Then the birds under the leaves hung their heads and were dumb. No good our making a sound, they said. We are superseded.
The great big, booming, half-naked birds were blown to smithereens. Only the real little feathery individuals hatched out again and remained. This was a consolation. The larks and warblers cheered up, and began to say their little say, out of the old ‘Sun’, to the new sun. But the peacock, and the turkey, and the raven, and the parrot above all, they could not get over it. Because, in the old days of the Sun of Birds, they had been the big guns. The parrot had been the old boss of the flock. He was so clever.
Now he was, so to speak, up a tree. Nor dare he come down, because of the toddling little curly white Corasmin, and such-like, down below. He felt absolutely bitter. That wingless, beakless, featherless, curly, misshapen bird’s nest of a Corasmin had usurped the face of the earth, waddling about, whereas his Grace, the heavy-nosed old Duke of a parrot, was forced to sit out of reach up a tree, dispossessed.
So, like the riff-raff up in the gallery at the theatre, aloft in the Paradiso of the vanished Sun, he began to whistle and jeer. ‘Yap-yap!’ said his new little lordship of a Corasmin. ‘Ye Gods!’ cried the parrot. ‘Hear him forsooth! Yap-yap! he says! Could anything be more imbecile? Yap-yap! Oh, Sun of the Birds, hark at that! Yap-yap-yap! Perro! Perro! Perr-rro! Oh, Perr-rr-rro!’
The parrot had found his cue. Stiff-nosed, heavy-nosed old duke of the birds, he wasn’t going to give in and sing a new song, like those fool brown thrushes and nightingales. Let, them twitter and warble. The parrot was a gentleman of the old school. He was going to jeer now! Like an ineffectual old aristocrat.
‘Oh, Perr-rro! Perr-rro-o-o-!’
The Aztecs say there have been four Suns and ours is the fifth. The first Sun, a tiger, or a jaguar, a night-spotted monster of rage, rose out of nowhere and swallowed it, with all its huge, mercifully forgotten insects along with it. The second Sun blew up in a great wind: that was when the big lizards must have collapsed. The third Sun burst in water, and drowned all the animals that were considered unnecessary, together with the first attempts at animal men.
Out of the floods rose our own Sun, and little naked man. ‘Hello!’ said the old elephant. ‘What’s that noise?’ And he pricked his ears, listening to a new voice on the face of the earth. The sound of man, and words for the first time. Terrible, unheard-of sound. The elephant dropped his tail and ran into the deep jungle, and there stood looking down his nose.
But little white curly Corasmin was fascinated. ‘Come on! Perro! Perro!’ called the naked two-legged one. And Corasmin, fascinated, said to himself: ‘Can’t stand out against that name. Shall have to go!’ so off he trotted, at the heels of the naked one. Then came the horse, then the elephant, spell-bound at being given a name. The other animals ran for their lives and stood quaking.
In the dust, however, the snake, the oldest dethroned king of all, bit his tail once more and said to himself: ‘Here’s another! No end to these new lords of creation! But I’ll bruise his heel! Just as I swallow the eggs of the parrot, and lick to the little Corasmin pups.’
And in the branches, the parrot said to himself: ‘Hello! What’s this new sort of half-bird? Why, he’s got Corasmin trotting at his heels! Must be a new sort of boss! Let’s listen to him, and see if I can’t take him off.’
Perr-rro! Perr-rr-rro-oo! Oh, Perro!
The parrot had hit it.
And the monkey, cleverest of creatures, cried with rage when he heard men speaking. ‘Oh, why couldn’t I do it!’ he chattered. But no good, he belonged to the old Sun. So he sat and gibbered across the invisible gulf in time, which is the ‘other dimension’ that clever people gas about: calling it ‘fourth dimension’, as if you could measure it with a foot-rule, the same as the obedient other three dimensions.
If you come to think of it, when you look at the monkey, you are looking straight into the other dimension. He’s got length and breadth and height all right, and he’s in the same universe of Space and Time as you are. But there’s another dimension. He’s different, There’s no rope of evolution linking him to you, like a navel string. No! Between you and him there’s a cataclysm and another dimension. It’s no good. You can’t link him up. Never will. It’s the other dimension.
He mocks at you and gibes at you and imitates you.
Sometimes he is even more like you than you are yourself. It’s funny, and you laugh just a bit on wrong your face. It’s the other dimension.
He stands in one Sun, you in another. He whisks his tail in one Day, you scratch your head in another. He jeers at you, and is afraid of you. You laugh at him and are frightened of him.
What’s the length and the breadth, what’s the height and the depths between you and me? says monkey.
You get out a tape-measure, and he flies into an obscene mockery of you.
It’s the other dimension, put the tape-measure away, it won’t serve.
‘Perro! Oh, Perr-rro!’ shrieks the parrot.
Corasmin looks up at me, as much as to say:
‘It’s the other dimension. There’s no help for it. Let us agree about it.’
And I look down into his yellow eyes, and say:
‘You’re quite right, Corasmin, it’s the other dimension. You and I, we admit it. But the parrot won’t, and the monkey won’t, and the crocodile won’t, neither the earwig. They all wind themselves up and wriggle inside the cage of the other dimension, hating it. And those that have voices jeer, and those that have mouths bite, and the insects that haven’t even mouths, they turn up their tails and nip with them, or sting, Just behaving according to their own dimension: which, for me, is the other dimension.’
And Corasmin wags his tail mildly, and looks at me with real wisdom in his eyes. He and I, we understand each other in the wisdom of the other dimension.
But the flat, saucer-eyed parrot won’t have it. Just won’t have it.
‘Oh, Perro! Perr-rro! Perr-rro-o-o-o! Yap-yap-yap!’
And Rosalino, the Indian mozo, looks up at me with his eyes veiled by their own blackness. We won’t have it either: he is hiding and repudiating. Between us also is the gulf of the other dimension, and he wants to bridge it with the foot-rule of the three-dimensional space. He knows it can’t be done. So do I. Each of us knows the other knows.
But he can imitate me, even more than life-like. As the parrot can him. And I have to laugh at his me, a bit on the wrong side of my face, as he has to grin on the wrong side of his face when I catch his eye as the parrot is whistling him, With a grin, with a laugh we pay tribute to the other dimension. But Corasmin is wiser. In his clear, yellow eyes is the self-possession of full admission.
The Aztecs said this world, our Sun, would blow up from inside, in earthquakes. Then what will come, in the other dimension, when we are superseded?
* * *
2 - WALK TO HUAYAPA
Curious is the psychology of Sunday. Humanity enjoying itself is on the whole a dreary spectacle, and holidays are more disheartening than drudgery. One makes up one’s mind: On Sundays and on fiestas I will stay at home, in the hermitage of the patio, with the parrots and Corasmin and the reddening coffee-berries. I will avoid the sight of people enjoying themselves’ — or try to, without much success.
Then comes Sunday morning, with the peculiar looseness of its sunshine. And even if you keep mum, the better-half says: Let’s go somewhere.
But, thank God, in Mexico at least one can’t set off in the ‘machine’. It is a question of a meagre horse and a wooden saddle; on a donkey; or what we called, as children, ‘Shanks’ pony’ — the shanks referring discourteously to one’s own legs.
We will go out of the town. Rosalino, we are going for a walk to San Felipe de las Aguas. Do you want to go, and carry the basket?’
‘Come no, Señor?’
It is Rosalino’s inevitable answer, as inevitable as the parrot’s ‘Perro?’ ‘Cone no, Señor?’ — ’How not, Señor?’
The
Norte, the north-wind, was blowing last night, rattling the worm-chewed window-frames.
‘Rosalino, I am afraid you will be cold in the night.’
‘Come no, Señor?’
‘Would you like a blanket?’
‘Come no, Señor?’
‘With this you will be warm?’
‘Come no, Señor?’
But the morning is perfect; in a moment we are clear out of the town. Most towns in Mexico, saving the capital, end in themselves, at once. As if they had been lowered from heaven in a napkin, and deposited, rather foreign, upon the wild plain. So we walk round the wall of the church and the huge old monastery enclosure that is now barracks for the scrap-heap soldiery, and at once there are the hills.
‘I will lift up my eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my strength.’ At least one can always do that, in Mexico. In a stride, the town passes away. Before us lies the gleaming, pinkish-ochre of the valley flat, wild and exalted with sunshine. On the left, quite near, bank the stiffly pleated mountains, all the foot-hills, that press savannah-coloured into the savannah of the valley. The mountains are clothed smokily with pine, ocote, and, like a woman in a gauze rebozo, they rear in a rich blue fume that is almost cornflower-blue in the clefts. It is their characteristic that they are darkest blue at the top. Like some splendid lizard with a wavering, royal-blue crest down the ridge of his back, and pale belly, and soft, pinky-fawn claws, no the plain.
Between the pallor of the claws, a dark spot of trees, and white dots of a church with twin towers. Further away, along the foot-hills, a few scattered trees, white dot and stroke of .a hacienda, and a green, green square of sugar-cane. Further off still, at the mouth of a cleft of a canyon, a dense little green patch of trees, and two spots of proud church.
‘Rosalino, which is San Felipe?’
‘Quien sabe, Señor?’ says Rosalino, looking at the villages; beyond the sun of the savannah with black, visionless eyes. In his voice is the inevitable flat resonance of aloofness, touched with resignation, as if to say: It is not becoming to a man to know these things. — Among the Indians it is not becoming to know anything, not even one’s own name.
Rosalino is a mountain boy, an Indian from a village two days’ walk away. But he has been two years in the little city, and has learnt his modicum of Spanish.
‘Have you never been to any of these villages?’
‘No, Señor, I never went.’
‘Didn’t you want to?’
‘Come no, Señor?’
The Americans would call him a dumb-bell.
We decide for the farthest speck of a village in a dark spot of trees. It lies so magical, alone, tilted in the fawn-pink slope, again as if the dark-green napkin with a few white tiny buildings had been lowered from heaven and left, there at the foot of the mountains, with the deep groove of a canyon slanting in behind. So alone and, as it were, detached from the world in which it lies, a spot.
Nowhere more than in Mexico does human life become isolated, external to its surroundings, and cut off tinily from the environment. Even as you come across the plain to a big city like Guadalajara, and see the twin towers of the cathedral peering around in loneliness like two lost birds side by side on a moor, lifting their white heads to look around in the wilderness, your heart gives a clutch, feeling the pathos, the isolated tininess of human effort. As for building a church with one tower only, it is unthinkable. There must be two towers, to keep each other company in this wilderness world.
The morning is still early, the brilliant sun does not burn too much. Tomorrow is the shortest day. The savannah valley is shadeless, spotted only with the thorny ravel of mesquite bushes. Down the trail that has worn grooves in the turf — the rock is near the surface — occasional donkeys with a blue-hooded woman perched on top come tripping in silence, twinkling, a shadow. Just occasional women taking a few vegetables to market. Practically no men. It is Sunday.
Rosalino, prancing behind with the basket, plucks up his courage to speak to one of the women passing on a donkey. ‘Is that San Felipe where we are going?’ — ’No, that is not San Felipe.’ — ’What, then, is it called?’ — ’It is called Huayapa.’ — ’Which, then, is San Felipe?’ — That one’ — and she points to her right.
They have spoken to each other in half-audible, crushed tones, as they always do, the woman on the donkey and the woman with her on foot swerving away from the basket-carrying Rosalino. They all swerve away from us, as if we were potential bold brigands. It really gets one’s pecker up. The presence of the Señora only half reassures them. For the Señora, in a plain hat of bluey-green woven grass, and a dress of white cotton with black squares on it, is almost a monster of unusualness. Prophet art thou, bird, or devil? the women seem to say, as they look at her with keen black eyes. I think they choose to decide she is more of the last.
The women look at the woman, the men look at the man. And always with that same suspicious, inquiring, wondering look, the same with which Edgar Allan Poe must have looked at his momentous raven:
‘Prophet art thou, bird, or devil?’
Devil, then, to please you! one longs to answer, in a tone of Nevermore.
Ten o’clock, and the sun getting hot. Not a spot of shade, apparently, from here to Huayapa. The blue getting thinner on the mountains, and an indiscernible vagueness, of too much light, descending on the plain.
The road suddenly dips into a little crack, where runs a creek. This again is characteristic of these parts of America. Water keeps out of sight. Even the biggest rivers, even the tiny brooks. You look across a plain on which the light sinks down, and you think: Dry! Dry! Absolutely dry! You travel along, and suddenly come to a crack in the earth, and a little stream is running in a little walled-in valley bed, where is a half-yard of green turf, and bushes, the palo-blanco with leaves, and with big white flowers like pure white, crumpled cambric. Or you may come to a river a thousand feet below, sheer below you. But not in this valley. Only the stream.
‘Shade!’ says the Señora, subsiding under a steep bank.
‘Mucho calor!’ says Rosalino, taking off his extra-jaunty straw hat, and subsiding with the basket.
Down the slope are coming two women on donkeys. Seeing the terrible array of three people sitting under a bank, they pull up.
‘Adios!’ I say, with firm resonance.
‘Adios!’ says the Señora, with diffidence.
‘Adios!’ says the reticent Rosalino, his voice the shadow of ours.
‘Adios! Adios! Adios!’ say the women, in suppressed voices, swerving, neutral, past us on their self-contained, sway-eared asses.
When they have passed, Rosalino looks at me to see if I shall laugh. I give a little grin, and he gives me back a great explosive grin, throwing back his head in silence, opening his wide mouth and showing his soft pink tongue, looking along his cheeks with his saurian black eyes, in an access of farouche derision.
A great hawk, like an eagle, with white bars at the end of its wings, sweeps low over us, looking for snakes. One can hear the hiss of its pinions.
‘Gabilán,’ says Rosalino.
‘What is it called in the idioma?’
‘Psia!’ — He makes the consonants explode and hiss.
‘Ah!’ says the Señora. ‘One hears it in the wings. Psia!’
‘Yes,’ says Rosalino, with black eyes of incomprehension.
Down the creek, two native boys, little herdsmen, are bathing, stooping with knees together and throwing water over themselves, rising, gleaming dark coffee-red in the sun, wetly. They are very dark, and their wet heads are so black, they seem to give off a bluish light, like dark electricity.
The great cattle they are tending slowly plunge through the bushes, coming up-stream. At the place where the path fords the stream, a great ox stoops to drink. Comes a cow after him, and a calf, and a young bull. They all drink a little at the stream, their noses delicately touching the water. And then the young bull, horns abranch, stares fixedly, with some f the same I
ndian wonder-and-suspicion stare, at us sitting under the bank.
Up jumps the Señora, proceeds uphill, trying to save her dignity. The bull, slowly leaning into motion, moves across-stream like a ship unmoored. The bathing lad on the bank is hastily fastening his calico pantaloons round his ruddy-dark waist. The Indians have a certain rich physique, even this lad. He comes running short-step down the bank, uttering a birdlike whoop, his dark hair gleaming bluish. Stooping for a moment to select a stone, he runs athwart the hull, and aims the stone sideways at him. There is a thud, the ponderous, adventurous young animal swerves docilely round towards the stream. ‘Becerro!’ cries the boy, in his bird-like, piping tone, selecting a stone to throw at the calf.
We proceed in the blazing sun up the slope. There is a white line at the foot of the trees. It looks like water running white over a weir. The supply of the town water comes this way. Perhaps this is a reservoir. A sheet of water I How lovely it would be, in this country, if there was a sheet of water with a stream running out of it! And those dense trees of Huayapa behind.
‘What is that white, Rosalino? Is it water?’
‘El Blanco? Si, aqua, Señora,’ says that dumb-bell.
Probably, if the Señora had said: Is it milk? he would have replied in exactly the same way: Si es leche, Señora! — Yes, it’s milk.
Hot, silent, walking only amidst a weight of light, out of which one hardly sees, we climb the spurs towards the dark trees. And as we draw nearer, the white slowly resolves into a broken, whitewashed wall.
‘Oh!’ exclaims the Señora, in real disappointment. ‘It isn’t water! it’s a wall!’
‘Si, Señora. Es panteón.’ (They call a cemetery a panteón, down here.)
‘It is a cemetery,’ announces Rosalino, with a certain ponderous, pleased assurance, and without afterthought. But when I suddenly laugh at the absurdity, he also gives a sudden broken yelp of laughter. — They laugh as if it were against their will, as if it hurt them, giving themselves away.
It was nearing midday. At last we got into a shady lane, in which were puddles of escaped irrigation-water. The ragged semi-squalor of a half-tropical lane, with naked trees sprouting into spiky scarlet flowers, and bushes with biggish yellow flowers, sitting rather wearily on their stems, led to the village.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 809