Kate’s face was baffled with incomprehension.
‘Not those Aztec horrors!’ she said.
‘The Aztec horrors! The Aztec horrors! Well, perhaps they were not so horrible after all. But if they were, it was because the Aztecs were all tied up. They were in a cul de sac, so they saw nothing but death. Don’t you think so?’
‘I don’t know enough!’ said Kate.
‘Nobody knows any more. But if you like the word Quetzalcoatl, don’t you think it would be wonderful if he came back again? Ah, the names of the gods! Don’t you think the names are like seeds, so full of magic, of the unexplored magic? Huitzilopochtli! — how wonderful! And Tlaloc! Ah! I love them! I say them over and over, like they say Mani padma Om! in Tibet. I believe in the fertility of sound. Itzpapalotl — the Obsidian Butterfly! Itzpapalotl! But say it, and you will see it does good to your soul. Itzpapalotl! Tezcatlipocá! They were old when the Spaniards came, they needed the bath of life again. But now, re-bathed in youth, how wonderful they must be! Think of Jehovah! Jehovah! Think of Jesus Christ! How thin and poor they sound! Or Jesús Cristo! They are dead names, all the life withered out of them. Ah, it is time now for Jesus to go back to the place of the death of the gods, and take the long bath of being made young again. He is an old-old young god, don’t you think?’ He looked long at Kate, then dived for his soup.
Kate widened her eyes in amazement at this torrent from the young Mirabal. Then she laughed.
‘I think it’s a bit overwhelming!’ she said, non-committal.
‘Ah! Yes! Exactly! Exactly! But how good to be overwhelmed! How splendid if something will overwhelm me! Ah, I am so glad!’
The last word came with a clapping French resonance, and the young man dived for his soup again. He was lean and pale, but burning with an intense, crazy energy.
‘You see,’ said young Garcia, raising his full, bright dark eyes to Kate, half aggressive and half bashful: ‘we must do something for Mexico. If we don’t, it will go under, no? You say you don’t like socialism. I don’t think I do either. But if there is nothing else but socialism, we will have socialism. If there is nothing better. But perhaps there is.’
‘Why should Mexico go under?’ said Kate. ‘There are lots of children everywhere.’
‘Yes. But the last census of Porfirio Diaz gave seventeen million people in Mexico, and the census of last year gave only thirteen millions. Maybe the count was not quite right. But you count four million people fewer, in twenty years, then in sixty years there will be no Mexicans: only foreigners, who don’t die.’
‘Oh, but figures always lie!’ said Kate. ‘Statistics are always misleading.’
‘Maybe two and two don’t make four,’ said Garcia. ‘I don’t know if they do. But I know, if you take two away from two, it leaves none.’
‘Do you think Mexico might die out?’ she said to Don Ramón.
‘Why!’ he replied. ‘It might. Die out and become Americanized.’
‘I quite see the danger of Americanization,’ said Owen. ‘That would be ghastly. Almost better die out.’
Owen was so American, he invariably said these things.
‘But!’ said Kate. ‘The Mexicans look so strong!’
‘They are strong to carry heavy loads,’ said Don Ramón. ‘But they die easily. They eat all the wrong things, they drink the wrong things, and they don’t mind dying. They have many children, and they like their children very much. But when the child dies, the parents say: Ah, he will be an angelito! So they cheer up and feel as if they had been given a present. Sometimes I think they enjoy it when their children die. Sometimes I think they would like to transfer Mexico en bloc into Paradise, or whatever lies behind the walls of death. It would be better there!’
There was a silence.
‘But how sad you are!’ said Kate, afraid.
Doña Isabel was giving hurried orders to the manservant.
‘Whoever knows Mexico below the surface, is sad!’ said Julio Toussaint, rather sententiously, over his black cravat.
‘Well,’ said Owen, ‘it seems to me, on the contrary, a gay country. A country of gay, irresponsible children. Or rather, they would be gay, if they were properly treated. If they had comfortable homes, and a sense of real freedom. If they felt that they could control their lives and their own country. But being in the grip of outsiders, as they have been for hundreds of years, life of course seems hardly worth while to them. Naturally, they don’t care if they live or die. They don’t feel free.’
‘Free for what?’ asked Toussaint.
‘To make Mexico their own. Not to be so poor and at the mercy of outsiders.’
‘They are at the mercy of something worse than outsiders,’ said Toussaint. ‘Let me tell you. They are at the mercy of their own natures. It is this way. Fifty per cent of the people in Mexico are pure Indian: more or less. Of the rest, a small proportion are foreigners or Spaniard. You have then the mass which is on top, of mixed blood, Indian and Spaniard mixed, chiefly. These are the Mexicans, those with the mixed blood. Now, you take us at this table. Don Cipriano is pure Indian. Don Ramón is almost pure Spaniard, but most probably he has the blood of Tlaxcalan Indians in his veins as well. Señor Mirabal is mixed French and Spanish. Señor Garcia most probably has a mixture of Indian blood with Spanish. I myself have French, Spanish, Austrian, and Indian blood. Very well! Now you mix blood of the same race, and it may be all right. Europeans are all Aryan stock, the race is the same. But when you mix European and American Indian, you mix different blood races, and you produce the half-breed. Now, the half-breed is a calamity. For why? He is neither one thing nor another, he is divided against himself. His blood of one race tells him one thing, his blood of another race tells him another. He is an unfortunate, a calamity to himself. And it is hopeless.
‘And this is Mexico. The Mexicans of mixed blood are hopeless. Well then! There are only two things to be done. All the foreigners and the Mexicans clear out and leave the country to the Indians, the pure-blooded Indians. But already you have a difficulty. How can you distinguish the pure-blooded Indian, after so many generations? Or else the half-breed or mixed-blood Mexicans who are all the time on top shall continue to destroy the country till the Americans from the United States flood in. We are as California and New Mexico now are, swamped under the dead white sea.
‘But let me tell you something further. I hope we are not Puritans. I hope I may say that it depends on the moment of coition. At the moment of coition, either the spirit of the father fuses with the spirit of the mother, to create a new being with a soul, or else nothing fuses but the germ of procreation.
‘Now consider. How have these Mexicans of mixed blood been begotten, for centuries? In what spirit? What was the moment of coition like? Answer me that, and you have told me the reason for this Mexico which makes us despair and which will go on making everybody despair, till it destroys itself. In what spirit have the Spanish and other foreign fathers gotten children of the Indian women? What sort of spirit was it? What sort of coition? And then, what sort of race do you expect?’
‘But what sort of a spirit is there between white men and white women!’ said Kate.
‘At least,’ replied the didactic Toussaint, ‘the blood is homogeneous, so that consciousness automatically unrolls in continuity.’
‘I hate its unrolling in automatic continuity,’ said Kate.
‘Perhaps! But it makes life possible. Without developing continuity in consciousness, you have chaos. And this comes of mixed blood.’
‘And then,’ said Kate, ‘surely the Indian men are fond of their women! The men seem manly, and the women seem very lovable and womanly.’
‘It is possible that the Indian children are pure-blooded, and there is the continuity of blood. But the Indian consciousness is swamped under the stagnant water of the white man’s Dead Sea consciousness. Take a man like Benito Juarez, a pure Indian. He floods his old consciousness with the new white ideas, and there springs up a whole forest of verb
iage, new laws, new constitutions and all the rest. But it is a sudden weed. It grows like a weed on the surface, saps the strength of the Indian soil underneath, and helps the process of ruin. No, madam! There is no hope for Mexico short of a miracle.’
‘Ah!’ cried Mirabal, flourishing his wine-glass. ‘Isn’t that wonderful, when only the miracle will save us! When we must produce the miracle? We! We! We must make the miracle!’ He hit his own breast emphatically. ‘Ah, I think that is marvellous!’ And he returned to his turkey in black sauce.
‘Look at the Mexicans!’ Toussaint flared on. ‘They don’t care about anything. They eat food so hot with chili, it burns holes in their insides. And it has no nourishment. They live in houses that a dog would be ashamed of, and they lie and shiver with cold. But they don’t do anything. They could make, easily, easily, a bed of maize leaves or similar leaves. But they don’t do it. They don’t do anything. They roll up in a thin serape and lie on a thin mat on the bare ground, whether it is wet or dry. And Mexican nights are cold. But they lie down like dogs, anyhow, as if they lay down to die. I say dogs! But you will see the dogs looking for a dry sheltered place. The Mexicans, no! Anywhere, nothing, nothing! And it is terrible. It is terrible! As if they wanted to punish themselves for being alive!’
‘But then, why do they have so many children?’ said Kate.
‘Why do they? The same, because they don’t care. They don’t care. They don’t care about money, they don’t care about making anything, they don’t care about nothing, nothing, nothing. Only they get an excitement out of women, as they do out of chili. They like to feel the red pepper burning holes in their insides, and they like to feel the other thing, the sex, burning holes in them too. But after the moment, they don’t care. They don’t care a bit.
‘And that is bad. I tell you, excuse me, but all, everything, depends on the moment of coition. At that moment many things can come to a crisis: all a man’s hope, his honour, his faith, his trust, his belief in life and creation and God, all these things can come to a crisis in the moment of coition. And these things will be handed on in continuity to the child. Believe me, I am a crank on this idea, but it is true. It is certainly absolutely true.’
‘I believe it is true,’ said Kate, rather coldly.
‘Ah! you do! Well then! Look at Mexico! The only conscious people are half-breeds, people of mixed blood, begotten in greed and selfish brutality.’
‘Some people believe in the mixed blood,’ said Kate.
‘Ah! They do, do they? Who?’
‘Some of your serious-minded men. They say the half-breed is better than the Indian.’
‘Better! Well! The Indian has his hopelessness. The moment of coition is his moment of supreme hopelessness, when he throws himself down the pit of despair.’
The Austrian, European blood, which fans into fire of conscious understanding, died down again, leaving what was Mexican in Julio Toussaint sunk in irredeemable gloom.
‘It is true,’ said Mirabal, out of the gloom. ‘The Mexicans who have any feeling always prostitute themselves, one way or another, and so they can never do anything. And the Indians can never do anything either, because they haven’t got hope in anything. But it is always darkest before the dawn. We must make the miracle come. The miracle is superior even to the moment of coition.’
It seemed, however, as if he said it by an effort of will.
The dinner was ending in silence. During the whirl of talk, or of passionate declaration, the servants had carried round the food and wine. Doña Isabel, completely oblivious of the things that were being said, watched and directed the servants with nervous anxiety and excitement, her hands with their old jewellery trembling with agitation. Don Ramón had kept his eye on his guests’ material comfort, at the same time listening, as it were, from the back of his head. His big brown eyes were inscrutable, his face impassive. But when he had anything to say, it was always with a light laugh and a teasing accent. And yet his eyes brooded and smouldered with an incomprehensible, unyielding fire.
Kate felt she was in the presence of men. Here were men face to face not with death and self-sacrifice, but with the life-issue. She felt, for the first time in her life, a pang almost like fear, of men who were passing beyond what she knew, beyond her depth.
Cipriano, his rather short but intensely black, curved eyelashes lowering over his dark eyes, watched his plate, only sometimes looking up with a black, brilliant glance, either at whomsoever was speaking, or at Don Ramón, or at Kate. His face was changeless and intensely serious, serious almost with a touch of childishness. But the curious blackness of his eyelashes lifted so strangely, with such intense unconscious maleness from his eyes, the movement of his hand was so odd, quick, light as he ate, so easily a movement of shooting, or of flashing a knife into the body of some adversary, and his dark-coloured lips were so helplessly savage, as he ate or briefly spoke, that her heart stood still. There was something undeveloped and intense in him, the intensity and the crudity of the semi-savage. She could well understand the potency of the snake upon the Aztec and Maya imagination. Something smooth, undeveloped, yet vital in this man suggested the heavy-ebbing blood of reptiles in his veins. That was what it was, the heavy-ebbing blood of powerful reptiles, the dragon of Mexico.
So that unconsciously she shrank when his black, big, glittering eyes turned on her for a moment. They were not, like Don Ramón’s, dark eyes. They were black, as black as jewels into which one could not look without a sensation of fear. And her fascination was tinged with fear. She felt somewhat as the bird feels when the snake is watching it.
She wondered almost that Don Ramón was not afraid. Because she had noticed that usually, when an Indian looked to a white man, both men stood back from actual contact, from actual meeting of each other’s eyes. They left a wide space of neutral territory between them. But Cipriano looked at Ramón with a curious intimacy, glittering, steady, warrior-like, and at the same time betraying an almost menacing trust in the other man.
Kate realized that Ramón had a good deal to stand up to. But he kept a little, foiling laugh on his face, and lowered his beautiful head with the black hair touched with grey, as if he would put a veil before his countenance.
‘Do you think one can make this miracle come?’ she asked of him.
‘The miracle is always there,’ he said, ‘for the man who can pass his hand through to it, to take it.’
They finished dinner, and went to sit out on the veranda, looking into the garden where the light from the house fell uncannily on the blossoming trees and the dark tufts of Yucca and the strange great writhing trunks of the Laurel de India.
Cipriano had sat down next to her, smoking a cigarette.
‘It is a strange darkness, the Mexican darkness!’ she said.
‘Do you like it?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘Do you?’
‘Yes. Very much. I think I like best the time when the day is falling and the night coming on like something else. Then, one feels more free, don’t you think? Like the flowers that send out their scent at night, but in the daytime they look at the sun and don’t have any smell.’
‘Perhaps the night here scares me,’ she laughed.
‘Yes. But why not? The smell of the flowers at night may make one feel afraid, but it is a good fear. One likes it, don’t you think?’
‘I am afraid of fear,’ she said.
He laughed shortly.
‘You speak such English English,’ she said. ‘Nearly all the Mexicans who speak English speak American English. Even Don Ramón does, rather.’
‘Yes. Don Ramón graduated in Columbia University. But I was sent to England, to school in London, and then to Oxford.’
‘Who sent you?’
‘My god-father. He was an Englishman: Bishop Severn, Bishop of Oaxaca. You have heard of him?’
‘No,’ said Kate.
‘He was a very well-known man. He died only about ten years ago. He was very rich, t
oo, before the revolution. He had a big hacienda in Oaxaca, with a very fine library. But they took it away from him in the revolution, and they sold the things, or broke them. They didn’t know the value of them, of course.’
‘And did he adopt you?’
‘Yes! In a way. My father was one of the overseers on the hacienda. When I was a little boy I came running to my father, when the Bishop was there, with something in my hands — so!’ — and he made a cup of his hand. ‘I don’t remember. This is what they tell me. I was a small child — three or four years of age — somewhere there. What I had in my hands’ was a yellow scorpion, one of the small ones, very poisonous, no?’
And he lifted the cup of his small, slender, dark hands, as if to show Kate the creature.
‘Well, the Bishop was talking to my father, and he saw what I had got before my father did. So he told me at once, to put the scorpion in his hat — the Bishop’s hat, no? Of course I did what he told me, and I put the scorpion in his hat, and it did not bite me. If it had stung me I should have died, of course. But I didn’t know, so I suppose the alacran was not interested. The Bishop was a very good man, very kind. He liked my father, so he became my god-father. Then he always took an interest in me, and he sent me to school, and then to England. He hoped I should be a priest. He always said that the one hope for Mexico was if she had really fine native priests.’ He ended rather wistfully.
‘And didn’t you want to become a priest?’ said Kate.
‘No!’ he said sadly. ‘No!’
‘Not at all?’ she asked.
‘No! When I was in England it was different from Mexico. Even God was different, and the Blessed Mary. They were changed so much, I felt I didn’t know them any more. Then I came to understand better, and when I understood I didn’t believe any more. I used to think it was the images of Jesus, and the Virgin, and the Saints, that were doing everything in the world. And the world seemed to me so strange, no? I couldn’t see that it was bad, because it was all so very strange and mysterious, when I was a child, in Mexico. Only in England I learned about the laws of life, and some science. And then when I knew why the sun rose and set, and how the world really was, I felt quite different.’
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 431