The Eighth Day (20 page)

The family glanced from time to time at the gentleman. It was soon assumed that so exalted a personage would take no interest in their conversation, even if he were able to understand the dialect in which they spoke. The widow wrapped herself in desolation and leaned her cheek against the window frame. The older son, opposite Ashley, gazed somberly before him, withdrawn into contempt from the woman talk that flowed on about him. The younger children began to whimper for the food that was piled on Clara's lap. Clara, fourteen, appeared to be her mother's deputy. An hour later the children were still complaining of hunger. Finally their mother opened her eyes and said, “Eat!'' Clara divided the food into five portions and gave Inés and Carlos their share. The four older members of the family denied that they were hungry. The gestures of sacrifice were transformed into a bitter quarrel. Pablo urged his mother to eat. In tones of hysterical exasperation she commanded him to eat. María del Carmen had no appetite.

“God in Heaven, why have I been given such children!”

“Mama,” said Clara softly, “you've dropped your purse. Here it is.”

“My purse! That's heavy, my purse! Keep it!”

“Yes, Mama.”

By noon the children were again hungry. Clara told them long rambling stories about the Infant Jesus. He passes through rooms where little children are sleeping. He makes little boys manly and little girls beautiful, so beautiful. Then, still in a low voice, she told them of the wonderful life that awaited them in Manantiales.

“Do you know what Manantiales means? It means that water comes right up out of the ground. It comes hot and it comes cold. And flowers everywhere—everywhere you look. And Grandmother will say, ‘Go out into the garden, Inés of my eyes, and bring me some roses to put before the Mother of God.' Do you remember what Grandmother said when she came to see Papa before he went to Heaven? She said there was an English lady in Manantiales who had a school for girls and that she would make Carmencita a laundress and, maybe, me a nursing sister and that we would bring money—money—money to Mama every Saturday of the Lord. This English lady—when a girl wants to be married, she gives her a bed and a griddle!”

“And shoes, Clara?”

“Oh, yes, shoes—and the man marries her.”

“Does she do anything for boys?”

“You don't listen! When she sees Pablito, she'll say, ‘I don't know what I've done that God is so good to me! I've been out of my mind looking for a strong honorable boy to take care of my mules and horses!' And when Carlos gets bigger she'll say, “I've been watching that Carlos Dávilos for some time now. I've plans for him.'”

Here the Widow Dávilos opened her eyes, leaned forward, and gave Clara a resounding slap across the face.

“
Mamita!
”

“Hold your noise! Filling the children's ears with that nonsense! You and your English lady and your griddles and your shoes.—Tell them we have nothing to live for! Tell them that!”

“Yes, Mama.”

The food was again distributed. María del Carmen accepted her share. Clara placed a portion on Pablo's knee. Barely moving, the train crossed a great trestle. María del Carmen covered her eyes with her hands and shuddered. Her mother looked at her angrily and suddenly pulled her hands from her face.

“Don't be a fool, child! Look down into that ravine! Look! It would be better for us all if we fell into that ditch.”

Clara looked sternly at her mother and crossed herself. Her mother was stung. “What does that mean, little pestilence?”

“Mama, we want you to live more than anything in the world.”

“For what? Tell me that—for
WHAT
? Your father has left us nothing. Nothing. Nothing. You grandmother can do nothing for us. Your uncle Tomás is below worthless. She has three women in the house already. You know what became of Ana Romero's children. You know that!”

“I am ready to beg, Mama. I will take Inés and Carlito with me. They can sing.” Again her mother slapped her sharply. Clara continued without flinching. “God doesn't hate beggars; He only hates the people who don't give anything to beggars. If Papa didn't leave us anything, it was the will of God.”

“What's that? What's that?”

“If Papa fell and hurt his head, it was the will—”

“Your father was a saint, a perfect saint!”

Pablo threw a glance of angry scorn at his mother.

“What are you looking at me like that for?
You!
You never appreciated your father—never! Oh! If you turn out to be one-tenth the man your father was, I know someone who'll be very much surprised!”

“Mama!” whispered Clara.

“Don't you ‘Mama' me!”

“Mama, you know you said to Sister Rufina how proud you were of Pablito. You said he was the manliest boy in the quarter.”

“You!”

Pablo stood up and said loudly, “Papa was a stooooopid!”

“Oh, Angels in Heaven, listen to him! I was married to your father for twenty years. I bore him nine children. I was the happiest woman in Antofagasta.”

“You were happy! You were happy!—Were
we
happy?”

Rosa Dávilos started to reply when Clara said to them all, authoritatively, “Papa is watching us.”

Ashley wiped his forehead. He all but groaned aloud. He seemed to himself to be dreaming—that is: present at one of those ten-act dramas of which we are simultaneously the spellbound spectator, the protagonist, and the unavowed author. A quarter of an hour later his eyes happened to meet those of Rosa Dávilos. As she looked at him expressions of astonishment and fear crossed her face. She drew herself up and assumed the air of a great lady. When the passengers descended at the next station she moved her family to another car. He walked down the village's one sunbaked street. He stood by the water tower and the pepper tree. At intervals he heard the sounds of detonation from the plain—dynamite cracking the surface to extract the nitrate that would cross the seas to furnish instruments of death and to fertilize crops. “Life affords no second chances,” he thought. “Is this what growing older is—seeing always more clearly the things we failed to see?” When he returned to the train he found himself in the midst of another family—a party so large that it filled several benches. All were a little tipsy. They were celebrating the name day of a little old lady who sat opposite him, giggling sleepily. From time to time her children and grandchildren would lean down and embrace her, exclaiming noisily: “
Mamita
, you treasure!” “Abuelita, darling!” The men pressed drinks on him. He was introduced to them all and paid his compliments to the old lady. It is the diversity of life that renders thinking difficult. Many a beginning philosopher has been on the point of grasping the problem of suffering, but what sage can cope with that of happiness?

At Manantiales he rented a room in the workers' quarter. His depression lifted. He was young; he was well; he had escaped his pursuers. For the first time in a year he was in a temperate climate; the nights were cold. Best of all he was active. He repaired the flue in his landlady's kitchen; he roused her son from torpor and together they cleaned the cistern. He sang. He made himself useful in the neighborhood and was invited to dinner. Imagine a gentleman getting himself dirty at tasks like that! It was “Don Jaime” here and “Don Jaime” there.

It was said later of the Ashley children that they were all slow to mature. They were, but not as preposterously slow as their father. The principal harm in being thus fast or slow seems to be that the growing boy or girl may skip or skimp or over-prolong one or other of the automutative phases to which—as it were—the young are entitled. John Ashley of Pulley's Falls, New York, had seen himself as the young Alexander conquering one world after another, but he had not been the boy who gives his life to working among lepers; he had been the knight crusader of the story books, but he had not seen himself as the statesman who would correct all the injustices in the social order. He had been a rebel only to the extent of erecting a wall between himself and his doting parents and of rejecting their idols. At engineering school he had calmly declared himself to be an atheist, only to commit himself to a more abject superstition: he had been certain that some agent was at his beck and call; catastrophes descended upon other people but not upon him; circumstances rushed forward to offer him whatever he most wanted. Above all, he had barely brushed that phase in late adolescence when every youth is an argumentative philosopher. Ashley in Manantiales was belatedly suffering pains that he should have endured twenty years before. At night he lay on the roof of his inn and gazed up at the constellations among the peaks. Like another young man in a story book thousands of miles away, he thought: “In infinite space, in infinite time, in infinite matter, an organism like a bubble is formed; it lasts a short while and then bursts; and that bubble is myself.”

Another memory of his past life returned to torment him—his relations with his parents. John Ashley had eloped with Beata Kellerman on the day following his graduation from engineering school in Hoboken, New Jersey. His parents had journeyed down from Pulley's Falls, New York, to be present at the exercises. They had seen him carry off the honors, prize after prize. The next day they returned to their home; he was to follow them within the week. At Christmas he sent them a card without return address. He never wrote them, though he considered doing so in his happiness when Lily was born. Without resentment and with little cause for resentment both he and Beata had cut themselves off from their families. During all the intervening years this conduct had caused John Ashley no regret and no self-reproach. Only now, when his attention was so urgently directed toward the family life about him, did he begin to ask himself anxiously wherein he was to blame. Was he an unnatural son? Had this “unnaturalness” exerted a harmful influence in the life of his own family? Would his children, in turn—self-sufficient and without affection—disappear into the throng? Had there been something amiss in the life at “The Elms”? But there had been seventeen years of loving happiness there!

Why, then, had María Icaza replied with scorn to his claim to having been happy?

His father had been an honorable man, a leader in the community, the president of the bank in Pulley's Falls. John was an only child, though he remembered that his parents had lost two children in infancy, two girls, before he was born. His father had been taciturn and undemonstrative, perhaps in reaction to his wife's effusiveness. His mother idolized her son, adored him. Even in the religious realm, these emotions often conceal an unspoken contract. Adoration of a human being, under guise of self-effacement and humility, advances large claims and is an attempt at possession. John had a good disposition; his rejection of his mother's demands on him never took the form of exasperation. He pretended to be unaware of them. He had in his life an example of the love which enlarges freedom; the summers he spent on his Grandmother Ashley's farm were the happiest days he was ever to know. It came back to him now that his father had one trait that had then seemed to him to be embarrassing but unimportant. His father had been a miser—a clandestine miser. His house was run in comfort; he made his contribution to the church; but any financial demand that exceeded his precise budget tortured him. His wife spent a great deal of time and ingenuity in attempting to conceal the extent of his idiosyncrasy from the neighbors, but stories circulated of complicated maneuvers to save a “red cent”! It now struck Ashley for the first time that his father was rich, probably very rich. In addition to his work at the bank he was constantly buying and selling farms, houses, and stores. Now, in Manantiales, Ashley realized that he had formed himself to be the opposite of his father and that his life had been as mistaken as his father's. The root of avarice is the fear of what circumstance may bring. The opposite of the miser is not the spendthrift of the parable—the prodigal son who wastes his substance in riotous living—but the grasshopper who heedlessly sings through a long summer. Ashley had lived without fear and without judgment.

He groaned aloud. “Is that what family life is? The growing children are misshapen by those parents who were in various ways warped by the blindness, ignorance, and passions of their own parents; and one's own errors impoverish and cripple one's children? Such is the endless chain of the generations?” Ashley's wonderful grandmother had been an eccentric. He knew very little about her early life. She had been born a Roman Catholic in Montreal. Marrying his grandfather, a small farmer on rocky soil, she had attended his Methodist church. She had persuaded him to move fifty miles south to better soil. But something had gone wrong between them. She had joined one of those peculiar religious sects—rigidly ascetic, yet given to emotional camp meetings and to “speaking in tongues”—that were particularly prevalent in northern New York State. Her husband had left to seek gold in Alaska. She ran her farm alone with the help of a succession of unreliable “hands” and developed her extraordinary gift for handling animals. She was strong-minded and tirelessly active; lavish in the works but not the words of love. She had sent her son to a small college from which he graduated to become the banker of Pulley's Falls—living in that world of little triumphs and vast dreads, which is a miser's life. Thereafter there had been no friendly bond between them. Had her very virtues been transmuted into her son's avarice?

Such is the endless chain of the generations?

During those summers his grandmother had taken him to the Wednesday-evening prayer meetings at her church. He was surprised to see that there was no preacher. Some sat, some stood, some knelt. There were long silences. There were short hushed hymns. There were brief requests for patience, for death, for light. All churches henceforward seemed trivial to him who had known this self-forgetting urgency. The company seemed to be waiting for his grandmother to pray. When she had spoken the meeting came to an end. She arose and addressed the Lord without closing her eyes. She spoke with a strong French accent which, when she was in deep earnest, became almost unintelligible. Many times her contribution was brief. Her thought turned always on God's plan for the universe. She asked to be shown her part in it. She complained of His slowness in its fulfillment. She asked that God be merciful to those who in wickedness or in ignorance had interfered with His great design. The air in the room became charged with electric energy. There was no doubt about it—it was
her
wickedness and ignorance that weighed her down—but all of her listeners took it on themselves. There was a murmuring and a rising and a sinking to the floor and a covering of eyes. John could not understand why his grandmother talked like that. She was the perfectest person he had ever known. Finally she consoled herself and the congregation by the conviction that God converts even our shortcomings to His own ends. She always ended by saying: “Let's sing, ‘Come Holy Ghost and Make Thy Home.'”