A little breeze was coming from the lake, but the deep dust underfoot was hot. On the right the hill rose precipitous, baked and yellowish, giving back the sun and the intense dryness, and exhaling the faint, desiccated, peculiar smell of Mexico, that smells as if the earth had sweated itself dry.
All the time strings of donkeys trotted laden through the dust, their drivers stalking erect and rapid behind, watching with eyes like black holes, but always answering Kate’s salute with a respectful Adiós! And Juana echoed her laconic Adiósn! She was limping, and she thought it horrible of Kate to walk four miles, when they might have struggled out in an old hired motor-car, or gone in a boat, or even ridden donkey-back.
But to go on foot! Kate could hear all her criada’s feelings in the drawled, sardonic Adiósn! But the man behind strode bravely and called cheerfully. His pistol was prominent in his belt.
A bluff of yellow rock came jutting at the road. The road wound round it, and into a piece of flat open country. There were fields of dry stone, and hedges of dusty thorn and cactus. To the left the bright green of the willows by the lake-shore. To the right the hills swerved inland, to meet the sheer, fluted sides of dry mountains. Away ahead, the hills curved back at the shore, and a queer little crack or niche showed. This crack in the hills led from Don Ramón’s shore-property to the little valley where he grew the sugar-cane. And where the hills approached the lake again there was a dark clustering of mango-trees, and the red upper storey of the hacienda house.
‘There it is!’ cried the man behind. ‘Jamiltepec, Señorita. ‘La hacienda de Don Ramón!’
And his eyes shone as he said the name. He was a proud peon, and he really seemed happy.
‘Look! How far!’ cried Juana.
‘Another time,’ said Kate, ‘I shall come alone, or with Ezequiel.’
‘No, Niña! Don’t say so. Only my foot hurts this morning.’
‘Yes. Better not to bring you.’
‘No, Niña! I like to come, very much!’
The tall windmill fan for drawing up water from the lake was spinning gaily. A little valley came down from the niche in the hills, and at the bottom a little water running. Towards the lake, where this valley flattened out, was a grove of banana-plants, screened a little from the lake breeze by a vivid row of willow-trees. And on the top of the slope, where the road ran into the shade of mango-trees, were the two rows of adobe huts, like a village, set a little back from the road.
Women were coming up between the trees, on the patch from the lake, with jars of water on their shoulders; children were playing around the doors, squatting with little naked posteriors in deep dust; and here and there a goat was tethered. Men in soiled white clothes were lounging, with folded arms and one leg crossed in front of the other, against the corner of a house, or crouching under the walls. Not by any means dolce far niente. They seemed to be waiting, eternally waiting for something.
‘That way, Señorita!’ called the man with the basket, running to her side and indicating the smoother road sloping down between some big trees, towards the white gate of the hacienda. ‘We are here!’
Always he spoke with pleased delight, as if the place were a wonder-place to him.
The big doors of the zaguán, the entrance, stood open, and in the shade of the entrance-way a couple of little soldiers were seated. Across the cleared, straw-littered space in front of the gates two peons were trotting, each with a big bunch of bananas on his head. The soldiers said something, and the two peons halted in their trotting, and slowly turned under their yellow-green load, to look back at Kate and Juana and the man Martin, approaching down the road. Then they turned again and trotted into the courtyard, barefoot.
The soldiers stood up. Martin, trotting at Kate’s side again, ushered her into the arched entrance, where the ox-wagons rumbling through had worn deep ruts. Juana came behind, making a humble noise.
Kate found herself in a big, barren yard, that seemed empty. There were high walls on the three sides, with sheds and stables. The fourth side, facing, was the house, with heavily-barred windows looking on to the courtyard, but with no door. Instead, there was another zaguán, or passage with closed doors piercing the house.
Martin trotted ahead to knock on the closed doors. Kate stood looking round at the big yard. In a shed in one corner, four half-naked men were packing bunches of bananas. A man in the shade was sawing poles, and two men in the sun were unloading tiles from a donkey. In a corner was a bullock-wagon, and a pair of big black-and-white oxen standing with heads pressed down, waiting.
The big doors opened, and Kate entered the second zaguán. It was a wide entrance way, with stairs going up on one side, and Kate lingered to look through the open iron gates in front of her, down a formal garden hemmed in with huge mango-trees, to the lake, with its little artificial harbour where two boats were moored. The lake seemed to give off a great light, between the dark walls of mango.
At the back of the new-comers the servant woman closed the big doors on to the yard, then waved Kate to the stairs.
‘Pass this way, Señorita.’
A bell tinkled above. Kate climbed the stone stairs. And there above her was Doña Carlota, in white muslin and with white shoes and stockings, her face looking curiously yellow and faded by contrast. Her soft brown hair was low over her ears, and she held out her thin brownish arms with queer effusiveness.
‘So you have come! And you have walked, walked all the way? Oh, imagine walking in so much sun and dust! Come, come in and rest.’
She took Kate’s hands and led her across the open terrace at the top of the stairs.
‘It is beautiful here,’ said Kate.
She stood on the terrace, looking out past the mango-trees at the lake. A distant sailing-canoe was going down the breeze, on the pallid, unreal water. Away across rose the bluish, grooved mountains, with the white speck of a village: far away in the morning it seemed, in another world, in another life, in another mode of time.
‘What is that village?’ Kate asked.
‘That one? That one there? It is San Ildefonso,’ said Doña Carlota, in her fluttering eagerness.
‘But it is beautiful here!’ Kate repeated.
‘Hermoso — sí! Sí, bonito!’ quavered the other woman uneasily, always answering in Spanish.
The house, reddish and yellow in colour, had two short wings towards the lake. The terrace, with green plants on the terrace wall, went round the three sides, the roof above supported by big square pillars that rose from the ground. Down below, the pillars made a sort of cloisters around the three sides, and in the little stone court was a pool of water. Beyond, the rather neglected formal garden with strong sun and deep mango-shade.
‘Come, you will need to rest!’ said Doña Carlota.
‘I would like to change my shoes,’ said Kate.
She was shown into a high, simple, rather bare bedroom with red-tiled floor. There she changed into the shoes and stockings Juana had carried, and rested a little.
As she lay resting, she heard the dulled thud-thud of the tom-tom drum, but, save the crowing of a cock in the distance, no other sound on the bright, yet curiously hollow Mexican morning. And the drum, thudding with its dulled, black insistence, made her uneasy. It sounded like something coming over the horizon.
She rose, and went into the long, high salon where Doña Carlota was sitting talking to a man in black. The salon, with its three window-doors open on to the terrace, its worn, red floor tiled with old square bricks, its high walls colour-washed a faint green, and the many-beamed ceiling whitewashed; and with its bareness of furniture; seemed like part of the out-of-doors, like some garden-arbour put for shade. The sense, which houses have in hot climates, of being just three walls wherein one lingers for a moment, then goes away again.
As Kate entered the room, the man in black rose and shook hands with Doña Carlota, bowing very low and deferential. Then with a deferential sideways sort of bow to Kate, he vanished out of doors.
‘Come!’ said Doña Carlota to Kate. ‘Are you sure now you are rested?’ And she pulled forward one of the cane rocking-chairs that had poised itself in the room, en route to nowhere.
‘Perfectly!’ said Kate. ‘How still it seems here! Except for the drum. Perhaps it is the drum that makes it seem so still. Though I always think the lake makes a sort of silence.’
‘Ah, the drum!’ cried Doña Carlota, lifting her hand with a gesture of nervous, spent exasperation. ‘I cannot hear it. No, I cannot, I cannot bear to hear it.’
And she rocked herself in a sudden access of agitation.
‘It does hit one rather below the belt,’ said Kate. ‘What is it?’
‘Ah, do not ask me! It is my husband.’
She made a gesture of despair, and rocked herself almost into unconsciousness.
‘Is Don Ramón drumming?’
‘Drumming?’ Doña Carlota seemed to start. ‘No! Oh no! He is not drumming, himself. He brought down two Indians from the north to do that.’
‘Did he!’ said Kate, non-committal.
But Doña Carlota was rocking in a sort of semi-consciousness. Then she seemed to pull herself together.
‘I must talk to somebody, I must!’ she said, suddenly straightening herself in her chair, her face creamy and creased, her soft brown hair sagging over her ears, her brown eyes oddly desperate. ‘May I talk to you?’
‘Do!’ said Kate, rather uneasy.
‘You know what Ramón is doing?’ she said, looking at Kate almost furtively, suspiciously.
‘Does he want to bring back the old gods?’ said Kate vaguely.
‘Ah!’ cried Doña Carlota, again with that desperate, flying jerk of her hand. ‘As if it were possible! As if it were possible! The old gods! Imagine it, Señora! The old gods! Why, what are they? Nothing but dead illusions. And ugly, repulsive illusions! Ah! I always thought my husband such a clever man, so superior to me! Ah, it is terrible to have to change one’s idea! This is such nonsense. How dare he! How dare he take such nonsense seriously! How does he dare!’
‘Does he believe in it himself?’ asked Kate.
‘Himself? But, Señora — ’ and Doña Carlota gave a pitiful, pitying smile of contempt. ‘How could he! As if it were possible. After all, he is an educated man! How could he believe in such nonsense!’
‘Then why does he do it?’
‘Why? Why?’ There was a tone of unspeakable weariness in Doña Carlota’s voice. ‘I wish I knew. I think he has gone insane, as Mexicans do. Insane like Francisco Villa, the bandit.’
Kate thought of the pug-faced notorious Pancho Villa in wonder, unable to connect him with Don Ramón.
‘All the Mexicans, as soon as they rise above themselves, go that way,’ said Doña Carlota. ‘Their pride gets the better of them. And then they understand nothing, nothing but their own foolish will, their will to be very, very important. It is just the male vanity. Don’t you think, Señora, that the beginning and the end of a man is his vanity? Don’t you think it was just against this danger that Christ came, to teach men a proper humility? To teach them the sin of pride. But that is why they hate Christ so much, and His teaching. First and last, they want their own vanity.’
Kate had often thought so herself. Her own final conclusion about men was that they were the vanity of vanities, nothing but vanity. They must be flattered and made to feel great: Nothing else.
‘And now, my husband wants to go to the other extreme of Jesus. He wants to exalt pride and vanity higher than God. Ah, it is terrible, terrible! And foolish like a little boy! Ah, what is a man but a little boy who needs a nurse and a mother! Ah, Señora, I can’t bear it.’
Doña Carlota covered her face with her hand, as if swooning.
‘But there is something wonderful, too, about Don Ramón,’ said Kate coaxingly: though at the moment she hated him.
‘Wonderful! Ah yes, he has gifts. He has great gifts! But what are gifts to a man who perverts them!’
‘Tell me what you think he really wants,’ said Kate.
‘Power! Just power! Just foolish, wicked power. As if there had not been enough horrible, wicked power let loose in this country. But he — he — wants to be beyond them all. He — he — he wants to be worshipped. To be worshipped! To be worshipped! A God! He, whom I’ve held, I’ve held in my arms! He is a child, as all men are children. And now he wants — to be worshipped — !’ She went off into a shrill, wild laughter, covering her face with her hands, and laughing shrilly, her laughter punctuated by hollow, ghastly sobs.
Kate sat in absolute dismay, waiting for the other woman to recover herself. She felt cold against these hysterics, and exerted all her heavy female will to stop them.
‘After all,’ she said, when Doña Carlota became quiet, her face in her hands, ‘it isn’t your fault. We can’t be responsible, even for our husbands. I know that, since my husband died, and I couldn’t prevent him dying. And then — then I learned that no matter how you love another person, you can’t really do anything, you are helpless when it comes to the last things. You have to leave them to themselves, when they want to die: or when they want to do things that seem foolish, so, so foolish, to a woman.’
Doña Carlota looked up at the other woman.
‘You loved your husband very much — and he died?’ she said softly.
‘I did love him. And I shall never, never love another man. I couldn’t. I’ve lost the power.’
‘And why did he die?’
‘Ah, even that was really his own fault. He broke his own soul and spirit, in those Irish politics. I knew it was wrong. What does Ireland matter, what does nationalism and all that rubbish matter, really! And revolutions! They are so, so stupid and vieux jeu. Ah! It would have been so much better if Joachim had been content to live his life in peace, with me. It could be so jolly, so lovely. And I tried and tried and tried with him. But it was no good. He wanted to kill himself with that beastly Irish business, and I tried in vain to prevent him.’
Doña Carlota stared slowly at Kate.
‘As a woman must try to prevent a man, when he is going wrong,’ she said. ‘As I try to prevent Ramón. As he will get himself killed, as surely as they all do, down to Francisco Villa. And when they are dead, what good is it all?’
‘When they are dead,’ said Kate, ‘then you know it’s no good.’
‘You do! Oh, Señora, if you think you can help me with Ramón, do help me, do! For it means the death either of me or him. And I shall die, though he is wrong. Unless he gets killed.’
‘Tell me what he wants to do,’ said Kate. ‘What does he think he wants to do, anyhow? — Like my husband thought he wanted to make a free Ireland and a great Irish people. But I knew all the time, the Irish aren’t a great people any more, and you can’t make them free. They are only good at destroying — just mere stupid destroying. How can you make a people free, if they aren’t free? If something inside them compels them to go on destroying!’
‘I know! I know! And that is Ramón. He wants to destroy even Jesus and the Blessed Virgin, for this people. Imagine it! To destroy Jesus and the Blessed Virgin! the last thing they’ve got!’
‘But what does he say himself, that he wants to do?’
‘He says he wants to make a new connection between the people and God. He says himself, God is always God. But man loses his connection with God. And then he can never recover it again, unless some new Saviour comes to give him his new connection. And every new connection is different from the last, though God is always God. And now, Ramón says, the people have lost God. And the Saviour cannot lead them to Him any more. There must be a new Saviour with a new vision. But ah, Señora, that is not true for me. God is love, and if Ramón would only submit to love, he would know that he had found God. But he is perverse. Ah, if we could be together, quietly loving, and enjoying the beautiful world, and waiting in the love of God! Ah, Señora, why, why, why can’t he see it? Oh, why can’t he see it! Instead of doing all these — ’
&n
bsp; The tears came to Doña Carlota’s eyes, and spilled over her cheeks. Kate also was in tears, mopping her face.
‘It’s no good!’ she said, sobbing. ‘I know it’s no good, no matter what we do. They don’t want to be happy and peaceful. They want this strife and these other false, horrible connections. It’s no good whatever we do! That’s what’s so bitter, so bitter!’
The two women sat in their bent-wood rocking-chairs and just sobbed. And as they sobbed, they heard a step coming along the terrace, the faint swish of the sandals of the people.
It was Don Ramón, drawn unconsciously by the emotional disturbance of the two women.
Doña Carlota hastily dabbed her eyes, and her sniffing nose, Kate blew her nose like a trumpet, and Don Ramón stood in the doorway.
He was dressed in white, dazzling, in the costume of the peons, the white blouse jacket and the white, wide pantaloon trousers. But the white was linen, slightly starched, and brilliant, almost unnatural in its whiteness. From under his blouse, in front, hung the ends of a narrow woollen sash, white, with blue and black bars, and a fringe of scarlet. And on his naked feet were the plaited huaraches, of blue and black strips of leather, with thick, red-dyed soles. His loose trousers were bound round the ankles with blue, red, and black woollen braids.
Kate glanced at him as he stood in the sun, so dazzingly white, that his black hair and dark face looked like a hole in the atmosphere. He came forward, the ends of his sash swinging against his thighs, his sandals slightly swishing.
‘I am pleased to see you,’ he said, shaking hands with Kate. ‘How did you come?’
He dropped into a chair, and sat quite still. The two women hung their heads, hiding their faces. The presence of the man seemed to put their emotion out of joint. He ignored all the signs of their discomfort, overlooking it with a powerful will. There was a certain strength in his presence. They all cheered up a bit.
‘You didn’t know my husband had become one of the people — a real peon — a Señor Peon, like Count Tolstoy became a Señor Moujik?’ said Doña Carlota, with an attempt at raillery.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 443