“We didn’t stay long, but when we left she asked him to come in whenever he liked. He wasn’t really the person to have calling on one: and he knew it, as she did. But he thanked her, and hoped he would one day be able to receive her at her — meaning his — humble house in the Guadalupe Road, where everything was her own. She said: ‘Why, sure, I’ll come one day. I should love to.’ Which he understood, and bowed himself out like some quick but lurking animal: quick as a scorpion, with silence of venom the same.
“After that he would call fairly often, at about five o’clock, but never alone, always with some other man. And he never said anything, always responded to her questions in the same short way, and always looked at her when he was speaking to the other man. He never once spoke to her — always spoke to his interpreter, in his flat, coarse Spanish. And he always looked at her when he was speaking to someone else.
“She tried every possible manner in which to touch his imagination: but never with any success. She tried the Indians, the Aztecs, the history of Mexico, politics, Don Porfirio, the bull-ring, love, women, Europe, America — and all in vain. All she got out of him was Verdad! He was utterly uninterested. He actually had no mental imagination. Talk was just noise to him. The only spark she roused was when she talked of money. Then the queer half-smile deepened on his face, and he asked his interpreter if the Señora was very rich. To which Ethel replied she didn’t really know what he meant by rich: he must be rich himself. At which he asked the interpreter friend if she had more than a million American dollars. To which she replied that perhaps she had — but she wasn’t sure. And he looked at her so strangely, even more like a yellow scorpion about to sting.
“I asked him later, what made him put such a crude question? Did he think of offering to marry her? ‘Marry a — — ?’ he replied, using an obscene expression. But I didn’t know even then what he really intended. Yet I saw he had her on his mind.
“Ethel was gradually getting into a state of tension. It was as if something tortured her. She seemed like a woman who would go insane. I asked her: ‘Why, whatever’s wrong with you?’ ‘I’ll tell you, Luis,’ she said, ‘but don’t you say anything to anybody, mind. It’s Cuesta! I don’t know whether I want him or not.’ — ’You don’t know whether he wants you or not,’ said I. — ’I can handle that,’ she said, ‘if I know about myself: if I know my own mind. But I don’t. My mind says he’s a nada-nada, a dumb-bell, no brain, no imagination, no anything. But my body says he marvellous, and he’s got something I haven’t got, and he’s stronger than I am, and he’s more an angel or a devil than a man, and I’m too merely human to get him — and all that, till I feel I shall just go crazy, and take an overdose of drugs. What am I to do with my body, I tell you? What am I to do with it? I’ve got to master it. I’ve got to be more than that man. I’ve got to get all round him, and past him. I’ve got to.’ — ’Then just take the train to New York to-night, and forget him,’ I said. — ’I can’t! That’s side-tracking. I won’t sidetrack my body. I’ve got to get the best of it. I’ve got to.’ — ’Well,’ I said, ‘you’re a point or two beyond me. If it’s a question of getting all round Cuesta, and getting past him, why, take the train, and you’ll forget him in a fortnight. Don’t fool yourself you’re in love with the fellow.’ — ’I’m afraid he’s stronger than I am,’ she cried out. — ’And what then? He’s stronger than I am, but that doesn’t prevent me sleeping. A jaguar even is stronger than I am, and an anaconda could swallow me whole. I tell you, it’s all in a day’s march. There’s a kind of animal called Cuesta. Well, what of it?’
“She looked at me, and I could tell I made no impression on her. She despised me. She sort of wanted to go off the deep end about something. I said to her: ‘God’s love; Ethel, cut out the Cuesta caprice! It’s not even good acting.’ But I might just as well have mewed, for all the notice she took of me.
“It was as if some dormant Popocatepetl inside her had begun to erupt. She didn’t love the fellow. Yet she was in a blind kill-me-quick sort of state, neither here nor there, nor hot or cold, not desirous nor undesirous, but just simply insane. In a certain kind of way, she seemed to want him. And in a very definite kind of way she seemed not to want him. She was in a kind of hysterics, lost her feet altogether. I tried might and main to get her away to the United States. She’d have come sane enough, once she was there. But I thought she’d kill me, when she found I’d been trying to interfere. Oh, she was not quite in her mind, that’s sure.
“‘If my body is stronger than my imagination, I shall kill myself,’ she said. — ’Ethel,’ I said, ‘people who talk of killing themselves always call a doctor if they cut their finger. What’s the quarrel between your body and your imagination? Aren’t they the same thing?’ — ’No!’ she said. ‘If the imagination has the body under control, you can do anything, it doesn’t matter what you do, physically. If my body was under the control of my imagination, I could take Cuesta for my lover, and it would be an imaginative act. But if my body acted without my imagination, I — I’d kill myself.’ — ’But what do you mean by your body acting without your imagination?’ I said. ‘You are not a child. You’ve been married twice. You know what it means. You even have two children. You must have had at least several lovers. If Cuesta is to be another of your lovers, I think it is deplorable, but I think it only shows you are very much like the other woman who fall in love with him. If you’ve fallen in love with him, your imagination has nothing to do but accept the fact and put as many roses on the ass’s head as you like.’ She looked at me very solemnly, and seemed to think about it. Then she said: ‘But my imagination has not fallen in love with him. He wouldn’t meet me imaginatively. He’s a brute. And once I start, where’s it going to end? I’m afraid my body has fallen — not fallen in love with him, but fallen for him. It’s abject! And if I can’t get my body on its feet again, and either forget him or else get him to make it an imaginative act with me — I — I shall kill myself.’ — ’All right,’ said I. ‘I don’t know what you are talking about, imaginative acts and unimaginative acts. The act is always the same.’ — ’It isn’t!’ she cried, furious with me. ‘It is either imaginative or else it’s impossible — to me.’ Well, I just spread my hands. What could I say, or do? I simply hated her way of putting it. Imaginative act! Why, I would hate performing an imaginative act with a woman. Damn it, the act is either real, or let it alone. But now I knew why I had never touched her, or even kissed her, not once: because I couldn’t stand that imaginative sort of bullying from her. It is death to a man.
“I said to Cuesta: ‘Why do you go to Ethel? Why don’t you stay away, and make her go back to the United States? Are you in love with her?’ He was obscene, as usual. ‘Am I in love with a cuttlefish, that is all arms and eyes, and no legs or tail! That blonde is a cuttlefish. She is an octopus, all arms and eyes and beak, and a lump of jelly.’ — ’Then why don’t you leave her alone?’ — ’Even cuttlefish is good when it’s cooked in sauce,’ he said. ‘You had much better leave her alone,’ I said. — ’Leave her alone yourself, my esteemed Señor,’ he said to me. And I knew I had better go no further.
“She said to him one evening, when only I was there — and she said it in Spanish, direct to him: ‘Why do you never come alone to see me? Why do you always come with another person? Are you afraid?’ He looked at her, and his eyes never changed. But he said, in his usual flat, meaningless voice: ‘It is because I cannot speak, except Spanish.’ — ’But we could understand one another,’ she said, giving one of her little violent snorts of impatience and embarrassed rage. ‘Who knows!’ he replied, imperturbably.
“Afterwards, he said to me: ‘What does she want? She hates a man as she hates a red-hot iron. A white devil, as sacred as the communion wafer!’ — ’Then why don’t you leave her alone?’ I said. — ’She is so rich,’ he smiled. ‘She has all the world in her thousand arms. She is as rich as God. The Archangels are poor beside her, she is so rich and so white-skinned and white-souled.’ — ’T
hen all the more, why don’t you leave her alone?’ But he did not answer me.
“He went alone, however, to see her. But always in the early evening. And he never stayed more than half an hour. His car, well-known everywhere, waited outside: till he came out in his French-grey suit and glistening brown shoes, his hat rather on the back of his head.
“What they said to one another, I don’t know. But she became always more distraught and absorbed, as if she were brooding over a single idea. I said to her: ‘Why take it seriously? Dozens of women have slept with Cuesta, and think no more of it. Why take him seriously?’ — ’I don’t,’ she said. ‘I take myself seriously, that’s the point.’ — ’Let it be the point. Go on taking yourself seriously, and leave him out of the question altogether.’
“But she was tired of my playing the wise uncle, and I was tired of her taking herself seriously. She took herself so seriously, it seemed to me she would deserve what she got, playing the fool with Cuesta. Of course she did not love him at all. She only wanted to see if she could make an impression on him, make him yield to her will. But all the impression she made on him was to make him call her a squid and an octopus and other nice things. And I could see their ‘love’ did not go forward at all.
“‘Have you made love to her?’ I asked him. — ’I have not touched the zopilote,’ he said. ‘I hate her bare white neck.’
“But still he went to see her: always, for a very brief call, before sundown. She asked him to come to dinner with me. He said he could never come to dinner, nor after dinner, as he was always engaged from eight o’clock in the evening onwards. She looked at him as much as to tell him she knew it was a lie and a subterfuge, but he never turned a hair. He was, she put it, utterly unimaginative: an impervious animal.
“‘You, however, come one day to your poor house in the Guadalupe Road,’ he said — meaning his house. He had said it, suggestively, several times.
“‘But you are always engaged in the evening,’ she said.
“‘Come, then, at night — come at eleven, when I am free,’ he said, with supreme animal impudence, looking into her eyes.
“‘Do you receive calls so late?’ she said, flushing with anger and embarrassment and obstinacy.
“‘At times,’ he said. ‘When it is very special.’
“A few days later, when I called to see her as usual, I was told she was ill, and could see no one. The next day, she was still not to be seen. She had had a dangerous nervous collapse. The third day, a friend rang me up to say Ethel was dead.
“The thing was hushed up. But it was known she had poisoned herself. She left a note to me, in which she merely said: ‘It is as I told you. Good-bye. But my testament holds good.’
“In her will, she had left half her fortune to Cuesta. The will had been made some ten days before her death — and it was allowed to stand. He took the money — ”
Colmenares’ voice tailed off into silence.
“Her body had got the better of her imagination, after all,” I said.
“It was worse than that,” he said.
“How?”
He was a long time before he answered. Then he said: “She actually went to Cuesta’s house that night, way down there beyond the Volador market. She went by appointment. And there in his bedroom he handed her over to half a dozen of his bull-ring gang, with orders not to bruise her. Yet at the inquest there were a few deep, strange bruises, and the doctors made reports. Then apparently the visit to Cuesta’s house came to light, but no details were ever told. Then there was another revolution, and in the hubbub this affair was dropped. It was too shady, anyhow. Ethel had certainly encouraged Cuesta at her apartment.”
“But how do you know he handed her over like that?”
“One of the men told me himself. He was shot afterwards.”
THE UNDYING MAN
LONG ago in Spain there were two very learned men, so clever and knowing so much that they were famous all over the world. One was called Rabbi Moses Maimonides, a Jew — blessed be his memory! — and the other was called Aristotle, a Christian who belonged to the Greeks.
These two were great friends, because they had always studied together and found out many things together. At last after many years, they found out a thing they had been specially trying for. They discovered that if you took a tiny little vein out of a man’s body, and put it in a glass jar with certain leaves and plants, it would gradually begin to grow, and would grow and grow until it became a man. When it had grown as big as a boy, you could take it out of the jar, and then it would live and keep on growing till it became a man, a fine man who would never die. He would be undying. Because he had never been born, he would never die, but live for ever and ever. Because the wisest men on earth had made him, and he didn’t have to be born.
When they were quite sure it was so, then the Rabbi Moses Maimonides and the Christian Aristotle decided they would really make a man Up till then, they had only experimented. But now they would make the real undying man.
The question was, from whom should they take the little vein? Because the man they took it from would die. So at first they decided to take it from a slave. But then they thought, a slave wasn’t good enough to make the beginnings of the undying man. So they decided to ask one of their devoted students to sacrifice himself. But that did not seem right either, because they might get a man they didn’t really like, and whom they wouldn’t want to be the beginning of the man who would never die. So at last, they decided to leave it to fate; they gathered together their best and most learned disciples, and they all agreed to draw lots. The lot fell to Aristotle, to have the little vein cut from his body.
So Aristotle had to agree. But before he would have the little vein cut out of his body, Aristotle asked Maimonides to take him by the hand and swear by their clasped hands that he would never interfere with the growth of the little vein, never at any time or in any way. Maimonides took him by the hand and swore. And then Aristotle had the little vein cut out of his body by Maimonides himself.
So now Maimonides alone took the little vein and placed it among the leaves and herbs, as they had discovered, in the great glass jar, and he sealed the jar. Then he set the jar on a shelf in his own room where nobody entered but himself, and he waited. The days passed by, and he recited his prayers, pacing back and forth in his room among his books, and praying loudly as he paced, as the Jews do. Then he returned to his books and his chemistry. But every day he looked at the jar, to see if the little vein had changed. For a long time it did not change. So he thought it was in vain.
Then at last it seemed to change, to have grown a little. Rabbi Moses Maimonides gazed at the jar transfixed, and forgot everything else in all the wide world; lost to all and everything, he gazed into the jar. And at last he saw the tiniest, tiniest tremor in the little vein, and he knew it was a tremor of growth. He sank on the floor and lay unconscious, because he had seen the first tremor of growth of the undying man.
When he came to himself, the room was dusk, it was almost night. And Rabbi Moses Maimonides was afraid. He did not know what he was afraid of. He rose to his feet, and glanced towards the jar. And it seemed to him, in the darkness on the shelf there was a tiny red glow, like the smallest ember of fire. But it did not go out, as the last ember of fire goes out while you watch. It stayed on, and glowed a tiny dying glow that did not die. Then he knew he saw the glow of the life of the undying man, and he was afraid.
He locked his room, where no one ever entered but himself, and went out into the town. People greeted him with bows and reverences, for he was the most learned of all rabbis. But tonight they all seemed very far from him. They looked small and they grimaced like monkeys in his eyes. And he thought to himself: they will all die! They grimace in this fashion, like monkeys, because they will all die. Only I shall not die!
But as he thought this, his heart stood still, because he knew that he too would die. He stood still in the street, though rain was falling, and people crept past
him humbly, thinking he was praying some great prayer. But he was only locked in this one thought: I shall die and pass away, but that little red spark which came from Aristotle the Christian, it will never die. It will live for ever and ever, like God. God alone lives for ever and ever. But this man in the jar will also live for ever and ever, even that red spark. He will be a man, and live for ever and ever, as good as God. Nay, better than God! For surely, to be as good as God, and to be also a man and alive, that would be better even than being God!
Rabbi Moses Maimonides started at this thought as if he had been stung. And immediately he began to walk down the street towards home, to see if the red glow were really glowing. When he got to his door, he stood still, afraid to open. He could not open.
So suddenly he cried a great fierce cry to God, to help him and His people. A great fierce cry for help. For they were God’s people, God’s chosen people. Though they grimaced in the sight of Rabbi Moses Maimonides like monkeys, they were beautiful in the sight of God, and the best Jews among them would sit in high, high places in the eternal glory of God, in the after-life.
This thought so emboldened Maimonides that he opened his door and entered his room. But he stood again as if pierced through the body by that strange red light, like no light of God, which glowed so tiny and yet was so fierce and strong. ‘Fierce and strong! fierce and strong!’ he kept muttering to himself as he paced back and forth in his room. ‘Fierce and strong!’ His servant thought he was praying, and she dared not bring his food to the door. ‘Fierce and strong!’ — he paced back and forth. And he himself thought he was praying. He was so used to praying the ritual prayers as he paced in his room, that now he thought he was praying to the one and only God. But in fact, all he was saying was ‘Fierce and strong! Fierce and strong!’
At last he sank down in exhaustion, and then his woman tapped at his door and set down the tray. But he told her to take the tray away, he would not eat in his room, but would come downstairs. For he could not eat in the presence of that little red glow.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 678