He stared at Stepanov full of accusation. Stepanov lifted his palm from his cup, and beating off flies, drank. “Light no good, probably,” he said. His eyes flickered open, clicked shut in Kennerly’s direction, as if they had taken a snapshot of something and that episode was finished.
“If you want to look at it that way,” said Kennerly, with resentment, “but after all, there it was, it had happened, it wasn’t our fault, and we might as well have had it.”
“We can always do it again,” said Stepanov. “When Justino comes back, and the light is better. The light,” he said to me, “it is always our enemy. Here we have one good day in five, or less.”
“Imagine,” said Kennerly, pouncing, “just try to imagine that—when that poor boy comes back he’ll have to go through the same scene he has gone through twice before, once in play and once in reality. Reality!” He licked his chops. “Think how he’ll feel. Why, it ought to drive him crazy.”
“If he comes back,” said Stepanov, “we must think of that.”
In the patio half a dozen Indian boys, their ragged white clothes exposing their tawny smooth skin, were flinging over the sleek-backed horses great saddles of deerskin encrusted with silver embroidery and mother-of-pearl. The women were returning to the washing fountain. The pigs were out rooting in their favorite wallows, and in the vat-room, silently, the day-workers were already filling the bullhide vats with freshly drawn pulque juice. Carlos Montaña was out early too, enjoying himself in the fresh morning air, watching three dogs chase a long-legged pig from wallow to barn. The pig, screaming steadily, galloped like a rocking horse towards the known safety of his pen, the dogs nipping at his heels just enough to keep him up to his best speed. Carlos roared with joy, holding his ribs, and the Indian boys laughed with him.
The Spanish overseer, who had been cast for the rôle of villain—one of them—in the film, came out wearing a new pair of tight riding trousers, of deerskin and silver embroidery, like the saddles, and sat slouched on the long bench near the arch, facing the great corral where the Indians and soldiers were. There he sat nearly all day, as he had sat for years and might sit for years more. His long wry North-Spanish face was dead with boredom. He slouched, with his English cap pulled over his close-set eyes, and did not even glance to see what Carlos was laughing at. Andreyev and I waved to Carlos and he came over at once. He was still laughing. It seemed he had forgotten the pig and was laughing at the overseer, who had already forty pairs of fancy charro trousers, but had thought none of them quite good enough for the film and had caused to be made, at great expense, the pair he was now wearing, which were entirely too tight. He hoped by wearing them every day to stretch them. He was miserable, entirely, for his trousers were all he had to live for, anyhow. “All he can do with his life,” said Andreyev, “is to put on a different pair of fancy trousers every day, and sit on that bench hoping that something, anything, may happen.”
I said I should have thought there had been enough happening for the past few weeks. . . or at any rate the past few days.
“Oh, no,” said Carlos, “nothing that lasts long enough. I mean real excitement like the last Agrarian raid. . . . There were machine guns on the towers, and every man on the place had a rifle and a pistol. They had the time of their lives. They drove the raiders off, and then they fired the rest of their ammunition in the air by way of celebration; and the next day they were bored. They wanted to have the whole show over again. It was very hard to explain to them that the fiesta was ended.”
“They do really hate the Agrarians, then?” I asked.
“No, they love excitement,” said Carlos.
We walked through the vat-room, picking our way through the puddles of sap sinking into the mud floor, idly stopping to watch, without comment, the flies drowning in the stinking liquor which seeped over the hairy bullhides sagging between the wooden frames. María Santísima stood primly in her blue painted niche in a frame of fly-blown paper flowers, with a perpetual light at her feet. The walls were covered with a faded fresco relating the legend of pulque; how a young Indian girl discovered this divine liquor, and brought it to the emperor, who rewarded her well; and after her death she became a half-goddess. An old legend: maybe the oldest: something to do with man’s confused veneration for, and terror of, the fertility of women and vegetation. . . .
Betancourt stood in the door sniffing the air bravely. He glanced around the walls with the eye of an expert. “This is a very good example,” he said, smiling at the fresco, “the perfect example, really. . . . The older ones are always the best, of course. It is a fact,” he said, “that the Spaniards found wall paintings in the pre-Conquest pulquerías. . . always telling this legend. So it goes on. Nothing ever ends,” he waved his long beautiful hand, “it goes on being and becomes little by little something else.”
“I’d call that an end, of a kind,” said Carlos.
“Oh, well, you,” said Betancourt, smiling with immense indulgence upon his old friend, who was becoming gradually something else.
At ten o’clock don Genaro emerged on his way to visit the village judge once more. Doña Julia, Andreyev, Stepanov, Carlos, and I were walking on the roofs in the intermittent sun-and-cloud light, looking out over the immense landscape of patterned field and mountain. Stepanov carried his small camera and took snapshots of us, with the dogs. We had already had our pictures taken on the steps with a nursling burro, with Indian babies; at the fountain on the long upper terrace to the south, where the grandfather lived; before the closed chapel door (with Carlos being a fat pious priest); in the patio still farther back with the ruins of the old monastery stone bath; and in the pulquería.
So we were tired of snapshots, and leaned in a row over the roof to watch don Genaro take his leave. . . . He leaped down the shallow steps with half a dozen Indian boys standing back for him to pass, hurled himself at the saddle of his Arab mare, his man let go the bridle instantly and leaped to his own horse, and don Genaro rode hell-for-leather out of the corral with his mounted man pounding twenty feet behind him. Dogs, pigs, burros, women, babies, boys, chickens, scattered and fled before him, little soldiers hurled back the great outer gates at his approach, and the two went through at a dead run, disappearing into the hollow of the road. . . .
“That judge will never let Justino go without the money, I know that, and everybody knows it. Genaro knows it. Yet he will still go and fight and fight,” said doña Julia in her toneless soft voice, without rebuke.
“Oh, it is barely possible he may,” said Carlos. “If Velarde sends word, you’ll see—Justino will pop out! like that!” He shot an imaginary pea between forefinger and thumb.
“Yes, but think how Genaro will have to pay Velarde!” said doña Julia. “It’s too tiresome, just when the film was going so well.” She looked at Stepanov.
He said, “Stay just that way one little second,” raised his camera and pressed the lever; then turned, gazed through the lens at a figure standing in the lower patio. Foreshortened, dirty gray-white against dirty yellow-gray wall, hat pulled down over his eyes, arms folded, Vicente stood without moving. He had been standing there for some time, staring. At last he did move; walked away suddenly with some decision, almost to the gate; then stood again staring, framed in the archway. Stepanov took another picture of him.
I said, to Andreyev, walking a little apart, “I wonder why he did not let his friend Justino escape, or at least give him his chance to try. . . . Why did he go after him, I wonder?”
“Revenge,” said Andreyev. “Imagine a man’s friend betraying him so, and with a woman, and a sister! He was furious. He did not know what he was doing, maybe. . . . Now I imagine he is regretting it.”
In two hours don Genaro and his servant were back; they approached the hacienda at a reasonable pace, but once fairly in sight they whipped up their horses and charged into the corral in the same style as when they left it. The servants, suddenly awake, ran back and forth, up and down steps, round and round; the anim
als scurried for refuge as before. Three Indian boys flew to the mare’s bridle, but Vicente was first. He leaped and danced as the mare plunged and fought for her head, his eyes fixed on don Genaro, who flung himself to the ground, landed lightly as an acrobat, and strode away with a perfectly expressionless face.
Nothing had happened. The judge still wanted two thousand pesos to let Justino go. This may have been the answer Vicente expected. He sat against the wall all afternoon, knees drawn up to his chin, hat over his eyes, his feet in their ragged sandals fallen limp on their sides. In half an hour the evil news was known even to the farthest man in the maguey fields. At the table, don Genaro ate and drank in silent haste, like a man who must catch the last train for a journey on which his life depends. “No, I won’t have this,” he broke out, hammering the table beside his plate. “Do you know what that imbecile judge said to me? He asked me why I worried so much over one peon. I told him it was my business what I chose to worry about. He said he had heard we were making a picture over here with men shooting each other in it. He said he had a jailful of men waiting to be shot, and he’d be glad to send them over for us to shoot in the picture. He couldn’t see why, he said, we were pretending to kill people when we could have all we needed to kill really. He thinks Justino should be shot, too. Let him try it! But never in this world will I give him two thousand pesos!”
At sunset the men driving the burros came in from the maguey fields. The workers in the vat-room began to empty the fermented pulque into barrels, and to pour the fresh maguey water into the reeking bullhide vats. The chanting and counting and the rolling of barrels down the incline began again for the night. The white flood of pulque flowed without pause; all over Mexico the Indians would drink the corpse-white liquor, swallow forgetfulness and ease by the riverful, and the money would flow silver-white into the government treasury; don Genaro and his fellow-hacendados would fret and curse, the Agrarians would raid, and ambitious politicians in the capital would be stealing right and left enough to buy such haciendas for themselves. It was all arranged.
We spent the evening in the billiard room. Doctor Volk had arrived, had passed an hour with Uspensky, who had a simple sore throat and a threat of tonsilitis. Doctor Volk would cure him. Meantime he played a round of billiards with Stepanov and don Genaro. He was a splendid, conscientious, hard-working doctor, a Russian, and he could not conceal his delight at being once more with Russians, having a little holiday with a patient who was not very sick, after all, and a chance to play billiards, which he loved. When it was his turn, he climbed, smiling, on the edge of the table, leaned halfway down the green baize, closed one eye, balanced his cue and sighted and balanced again. Without taking his shot, he rolled off the table, smiling, placed himself at another angle, sighted again, leaned over almost flat, sighted, took his shot, and missed, smiling. Then it was Stepanov’s turn. “I simply cannot understand it,” said Doctor Volk, shaking his head, watching Stepanov with such an intensity of admiration that his eyes watered.
Andreyev sat on a low stool playing the guitar and singing Russian songs in a continuous murmur. Doña Julia curled up on the divan near him, in her black pajamas, with her Pekinese slung around her neck like a scarf. The beast snuffled and groaned and rolled his eyes in a swoon of flabby enjoyment. The big dogs sniffed around him with pained knotted foreheads. He yammered and snapped and whimpered at them. “They cannot believe he is really a dog,” said doña Julia in delight. Carlos and Betancourt sat at a small table with music and costume designs spread before them. They were talking as if they were going over again a subject which wearied them both. . . .
I was learning a new card game with a thin dark youth who was some sort of assistant to Betancourt. He was very sleek and slim-waisted and devoted, he said, to fresco painting, “only modern,” he told me, “like Rivera’s, the method, but not old-fashioned style like his. I am decorating a house in Cuernavaca, come and look at it. You will see what I mean. You should not have played the dagger,” he added; “now I shall play the crown, and there you are, defeated.” He gathered up the cards and shuffled them. “When Justino was here,” he said, “the director was always having trouble with him in the serious scenes, because Justino thought everything was a joke. In the death scenes, he smiled all over his face and ruined a great deal of film. Now they are saying that when Justino comes back no one will ever have to say again to him, ‘Don’t laugh, Justino, this is death, this is not funny.’”
Doña Julia turned her Pekinese over and rolled him back and forth on her lap. “He will forget everything, the minute it is over. . . his sister, everything,” she said, gently, looking at me with soft empty eyes. “They are animals. Nothing means anything to them. And,” she added, “it is quite possible he may not come back.”
A silence like a light trance fell over the whole room in which all these chance-gathered people who had nothing to say to each other were for the moment imprisoned. Action was their defense against the predicament they were in, all together, and for the moment nothing was happening. The suspense in the air seemed ready to explode when Kennerly came in almost on tiptoe, like a man entering church. Everybody turned toward him as if he were in himself a whole rescue party. He announced his bad news loudly: “I’ve got to go back to Mexico City tonight. There’s all sorts of trouble there. About the film. I better get back there and have it out with the censors. I just talked over the telephone there and he says there is some talk about cutting out a whole reel. . . you know, that scene with the beggars at the fiesta.”
Don Genaro laid down his cue. “I’m going back tonight,” he said; “you can go with me.”
“Tonight?” doña Julia turned her face towards him, her eyes down. “What for?”
“Lolita,” he said briefly and angrily. “She must come back. They have to make three or four scenes over again.”
“Ah, that’s lovely!” said doña Julia. She buried her face in the fur of her little dog. “Ah, lovely! Lolita back again! Do go for her—I can’t wait!”
Stepanov spoke over his shoulder to Kennerly with no attempt to conceal his impatience—“I shouldn’t worry about the censors—let them have their way.”
Kennerly’s jaw jerked and his voice trembled: “My God! I’ve got to worry and somebody has got to think of the future around here!”
Ten minutes later don Genaro’s powerful car roared past the billiard room and fled down the wild dark road towards the capital.
In the morning there began a gradual drift back to town, by train, by automobile. “Stay here,” each said to me in turn, “we are coming back tomorrow, Uspensky will be feeling better, the work will begin again.” Doña Julia was stopping in bed. I said good-by to her in the afternoon. She was sleepy and downy, curled up with her Pekinese on her shoulder. “Tomorrow,” she said, “Lolita will be here, and there will be great excitement. They are going to do some of the best scenes over again.” I could not wait for tomorrow in this deathly air. “If you should come back in about ten days,” said the Indian driver, “you would see a different place. It is very sad here now. But then the green corn will be ready, and ah, there will be enough to eat again!”
CHRONOLOGY
NOTE ON THE TEXTS
NOTES
Chronology
1890
Born Callie Russell Porter, May 15, in Indian Creek, Texas, the fourth child of Harrison Boone Porter (b. 1857, Hays County, Texas) and (Mary) Alice Jones Porter (b. 1859, Guadalupe County, Texas). (Alice Porter, a former schoolteacher, was the second of three children of prosperous farmer John Newton Jones, 1833–1886, and Caroline Lee Frost Jones, b. 1835; she met Harrison Porter, a graduate of the Texas Military Institute, at a family wedding in 1880. In 1883, when Alice’s mother was declared insane, John Jones placed her in private care and moved to Indian Creek, a frontier settlement in Brown County, North Central Texas, where he purchased a 640-acre farm. In 1885, he invited Alice and Harrison, married two years earlier, to join him and Alice’s brothers at the farm,
offering them free tenancy on a small farming tract. Harrison Porter was the fourth of 11 children born to Asbury Duval Porter, 1814–1879, a veteran of the Confederate Army, and Catharine Ann Skaggs [“Cat”] Porter, b. 1827, a native of Warren County, Kentucky. Harrison and Alice’s first child, Anna Gay [called “Gay”], was born in 1885, and their second, Harry Ray, in 1887. Their third child, Johnnie, was born in 1889 and died shortly after his first birthday.)
1892
The Porters’ fifth child, a daughter, born January 25; Alice Porter, always frail, dies March 20. To honor her memory, Harrison christens the infant Mary Alice, but she will always be known as “Baby.” Harrison takes the children to Kyle, a town of 500 in Hays County, to live in the home of his widowed mother, Cat Skaggs Porter. Family divides time between Kyle and Cat’s small farm on nearby Plum Creek.
1893–95
Grieving and directionless, Harrison is a distracted and often-absent father. Cat takes charge of the children: she demands obedience, excellent schoolwork, attendance at the local Methodist Church, and good manners. She also instills in Callie the pleasures and powers of storytelling, spinning family tales in which her Skaggs ancestors are larger-than-life figures: her father, Abraham Moredock Skaggs, fought with distinction in the War of 1812; her mother, Rhoda Boone Smith Skaggs, was a descendant of Jonathan Boone, brother of Daniel; her grandfather James Skaggs served under General George Washington; and her great-grandfather Henry Skaggs was an intrepid explorer in the Kentucky territory. “I was fed from birth on myth and legend,” Porter will recall, “and a conviction of natural superiority bestowed by birth and tradition.”
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