The Blood of the Conquerors 6 – Fergusson · Verses Across
Literature · Historical Fiction
The Blood of the Conquerors 6Chapter VI
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Literature · Historical Fiction
The Blood of the Conquerors 6
Chapter VI
FergussonEnglish
At ten o’clock in the morning Ramon was hard at work in the office of James B. Green. He worked efficiently and with zest as he always did after one of his trips to the mountains. He got out of these ventures into another environment about what some men get out of sprees—a complete change of the state of mind. Archulera and his daughter were now completely forgotten, and all of his usual worries and plans were creeping back into his consciousness.
But this day he had a feeling of pleasant anticipation. At first he could not account for it. And then he remembered the girl—the one he had seen on the train and had met again at the Montezuma ball. It seemed as though the thought of her had been in the back of his mind all the time, and now suddenly came forward, claiming all his attention, stirring him to a quick, unwonted excitement. She had said he might come to see her. He was to ’phone first. Maybe she would be alone.…
In this latter hope he was disappointed. She gave him the appointment, and she herself admitted him. He thought he had never seen such a dainty bit of fragrant perfection, all in pink that matched the pink of her strange little crinkled mouth.
“I’m awfully glad you came,” she told him. (Her gladness was always awful.) She led him into the sitting room and presented him to the tall emaciated sick man and the large placid woman who had watched over her so carefully on the train.
Gordon Roth greeted him with a cool and formal manner into which he evidently tried to infuse something of cordiality, as though a desire to be just and broad-minded struggled with prejudice. Mrs. Roth looked at him with curiosity, and gave him a still more restrained greeting. The conversation was a weak and painful affair, kept barely alive, now by one and now by another. The atmosphere was heavy with disapproval. If their greetings had left Ramon in any doubt as to the attitude of the girl’s family toward him, that doubt was removed by the fact that neither Mrs. Roth nor her son showed any intention of leaving the room. This would have been not unusual if he had called on a Mexican girl, especially if she belonged to one of the more old-fashioned families; but he knew that American girls are left alone with their suitors if the suitor is at all welcome.
He knew a little about this family from hear-say. They came from one of the larger factory towns in northern New York, and were supposed to be moderately wealthy. They used a very broad “a” and served tea at four o’clock in the afternoon. Gordon Roth was a Harvard graduate and did not conceal the fact. Neither did he conceal his hatred for this sandy little western town, where ill-health had doomed him to spend many of his days and perhaps to end them.
The girl was strangely different from her mother and brother. Whereas their expressions were stiff and solemn, her eyes showed an irrepressible gleam of humour, and her fascinating little mouth was mobile with mirth. She fidgeted around in her chair a good deal, as a child does when bored.
Mrs. Roth decorously turned the conversation toward the safe and reliable subjects of literature and art.
“What do you think of Maeterlinck, Mr. Delcasar?” she enquired in an innocent manner that must have concealed malice.
“I don’t know him,” Ramon admitted, “Who is he?”
Mrs. Roth permitted herself to smile. Gordon Roth came graciously to the rescue.
“Maeterlinck is a great Belgian writer,” he explained. “We are all very much interested in him.…”
Julia gave a little flounce in her chair, and crossed her legs with a defiant look at her mother.
“I’m not interested in him,” she announced with decision. “I think he’s a bore. Listen, Mr. Delcasar. You know Conny Masters? Well, he was telling me the most thrilling tale the other day. He said that the country Mexicans have a sort of secret religious fraternity that most of the men belong to, and that they meet every Good Friday and beat themselves with whips and sit down on cactus and crucify a man on a cross and all sorts of horrible things … for penance you know, just like the monks and things in the Middle Ages.… He claims he saw them once and that they had blood running down to their heels. Is that all true? I’ve forgotten what he called them.…”
Ramon nodded.
“Sure. The penitentes. I’ve seen them lots of times.”
“O, do tell us about them. I love to hear about horrible things.”
“Well, I’ve seen lots of penitente processions, but the best one I ever saw was a long time ago, when I was a little kid. There are not so many of them now, and they don’t do as much as they used to. The church is down on them, you know, and they’re afraid. Ten years ago if you tried to look at them, they would shoot at you, but now tourists take pictures of them.”
Gordon Roth’s curiosity had been aroused.
“Tell me,” he broke in. “What is the meaning of this thing? How did it get started?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Ramon admitted. “My grandfather told me that they brought it over from Spain centuries ago, and the Indians here had a sort of whipping fraternity, and the two got mixed up, I guess. The church used to tolerate it; it was a regular religious festival. But now it’s outlawed. They still have a lot of political power. They all vote the same way. One man that was elected to Congress—they say that the penitente stripes on his back carried him there. And he was a gringo too. But I don’t know. It may be a lie.…”
“But tell us about that procession you saw when you were a little boy,” Julia broke in. She was leaning forward with her chin in her hand, and her big grey eyes, wide with interest, fixed upon his face.
“Well, I was only about ten years old, and I was riding home from one of our ranches with my father. We were coming through Tijeras canyon. It was March, and there was snow on the ground in patches, and the mountains were cold and bare, and I remember I thought I was going to freeze. Every little while we would get off and set fire to a tumble-weed by the road, and warm our hands and then go on again.…
“Anyway, pretty soon I heard a lot of men singing, all together, in deep voices, and the noise echoed around the canyon and sounded awful solemn. And I could hear, too, the slap of the big wide whips coming down on the bare backs, wet with blood, like slapping a man with a wet towel, only louder. I didn’t know what it was, but my father did, and he called to me and we spurred our horses right up the mountain, and hid in a clump of cedar up there. Then they came around a bend in the road, and I began to cry because they were all covered with blood, and one of them fell down.… My father slapped me and told me to shut up, or they would come and shoot us.”
“But what did they look like? What were they doing?” Julia demanded frowning at him, impatient with his rambling narrative.
“Well, in front there was un carreta del muerto. That means a wagon of death. I don’t think you would ever see one any more. It was just an ordinary wagon drawn by six men, naked to the waist and bleeding, with other men walking beside them and beating them with blacksnake whips, just like they were mules. In the wagon they had a big bed of stones, covered with cactus, and a man sitting in the cactus, who was supposed to represent death. And then they had a Virgin Mary, too. Four penitentes just like the others, with nothing on but bloody pants and black bandages around their eyes, carried the image on a litter raised up over their heads, and they had swords fastened to their elbows and stuck between their ribs, so that if they let down, the swords would stick into their hearts and kill them. And behind that came the Cristo—the man that represented Jesus, you know, dragging a big cross. Behind him came twenty or thirty more penitentes, the most I ever saw at once, some of them whipping themselves with big broad whips made out of amole. One was too weak to whip himself, so two others walked behind him and whipped him. Pretty soon he fell down and they walked over him and stepped on his stomach.…”
“But did they crucify the man, the whatever-you-call-him?” Gordon demanded.
“The Cristo. Sure. They crucify one every year. They used to nail him. Now they generally do it with ropes, but that’s bad enough, because it makes him swell up and turn blue.… Sometimes he dies.”
Julia was listening with lips parted and eyes wide, horrified and yet fascinated, as are so many women by what is cruel and bloody. But Gordon, who had become equally interested, was cool and inquisitive.
“And you mean to tell me that at one time nearly all the—er—native people belonged to this barbaric organization, and that many of them do yet?”
“Nearly all the common pelados,” Ramon hastened to explain. “They are nearly all Indian or part Indian, you know. Not the educated people.” Here a note of pride came into his voice. “We are descended from officers of the Spanish army—the men who conquered this country. In the old days, before the Americans came, all these common people were our slaves.”
“I see,” said Gordon Roth in a dry and judicial tone.
The penitentes, as a subject of conversation, seemed exhausted for the time being and Ramon had given up all hope of being alone with Julia. He rose and took his leave. To his delight Julia followed him to the door. In the hall she gave him her hand and looked up at him, and neither of them found anything to say. For some reason the pressure of her hand and the look of her eyes flustered and confused him more than had all the coldness and disapproval of her family. At last he said good-bye and got away, with his hat on wrong side before and the blood pounding in his temples.
