Katherine Anne Porter (142 page)

Rosalie Caden Evans was an American woman, born in Galveston, Texas. She married a British subject, Harry Evans, who became owner of several haciendas in Mexico during the Díaz regime. They lost their property in the Madero revolution, and for several years lived in the United States and in Europe.
In 1917 Mr. Evans died while in Mexico, after an unsuccessful attempt to regain his property under the Carranza administration. Mrs. Evans returned to Mexico, and for more than six years she proved a tough enemy to the successive revolutionary governments, holding her hacienda under almost continuous fire. This contest required a great deal of attention from three governments, Mexico, Great Britain, and the United States, and furnished a ready bone of contention in the long-drawn argument between Mexico and foreign powers respecting the famous Article 27 of the new Mexican Constitution, which provides among other things that the large landholdings of Mexico shall be repartitioned among the Indians, subject to proper indemnification to the former owner.

H. A. C. Cummins, of the British legation, was expelled from Mexico for his championship of Mrs. Evans, and a fair amount of trouble ensued between Mexico and Great Britain about it. The case of Mrs. Evans was cited in the United States as an argument against our recognition of the Obregón government. An impressive volume of diplomatic correspondence was exchanged between the three governments concerning the inflexible lady, who held her ground, nevertheless, saying that she could be removed from her holdings only as a prisoner or dead.

In August, 1924, the news came that Mrs. Evans had been shot from ambush by a number of men while driving in a buckboard from the village of San Martín to her hacienda, San Pedro Coxtocan.

Reading the letters Rosalie Evans wrote her sister, Mrs. Daisy Caden Pettus, from Mexico, this adventure takes on all the colors of a lively temperament; the story is lighted for us like a torch. The aim in publishing the letters was to present Mrs. Evans to a presumably outraged Anglo-Saxon world as a martyr to the sacred principles of private ownership of property: to fix her as a symbol of devotion to a holy cause. “Some Americans,” says Mrs. Pettus in a foreward to the volume, “in ignorance of Mexican conditions, have said the fight carried on by Mrs. Evans was unwise, if not unworthy, in that it is charged that she was resisting the duly established laws and principles of the Mexican people. This is very far from true.”

It is true, however, that she opposed, and to her death, the
attempts of the Mexican people to establish those laws and principles which were the foundation of their revolution, and on which their national future depends. She cast her individual weight against the march of an enormous social movement, and though her fight was gallant, brilliant and wholehearted, admirable as a mere exhibition of daring, energy and spirit, still I cannot see how she merits the title of martyr. She was out for blood, and she had a glorious time while the fight lasted.

Her letters are a swift-moving account of a life as full of thrills and action as any novel of adventure you may find. They are written at odd moments, dashed off in the midst of a dozen things all going at once: the episodes are struck off white-hot. The result is a collection of letters that could scarcely be equaled for speed, for clarity, for self-revelation, for wit and charm. We are shown the most fantastic blend of a woman: fanaticism, physical courage, avarice, mystical exaltation and witch-wife superstition; social poise and financial shrewdness, a timeless feminine coquetry tempered by that curious innocence which is the special gift of the American woman: all driven mercilessly by a tautness of the nerves, a deep-lying hysteria that urges her to self-hypnosis. Toward the last she had almost lost her natural reactions. Anger, fear, delight, hope—no more of these. She was a Will.

Mrs. Evans returned to Mexico to take up her husband’s fight when he had wearied to death of it. Belief in private property had not yet become a religion. She was animated by sentiment for her dead husband. All feminine, she insisted that his shade still guarded and directed her. The demon that possessed her was by no means of so spiritual a nature as she fancied: she was ruled by a single-minded love of money and power. She came into Mexico at harvest time, and after a short, sharp battle she got hold of the ripened wheat on her main hacienda. This victory fired her, and was the beginning of the end. Shortly afterward the shade of her husband left her. “I stand alone.”

No single glimmer of understanding of the causes of revolution or the rights of the people involved ever touched her mind. She loved Spaniards, the British, the Americans of the foreign colony. She thought the Indians made good servants, though occasionally they betrayed her. She writes with annoyance
of Obregón’s taking Mexico City and creating a disturbance when she was on the point of wresting from the Indians her second crop of wheat—“gold in color, gold in reality!” She is most lyrical, most poetic when she contemplates this gold which shall be hers, though all Mexico go to waste around her. Carranza’s flight interested her merely because it menaced her chances of getting the only threshing machine in the Puebla Valley.

Of all the machinations, the crooked politics, the broken faiths, the orders and counter orders, the plots and counterplots that went on between literally thousands of people over this single holding, I have not time to tell. Mrs. Evans was passed from hand to hand, nobody wanted to be responsible for what must eventually happen to her. She pressed everybody into her service, from her maids to the high diplomats. Every man of any official note in Mexico, connected with the three governments, finally got into the business, and she shows them all up in turn.

The story of the double dealing here revealed is not pretty, showing as it does some of our eminent diplomats engaged in passing the buck and gossiping behind each other’s backs. But sooner or later they all advised her to listen to reason, accept 100,000 pesos for her land and give way. At least they perceived what she could not; that here was a national movement that must be reckoned with.

At first she would not. And later, she could not. She loved the romantic danger of her situation, she admired herself in the role of heroine. Her appetite for excitement increased; she confessed herself jaded, and sought greater danger.

Speaking of a safe conduct she obtained in order to go over her hacienda and inspect the crops, she says: “You see it means a chance of gaining 80,000 pesos besides the adventure.” After each hairbreadth encounter with sullen Indians armed with rope and scythe, with troops bearing bared arms, she was flushed with a tense joy. Later, when she came to open war, she would ride into armed groups with her pistol drawn, singing
“Nous sommes les enfants de Gasconne!”
She cracked an Indian agrarian over the head with her riding whip during an altercation over the watercourse and patrolled the fields during harvest with a small army.

Her love of the drama was getting the upper hand of principle. If at first her cry was all for law and justice, later she refers to herself merrily as an outlaw. “You have no idea how naturally one takes to the greenwood!” She became a female conquistador—victory was her aim, and she was as unscrupulous in her methods as any other invader.

There is not a line in her letters to show that she had any grasp of the true inward situation, but her keen eye and ready wit missed no surface play of event. She maintained peaceable relations first with one, then another of the many groups of rebels. Inexplicably the situation would shift and change, her allies would vanish, leaving her mystified. She had all Mexico divided into two classes: the Good, who were helping her hold her property, and the Bad, who were trying to take it from her.

She could be self-possessed in the grand manner, and seemed to have second-sight in everything immediately concerning herself. She sat for three days and fed her pigeons while serious persons advised her to pay the 300 pesos ransom demanded for her majordomo, kidnapped to the hills. She refused. It was too much to pay for a majordomo, and she felt they would not shoot him anyhow. They did not. When he returned she sent him back with a present of $80 to the kidnappers.

At another crisis she played chess. After a brilliant encounter with some hint of gunfire, she came in and washed her hair. At times she studied astronomy, other times she read Marcus Aurelius or poetry. At all times she played the great lady. Her love for her horses, her dogs, her servants, her workers and allies was all of a piece, grounded in her sense of possession. They were hers; almost by virtue of that added grace she loved them, and she looked after them in the feudal manner.

There was something wild and strange in her, a hint of madness that touches genius; she lived in a half-burned ranch house with her dogs, near a haunted chapel, hourly expecting attack, and longed to join the coyotes in their weird dances outside her door. She foretold the manner of her own death, and related for sober fact the most hair-raising ghost story I have ever read:

The last night I was there I had been in bed an hour perhaps and was growing drowsy when I heard some one crying at my window. The
most gentle attenuated sobbing; the most pitiful sounds you ever heard. I never for a minute thought of the spirits, but called the girl to light the candle. She heard it too—but the strange part is,
I
said it was at the back window and
she
heard it at the front, and neither did
she
think of spirits. As she opened to see who was there, IT came in sobbing—and we looked at each other and closed the windows. Perhaps you think we were frightened or horrified? I can only answer for myself—it filled me with an intense pity. I only wanted to comfort it and I said to the girl: “If it would
only
be quiet.” I then promised to have the mass said and invite the people, and it left, sobbing. And we, of course, both went to our beds to sleep dreamlessly till morning.

Revolution is not gentle, either for those who make it or those who oppose it. This story has its own value as a record of one life lived very fully and consciously. I think the life and death of Mrs. Evans were her own private adventures, most gladly sought and enviably carried through. As a personality, she is worth attention, being beautiful, daring and attractive. As a human being she was avaricious, with an extraordinary hardness of heart and ruthlessness of will; and she died in a grotesque cause.

In Mexico there is a well seasoned tradition of fine caricature: almost every one of the younger painters possesses this lacerating gift. It goes with the Mexican aptitude for deadly discernment of the comic in the other person, together with each man’s grave regard for his own proper dignity. In arguments, whether personal or political, they resort early to popular songs and cartoons that carry sharper fangs than any other sort of debate. They have a charming habit of disregarding the main point at issue long enough to call attention to some defect or weakness, preferably an irremediable one, in the opponent. The quick-witted public, humanly fond of a joke on someone else, laughs the loser out.

Covarrubias in this is more Mexican than the Mexicans. As a youth he moved among that group of younger insurgents who revolutionized Mexican painting almost overnight. He was the youngest, and no one was ever born so naïve as he appeared. He did no serious painting, but amused himself at the innocent pastime of making caricatures of the serious paintings of others, and thereafter it was an effort to look at those paintings with an untangled viewpoint. He had a merry little way of dropping into the cafés haunted by his set, joining the carefree group gathered there, and dashing off a few careless impressions of their faces that would spoil their evening for them.

While he was yet too young to be called to account, he brought his talents to New York, and for once the favorite success legend of this nation jibed with the pure truth. The brilliant suddenness of his popularity made the old-fashioned tales of the hardships of genius sound a trifle drab, as his caricature of our native celebrities put a crimp in the high seriousness of intellectual life as she was being led in this city.

Smart New York, under whose garment of custom tailored sophistication beats an eager barbarian heart, touched to wonder by all that is deft, off-hand and of high visibility, had found a new champion; a boy with sure-fire stuff, backed up with the invaluable social gift of malice. “Enfant du siècle” they dubbed him, among other things. He is more than a mere child of his century; more than contemporaneous. He is current—as aptly present in the public interest as this month’s leading musical revue.

It is his speed, his wit, his lively accuracy that first arrest the attention. But beyond his showy technique he has the spontaneous combustion called genius. In this collection of more than sixty drawings, there is only one failure: Babe Ruth. And that merely a comparative failure. There are less than half a dozen that are not superb. The rest are beyond criticism as keen satirical comment, and I claim it is a comment considerably more than skin-deep.

Covarrubias has a wide range of symbols, a command of many styles, and he adapts his medium and his method of approach with an impish understanding of the personality of his subject. Compare the caricatures of Alfred Stieglitz, of Calvin Coolidge, of Robert Edmond Jones, of Xavier Algara. If in the
case of President Coolidge he has subtly piled up the miserable details, at other times he strips his subject to the buff: literally, in the drawing of Jack Dempsey, where in a few strokes we are given three dimensions, a framework with a skeleton inside: and in all of them, something else that belongs to metaphysics: a feeling that he has exposed the very outer appearance of a sitter that is the clue to an inner quality the sitter has spent most of his life trying to hide, or disguise. If that isn’t murder, what is it? And what is?