Cipriano wanted Kate. The little general, the strutting little soldier, he wanted Kate: just for moments. He did not really want to marry her. He wanted the moments, no more. She was to give him his moments, and then he was off again, to his army, to his men. It was what he wanted.
It was what she wanted too. Her life was her own! It was not her métier to be fanning the blood in a man, to make him almighty and blood-glamorous. Her life was her own!
She rose and went to her bedroom to look for a book she had promised Ramón. She could not bear the sight of him in love with Teresa any longer. The heavy, mindless smile on his face, the curious glisten of his eyes, and the strange, heavy, lordly aplomb of his body affected her like a madness. She wanted to run.
This was what they were, these people! Savages, with the impossible fluid flesh of savages, and that savage way of dissolving into an awful black mass of desire. Emerging with the male conceit and haughtiness swelling his blood and making him feel endless. While his eyes glistened with a haughty blackness.
The trouble was, that the power of the world, which she had known until now only in the eyes of blue-eyed men, who made queens of their women — even if they hated them for it in the end — was now fading in the blue eyes, and dawning in the black. In Ramón’s eyes at this moment was a steady, alien gleam of pride, and daring, and power, which she knew was masterly. The same was in Cipriano’s quick looks. The power of the world was dying in the blond men, their bravery and their supremacy was leaving them, going into the eyes of the dark men, who were rousing at last.
Joachim, the eager, clever, fierce, sensitive genius, who could look into her soul, and laugh into her soul, with his blue eyes: he had died under her eyes. And her children were not even his children.
If she could have fanned his blood as Teresa now fanned the blood of Ramón, he would never have died.
But it was impossible. Every dog has his day. — And every race.
Teresa came tapping timidly.
‘May I come?’
‘Do!’ said Kate, rising from her knees and leaving little piles of books all round the book-trunk.
It was a fairly large room, with doors opening on to the patio and the sun-hard garden, smooth mango-trees rising like elephant’s trunks out of the ground, green grass after the rains, chickens beneath the ragged banana leaves. A red bird splashed in the basin of water, opening and shutting brown wings above his pure scarlet, vivid.
But Teresa looked at the room, not out of doors. She smelt the smell of cigarettes and saw the many cigarette stumps in the agate tray by the bed. She saw the littered books, the scattered jewellery, the brilliant New-Mexican rugs on the floor, the Persian curtain hung behind the bed, the handsome, coloured bedcover, the dresses of dark silk and bright velvet flung over a trunk, the folded shawls with their long fringe, the scattered shoes, white, grey, pale-brown, dark-brown, black, on the floor, the tall Chinese candlesticks. The room of a woman who lived her own life, for her own self.
Teresa was repelled, uneasy, and fascinated.
‘How nice this is!’ she said, touching the glowing bedcover.
‘A friend made it for me, in England.’
Teresa looked with wonder at everything, especially at the tangle of jewellery on the dressing-table.
‘Don’t you like those red stones!’ said Kate, kneeling again to put the books back, and looking at the brown neck bent absorbedly over the jewels. Thin shoulders, with a soft, dark skin, in a bit of a white dress! And loosely folded masses of black hair held by tortoise-shell pins. — An insignificant little thing, humble, Kate thought to herself.
But she knew really that Teresa was neither insignificant nor humble. Under that soft brown skin, and in that stooping female spine was a strange old power to call up the blood in a man, and glorify it, and, in some way, keep it for herself.
On the sewing-table was a length of fine Indian muslin which Kate had bought in India, and did not know what to do with. It was a sort of yellow-peach colour, beautiful, but it did not suit Kate. Teresa was fingering the gold-thread selvedge.
‘It is not organdie?’ she said.
‘No, muslin. Hand-made muslin from India. — Why don’t you take it? It doesn’t suit me. It would be perfect for you.’
She rose and held the fabric against Teresa’s dark neck, pointing to the mirror. Teresa saw the warm-yellow muslin upon herself, and her eyes flashed.
‘No!’ she said. ‘I couldn’t take it.’
‘Why not? It doesn’t suit me. I’ve had it lying about for a year now, and was wondering whether to cut it up for curtains. Do have it.’
Kate could be imperious, almost cruel in her giving.
‘I can’t take it from you!’
‘Of course you can!’
Ramón appeared in the doorway, glancing round the room, and at the two women.
‘Look!’ said Teresa, rather confused. ‘The Señora wants to give me this Indian muslin.’ — She turned to him shyly, with the fabric held to her throat.
‘You look very well in it,’ he said, his eyes resting on her.
‘The Señora ought not to give it to me.’
‘The Señora would not give it you unless she wished to.’
‘Then!’ said Teresa to Kate. ‘Many thanks! But many thanks!’
‘It is nothing,’ said Kate.
‘But Ramón says it suits me.’
‘Yes, doesn’t it suit her!’ cried Kate to him. ‘It was made in India for someone as dark as she is. It does suit her.’
‘Very pretty!’ said Ramón.
He had glanced round the room, at the different attractive things from different parts of the world, and at the cigarette ends in the agate bowl: the rather weary luxury and disorder, and the touch of barrenness, of a woman living her own life.
She did not know what he was thinking. But to herself she thought: This is the man I defended on that roof. This is the man who lay with a hole in his back, naked and unconscious under the lamp. He didn’t look like a Sultan then.
Teresa must have divined something of her thought, for she said, looking at Ramón:
‘Señora! But for you Ramón would have been killed. Always I think of it.’
‘Don’t think of it,’ said Kate. ‘Something else would have happened. Anyhow it wasn’t I, it was destiny.’
‘Ah, but you were the destiny!’ said Teresa.
‘Now there is a hostess, won’t you come and stay some time at Jamiltepec?’ said Ramón.
‘Oh, do! Do come!’ cried Teresa.
‘But do you really want me?’ said Kate, incredulous.
‘Yes! Yes!’ cried Teresa.
‘She needs a woman-friend,’ said Ramón gently.
‘Yes, I do!’ she cried. ‘I have never had a true, true woman-friend: only when I was at school, and we were girls.’
Kate doubted very much her own capacity for being a true, true woman-friend to Teresa. She wondered what the two of them saw in her. As what did they see her?
‘Yes, I should like to come for a few days,’ she replied.
‘Oh, yes!’ cried Teresa. ‘When will you come?’
The day was agreed.
‘And we will write the Song of Malintzi,’ said Ramón.
‘Don’t do that!’ cried Kate quickly.
He looked at her, in his slow, wondering way. He could make her feel, at moments, as if she were a sort of child and as if he were a ghost.
Kate went to Jamiltepec, and before the two women knew it, almost, they were making dresses for Teresa, cutting up the pineapple-coloured muslin. Poor Teresa, for a bride she had a scanty wardrobe: nothing but her rather pathetic black dresses that somehow made her look poor, and a few old white dresses. She had lived for her father — who had a good library of Mexicana and was all his life writing a history of the State of Jalisco — and for the hacienda. And it was her proud boast that Las Yemas was the only hacienda, within a hundred miles range, which had not been smashed at all during the revolutions t
hat followed the flight of Porfirio Diaz.
Teresa had a good deal of the nun in her. But that was because she was deeply passionate, and deep passion tends to hide within itself, rather than expose itself to vulgar contact.
So Kate pinned the muslin over the brown shoulders, wondering again at the strange, uncanny softness of the dark skin, the heaviness of the black hair. Teresa’s family, the Romeros, had been in Mexico since the early days of the Conquest.
Teresa wanted long sleeves.
‘My arms are so thin!’ she murmured, hiding her slender brown arms with a sort of shame. ‘They are not beautiful like yours.’
Kate was a strong, full-developed woman of forty, with round, strong white arms.
‘No!’ she said to Teresa. ‘Your arms are not thin: they are exactly right for your figure, and pretty and young and brown.’
‘But make the sleeves long, to the wrist,’ pleaded Teresa.
And Kate did so, realizing it became the other woman’s nature better.
‘The men here don’t like little thin women,’ said Teresa, wistfully.
‘One doesn’t care what the men like,’ said Kate. ‘Do you think Don Ramón wishes you were a plump partridge?’
Teresa looked at her with a smile in her dark, big bright eyes, that were so quick, and in many ways so unseeing.
‘Who knows!’ she said. And in her quick, mischievous smile it was evident she would like also, sometimes, to be a plump partridge.
Kate now saw more of the hacienda life than she had done before. When Ramón was at home, he consulted his overseer, or administrator, every morning. But already Teresa was taking this work off his hands. She would see to the estate.
Ramón was a good deal absent, either in Mexico City or in Guadalajara, or even away in Sonora. He was already famous and notorious throughout the country, his name was a name to conjure with. But underneath the rather ready hero-worship of the Mexicans, Kate somehow felt their latent grudging. Perhaps they took more satisfaction in ultimately destroying their heroes, than in temporarily raising them high. The real perfect moment was when the hero was downed.
And to Kate, sceptic as she was, it seemed much more likely that they were sharpening the machete to stick in Ramón’s heart, when he got a bit too big for them, than anything else. Though, to be sure, there was Cipriano to reckon with. And Cipriano was a little devil whom they quite rightly feared. And Cipriano, for once, was faithful. He was, to himself, Huitzilopochtli, and to this he would maintain a demonish faith. He was Huitzilopochtli, Ramón was Quetzalcoatl. To Cipriano this was a plain and living fact. And he kept his army keen as a knife. Even the President would not care to run counter to Cipriano. And the President was a brave man too.
‘One day,’ he said, ‘we will put Quetzalcoatl in Puebla Cathedral, and Huitzilopochtli in Mexico Cathedral and Malintzi in Guadalupe. The day will come, Ramón.’
‘We will see that it comes,’ Ramón replied.
But Ramón and Montes suffered alike from the deep, devilish animosity the country sent out in silence against them. It was the same, whoever was in power, the Mexicans seemed to steam with invisible, grudging hate, the hate of demons foiled in their own souls, whose only motive is to foil everything, everybody, in the everlasting hell of cramped frustration.
This was the dragon of Mexico, that Ramón had to fight. Montes, the President, had it to fight the same. And it shattered his health. Cipriano also had it up against him. But he succeeded best. With his drums, with his dances round the fire, with his soldiers kept keen as knives he drew real support from his men. He grew stronger and more brilliant.
Ramón also, at home in his own district, felt the power flow into him from his people. He was their chief, and by his effort and his power he had almost overcome their ancient, fathomless resistance. Almost he had awed them back into the soft mystery of living, awed them until the tension of their resistant, malevolent wills relaxed. At home, he would feel his strength upon him.
But away from home, and particularly in the city of Mexico, he felt himself bled, bled, bled by the subtle, hidden malevolence of the Mexicans, and the ugly negation of the greedy, mechanical foreigners, birds of prey forever alighting in the cosmopolitan capital.
While Ramón was away, Kate stayed with Teresa. The two women had this in common, that they felt it was better to stand faithfully behind a really brave man, than to push forward into the ranks of cheap and obtrusive women. And this united them. A certain deep, ultimate faithfulness in each woman, to her own man who needed her fidelity, kept Kate and Teresa kindred to one another.
The rainy season had almost passed, though throughout September and even in October occasional heavy downpours fell. But the wonderful Mexican autumn, like a strange, inverted spring, was upon the land. The waste places bloomed with pink and white cosmos, the strange wild trees flowered in a ghostly way, forests of small sunflowers shone in the sun, the sky was a pure, pure blue, the floods of sunshine lay tempered on the land, that in part was flooded with water, from the heavy rains.
The lake was very full, strange and uneasy, and it had washed up a bank of the wicked water-hyacinths along all its shores. The wild-fowl were coming from the north, clouds of wild ducks like dust in the high air, sprinkling the water like weeds. Many, many wild fowl, grebe, cranes, and white gulls of the inland seas, so that the northern mystery seemed to have blown so far south. There was a smell of water in the land, and a sense of soothing. For Kate firmly believed that part of the horror of the Mexican people came from the unsoothed dryness of the land and the untempered crudity of the flat-edged sunshine. If only there could be a softening of water in the air, and a haze above trees, the unspoken and unspeakable malevolence would die out of the human hearts.
Kate rode out often with Teresa to see the fields. The sugarcane in the inner valley was vivid green, and rising tall, tall. The peons were beginning to cut it with their sword-like machetes, filling the bullock-wagons, to haul the cane to the factory in Sayula. On the dry hill-slopes the spikey tequila plant — a sort of maguey — flourished in its iron wickedness. Low wild cactuses put forth rose-like blossoms, wonderful and beautiful for such sinister plants. The beans were gathered from the bean-fields, some gourds and squashes still sprawled their uncanny weight across the land. Red chiles hung on withering plants, red tomatoes sank to the earth. Some maize still reared its flags, there was still young corn to eat on the cob. The banana crop was small, the children came in with the little wild yellow tejocote apples, for making preserves. Teresa was making preserves, even with the late figs and peaches. On the trees, the ponderous mango-trees, some fruit was again orange-yellow and ripe, but the most still hung in strings, heavy and greenish and dropping like the testes of bulls.
It was autumn in Mexico, with wild duck on the waters, and hunters with guns, and small wild doves in the trees. Autumn in Mexico, and the coming of the dry season, with the sky going higher and higher, pure pale blue, the sunset arriving with a strange flare of crystal yellow light. With the coffee berries turning red on the struggling bushes under the trees, and bougainvillea in the strong light glowing with a glow of magenta colour so deep you could plunge your arms deep in it. With a few humming-birds in the sunshine, and the fish in the waters gone wild, and the flies, that steamed black in the first rains, now passing away again.
Teresa attended to everything, and Kate helped. Whether it was a sick peon in one of the little houses, or the hosts of bees from the hives under the mangoes, or the yellow, yellow beeswax to be made into little bowlfuls, or the preserves, or the garden, or the calves, or the bit of butter and the little fresh cheeses made of strands of curd, or the turkeys to be overlooked: she saw to it along with Teresa. And she wondered at the steady, urgent, efficient will which had to be exerted all the time. Everything was kept going by a heavy exertion of will. If once the will of the master broke, everything would break, and ruin would overtake the place almost at once. No real relaxation, ever. Always the sombre, insistent will.
Ramón arrived home one evening in November, from a long journey to Sonora. He had come overland from Tepic, and twice had been stopped by floods. The rains, so late, were very unusual. He was tired and remote-seeming. Kate’s heart stood still a moment as she thought: He goes so remote, as if he might go away altogether into death.
It was cloudy again, with lightning beating about on the horizons. But all was very still. She said good-night early, and wandered down her own side of the terrace, to the look-out at the end, which looked on to the lake. Everything was dark, save for the intermittent pallor of lightning.
And she was startled to see, in a gleam of lightning, Teresa sitting with her back to the wall of the open terrace, Ramón lying with his head in her lap, while she slowly pushed her fingers through his thick black hair. They were as silent as the night.
Kate gave a startled murmur and said:
‘I’m so sorry! I didn’t know you were here.’
‘I wanted to be under the sky!’ said Ramón, heaving himself to rise.
‘Oh, don’t move!’ said Kate. ‘It was stupid of me to come here. You are tired.’
‘Yes,’ he said, sinking again. ‘I am tired. These people make me feel I have a hole in the middle of me. So I have come back to Teresa.’
‘Yes!’ said Kate. ‘One isn’t the Living Quetzalcoatl for nothing. Of course they eat holes in you. — Really, is it worth it? — To give yourself to be eaten away by them.’
‘It must be so,’ he said. ‘The change has to be made. And some man has to make it. I sometimes wish it wasn’t I.’
‘So do I wish it. So does Teresa. One wonders if it isn’t better to be just a man,’ said Kate.
But Teresa said nothing.
‘One does what one must. And after all, one is always just a man,’ he said. ‘And if one has wounds — à la guerre comme à la guerre!’
His voice came out of the darkness like a ghost.
‘Ah!’ sighed Kate. ‘It makes one wonder what a man is, that he must needs expose himself to the horrors of all the other people.’
There was silence for a moment.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 471