Katherine Anne Porter (25 page)

“A Puss Moth,” said don Genaro to Stepanov. “I flew it half an hour yesterday; awfully
chic
. I may buy it. I need something really fast. Something light, too, it must be fast. It must be something I can depend upon at any minute.” Stepanov was an expert pilot. He excelled in every activity that don Genaro respected. Don Genaro listened attentively while Stepanov
gave him some clear sensible advice about airplanes: what kind to buy, how to keep them in order, and what one might expect of airplanes as a usual thing.

“Airplanes!” said Kennerly, listening in. “I wouldn’t go up with a Mexican pilot for all the money in—”

“Airplane! At last!” cried doña Julia, like a gently enraptured child. She leaned over the table and called in Spanish softly as if waking someone, “Carlos! Do you hear? Genarito is going to buy me an airplane, after all!”

Don Genaro talked on with Stepanov as if he had not heard. “And what will you do with it?” asked Carlos, eyes round and amiable from under his bushy brows. Without lifting his head from his hand, he went on eating his fried beans and green chili sauce with a spoon, good Mexican country fashion, and enjoying them.

“I shall turn somersaults in it,” said doña Julia.

“A Failure,” Betancourt went on, in English, which Carlos could not understand, “though I must say he looks worse today than usual. He slipped and hurt himself in the bathtub this morning.” It was as if this accident were another point against Carlos, symbolic proof of the fatal downward tendency in his character.

“I thought he had composed half the popular songs in Mexico,” I said. “I heard nothing but his songs here, ten years ago. What happened?”

“Ah, that was ten years ago, don’t forget. He does almost nothing now. He hasn’t been director of the Jewel for, oh, ages!”

I observed the Failure. He seemed cheerful enough. He was beating time with the handle of his spoon and humming a song to Andreyev, who listened, nodding his head. “Like that, for two measures,” said Carlos in French, “then like this,” and he beat time, humming. “Then this for the dance. . . .” Andreyev hummed the tune and tapped on the table with his left forefinger, his right hand waving slightly. Betancourt watched them for a moment. “He feels better just now, poor fellow,” he said, “now I have got him this job. It may be a new beginning for him. But he is sometimes tired, he drinks too much, he cannot always do his best.”

Carlos had slumped back in his chair, his round shoulders
drooped, his swollen lids covered his eyes, he poked fretfully at his plate of enchiladas with sour cream. “You’ll see,” he said to Andreyev in French, “how Betancourt will not like this idea either. There will be something wrong with it. . . .” He said it not angrily, not timidly, but with an unhappy certainty. “Either it will not be modern enough, or not enough in the old style, or just not Mexican enough. . . . You’ll see.”

Betancourt had spent his youth unlocking the stubborn secrets of Universal Harmony by means of numerology, astronomy, astrology, a formula of thought-transference and deep breathing, the practice of will-to-power combined with the latest American theories of personality development; certain complicated magical ceremonies; and a careful choice of doctrines from the several schools of Oriental philosophies which are, from time to time, so successfully introduced into California. From this material he had constructed a Way of Life which could be taught to anyone, and once learned led the initiate quietly and surely toward Success: success without pain, almost without effort except of a pleasurable kind, success accompanied by moral and esthetic beauty, as well as the most desirable material reward. Wealth, naturally, could not be an end in itself: alone, it was not Success. But it was the unobtrusive companion of all true Success. . . . From this point of view he was cheerfully explicit about Carlos. Carlos had always been contemptuous of the Eternal Laws. He had always simply written his tunes without giving a thought to the profounder inferences of music, based as it is upon the harmonic system of the spheres. . . . He, Betancourt, had many times warned Carlos. It had done no good at all. Carlos had gone on inviting his own doom.

“I have warned you, too,” he said to me kindly. “I have asked myself many times why you will not or cannot accept the Mysteries which would open a whole treasure house for you. . . . All,” he said, “is possible through scientific intuition. If you depend on mere intellect, you must fail.”

“You must fail,” he had been saying all this time to poor simple Carlos. “He has failed,” he said of him to others. He now looked almost fondly upon his handiwork, who sat there, somewhat grubby and gloomy, a man who had done a good day’s work in his time, and was not altogether finished yet.
The neat light figure beside me posed gracefully upon its slender spine, the too-beautiful slender hands waved rhythmically upon insubstantial wrists. I remembered all that Carlos had done for Betancourt in other days; he had, in his thoughtless hopelessly human way, piled upon these thin shoulders a greater burden of gratitude than they could support. Betancourt had set in motion all the machinery of the laws of Universal Harmony he could command to help him revenge himself on Carlos. It was slow work, but he never tired.

“I don’t, of course, understand just what you mean by failure, or by success either,” I told him at last. “You know, I never could understand.”

“It is true, you could not,” he said, “that was the great trouble.”

“As for Carlos,” I said, “you should forgive him. . . .”

Betancourt said with perfect sincerity, “You know I never blame anyone for anything at all.”

Carlos came round and shook hands with me as everybody pushed back his chair and began drifting out by the several doorways. He was full of humanity and good humor about Justino and his troubles. “These family love affairs,” he said, “what can you expect?”

“Oh, no, now,” said Betancourt, uneasily. He laughed his twanging tremulous little laugh.

“Oh, yes, now,” said Carlos, walking beside me. “I shall make a
corrido
about Justino and his sister.” He began to sing almost in a whisper, imitating the voice and gestures of a singer peddling broadsides in the market. . . .

“One bullet,” said Betancourt, wagging a long finger at Carlos. “One bullet!”

Carlos laughed. “Very well, one bullet! Such a precisionist! Good night,” he said.

Kennerly and Carlos disappeared early. Don Genaro spent the evening playing billiards with Stepanov, who won always. Don Genaro was very good at billiards, but Stepanov was a champion, with all sorts of trophies to show, so it was no humiliation to be defeated by him.

In the drafty upper-hall room fitted up as a parlor, Andreyev turned off the mechanical attachment of the piano and sang Russian songs, running his hands over the keys while he waited to remember yet other songs. Doña Julia and I sat listening. He sang for us, but for himself mostly, in the same kind of voluntary forgetfulness of his surroundings, the same self-induced absence of mind that had kept him talking about Russia in the afternoon.

We sat until very late. Doña Julia smiled steadily every time she caught the glance of Andreyev or myself, yawning now and then under her hand, her Pekinese sprawling and snoring on her lap. “You’re not tired?” I asked her. “You wouldn’t let us stay up too late?”

“Oh, no, let’s go on with the music. I love sitting up all night. I never go to bed if I can possibly sit up. Don’t go yet.”

At half-past one Uspensky sent for Andreyev, for Stepanov. He was restless, in a fever, he wished to talk. Andreyev said, “I have already sent for Doctor Volk. It is better not to delay.”

Doña Julia and I looked on in the billiard room downstairs, where Stepanov and don Genaro were settling the score. Several Indians leaned in at the windows, their vast straw hats tilted forward, watching in silence. Doña Julia asked her husband, “Then you’re not going to Mexico tonight?”

“Why should I?” he inquired suddenly without looking at her.

“I thought you might,” said doña Julia. “Good night, Stepanov,” she said, her black eyes shining under her long lids painted silver blue.

“Good night, Julita,” said Stepanov, his frank Northern smile meaning anything or nothing at all. When he was not smiling, his face was severe, expressive, and intensely alive. His smile was misleadingly simple, like a very young boy’s. He was anything but simple; he smiled now like a merry open book
upon the absurd little figure strayed out of a marionette theater. Turning away, Doña Julia slanted at him the glittering eye of a femme fatale in any Hollywood film. He examined the end of his cue as if he looked through a microscope. Don Genaro said violently, “Good night!” and disappeared violently through the door leading to the corral.

Doña Julia and I passed through her apartment, a long shallow room between the billiard and the vat-room. It was puffy with silk and down, glossy with bright new polished wood and wide mirrors, restless with small ornaments, boxes of sweets, French dolls in ruffled skirts and white wigs. The air was thick with perfume which fought with another heavier smell. From the vat-room came a continual muffled shouting, the rumble of barrels as they rolled down the wooden trestles to the flat mule-car standing on the tracks running past the wide doorway. The smell had not been out of my nostrils since I came, but here it rose in a thick vapor through the heavy drone of flies, sour, stale, like rotting milk and blood; this sound and this smell belonged together, and both belonged to the intermittent rumble of barrels and the long chanting cry of the Indians. On the narrow stairs I glanced back at doña Julia. She was looking up, wrinkling her little nose, her Pekinese with his wrinkled nose of perpetual disgust held close to her face. “Pulque!” she said. “Isn’t it horrid? But I hope the noise will not keep you awake.”

On my balcony there was no longer any perfume to disturb the keen fine wind from the mountains, or the smell from the vat-room. “Twenty-one!” sang the Indians in a long, melodious chorus of weariness and excitement, and the twenty-first barrel of fresh pulque rolled down the slide, was seized by two men and loaded on the flat-car under my window.

From the window next to mine, the three Russian voices murmured along quietly. Pigs grunted and rooted in the soft wallow near the washing fountain, where the women were still kneeling in the darkness, thumping wet cloth on the stones, chattering, laughing. All the women seemed to be laughing that night: long after midnight, the high bright sound sparkled again and again from the long row of peon quarters along the corral. Burros sobbed and mourned to each other, there was everywhere the drowsy wakefulness of creatures, stamping
hoofs, breathing and snorting. Below in the vat-room a single voice sang suddenly a dozen notes of some rowdy song; and the women at the washing fountain were silenced for a moment, then tittered among themselves. There occurred a light flurry at the arch of the gate leading into the inner patio: one of the polite, expensive dogs had lost his dignity and was chasing, with snarls of real annoyance, a little fat-bottomed soldier back to his proper place, the barracks by the wall opposite the Indian huts. The soldier scrambled and stumbled silently away, without resistance, his dim lantern agitated violently. At a certain point, as if here was the invisible boundary line, the dog stopped, watched while the soldier ran on, then returned to his post under the archway. The soldiers, sent by the government as a guard against the Agrarians, sprawled in idleness eating their beans at don Genaro’s expense. He tolerated and resented them, and so did the dogs.

I fell asleep to the long chanting of the Indians, counting their barrels in the vat-room, and woke again at sunrise, summer sunrise, to their long doleful morning song, the clatter of metal and hard leather, and the stamping of mules as they were being harnessed to the flat-cars. . . . The drivers swung their whips and shouted, the loaded cars creaked and slid away in a procession, off to meet the pulque train for Mexico City. The field workers were leaving for the maguey fields, driving their donkeys. They shouted, too, and whacked the donkeys with sticks, but no one was really hurrying, nor really excited. It was just another day’s work, another day’s weariness. A three-year-old man-child ran beside his father; he drove a weanling donkey carrying two miniature casks on its furry back. The two small creatures imitated each in his own kind perfectly the gestures of their elders. The baby whacked and shouted, the donkey trudged and flapped his ears at each blow.

“My God!” said Kennerly over coffee an hour later. “Do you remember—” he beat off a cloud of flies and filled his cup with a wobbling hand—“I thought of it all night and couldn’t sleep—
don’t
you remember,” he implored Stepanov, who held one palm over his coffee cup while he finished a cigarette, “those scenes we shot only two weeks ago, when Justino played the part of a boy who killed a girl by accident, tried to
escape, and Vicente was one of the men who ran him down on horseback? Well, the same thing has happened to the same people in
reality
! And—” he turned to me, “the strangest thing is, we have to make that scene again, it didn’t turn out so well, and look, my God, we had it happening really, and nobody thought of it then! Then was the time. We could have got a close-up of the girl, really dead, and real blood running down Justino’s face where Vicente hit him, and my God! we never even thought of it. That kind of thing,” he said, bitterly, “has been happening ever since we got here. Just happens over and over. . . . Now, what was the matter, I wonder?”

He stared at Stepanov full of accusation. Stepanov lifted his palm from his cup, and beating off flies, drank. “Light no good, probably,” he said. His eyes flickered open, clicked shut in Kennerly’s direction, as if they had taken a snapshot of something and that episode was finished.