Chapter I: Part 1

MORNINGS IN MEXICO

These essays have appeared in
_The Theatre Arts Monthly_, in
_The Adelphi_, in _Travel_, and in
_The Laughing Horse_, and thanks
are due to the respective editors
of these publications.

LONDON: MARTIN SECKER LIMITED
NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI

MORNINGS IN
MEXICO

By
D. H. LAWRENCE

LONDON:
MARTIN SECKER
1927

TO
MABEL LUJAN

CONTENTS

PAGE

CORASMIN AND THE PARROTS 9

WALK TO HUAYAPA 27

THE MOZO 55

MARKET DAY 79

INDIANS AND ENTERTAINMENT 97

THE DANCE OF THE SPROUTING CORN 121

THE HOPI SNAKE DANCE 135

A LITTLE MOONSHINE WITH LEMON 173

CORASMIN AND THE PARROTS

_Corasmin and the Parrots_

One says Mexico: one means, after all, one little town away South in the Republic: and in this little town, one rather crumbly adobe house built round two sides of a garden _patio_: and of this house, one spot on the deep, shady verandah facing inwards to the trees, where there are an onyx table and three rocking-chairs and one little wooden chair, a pot with carnations, and a person with a pen. We talk so grandly, in capital letters, about Morning in Mexico. All it amounts to is one little individual looking at a bit of sky and trees, then looking down at the page of his exercise book.

It is a pity we don’t always remember this. When books come out with grand titles, like _The Future of America_ or _The European Situation_, it’s a pity we don’t immediately visualize a thin or a fat person, in a chair or in bed, dictating to a bob-haired stenographer or making little marks on paper with a fountain pen.

Still, it is morning, and it is Mexico. The sun shines. But then, during the winter, it always shines. It is pleasant to sit out of doors and write, just fresh enough, and just warm enough. But then it is Christmas next week, so it ought to be just right.

There is a little smell of carnations, because they are the nearest thing. And there is a resinous smell of ocote wood, and a smell of coffee, and a faint smell of leaves, and of Morning, and even of Mexico. Because when all is said and done, Mexico has a faint, physical scent of her own, as each human being has. And this is a curious, inexplicable scent, in which there are resin and perspiration and sunburned earth and urine among other things.

And cocks are still crowing. The little mill where the natives have their corn ground is puffing rather languidly. And because some women are talking in the entrance-way, the two tame parrots in the trees have started to whistle.

The parrots, even when I don’t listen to them, have an extraordinary effect on me. They make my diaphragm convulse with little laughs, almost mechanically. They are a quite commonplace pair of green birds, with bits of bluey red, and round, disillusioned eyes, and heavy, overhanging noses. But they listen intently. And they reproduce. The pair whistle now like Rosalino, who is sweeping the _patio_ with a twig broom; and yet it is so unlike him, to be whistling full vent, when any of us is around, that one looks at him to see. And the moment one sees him, with his black head bent rather drooping and hidden as he sweeps, one laughs.

The parrots whistle exactly like Rosalino, only a little more so. And this little-more-so is extremely, sardonically funny. With their sad old long-jowled faces and their flat disillusioned eyes, they reproduce Rosalino and a little-more-so without moving a muscle. And Rosalino, sweeping the _patio_ with his twig broom, scraping the tittering leaves into little heaps, covers himself more and more with the cloud of his own obscurity. He doesn’t rebel. He is powerless. Up goes the wild, sliding Indian whistle into the morning, very powerful, with an immense energy seeming to drive behind it. And always, always a little more than lifelike.

Then they break off into a cackling chatter, and one knows they are shifting their clumsy legs, perhaps hanging on with their beaks and clutching with their cold, slow claws, to climb to a higher bough, like rather raggedy green buds climbing to the sun. And suddenly, the penetrating, demonish mocking voices:

“Perro! Oh, Perro! Perr-rro! Oh, Perr-rro! Perro!”

They are imitating somebody calling the dog. _Perro_ means dog. But that any creature should be able to pour such a suave, prussic-acid sarcasm over the voice of a human being calling a dog, is incredible. One’s diaphragm chuckles involuntarily. And one thinks: _Is it possible?_ Is it possible that we are so absolutely, so innocently, so _ab ovo_ ridiculous?

And not only is it possible, it is patent. We cover our heads in confusion.

Now they are yapping like a dog: exactly like Corasmin. Corasmin is a little fat, curly white dog who was lying in the sun a minute ago, and has now come into the verandah shade, walking with slow resignation, to lie against the wall near by my chair. “Yap-yap-yap! Wouf! Wouf! Yapyapyapyap!!” go the parrots, exactly like Corasmin when some stranger comes into the _zaguan_. Corasmin and a little-more-so.

With a grin on my face I look down at Corasmin. And with a silent, abashed resignation in his yellow eyes, Corasmin looks up at me, with a touch of reproach. His little white nose is sharp, and under his eyes there are dark marks, as under the eyes of one who has known much trouble. All day he does nothing but walk resignedly out of the sun, when the sun gets too hot, and out of the shade, when the shade gets too cool. And bite ineffectually in the region of his fleas.

Poor old Corasmin: he is only about six, but resigned, unspeakably resigned. Only not humble. He does not kiss the rod. He rises in spirit above it, letting his body lie.

“Perro! Oh, Perr-rro! Perr-rro! Perr-rr-rro!!” shriek the parrots, with that strange penetrating, antediluvian malevolence that seems to make even the trees prick their ears. It is a sound that penetrates one straight at the diaphragm, belonging to the ages before brains were invented. And Corasmin pushes his sharp little nose into his bushy tail, closes his eyes because I am grinning, feigns to sleep; and then, in an orgasm of self-consciousness, starts up to bite in the region of his fleas.

“Perr-rro! Perr-rro!” And then a restrained, withheld sort of yapping. The fiendish rolling of the Spanish “r,” malevolence rippling out of all the vanished, spiteful æons. And following it, the small, little-curly-dog sort of yapping. They can make their voices so devilishly small and futile, like a little curly dog. And follow it up with that ringing malevolence that swoops up the ladders of the sunbeams right to the stars, rolling the Spanish “r.”

Corasmin slowly walks away from the verandah, his head drooped, and flings himself down in the sun. No! He gets up again, in an agony of self-control, and scratches the earth loose a little, to soften his lie. Then flings himself down again.

Invictus! The still-unconquered Corasmin! The sad little white curly pendulum oscillating ever slower between the shadow and the sun.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud,
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

But that is human bombast, and a little too ridiculous even for Corasmin. Poor old Corasmin’s clear yellow eyes! He is going to be master of his own soul, under all the vitriol those parrots pour over him. But he’s not going to throw out his chest in a real lust of self-pity. That belongs to the next cycle of evolution.

I wait for the day when the parrots will start throwing English at us, in the pit of our stomachs. They cock their heads and listen to our gabble. But so far they haven’t got it. It puzzles them. Castilian, and Corasmin, and Rosalino come more natural.

Myself, I don’t believe in evolution, like a long string hooked on to a First Cause, and being slowly twisted in unbroken continuity through the ages. I prefer to believe in what the Aztecs called Suns: that is, Worlds successively created and destroyed. The sun itself convulses, and the worlds go out like so many candles when somebody coughs in the middle of them. Then subtly, mysteriously, the sun convulses again, and a new set of worlds begins to flicker alight.

This pleases my fancy better than the long and weary twisting of the rope of Time and Evolution, hitched on to the revolving hook of a First Cause. I like to think of the whole show going bust, _bang!_--and nothing but bits of chaos flying about. Then out of the dark, new little twinklings reviving from nowhere, nohow.

I like to think of the world going pop! when the lizards had grown too unwieldy, and it was time they were taken down a peg or two. Then the little humming birds beginning to spark in the darkness, and a whole succession of birds shaking themselves clean of the dark matrix, flamingoes rising upon one leg like dawn commencing, parrots shrieking about at midday, _almost_ able to talk, then peacocks unfolding at evening like the night with stars. And apart from these little, pure birds, a lot of unwieldy skinny-necked monsters bigger than crocodiles, barging through the mosses; till it was time to put a stop to them. When someone mysteriously touched the button, and the sun went bang, with smithereens of birds bursting in all directions. Only a few parrots’ eggs and peacocks’ eggs and eggs of flamingoes smuggling in some safe nook, to hatch on the next Day, when the animals arose.

Up reared the elephant, and shook the mud off his back. The birds watched him in sheer stupefaction. What? _What in heaven’s name is this wingless, beakless old perambulator?_

No good, oh birds! Curly, little white Corasmin ran yapping out of the undergrowth, the new undergrowth, till parrots, going white at the gills, flew off into the ancientest recesses. Then the terrific neighing of the wild horse was heard in the twilight for the first time, and the bellowing of lions through the night.

And the birds were sad. What is this? they said. A whole vast gamut of new noises. A universe of new voices.

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-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 hold 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 up 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 the wrong side of 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 the 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?

WALK TO HUAYAPA

_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; or 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!” “_Come 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 until 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, on 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 on 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. To-morrow 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, enquiring, wondering look, the same with which Edgar Allen 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.

“_Gabilan_,” 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 of the same Indian 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 bird-like whoop, his dark hair gleaming bluish. Stooping for a moment to select a stone, he runs athwart the bull, 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! 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, agua, 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.

We were entering Huayapa. _Iª Calle de las Minas_, said an old notice. _Iª Calle de las Minas_, said a new, brand-new, notice, as if in confirmation. _First Street of the Mines._ And every street had the same old and brand-new notice: 1st. Street of the Magnolia: 4th Street of Enriquez Gonzalez: very fine!

But the First Street of the Mines was just a track between the stiff living fence of organ cactus, with _poinsettia_ trees holding up scarlet mops of flowers, and mango trees, tall and black, stonily drooping the strings of unripe fruit. The Street of the Magnolia was a rocky stream-gutter, disappearing to nowhere from nowhere, between cactus and bushes. The Street of the Vasquez was a stony stream-bed, emerging out of tall, wildly tall reeds.

Not a soul anywhere. Through the fences, half-deserted gardens of trees and banana plants, each enclosure with a half-hidden hut of black adobe bricks crowned with a few old tiles for a roof, and perhaps a new wing made of twigs. Everything hidden, secret, silent. A sense of darkness among the silent mango trees, a sense of lurking, of unwillingness. Then actually some half-bold curs barking at us across the stile of one garden, a forked bough over which one must step to enter the chicken-bitten enclosure. And actually a man crossing the proudly labelled: Fifth Street of the Independence.

If there were no churches to mark a point in these villages, there would be nowhere at all to make for. The sense of nowhere is intense, between the dumb and repellent living fence of cactus. But the Spaniards, in the midst of these black, mud-brick huts, have inevitably reared the white twin-towered magnificence of a big and lonely, hopeless church; and where there is a church there will be a _plaza_. And a _plaza_ is a _zocalo_, a hub. Even though the wheel does not go round, a hub is still a hub. Like the old Forum.

So we stray diffidently on, in the maze of streets which are only straight tracks between cactuses, till we see _Reforma_, and at the end of _Reforma_, the great church.

In front of the church is a rocky _plaza_ leaking with grass, with water rushing into two big, oblong stone basins. The great church stands rather ragged, in a dense forlornness, for all the world like some big white human being, in rags, held captive in a world of ants.

On the uphill side of the _plaza_, a long low white building with a shed in front, and under the shed, crowding, all the short-statured men of the _pueblo_, in their white cotton clothes and big hats. They are listening to something: but the silence is heavy, furtive, secretive. They stir like white-clad insects.

Rosalino looks sideways at them, and sheers away. Even we lower our voices to ask what is going on. Rosalino replies, _sotto voce_, that they are making _asuntos_. But what business? we insist. The dark faces of the little men under the big hats look round at us suspiciously, like dark gaps in the atmosphere. Our alien presence, in this vacuous village, is like the sound of a drum in a churchyard. Rosalino mumbles unintelligibly. We stray across the forlorn yard into the church.

Thursday was the day of the Virgin of the Soledad, so the church is littered with flowers, sprays of wild yellow flower trailing on the floor. There is a great Gulliver’s Travels fresco picture of an angel having a joy-ride on the back of a Goliath. On the left, near the altar steps, is seated a life-size Christ--undersized; seated upon a little table, wearing a pair of woman’s frilled knickers, a little mantle of purple silk dangling from His back, and His face bent forward gazing fatuously at His naked knee, which emerges from the needlework frill of the drawers. Across from Him a living woman is half-hidden behind a buttress, mending something, sewing.

We sit silent, motionless, in the whitewashed church ornamented with royal blue and bits of gilt. A barefoot Indian with a high-domed head comes in and kneels with his legs close together, his back stiff, at once very humble and resistant. His cotton jacket and trousers are long-unwashed rag, the colour of dry earth, and torn, so that one sees smooth pieces of brown thigh, and brown back. He kneels in a sort of intense fervour for a minute, then gets up and childishly, almost idiotically, begins to take the pieces of candle from the candlesticks. He is the Verger.

Outside, the gang of men is still pressing under the shed. We insist on knowing what is going on. Rosalino, looking sideways at them, plucks up courage to say plainly that the two men at the table are canvassing for votes: for the Government, for the State, for a new governor, whatever it may be. Votes! Votes! Votes! The farce of it! Already on the wall of the low building, on which one sees, in blue letters, the word _Justizia_, there are pasted the late political posters, with the loud announcement: Vote For This Mark . Or another: Vote For This Mark .

My dear fellow, this is when democracy becomes real fun. You vote for one red ring inside another red ring, and you get a Julio Echegaray. You vote for a blue dot inside a blue ring, and you get a Socrate Ezequiel Tos. Heaven knows what you get for the two little red circles on top of one another . Suppose we vote, and try. There’s all sorts in the lucky bag. There might come a name like Peregrino Zenon Cocotilla.

Independence! Government by the People, of the People, for the People! We all live in the Calle de la Reforma, in Mexico.

On the bottom of the _plaza_ is a shop. We want some fruit. “_Hay frutas?_ Oranges or bananas?”--“No, Señor.”--“No fruits?”--“_No hay!_”--“Can I buy a cup?”--“_No hay._”--“Can I buy a _jicara_, a gourd-shell that we might drink from?” “_No hay._”

_No hay_ means _there isn’t any_, and it’s the most regular sound made by the prevailing dumb-bells of the land.

“What is there, then?” A sickly grin. There are, as a matter of fact, candles, soap, dead and withered chiles, a few dried grasshoppers, dust, and stark, bare wooden pigeon-holes. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Next-door is another little hole of a shop. _Hay frutas?_--_No hay._--_Qué hay?_--_Hay tepache!_

“_Para borracharse_,” says Rosalino, with a great grin.

_Tepache_ is a fermented drink of pineapple rinds and brown sugar: to get drunk on, as Rosalino says. But mildly drunk. There is probably _mescal_ too, to get brutally drunk on.

The village is exhausted in resource. But we insist on fruit. Where, _where_ can I buy oranges and bananas? I see oranges on the trees, I see banana plants.

“Up there!” The woman waves with her hand as if she were cutting the air upwards.

“That way?”

“Yes.”

We go up the Street of Independence. They have got rid of us from the _plaza_.

Another black hut with a yard, and orange-trees beyond.

“_Hay frutas?_”

“_No hay._”

“Not an orange, nor a banana?”

“_No hay._”

We go on. _She_ has got rid of us. We descend the black rocky steps to the stream, and up the other side, past the high reeds. There is a yard with heaps of maize in a shed, and tethered bullocks: and a bare-bosom, black-browed girl.

“_Hay frutas?_”

“_No hay._”

“But yes! There are oranges--there!”

She turns and looks at the oranges on the trees at the back, and imbecilely answers:

“_No hay._”

It is a choice between killing her and hurrying away.

We hear a drum and a whistle. It is down a rocky black track that calls itself The Street of Benito Juarez: the same old gent who stands for all this obvious Reform, and Vote for .

A yard with shade round. Women kneading the maize dough, _masa_, for _tortillas_. A man lounging. And a little boy beating a kettledrum sideways, and a big man playing a little reedy wooden whistle, rapidly, endlessly, disguising the tune of _La Cucuracha_. They won’t play a tune unless they can render it almost unrecognisable.

“_Hay frutas?_”

“_No hay._”

“Then what is happening here?”

A sheepish look, and no answer.

“Why are you playing music?”

“It is a _fiesta_.”

My God, a feast! That weary _masa_, a millstone in the belly. And for the rest, the blank, heavy, dark-grey barrenness, like an adobe brick. The drum-boy rolls his big Indian eyes at us, and beats on, though filled with consternation. The flute man glances, is half appalled and half resentful, so he blows harder. The lounging man comes and mutters to Rosalino, and Rosalino mutters back, four words.

Four words in the _idioma_, the Zapotec language. We retire, pushed silently away.

“What language do they speak here, Rosalino?”

“The _idioma_.”

“You understand them? It is Zapoteca, same as your language?”

“Yes, Señor.”

“Then why do you always speak in Spanish to them?”

“Because they don’t speak the _idioma_ of my village.”

He means, presumably, that there are dialect differences. Anyhow, he asserts his bit of Spanish, and says _Hay frutas?_

It was like a _posada_. It was like the Holy Virgin on Christmas Eve, wandering from door to door looking for a lodging in which to bear her child: Is there a room here? _No hay!_

The same with us. _Hay frutas?_ _No hay!_ We went down every straight ant-run of that blessed village. But at last we pinned a good-natured woman. “Now tell us, _where_ can we buy oranges? We see them on the trees. We want them to eat.”

“Go,” she said, “to Valentino Ruiz. He has oranges. Yes, he has oranges, and he sells them.” And she cut the air upwards with her hand.

From black hut to black hut went we, till at last we got to the house of Valentino Ruiz. And lo! it was the yard with the _fiesta_. The lounging man was peeping out of the gateless gateway, as we came, at us.

“It is the same place!” cried Rosalino, with a laugh of bashful agony.

But we don’t belong to the ruling race for nothing. Into the yard we march.

“Is this the house of Valentino Ruiz? _Hay naranjas?_ Are there oranges?”

We had wandered so long, and asked so often, that the _masa_ was made into _tortillas_, the _tortillas_ were baked, and a group of people were sitting in a ring on the ground, eating them. It was the _fiesta_.

At my question up jumped a youngish man, and a woman, as if they had been sitting on a scorpion each.

“Oh, Señor,” said the woman, “there are few oranges, and they are not ripe, as the Señor would want them. But pass this way.”

We pass up to the garden, past the pink roses, to a little orange-tree, with a few yellowish-green oranges.

“You see, they are not ripe as you will want them,” says the youngish man.

“They will do.” Tropical oranges are always green. These, we found later, were almost insipidly sweet.

Even then, I can only get three of the big, thick-skinned, greenish oranges. But I spy sweet limes, and insist on having five or six of these.

He charges me three cents apiece for the oranges: the market price is two for five cents: and one cent each for the _limas_.

“In my village,” mutters Rosalino when we get away, “oranges are five for one cent.”

Never mind! It is one o’clock. Let us get out of the village, where the water will be safe, and eat lunch.

In the _plaza_, the men are just dispersing, one gang coming down the hill. They watch us as if we were coyote, a zopilote, and a white she-bear walking together in the street.

“_Adios!_”

“_Adios!_” comes the low roll of reply, like a roll of cannon shot.

The water rushes downhill in a stone gutter beside the road. We climb up the hill, up the Street of the Camomile, alongside the rushing water. At one point it crosses the road unchannelled, and we wade through it. It is the village drinking supply.

At the juncture of the roads, where the water crosses, another silent white gang of men. Again: _Adios!_ and again the low, musical, deep volley of _Adios!_

Up, up wearily. We must get above the village to be able to drink the water without developing typhoid.

At last, the last house, the naked hills. We follow the water across a dry maize-field, then up along a bank. Below is a quite deep gully. Across is an orchard, and some women with baskets of fruit.

“_Hay frutas?_” calls Rosalino, in a half-voice. He is getting bold.

“_Hay_,” says an old woman, in the curious half-voice. “But not ripe.”

Shall we go down into the gully into the shade? No; someone is bathing among the reeds below, and the aqueduct water rushes along in the gutter here above. On, on, till we spy a wild guava tree over the channel of water. At last we can sit down and eat and drink, on a bank of dry grass, under the wild guava tree.

We put the bottle of lemonade in the aqueduct to cool. I scoop out a big half-orange, the thick rind of which makes a cup.

“Look, Rosalino! The cup!”

“_La taza!_” he cries, soft-tongued, with a bark of laughter and delight.

And one drinks the soft, rather lifeless, warmish Mexican water. But it is pure.

Over the brink of the water-channel is the gully, and a noise--chock, chock! I go to look. It is a woman, naked to the hips, standing washing her other garments upon a stone. She has a beautiful full back, of a deep orange colour, and her wet hair is divided and piled. In the water a few yards up-stream two men are sitting naked, their brown-orange giving off a glow in the shadow, also washing their clothes. Their wet hair seems to steam blue-blackness. Just above them is a sort of bridge, where the water divides, the channel-water taken from the little river, and led along the top of the bank.

We sit under the wild guava tree in silence, and eat. The old woman of the fruit, with naked breast and coffee-brown naked arms, her under-garment fastened on one shoulder, round her waist an old striped _sarape_ for a skirt, and on her head a blue _rebozo_ piled against the sun, comes marching down the aqueduct with black bare feet, holding three or four _chirimoyas_ to her bosom. _Chirimoyas_ are green custard-apples.

She lectures us, in slow, heavy Spanish:

“This water, here, is for drinking. The other, below, is for washing. This, you drink, and you don’t wash in it. The other, you wash in, and you don’t drink it.” And she looked inquisitively at the bottle of lemonade, cooling.

“Very good. We understand.”

Then she gave us the _chirimoyas_. I asked her to change the _peso_: I had no change.

“No, Señor,” she said. “No, Señor. You don’t pay me. I bring you these, and may you eat well. But the _chirimoyas_ are not ripe: in two or three days they will be ripe. Now, they are not. In two or three days they will be. Now, they are not. You can’t eat them yet. But I make a gift of them to you, and may you eat well. Farewell. Remain with God.”

She marched impatiently off along the aqueduct.

Rosalino waited to catch my eye. Then he opened his mouth and showed his pink tongue and swelled out his throat like a cobra, in a silent laugh after the old woman.

“But,” he said in a low tone, “the _chirimoyas_ are not good ones.”

And again he swelled in the silent, delighted, derisive laugh.

He was right. When we came to eat them, three days later, the custard-apples all had worms in them, and hardly any white meat.

“The old woman of Huayapa,” said Rosalino, reminiscent.

However, she had got the bottle. When we had drunk the lemonade, we sent Rosalino to give her the empty wine-bottle, and she made him another sententious little speech. But to her the bottle was a treasure.

And I, going round the little hummock behind the wild guava tree, to throw away the papers of the picnic, came upon a golden-brown young man with his shirt just coming down over his head, but over no more of him. Hastily retreating, I thought again what beautiful, suave, rich skins these people have; a sort of richness of the flesh. It goes, perhaps, with the complete absence of what we call “spirit.”

We lay still for a time, looking at the tiny guavas and the perfect, soft, high blue sky overhead, where the hawks and the ragged-winged _zopilotes_ sway and diminish. A long, hot way home. But _mañana es otro dia_. To-morrow is another day. And even the next five minutes are far enough away, in Mexico, on a Sunday afternoon.

THE MOZO

_The Mozo_

Rosalino really goes with the house, though he has been in service here only two months. When we went to look at the place, we saw him lurking in the _patio_, and glancing furtively under his brows. He is not one of the erect, bantam little Indians that stare with a black, incomprehensible, but somewhat defiant stare. It may be Rosalino has a distant strain of other Indian blood, not Zapotec. Or it may be he is only a bit different. The difference lies in a certain sensitiveness and aloneness, as if he were a mother’s boy. The way he drops his head and looks sideways under his black lashes, apprehensive, apprehending, feeling his way, as it were. Not the bold male glare of most of the Indians, who seem as if they had never, never had mothers at all.

The Aztec gods and goddesses are, as far as we have known anything about them, an unlovely and unlovable lot. In their myths there is no grace or charm, no poetry. Only this perpetual grudge, grudge, grudging, one god grudging another, the gods grudging men their existence, and men grudging the animals. The goddess of love is goddess of dirt and prostitution, a dirt-eater, a horror, without a touch of tenderness. If the god wants to make love to her, she has to sprawl down in front of him, blatant and accessible.

And then, after all, when she conceives and brings forth, what is it she produces? What is the infant-god she tenderly bears? Guess, all ye people, joyful and triumphant!

You never could.

It is a stone knife.

It is a razor-edged knife of blackish-green flint, the knife of all knives, the veritable Paraclete of knives. It is the sacrificial knife with which the priest makes a gash in his victim’s breast, before he tears out the heart, to hold it smoking to the sun. And the Sun, the Sun behind the sun, is supposed to suck the smoking heart greedily with insatiable appetite.

This, then, is a pretty Christmas Eve. Lo, the goddess is gone to bed, to bring forth her child. Lo! ye people, await the birth of the saviour, the wife of a god is about to become a mother.

_Tarumm-tarah! Tarumm-tarah!_ blow the trumpets. The child is born. Unto us a son is given. Bring him forth, lay him on a tender cushion. Show him, then, to all the people. See! See! See him upon the cushion, tenderly new-born and reposing! Ah, _qué bonito_! Oh, what a nice, blackish, smooth, keen stone knife!

And to this day, most of the Mexican Indian women seem to bring forth stone knives. Look at them, these sons of incomprehensible mothers, with their black eyes like flints, and their stiff little bodies as taut and as keen as knives of obsidian. Take care they don’t rip you up.

Our Rosalino is an exception. He drops his shoulders just a little. He is a bit bigger, also, than the average Indian down here. He must be about five feet four inches. And he hasn’t got the big, obsidian, glaring eyes. His eyes are smaller, blacker, like the quick black eyes of the lizard. They don’t look at one with the obsidian stare. They are just a bit aware that there is another being, unknown, at the other end of the glance. Hence he drops his head with a little apprehension, screening himself as if he were vulnerable.

Usually, these people have no correspondence with one at all. To them a white man or white woman is a sort of phenomenon, just as a monkey is a sort of phenomenon; something to watch, and wonder at, and laugh at, but not to be taken on one’s own plane.

Now the white man is a sort of extraordinary white monkey that, by cunning, has learnt lots of semi-magical secrets of the universe, and made himself boss of the show. Imagine a race of big white monkeys got up in fantastic clothes, and able to kill a man by hissing at him; able to leap through the air in great hops, covering a mile in each leap; able to transmit his thoughts by a moment’s effort of concentration to some great white monkey or monkeyess, a thousand miles away: and you have, from our point of view, something of the picture that the Indian has of us.

The white monkey has curious tricks. He knows, for example, the time. Now to a Mexican, and an Indian, time is a vague, foggy reality. There are only three times: _en la mañana_, _en la tarde_, _en la noche_: in the morning, in the afternoon, in the night. There is even no midday, and no evening.

But to the white monkey, horrible to relate, there are exact spots of time, such as five o’clock, half-past nine. The day is a horrible puzzle of exact spots of time.

The same with distance: horrible invisible distances called two miles, ten miles. To the Indians, there is near and far, and very near and very far. There is two days or one day. But two miles are as good as twenty to him, for he goes entirely by his feeling. If a certain two miles feels far to him, then it _is_ far, it is _muy lejos_! But if a certain twenty miles _feels_ near and familiar, then it is not far. Oh, no, it is just a little distance. And he will let you set off in the evening, for night to overtake you in the wilderness, without a qualm. It is not far.

But the white man has a horrible, truly horrible, monkey-like passion for invisible exactitudes. _Mañana_, to the native, may mean to-morrow, three days hence, six months hence, and never. There are no fixed points in life, save birth, and death, and the _fiestas_. The fixed points of birth and death evaporate spontaneously into vagueness. And the priests fix the _fiestas_. From time immemorial priests have fixed the _fiestas_, the festivals of the gods, and men have had no more to do with time. What should men have to do with time?

The same with money. These _centavos_ and these _pesos_, what do they mean, after all? Little discs that have no charm. The natives insist on reckoning in invisible coins, coins that don’t exist here, like _reales_ or _pesetas_. If you buy two eggs for a _real_, you have to pay twelve and a half _centavos_. Since also half a _centavo_ doesn’t exist, you or the vendor forfeit the non-existent.