Evening was falling. The garden was drawn up tall, under the huge dark trees on the one side, and the tall, reddish-and-yellow house on the other. It was like being at the bottom of some dusky, flowering garden down in Hades. Hibiscus hung scarlet from the bushes, putting out yellow bristling tongues. Some roses were scattering scentless petals on the twilight, and lonely-looking carnations hung on weak stalks. From a huge dense bush the mysterious white bells of the datura were suspended, large and silent, like the very ghosts of sound. And the datura scent was moving thick and noiseless from the tree, into the little alleys.
Mrs Burlap had hitched herself on to Kate, and from her silly, social baby-face was emitting searching questions.
‘What hotel are you staying at?’
Kate told her.
‘I don’t know it. Where is it?’
‘In the Avenida del Peru. You wouldn’t know it, it is a little Italian hotel.’
‘Are you staying long?’
‘We aren’t certain.’
‘Is Mr Rhys on a newspaper?’
‘No, he’s a poet.’
‘Does he make a living by poetry?’
‘No, he doesn’t try to.’
It was the sort of secret service investigation one is submitted to, in the capital of shady people, particularly shady foreigners.
Mrs Norris was lingering by a flowering arch of little white flowers.
Already a firefly was sparking. It was already night.
‘Well, good-bye, Mrs Norris! Won’t you come and lunch with us? I don’t mean come out to our house. Only let me know, and lunch with me anywhere you like, in town.’
‘Thank you, my dear! Thank you so much! Well! I’ll see!
Mrs Norris was almost regal, stonily, Aztec-regal.
At last they had all made their adieus, and the great doors were shut behind them.
‘How did you come out?’ Mrs Burlap asked, impertinent.
‘In an old Ford taxi — but where is it?’ said Kate, peering into the dark. It should have been under the fresno trees opposite, but it wasn’t.
‘What a curious thing!’ said Owen, and he disappeared into the night.
‘Which way do you go?’ said Mrs Burlap.
‘To the Zócalo,’ said Kate.
‘We have to take a tram, the opposite way,’ said the baby-faced, withered woman from the Middle-West.
The Judge was hobbling along the pavement like a cat on hot bricks, to the corner. Across the road stood a group of natives in big hats and white calico clothes, all a little the worse for the pulque they had drunk. Nearer, on this side of the road, stood another little gang, of workmen in town clothes.
‘There you have them,’ said the Judge, flourishing his stick with utter vindictiveness. ‘There’s the two lots of ‘em.’
‘What two lots?’ said Kate, surprised.
‘Those peon fellows and those obreros, all drunk, the lot of them. The lot of them!’ And in a spasm of pure, frustrated hate, he turned his back on her.
At the same time they saw the lights of a tram-car rushing dragon-like up the dark road, between the high wall and the huge trees.
‘Here’s our car!’ said the Judge, beginning to scramble excitedly with his stick.
‘You go the other way,’ flung the baby-faced, faded woman in the three-cornered satin hat, also beginning to fluster as if she were going to swim off the pavement.
The couple clambered avidly into the brightly-lighted car, first class; hobbling up. The natives crowded into the second class.
Away whizzed the tren. The Burlap couple had not even said good night. They were terrified lest they might have to know somebody whom they might not want to know; whom it might not pay to know.
‘You common-place little woman!’ said Kate aloud, looking after the retreating tram-car. ‘You awful ill-bred little pair.’
She was a bit afraid of the natives, not quite sober, who were waiting for the car in the opposite direction. But stronger than her fear was a certain sympathy with these dark-faced silent men in their big straw hats and naïve little cotton blouses. Anyhow they had blood in their veins: they were columns of dark blood.
Whereas the other bloodless, acidulous couple from the Middle-West, with their nasty whiteness . . .!
She thought of the little tale the natives tell. When the Lord was making the first men, He made them of clay and put them into the oven to bake. They came out black. They’re baked too much! said the Lord. So He made another batch, and put them in. They came out white. They’re baked too little! He said. So He had a third try. These came out a good warm brown. They’re just right! said the Lord.
The couple from the Middle-West, that withered baby-face and that limping Judge, they weren’t baked. They were hardly baked at all.
Kate looked at the dark faces under the arc-lamp. They frightened her. They were a sort of menace to her. But she felt they were at least baked hot and to a certain satisfactory colour.
The taxi came lurching up, with Owen poking his head out and opening the door.
‘I found the man in a pulquería,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think he’s quite drunk. Will you risk driving back with him?’
‘The pulquería was called La Flor de un Día — the Flower of a Day,’ said Owen, with an apprehensive laugh.
Kate hesitated, looking at her man.
‘We may as well,’ she said.
Away gallivanted the Ford, full speed to Hell.
‘Do tell him not so fast,’ said Kate.
‘I don’t know how,’ said Owen.
He shouted in good English:
‘Hey! chauffeur! Not so fast! Don’t drive so fast.’
‘No presto. Troppo presto. Va troppo presto!’ said Kate.
The man looked at them with black, dilated eyes of fathomless incomprehension. Then he put his foot on the accelerator.
‘He’s only going faster!’ laughed Owen nervously.
‘Ah! Let him alone!’ said Kate, with utter weariness.
The fellow drove like a devil incarnate, as if he had the devil in his body. But also, he drove with the devil’s own nonchalant skill. There was nothing to do but let him rip.
‘Wasn’t that a ghastly tea-party!’ said Owen.
‘Ghastly!’ said Kate.
CHAPTER III
Fortieth Birthday
Kate woke up one morning, aged forty. She did not hide the fact from herself, but she kept it dark from the others.
It was a blow, really. To be forty! One had to cross a dividing line. On this side there was youth and spontaneity and ‘happiness.’ On the other side something different: reserve, responsibility, a certain standing back from ‘fun.’
She was a widow, and a lonely woman now. Having married young, her two children were grown up. The boy was twenty-one, and her daughter nineteen. They stayed chiefly with their father, from whom she had been divorced ten years before, in order to marry James Joachim Leslie. Now Leslie was dead, and all that half of life was over.
She climbed up to the flat roofs of the hotel. It was a brilliant morning, and for once, under the blue sky of the distance, Popocatepetl stood aloof, a heavy giant presence under heaven, with a cape of snow. And rolling a long dark roll of smoke like a serpent.
Ixtaccihuatl, the White Woman, glittered and seemed near, but the other mountain, Popocatepetl, stood farther back, and in shadow, a pure cone of atmospheric shadow, with glinting flashes of snow. There they were, the two monsters, watching gigantically and terribly over their lofty, bloody cradle of men, the Valley of Mexico. Alien, ponderous, the white-hung mountains seemed to emit a deep purring sound, too deep for the ear to hear, and yet audible on the blood, a sound of dread. There was no soaring or uplift or exaltation, as there is in the snowy mountains of Europe. Rather a ponderous, white-shouldered weight, pressing terribly on the earth, and murmuring like two watchful lions.
Superficially, Mexico might be all right: with its suburbs of villas, its central fine streets, its thousands of
motor-cars, its tennis, and its bridge-parties. The sun shone brilliantly every day, and big bright flowers stood out from the trees. It was a holiday.
Until you were alone with it. And then the undertone was like the low, angry, snarling purring of some jaguar spotted with night. There was a ponderous, down-pressing weight upon the spirit: the great folds of the dragon of the Aztecs, the dragon of the Toltecs winding around one and weighing down the soul. And on the bright sunshine was a dark steam of an angry, impotent blood, and the flowers seemed to have their roots in spilt blood. The spirit of place was cruel, down-dragging, destructive.
Kate could so well understand the Mexican who had said to her: El grito mexicano es siempre el grito del odio — The Mexican shout is always a shout of hate. The famous revolutions, as Don Ramón said, began with Viva! but ended always with Muera! Death to this, death to the other; it was all death! death! death! as insistent as the Aztec sacrifices. Something for ever gruesome and macabre.
Why had she come to this high plateau of death? As a woman, she suffered even more than men suffer: and in the end, practically all men go under. Once, Mexico had had an elaborate ritual of death. Now it has death, ragged, squalid, vulgar, without even the passion of its own mystery.
She sat on a parapet of the old roof. The street beyond was like a black abyss, but around her was the rough glare of uneven flat roofs, with loose telephone wires trailing across, and the sudden, deep, dark wells of the patios, showing flowers blooming in shade.
Just behind was a huge old church, its barrel roof humping up like some crouching animal, and its domes, like bubbles inflated, glittering with yellow tiles, and blue and white tiles, against the intense blue heaven. Quiet native women in long skirts were moving on the roofs, hanging out washing or spreading it on the stones. Chickens perched here and there. An occasional bird soared huge overhead, trailing a shadow. And not far away stood the brownish tower-stumps of the Cathedral, the profound old bell trembling huge and deep, so soft as to be almost inaudible, upon the air.
It ought to have been all gay, allegro, allegretto, in that sparkle of bright air and old roof surfaces. But no! There was the dark undertone, the black, serpent-like fatality all the time.
It was no good Kate’s wondering why she had come. Over in England, in Ireland, in Europe, she had heard the consummatum est of her own spirit. It was finished, in a kind of death agony. But still this heavy continent of dark-souled death was more than she could bear.
She was forty: the first half of her life was over. The bright page with its flowers and its love and its stations of the Cross ended with a grave. Now she must turn over, and the page was black, black and empty.
The first half of her life had been written on the bright, smooth vellum of hope, with initial letters all gorgeous upon a field of gold. But the glamour had gone from station to station of the Cross, and the last illumination was the tomb.
Now the bright page was turned, and the dark page lay before her. How could one write on a page so profoundly black?
She went down, having promised to go and see the frescoes in the university and schools. Owen and Villiers and a young Mexican were waiting for her. They set off through the busy streets of the town, where automobiles and the little omnibuses called camiones run wild, and where the natives in white cotton clothes and sandals and big hats linger like heavy ghosts in the street, among the bourgeoisie, the young ladies in pale pink crêpe de chine and high heels, the men in little shoes and American straw hats. A continual bustle in the glitter of sunshine.
Crossing the great shadeless plaza in front of the Cathedral, where the tram-cars gather as in a corral, and slide away down their various streets, Kate lingered again to look at the things spread for sale on the pavement: the little toys, the painted gourd-shells, brilliant in a kind of lacquer, the novedades from Germany, the fruits, the flowers. And the natives squatting with their wares, large-limbed, silent, handsome men looking up with their black, centreless eyes, speaking so softly, and lifting with small sensitive brown hands the little toys they had so carefully made and painted. A strange gentle appeal and wistfulness, strange male voices, so deep, yet so quiet and gentle. Or the women, the small quick women in their blue rebozos, looking up quickly with dark eyes, and speaking in their quick, coaxing voices. The man just setting out his oranges, wiping them with a cloth so carefully, almost tenderly, and piling them in bright tiny pyramids, all neat and exquisite. A certain sensitive tenderness of the heavy blood, a certain chirping charm of the bird-like women, so still and tender with a bud-like femininity. And at the same time, the dirty clothes, and the unwashed skin, the lice, and the peculiar hollow glint of the black eyes, at once so fearsome and so appealing.
Kate knew the Italian fruit vendors, vigorously polishing their oranges on their coat-sleeves. Such a contrast, the big, handsome Indian, sitting so soft and as it were lonely by the kerb, softly, lingeringly polishing his yellow oranges to a clean gleam, and lingeringly, delicately arranging the little piles, the pyramids for two or three cents each.
Queer work, for a big, handsome, male-looking man. But they seem to prefer these childish jobs.
The University was a Spanish building that had been done up spick and span, and given over to the young artists to decorate. Since the revolutions, nowhere had authority and tradition been so finally overthrown as in the Mexican fields of science and art. Science and art are the sport of the young. Go ahead, my boys!
The boys had gone ahead. But even then, the one artist of distinction was no longer a boy, and he had served a long apprenticeship in Europe.
Kate had seen the reproductions of some of Ribera’s frescoes. Now she went round the patios of the University, looking at the originals. They were interesting: the man knew his craft.
But the impulse was the impulse of the artist’s hate. In the many frescoes of the Indians there was sympathy with the Indian, but always from the ideal, social point of view. Never the spontaneous answer of the blood. These flat Indians were symbols in the great script of modern socialism, they were figures of the pathos of the victims of modern industry and capitalism. That was all they were used for: symbols in the weary script of socialism and anarchy.
Kate thought of the man polishing his oranges half-an-hour before: his peculiar beauty, a certain richness of physical being, a ponderous power of blood within him, and a helplessness, a profound unbelief that was fatal and demonish. And all the liberty, all the progress, all the socialism in the world would not help him. Nay, it would only help further to destroy him.
On the corridors of the University, young misses in bobbed hair and boys’ jumpers were going around, their chins pushed forward with the characteristic, deliberate youth-and-eagerness of our day. Very much aware of their own youth and eagerness. And very American. Young professors were passing in soft amiability, young and apparently harmless.
The artists were at work on the frescoes, and Kate and Owen were introduced to them. But they were men — or boys — whose very pigments seemed to exist only to épater le bourgeois. And Kate was weary of épatisme, just as much as of the bourgeoisie. She wasn’t interested in épatant le bourgeois. The épateurs were as boring as the bourgeois, two halves of one dreariness.
The little party passed on to the old Jesuit convent, now used as a secondary school. Here were more frescoes.
But they were by another man. And they were caricatures so crude and so ugly that Kate was merely repelled. They were meant to be shocking, but perhaps the very deliberateness prevents them from being so shocking as they might be. But they were ugly and vulgar. Strident caricatures of the Capitalist and the Church, and of the Rich Woman, and of Mammon painted life-size and as violently as possible, round the patios of the grey old building, where the young people are educated. To anyone with the spark of human balance, the things are a misdemeanour.
‘Oh, but how wonderful!’ cried Owen.
His susceptibilities were shocked, therefore, as at the bull-fight, he was rather ple
ased. He thought it was novel and stimulating to decorate your public buildings in this way.
The young Mexican who was accompanying the party was a professor in the University too: a rather short, soft young fellow of twenty-seven or eight, who wrote the inevitable poetry of sentiment, had been in the Government, even as a member of the House of Deputies, and was longing to go to New York. There was something fresh and soft, petulant about him. Kate liked him. He could laugh with real hot young amusement, and he was no fool.
Until it came to these maniacal ideas of socialism, politics, and La Patria. Then he was as mechanical as a mousetrap. Very tedious.
‘Oh no!’ said Kate in front of the caricatures. ‘They are too ugly. They defeat their own ends.’
‘But they are meant to be ugly,’ said young Garcia. ‘They must be ugly, no? Because capitalism is ugly, and Mammon is ugly, and the priest holding his hand to get the money from the poor Indians is ugly. No?’ He laughed rather unpleasantly.
‘But,’ said Kate, ‘these caricatures are too intentional. They are like vulgar abuse, not art at all.’
‘Isn’t that true?’ said Garcia, pointing to a hideous picture of a fat female in a tight short dress, with hips and breasts as protuberances, walking over the faces of the poor.
‘That is how they are, no?’
‘Who is like that?’ said Kate. ‘It bores me. One must keep a certain balance.’
‘Not in Mexico!’ said the young Mexican brightly, his plump cheeks flushing. ‘In Mexico you can’t keep a balance, because things are so bad. In other countries, yes, perhaps you can remain balanced, because things are not so bad as they are here. But here they are so very bad, you can’t be human. You have to be Mexican. You have to be more Mexican than human, no? You can’t do no other. You have to hate the capitalist, you have to, in Mexico, or nobody can live. We can’t live. Nobody can live. If you are Mexican you can’t be human, it is impossible. You have to be a socialist Mexican, or you have to be a capitalist Mexican, and you hate. What else is there to be done? We hate the capitalist because he ruins the country and the people. We must hate him.’
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 429