Kate was soon fond of the limping, untidy Juana, and of
the girls. Concha was fourteen, a thick, heavy, barbaric
girl with a mass of black waving hair which she was always
scratching. Maria was eleven, a shy, thin bird-like thing with
big eyes that seemed almost to absorb the light round her.
It was a reckless family. Juana admitted a different
father for Jesús, but to judge from the rest, one would have
suspected a different father for each of them. There was a
basic, sardonic carelessness in the face of life, in all the
family. They lived from day to day, a stubborn, heavy,
obstinate life of indifference, careless about the past, careless
about the present, careless about the future. They had
even no interest in money. Whatever they got they spent
in a minute, and forgot it again.
Without aim or purpose, they lived absolutely à terre,
down on the dark, volcanic earth. They were not animals,
because men and women and their children cannot be
animals. It is not granted us. Go, for once gone, thou
never canst return! says the great Urge which drives us
creatively on. When man tries brutally to return to the
older, previous levels of evolution, he does so in the spirit
of cruelty and misery.
So in the black eyes of the family, a certain vicious fear
and wonder and misery. The misery of human beings who
squat helpless outside their own unbuilt selves, unable to
win their souls out of the chaos, and indifferent to all other
victories.
White people are becoming soulless too. But they have
conquered the lower worlds of metal and energy, so they
whizz around in machines, circling the void of their own
emptiness.
To Kate, there was a great pathos in her family. Also a
certain repulsiveness.
Juana and her children, once they accepted their Niña as
their own, were honest with intensity. Point of honour, they
were honest to the least little plum in the fruit bowl. And
almost intensely eager to serve.
Themselves indifferent to their surroundings, they would
live in squalor. The earth was the great garbage bowl.
Everything discarded was flung on the earth and they did
not care. Almost they liked to live in a milieu of fleas and
old rags, bits of paper, banana skins and mango stones.
Here’s a piece torn off my dress! Earth, take it. Here’s
the combings of my hair! Earth, take them!
But Kate could not bear it. She cared. And immediately,
the family was quite glad, thrilled that she cared.
They swept the patio with the twig broom till they swept
the very surface of the earth away. Fun! The Niña had
feelings about it.
She was a source of wonder and amusement to them. But
she was never a class superior. She was a half-incomprehensible,
half-amusing wonder-being.
The Niña wanted the aquador to bring two botes of hot
water, quick, from the hot springs, to wash herself all over
every morning. Fun! Go, Maria, tell the aquador to run
with the Niña’s water.
Then they almost resented it that she shut herself off to
have her bath. She was a sort of goddess to them, to provide
them with fun and wonder; but she ought always to be
accessible. And a god who is forever accessible to human
beings has an unenviable time of it, Kate soon discovered.
No, it was no sinecure, being a Niña. At dawn began
the scrape-scrape of the twig broom outside. Kate stayed
on in bed, doors fastened but shutters open. Flutter outside!
Somebody wanted to sell two eggs. Where is the
Niña. She is sleeping! The visitor does not go. Continual
flutter outside.
The aquador! Ah, the water for the Niña’s bath! She
is sleeping, she is sleeping. “No!” called Kate, slipping
into a dressing-gown and unbolting the door. In come the
children with the bath tub, in comes the aquador with the
two square kerosene cans full of hot water. Twelve
centavos! Twelve centavos for the aquador! No hay! We
haven’t got twelve centavos. Later! Later! Away trots
the aquador, pole over his shoulder. Kate shuts her doors
and shutters and starts her bath.
“Niña? Niña?”
“What do you want?”
“Eggs boiled or fried or rancheros? Which do you
want?”
“Boiled.”
“Coffee or chocolate?”
“Coffee.”
“Or do you want tea?”
“No, coffee.”
Bath proceeds.
“Niña?”
“Yes.”
“There is no coffee. We are going to buy some.”
“I’ll take tea.”
“No, Niña! I am going. Wait for me.”
“Go then.”
Kate comes out to breakfast on the verandah. The table
is set, heaped with fruit and white bread and sweet buns.
“Good morning, Niña. How have you passed the night?
Well! Ah, praised be God! Maria, the coffee. I’m going
to put the eggs in the water. Oh, Niña, that they may not
be boiled hard!—Look, what feet of the Madonna! Look!
Bonitos!”
And Juana stooped down fascinated to touch with her
black finger Kate’s white soft feet, that were thrust in light
sandals, just a thong across the foot.
The day had begun. Juana looked upon herself as dedicated
entirely to Kate. As soon as possible she shooed her
girls away, to school. Sometimes they went: mostly they
didn’t. The Niña said they must go to school. Listen!
Listen now! Says the Niña that you must go to school!
Away! Walk!
Juana would limp back and forth down the long verandah
from kitchen to the breakfast table, carrying away the dishes
one by one. Then, with a great splash, she was washing up.
Morning! Brilliant sun pouring into the patio, on the
hibiscus flowers and the fluttering yellow and green rags of
the banana trees. Birds swiftly coming and going, with
tropical suddenness. In the dense shadow of the mango-grove,
white clad Indians going like ghosts. The sense of
fierce sun and almost more impressive, of dark, intense
shadow. A twitter of life, yet a certain heavy weight of
silence. A dazzling flicker and brilliance of light, yet the
feeling of weight.
Kate would sit alone, rocking on her verandah, pretending
to sew. Silently appears an old man with one egg held up
mysteriously, like some symbol. Would the patrons buy it
for five centavos. La Juana only gives four centavos. All
right? Where is Juana?
Juana appears from the plaza with more purchases. The
egg! The four centavos! The account of the spendings.
Entonces! Entonces! Luego! Luego! Ah, Niña, no
tengo memoria! Juana could not read nor write. She
scuffled off to the market with her pesos, bought endless
little things at one or two centavos each, every morning.
And every morning there was a reckoning up. Ah! Ah!
Where are we? I have no memory. Well then—ah—yes—I
bought ocote for three centavos! How much? How much,
Niña? How much is it now?
It was a game which thrilled Juana to the marrow, reckoning
up the centavos to get it just right. If she was a centavo
short in the change, she was paralysed. Time after time
she would re-appear. There is a centavo short, Niña? Ah,
how stupid I am? But I will give you one of mine!
“Don’t bother,” said Kate. “Don’t think of it any
more.”
“But yes. But yes!” and away she limped in distraction.
Till an hour later, loud cry from the far end of the house.
Juana waving a scrap of greenery.
“Mire! Niña! Compré perjil a un centavo—I bought
parsley for one cent. Is it right?”
“It is right,” said Kate.
And life could proceed once more.
There were two kitchens, the one next the dining-room,
belonging to Kate, and the narrow little shed under the
banana trees, belonging to the servants. From her verandah
Kate looked away down to Juana’s kitchen shed. It had a
black window hole.
Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap! Why I thought Concha was
at school! said Kate to herself.
No!—there, in the darkness of the window hole was
Concha’s swarthy face and mane, peering out like some
animal from a cave, as she made the tortillas. Tortillas are
flat pancakes of maize dough, baked dry on a flat earthenware
plate over the fire. And the making consists of clapping
a bit of new dough from the palm of one hand to the
other, till the tortilla is of the requisite thinness, roundness,
and so-called lightness.
Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap! It was as
inevitable as the tick of some spider, the sound of Concha
making tortillas in the heat of the morning, peering out of
her dark window hole. And some time after mid-day, the
smoke would be coming out of the window hole; Concha was
throwing the raw tortillas on the big earthen plate over the
slow wood fire.
Then Ezequiel might or might not stride in, very much
the man, serape poised over one shoulder and big straw hat
jauntily curled, to eat the mid-day tortillas. If he had
work in the fields at any distance, he would not appear till
nightfall. If he appeared, he sat on the doorstep and the
women served him his tortillas and fetched him his drink of
water as if he was a king, boy though he might be. And his
rough, breaking voice was heard in quiet command.
Command was the word. Though he was quiet and
gentle, and very conscientious, there was calm, kingly command
in his voice when he spoke to his mother or sisters.
The old male prerogative. Somehow, it made Kate want to
ridicule him.
Came her own meal: one of her trials. Hot, rather
greasy soup. Inevitable hot, greasy, rather peppery rice.
Inevitable meat in hot, thick, rather greasy sauce. Boiled
calabacitas or egg-plant, salad, perhaps some dulce made
with milk—and the big basket of fruit. Overhead, the blazing
tropical sun of late May.
Afternoon, and greater heat. Juana set off with the girls
and the dishes. They would do the washing up in the lake.
Squatting on the stones, they would dabble the plates one
by one, the spoons and the forks one by one in the filmy
water of the lake, then put them in the sun to dry. After
which Juana might wash a couple of towels in the lake and
the girls might bathe. Sauntering the day away—sauntering
the day away.
Jesús, the eldest son, a queer, heavy, greasy fellow,
usually appeared in the afternoon, to water the garden. But
he ate his meals at the hotel, and really lived there, had his
home there. Not that he had any home, any more than
a zopilote had a home. But he ran the planta, and did odd
jobs about the hotel, and worked every day in the year till
half past ten at night, earning twenty-two pesos, eleven
dollars, a month. He wore a black shirt, and his thick,
massive black hair dropped over his low brow. Very near
to an animal. And though, to order, he wore a black
Fascisti shirt, he had the queer, animal jeering of the socialists,
an instinct for pulling things down.
His mother and he had a funny little intimacy of quiet
and indifferent mutual taunting of one another. He would
give her some money if she were in a strait. And there was
a thin little thread of blood-bondage between them. Apart
from that, complete indifference.
Ezequiel was a finer type. He was slender and so erect
that he almost curved backwards. He was very shy,
farouche. Proud also, and more responsible to his family.
He would not go to work in an hotel. No. He was a worker
in the fields, and he was proud of it. A man’s work. No
equivocal sort of half-service for him.
Though he was just a hired labourer, yet, working on the
land he never felt he was working for a master. It was the
land he worked for. Somewhere inside himself he felt that
the land was his, and he belonged in a measure to it. Perhaps
a lingering feeling of tribal, communal land-ownership
and service.
When there was work, he was due to earn a peso a day.
There was often no work: and often only seventy-five centavos
a day for wage. When the land was dry, he would
try to get work on the road, though this he did not like.
But he earned his peso a day.
Often, there was no work. Often, for days, sometimes for
weeks, he would have to hang about, nothing to do, nothing
to do. Only, when the Socialist Government had begun
giving the peasants bits of land, dividing up the big haciendas,
Ezequiel had been allotted a little piece outside the
village. He would go and gather the stone together there,
and prepare to build a little hut. And he would break the
earth with a hoe, his only implement, as far as possible.
But he had no blood connection with this square allotment
of unnatural earth, and he could not get himself into relations
with it. He was fitful and diffident about it. There
was no incentive, no urge.
On workdays he would come striding in about six o’clock,
shyly greeting Kate as he passed. He was a gentleman in
his barbarism. Then, away in the far recess, he would
rapidly fold tortilla after tortilla, sitting on the floor with
his back to the wall, rapidly eating the leathery things that
taste of mortar, because the maize is first boiled with lime
to loosen the husk, and accepting another little pile, served
on a leaf, from the cook, Concha. Juana, cook for the Niña,
would no longer condescend to cook for her own family.
And sometimes there was a mess of meat and chile for
Ezequiel to scoop up out of the earthenware casserole, with
his tortillas. And sometimes there was not. But always, he
ate with a certain blind, rapid indifference, that also seems
to be Mexican. They seem to eat even with a certain hostile
reluctance, and have a strange indifference to what or when
they eat.
His supper finished, as a rule he was off again like a shot,
to the plaza, to be among men. And the women would sit
desultorily about, on the ground. Sometimes Kate would
come in at nine o’clock to an empty place—Ezequiel in the
plaza, Juana and Maria disappeared somewhere or other,
and Concha lying asleep like a heap of rags on the gravel
of the patio. When Kate called her, she would raise her
head, stupefied and hopeless; then get up like a dog and
crawl away to the gate. The strange stupor of boredom and
hopelessness that was always sinking upon them would make
Kate’s heart stand still with dread.
The peculiar indifference to everything, even to one
another. Juana washed a cotton shirt and a pair of cotton
trousers for each of her sons, once a week, and there her
maternal efforts ended. She saw hardly anything of them,
and was often completely unaware of what Ezequiel was
doing, where he was working, or at what. He had just gone
off to work, no more.
Yet again, sometimes she had hot, fierce pangs of maternal
protectiveness, when the boy was unjustly treated, as he
often was. And if she thought he were ill, a black sort of
fatalistic fear came over her. But Kate had to rouse her
into getting some simple medicine.
Like animals, yet not at all like animals. For animals are
complete in their isolation and their insouciance. With them
it is not indifference. It is completeness in themselves. But
with the family there was always a kind of bleeding of incompleteness,
a terrible stupor of boredom settling down.
The two girls could not be apart: they must always be
running after one another. Yet Concha continually teased
the big-eyed, naïve simpleton of a Maria. And Maria was
always in tears. Or the two were suddenly throwing stones
at one another. But with no real aim to hit. And Juana was
abusing them with sudden vehemence, that flickered in a
minute to complete indifference again.
Queer, the savage ferocity with which the girls would suddenly
be throwing stones at one another. But queerer still,
they always aimed just to miss. Kate noticed the same in
the savage attacks the boys made on one another, on the
beach; hurling large stones with intense, terrible ferocity.
But almost always, aiming with a curious cast in the eyes,
just to miss.
But sometimes not. Sometimes hitting with a sharp cut.
And then the wounded one would drop right down, with a
howl, as if dead. And the other boys would edge away, in
a silent kind of dread. And the wounded boy would be
prostrate, not really much hurt, but as if he was killed.
Then, maybe, suddenly he would be up, with a convulsion
of murder in his face, pursuing his adversary with a stone.
And the adversary would abjectly flee.
Always the same thing among the young: a ceaseless,
endless taunting and tormenting. The same as among the
Red Indians. But the Pueblo Indians rarely lapsing from
speech into violence. The Mexican boys almost always.
And almost always, one boy in murderous rage, pursuing
his taunter till he had hurt him: then an abject collapse of
the one hurt. Then, usually, a revival of the one hurt, the
murderous frenzy transferred to him, and the first attacker
fleeing abjectly, in terror. One or the other always abject.
They were a strange puzzle to Kate. She felt something
must be done. She herself was inspired to help. So she
had the two girls for an hour a day, teaching them to read,
to sew, to draw. Maria wanted to learn to read: that she
did want. For the rest, they began well. But soon, the
regularity and the slight insistence of Kate on their attention
made them take again that peculiar invisible jeering
tone, something peculiar to the American Continent. A
quiet, invisible, malevolent mockery, a desire to wound.
They would press upon her, trespassing upon her privacy,
and with a queer effrontery, doing all they could to walk
over her. With their ugly little wills, trying to pull her will
down.
“No, don’t lean on me, Concha. Stand on your own
feet.”
The slight grin of malevolence on Concha’s face, as she
stood on her own feet. Then:
“Do you have lice in your hair, Niña?”
The question asked with a peculiar, subtle, Indian insolence.
“No!” said Kate, suddenly angry. “And now go! Go!
Go away from me! Don’t come near me.”
They slunk out, abject. So much for educating them.
Kate had visitors from Guadalajara—great excitement.
But while the visitors were drinking tea with Kate on the
verandah, at the other side of the patio, full in view, Juana,
Concha, Maria, and Felipa, a cousin of about sixteen,
squatted on the gravel with their splendid black hair down
their backs, displaying themselves as they hunted in each
other’s hair for lice. They wanted to be full in view. And
they were it. They wanted the basic fact of lice to be thrust
under the noses of those white people.
Kate strode down the verandah.
“If you must pick lice,” she said in a shaking voice to
Juana, shaking with anger, “pick them there, in your own
place, where you can’t be seen.”
One instant, Juana’s black inchoate eyes gleamed with a
malevolent ridicule, meeting Kate’s. The next instant,
humble and abject, the four with their black hair down
their backs slunk into the recess out of sight.
But it pleased Juana that she had been able to make
Kate’s eyes blaze with anger. It pleased her. She felt a
certain low power in herself. True, she was a little afraid of
that anger. But that was what she wanted. She would have
no use for a Niña of whom she was not a bit afraid. And
she wanted to be able to provoke that anger, of which she
felt a certain abject twinge of fear.
Ah the dark races! Kate’s own Irish were near enough,
for her to have glimpsed some of the mystery. The dark
races belong to a bygone cycle of humanity. They are left
behind in a gulf out of which they have never been able to
climb. And on to the particular white man’s levels they never
will be able to climb. They can only follow as servants.
While the white man keeps the impetus of his own proud,
onward march, the dark races will yield and serve, perforce.
But let the white man once have a misgiving about his own
leadership, and the dark races will at once attack him, to
pull him down into the old gulfs. To engulf him again.
Which is what is happening. For the white man, let him
bluster as he may, is hollow with misgiving about his own
supremacy.
Full speed ahead, then, for the débâcle.
But once Kate had been roused to a passion of revulsion
from these lice-picking, down-dragging people, they changed
again, and served her with a certain true wistfulness that
could not but touch her. Juana cared really about nothing.
But just that last thread of relationship that connected her
with Kate and the upper world of daylight and fresh air,
she didn’t want to break. No, no, she didn’t want finally
to drive her Niña away. No no, the only one thing she did
want, ultimately, was to serve her Niña.
But at the same time, she cherished a deep malevolent
grudge against rich people, white people, superior people.
Perhaps the white man has finally betrayed his own leadership.
Who knows! But it is a thing of the brave, on-marching
soul, and perhaps this has been betrayed already
by the white man. So that the dark are rising upon him.
Juana would come to Kate, telling her stories from the
past. And the sinister mocking film would be on her black
eyes, and her lined copper face would take on its reptile
mask as she would continue: “Usted sabe, Niña, los gringos,
los gringitos llevan todo—you know, Niña, the gringos
and the gringitos take away everything...?”
The gringos are the Americans. But Kate herself was included
by Juana in the gringitos: the white foreigners. The
woman was making another sliding, insolent attack.
“It is possible,” said Kate coldly. “But tell me what
I take away from Mexico.”
“No, Niña, No!” The subtle smile of satisfaction
lurked under the bronze tarnish of Juana’s face. She had
been able to get at the other woman, touch the raw. “I
don’t speak of you, Niña!” But there was too much
protest in it.
Almost, they wanted to drive her away: to insult her and
drag her down and make her want to go away. They
couldn’t help it. Like the Irish, they could cut off their
nose to spite their face.
The backward races!
At the same time there was a true pathos about them.
Ezequiel had worked for a man for two months, building
a house, when he was a boy of fourteen, in order to get a
serape. At the end of the two months, the man had put him
off, and he had not got the serape: had never got it. A
bitter disappointment.
But then, Kate was not responsible for that. And Juana
seemed almost to make her so.
A people without the energy of getting on, how could they
fail to be hopelessly exploited. They had been hopelessly
and cruelly exploited, for centuries. And their backbones
were locked in malevolent resistance.
“But,” as Kate said to herself, “I don’t want to exploit
them. Not a bit. On the contrary, I am willing to give
more than I get. But that nasty insinuating insultingness
is not fair in the game. I never insult them. I am so careful
not to hurt them. And then they deliberately make these
centipede attacks on me, and are pleased when I am hurt.”
But she knew her own Irish at the game. So she was able
to put Juana and the girls away from her, and isolate herself
from them. Once they were put away, their malevolence
subsided and they remembered what Kate wanted.
While she stayed amiable, they forgot. They forgot to
sweep the patio, they forgot to keep themselves clean. Only
when they were shoved back, into isolation, did they remember
again.
The boy, Ezequiel, seemed to her to have more honour
than the women. He never made these insidious attacks.
And when her house was clean and quiet and the air
seemed cleaned again, the soul renewed, her old fondness
for the family came back. Their curious flitting, coming
and going, like birds: the busy clap—clap—clapping of
tortillas, the excited scrunching of tomatoes and chile on
the metate, as Juana prepared sauce. The noise of the
bucket in the well. Jesús, come to water the garden.
The game, the game of it all! Everything they did must
be fun, or they could not do it. They could not abstract
themselves to a routine. Never. Everything must be fun,
must be variable, must be a bit of an adventure. It was
confusion, but after all, a living confusion, not a dead,
dreary thing. Kate remembered her English servants in the
English kitchens: so mechanical and somehow inhuman.
Well, this was the other extreme.
Here there was no discipline nor method at all. Although
Juana and her brats really wanted to do the things Kate
wished, they must do them their own way. Sometimes
Kate felt distracted: after all, the mechanical lines are so
much easier to follow. But as far as possible, she let the
family be. She had to get used, for example, to the vagaries
of her dining table: a little round table that always
stood on the verandah. At breakfast time it would be discreetly
set under the plantas by the salon; for dinner, at
one o’clock, it would have travelled way down the verandah;
for tea it might be under a little tree on the grass.
And then Juana would decide that the Niña must take
supper, two eggs, rancheros, in the dining-room itself,
isolated at the corner of the long dining-table meant for
fourteen people.
The same with the dishes. Why they should, after washing
up in the big bowls in the kitchen for several days,
suddenly struggle way down to the lake with the unwashed
pots in a basket on Concha’s shoulder, Kate never knew.
Except for the fun of the thing.
Children! But then, not at all children. None of the
wondering insouciance of childhood. Something dark and
cognisant in their souls all the time: some heavy weight of
resistance. They worked in fits and starts, and could be
very industrious; then came days when they lay about on
the ground like pigs. At times they were merry, seated
round on the ground in groups, like Arabian nights, and
laughing away. Then suddenly resisting even merriment in
themselves, relapsing into the numb gloom. When they
were busily working, suddenly for no reason, throwing away
the tool, as if resenting having given themselves. Careless
in their morals, always changing their loves, the men at
least resisted all the time any real giving of themselves.
They didn’t want the thing they were pursuing. It was the
women who drew them on. And a young man and a girl
going down the road from the lake in the dark, teasing and
poking each other in excitement, would startle Kate because
of their unusualness—the men and women never
walked their sex abroad, as white people do. And the
sudden, sexual laugh of the man, so strange a sound of pain
and desire, obstinate reluctance and helpless passion, a
noise as if something tearing in his breast, was a sound to
remember.
Kate felt her household a burden. In a sense, they were
like parasites, they wanted to live on her life, and pull her
down, pull her down. Again, they were so generous with
her, so good and gentle, she felt they were wonderful. And
then once more she came up against that unconscious, heavy,
reptilian indifference in them, indifference and resistance.
Her servants were the clue to all the native life, for her.
The men always together, erect, handsome, balancing their
great hats on the top of their heads and sitting, standing,
crouching with a snake-like impassivity. The women together
separately, soft, and as if hidden, wrapped tight in
their dark rebozos. Men and women seemed always to be
turning their backs on one another, as if they didn’t want
to see one another. No flirting, no courting. Only an occasional
quick, dark look, the signal of a weapon-like desire,
given and taken.
The women seemed, on the whole, softly callous and determined
to go their own way: to change men if they wished.
And the men seemed not to care very profoundly. But it
was the women who wanted the men.
The native women, with their long black hair streaming
down their full, ruddy backs, would bathe at one end of the
beach, usually wearing their chemise, or a little skirt. The
men took absolutely no notice. They didn’t even look the
other way. It was the women bathing, that was all. As
if it were, like the charales swimming, just a natural part of
the lake life. The men just left that part of the lake to the
women. And the women sat in the shallows of the lake,
isolated in themselves like moor-fowl, pouring water over
their heads and over their ruddy arms from a gourd scoop.
The quiet, unobtrusive, but by no means down-trodden
women of the peon class. They went their own way,
enveloped in their rebozos as in their own darkness. They
hurried nimbly along, their full cotton skirts swinging,
chirping and quick like birds. Or they sat in the lake with
long hair streaming, pouring water over themselves: again
like birds. Or they passed with a curious slow inevitability
up the lake-shore, with a heavy red jar of water perched on
one shoulder, one arm over the head, holding the rim of the
jar. They had to carry all water from the lake to their
houses. There was no town supply. Or, especially on
Sunday afternoons, they sat in their doorways lousing one
another. The most resplendent belles, with magnificent
black wavy hair, were most thoroughly loused. It was as
if it were a meritorious public act.
The men were the obvious figures. They assert themselves
on the air. They are the dominant. Usually they are in
loose groups, talking quietly, or silent: always standing or
sitting apart, rarely touching one another. Often a single
man would stand alone at a street corner in his serape,
motionless for hours, like some powerful spectre. Or a man
would lie on the beach as if he had been cast up dead from
the waters. Impassive, motionless, they would sit side by
side on the benches of the plaza, not exchanging a word.
Each one isolated in his own fate, his eyes black and quick
like a snake’s, and as blank.
It seemed to Kate that the highest thing this country
might produce would be some powerful relationship of man
to man. Marriage itself would always be a casual thing.
Though the men seemed very gentle and protective to the
little children. Then they forgot them.
But sex itself was a powerful, potent thing, not to be
played with or paraded. The one mystery. And a mystery
greater than the individual. The individual hardly counted.
It was strange to Kate to see the Indian huts on the
shore, little holes built of straw or corn-stalks, with half-naked
children squatting on the naked earth floor, and a
lousy woman-squalor around, a litter of rags and bones, and
a sharp smell of human excrement. The people have no
noses. And standing silent and erect not far from the hole
of the doorway, the man, handsome and impassive. How
could it be, that such a fine-looking human male should be
so absolutely indifferent, content with such paltry squalor?
But there he was, unconscious. He seemed to have life and
passion in him. And she knew he was strong. No men in
the world can carry heavier loads on their backs, for longer
distances, than these Indians. She had seen an Indian trotting
down a street with a piano on his back: holding it, also,
by a band round his forehead. From his forehead, and on
his spine he carried it, trotting along. The women carry
with a brand round the breast.
So there is strength. And apparently, there is passionate
life. But no energy. Nowhere in Mexico is there any sign
of energy. This is, as it were, switched off.
Even the new artizan class, though it imitates the artizan
class of the United States, has no real energy. There are
workmen’s clubs. The workmen dress up and parade a best
girl on their arm. But somehow, it seems what it is, only
a weak imitation.
Kate’s family was increased, without her expecting it.
One day there arrived from Ocotlan a beautiful ox-eyed
girl of about fifteen, wrapped in her black cotton rebozo,
and somewhat towny in her Madonna-meekness: Maria del
Carmen. With her, Julio, a straight and fierce young man
of twenty-two. They had just been married, and had come
to Sayula for a visit. Julio was Juana’s cousin.
Might they sleep in the patio with herself and the girls,
was Juana’s request. They would stay only two days.
Kate was amazed. Maria del Carmen must have had some
Spanish blood, her beauty was touched with Spain. She
seemed even refined and superior. Yet she was to sleep out on
the ground like a dog, with her young husband. And he, so
erect and proud-looking, possessed nothing in the world but
an old serape.
“There are three spare bedrooms,” said Kate. “They
may sleep in one of those.”
The beds were single beds. Would they need more
blankets? she asked Juana.
No! They would manage with the one serape of Julio’s.
The new family had arrived. Julio was a bricklayer.
That is to say, he worked building the adobe walls of the
little houses. He belonged to Sayula, and had come back
for a visit.
The visit continued. Julio would come striding in at mid-day
and at evening; he was looking for work. Maria del
Carmen, in her one black dress, would squat on the floor
and pat tortillas. She was allowed to cook them in Juana’s
kitchen hole. And she talked and laughed with the girls.
At night, when Julio was home, he would lie on the ground
with his back to the wall, impassive, while Maria del Carmen
fondled his thick black hair.
They were in love. But even now, he was not yielding
to his love.
She wanted to go back to Ocotlan, where she was at home,
and more a señorita than here in Sayula. But he refused.
There was no money: the young ménage lived on about
five American cents a day.
Kate was sewing. Maria del Carmen, who didn’t even
know how to put a chemise together, watched with great
eyes. Kate taught her, and bought a length of cotton
material. Maria del Carmen was sewing herself a dress!
Julio had got work at a peso a day. The visit continued.
Kate thought Julio wasn’t very nice with Maria del Carmen:
his quiet voice was so overbearing in command when he
spoke to her. And Maria del Carmen, who was a bit towny,
did not take it well. She brooded a little.
The visit stretched into weeks. And now Juana was getting
a bit tired of her relative.
But Julio had got a bit of money. He had rented a little
one-room adobe house, at one peso fifty per week. Maria
del Carmen was going to move into her own home.
Kate saw the new outfit got together. It consisted of one
straw mat, three cooking plates of earthenware, five bits of
native crockery, two wooden spoons, one knife and Julio’s
old blanket. That was all. But Maria del Carmen was
moving in.
Kate presented her with a large old eiderdown, whose
silk was rather worn, a couple of bowls, and a few more
bits of crockery. Maria del Carmen was set up. Good!
Good! Oh Good! Kate heard her voice down the patio.
I have got a coverlet! I have got a coverlet!
In the rainy season, the nights can be very cold, owing
to evaporation. Then the natives lie through the small
hours like lizards, numb and prostrate with cold. They are
lying on the damp earth on a thin straw mat, with a corner
of an old blanket to cover them. And the same terrible
inertia makes them endure it, without trying to make any
change. They could carry in corn husks or dry banana
leaves for a bed. They could even cover themselves with
banana leaves.
But no! On a thin mat on damp cold earth they lie and
tremble with cold, night after night, night after night,
night after night.
But Maria del Carmen was a bit towny. Oh good! Oh
good! I’ve got a coverlet!
