When men meet at the quick of all things, they are neither naked nor clothed; in the transfiguration they are just complete, they are not seen in part. The final perfect strength has also the power of innocence.
Sitting on the seat beside Kate, Ramón was sad with the sense of heaviness and inadequacy. His third Hymn was angry and bitter. Carlota almost embittered his soul. In Mexico, turbulent fellows had caught at his idea and burlesqued it. They had invaded one of the churches of the city, thrown out the sacred images, and hung in their place the grotesque papier-mâché Judas figures, which the Mexicans explode at Easter time. This of course made a scandal. And Cipriano, whenever he was away on his own for some time, slipped back into the inevitable Mexican General, fascinated by the opportunity for furthering his own personal ambition and imposing his own personal will. Then came Kate, with this centre of sheer repudiation deep in the middle of her, the will to explode the world.
He felt his spirits sinking again, his limbs going like lead. There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, and be alone there. Then afterwards, in the Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him.
But to find the way, far, far along, to the bright Quick of all things, this is difficult, and requires all a man’s strength and courage, for himself. If he breaks a trail alone, it is terrible. But if every hand pulls at him, to stay him in the human places; if the hands of love drag at his entrails and the hands of hate seize him by the hair, it becomes almost impossible.
This was how Ramón felt at the moment: — I am attempting the impossible. I had better either go and take my pleasure of life while it lasts, hopeless of the pleasure which is beyond all pleasures. Or else I had better go into the desert and take my way all alone, to the Star where at last I have my wholeness, holiness. The way of the anchorites and the men who went into the wilderness to pray. For surely my soul is craving for her consummation, and I am weary of the thing men call life. Living, I want to depart to where I am.
Yet, he said to himself, the woman that was with me in the Morning Star, how glad I should be of her! And the man that was with me there, what a delight his presence would be! Surely the Morning Star is a meeting-ground for us, for the joy!
Sitting side by side on the bench, Ramón and Kate forgot one another, she thinking back on the past, with the long disgust of it all, he thinking on into his future, and trying to revive his heavy spirits.
In the silence, Cipriano came out on to the balcony above, looking around. He almost started as he saw the two figures seated on the bench below, under the white oleander tree, miles apart, worlds apart, in their silence.
Ramón heard the step, and glanced up.
‘We are coming up!’ he called, rising and looking round at Kate. ‘Shall we go upstairs? Will you drink something cool, tepache, or squeezed oranges? There is no ice.’
‘I would like orange juice and water,’ she said.
He called to his servant and gave the order.
Cipriano was in the white pantaloons and blouse, like Ramón. But his sash was scarlet, with black curves, something like the markings on a snake.
‘I heard you come. I thought perhaps you had gone away again,’ he said, looking at her with a certain black reproachfulness: an odd, hesitating wistfulness of the barbarian, who feels himself at a loss. Then also a certain resentment.
‘Not yet,’ she said.
Ramón laughed, and flung himself into a chair.
‘The Señora Caterina thinks we are all monkeys, but perhaps this particular monkey-show is the most amusing after all,’ he said. ‘So she will see a little more of it.’
Cipriano, a real Indian, was offended in his pride, and the little black imperial on his chin seemed to become portentous.
‘That’s rather an unfair way of putting it!’ laughed Kate.
The black eyes of Cipriano glanced at her in hostility. He thought she was laughing at him. And so, at the depths of her female soul, she was. She was jeering at him inwardly. Which no man can stand, least of all a dark-skinned man.
‘No!’ she said. ‘There’s something else beside that.’
‘Ah!’ said Ramón. ‘Take care! A little mercy is a dangerous thing.’
‘No! Not mercy!’ she said, flushing. ‘Why are you being horrid to me?’
‘Monkeys always end by being horrid to the spectators,’ said Ramón.
She looked up at him, and caught the flash of anger in his eyes.
‘I came,’ she said, ‘to hear about the Mexican pantheon. I was even given to understand I might be admitted.’
‘Ah, that is good!’ laughed Ramón. ‘A rare specimen of the female monkey has been added to the Ramón menagerie! I am sure you would be a good draw. There have been some pretty goddesses, I assure you, in the Aztec pantheon.’
‘How horrid!’ she said.
‘Come! Come!’ he cried. ‘Let us keep to the bedrock of things, Señora mía. We are all monkeys. Monos somos. — Ihr seid alle Affen! Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings was it spoken, as Carlota said. You see that little male monkey, Cipriano. He had the monkey’s idea of marrying you. Say the word. Marriage is a monkey’s game. Say the word. He will let you go when you’ve had enough; and he’s had enough. He is a general and a very great jefe. He can make you monkey-queen of monkey-Mexico, if it please you. And what should monkeys do, but amuse themselves! Vamos! Embobémonos! Shall I be priest? Vamos! Vamos!’
He rose with sudden volcanic violence, and rushed away.
Cipriano looked at Kate in wonder. She had gone pale.
‘What have you been saying to him?’ he asked.
‘Nothing!’ she said, rising. ‘I’d better go now.’
Juana was collected; and Alonso and Kate set off back down the lake. She sat with a certain obstinate offendedness under the awning of the boat. The sun was terrifically hot, and the water blinded her. She put on black spectacles, in which she looked a monster.
‘Mucho calor, Niña! Mucho calor!’ Juana was repeating behind her. The criada had evidently imbibed tepache.
On the pale-brown water little tufts of water-hyacinth were vaguely sailing, holding up the hand of a leaf for a sail. Everywhere the lake was dotted with these sailing tufts. The heavy rains had washed in flood down the Lerma river into the lake, washing the acres of lirio loose from the marshy end of the waters, thirty miles away, and slowly setting them travelling over all the expanse of the inland sea, till the shores began to be piled, and the far-off Santiago river, which flowed out of the lake, was choked.
That day Ramón wrote his Fourth Hymn.
WHAT QUETZALCOATL SAW IN MEXICO
Who are these strange faces in Mexico?
Palefaces, yellowfaces, blackfaces? These are no Mexicans!
Where do they come from, and why?
Lord of the Two Ways, these are the foreigners.
They come out of nowhere.
Sometimes they come to tell us things,
Mostly they are the greedy ones.
What then do they want?
They want gold, they want silver from the mountains,
And oil, much oil from the coast.
They take sugar from the tall tubes of the cane,
Wheat from the high lands, and maize;
Coffee from the bushes in the hot lands, even the juicy rubber.
They put up tall chimneys that smoke,
And in the biggest houses they keep their machines, that talk
And work iron elbows up and down,
And hold myriad threads from their claws!
Wonderful are the machines of the greedy ones!
And you, Mexicans and peons, what do you do?
We work with their machines, we work in their fields,
They give us pesos made of Mexican silver.
They are the clever ones.
Do you love them then?
We love them not, and ne
ver.
Their faces are ugly, yet they make wonderful things.
And their wills are like their machines of iron.
What can we do?
I see dark things rushing across the country.
Yea, Lord! Even trains and camiones and automobiles.
Trains and camiones, automobiles and aeroplanes.
How nice! says the peon, to go rushing in a train!
How nice, to get in the camion, and for twenty centavos, to be gone!
How nice, in the great cities, where all things rush, and huge lights flare bright, to wander and do nothing!
How nice to sit in the cine, where the picture of all the world dances before the eyes!
How nice if we could take all these things away from the foreigners, and possess them!
Take back our lands and silver and oil, take the trains and the factories and the automobiles
And play with them all the time!
How nice!
Oh, fools! Mexicans and peons!
Who are you, to be masters of machines which you cannot make?
Which you can only break!
Those that can make are masters of these machines.
Not you, poor boobs.
How have these palefaces, yellowfaces crossed the waters of the world?
Oh, fools! Mexicans and peons, with muddy hearts!
Did they do it by squatting on their hams?
You do nothing but squat on your hams, and stare with vacant eyes, and drink fire-waters, and quarrel and stab.
And then run like surly dogs at the bidding of paleface masters.
Oh, dogs and fools, Mexicans and peons!
Watery-hearted, with wishy-washy knees.
Sulky in spirit, and inert.
What are you good for, but to be slaves, and rot away?
You are not worth a god!
Lo! the universe tangles its great dragons,
The dragons in the cosmos are stirring with anger again.
The dragon of the disappointed dead, that sleeps in the snow-white north
Is lashing his tail in his sleep; the winds howl, the cold rocks round.
The spirits of the cold dead whistle in the ears of the world.
Prepare for doom.
For I tell you, there are no dead dead, not even your dead.
There are dead that sleep in the waves of the Morning Star, with freshening limbs.
There are dead that weep in bitter rains.
There are dead that cluster in the frozen north, shuddering and chattering among the ice
And howling with hate.
There are dead that creep through the burning bowels of the earth,
Stirring the fires to acid of bitterness.
There are dead that sit under the trees, watching with ash-grey eyes for their victims.
There are dead that attack the sun like swarms of black flies, to suck his life.
There are dead that stand upon you, when you go in to your women,
And they dart to her womb, they fight for the chance to be born, they struggle at the gate you have opened,
They gnash when it closes, and hate the one that got in to be born again,
Child of the living dead, the dead that live and are not refreshed.
I tell you, sorrow upon you; you shall all die.
And being dead, you shall not be refreshed.
There are no dead dead.
Being dead, you shall rove like dogs with broken haunches
Seeking the offal and garbage of life, in the invisible lanes of the air.
The dead that have mastered fire live on, salamanders, in fire.
The dead of the water-lords rock and glimmer in the seas.
The dead of the steel machines go up in motion, away!
The dead of electric masters are electricity itself.
But the dead of those who have mastered nothing, nothing at all,
Crawl like masterless dogs in the back streets of the air,
Creeping for the garbage of life, and biting with venomous mouths.
Those that have mastered the forces of the world, die into the forces, they have homes in death.
But you! what have you mastered, among the dragon hosts of the cosmos?
There are dragons of sun and ice, dragons of the moon and the earth, dragons of salty waters, dragons of thunder;
There is the spangled dragon of the stars at large.
And far at the centre, with one unblinking eye, the dragon of the Morning Star.
Conquer! says the Morning Star. Pass the dragons, and pass on to me.
For I am sweet, I am the last and the best, the pool of new life.
But lo! you inert ones, I will set the dragons upon you.
They shall crunch your bones.
And even then they shall spit you out, as broken-haunched dogs,
You shall have nowhere to die into.
Lo! in the back streets of the air, dead ones are crawling like curs!
Lo! I release the dragons! The great white one of the north,
Him of the disappointed dead, he is lashing and turning round.
He is breathing cold corruption upon you, you shall bleed in your chests.
I am going to speak to the dragon of the inner fires,
He who housels the dead of the guns,
To withdraw his warmth from your feet, so your feet turn cold with death.
I am about to tell the dragon of the waters to turn round on you
And spew out corrosion into your streams, on your rains.
And I wait for the final day, when the dragon of thunder, waking under the spider-web nets
Which you’ve thrown upon him, shall suddenly shake with rage,
And dart his electric needles into your bones, and curdle your blood like milk with electric venom.
Wait! Only wait! Little by little it all shall come upon you.
Ramón put on his black city clothes, and a black hat, and went himself with this hymn to the printer in the city. The sign of Quetzalcoatl he had printed in black and red, and the sign of the dragon, at the end, in green and black and red. And the sheet was folded.
Six soldiers of Cipriano’s command took the bundles of hymns by train; one to the capital, one to Puebla and Jalapa, one to Tampico and Monterrey, one to Torreon and Chihuahua, one to Sinaloa and Sonora, and one to the mines in Pachucha, Guanajuato, and the central region. Each soldier took only a hundred sheets. But in every town there was a recognized Reader of the Hymns; or two, or three, or four, or even ten Readers in one city. And readers who went round to the villages.
Because there was a strange, submerged desire in the people for things beyond the world. They were weary of events, and weary of news and the newspapers, weary even of the things that are taught in education. Weary is the spirit of man with man’s importunity. Of all things human, and humanly invented, we have had enough, they seemed to say. And though they took not much active notice of the Hymns, they craved for them, as men crave for alcohol, as a relief from the weariness and ennui of mankind’s man-made world.
Everywhere, in all the towns and villages, at night-time the little flames would be seen flickering, a cluster of people was seen, sometimes standing, sometimes sitting upon the ground, listening to the slow voice of some Reader.
More rarely, in some small, out-of-the-way plaza, would sound the sinister thud of the tom-tom, beating out of the hollow of the ages. And there would be two men with white serapes with the blue edges. Then the singing of the Songs of Quetzalcoatl, and perhaps the slow round dance, with the ancient rhythm of the feet on the earth, belonging to aboriginal America.
For the old dances of the Aztecs and the Zapotees, of all the submerged Indian races, are based upon the old, sinking bird-step of the Red Indians of the north. It is in the blood of the people; they cannot quite forget it. It comes back to them, with a sense of fear, and joy, and relief.
Of themselves, they dared not revive the old motion, nor stir the blood in the old w
ay. The spell of the past is too terrible. But in the Songs and the Hymns of Quetzalcoatl there spoke a new voice, the voice of a master and authority. And though they were slow to trust, the slowest and the most untrusting, they seized upon the new-old thrill, with a certain fear, and joy, and relief.
The Men of Quetzalcoatl avoided the great market-places and centres of activity. They took their stand in the little side places. On the rim of a fountain a man in a dark blanket with blue borders, or with the sign of Quetzalcoatl in his hat, would sit down and begin to read aloud. It was enough. The people lingered to listen. He would read to the end, then say: ‘I have finished this reading of the Fourth Hymn of Quetzalcoatl. Now I will begin again.’
In this way, by a sort of far-away note in the voice, and by the slow monotony of repetition, the thing would drift darkly into the consciousness of the listeners.
Already in the beginning there had been the scandal of the Judases. Holy Week, in Mexico City, is, to all appearance, the great week of Judas. Everywhere you see men carrying home in triumph the great, gaudily-varnished dolls of papier-mâché. They are all men-dolls, more or less life-like grotesque. Most frequently it is a fat Mexican-Spanish hacendado, landowner and big farmer, who is represented with his tight trousers, sticking-out belly, and huge upturned moustaches. The old-fashioned patrón. Some of the figures are like Punch, some are like harlequin. But they all have rosy faces and the white man’s get-up. You never see the dark-faced image of a native-blooded Mexican; always a stiff, haughty grotesque of a white man.
And all these are Judases. Judas is the fun of the fair, the victim, the big man of Holy Week, just as the Skeleton, and the skeleton on horseback, is the idol of the first week in November, the days of the dead and of all the saints.
On Easter Saturday the Judases are hung from the balconies, the string is lighted, and at length, bang! Shrieks of joy, Judas has exploded into nothingness, from a big cracker in the middle of him! — All the town is popping with Judases.
There was the scandal of the Holy Images thrown out of one of the churches in Mexico City, and these Judases put in their place. The Church began to move.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 454