‘There sit the Indians staring as if heaven had opened and the Virgin of Guadalupe was standing tiptoe on their chins. And what do you expect? The telephone is a dummy. It isn’t connected with anywhere. Isn’t that rich? But it’s Mexico.’
The moment’s fatal pause followed this funny story.
‘Oh but!’ said Kate, ‘it’s wicked! It is wicked. I’m sure the Indians would be all right, if they were left alone.’
‘Well,’ said Mrs Norris, ‘Mexico isn’t like any other place in the world.’
But she spoke with fear and despair in her voice.
‘They seem to want to betray everything,’ said Kate. ‘They seem to love criminals and ghastly things. They seem to want the ugly things. They seem to want the ugly things to come up to the top. All the foulness that lies at the bottom, they want to stir up to the top. They seem to enjoy it. To enjoy making everything fouler. Isn’t it curious!’
‘It is curious,’ said Mrs Norris.
‘But that’s what it is,’ said the Judge. ‘They want to turn the country into one big crime. They don’t like anything else. They don’t like honesty and decency and cleanliness. They want to foster lies and crime. What they call liberty here is just freedom to commit crime. That’s what Labour means, that’s what they all mean. Free crime, nothing else.’
‘I wonder all the foreigners don’t go away,’ said Kate.
‘They have their occupations here,’ snapped the Judge.
‘And the good people are all going away. They have nearly all gone, those that have anything left to go to,’ said Mrs Norris. ‘Some of us, who have our property here, and who have made our lives here, and who know the country, we stay out of a kind of tenacity. But we know it’s hopeless. The more it changes, the worse it is. — Ah, here is Don Ramón and Don Cipriano. So pleased to see you. Let me introduce you.’
Don Ramón Carrasco was a tall, big, handsome man who gave the effect of bigness. He was middle aged, with a large black moustache and large, rather haughty eyes under straight brows. The General was in civilian clothes, looking very small beside the other man, and very smartly built, almost cocky.
‘Come,’ said Mrs Norris. ‘Let us go across and have tea.’
The Major excused himself, and took his departure.
Mrs Norris gathered her little shawl round her shoulders and led through a sombre antechamber to a little terrace, where creepers and flowers bloomed thick on the low walls. There was a bell-flower, red and velvety, like blood that is drying: and clusters of white roses: and tufts of bougainvillea, papery magenta colour.
‘How lovely it is here!’ said Kate. ‘Having the great dark trees beyond.’
But she stood in a kind of dread.
‘Yes it is beautiful,’ said Mrs Norris, with the gratification of a possessor. ‘I have such a time trying to keep these apart.’ And going across in her little black shawl, she pushed the bougainvillea away from the rust-scarlet bell-flowers, stroking the little white roses to make them intervene.
‘I think the two reds together interesting,’ said Owen.
‘Do you really!’ said Mrs Norris, automatically, paying no heed to such a remark.
The sky was blue overhead, but on the lower horizon was a thick, pearl haze. The clouds had gone.
‘One never sees Popocatepetl nor Ixtaccihuatl,’ said Kate, disappointed.
‘No, not at this season. But look, through the trees there, you see Ajusco!’
Kate looked at the sombre-seeming mountain, between the huge dark trees.
On the low stone parapet were Aztec things, obsidian knives, grimacing squatting idols in black lava, and a queer thickish stone stick, or bâton. Owen was balancing the latter: it felt murderous even to touch.
Kate turned to the General, who was near her, his face expressionless, yet alert.
‘Aztec things oppress me,’ she said.
‘They are oppressive,’ he answered, in his beautiful cultured English, that was nevertheless a tiny bit like a parrot talking.
‘There is no hope in them,’ she said.
‘Perhaps the Aztecs never asked for hope,’ he said, somewhat automatically.
‘Surely it is hope that keeps one going?’ she said.
‘You, maybe. But not the Aztec, nor the Indian to-day.’
He spoke like a man who has something in reserve, who is only half attending to what he hears, and even to his own answer.
‘What do they have, if they don’t have hope?’ she said.
‘They have some other strength, perhaps,’ he said evasively.
‘I would like to give them hope,’ she said. ‘If they had hope, they wouldn’t be so sad, and they would be cleaner, and not have vermin.’
‘That of course would be good,’ he said, with a little smile. ‘But I think they are not so very sad. They laugh a good deal and are gay.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘They oppress me, like a weight on my heart. They make me irritable, and I want to go away.’
‘From Mexico?’
‘Yes. I feel I want to go away from it and never, never see it again. It is so oppressive and gruesome.’
‘Try it a little longer,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you will feel differently. But perhaps not,’ he ended vaguely, driftingly.
She could feel in him a sort of yearning towards her. As if a sort of appeal came to her from him, from his physical heart in his breast. As if the very heart gave out dark rays of seeking and yearning. She glimpsed this now for the first time, quite apart from the talking, and it made her shy.
‘And does everything in Mexico oppress you?’ he added, almost shyly, but with a touch of mockery, looking at her with a troubled naïve face that had its age heavy and resistant beneath the surface.
‘Almost everything!’ she said. ‘It always makes my heart sink. Like the eyes of the men in the big hats — I call them the peons. Their eyes have no middle to them. Those big handsome men, under their big hats, they aren’t really there. They have no centre, no real I. Their middle is a raging black hole, like the middle of a maelstrom.’
She looked with her troubled grey eyes into the black, slanting, watchful, calculating eyes of the small man opposite her. He had a pained expression, puzzled, like a child. And at the same time something obstinate and mature, a demonish maturity, opposing her in an animal way.
‘You mean we aren’t real people, we have nothing of our own, except killing and death,’ he said, quite matter of fact.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, startled by his interpretation. ‘I only say how it makes me feel.’
‘You are very clever, Mrs Leslie,’ came Don Ramón’s quiet, but heavy teasing voice behind her. ‘It is quite true. Whenever a Mexican cries Viva! he ends up with Muera! When he says Viva! he really means Death for Somebody or Other! I think of all the Mexican revolutions, and I see a skeleton walking ahead of a great number of people, waving a black banner with Viva la Muerte! written in large white letters. Long live Death! Not Viva Cristo Rey! but Viva Muerte Rey! Vamos! Viva!’
Kate looked round. Don Ramón was flashing his knowing brown Spanish eyes, and a little sardonic smile lurked under his moustache. Instantly Kate and he, Europeans in essence, understood one another. He was waving his arm to the last Viva!
‘But,’ said Kate, ‘I don’t want to say Viva la Muerte!’
‘But when you are real Mexican — ’ he said, teasing.
‘I never could be,’ she said hotly, and he laughed.
‘I’m afraid Viva la Muerte! hits the nail on the head,’ said Mrs Norris, rather stonily. ‘But won’t you come to tea! Do!’
She led the way in her black little shawl and neat grey hair, going ahead like a Conquistador herself, and turning to look with her Aztec eyes through her pince-nez, to see if the others were coming.
‘We are following,’ said Don Ramón in Spanish, teasing her. Stately in his black suit, he walked behind her on the narrow terrace, and Kate followed, with the small, strutting Don Cipriano, also in a black sui
t, lingering oddly near her.
‘Do I call you General or Don Cipriano?’ she asked, turning to him.
An amused little smile quickly lit his face, though his eyes did not smile. They looked at her with a black, sharp look.
‘As you wish,’ he said. ‘You know General is a term of disgrace in Mexico. Shall we say Don Cipriano?’
‘Yes, I like that much the best,’ she said.
And he seemed pleased.
It was a round tea-table, with shiny silver tea-service, and silver kettle with a little flame, and pink and white oleanders. The little neat young footman carried the tea-cups, in white cotton gloves. Mrs Norris poured tea and cut cakes with a heavy hand.
Don Ramón sat on her right hand, the Judge on her left. Kate was between the Judge and Mr Henry. Everybody except Don Ramón and the Judge was a little nervous. Mrs Norris always put her visitors uncomfortably at their ease, as if they were captives and she the chieftainess who had captured them. She rather enjoyed it, heavily, archaeologically queening at the head of the table. But it was evident that Don Ramón, by far the most impressive person present, liked her. Cipriano, on the other hand, remained mute and disciplined, perfectly familiar with the tea-table routine, superficially quite at ease, but underneath remote and unconnected. He glanced from time to time at Kate.
She was a beautiful woman, in her own unconventional way, and with a certain richness. She was going to be forty next week. Used to all kinds of society, she watched people as one reads the pages of a novel, with a certain disinterested amusement. She was never in any society: too Irish, too wise.
‘But of course nobody lives without hope,’ Mrs Norris was saying banteringly to Don Ramón. ‘If it’s only the hope of a real, to buy a litre of pulque.’
‘Ah, Mrs Norris!’ he replied in his quiet, yet curiously deep voice, like a violoncello: ‘If pulque is the highest happiness!’
‘Then we are fortunate, because a tostón will buy paradise,’ she said.
‘It is a bon mot, Señora mía,’ said Don Ramón, laughing and drinking his tea.
‘Now won’t you try these little native cakes with sesame seeds on them!’ said Mrs Norris to the table at large.’ My cook makes them, and her national feeling is flattered when anybody likes them. Mrs Leslie, do take one.’
‘I will,’ said Kate. ‘Does one say Open Sesame!’
‘If one wishes,’ said Mrs Norris.
‘Won’t you have one?’ said Kate, handing the plate to Judge Burlap.
‘Don’t want any,’ he snapped, turning his face away as if he had been offered a plate of Mexicans, and leaving Kate with the dish suspended.
Mrs Norris quickly but definitely took the plate, saying:
‘Judge Burlap is afraid of Sesame Seed, he prefers the cave shut.’ And she handed the dish quietly to Cipriano, who was watching the old man’s bad manners with black, snake-like eyes.
‘Did you see that article by Willis Rice Hope, in the Excelsior?’ suddenly snarled the Judge, to his hostess.
‘I did. I thought it very sensible.’
‘The only sensible thing that’s been said about these Agrarian Laws. Sensible! I should think so. Why Rice Hope came to me, and I put him up to a few things. But his article says everything, doesn’t miss an item of importance.’
‘Quite!’ said Mrs Norris, with rather stony attention. ‘If only saying would alter things, Judge Burlap.’
‘Saying the wrong thing has done all the mischief!’ snapped the Judge. ‘Fellows like Garfield Spence coming down here and talking a lot of criminal talk. Why the town’s full of Socialists and Sinvergüenzas from New York.’
Mrs Norris adjusted her pince-nez.
‘Fortunately,’ she said, ‘they don’t come out to Tlacolula, so we needn’t think about them. Mrs Henry, let me give you some more tea.’
‘Do you read Spanish?’ the Judge spat out, at Owen. Owen, in his big shell spectacles, was evidently a red rag to his irritable fellow-countryman.
‘No!’ said Owen, round as a cannon-shot.
Mrs Norris once more adjusted her eye-glasses.
‘It’s such a relief to hear someone who is altogether innocent of Spanish, and altogether unashamed,’ she said. ‘My father had us all speaking four languages by the time we were twelve, and we have none of us ever quite recovered. My stockings were all dyed blue for me before I put my hair up. By the way! How have you been for walking, Judge? You heard of the time I had with my ankle?’
‘Of course we heard!’ cried Mrs Burlap, seeing dry land at last. I’ve been trying so hard to get out to see you, to ask about it. We were so grieved about it.’
‘What happened?’ said Kate.
‘Why I foolishly slipped on a piece of orange peel in town — just at the corner of San Juan de Latrán and Madero. And I fell right down. And of course, the first thing I did when I got up was to push the piece of orange peel into the gutter. And would you believe it, that lot of Mex — ’ she caught herself up — ’that lot of fellows standing there at the corner laughed heartily at me, when they saw me doing it. They thought it an excellent joke.’
‘Of course they would,’ said the Judge. ‘They were waiting for the next person to come along and fall.’
‘Did nobody help you?’ asked Kate.
‘Oh no! If anyone has an accident in this country, you must never, never help. If you touch them even, you may be arrested for causing the accident.’
‘That’s the law!’ said the Judge. ‘If you touch them before the police arrive, you are arrested for complicity. Let them lie and bleed, is the motto.’
‘Is that true?’ said Kate to Don Ramón.
‘Fairly true,’ he replied. ‘Yes, it is true you must not touch the one who is hurt.’
‘How disgusting!’ said Kate.
‘Disgusting!’ cried the Judge. ‘A great deal is disgusting in this country, as you’ll learn if you stay here long. I nearly lost my life on a banana skin; lay in a darkened room for days, between life and death, and lame for life from it.’
‘How awful!’ said Kate. ‘What did you do when you fell?’
‘What did I do? Just smashed my hip.’
It had truly been a terrible accident, and the man had suffered bitterly.
‘You can hardly blame Mexico for a banana skin,’ said Owen, elated. ‘I fell on one in Lexington Avenue; but fortunately I only bruised myself on a soft spot.’
‘That wasn’t your head, was it?’ said Mrs Henry.
‘No,’ laughed Owen. ‘The other extreme.’
‘We’ve got to add banana skins to the list of public menaces,’ said young Henry. ‘I’m an American, and I may any day turn bolshevist, to save my pesos, so I can repeat what I heard a man saying yesterday. He said there are only two great diseases in the world to-day — Bolshevism and Americanism; and Americanism is the worse of the two, because Bolshevism only smashes your house or your business or your skull, but Americanism smashes your soul.’
‘Who was he?’ snarled the Judge.
‘I forget,’ said Henry, wickedly.
‘One wonders,’ said Mrs Norris slowly, ‘what he meant by Americanism.’
‘He didn’t define it,’ said Henry. ‘Cult of the dollar, I suppose.’
‘Well,’ said Mrs Norris. ‘The cult of the dollar, in my experience, is far more intense in the countries that haven’t got the dollar, than in the United States.’
Kate felt that the table was like a steel disc to which they were all, as victims, magnetized and bound.
‘Where is your garden, Mrs Norris?’ she asked.
They trooped out, gasping with relief, to the terrace. The Judge hobbled behind, and Kate had to linger sympathetically to keep him company.
They were on the little terrace.
‘Isn’t this strange stuff!’ said Kate, picking up one of the Aztec stone knives on the parapet. ‘Is it a sort of jade?’
‘Jade!’ snarled the Judge. ‘Jade’s green, not black. That’s obsidian.’
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‘Jade can be black,’ said Kate. ‘I’ve got a lovely little black tortoise of jade from China.’
‘You can’t have. Jade’s bright green.’
‘But there’s white jade too. I know there is.’
The Judge was silent from exasperation for a few moments, then he snapped:
‘Jade’s bright green.’
Owen, who had the ears of a lynx, had heard.
‘What’s that?’ he said.
‘Surely there’s more than green jade!’ said Kate.
‘What!’ cried Owen. ‘More! Why there’s every imaginable tint — white, rose, lavender — ’
‘And black?’ said Kate.
‘Black? Oh yes, quite common. Why you should see my collection. The most beautiful range of colour! Only green jade! Ha-ha-ha!’ — and he laughed a rather stage laugh.
They had come to the stairs, which were old stone, waxed and polished in some way till they were a glittering black.
‘I’ll catch hold of your arm down here,’ said the Judge to young Henry. ‘This staircase is a death-trap.’
Mrs Norris heard without comment. She only tilted her pince-nez on her sharp nose.
In the archway downstairs, Don Ramón and the General took their leave. The rest trailed on into the garden.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 428