The lake was quite black, like a great pit. The wind suddenly blew with violence, with a strange ripping sound in the mango-trees, as if some membrane in the air were being ripped. The white-flowered oleanders in the garden below leaned over quite flat, their white flowers ghostly, going right down to the earth, in the pale beam of the lamp — like a street lamp — that shone on the wall at the front entrance. A young palm-tree bent and spread its leaves on the ground. Some invisible juggernaut car rolling in the dark over the outside world.
Away across the lake, south-west, lightning blazed and ran down the sky like some portentous writing. And soft, velvety thunder broke inwardly, strangely.
‘It frightens me!’ cried Doña Carlota, putting her hand over her eyes and hastening into a far corner of the bare salon.
Cipriano and Kate stood on the terrace, watching the coloured flowers in the pots shake and fly to bits, disappearing up into the void of darkness. Kate clutched her shawl. But the wind suddenly got under Cipriano’s blanket, and lifted it straight up into the air, then dropped it in a scarlet flare over his head. Kate watched his deep, strong Indian chest lift as his arms quickly fought to free his head. How dark he was, and how primitively physical, beautiful, and deep-breasted, with soft, full flesh! But all, as it were, for himself. Nothing that came forth from him to meet with one outside. All oblivious of the outside, all for himself.
‘Ah! the water!’ he cried, holding down his serape.
The first great drops were flying darkly at the flowers, like arrows. Kate stood back into the doorway of the salon. A pure blaze of lightning slipped three-fold above the black hills, seemed to stand a moment, then slip back into the dark.
Down came the rain with a smash, as if some great vessel had broken. With it, came a waft of icy air. And all the time, first in one part of the sky, then in another, in quick succession the blue lightning, very blue, broke out of heaven and lit up the air for a blue, breathless moment, looming trees and ghost of a garden, then was gone, while thunder dropped and exploded continually.
Kate watched the dropping masses of water in wonder. Already, in the blue moments of lightning, she saw the garden below a pond, the walks were rushing rivers. It was cold. She turned indoors.
A servant was going round the rooms with a lantern, to look if scorpions were coming out. He found one scuttling across the floor of Kate’s room, and one fallen from the ceiling beams on to Carlota’s bed.
They sat in the salon in rocking-chairs, Carlota and Kate, and rocked, smelling the good wetness, breathing the good, chilled air. Kate had already forgotten what really chill air was like. She wrapped her shawl tighter round her.
‘Ah, yes, you feel cold! You must take care in the nights now. Sometimes in the rainy season the nights are very cold. You must be ready with an extra blanket. And the servants, poor things, they just lie and shudder, and they get up in the morning like corpses. — But the sun soon warms them again, and they seem to think they must bear what comes. So they complain sometimes, but still they don’t provide.’
The wind had gone, suddenly. Kate was uneasy, uneasy, with the smell of water, almost of ice, in her nostrils, and her blood still hot and dark. She got up and went again to the terrace. Cipriano was still standing there, motionless and inscrutable, like a monument, in his red and dark serape.
The rain was abating. Down below in the garden two barefooted women-servants were running through the water, in the faint light of the zaguán lamp, running across the garden and putting ollas and square gasoline cans under the arching spouts of water that seethed down from the roof, then darting away while they filled, then struggling in with the frothy vessel. It would save making trips to the lake, for water.
‘What do you think of us?’ Cipriano said to her.
‘It is strange to me,’ she replied, wondering and a little awed by the night.
‘Good, no?’ he said, in an exultant tone.
‘A little scaring,’ she replied, with a slight laugh.
‘When you are used to it,’ he said, ‘it seems natural, no? It seems natural so — as it is. And when you go to a country like England, where all is so safe and ready-made, then you miss it. You keep saying to yourself: “What am I missing? What is it that is not here?”‘
He seemed to be gloating in his native darkness. It was curious, that though he spoke such good English, it seemed always foreign to her, more foreign than Doña Carlota’s Spanish.
‘I can’t understand that people want to have everything, all life, no? — so safe and ready-made as in England and America. It is good to be awake. On the qui vive, no?’
‘Perhaps,’ she said.
‘So I like it,’ he said, ‘when Ramón tells the people the earth is alive, and the sky has a big bird in it, that you don’t see. I think it is true. Certainly! And it is good to know it, because then one is on the qui vive, no?’
‘But it’s tiring to be always on the qui vive,’ she said.
‘Why? Why tiring? No, I think, on the contrary, it is refreshing. — Ah, you should marry, and live in Mexico. At last, I am sure, you would like it. You would keep waking up more and more to it.’
‘Or else going more and more deadened,’ she said. ‘That is how most foreigners go, it seems to me.’
‘Why deadened?’ he said to her. ‘I don’t understand. Why deadened? Here you have a country where night is night, and rain comes down and you know it. And you have a people with whom you must be on the qui vive all the time, all the time. And that is very good, no? You don’t go sleepy. Like a pear! Don’t you say a pear goes sleepy, no? — cuando se echa a perder?’
‘Yes!’ she said.
‘And here you have also Ramón. How does Ramón seem to you?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to say anything. But I do think he is almost too much: too far. — And I don’t think he is Mexican.’
‘Why not? Why not Mexican? He is Mexican.’
‘Not as you are.’
‘How not as I am? He is Mexican.’
‘He seems to me to belong to the old, old Europe,’ she said.
‘And he seems to me to belong to the old, old Mexico — and also to the new,’ he added quickly.
‘But you don’t believe in him.’
‘How?’
‘You — yourself. You don’t believe in him. You think it is like everything else, a sort of game. Everything is a sort of game, a put-up job, to you Mexicans. You don’t really believe, in anything.’
‘How not believe? I not believe in Ramón? — Well, perhaps not, in that way of kneeling before him and spreading out my arms and shedding tears on his feet. But I — I believe in him, too. Not in your way, but in mine. I tell you why. Because he has the power to compel me. If he hadn’t the power to compel me, how should I believe?’
‘It is a queer sort of belief that is compelled,’ she said.
‘How else should one believe, except by being compelled? I like Ramón for that, that he can compel me. When I grew up, and my godfather could not compel me to believe, I was very unhappy. It made me very unhappy. — But Ramón compels me, and that is very good. It makes me very happy, when I know I can’t escape. It would make you happy too.’
‘To know I could not escape from Don Ramón?’ she said ironically.
‘Yes, that also. And to know you could not escape from Mexico. And even from such a man as me.’
She paused in the dark before she answered, sardonically:
‘I don’t think it would make me happy to feel I couldn’t escape from Mexico. No, I feel, unless I was sure I could get out any day, I couldn’t bear to be here.’
In her mind she thought: And perhaps Ramón is the only one I couldn’t quite escape from, because he really touches me somewhere inside. But from you, you little Cipriano, I should have no need even to escape, because I could not be caught by you.
‘Ah!’ he said quickly. ‘You think so. But then you don’t know. You can only think with American thoughts, it is natural. Fr
om your education, you have only American thoughts, U.S.A. thoughts, to think with. Nearly all women are like that: even Mexican women of the Spanish-Mexican class. They are all thinking nothing but U.S.A. thoughts, because those are the ones that go with the way they dress their hair. And so it is with you. You think like a modern woman, because you belong to the Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic world, and dress your hair in a certain way, and have money, and are altogether free. — But you only think like this because you have had these thoughts put in your head, just as in Mexico you spend centavos and pesos, because that is the Mexican money you have put in your pocket. It’s what they give you at the bank. — So when you say you are free, you are not free. You are compelled all the time to be thinking U.S.A. thoughts — compelled, I must say. You have not as much choice as a slave. As the peons must eat tortillas, tortillas, tortillas, because there is nothing else, you must think these U.S.A. thoughts, about being a woman and being free. Every day you must eat those tortillas, tortillas. — Till you don’t know how you would like something else.’
‘What else should I like?’ she said, with a grimace at the darkness.
‘Other thoughts, other feelings. — You are afraid of such a man as me, because you think I should not treat you à l’américaine. You are quite right. I should not treat you as an American woman must be treated. Why should I? I don’t wish to. It doesn’t seem good to me.’
‘You would treat a woman like a real old Mexican, would you? Keep her ignorant, and shut her up?’ said Kate sarcastically.
‘I could not keep her ignorant if she did not start ignorant. But what more I had to teach her wouldn’t be in the American style of teaching.’
‘What then?’
‘Quién sabe! Ça reste à voir.’
‘Et continuera à y rester,’ said Kate, laughing.
CHAPTER XIV
Home to Sayula
The morning came perfectly blue, with a freshness in the air and a blue luminousness over the trees and the distant mountains, and birds so bright, absolutely like new-opened buds sparking in the air.
Cipriano was returning to Guadalajara in the automobile, and Carlota was going with him. Kate would be rowed home on the lake.
To Ramón, Carlota was still, at times, a torture. She seemed to have the power still to lacerate him, inside his bowels. Not in his mind or spirit, but in his old emotional, passional self: right in the middle of his belly, to tear him and make him feel he bled inwardly.
Because he had loved her, he had cared for her: for the affectionate, passionate, whimsical, sometimes elfish creature she had been. He had made much of her, and spoiled her, for many years.
But all the while, gradually, his nature was changing inside him. Not that he ceased to care for her, or wanted other women. That she could have understood. But inside him was a slow, blind imperative, urging him to cast his emotional and spiritual and mental self into the slow furnace, and smelt them into a new, whole being.
But he had Carlota to reckon with. She loved him, and that, to her, was the outstanding factor. She loved him, emotionally. And spiritually, she loved mankind. And mentally, she was sure she was quite right.
Yet, as time went on, he had to change. He had to cast that emotional self, which she loved, into the furnace, to be smelted down to another self.
And she felt she was robbed, cheated. Why couldn’t he go on being gentle, good, and loving, and trying to make the whole world more gentle, good, and loving?
He couldn’t, because it was borne in upon him that the world had gone as far as it could go in the good, gentle, and loving direction, and anything farther in that line meant perversity. So the time had come for the slow, great change to something else — what, he didn’t know.
The emotion of love, and the greater emotion of liberty for mankind seemed to go hard and congeal upon him, like the shell on a chrysalis. It was the old caterpillar stage of Christianity evolving into something else.
But Carlota felt this was all she had, this emotion of love, for her husband, her children, for her people, for the animals and birds and trees of the world. It was her all, her Christ, and her Blessed Virgin. How could she let it go?
So she continued to love him, and to love the world, steadily, pathetically, obstinately, and devilishly. She prayed for him, and she engaged in works of charity.
But her love had turned from being the spontaneous flow, subject to the unforeseen comings and goings of the Holy Ghost, and had turned into will. She loved now with her will: as the white world now tends to do. She became filled with charity: that cruel kindness.’
Her winsomeness and her elfishness departed from her, she began to wither, she grew tense. And she blamed him, and prayed for him. Even as the spontaneous mystery died in her, the will hardened, till she was nothing but a will: a lost will.
She soon succeeded in drawing the life of her young boys all to herself, with her pathos and her subtle will. Ramón was too proud and angry to fight for them. They were her children. Let her have them.
They were the children of his old body. His new body had no children: would probably never have any.
‘But remember,’ he said to her, with southern logic, ‘you do not love, save with your will. I don’t like the love you have for your god: it is an assertion of your own will. I don’t like the love you have for me: it is the same. I don’t like the love you have for your children. If ever I see in them a spark of desire to be saved from it, I shall do my best to save them. Meanwhile have your love, have your will. But you know I dislike it. I dislike your insistence. I dislike your monopoly of one feeling, I dislike your charity works. I disapprove of the whole trend of your life. You are weakening and vitiating the boys. You do not love them, you are only putting your love will over them. One day they will turn and hate you for it. Remember I have said this to you.’
Doña Carlota had trembled in every fibre of her body, under the shock of this. But she went away to the chapel of the Annunciation Convent, and prayed. And, praying for his soul, she seemed to gain a victory over him, in the odour of sanctity. She came home in frail, pure triumph, like a flower that blooms on a grave: his grave.
And Ramón henceforth watched her in her beautiful, rather fluttering, rather irritating gentleness, as he watched his closest enemy.
Life had done its work on one more human being, quenched the spontaneous life and left only the will. Killed the god in the woman, or the goddess, and left only charity, with a will.
‘Carlota,’ he had said to her, ‘how happy you would be if you could wear deep, deep mourning for me. — I shall not give you this happiness.’
She gave him a strange look from her hazel-brown eyes.
‘Even that is in the hands of God,’ she had replied, as she hurried away from him.
And now, on this morning after the first rains, she came to the door of his room as he was sitting writing. As yesterday, he was naked to the waist, the blue-marked sash tied round his middle confined the white linen, loose trousers — like big, wide pyjama trousers crossed in front and tied round his waist.
‘May I come in?’ she said nervously.
‘Do!’ he replied, putting down his pen and rising.
There was only one chair — he was offering it her, but she sat down on the unmade bed, as if asserting her natural right. And in the same way she glanced at his naked breast — as if asserting her natural right.
‘I am going with Cipriano after breakfast,’ she said.
‘Yes, so you said.’
‘The boys will be home in three weeks.’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t you want to see them?’
‘If they want to see me.’
‘I am sure they do.’
‘Then bring them here.’
‘Do you think it is pleasant for me?’ she said, clasping her hands.
‘You do not make it pleasant for me, Carlota.’
‘How can I? You know I think you are wrong. When I listened to you last night — there
is something so beautiful in it all — and yet so monstrous. So monstrous! — Oh! I think to myself: What is this man doing? This man of all men, who might be such a blessing to his country and mankind — ’
‘Well,’ said Ramón. ‘And what is he instead?’
‘You know! You know! I can’t bear it. — It isn’t for you to save Mexico, Ramón. Christ has already saved it.’
‘It seems to me not so.’
‘He has! He has! And He made you the wonderful being that you are, so that you should work out the salvation, in the name of Christ and of love. Instead of which — ’
‘Instead of which, Carlota, I try something else. — But believe me, if the real Christ has not been able to save Mexico — and He hasn’t — then I am sure the white Anti-Christ of charity, and socialism, and politics, and reform, will only succeed in finally destroying her. That, and that alone, makes me take my stand. — You, Carlota, with your charity works and your pity: and men like Benito Juarez, with their Reform and their Liberty: and the rest of the benevolent people, politicians and socialists and so forth, surcharged with pity for living men, in their mouths, but really with hate — the hate of the materialist have-nots for the materialist haves: they are the Anti-Christ. The old world, that’s just the world. But the new world, that wants to save the People, this is the Anti-Christ. This is Christ with real poison in the communion cup. — And for this reason I step out of my ordinary privacy and individuality. I don’t want everybody poisoned. About the great mass I don’t care. But I don’t want everybody poisoned.’
‘How can you be so sure that you yourself are not a poisoner of the people? — I think you are.’
‘Think it then. I think of you, Carlota, merely that you have not been able to come to your complete, final womanhood: which is a different thing from the old womanhoods.’
‘Womanhood is always the same.’
‘Ah, no, it isn’t! Neither is manhood.’
‘But what do you think you can do? What do you think this Quetzalcoatl nonsense amounts to?’
‘Quetzalcoatl is just a living word, for these people, no more. All I want them to do is to find the beginnings of the way to their own manhood, their own womanhood. Men are not yet men in full, and women are not yet women. They are all half and half, incoherent, part horrible, part pathetic, part good creatures. Half arrived. — I mean you as well, Carlota. I mean all the world. — But these people don’t assert any righteousness of their own, these Mexican people of ours. That makes me think that grace is still with them. And so, having got hold of some kind of clue to my own whole manhood, it is part of me now to try with them.’
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 448