Angle of Repose (50 page)

I have a double reason for soaking myself in this walled, protected domestic life. It provides me many sketches, and it gives me a model for what may become my own future. Oliver told me before be left that there is a good chance, providing the mine turns out well, that he will be asked to come back and run it. I will then have the problem of making a home here that we can live in according to our own habits, but that will not offend against Mexican conventions, which have little
give
in them.

You can imagine how such a house as Emelita’s, beautifully run and hypnotically comfortable, affects my thwarted home-making instincts. I love the peace of this house, which was once a priests’ college and retains its cloistered air. In the mornings there is a most satisfying sense of women’s work going on, the hum of voices in far rooms, the chuckling of doves on their high ledges, old Ascención’s broom scratching down the
corredor,
and from the rear court the slap and flop of clothes being washed, and whiffs of woodsmoke, strong soap, and steam. The other morning, coming past the work room off the kitchen, I stopped still, smitten by such a lovely smell of fresh ironing that I was instantly melted into a housewife. I make Emelita write me out the receipt for every unusual dish we eat–whether we stay or go, such things are beyond price.

I am as intimate here as a sister, as privileged as a guest, and I tag around after Emelita on her morning rounds, carrying my sketch pad and stool. The
salas
are uninteresting-overdecorated, with too much crystal and heavy furniture, but the kitchen is a treasure, hung with copper pots above its charcoal fires, and a thin, peevish cook who would be dismissed in a minute if she were not capable of such mouth-watering food. So we all praise and placate her instead, and she takes our praise and turns it instantly sour, and I draw her in her sourness and get a picture that I think Thomas and even you will like.

I draw everything–Ascención watering his flower pots, Soledad making up one of the great
lit du roi
beds, Concepción sweeping, crouching over her short-handled broom, the Indian women sousing their washing in the copper tubs that are sunk in stone furnaces in the back court, across from a fountain that plays with a cool tinkle into a stone horse trough under bamboos. I envy those washerwomen the place in which they labor, but my
norteamericana
instincts led me to suggest to Emelita that scrub boards might ease their backs, as a longer-handled broom might ease Concepción’s. Ah no, she said. It would confuse them. They are used to doing it the old way.

I am having to learn a good deal of Spanish, for you know how I love to get together with others through the tongue, and there is now no English-speaker in the house, with the men gone, except little Enriqueta’s Austrian governess, a rather desperate, solitary woman who rarely leaves her room and who focusses all her feelings upon Enriqueta’s poodle, Enrique. So one side of my sketch pad acquires pictures and the other side acquires Spanish verbs and nouns. And at the same time I learn some of the mysteries of Mexican housekeeping.

How many servants, I asked Emelita the other day, for a house just big enough for the three Wards?

But you will need a large house, she said. Your eminence (!). Your husband’s position!

I couldn’t run one, I said. Not as you do. A middle-sized house at most. How many servants?

So she thought them off on her fingers. A coachman. A cook. A chambermaid. A nurse or governess. A
mozo
for general sweeping and to mind the gate. Five at least.

I told her that the last servant I had, that wonderful and never properly appreciated Lizzie, was cook, washerwoman, chambermaid,
mozo,
sometimes nursemaid, and also artist’s model.

She said there are no such people here.

I said suppose I could find one to bring down.

But she said it wouldn’t do. Look at Fräulein Eberl. She was very lonely, that one, unable to associate with the family and unwilling to associate with the servants, and with no one of her class in all Morelia.

If Don Gustavo had not taken a vow, on which he greatly prides himself, never to marry again, I suppose that Emelita would have married him long since. I can’t make up my mind whether I wish she had, or whether I’m happy she hasn’t and he won’t. She is at least entitled to the dignity of her position. It irritates my republican and suffragist sentiments to see such feminine perfection tied like a servant to that Prussian self-satisfaction. She is not pretty, except for her dark blue eyes, and like the other respectable women of Morelia she dresses richly without dressing well. But I have learned to love her in less than two weeks, and she makes the thought of living here very attractive.

You see the things that my mind plays with, mostly at siesta time when everything hushes and even the city outside shuts its doors and stills its bells. I am no better sleeper than I ever was, and so I lie and let the exciting and troubling possibilities buzz around in my head. Or I write you, which is more profitable.

Things are beginning to stir in the house. That means it will soon be time for our afternoon drive, our “airing” as it is called, though we never open the carriage windows. It is during this hour of freedom, such as it is, that I realize how close to imprisonment is the life of a Mexican woman. I watch Emelita and learn discretion. She being the head of a household and I being married, we may acknowledge the bows of gentlemen, but only of
certain
gentlemen. The young men riding their English thoroughbreds so proudly around the
zocolo
stare at all the ladies, but the ladies do not stare back, or bow. If they are marriageable, they may hardly acknowledge the existence of anyone male, or even of the female relative of a possible suitor. Inferences would instantly be drawn. So we go around the park every afternoon, getting neither exercise nor air, fluttering our fingers at balconies and carriages, while all around us the gentlemen are walking or riding and getting their blood flowing in the cool of the afternoon, and Indian girls in embroidered chemises–they look as if they had gone happily out of doors without putting on their dresses–swing up and down, and use their
rebozos
not to hide their faces but to enhance their eyes, and giggle and hug one another and cast slant eyes at passing boys. Respectability is a burden perhaps greater than I want to bear. Unless I can be forgiven my habitual freedoms I shall find it hard to be a Morelia wife!

This afternoon I shall know more about the possibilities. Emelita tells me of the house of the town advocate–I believe there is only one–who is in Germany seeking relief for his gout. It is a small house, only twelve rooms! She will have Ysabel drive us past when we take our airing.

I can’t tell you whether I hope it will suit or not, whether I want to stay or not. But I believe I do. I miss my little Ollie, of whom we have not heard since we sailed. I know he is safer with Mother and Bessie than he would be with me, but I wish we had him here just the same. After all that sickness in Leadville, and all the moving he has done in his short life, he deserves a safe home.

More later. I hear Ysabel bringing out the mules.

 

Next day. I have seen the house–white stucco around a central patio, with a white wall around it all, and a bougainvillea swarming over the wall. Very definitely it will do. The rooms are good, and the arrangement of square within square, a wall around the house and the house around a court, will let us live as we please. It is very near the park, so that the three of us could ride there together, assuming that I can ride without shocking the citizens. Oliver will not mind, I know. He has a way of walking through conventions of that kind as if they did not exist, and being so much himself that pretty soon people begin adapting themselves to
him.

Even when he is at the mine, which he will surely have to be half the time, Ollie and I might ride, accompanied by some Rubio or Bonifacio, once we had accustomed people to our irregularities. It gives me a delightful sense of wickedness to contemplate it, though I wouldn’t think of being so cavalier with the proprieties at home.

I think it will do, I honestly think it will. You and Thomas can visit us here, instead of at that lighthouse on the Pacific to which I once confidently invited you. Morelia isn’t Paris, but it is gorgeously picturesque. Much of it is made of a soft pink stone that in certain lights, or when wetted by a shower, glows almost rose. I think you would find subjects for your brush, as I find them for my pencil, on every corner.

Today, as we were returning from looking at the house, we passed the market, which I had never seen. It was thronging with Indians, the men in white pyjamas, the women with their heads and infants wrapped in
rebozos,
the children often in nothing at all except a little shirt. And the things spread out there on the ground, under the matting roofs! Oranges, lemons, watermelons, little baby bananas,
camotes
(sweet potatoes), ears of their funny particolored corn, strange fruits, strange vegetables, chickens hanging by the legs like so many bouquets of Everlasting drying in an attic. Turkeys, pigs, beans, onions, vast fields of pottery and baskets, booths where were sold tortillas and pulque and mysterious sweets and coarse sugar like cracked corn. Such a colorful jumble, such a hum of life, such bright hand-woven cottons and embroidered chemises! Over one side soared the arches of the aqueduct, and in the center was a fountain from which girls were drawing water, gathered around its bright splashing as bright as flowers. (In this place, the poor look like flowers, the rich like mourners–at least the women.)

I cried out at once that I must come and draw it in the morning, when the sun would be on the other side of the aqueduct and would throw its looped shadow across the market, and give me a chance to hold down the boil of all that human activity with some architectural weight. I asked Emelita if I could be spared Soledad or Concepción, to accompany me for a couple of hours. She never quivered. Of course.
¿Como no?

To her, I am sure it seemed a reckless and dangerous and improper request, for in the streets of this fascinating city no respectable woman walks, even accompanied by a maid. My stilts and bearskins were showing, but no one would have known from Emelita’s face that I had asked anything at all out of the ordinary.

 

Later. What day? I lose track of time. I have been keeping back this letter for the post that leaves tomorrow for Mexico City. Every day is like the day before, but every day there is something that to me is new, too.

When I spoke to you last, I was planning to go and draw the market. I went. In the morning Emelita came to me, dressed in her black silk, while I was drawing Enriqueta at her lessons with Fräulein Eberl, and said that Soledad was free to go with me whenever I was ready. I was ready very soon, for I didn’t want to miss the proper light, and went into the courtyard to find an expedition prepared that rivaled Oliver’s Crusade. There was Ysabel with the carriage and the white mules. There was Soledad with a French gilt chair and a black umbrella. There was Emelita in her black silk. I had come down in my usual morning dress, and for once Emelita’s resolution to notice none of my improprieties was not up to the occasion. Her look told me that I would embarrass her. Of course I made an excuse and went back and changed. But even when I was in proper costume, you cannot possibly imagine the consternation I caused–I on my gilt chair with pad and pencil, Soledad standing and holding the umbrella over me, Emelita bravely out of the carriage, but not
too
far, and looking as if every moment were not only mortal sin, but its punishment. It was all Ysabel could do to keep back the curious.

I could not bear to stay more than twenty minutes, keeping Emelita there in the sun scorning even to lift her hem from the dust, and my sketch was very sketchy. But the morning taught me two things. One is that it is perfectly
safe
to do most of the things that propriety frowns on, the other is that I won’t again embarrass my Mexican friends by making them share my indiscretions.

Today one of the
mozos
returned from the Crusade, reporting that all were well and that they would be back as scheduled. He came for a fresh supply of wine, one of the mules having fallen and crushed his hamper. Don Pedro is not the sort to make his guests do without their luxuries, though it means sending a servant on a two-hundred-mile round trip.

In a week, therefore, I shall be seeing Oliver, and we shall be planning the shape of our future. My darling, I wish I could tell you now, but I must await Oliver’s news. I shall have to tell you in New York–and how can we get around to the future, with all that past to catch up on?

Good night, darling Augusta. I have just been out in the
corredor
prowling up and down. The house is black and still. The starlight doesn’t penetrate the shadows under the arcade, and does only a little to lighten the sunken court. It seemed profoundly peaceful and undangerous, strange but at the same time familiar, and I thought of summer nights at Milton, everyone else asleep, when we used to creep out in our night dresses and run barefoot on the wet grass. I fear I am a strange creature, my two great loves are of such different kinds. When Oliver is away from me I miss him and am restless until he returns, but isn’t it strange, his absence makes me think so much more acutely of
you
.

Will you visit us in our white house with the bougainvillea, away down here in Michoacán? I mean to keep tempting you with my little exotic sweetmeats until you fall. But first I shall see you in that loved studio where we were girls and art students together a thousand years ago. Even if we are to stay here, as I now truly hope we will, we shall have to be in New York for a considerable time getting prepared.

Good night, good night. The church bells are solemn across the Plaza of the Martyrs. I feel smothered, lonely, eager, I don’t know what. The future is as dark as the
corredor
out there, but might be every bit as charming once light comes on it. One thing I do know–it must have you in it, somehow, somewhere.