Owen had to return to the United States, and he asked Kate
whether she wanted to stay on in Mexico.
This put her into a quandary. It was not an easy country
for a woman to be alone in. And she had been beating her
wings in an effort to get away. She felt like a bird round
whose body a snake has coiled itself. Mexico was the
snake.
The curious influence of the country, pulling one down,
pulling one down. She had heard an old American, who had
been forty years in the Republic, saying to Owen: “No man
who hasn’t a strong moral backbone should try to settle in
Mexico. If he does, he’ll go to pieces, morally and physically,
as I’ve seen hundreds of young Americans do.”
To pull one down. It was what the country wanted to do
all the time, with a slow, reptilian insistence, to pull one
down. To prevent the spirit from soaring. To take away
the free, soaring sense of liberty.
“There is no such thing as liberty,” she heard the quiet,
deep, dangerous voice of Don Ramón repeating. “There is
no such thing as liberty. The greatest liberators are usually
slaves of an idea. The freest people are slaves to convention
and public opinion, and more still, slaves to the industrial
machine. There is no such thing as liberty. You only change
one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to
choose our master.”
“But surely that is liberty—for the mass of people.”
“They don’t choose. They are tricked into a new form
of servility, no more. They go from bad to worse.”
“You yourself—aren’t you free?” she asked.
“I?” he laughed. “I spent a long time trying to pretend.
I thought I could have my own way. Till I realised
that having my own way meant only running about smelling
all the things in the street, like a dog that will pick up something.
Of myself, I have no way. No man has any way in
himself. Every man who goes along a way is led by one of
three things: by an appetite—and I class ambition among
appetite; or by an idea; or by an inspiration.”
“I used to think my husband was inspired about Ireland,”
said Kate doubtfully.
“And now?”
“Yes! Perhaps he put his wine in old, rotten bottles
that wouldn’t hold it. No!—Liberty is a rotten old wine-skin.
It won’t hold one’s wine of inspiration or passion any
more,” she said.
“And Mexico!” he said. “Mexico is another Ireland.
Ah no, no man can be his own master. If I must serve, I
will not serve an idea, which cracks and leaks like an old
wine-skin. I will serve the God that gives me my manhood.
There is no liberty for a man, apart from the God of his manhood.
Free Mexico is a bully, and the old, colonial, ecclesiastical
Mexico was another sort of bully. When man has
nothing but his will to assert—even his good-will—it is always
bullying. Bolshevism is one sort of bullying, capitalism
another: and liberty is a change of chains.”
“Then what’s to be done?” said Kate. “Just nothing?”
And with her own will, she wanted nothing to be done.
Let the skies fall!
“One is driven, at last, back to the far distance, to look
for God,” said Ramón uneasily.
“I rather hate this search-for-God business, and religiosity,”
said Kate.
“I know!” he said, with a laugh. “I’ve suffered from
would-be-cocksure religion myself.”
“And you can’t really ‘find God’!” she said. “It’s a
sort of sentimentalism, and creeping back into old, hollow
shells.”
“No!” he said slowly. “I can’t find God, in the old
sense. I know it’s a sentimentalism if I pretend to. But I
am nauseated with humanity and the human will: even with
my own will. I have realised that my will, no matter how
intelligent I am, is only another nuisance on the face of the
earth, once I start exerting it. And other people’s wills are
even worse.”
“Oh! isn’t human life horrible!” she cried. “Every
human being exerting his will all the time—over other
people, and over himself, and nearly always self-righteous!”
Ramón made a grimace of repulsion.
“To me,” he said, “that is just the weariness of life!
For a time, it can be amusing: exerting your own will, and
resisting all the other people’s wills, that they try to put
over you. But at a certain point, a nausea sets in at the very
middle of me: my soul is nauseated. My soul is nauseated,
and there is nothing but death ahead, unless I find something
else.”
Kate listened in silence. She knew the road he had gone,
but she herself had not yet come to the end of it. As yet
she was still strong in the pride of her own—her very own
will.
“Oh, people are repulsive!” she cried.
“My own will becomes even more repulsive at last,” he
said. “My own will, merely as my own will, is even more
distasteful to me than other people’s wills. From being the
god in my own machine, I must either abdicate, or die of
disgust—self-disgust, at that.”
“How amusing!” she cried.
“It is rather funny,” he said sardonically.
“And then?” she asked, looking at him with a certain
malevolent challenge.
He looked back at her slowly, with an ironical light in his
eyes.
“Then!” he repeated. “Then!—I ask, what else is
there in the world, besides human will, human appetite?
because ideas and ideals are only instruments of human will
and appetite.”
“Not entirely,” said Kate. “They may be disinterested.”
“May they? If the appetite isn’t interested, the will is.”
“Why not?” she mocked. “We can’t be mere detached
blocks.”
“It nauseates me—I look for something else.”
“And what do you find?”
“My own manhood!”
“What does that mean?” she cried, jeering.
“If you looked, and found your own womanhood, you
would know.”
“But I have my own womanhood!” she cried.
“And then—when you find your own manhood—your
womanhood,” he went on, smiling faintly at her—“then
you know it is not your own, to do as you like with. You
don’t have it of your own will. It comes from—from the
middle—from the God. Beyond me, at the middle, is the
God. And the God gives me my manhood, then leaves me to
it. I have nothing but my manhood. The God gives it me,
and leaves me to do further.”
Kate would not hear any more. She broke off into banalities.
The immediate question, for her, was whether she would
stay in Mexico or not. She was not really concerned with
Don Ramón’s soul—or even her own. She was concerned
with her immediate future. Should she stay in Mexico?
Mexico meant the dark-faced men in cotton clothes, big
hats: the peasants, peons, pelados, Indians, call them what
you will. The mere natives.
Those pale-faced Mexicans of the Capital, politicians,
artists, professionals, and business people, they did not interest
her. Neither did the hacendados and the ranch-owners,
in their tight trousers and weak, soft sensuality, pale victims
of their own emotional undiscipline. Mexico still meant
the mass of silent peons, to her. And she thought of them
again, these silent, stiff-backed men, driving their strings of
asses along the country roads, in the dust of Mexico’s infinite
dryness, past broken walls, broken houses, broken
haciendas, along the endless desolation left by the revolutions;
past the vast stretches of maguey, the huge cactus, or
aloe, with its gigantic rosette of upstarting, pointed leaves,
that in its iron rows covers miles and miles of ground in the
Valley of Mexico, cultivated for the making of that bad-smelling
drink, pulque. The Mediterranean has the dark
grape, old Europe has malted beer, and China has opium
from the white poppy. But out of the Mexican soil a bunch
of black-tarnished swords bursts up, and a great unfolded
bud of the once-flowering monster begins to thrust at the
sky. They cut the great phallic bud and crush out the
sperm-like juice for the pulque. Agua miel! Pulque!
But better pulque than the fiery white brandy distilled
from the maguey: mescal, tequila: or in the low lands, the
hateful sugar-cane brandy, aguardiente.
And the Mexican burns out his stomach with those
beastly fire-waters and cauterises the hurt with red-hot chili.
Swallowing one hell-fire to put out another.
Tall fields of wheat and maize. Taller, more brilliant
fields of bright-green sugar-cane. And threading in white
cotton clothes, with dark, half-visible face, the eternal peon
of Mexico, his great white calico drawers flopping round his
ankles as he walks, or rolled up over his dark, handsome
legs.
The wild, sombre, erect men of the north! The too-often
degenerate men of Mexico Valley, their heads through the
middle of their ponchos! The big men in Tascala, selling
ice-cream or huge half-sweetened buns and fancy bread!
The quick little Indians, quick as spiders, down in Oaxaca!
The queer-looking half-Chinese natives towards Vera Cruz!
The dark faces and the big black eyes on the coast of Sinaloa!
The handsome men of Jalisco, with a scarlet blanket
folded on one shoulder!
They were of many tribes and many languages, and far
more alien to one another than Frenchmen, English, and
Germans are. Mexico! It is not really even the beginnings
of a nation: hence the rabid assertion of nationalism in the
few. And it is not a race.
Yet it is a people. There is some Indian quality which
pervades the whole. Whether it is men in blue overalls and
a slouch, in Mexico City, or men with handsome legs in skin-tight
trousers, or the floppy, white, cotton-clad labourers in
the fields, there is something mysteriously in common. The
erect, prancing walk, stepping out from the base of the
spine with lifted knees and short steps. The jaunty balancing
of the huge hats. The thrown-back shoulders with a
folded sarape like a royal mantle. And most of them handsome,
with dark, warm-bronze skin so smooth and living,
their proudly-held heads, whose black hair gleams like wild,
rich feathers. Their big, bright black eyes that look at you
wonderingly, and have no centre to them. Their sudden,
charming smile, when you smile first. But the eyes unchanged.
Yes, and she had to remember, too, a fair proportion of
smaller, sometimes insignificant looking men, some of them
scaly with dirt, who looked at you with a cold, mud-like
antagonism as they stepped cattishly past. Poisonous, thin,
stiff little men, cold and unliving like scorpions, and as
dangerous.
And then the truly terrible faces of some creatures in the
city, slightly swollen with the poison of tequila, and with
black, dimmed, swivel eyes swinging in pure evil. Never
had she seen such faces of pure brutish evil, cold and insect-like,
as in Mexico City.
The country gave her a strange feeling of hopelessness and
of dauntlessness. Unbroken, eternally resistant, it was a
people that lived without hope, and without care. Gay
even, and laughing with indifferent carelessness.
They were something like her own Irish, but gone to a
much greater length. And also, they did what the self-conscious
and pretentious Irish rarely do, they touched her
bowels with a strange fire of compassion.
At the same time, she feared them. They would pull her
down, pull her down, to the dark depths of nothingness.
It was the same with the women. In their full long skirts
and bare feet, and with the big, dark-blue scarf or shawl
called a rebozo over their womanly small heads and tight
round their shoulders, they were images of wild submissiveness,
the primitive womanliness of the world, that is so
touching and so alien. Many women kneeling in a dim
church, all hooded in their dark-blue rebozos, the pallor of
their skirts on the floor, their heads and shoulders wrapped
dark and tight, as they swayed with devotion of fear and
ecstasy! A churchful of dark-wrapped women sunk there in
wild, humble supplication of dread and of bliss filled Kate
with tenderness and revulsion. They crouched like people
not quite created.
Their soft, untidy black hair, which they scratched for
lice; the round-eyed baby joggling like a pumpkin in the
shawl slung over the woman’s shoulder, the never-washed
feet and ankles, again somewhat reptilian under the long,
flounced, soiled cotton skirt; and then, once more, the dark
eyes of half-created women, soft, appealing, yet with a queer
void insolence! Something lurking, where the womanly
centre should have been; lurking snake-like. Fear! The
fear of not being able to find full creation. And the inevitable
mistrust and lurking insolence, insolent against a
higher creation, the same thing that is in the striking of a
snake.
Kate, as a woman, feared the women more than the men.
The women were little and insidious, the men were bigger
and more reckless. But in the eyes of each, the uncreated
centre, where the evil and the insolence lurked.
And sometimes she wondered whether America really was
the great death-continent, the great No! to the European
and Asiatic and even African Yes! Was it really the great
melting pot, where men from the creative continents were
smelted back again, not to a new creation, but down into
the homogeneity of death? Was it the great continent of
the undoing, and all its peoples the agents of the mystic
destruction! Plucking, plucking at the created soul in a
man, till at last it plucked out the growing germ, and left
him a creature of mechanism and automatic reaction, with
only one inspiration, the desire to pluck the quick out of
every living spontaneous creature.
Was that the clue to America, she sometimes wondered.
Was it the great death-continent, the continent that destroyed
again what the other continents had built up. The
continent whose spirit of place fought purely to pick the eyes
out of the face of God. Was that America?
And all the people who went there, Europeans, negroes,
Japanese, Chinese, all the colours and the races, were they
the spent people, in whom the God impulse had collapsed,
so they crossed to the great continent of the negation, where
the human will declares itself “free,” to pull down the soul
of the world? Was it so? And did this account for the
great drift to the New World, the drift of spent souls passing
over to the side of Godless democracy, energetic negation?
The negation which is the life-breath of materialism. And
would the great negative pull of the Americans at last
break the heart of the world?
This thought would come to her, time and again.
She herself, what had she come to America for?
Because the flow of her life had broken, and she knew she
could not re-start it, in Europe.
These handsome natives! Was it because they were
death-worshippers, Moloch-worshippers, that they were so
uncowed and handsome? Their pure acknowledgment of
death, and their undaunted admission of nothingness kept
so erect and careless.
White men had had a soul, and lost it. The pivot of fire
had been quenched in them, and their lives had started to
spin in the reversed direction, widdershins. That reversed
look which is in the eyes of so many white people, the look
of nullity, and life wheeling in the reversed direction.
Widdershins.
But the dark-faced natives, with their strange soft flame of
life wheeling upon a dark void: were they centreless and
widdershins too, as so many white men now are?
The strange, soft flame of courage in the black Mexican
eyes. But still it was not knit to a centre, that centre which
is the soul of a man in a man.
And all the efforts of white men to bring the soul of the
dark men of Mexico into final clinched being has resulted in
nothing but the collapse of the white man. Against the
soft, dark flow of the Indian the white man at last collapses,
with his God and his energy he collapses. In attempting to
convert the dark man to the white man’s way of life, the
white man has fallen helplessly down the hole he wanted to
fill up. Seeking to save another man’s soul, the white man
lost his own, and collapsed upon himself.
Mexico! The great, precipitous, dry, savage country,
with a handsome church in every landscape, rising as it were
out of nothing. A revolution broken landscape, with lingering,
tall, handsome churches whose domes are like inflations
that are going to burst, and whose pinnacles and towers are
like the trembling pagodas of an unreal race. Gorgeous
churches waiting, above the huts and straw hovels of the
natives, like ghosts to be dismissed.
And noble ruined haciendas, with ruined avenues approaching
their broken splendour.
And the cities of Mexico, great and small, that the
Spaniards conjured up out of nothing. Stones live and die
with the spirit of the builders. And the spirit of Spaniards
in Mexico dies, and the very stones in the building die. The
natives drift into the centre of the plazas again, and in
unspeakable empty weariness the Spanish buildings stand
around, in a sort of dry exhaustion.
The conquered race! Cortes came with his iron heel and
his iron will, a conqueror. But a conquered race, unless
grafted with a new inspiration, slowly sucks the blood of the
conquerors, in the silence of a strange night and the heaviness
of a hopeless will. So that now, the race of the conquerors
in Mexico is soft and boneless, children crying in
helpless hopelessness.
Was it the dark negation of the continent?
Kate could not look at the stones of the National Museum
in Mexico without depression and dread. Snakes coiled like
excrement, snakes fanged and feathered beyond all dreams
of dread. And that was all.
The ponderous pyramids of San Juan Teotihuacan, the
House of Quetzalcoatl wreathed with the snake of all snakes,
his huge fangs white and pure to-day as in the lost centuries
when his makers were alive. He has not died. He is not so
dead as the Spanish churches, this all-enwreathing dragon of
the horror of Mexico.
Cholula, with its church where the altar was! And the
same ponderousness, the same unspeakable sense of weight
and downward pressure of the blunt pyramid. Down-sinking
pressure and depression. And the great market-place
with its lingering dread and fascination.
Mitla under its hills, in the parched valley where a wind
blows the dust and the dead souls of the vanished race in
terrible gusts. The carved courts of Mitla, with a hard,
sharp-angled, intricate fascination, but the fascination of
fear and repellance. Hard, four-square, sharp-edged, cutting,
zigzagging Mitla, like continual blows of a stone axe.
Without gentleness or grace or charm. Oh America, with
your unspeakable hard lack of charm, what then is your
final meaning! Is it forever the knife of sacrifice, as you put
out your tongue at the world?
Charmless America! With your hard, vindictive beauty,
are you waiting forever to smite death? Is the world your
everlasting victim?
So long as it will let itself be victimised.
But yet! But yet! The gentle voices of the natives.
The voices of the boys, like birds twittering among the trees
of the plaza of Tehuacan! The soft touch, the gentleness.
Was it the dark-fingered quietness of death, and the music
of the presence of death in their voices?
She thought again of what Don Ramón had said to
her.
“They pull you down! Mexico pulls you down, the
people pull you down like a great weight! But it may be
they pull you down as the earth’s pull of gravitation does,
that you can balance on your feet. Maybe they draw you
down as the earth draws down the roots of a tree, so that
it may be clinched deep in soil. Men are still part of the
Tree of Life, and the roots go down to the centre of the
earth. Loose leaves, and aeroplanes, blow away on the
wind, in what they call freedom. But the Tree of Life has
fixed, deep, gripping roots.
“It may be you need to be drawn down, down, till you
send roots into the deep places again. Then you can send
up the sap and the leaves back to the sky; later.
“And to me, the men in Mexico are like trees, forests that
the white men felled in their coming. But the roots of the
trees are deep and alive and forever sending up new shoots.
“And each new shoot that comes up overthrows a Spanish
church or an American factory. And soon the dark forest
will rise again, and shake the Spanish buildings from the face
of America.
“All that matters to me are the roots that reach down beyond
all destruction. The roots and the life are there. What
else it needs is the word, for the forest to begin to rise again.
And some man among men must speak the word.”
The strange doom-like sound of the man’s words! But
in spite of the sense of doom on her heart, she would not go
away yet. She would stay longer in Mexico.
