Katherine Anne Porter (132 page)

I think calmly of death as I butter a roll and examine the lilies. Then I turn my eyes toward the pine tree with four planes of branches rising above the wall, drowned in prodigious blue distances, and feel immortal. It always pleases me to feel immortal at this hour of the day, while I drink my coffee. The muchacho brings the coffee in a pottery cup, capacious as a bowl. He holds it with extraordinary care, gripping the saucer with both hands. But he splashes it anyhow, on the cloth, on my plate, on my sleeve, and on his own thumb. He gives a strangled yelp of surprise and puts his thumb in his mouth. Thank heaven, that means the coffee is hot for once.

An Indian girl wearing huge brass hoops in her ears trots through the dining room carrying an immense tray of food on her head. Her hair is braided in a thick round coil on her crown, making a flat surface for carrying burdens. Her raised arms are
curved as softly as the handles of a native jar. She disappears into the corridor leading to Doña Rosa’s apartment.

Doña Rosa is the hostess, as the courteous phrase has it, of this guest house. She is large and leisurely and placid. She lives in rooms adjoining the kitchen, whence her two children, a son and a daughter, both as fat and wholesome looking as apple dumplings, emerge and disappear again at intervals. Doña Rosa herself rarely comes out. She sits inside and rings a bell which sounds in the rear hall. At the first jingle, a cook, a maid, and several of their children rush to answer it. In a moment they all rush back to the kitchen, where after some confusion and excited talk, they clatter again through the dining room, carrying a cup of chocolate and a plate of rice and a pitcher of hot water for Doña Rosa.

On rare occasions I have seen her, at the noon hour, returning from market. The cleanly brown skin of her face is unmarred by powder. Her smooth black hair is fastened with three flat jet pins. Her eyes are clear brown, her teeth strong and white. She is tall, and her ample black skirts sweep the floor, swinging handsomely over her opulent hips. A black reboso of heavy crinkled silk, fringed thickly and at great length, falls about her shoulders. She moves with extraordinary decision, turning her head slowly on her muscular neck, observing everything serenely. She is the widow of a general who was killed in a casual battle at the frayed end of some revolution, when her children were babies.

Now she wears mourning, and goes to church, and to market.

I take occasion to speak with Doña Rosa concerning the young coyote tethered to the water pipe on my roof. He is a pilgrim on his way to another fate; Heraclia’s brother will take him to the country in a few days, and there, I hope, he will become the pet of an indulgent household. But in the meantime he grieves, and although I grieve with him, still I cannot devote all my time to it. Is it possible to have him removed to a far corner of the patio for the rest of his stay? He has an enormous voice for so young a creature.

With this question carefully assembled in Spanish from a
phrase book, I enter the darkened room of Doña Rosa. Against the precision of the maroon coloured wall paper design hang pictures of obscure saints, their upturned eyes glazed with highly specialized agonies. A shrine lamp is blood colour before a pallid Virgin gazing into the mysteries of a paper-flower bouquet.

Doña Rosa sits in a vast bed overflowing with puffy quilts riotous with strange blossoms. Her daughter sits at one elbow, her son at another. The three of them wear dressing gowns of the same material. The tray is on her flattened knees. They are drinking hot milk flavoured with coffee, munching great sugared buns.

Daughter feeds a grey kitten. Son feeds a yellow kitten, and with difficulty persuades him not to drink from the family milk pitcher. A pair of slightly fevered, ill-humoured eyes and a moist, black lacquered nose burrowing under Doña Rosa’s arm, belong to Pipo the naked Chihuahua dog. We have met only once before, but I remember him well. He was then painted a watermelon pink, and wore a blue ribbon on his tail. He was eating beans from an orange and red Oaxaca bowl, and it occurred to me then that I had never sufficiently understood the phrase “local colour.” Pipo was It. Now, he struggles out a bit from his smother of blankets, and I see that his crepe de chine surface is tinted emerald green. No wonder his eyes are fevered.

Doña Rosa offers me a cup of coffee. Daughter gives me a roll. I sit on the billowing bedside, and we straighten out the coyote question with the utmost amiability, in snatches of three languages.

This is a house of respectable age merely, not antique. It was built during Emperor Maximilian’s time, and therefore clings to doubtful grandeurs of the Italian type, such as stained glass windows, steps of streaked marble, and other steps painted to resemble marble. The floors are bare and rough from much scrubbing. The furnishings must be wedding presents of several generations, for carved walnut and horse hair share the same rooms with gilt chairs and sofas upholstered in rose brocaded satin, and slab settees in that deplorable style known as Mission. Plaster casts of smiling ladies, effulgent of bust and
hair, are set about in corners that would otherwise be happily empty.

Doña Rosa takes no pleasure in her house, except in that one big overfilled room where she sits, and where her children love to play. She spends part of her afternoons in the shady garden beside the fountain where friends come for long visits. They sit here, gossiping over chocolate thick as soup, sipping slowly with long handled wooden spoons from little lacquered gourds.

The natural industry of the servants is reason enough for the general air of freshness and dampness that pervades the house. They mop and sweep and dust, talking softly all the time. There is no quarrelling, no dissension. La Cocinera is maybe a trifle brittle of temper at times, but she is an overworked, distracted woman with three children at her skirts. Life is a tragic business for her.

This morning when she came to my room with ten o’clock chocolate her smallest son came with her, and sat on my bed as we talked, his round grubby face as friendly as a little dog’s. His mother shrieked. Her act of seizing and flinging him out of the room was done in one curving motion. I have never seen anything so finished. Then she examined the spot where he had been. There was the complete outline of his little shape, done neatly in charcoal dust. Her gesture of despair measured calamity. And these people face real calamity with perfect stoicism.

On the walls of the servants’ quarters is painted a curious landscape: a tall castle in the middle distance, abnormally rotund domestic animals in the immediate foreground, and dying trees along the water’s edge. It is acutely surprising to the eye when one first walks through the gate to see this painting, so utterly removed from anything resembling either life or art, down the hundred foot vista of patio. At its base the servants’ children, Consuelo, her cousins and friends, play amid a confusion of brown cooking pots and baskets and mats. They are contented little people, who rarely weep and who are never punished. I have seen Consuelo busy for an hour, trying to bend a bit of wire into a shape that pleased her. It is a pity she must be a servant when she grows up. She is very beautiful, with finely
formed hands and feet. In a decade, she will be like her mother, a seventeen year old girl already haggard, who works with a baby on her arm, wound in her reboso. In two decades she will resemble her grandmother, who cannot be older than forty years. But she has the look of something agelessly old, that was born old, that could never have been young.

Why not? One may have the complete use of a human being here for eight or ten pesos a month. They carry water in huge jars to the stone washing tubs, where they kneel at their work. They toil up and down endless flights of stairs: to the roof to hang linen, down again for another load, crossing long courts on hundreds of small errands. If I go to sleep at twelve, it is to the sound of their voices on the other side of the wall, still gathering together the ends of the day’s labour. If I wake at six, they are pattering about, their bare feet clumping like pony hoofs.

My poor Gatito de Oro (Golden Kitten) has passed out attended by every circumstance of tragedy.

He did not come in for breakfast this morning, nor did he appear for his noon bowl of milk. I had begun to miss him seriously this afternoon, when the small brown child from the patio came up to tell me that poor Gatito was dead, in the garden, with blood on his arms and breast, and dried blood on his mouth.

I inquired no further into particulars, but she supplied them lavishly. They had found him lying twisted, so, with his head so,—and the ants were at him. His teeth were showing, and he seemed very angry. But he was not angry—of course not, he was only dead. Pobrecito!

Pobrecito indeed. He was a gentle, childlike beast, living by his affections. He was the first cat I ever saw who required to be loved. He came to my window one morning wailing aloud, his yellow fur standing up; I thought he was sick. But no, he wished only to be petted. When I stroked his head, he purred. When I stopped, he wailed. For weeks after he came, he went back to the patio kitchen for his food, and never for one moment could I accuse him of self interest in the matter of shelter. He was fat and thriving when he took up his abode with me.

He slept on my pillow at night, and sat on the window sill
by day, washing his adolescent person carefully; or he followed me about, talking to himself, answering when I called. He understood my Spanish very well.

Pobrecito! The night before he died, the wind rattled the window latches, as though a hand was trying to unfasten them. Gatito de Oro stared at the window and listened, his eyes blackened with uneasiness. He growled in his throat forebodingly, like a little dog. Now he is not afraid of anything. It is too bad.

Five Indian men, their women and six children are on the roof of my neighbor’s house this morning. They have come from Xochimilco to build her a thatched hut, which she means to use for a tea house. The men are setting up roughly hewn sapling trunks, and the women are tying the thatch together with thick strands of twisted maguey fibre. They have their food baskets, a collection of beautiful brown decorated pottery, and many blankets and mats. One of the women is building a charcoal fire on the cement paved roof. They will eat, sleep and build the hut up there for two days.

The babies roll about almost naked. One of them, a large child, is hanging at his mother’s breast nursing, arms and legs clutching monkey-like, as she walks about unconcernedly with both hands free, arranging her household. The women are quite nice. Their blouses are embroidered in red and green, they wear very wide skirts wrapped about them, plain and smooth across their hips, pleated amply in front and bound with a woven girdle in many colours.

The hut is finished. It stands solemnly, the thatch droops around the edges like the brim of a dilapidated hat. It seems strangely different from those we saw in Xochimilco. But my neighbor, an American, regards it affectionately, and promises us tea in it. Her husband explains to the Indians that he means to call it the Hula Hula Hall because of the grass skirt. They smile politely.

I encounter at dinner today the young married couple. She is fat, with the fresh and blooming fatness of the happily married bride who apparently is living by the twin delights of food and love. If a thought ever ruffled that sleek brow, or darkened
those full thick-lidded eyes, it left no trace. Wearing a pink silk pleated jacket, and thin green slippers on her white stockinged feet, she comes to dine with her husband, leaning on his arm. He is a portly, rather too-knowing young man, who scolds her and reproves her and slaps her resoundingly on the back, to the amazement of every one. She reacts like a devoted, slightly bewildered dog: she snaps when he scolds and fawns when he pats. Either response seems equally to amuse him.

When she dresses to go out, her hat is enormous, of fluffy black lace, strapped under her full chin. Her complexion is a chemical marvel of whiteness and smoothness, her lips a bleeding bow. Her light blue silk dress strains over her round high bosom, and she tilts forward perilously in her tight French slippers. Her husband admires her immensely at these times, and cannot take his eyes from the sight of all that magnificent femaleness.

He tells me his wife is clever, and does not wish to be idle merely because she is married. “A very modern girl,” he pronounces in English. He allows her to have her voice trained. Ah, so it is she I have heard for the past four days, singing the Musetta Waltz, a half tone off key.

I will have dinner in my room this evening. It is brought to me by the sweet sentimental-eyed Dolores, who often helps in small ways, though she is cousin to Doña Rosa. The tray resembles the food-dream of a delirious person. There is a huge plate of rice, deliciously cooked with peppers and spices, very dry and rich. A dish of ground meat mingled with peppers and garlic, flooded with red sauce. Coarse spinach with onions. A croquette of frijoles. Two very red apples, a dish of zapote, the suave delicately flavoured black fruit pulp I like, and coffee. I eat heroically, because a failure to do so will bring the household about my ears, inquiring if I am sick.

Dolores seats herself with the air of one come for a visit, and sews on a dress which hung over her arm while she carried the tray. She is accompanied by Duquesa her little copper-coloured collie dog, who folds her paws and watches her mistress prayerfully.

Dolores applies the diminutive to everything. “Un momentito,” she says, bringing her thumb and forefinger almost
together, measuring the smallest possible fraction of time. “Pobrecita,” she calls the prosperous Duquesa, everybody’s pet. “Yo solita,” she calls herself, her appealing black eyes floating suddenly in inexplicable tears. She sews as she talks, stitching lace on a dress that has even now too much lace. A blue reboso over her head, a black muslin dress with red ribbons showing in her embroidered chemise top, a hiatus of four inches of white cotton stockings between her skirts and her yellow topped shoes, she talks and smiles, her brown hands vague and groping among the folds of her material. When I see the sadness of her down drooping face, I know she is beginning to think of love. “Yo solita,” she calls herself.