saying:
“It seems so wonderfully peaceful here.”
“Peaceful!” echoed Carlota. “Ah, I do not find it
peaceful. There is a horrible stillness, which makes me
afraid.”
“Do you come out very often?” said Kate, to Cipriano.
“Yes. Fairly often. Once a week. Or twice,” he replied,
looking at her with a secret consciousness which she could
not understand, lurking in his black eyes.
These men wanted to take her will away from her, as if
they wanted to deny her the light of day.
“I must be going home now,” she said. “The sun will
be setting.”
“Ya va?” said Cipriano, in his soft, velvety Indian voice,
with a note of distant surprise and reproach. “Will you
go already?”
“Oh, no, Señora!” cried Carlota. “Stay until to-morrow.
Oh, yes, stay until to-morrow, with me.”
“They will expect us home,” she said, wavering.
“Ah, no! I can send a boy to say you will come to-morrow.
Yes? You will stay? Ah, good, good!”
And she laid her hand caressively on Kate’s arm, then
rose to hurry away to the servants.
Cipriano had taken out his cigarette case. He offered it
to Kate.
“Shall I take one?” she said. “It is my vice.”
“Do take one,” he said. “It isn’t good, to be perfect.”
“It isn’t, is it?” she laughed, puffing her cigarette.
“Now would you call it peace?” he asked with incomprehensible
irony.
“Why?” she cried.
“Why do white people always want peace?” he asked.
“Surely peace is natural! Don’t all people want it?
Don’t you?”
“Peace is only the rest after war,” he said. “So it is
not more natural than fighting: perhaps not so natural.”
“No, but there is another peace: the peace that passes
all understanding. Don’t you know that?”
“I don’t think I do,” he said.
“What a pity!” she cried.
“Ah!” he said. “You want to teach me! But to me
it is different. Each man has two spirits in him. The one
is like the early morning in the time of rain, very quiet,
and sweet, moist, no?—with the mocking-bird singing, and
birds flying about, very fresh. And the other is like the
dry season, the steady, strong hot light of the day, which
seems as if it will never change.”
“But you like the first better,” she cried.
“I don’t know!” he replied. “The other lasts longer.”
“I am sure you like the fresh morning better,” she said.
“I don’t know! I don’t know!” He smiled a crumpled
sort of smile, and she could tell he really did not know. “In
the first time, you can feel the flowers on their stem, the
stem very strong and full of sap, no?—and the flower opening
on top like a face that has the perfume of desire. And
a woman might be like that.—But this passes, and the sun
begins to shine very strong, very hot, no? Then everything
inside a man changes, goes dark, no! And the flowers
crumple up, and the breast of a man becomes like a steel
mirror. And he is all darkness inside, coiling and uncoiling
like a snake. All the flowers withered up on shrunk stems,
no? And then women don’t exist for a man. They disappear
like the flowers.”
“And then what does he want?” said Kate.
“I don’t know. Perhaps he wants to be a very big man,
and master all the people.”
“Then why doesn’t he?” said Kate.
He lifted his shoulders.
“And you,” he said to her. “You seem to me like that
morning I told you about.”
“I am just forty years old,” she laughed shakily.
Again he lifted his shoulders.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It is the same. Your
body seems to me like the stem of the flower I told you
about, and in your face it will always be morning, of the
time of the rains.”
“Why do you say that to me?” she said, as an involuntary
strange shudder shook her.
“Why not say it!” he replied. “You are like the cool
morning, very fresh. In Mexico, we are the end of the hot
dry day.”
He watched her, with a strange lingering desire in his
black eyes, and what seemed to her a curious, lurking sort
of insolence. She dropped her head to hide from him, and
rocked in her chair.
“I would like to marry you,” he said; “if ever you will
marry. I would like to marry you.”
“I don’t think I shall ever marry again,” she flashed,
her bosom heaving like suffocation, and a dark flush suffusing
over her face, against her will.
“Who knows!” said he.
Ramón was coming down the terrace, his fine white serape
folded over his naked shoulder, with its blue-and-dark
pattern at the borders, and its long scarlet fringe dangling
and swaying as he walked. He leaned against one of the
pillars of the terrace, and looked down at Kate and Cipriano.
Cipriano glanced up with that peculiar glance of primitive
intimacy.
“I told the Señora Caterina,” he said, “if ever she
wanted to marry a man, she should marry me.”
“It is plain talk,” said Ramón, glancing at Cipriano with
the same intimacy, and smiling.
Then he looked at Kate, with a slow smile in his brown
eyes, and a shadow of curious knowledge on his face. He
folded his arms over his breast, as the natives do when it is
cold and they are protecting themselves; and the cream-brown
flesh, like opium, lifted the bosses of his breast, full
and smooth.
“Don Cipriano says that white people always want
peace,” she said, looking up at Ramón with haunted eyes.
“Don’t you consider yourselves white people?” she asked,
with a slight, deliberate impertinence.
“No whiter than we are,” smiled Ramón. “Not lily-white,
at least.”
“And don’t you want peace?” she asked.
“I? I shouldn’t think of it. The meek have inherited the
earth, according to prophecy. But who am I, that I should
envy them their peace! No, Señora. Do I look like a
gospel of peace?—or a gospel of war either? Life doesn’t
split down that division, for me.”
“I don’t know what you want,” said she, looking up at
him with haunted eyes.
“We only half know ourselves,” he replied, smiling with
changeful eyes. “Perhaps not so much as half.”
There was a certain vulnerable kindliness about him, which
made her wonder, startled, if she had ever realised what
real fatherliness meant. The mystery, the nobility, the inaccessibility,
and the vulnerable compassion of man in his
separate fatherhood.
“You don’t like brown-skinned people?” he asked her
gently.
“I think it is beautiful to look at,” she said. “But”—with
a faint shudder—“I am glad I am white.”
“You feel there could be no contact?” he said, simply.
“Yes!” she said. “I mean that.”
“It is as you feel,” he said.
And as he said it, she knew he was more beautiful to her
than any blond white man, and that, in a remote, far-off
way, the contact with him was more precious than any
contact she had known.
But then, though he cast over her a certain shadow, he
would never encroach on her, he would never seek any close
contact. It was the incompleteness in Cipriano that sought
her out, and seemed to trespass on her.
Hearing Ramón’s voice, Carlota appeared uneasily in a
doorway. Hearing him speak English, she disappeared
again, on a gust of anger. But after a little while, she came
once more, with a little vase containing the creamy-coloured,
thick flowers that are coloured like freesias, and that smell
very sweet.
“Oh, how nice!” said Kate. “They are temple flowers!
In Ceylon the natives tiptoe into the little temples and lay
one flower on the table at the foot of the big Buddha statues.
And the tables of offering are all covered with these flowers,
all put so neatly. The natives have that delicate oriental
way of putting things down.”
“Ah!” said Carlota, setting the vase on the table. “I
did not bring them for any gods, especially strange ones. I
brought them for you, Señora. They smell so sweet.”
“Don’t they!” said Kate.
The two men went away, Ramón laughing.
“Ah, Señora!” said Carlota, sitting down tense at the
table. “Could you follow Ramón? Could you give up the
Blessed Virgin?—I could sooner die!”
“Ha!” said Kate, with a little weariness. “Surely we
don’t want any more gods.”
“More gods, Señora!” said Doña Carlota, shocked.
“But how is it possible!—Don Ramón is in mortal sin.”
Kate was silent.
“And he wants to lead more and more people into the
same,” continued Carlota. “It is the sin of pride. Men
wise in their own conceit!—The cardinal sin of men. Ah,
I have told him.—And I am so glad, Señora, that you feel
as I feel. I am so afraid of American women, women like
that. They wish to have men’s minds, so they accept all
the follies and wickedness of men.—You are Catholic,
Señora?”
“I was educated in a convent,” said Kate.
“Ah, of course! Of course!—Ah, Señora, as if a woman
who had ever known the Blessed Virgin could ever part from
her again. Ah, Señora, what woman would have the heart
to put Christ back on the Cross, to crucify him twice! But
men, men! This Quetzalcoatl business! What buffoonery,
Señora; if it were not horrible sin! And two clever, well-educated
men! Wise in their own conceit!”
“Men usually are,” said Kate.
It was sunset, with a big level cloud like fur overhead, only
the sides of the horizon fairly clear. The sun was not visible.
It had gone down in a thick, rose-red fume behind the wavy
ridge of the mountains. Now the hills stood up bluish, all
the air was a salmon-red flush, the fawn water had pinkish
ripples. Boys and men, bathing a little way along the shore,
were the colour of deep flame.
Kate and Carlota had climbed up to the azotea, the flat
roof, from the stone stairway at the end of the terrace.
They could see the world: the hacienda with its courtyard
like a fortress, the road between deep trees, the black mud
huts near the broken highroad, and little naked fires already
twinkling outside the doors. All the air was pinkish, melting
to a lavender blue, and the willows on the shore, in the pink
light, were apple-green and glowing. The hills behind rose
abruptly, like mounds, dry and pinky. Away in the distance,
down the lake, the two white obelisk towers of Sayula glinted
among the trees, and villas peeped out. Boats were creeping
into the shadow, from the outer brightness of the lake.
And in one of these boats was Juana, being rowed, disconsolate,
home.
