27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays Page 5
Sangre mala, you call it?
THE JUDGE:
Your pride turned inward too far, excluded the world and lost itself in a mirror.
MOTHER:
No, we admitted too much of the world, I think.
We should have put up more fences.
The Conquistadors must not neglect their fences.
FATHER: Ours were neglected.
MOTHER: We poured our blood in the desert to make it flower.
FATHER: The flowers were not good flowers.
(The sky through the doorway darkens. Wind moans.)
MOTHER: They were neglected.
SON: (tormented) Mother!
MOTHER: I never should have poured—dark wine—at supper.
SON: Mother!
MOTHER:
Yes—yes, lately the place has grown a great deal wilder
because of neglect
or maybe because winds take more liberty with it.
Storms seem to come more often.
FATHER:
Year after year it’s the same.
I step out the door, a little bit drunk after supper, to watch down the valley—
Five miles off, even ten,
the rainstorms advancing like armies of tall, silent men.
Nothing changes . . .
MOTHER:
But isn’t it strange how things grow up in a life?
Like trees—
One spring planted—accepted—forgotten almost,
Then all of a sudden—crowding the backyard with shadows!
FATHER:
Invaders!
We are invaders ourselves.
These ranches, these golden valleys—
A land so fiercely contested as this land was.
Father’s blood and mother’s anguish bought it!
Is it to be merely used for cattle to graze on?
Are we to build on it nothing but barns and fences?
No, no, we are invaders. We used the land—gave nothing!
But even so—
This man has killed our daughter.
We ask in return his life.
MOTHER: Demand his life in return.
LUISA: Hear how the blood-lust in them cries out loud!
THE JUDGE:
Rosalio, in your presence your sister was slain.
It is for you to accuse the man who . . .
SON: (springing up) Yes, I accuse him!
LUISA:
Your tongue should be torn from your mouth and flung to buzzards!
Shameless—Shameless!
SON:
Yes, I am shameless—shameless.
The kitchen-woman has spoken her kitchen truth.
The loft of the barn was occupied by lovers not once, not twice, but time and time again, whenever our blood’s rebellion broke down bars.
Resistless it was, this coming of birds together in heaven’s center . . .
Plumage—song—the dizzy spirals of flight all suddenly forced together in one brief, burning conjunction!
Oh—oh—
a passionate little spasm of wings and throats that clutched—and uttered—darkness . . .
Down
down
down
Afterwards, shattered, we found our bodies in grass.
(Soft music)
The coolness healed us,
the evening drained our fever,
bandaged the wounded part in silk of stars . . .
And so did the wind take back the startling pony—and hurl him down arroyos toward the dawn!
(He sinks down on the bench between his parents.)
THE JUDGE: (rising)
Enough for a while—enough. The court is thirsty.
(He crosses to door and shouts.)
Muckachos! Run to the well and bring us water!
Or if you prefer—habanero!
Musician—play!
(Smiling cavalierly, The Guitar Player moves sinuously forward.
He stands in the light through the window and plays a danson. Gourds and buckets of water are brought inside and passed among the benches.
The Judge returns from the doorway.)
SCENE II
THE JUDGE:
The clouds are darkening still.
If heaven is good enough to send us rain, the court will be suspended until tomorrow.
Now let us get on.
(He pauses before the people from Casa Blanca.)
Rosalio, could you not guess that this violation of blood which you have acknowledged would certainly—sooner or later—bring shame—disaster?
SON:
We knew—and we did not know.
We were oblivious of this sun-bleached man who sullenly dreamed to possess her.
But he of us derived his green suspicion, the only green thing in him, watered and tended by this sly Indian woman.
He, our former repair man, mender of our broken fences, which almost without our knowledge had grown to be his, till he seized on the girl—instead of Casa Blanca.
Finding that all of his clutching was finally gainless, clutched an axe!
For he would be owner of something—or else destroy it!
(The guitar sounds. He faces The Rancher.)
You, repair man, come early, before daybreak can betray you.
Now clasp in your hand the smooth white heft of the axe!
But wait! Wait—first—
Fill up the tin buckets with chalky white fluid, the milk of that phosphorescent green lizard—Memory, passion.
LUISA: The tainted spring . . .
SON:
Unsatisfied old appetites—And stir these together—carefully, not to slop over—
LUISA: . . . is bubbling!
SON: (to Luisa)
You, too, assist in this business.
Bring a scapular blade to remove the stained parts of the lumber—collection of rags to scrub the splatterings off.
MOTHER: (moaning) Ahhh—ahhh . . .
SON: (deliriously)
For often toward daybreak that rime of the reptile’s diamond-like progress . . .
LUISA: (mockingly) He wanders again. The tainted spring is bubbling!
SON:
. . . makes following easy for those who desire to pursue him.
He depends on his tail’s rapid motion, scimitar-like—green lightning—to stave off hunters!
You have to skip rope lightly, handy-man, our former repair man,
you have to skip rope lightly—lightly!—lightly!
Carry your axe and your bucket
slow-clanking past frozen hen-houses
where sinister stalactite fowls make rigid comment
claw—beak—
barely, perceptibly stirring their russet feathers—
on purpose of your quiet passage.
Go on—go on to where
the barn,
that moon-paled building,
large
and church-like in arch of timber,
tumescent between the sensual fingers of vines,
intractably waits
this side of your death-coition!
There halt, repair man, for surely the light will halt you if nothing else does.
(Guitar)
RANCHER: (trance-like)
It stood in a deep well of light.
It stood like a huge wrecked vessel—in deep seas of light!
SON: You halted . . .
CHORUS: (like an echo) Halt!
RANCHER: Yes.
SON: At this immemorial vault,
CHORUS: Vault!
SON:
this place of plateaux and ranges of Spanish-named mountains . . .
CHORUS: Mountains!
RANCHER:
Yes.
I set up the ladder.
SON:
Set up the steep, steep ladder—
Narrow . . .
RANCHER:
Narrow! —Enquiring
If Christ be still on the Cross!
CHORUS: Cross!
SON: Against the north wall set it . . .
RANCHER:
Set it and climbed . . .
(He clutches his forehead.) Climbed!
CHORUS: Climbed!
SON:
Climbed!
To the side of the loft that gave all things to the sky.
The axe—
for a single moment—
saluted the moon—then struck!
CHORUS: Struck!
SON: And she didn’t cry . . .
RANCHER:
Struck?
Aye, struck—struck—struck!
CHORUS: Struck!
(Dissonant chords on the guitar, with cymbals. The two men surge together and struggle like animals till they are torn apart. There is a rumble of thunder.)
THE JUDGE:
Thunder?—Over the Lobos.
Señores, Your passion is out of season.
This is the time for reflection to calm the brain, as later, I hope, the rain will cool our ranches.
I know that truth evades the certain statement but gradually and obliquely filters through the mind’s unfettering in sleep and dream.
The stammered cry gives more of truth than the hand could put on passionless paper . . .
My neighbor from Casa Rojo, Stand and speak your part in this dark recital.
You say that the woman Elena never allowed you freely the right of marriage?
RANCHER:
Never freely, and never otherwise.
It was no marriage.
They have compared her to water—and water, indeed, she was.
Water that ran through my fingers when I was athirst.
Oh, from the time that I worked at Casa Blanca,
a laborer for her people, as they have mentioned,
I knew there was something obscure—subterranean—cool—from which she drew her persistence,
when by all rights of what I felt to be nature, she should have dried—as fields in a rainless summer, a summer like this one that presently starves our grain-fields, she should have dried, this seemingly loveless woman, and yet she didn’t.
Yes, she was cool, she was water, even as they have described her—
but water sealed under the rock—where I was concerned.
I burned.
I burned.
I burned . . .
(Three dissonant notes are sounded on the guitar. There is a feverish, incessant rustling sound like wind in a heap of dead leaves.)
RANCHER: (hoarsely)
I finally said to her once, in the late afternoon it was, and she stood in the doorway . . .
(The dissonant notes are repeated. The rustling is louder. A sound of mocking laughter outside the door, sudden and brief.
The Desert Elena appears. It is the same lost girl, but not as the brother had seen her. This is the vision of the loveless bride, the water sealed under rock from the lover’s thirst—not the green of the mountains and the clear swift streams, but the sun-parched desert. Her figure is closely sheathed in a coarse-fibered bleached material, her hair bound tight to her skull. She bears a vessel in either hand, like balanced scales, one containing a cactus, the other a wooden grave-cross with a wreath of dry, artificial flowers on it. Only The Rancher observes her.)
RANCHER:
‘Woman,’ I said to her, ‘Woman, what keeps you alive?’
‘What keeps you sparkling so, you make-believe fountain?’
(to the vision)
‘You and the desert,’ I told her,
‘You are sisters—sisters beneath the skin!’
But even the desert is sometimes pregnant with something,
distorted progeny,
twisted, dry, imbecilic,
gives birth to the cacti, the waterless Judas tree.
The blood of the root makes liquor to scorch the brain and put foul oaths on the tongue.
But you—you, woman, bear nothing, nothing ever but death—which is all you will get with your pitiful—stone kind of body.
ELENA: Oh, no—I will get something more.
THE JUDGE:
More? You will get something more?
Where will it come from—lovely, smiling lady?
(The dead leaves rustle.)
Will it come singing and shouting and plunging bare-back
down canyons
and run like wild birds home to Sangre de Cristo
when August crazes the sky?
ELENA: (smiling) Yes!
RANCHER: (to the Judge)
Yes, she admitted, yes!
For in their house, these people from Casa Blanca—no one can say they fear to speak the truth! ELENA:
Perhaps it will come as you say—but until then
The fences are broken—mend them.
The moon is needing a new coat of white-wash on it!
Attend to that, repair man! Those are your duties.
But keep your hands off me!
RANCHER: My hands are empty—starved!
ELENA: Fill them with chicken-feathers! Or buzzard-feathers.
RANCHER: My lips are dry.
ELENA:
Then drink from the cistern. Or if the cistern is empty, moisten your lips with the hungry blood of the fox that kills our fowls.
RANCHER: The fox-blood burns!
ELENA:
Mine, too.
I have no coolness for you:
my hands are made of the stuff in the dried sulphur pools.
These are my gifts: the cactus, the bleached grave-cross with the wreath of dead vines on it.
Listen! The wind, when it blows, is rattling dry castanets in the restless grave-yard.
The old monks whittle—they make prayer-beads in the cellar.
Their fingers are getting too stiff to continue the work.
They dread the bells. For the bells are heavy and iron and have no wetness in them.
The bones of the dead have cracked from lack of moisture.
The sisters come out in a quick and steady file and their black skirts whisper dryer and dryer and dryer, until they halt before their desperate march has reached the river.
The river has turned underground.
The sisters crumble: beneath their black skirts crumble, the skirts are blown and the granular salty bodies go whispering off among the lifeless grasses . . .
I must go too,
For I, like these, have glanced at a burning city.
Now let me go!
(She turns austerely and moves away from the door. Three dissonant notes on the guitar and the sound of dead rustling leaves is repeated. A yellow flash of lightning in the portal, now vacant, and the sound of wind.)
RANCHER:
My hand shot-out, whip-like, to catch at her wrist,
But she had gone . . .
My wife—that make-believe fountain—had fled from the door.
(He covers his face with his hands.)
THE JUDGE: (rising)
Player, give us the music of wind that promises rain.
The time is dry.
But clouds have come,
and the sound of thunder is welcome.
Now let the Indian women tread the earth in the dance that destroys the locust!
(The three white-robed women rise from their bench and move in front. They perform a slow, angular dance to drums and guitar. Their movements slow. The music softens. The dance and the music become a reticent background for the speech.)
RANCHER:
Elena had fled through the door as the storm broke on us.
She had fled through the open door, out over the fields
darkening down the valley where rain was advancing its tall silent squadrons of silver.
Her figure was lost in a sudden convulsion of shadows heaved by the eucalyptus.
(The dancers raise their arms.)
The rain came down as sound of rapturous trumpets rolled over the earth,
and still
the delicate warmthless yellow
of late afternoon persisted
behind
that transparent curtain of silver.
At once the clouds
had changed their weight into motion,
their inkiness thinned, their cumulous forms rose higher, their edges were stirred as radiant feathers, upwards, above the mountains.
(Distant choral singing. Wordless. “La Golondrina” is woven into the music.)
RANCHER:
A treble choir now sang in the eucalyptus, an Angelus rang!
(Bells)
The whole wide vault of the valley, the sweep of the plain assumed a curious lightness under the rain.
The birds already, the swallows,
before the rainstorm ceased,
had begun to climb the atmosphere’s clean spirals.
Ethereal wine
intoxicated these tipplers,
their notes were wild and prodigal as fool’s silver.
The moon, unshining, blank, bone-like, stood over the Lobos mountains and grinned and grinned like a speechless idiot where the cloud-mass thinned . . .
I saw her once more—briefly, running along by the fence at the end of the meadow.
The long and tremendous song of the eucalyptus described this flight:
the shoulders inclined stiffly forward,
the arms flung out, throat arched,
more as though drunk with a kind of heroic abandon—than blinded—by fright.
(He covers his face.)
Forgive me . . .
(The cloud that darkened the sun passes over. The stream of fierce sunlight returns through the door and the windows. The women return to the bench.)
SCENE III
(The Judge pours water from a gourd to wet his handkerchief and wipes his forehead.)
THE JUDGE:
The clouds have cheated again—and crossed away.
Our friend the sun comes back like an enemy now.
We want the rain—the coolness—the shade . . .
It is not given us yet.
THE WOMEN: (softly chanting)
Rojo—rojo
Rojo de sangre es el sol.
THE JUDGE:
It is the lack of what he desires most keenly that twists a man out of nature.
When you were a boy, my friend from Casa Rojo, you were gentle—withdrew too much from the world.
This reticence, almost noble, persisted through youth,
but later, as you grew older,
an emptiness, still unfilled, became a cellar,
a cellar into which blackness dripped and trickled,
a slow, corrosive seepage.
Then the reticence was no longer noble—but locked—resentful, and breeding a need for destruction.