Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 461
There was no kindness in Cipriano. The god-demon Pan preceded kindness. She wondered if she wanted kindness. She did not know. Everything felt numb.
‘I was wondering whether to go to England,’ she said.
‘Again?’ said Ramón, with a slight smile. ‘Away from the bullets and the knives, is that it?’
‘Yes! — to get away.’ And she sighed deeply.
‘No!’ said Ramón. ‘Don’t go away. You will find nothing in England.’
‘But can I go on here?’
‘Can you help it?’
‘I wish I knew what to do.’
‘How can one know? Something happens inside you, and all your decisions are smoke. — Let happen what will happen.’
‘I can’t quite drift as if I had no soul of my own, can I?’
‘Sometimes it is best.’
There was a pause. Cipriano stayed outside the conversation altogether, in a dusky world of his own, apart and secretly hostile.
‘I have been thinking so much about you,’ she said to Ramón, ‘and wondering whether it is worth while.’
‘What?’
‘What you are doing; trying to change the religion of these people. If they have any religion to change. I don’t think they are a religious people. They are only superstitious. I have no use for men and women who go crawling down a church aisle on their knees, or holding up their arms for hours. There’s something stupid and wrong about it. They never worship a God. Only some little evil power. I have been wondering so much if it is worth while giving yourself to them, and exposing yourself to them. It would be horrible if you were really killed. I have seen you look dead.’
‘Now you see me look alive again,’ he smiled.
But a heavy silence followed.
‘I believe Don Cipriano knows them better than you do. I believe he knows best, if it is any good,’ she said.
‘And what does he say?’ asked Ramón.
‘I say I am Ramón’s man,’ replied Cipriano stubbornly.
Kate looked at him, and mistrusted him. In the long run he was nobody’s man. He was that old, masterless Pan-male, that could not even conceive of service; particularly the service of mankind. He saw only glory; the black mystery of glory consummated. And himself like a wind of glory.
‘I feel they’ll let you down,’ said Kate to Ramón.
‘Maybe! But I shan’t let myself down. I do what I believe in. Possibly I am only the first step round the corner of change. But: ce n’est que le premier pas qui coute — Why will you not go round the corner with us? At least it is better than sitting still.’
Kate did not answer his question. She sat looking at the mango-trees and the lake, and the thought of that afternoon came over her again.
‘How did those two men get in; those two bandits on the roof?’ she asked wonderingly.
‘It was a woman this time; a girl whom Carlota brought here from the Cuna in Mexico City, to be a sewing girl and to teach the peon’s wives to sew and do little things. She had a little room at the end of the terrace there — ’ Ramón pointed to the terrace projecting towards the lake, opposite the one where his own room was, and the covered balcony. ‘She got entangled with one of the peons; a sort of second overseer, called Guillermo. Guillermo had got a wife and four children, but he came to me to say could he change and take Maruca — the sewing girl. I said no, he could stay with his family. And I sent Maruca back to Mexico. But she had had a smattering of education, and thought she was equal to anything. She got messages through to Guillermo, and he ran away and joined her in Mexico, leaving wife and four children here. The wife then went to live with another peon — the blacksmith — whose wife had died and who was supposed to be a good match; a decent fellow.
‘One day appeared Guillermo, and said: could he come back? I said not with Maruca. He said he didn’t want Maruca, he wanted to come back. His wife was willing to go back to him again with the children. The blacksmith was willing to let her go. I said very well; but he had forfeited his job as sub-overseer, and must be a peon again.
‘And he seemed all right — satisfied. But then Maruca came and stayed in Sayula, pretending to make her living as a dressmaker. She was in with the priest; and she got Guillermo again.
‘It seems the Knights of Cortés had promised a big reward for the man who would bring in my scalp; secretly, of course. The girl got Guillermo: Guillermo got those two peons, one from San Pablo and one from Ahuajijic; somebody else arranged for the rest.
‘The bedroom the girl used to have is that one, on the terrace not far from where the stairs go up to the roof. The bedroom has a lattice window, high up, looking out on the trees. There’s a big laurel de India growing outside. It appears the girl climbed on a table and knocked the iron lattice of the window loose, while she was living here, and that Guillermo, by taking a jump from the bough — a very risky thing, but then he was one of that sort — could land on the window-sill and pull himself into the room.
‘Apparently he and the other two men were going to get the scalp and pillage the house before the others could enter. So the first one, the man I killed, climbed the tree, and with a long pole shoved in the lattice of the window, and so got into the room, and up the terrace stairs.
‘Martin, my man, who was waiting on the other stairs, ready if they tried to blow out the iron door, heard the smash of the window and rushed round just as the second bandit — the one you shot — was crouching on the window-sill to jump down into the room. The window is quite small, and high up.
‘Before Martin could do anything the man had jumped down on top of him and stabbed him twice with his machete. Then he took Martin’s knife and came up the stairs, when you shot him in the head.
‘Martin was on the floor when he saw the hands of a third man gripping through the window. Then the face of Guillermo. Martin got up and gave the hands a slash with the heavy machete, and Guillermo fell smash back down on to the rocks under the wall.
‘When I came down, I found Martin lying outside the door of that room. He told me — They came through there, Patrón. Guillermo was one of them.
‘Guillermo broke his thigh on the rocks, and the soldiers found him. He confessed everything, and said he was sorry, and begged my pardon. He’s in the prison hospital now.’
‘And Maruca?’ said Kate.
‘They’ve got her too.’
‘There will always be a traitor,’ said Kate gloomily.
‘Let us hope there will also be a Catarina,’ said Ramón.
‘But will you go on with it — your Quetzalcoatl?’
‘How can I leave off? It’s my métier now. Why don’t you join us? Why don’t you help me?’
‘How?’
‘You will see. Soon you will hear the drums again. Soon the first day of Quetzalcoatl will come. You will see. Then Cipriano will appear — in the red serape — and Huitzilopochtli will share the Mexican Olympus with Quetzalcoatl. Then I want a goddess.’
‘But will Don Cipriano be the god Huitzilopochtli?’ she asked, taken aback.
‘First Man of Huitzilopochtli, as I am First Man of Quetzalcoatl.’
‘Will you?’ said Kate to Cipriano. ‘That horrible Huitzilopochtli?’
‘Yes, Señora!’ said Cipriano, with a subtle smile of hauteur, the secret savage coming into his own.
‘Not the old Huitzilopochtli — but the new,’ said Ramón. ‘And then there must come a goddess; wife or virgin, there must come a goddess. Why not you, as the First Woman of — say Itzpapalotl, just for the sound of the name?’
‘I?’ said Kate. ‘Never! I should die of shame.’
‘Shame?’ laughed Ramón. ‘Ah, Señora Caterina, why shame? This is a thing that must be done. There must be manifestations. We must change back to the vision of the living cosmos; we must. The oldest Pan is in us, and he will not be denied. In cold blood and in hot blood both, we must make the change. That is how man is made. I accept the must from the oldest Pan in my soul, and from the newest me. Once a man gathers his whole soul together and arrives at a conclusion, the time of alternatives has gone. I must. No more than that. I am the First Man of Quetzalcoatl. I am Quetzalcoatl himself, if you like. A manifestation, as well as a man. I accept myself entire, and proceed to make destiny. Why, what else can I do?’
Kate was silent. His loss of blood seemed to have washed him curiously fresh again, and he was carried again out of the range of human emotion. A strange sort of categorical imperative! She saw now his power over Cipriano. It lay in this imperative which he acknowledged in his own soul, and which really was like a messenger from the beyond.
She looked on like a child looking through a railing; rather wistful, and rather frightened.
Ah, the soul! The soul was always flashing and darkening into new shapes, each one strange to the other. She had thought Ramón and she had looked into each other’s souls. And now, he was this pale, distant man, with a curious gleam, like a messenger from the beyond, in his soul. And he was remote, remote from any woman.
Whereas Cipriano had suddenly opened a new world to her, a world of twilight, with the dark, half-visible face of the god-demon Pan, who can never perish, but ever returns upon mankind from the shadows. The world of shadows and dark prostration, with the phallic wind rushing through the dark.
Cipriano had to go to the town at the end of the lake, near the State of Colima; to Jaramay. He was going in a motor-boat with a couple of soldiers. Would Kate go with him? He waited, in heavy silence, for her answer.
She said she would. She was desperate. She did not want to be sent back to her own empty, dead house.
It was one of those little periods when the rain seems strangled, the air thick with thunder, silent, ponderous thunder latent in the air from day to day, among the thick, heavy sunshine. Kate, in these days in Mexico, felt that between the volcanic violence under the earth, and the electric violence of the air above, men walked dark and incalculable, like demons from another planet.
The wind on the lake seemed fresh, from the west, but it was a running mass of electricity, that burned her face and her eyes and the roots of her hair. When she had wakened in the night and pushed the sheets, heavy sparks fell from her fingertips. She felt she could not live.
The lake was like some frail milk of thunder; the dark soldiers cur-led under the awning of the boat, motionless. They seemed dark as lava and sulphur, and full of a dormant, diabolic electricity. Like salamanders. The boatman in the stern, steering, was handsome, almost like the man she had killed. But this one had pale greyish eyes, phosphorescent with flecks of silver.
Cipriano sat in silence in front of her. He had removed his tunic, and his neck rose almost black from his white shirt. She could see how different his blood was from hers, dark, blackish, like the blood of lizards among hot black rocks. She could feel its changeless surge, holding up his light, bluey-black head as on a fountain. And she would feel her own pride dissolving, going.
She felt he wanted his blood-stream to envelop hers. As if it could possibly be. He was so still, so unnoticing, and the darkness of the nape of his neck was so like invisibility. Yet he was always waiting, waiting, waiting, invisibly and ponderously waiting.
She lay under the awning in the heat and light without looking out. The wind made the canvas crackle.
Whether the time was long or short, she knew not. But they were coming to the silent lake-end, where the beach curved round in front of them. It seemed sheer lonely sunlight.
But beyond the shingle there were willow-trees, and a low ranch-house. Three anchored canoas rode with their black, stiff lines. There were flat lands, with maize half grown and blowing its green flags sideways. But all was as if invisible, in the intense hot light.
The warm, thin water ran shallower and shallower, to the reach of shingle beyond. Black water-fowl bobbed like corks. The motor stopped. The boat ebbed on. Under the thin water were round stones, with thin green hair of weed. They would not reach the shore — not by twenty yards.
The soldiers took off their huaraches, rolled their cotton trousers up their black legs, and got into the water. The tall boatman did the same, pulling forward the boat. She would go no farther. He anchored her with a big stone. Then with his uncanny pale eyes, under the black lashes, he asked Kate in a low tone if he could carry her ashore, offering her his shoulder.
‘No, no!’ she said. ‘I’ll paddle.’
And hastily she took off her shoes and stockings and stepped into the shallow water, holding up her thin skirt of striped silk. The man laughed; so did the soldiers.
The water was almost hot. She went blindly forward, her head dropped. Cipriano watched her with the silent, heavy, changeless patience of his race, then when she reached the shingle he came ashore on the boatman’s shoulders.
They crossed the hot shingle to the willow-trees by the maize-fields, and sat upon boulders. The lake stretched pale and unreal, far, far away into the invisible, with dimmed mountains rising on either side, bare and abstract. The canoas were black and stiff, their masts motionless. The white motor-boat rode near. Black birds were bobbing like corks, at this place of the water’s end and the world’s end.
A lonely woman went up the shingle with a water-jar on her shoulder. Hearing a sound, Kate looked, and saw a group of fishermen holding a conclave in a dug-out hollow by a tree. They saluted, looking at her with black, black eyes. They saluted humbly, and yet in their black eyes was that ancient remote hardness and hauteur.
Cipriano had sent the soldiers for horses. It was too hot to walk.
They sat silent in the invisibility of this end of the lake, the great light taking sight away.
‘Why am I not the living Huitzilopochtli?’ said Cipriano quietly, looking full at her with his black eyes.
‘Do you feel you are?’ she said, startled.
‘Yes,’ he replied, in the same low, secret voice. ‘It is what I feel.’
The black eyes looked at her with a rather awful challenge. And the small, dark voice seemed to take all her will away. They sat in silence, and she felt she was fainting, losing her consciousness for ever.
The soldiers came, with a black Arab horse for him; a delicate thing; and for her a donkey, on which she could sit sideways. He lifted her into the saddle, where she sat only half-conscious. A soldier led the donkey, and they set off, past the long, frail, hanging fishing-nets, that made long filmy festoons, into the lane.
Then out into the sun and the grey-black dust, towards the grey-black, low huts of Jaramay, that lined the wide, desert road.
Jaramay was hot as a lava oven. Black low hut-houses with tiled roofs lined the broken, long, dilapidated street. Broken houses. Blazing sun. A brick pavement all smashed and sun-worn. A dog leading a blind man along the little black walls, on the broken pavement. A few goats. And unspeakable lifelessness, emptiness.
They came to the broken plaza, with sun-decayed church and ragged palm trees. Emptiness, sun, sun-decay, sun-dilapidation. One man on a dainty Arab horse trotting lightly over the stones, gun behind, big hat making a dark face. For the rest, the waste space of the centre of life. Curious how dainty the horse looked, and the horseman sitting erect, amid the sun-roasted ruin.
They came to a big building. A few soldiers were drawn up at the entrance. They saluted Cipriano as if they were transfixed, rolling their dark eyes.
Cipriano was down from his horse in a moment. Emitting the dark rays of dangerous power, he found the Jefe all obsequious; a fat man in dirty white clothes. They put their wills entirely in his power.
He asked for a room where his esposa could rest. Kate was pale and all her will had left her. He was carrying her on his will.
He accepted a large room with a brick-tiled floor and a large, new brass bed with a coloured cotton cover thrown over it, and with two chairs. The strange, dry, stark emptiness, that looked almost cold in the heat.
‘The sun makes you pale. Lie down and rest. I will close the windows,’ he said.
He closed the shutters till only a darkness remained.
Then in the darkness, suddenly, softly he touched her, stroking her hip.
‘I said you were my wife,’ he said, in his small, soft Indian voice. ‘It is true, isn’t it?’
She trembled, and her limbs seemed to fuse like metal melting down. She fused into a molten unconsciousness, her will, her very self gone, leaving her lying in molten life, like a lake of still fire, unconscious of everything save the eternality of the fire in which she was gone. Gone in the fadeless fire, which has no death. Only the fire can leave us, and we can die.
And Cipriano the master of fire. The Living Huitzilopochtli, he had called himself. The living firemaster. The god in the flame; the salamander.
One cannot have one’s own way, and the way of the gods. It has to be one or the other.
When she went out into the next room, he was sitting alone, waiting for her. He rose quickly, looking at her with black, flashing eyes from which dark flashes of light seemed to play upon her. And he took her hand, to touch her again.
‘Will you come to eat at the little restaurant?’ he said.
In the uncanny flashing of his eyes she saw a gladness that frightened her a little. His touch on her hand was uncannily soft and inward. His words said nothing; would never say anything. But she turned aside her face, a little afraid of that flashing, primitive gladness, which was so impersonal and beyond her.
Wrapping a big yellow-silk shawl around her, Spanish fashion, against the heat, and taking her white sunshade lined with green, she stepped out with him past the bowing Jefe and the lieutenant, and the saluting soldiers. She shook hands with the Jefe and the lieutenant. They were men of flesh and blood, they understood her presence, and bowed low, looking up at her with flashing eyes. And she knew what it was to be a goddess in the old style, saluted by the real fire in men’s eyes, not by their lips.
In her big, soft velour hat of jade green, her breast wrapped round with the yellow brocade shawl, she stepped across the sun-eaten plaza, a sort of desert made by man, softly, softly beside her Cipriano, soft as a cat, hiding her face under her green hat and her sunshade, keeping her body secret and elusive. And the soldiers and the officers and clerks of the Jefatura, watching her with fixed black eyes, saw, not the physical woman herself, but the inaccessible, voluptuous mystery of man’s physical consummation.
