Katherine Anne Porter (133 page)

In the early evening, fragments of life quite different from those of the hurrying day drift through our street. I like to stand in my balcony and watch them. A wide hatted man drives a two wheeled cart, cumbrous and full of groans, the shafts too high for the struggling little mule, who wavers from side to side, his hoofs knocking against the wheels. An Indian boy carries a bundle of long handled feather dusters, used for sweeping the ceilings. He walks steadily, balancing the wicker poles, setting one foot exactly before the other. The feathers nod in time, and his vending cry shatters the silence. A very old woman with scanty grey hair drives a burdened burro; a tiny girl trots beside her, bent under a sack of corn. They are country Indians leaving town until another day. They all carry lighted candles set in deep cups of paper, and the pointed flames flutter delicately as birds’ wings.

Others are also watching life pass by; I count the young girl heads at this moment nodding under high coiffures, discreetly visible at upper windows. There are two in my house, one on either side, and three in houses across the narrow street.

The girl in the balcony at my left hand is Dolores, only fifteen years old. Her hair is not yet pinned up, but falls in two thick braids to her knees. Darkness is here, and the heads in the windows are lost. Here and there a pale face glimmers for a moment in the framing blackness, and floats away. The girl on the right hand balcony is gone.

Dolores leans forward, her chin on the rail, and stares at a blotch, humanly shaped, defined against the fog grey of the
wall of the opposite house. The flare of a match lights the face of a man whose eyes peer upward. His lighted cigarette moves and traces lines before him. The spark spins gently, in long curves, sudden down-jutting lines, circles. I read: “Yo te amo, Cielito Lindo. . .” and then three times over, “Dolores, Dolores, Dolores!”

Observing this, I ponder the finished technique of ardency required to form those burning words with so fragile a torch. How practised are those fingers, turning delicately on a steady wrist, scrivening in ash veiled flame upon a wall of air!

Dolores rises and leans over the wall. She kisses her fingers many times toward the spot of light. Her outstretched bared arm shudders to the shoulder with the agitation of her shaking hand.

Tonight, hurrying through the patio, with the moon not yet risen over the massed tree tops, I saw a man leaning against a pillar on the narrow driveway. A wide black hat blurred his face, a spectral black cloak swathed him. . . . In such a moment, one’s conscious mind contracts, and cancels all engagements for this world. . . . But the nervous centers know better. They gather themselves and spring for safety, remembering for your helpless mind that tomorrow also will be sweet. From the top step I glanced back. He was gone. In the lower hall, I collided with Heraclia, wearing a white lace veil over her hair, and carrying a lighted candle. I leaned on her arm, shaking, my breath gone. “Don’t go in the patio,” I said. “Something is there.”

Heraclia was very calm. She held the candle above her head, so it shone on both our faces, and smiled gently. “It is probably the ghost of the house,” she explained in a low whisper. “He comes often. But he is harmless. Do not be afraid. I will go with you up the stairway.” She followed me to my door. “Buenas noches,” she said, her grave eyes shining a little. “I assure you, you need not fear ghosts.”

I listened to her footsteps down the stairs, across the hall, and from the patio her candle glimmered an instant, and was snuffed out. There were happy, confused little noises—a whisper, a rush of skirts, smothered laughter, feet running on tip toe. I am very much amused. She is two years older than poor little sister Dolores, and has managed to learn a great deal, it
seems. Doña Rosa would take it out of the skin of Josefina the portera if she knew; but I am pleased that Heraclia will have her love messages by another medium than lighted cigarettes writing in cold air.

Josefina is not usually so hospitable, to ghosts or other shape of folk. Lying awake listening to noises, I hear insistently now near, now far, up and down the little Eliseo, the rat-tat-tat and thump-thump of late returning persons knocking at their barred gates. Getting into the house after ten o’clock is an achievement of no mean order.

Josefina sleeps soundly, without sympathy for those owlish ones who love the world by starlight. Two nights since a pilgrim entertained himself with rhythms for the better part of an hour, playing upon the knocker in waltz time, both slow and fast. He changed to the jota, and jingled away cheerfully. Then he experimented with the two-step, and not doing so well, he ended with a marvelous flourish, a soft shoe dance finale. At last he settled down for the night in doleful marching time, a steady processional knock-knock-knock. In the midst of this, Josefina opened the door arguing shrilly. He replied with laughter, keeping a high good humour. . . to have got in was enough.

I danced the other night with a group of young Mexican boys and girls in an old square garden, paved with tiles and lined with rose bushes and palms. Jasmine and violets were sweet in shallow bowls. Two Indians from the country made melancholy music with fiddle and flute, and our feet followed the sad, gay pattern of rhythm. Now and then someone clicked his heels ringingly on the glassy tiles. There was no light except a late-rising moon, swung between stars like a plaque of white-gold beaten thin.

A man draws his thumb lightly across all the strings of his guitar. . . a sighing breeze of sound. He sings, mournfully, with a jolly face. . . . “What does he say?”

“He is singing about love, how it is cruel, because life devours us, a day at a time, and a dream at a time, until we are ended utterly. . . .”

He wails on and on, ecstatically.

We danced until the moon went down, and by candle light
we danced until the morning. When we went home, the sky was grey and our faces were grey. . . . Sancha had drunk a little too much wine. She looked at us, as we silently stepped into motor cars and huddled silently together. She touched her own face. . . . “I am a ghost too!” she cried out in a high shocked voice. Her mouth became a turned down crescent moon. She began to cry. “I am a ghost, a ghost! I can never dance again!”

A woman in this house plays Chopin at two o’clock in the morning. I know it is a woman, because she plays very softly, with many mistakes, and for her, you understand plainly, the music takes the place of tears. Women always corrupt the music of Chopin with tears. It is like listening to one who weeps in a dream. In the sunlight one may laugh, and sniff the winds, but the night is crowded with thoughts darker than the sunless world.

Now I lean on my window ledge, wrapped in a shawl, shivering. The sky is empty, the patio is like a well. I listen to the Mexican woman who weeps Chopin through her sleepless nights. It is a group of Preludes. . . why be so stubborn, so intent on composure? I love them. I am thankful for her tears.

1921

T
HE
petate is a woven straw mat, in shape an oblong square, full of variations in color and texture, and very sweet smelling when it is new. In its ordinary form, natural colored, thick and loosely contrived, it is the Mexican Indian bed, an ancient sort of sleeping mat such as all Oriental peoples use. There is a proverb full of vulgar contempt which used to be much quoted here in Mexico: “Whoever was born on a
petate
will always smell of the straw.” Since 1910, I shall say simply to fix a date on changes which have been so gradual it is impossible to say when the transition actually was made, this attitude has disappeared officially. The
petate
, an object full of charm for the eye, and immensely useful around any house, is no longer a symbol of racial and economic degradation from which there is no probable hope of rising. On the contrary, many of the best 1920 revolutionists insisted on smelling of the straw whether they were born on the
petate
or not. It was a mark of the true revolutionary to acknowledge Indian blood, the more the better, to profess Indian points of view, to make, in short, an Indian revolution. All the interlocking advances of the
mestizo
(mixed Spanish and Indian) revolution since Benito Juárez have been made for the Indian, and only secondarily by him—much as the recent famous renascence of Indian sculpture and painting was the work of European-trained
mestizos
. No matter: this article is not going to deal with grand generalities. I am interested in a few individual human beings I have met here lately, whose lives make me believe that the Indian, when he gets a chance, is leaving the
petate
.

And no wonder. He wraps himself in his
serape
, a pure-wool blanket woven on a hand loom and colored sometimes with vegetable dyes, and lies down to rest on his
petate
. The blankets are very beautiful, but they are always a little short, and in this table-land of Mexico at least, where the nights are always cold, one blanket is not enough. The
petate
, beautiful as it is, is also a little short, so the man curls down on his side, draws his knees up and tucks his head down in a prenatal posture, and
sleeps like that. He can sleep like that anywhere: on street corners, by the roadside, in caves, in doorways, in his own hut, if he has one. Sometimes he sleeps sitting with his knees drawn up to his chin and his hat over his eyes, forming a kind of pyramid with his blanket wound about him. He makes such an attractive design as he sits thus: no wonder people go around painting pictures of him. But I think he sleeps there because he is numbed with tiredness and has no other place to go, and not in the least because he is a public decoration. Toughened as he may be to hardship, you can never convince me he is really comfortable, or likes this way of sleeping. So the first moment he gets a chance, a job, a little piece of land, he leaves his
petate
and takes as naturally as any other human or brute being to the delights of kinder living. At first he makes two wooden stands, and puts boards across them, and lays his
petate
on a platform that lifts him from the chill of the earth. From this there is only a step to thin cotton mattresses, and pillows made of lumps of rags tied up in a square of muslin, and thence. . . .

There were presently three women near me who had lately left the
petate:
Consuelo, Eufemia and Hilaria. Consuelo is the maid of a young American woman here, Eufemia was my maid, and Hilaria is her aunt. Eufemia is young, almost pure Aztec, combative, acquisitive, secretive, very bold and handsome and full of tricks. Hilaria is a born intriguer, a carrier of gossip and maker of mischief. Until recently she worked for a hot-headed Mexican man who managed his servants in the classical middle-class way: by bullying and heckling. This gentleman would come in for his dinner, and if it was not ready on the instant, he would grab his hat and stamp shouting into the street again. “My señor has an incredibly violent nature,” said Hilaria, melting with pride. But she grew into the habit of sitting in my kitchen most of the time, whispering advice to Eufemia about how best to get around me; until one day the señor stamped around his house shouting he would rather live in the streets than put up with such a cook, so Hilaria has gone back to her native village near Toluca—back, for a time at least, to her
petate
. She has never really left it in spirit. She wears her
reboso,
the traditional dark-colored cotton-fringed scarf, in the old style, and her wavy black hair is braided in two short tails tied
together in the back. Her niece Eufemia came to me dressed in the same way, but within a week she returned from her first day off with a fashionable haircut, parted on the side, waved and peaked extravagantly at the nape—“In the shape of a heart,” she explained—and a pair of high-heeled patent-leather pumps which she confessed hurt her feet shockingly.

Hilaria came over for a look, went away, and brought back Eufemia’s godmother, her cousins and a family friend, all old-fashioned women like herself, to exclaim over Eufemia’s haircut. They turned her about and uttered little yips of admiration tempered with rebuke. What a girl! but look at that peak in the back! What do you think your mother will say? But see, the curls on top, my God! Look here over the ears—like a boy, Eufemia, aren’t you ashamed of yourself! and so on. And then the shoes, and then Eufemia’s dark-red crochet scarf which she wore in place of a
reboso
—well, well. . . .

They were really very pleased and proud of her. A few days later a very slick pale young man showed up at the house and with all formality explained that he was engaged to marry Eufemia, and would I object if now and then he stopped by to salute her? Naturally I should never object to such a thing. He explained that for years upon years he had been looking for a truly virtuous, honorable girl to make his wife, and now he had found her. Would I be so good as to watch her carefully, never allow her to go on the street after dark, nor receive other visitors? I assured him I would have done this anyhow. He offered me a limp hand, bowed, shook hands with Eufemia, who blushed alarmingly, and disappeared gently as a cat. Eufemia dashed after me to explain that her young man was not an Indian—I could see that—that he was a barber who made good money, and it was he who had given her the haircut. He had also given her a black lace veil to wear in church—lace veils were once the prerogative of the rich—and had told her to put aside her
reboso
. It was he who had advised her to buy the high-heeled shoes.

After this announcement of the engagement, Eufemia began saving her money and mine with miserly concentration. She was going to buy a sewing machine. In every department of the household I began to feel the dead weight of Eufemia’s sewing machine. Food doubled in price, and there was less of
it. Everything, from soap to a packet of needles, soared appallingly until I began to look about for a national economic crisis. She would not spend one penny of her wages, and whenever I left town for a few days, leaving her the ordinary allowance for food, I always returned to find the kitten gaunt and yelling with famine and Eufemia pallid and inert from a diet of tortillas and coffee. If all of us perished in the effort, she was going to have a sewing machine, and if we held out long enough, a brass bed and a victrola.