A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The Moon of Montezuma

This is a story you can never forget. It is a tale of terror, of murder in the night, of justice beyond the laws of man. The background is modern Mexico... yet its long-dead past, when the Aztecs ruled and Montezuma and Cuauhtemoc were as gods, pushes inexorably into the lives of a beautiful American girl and her infant son. There can be only one result...

The hired car was very old. The girl in it was very young.

They were both American. Which was strange here in this far-off place, this other world, as remote from things American as anywhere could be.

The car was a vintage model, made by some concern whose very name has been forgotten by now; a relic of the Teens or early Twenties, built high and squared-off at the top, like a box on wheels.

It crawled precariously to the top of the long, winding, sharply ascending rutted road — wheezing, gasping, threatening to slip backward at any moment, but never doing so; miraculously managing even to inch on up.

It stopped at last, opposite what seemed to be a blank, biscuit-colored wall. This had a thick door set into it, but no other openings. A skimpy tendril or two of bougainvillea, burningly mauve, crept downward over its top here and there. There were cracks in the wall, and an occasional place where the plaster facing had fallen off to reveal the adobe underpart.

The girl peered out from the car. Her hair was blonde, her skin fair. She looked unreal in these surroundings of violent color; somehow completely out of key with them. She was extremely tired-looking; there were shadows under her blue eyes. She was holding a very young baby wrapped into-a little cone-shaped bundle in a blanket. A baby not more than a few weeks old. And beside the collar of her coat a rosebud was pinned. Scarcely opened, yet dying already. Red as a glowing coal. Or a drop of blood. She looked at the driver, then back to the blank wall again. “Is this where?”

He shrugged. He didn’t understand her language. He said something to her. A great deal of something.

She shook her head bewilderedly. His language was as mysterious to her. She consulted the piece of paper she was holding in her hand, then looked again at the place where they’d stopped. “But there’s no house here. There’s just a wall.”

He flicked the little pennant on his meter so that it sprang upright. Underneath it said “7.50”. She could read that, at least. He opened the creaking door, to show her what he meant. “Pay me, Señorita. I have to go all the way back to the town.”

She got out reluctantly, a forlorn, lost figure. “Wait here,” she said. “Wait for me until I find out.”

He understood the sense of her faltering gesture. He shook his head firmly. He became very voluble. He had to go back to where he belonged, he had no business being all the way out here. It would be dark soon. His was the only auto in the whole town.

She paid him, guessing at the unfamiliar money she still didn’t understand. When he stopped nodding, she stopped giving it to him. There was very little left — a paper bill or two, a handful of coins. She reached in and dragged out a bulky bag and stood that on the ground beside her. Then she turned around and looked at the inscrutable wall.

The car turned creakily and went down the long, rutted road, back into the little town below.

She was left there, with child, with baggage, with a scrap of paper in her hand. She went over to the door in the wall, looked about for something to ring. There was a short length of rope hanging there against the side of the door. She tugged at it and a bell, the kind with hanging clapper, jangled loosely.

The child opened its eyes momentarily, then closed them again. Blue eyes, like hers.

The door opened, narrowly but with surprising quickness. An old woman stood looking at her. Glittering black eyes, gnarled face the color of tobacco, blue reboso coifed about her head to hide every vestige of hair, one end of the scarf looped rearward over her throat. There was something malignant in the idol-like face, something almost Aztec.

“Señorita wishes?” she breathed suspiciously.

“Can you read?” The girl showed her the scrap of paper. That talisman that had brought her so far.

The old woman touched her eyes, shook her head. She couldn’t read.

“But isn’t this — isn’t this—” Her tired tongue stumbled over the unfamiliar words. “Caminode...”

The old woman pointed vaguely in dismissal. “Go, ask them in the town, they can answer your questions there.” She tried to close the heavy door again.

The girl planted her foot against it, held it open. “Let me in. I was told to come here. This is the place I was told to come. I’m tired, and I have no place to go.” For a moment her face was wreathed in lines of weeping, then she curbed them. “Let me come in and rest a minute until I can find out. I’ve come such a long way. All night long, that terrible train from Mexico City, and before that the long trip down from the border...” She pushed the door now with her free hand as well as her foot.

“I beg you, Señorita,” the old woman said with sullen gravity, “do not enter here now. Do not force your way in here. There has been a death in this house.”

“¿Qué pasa?”a younger, higher voice suddenly said, somewhere unseen behind her.

The crone stopped her clawing, turned her head. Suddenly she had whisked from sight as though jerked on a wire, and a young girl had taken her place in the door opening.

The same age as the intruder, perhaps even a trifle younger. Jet-black hair parted arrow-straight along the center of her head. Her skin the color of old ivory. The same glittering black eyes as the old one, but larger, younger. Even more liquid, as though they had recently been shedding tears. There was the same cruelty implicit in them too, but not yet as apparent. There was about her whole beauty, and she was beautiful, a tinge of cruelty, of barbarism. That same mask-like Aztec cast of expression, of age-old racial inheritance. “¿Si?”

“Can you understand me?” the girl pleaded, hoping against hope for a moment.

There was a flash of perfect white teeth, but the black hair moved negatively. “The señorita is lost, perhaps?”

Somehow, the American sensed the meaning of the words. “This is where they told me to come. I inquired in Mexico City. The American consul. They even told me how to get here, what trains. I wrote him, and I never heard. I’ve been writing him and writing him, and I never heard. But this must be the place. This is where I’ve been writing, Camino de las Rosas... A dry sob escaped with the last.

The liquid black eyes had narrowed momentarily. “The señorita looks for who?”

“Bill. Bill Taylor.” She tried to turn it into Spanish, with the pitiful resources at her command. “Señor Taylor. Señor Bill Taylor. Look, I’ll show you his picture.” She fumbled in her handbag, drew out a small snapshot, handed it to the waiting girl. It was a picture of herself and a young man. “Him. I’m looking for him. Now do you understand?”

For a moment there seemed to have been a sharp intake of breath, but it might have been an illusion. The dark-haired girl smiled ruefully. Then she shook her head.

“Don’t you know him? Isn’t he here? Isn’t this his house?” She pointed to the wall alongside. “But it must be. Then whose house is it?”

The dark-haired girl pointed to herself, then to the old woman hovering and hissing surreptitiously in the background. “Casa de nosotros. The house of Chata and her mother. Nobody else.”

“Then he isn’t here?” The American leaned her back for a moment hopelessly against the wall, turning the other way, to face out from it. She let her head roll a little to one side. “What am I going to do? Where is he, what became of him? I haven’t even enough money to go back. I have nowhere to go. They warned me back home not to come down here alone like this, looking for him — oh, I should have listened!”

The black eyes were speculatively narrow again, had been for some time. She pointed to the snapshot. “Hermano? He is the brother of the señorita, or—?”

The blonde stranger touched her own ring finger. This time the sob came first. “He’s my husband! I had to pawn my wedding ring, to help pay my way here. I’ve got to find him! He was going to send for me later — and then he never did.”

The black eyes had flicked downward to the child, almost unnoticeably, then up again. Once more she pointed to the snapshot.

The blonde nodded. “It’s his. Ours. I don’t think he even knows about it. I wrote him, and I never heard back...”

The other’s head turned sharply aside for a moment, conferring with the old woman. In profile, her cameo-like beauty was even more expressive. So was the razor-sharpness of its latent cruelty.

Abruptly she had reached out with both hands. “Entra. Entra. Come in. Rest. Refresh yourself.” The door was suddenly open at full width, revealing a patio in the center of which was a profusion of white roses. The bushes were not many, perhaps six all told, but they were all in full bloom, weighted down with their masses of flowers. They were arranged in a hollow square. Around the outside ran a border of red-tiled flooring. In the center there was a deep gaping hole — a well, either being dug or being repaired. It was lined with a casing of shoring planks that protruded above its lip. A litter of construction effluvia lay around, lending a transient ugliness to the otherwise beautiful little enclosure: a wheelbarrow, several buckets, a mixing trough, a sack of cement, shovels and picks, and an undulating mound of misplaced earth brought up out of the cavity.

There was no one working at it now, it was too late in the day. Silence hung heavily. In the background was the house proper, its rooms ranged single file about three sides of the enclosure, each one characteristically opening onto it with its own individual doorway. The old houses of Moorish Africa, of which this was a lineal descendant, had been like that: blind to the street, windowless, cloistered, each living its life about its own inner, secretive courtyard. Twice transplanted — first to Spain, then to the newer Spain across the waters.

Now that entry had at last been granted, the blonde girl was momentarily hesitant about entering. “But if — but if this isn’t his house, what good is it to come in?”

The insistent hands of the other reached her, drew her, gently but firmly, across the threshhold. In the background the old woman still looked on with a secretive malignancy that might have been due solely to the wizened lines in her face.

“Pase, pase,” the dark-haired girl was coaxing her. Step in.

“Descansa.” Rest. She snapped her fingers with sudden, concealed authority behind her own back, and the old woman, seeming to understand the esoteric signal, sidled around to the side of them and out to the road for a moment, looked quickly up the road, then quickly down, picked up the bag standing there and drew it inside with her, leaning totteringly against its weight.

Suddenly the thick wall-door had closed behind her and the blonde wayfarer was in, whether she wanted to be or not.

The silence, the remoteness, was as if a thick, smothering velvet curtain had fallen all at once. Although the road had been empty, the diffuse, imponderable noises of the world had been out there somehow. Although this patio courtyard was unroofed and open to the same evening sky, and only a thick wall separated it from the outside, there was a stillness, a hush, as though it were a thousand miles away, or deep down within the earth.

They led her, one on each side of her — the girl with the slightest of forward-guiding hands just above her waist, the old woman still struggling with the bag — along the red-tiled walk skirting the roses, in under the overhanging portico of the house proper, and in through one of the doorways. It had no door as such; only a curtain of wooden-beaded strings was its sole provision for privacy and isolation. These clicked and hissed when they were stirred. Within were cool plaster walls painted a pastel color halfway up, allowed to remain undyed the rest of the way; an equally cool tiled flooring; an iron bedstead; an ebony chair or two, stiff, tortuously hand-carved, with rush-bottomed seats and backs. A serape of burning emerald and orange stripes, placed on the floor alongside the bed, served as a rug. A smaller one, of sapphire and cerise bands, affixed to the wall, served as the only decoration there was.

They sat her down in one of the chairs, the baby still in her arms. Chata, after a moment’s hesitancy, summoned up a sort of defiant boldness, reached out and deliberately removed the small traveling-hat from her head without asking permission. Her expressive eyes widened for a moment, then narrowed again, as they took in the exotic blonde hair in all its unhampered abundance.

Her eyes now went to the child, but more as an afterthought than as if that were her primary interest, and she leaned forward and admired and played with him a little, as women do with a child, and women, of any race. Dabbing her finger at his chin, at his little button of a nose, taking one of his little hands momentarily in hers, then relinquishing it again. There was something a trifle mechanical about her playing; there was no real feeling for the child at all.

She said something to the old woman, and the latter came back after a short interval with milk in an earthenware bowl.

“He’ll have to drink it with a nipple,” the young mother said. “He’s too tiny.” She handed him for a moment to Chata to hold for her, fumbled with her bag, opened it and got out his feeding-bottle. She poured some of the milk into that, then recapped it and took him up to feed him.

She had caught a curious look on Chata’s face in the moment or two she was holding him. As though she were studying the child closely; but not with melting fondness, with a completely detached, almost cold, curiosity.

They remained looking on for a few moments; then they slipped out and left her, the old woman first, Chata a moment later, with a few murmured words and a half-gesture toward the mouth, that she sensed as meaning she was to come and have something to eat with them when she was ready.

She fed him first, and then she turned back the covers and laid him down on the bed. She found two large-size safety-pins in her bag and pinned the covers down tight on either side of him, so that he could not roll off and fall down. His eyes were already closed again, one tiny fist bent backward toward his head. She kissed him softly, with a smothered sob — that was for the failure of the long pilgrimage that had brought her all this way — then tiptoed out.

There was an aromatic odor of spicy cooking hovering disembodiedly about the patio, but just where it was originating from she couldn’t determine. Of the surrounding six doorways, three were pitch-black. From one there was a dim, smouldering red glow peering. From another a paler, yellow light was cast subduedly. She mistakenly went toward this.

It was two doors down from the one from which she had just emerged. If they were together in there, they must be talking in whispers. She couldn’t hear a sound, not even the faintest murmur.

It had grown darker now; it was full night already, with the swiftness of the mountainous latitudes. The square of sky over the patio was soft and dark as indigo velour, with magnificent stars like many-legged silver spiders festooned on its underside. Below them the white roses gleamed phosphorescently in the starlight, with a magnesium-like glow. There was a tiny splash from the depths of the well as a pebble or grain of dislodged earth fell in.

She made her way toward the yellow-ombre doorway. Her attention had been on other things: the starlight, the sheen of the roses; and she turned the doorway and entered the room too quickly, without stopping outside to look in first.

She was already well over the threshhold and in before she stopped short, frozen there, with a stifled intake of fright and an instinctive clutching of both hands toward her throat.

The light came from two pairs of tapers. Between them rested a small bier that was perhaps only a trestled plank shrouded with a cloth. One pair stood at the head of it, one pair at the foot.

On the bier lay a dead child. An infant, perhaps days younger than her own. In fine white robes. Gardenias and white rosebuds disposed about it in impromptu arrangement, to form a little nest or bower. On the wall was a religious image; under it in a red glass cup burned a holy light.

The child lay there so still, as if waiting to be picked up and taken into its mother’s arms. Its tiny hands folded on its breast.

She drew a step closer, staring. A step closer, a step closer. Its hair was blond; fair, golden blond.

There was horror lurking in this somewhere. She was suddenly terribly frightened. She took another step, and then another. She wasn’t moving her feet, something was drawing them.

She was beside it now. The sickening, cloying odor of the gardenias was swirling about her head like a tide. The infant’s little eyes had been closed. She reached down gently, lifted an eyelid, then snatched her hand away. The baby’s eyes had been blue.

Horror might have found her then, but it was given no time. She whirled suddenly, not in fright so much as mechanistic nervousness, and Chata was standing motionless in full-center of the doorway, looking in at her.

The black head gave a toss of arrogance. “My child, yes. My little son.” And in the flowery language that can express itself as English never can, without the risk of being ridiculous: “The son of my heart.” For a moment her face crumbled and a gust of violent emotion swept across it, instantly was gone again.

But it hadn’t been grief, it had been almost maniacal rage. The rage of the savage who resents a loss, does not know how to accept it.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know — I didn’t mean to come in here—”

“Come, there is some food for you,” Chata cut her short curtly. She turned on her heel and went down the shadowy arcade toward the other lighted doorway, the more distant one her self-invited guest should have sought out in the first place.

The American went more slowly, turning in the murky afterglow beyond the threshhold to look lingeringly back inside again: I will not think of this for a while. Later, I know, I must, but not now. That in this house where he said he lived there is a child lying dead whose hair is golden, whose eyes were blue.

Chata had reappeared in the designated doorway through which she wanted her to follow, to mark it out for her, to hasten her coming. The American advanced toward it, and went in in turn.

They squatted on the floor to eat, as the Japanese do. The old woman palmed it, and Chata palmed it in turn, to have her do likewise, and to show her where.

She sank awkwardly down as they were, feeling her legs to be too long, but managing somehow to dispose of them with a fanned-out effect to the side. An earthenware bowl of rice and red beans was set down before her.

She felt a little faint for a moment, for the need of food, as the aroma reached her, heavy and succulent. She wanted to crouch down over it, and up-end the entire bowl against her face, to get its entire contents in all at one time.

The old woman handed her a tortilla, a round flat cake, paper-thin, of pestled maize, limp as a wet rag. She held it in her own hand helplessly, did not know what to do with it. They had no eating utensils.

The old woman took it back from her, deftly rolled it into a hollowed tube, returned it. She did with it as she saw them doing with theirs; held the bowl up closer to her mouth and scooped up the food in it by means of the tortilla.

The food was unaccustomedly piquant; it prickled, baffled the taste-buds of her tongue. A freakish thought from nowhere suddenly flitted through her mind: I should be careful. If they wanted to poison me... And then: But why should they want to harm me? I’ve done them no harm; my being here certainly does them no harm.

And because it held no solid substance, the thought misted away again.

She was so exhausted, her eyes were already drooping closed before the meal was finished. She recovered with a start, and they had both been watching her fixedly. She could tell that by the way fluidity of motion set in again, as happens when people try to cover up the rigid intentness that has just preceded it. Each motion only started as she resumed her observation of it.

“Tienes sueño,” Chata murmured. “¿Quieresacostarte?” And she motioned toward the doorway, without looking at it herself.

Somehow the American understood the intention of the words by the fact of the gesture, and the fact that Chata had not risen from the floor herself, but remained squatting. She was not being told to leave the house, she was being told that she might remain within the house and go and lie down with her child if she needed to.

She stumbled to her feet awkwardly, almost threatened to topple for a moment with fatigue. Then steadied herself.

“Gracia,” she faltered. “Gracia, mucho.” Two pitiful words.

They did not look at her. They were looking down at the emptied food bowls before them. They did not turn their eyes toward her as when somebody is departing from your presence. They kept them on the ground before them as if holding them leashed, waiting for the departure to have been completed.

She draggingly made the turn of the doorway and left them behind her.

The patio seemed to have brightened while she’d been away. It was bleached an almost dazzling white now, with the shadows of the roses and their leaves an equally intense black. Like splotches and drippings of ink beneath each separate component one. Or like a lace mantilla flung open upon a snowdrift.

A raging, glowering full moon had come up, was peering down over the side of the sky-well above the patio.

That was the last thing she saw as she leaned for a moment, inert with fatigue, against the doorway of the room in which her child lay. Then she dragged herself in to topple headlong upon the bed and, already fast asleep, to circle her child with one protective arm, moving as if of its own instinct.

Not the meek, the pallid, gentle moon of home. This was the savage moon that had shone down on Montezuma and Cuauhtemoc, and came back looking for them now. The primitive moon that had once looked down on terraced heathen cities and human sacrifices. The moon of Anahuac.

Now the moon of the Aztecs is at the zenith, and all the world lies still. Full and white, the white of bones, the white of a skull; blistering the center of the sky-well with its throbbing, not touching it on any side. Now the patio is a piebald place of black and white, burning in the downward-teeming light. Not a leaf moves, not a petal falls, in this fierce amalgam.

Now the lurid glow from within the brazero has dimmed, and is just a threaded crimson outline against contrasting surfaces, skipping the space in between. It traces, like a fine wire, two figures coifed with rebosos. One against the wall, inanimate, like one of the mummies of her race that used to be sat upright in the rock catacombs. Eyes alone move quick above the mouth-shrouded reboso.

The other teetering slightly to and fro. Ever so slightly, in time to a whispering. A whispering that is like a steady sighing in the night; a whispering that does not come through the muffling rebosos.

The whispering stops. She raises something. A small stone. A whetstone. She spits. She returns it to the floor again. The whispering begins once more. The whispering that is not of the voice, but of a hungry panting in the night. A hissing thirst.

The roses sleep pale upon the blackness of a dream. The haunted moon looks down, lonely for Montezuma and his nation, seeking across the land.

The whispering stops now. The shrouded figure in the center of the room holds out something toward the one propped passive against the wall. Something slim, sharp, grip foremost. The wire-outline from the brazero-mouth finds it for a moment, runs around it like a current, flashes into a momentary highlight, a burnished blur, then runs off it again and leaves it to the darkness.

The other takes it. Her hands go up briefly. The reboso falls away from her head, her shoulders. Two long plaits of dark glossy hair hang down revealed against the copper satin that is now her upper body. Her mouth opens slightly. She places the sharp thing crosswise to it. Her teeth fasten on it. Her hand leaves it there, rigid, immovable.

Her hands execute a swift circling about her head. The two long plaits whip from sight, like snakes scampering to safety amidst rocks. She twines them, tucks them up.

She rises slowly with the grace of unhurried flexibility, back continuing to the wall. She girds her skirt up high about her thighs and interlaces it between, so that it holds itself there. Unclothed now, save for a broad swathing about the waist and hips, knife in mouth, she begins to move. Sideward toward the entrance, like a ruddy flame coursing along the wall, with no trace behind it.

Nothing is said. There is nothing to be said.

Nothing was said before. Nothing needed to be said. Dark eyes understood dark eyes. Dark thoughts met dark thoughts and understood, without, the need of a word.

Nothing will be said after it is over. Never, not in a thousand days from now, not in a thousand months. Never again.

The old gods never had a commandment not to kill. That was another God in another land. The gods of Anahuac demanded the taking of human life, that was their nature. And who should know better than the gods what its real value is, for it is they who give it in the first place.

The flame is at the doorway now, first erect, then writhing, the way a flame does. Then the figure goes down on hands and knees, low, crouching, for craft, for stealth, for the approach to kill. The big cats in the mountains do it this way, belly-flat, and the tribe of Montezuma did it this way too, half a thousand years ago. And the blood remembers what the heart has never learned. The approach to kill.

On hands and knees the figure comes pacing along beside the wall that flanks the patio, lithe, sinuous, knife in mouth perpendicular to its course. In moonlight and out of it, as each successive archway of the portico circles high above it, comes down to join its support, and is gone again to the rear.

The moon is a caress on supple skin. The moon of Anahuac understands, the moon is in league, the moon will not betray.

Slowly along the portico creeps the death-approach, now borax-white in archway-hemisphere, now clay-blue in slanted support-ephemera. The knife-blade winks, like a little haze-puff of white dust, then the shadow hides it again.

The roses dream, the well lies hushed, not a straggling grain topples into it to mar it. No sound, no sound at all. Along the wall crawls life, bringing an end to life.

Past the opening where the death-tapers burn all night. She doesn’t even turn her head as she passes. What is dead is gone. What is dead does not matter any more. There were no souls in Anahuac, just bodies that come to stir, then stop and stir no longer.

What is dead does not matter any more. The love of a man, that is what matters to a woman. If she has not his child, she cannot hold his love. If she loses his child, then she must get another.

And now the other entrance is coming nearer as the wraithlike figure creeps on. Like smoke, like mist, flickering along at the base of a wall. It seems to move of its own accord, sidling along the wall as if it were a black slab or panel traveling on hidden wheels or pulleys at the end of a draw-cord. Coming nearer all the time, black, coffin-shaped, against the bluish-pale wall. Growing taller, growing wider, growing greater.

And then a sound, a small night sound, a futile, helpless sound — a child whimpers slightly in its sleep.

But instantly the figure stops, crouched. Is as still as if it had never moved a moment ago, would never move again. Not a further ripple, not a fluctuation, not a belated muscular contraction, not even the pulsing of breath. As the mountain lioness would stop as it stalked an alerted kill.

The child whimpers troubledly again. It is having a dream perhaps. Something, someone, stirs. Not the child. A heavier, a larger body than the child. There is a faint rustling, as when someone turns against overlying covers.

Then the sibilance of a soothing, bated voice, making a hushing sound. “Sh-h-h. Sh-h-h.” Vibrant with a light motion. The motion of rocking interfolded arms.

A drowsy murmur of words, almost inchoate. “Sleep, darling. We’ll find your daddy soon.”

The moon glares down patiently, remorselessly, waiting. The moon will wait. The night will wait.

Seconds of time pass. Breathing sounds from within the doorway on the stillness now, in soft, slow, rhythmic waves. With little ripples in the space between each wave. Breathing of a mother, and elfin echo of her arm-cradled child. The shadow moves along the wall.

The open doorway, from within, would be a sheet of silver or of mercury, thin but glowing, if any eye were open there upon it. Then suddenly, down low at its base, comes motion, comes intrusion. A creeping, curved thing circles the stone wall-breadth, loses itself again in the darkness on the near side. Now once again the opening is an unmarred sheet of silver, fuming, sheeny.

Not even a shadow glides along the floor now, for there is no longer light to shape one. Nothing. Only death moving in invisibility.

The unseen current of the breathing still rides upon the darkness, to and fro, to and fro; lightly upon the surface of the darkness, like an evanescent pool of water stirring this way and that way.

Then suddenly it plunges deep, as if an unexpected vent, an outlet, had been driven through for it, gurgling, swirling, hollowing and sinking in timbre. A deep, spiralling breath that is the end of all breaths. No more than that. Then evaporation, the silence of death, in an arid, a denuded place.

The breathing of the child peers through again in a moment, now that its overshadowing counterpoint has been erased. It is taken up by other arms. Held pressed to another breast.

In the room of the smouldering brazero the other figure waits; patient, head inclined, reboso-coifed. The soft pad of bare feet comes along the patio-tiles outside, exultant-quick. No need to crawl now. There are no longer other ears to overhear. Bare feet, proud and graceful; coolly firm, like bare feet wading through the moon-milk.

She comes in triumphant, erect and willowy, holding something in her arms, close to her breast. What a woman is supposed to hold. What a woman is born to hold.

She sinks down there on her knees before the other, the other who once held her thus in turn. She turns her head slightly in indication, holds it bent awkwardly askance, for her hands are not free. The old woman’s hands go to her coil-wound hair, trace to the back of her head, draw out the knife for her.

Before her on the floor stands an earthenware bowl holding water. The knife splashes into it. The old woman begins to scrub and knead its blade dexterously between her fingers.

The younger one, sitting at ease now upon the backs of her heels, frees one hand, takes up the palm-leaf, fans the brazero to a renewed glow. Scarlet comes back into the room, then Vermillion. Even light orange, in splashes here and there, upon their bodies and their faces.

She speaks, staring with copper-plated mask into the orange maw of the brazero. “My man has a son again. I have his son again. I will not lose my man now.”

“You have done well, my daughter. You have done as a woman should.” Thus a mother’s approbation to her daughter, in olden Anahuac.

She places the baby’s head to her breast, the new-made mother, and begins to suckle him.

The moon of Montezuma, well-content, is on the wane now, slanting downward on the opposite side of the patio. Such sights as these it once knew well in

Anahuac; now its hungering loneliness has been in a measure assuaged, for it has glimpsed them once again.

The moon has gone now; it is the darkness before dawn. Soon the sun will come, the cosmic male-force. The time of women is rapidly ending, the time of men will be at hand.

They are both in the room with the trestle bier and the flowers and the gold-tongued tapers. The little wax doll is a naked wax doll now, its wrappings taken from it, cast aside. Lumpy, foreshortened, like a squat clay image fashioned by the soft-slapping hands of some awkward, unpractised potter.

The old woman is holding a charcoal sack, black-smudged, tautly wide at its mouth. She brings it up just under the bier, holds it steady, in the way of a catch-all.

Chata’s hands reach out, scoop, roll something toward her.

The bier is empty and the charcoal sack has swelled full at the bottom.

The old woman quickly folds it over and winds it about itself. She passes it to Chata. Deft swirling and tightening of Chata’s reboso about her own figure, and it has gone, and Chata’s arms with it, hidden within.

The old woman takes apart the bier. Takes down the two pitiful planks from the trestles that supported them. A gardenia-petal or two slides down them to the floor.

“Go far,” she counsels knowingly.

“I will go far up the mountain, where it is bare. Where the buzzards can see it easily from overhead. By the time the sun goes down it will be gone. Small bones like this they will even carry up with them and scatter.”

The old woman pinches one taper-wick and it goes out.

She moved on toward another and pinches that.

Darkness blots the room. In the air a faint trace of gardenias remains. How long does the scent of gardenias last? How long does life last? And when each has gone, where is it each has gone?

They move across the moonless patio now, one back of the other. The wooden door in the street wall jars and creaks back aslant. The old woman sidles forth. Chata waits. The old woman reinserts herself. Her finger flicks permissive safety toward the aperture.

The girl slips out, just an Indian girl enswathed, a lump under her reboso, the margin of it drawn up over her mouth against the unhealthful night air.

It is daybreak now. Clay-blue and dove-gray, rapidly paling with white. The old woman is sitting crouched upon her haunches, in patient immobility, just within the door.

She must have heard an almost wraith-like footfall that no other ears could have caught. She rose suddenly. She waited a bated moment, inclined toward the door, then she unfastened and swung open the door.

Chata slipped in on the instant, reboso flat against her now. No more lump saddling her hip.

The old woman closed the door, went after her to deeper recesses of the patio. “You went far?”

Chata unhooded her reboso from head and shoulders with that negligent racial grace she was never without. “I went far. I went up where it is bare rock. Where no weed grows that will hide it from the sailing wings in the sky. They will see it. Already they were coming from afar as I looked back from below. By sundown it will be gone.”

The old woman nodded. “You have done well, my daughter,” she praised her dignifiedly.

Beside the well in the patio there was something lying now. Another mound beside the mound of disinterred earth. And alongside it, parallel to one side of the well, a deep narrow trough lay dug, almost looking like a grave.

The rose bushes had all been pulled out and lay there expiring on their sides now, roots striking skyward like frozen snakes.

“They were in the way,” the old woman grunted. “I had to. I deepened it below where they left it when they were here last. The new earth I took out is apart, over there, in that smaller pile by itself. So we will know it from the earth they took out when they were last here. See, it is darker and fresher.”

“He liked them,” Chata said. “He will ask why it is, when he comes back.”

“Tell him the men did it, Fulgencio and his helper.”

“But if he asks them, when he goes to pay them for the work, they will say they did not, they left them in.”

“Then we will plant them in again, lightly at the top, before they come back to resume their work. I will cut off their roots short, so that it can be done.”

“They will die that way.”

The old woman nodded craftily. “But only after a while. He will see them still in place, though dead. Then we will say it was the work of the men did it. Then Fulgencio and his helper will not be able to say they did not do it. For they were alive when the work began, and they will be dead when it was done.”

Chata did not have to ask her to help. With one accord, with no further words between them, they went to the mound beside the mound of earth. The mound that was not earth. The mound that was concealing rags and bundled charcoal sacking. One went to one end, one to the other. Chata pried into the rags for a moment, made an opening, peered into it. It centered on a red rosebud, withered and falling apart, but still affixed by a pin to the dark-blue cloth of a coat.

“She wore a rose upon her coat,” she hissed vengefully. “I saw it when, she came in last night. She must have brought it with her from Tapatzingo, for there are none of that color growing here. He must have liked to see them on her.” She swerved her head and spat into the trough alongside. “It is dead now,” she said exultingly.

“As she is,” glowered the old woman, tight-lipped.

“Let it go with her, for the worms to see.”

They both scissored their arms, and the one mound overturned and dropped, was engulfed by the other. Then Chata took up the shovel the workmen had left, and began lessening the second mound, the mound that was of earth. She knew just what they did and how they went about it, she had watched them for so many days now. The old woman, spreading her reboso flat upon the ground nearby, busied herself palming and urging the newer fill over onto it, the fill that she herself had taken out to make more depth.

When it was filled, she tied the corners into a bundle and carried it from sight. She came back with the reboso empty and began over again. After the second time, the pile of new fill was gone.

Chata had disappeared from the thighs down, was moving about as in a grave, trampling, flattening, with downbeating of her feet.

In midmorning, when Fulgencio and his nephew came, languid, to their slow-moving work, the white roses were all luxuriating around the well again, with a slender stick lurking here and there to prop them. Everything was as it had been. If the pile of disinterred earth they had left was a little lower, or if the depression waiting to take it back was a little shallower, who could tell? Who measured such things?

The old woman brought out a jug of pulque to them, so that they might refresh themselves. Their eyes were red when they left at sundown, and their breaths and their sweat were sour. But it had made their work go quicker, with snatches of song, and with laughter, and with stumblings of foot. And it had made the earth they shoveled back, the hollow they filled, the tiles they cemented back atop, the roses they brushed against and bent, all dance and blur in fumes of maguey.

But the task was completed, and when the door was closed upon their swaying, drooping-lidded forms, they needed to come back no more.

Seven times the sun rises, seven times it falls. Then fourteen. Then, perhaps, twenty-one. Who knows, who counts it? Hasn’t it risen a thousand years in Anahuac, to fall again, to rise again?

Then one day, in its declining hours, there is a heavy knocking of men’s hands on the outside of the wooden door in the street-wall. The hands of men who have a right to enter, who may not be refused; their knocking tells that.

They know it for what it is at first sound, Chata and the old woman. They have known it was coming. There is another law in Anahuac now than the old one.

Eyes meet eyes. The trace of a nod is exchanged. A nod that confirms. That is all. No fear, no sudden startlement. No fear, because no sense of guilt. The old law did not depend on signs of fear, proofs and evidences, witnesses. The old law was wise, the new law is a fool.

The old woman struggles to her feet, pads forth across the patio toward the street-door, resounding now like a drum. Chata remains as she was, dexterously plaiting withes into a basket, golden-haired child on its back on the sun-cozened ground beside her, little legs fumbling in air.

The old woman comes back with two of mixed blood. Anahuac is in their faces, but so is the other race, with its quick mobility of feature that tells every thought. One in uniform of those who enforce the law, one in attire such as Chata’s own man wears when he has returned from his prospecting trips in the distant mountains and walks the streets of the town with her on Sunday, or takes his ease without her in the cantina with the men of the other women.

They come and stand over her, where she squats at her work, look down on her. Their shadows shade her, blot out the sun in the corner of the patio in which she is. Are like thick blue stripes blanketing her and the child from some intangible serape.

Slowly her eyes go upward to them, liquid, dark, grave, respectful but not afraid, as a woman’s do to strange men who come where she has a right to be.

“Stand. We are of the police. From Tapatzingo, on the other side of the mountain. We are here to speak to you.”

She puts her basket-weaving aside and rises, graceful, unfrightened.

“And you are?” the one who speaks for the two of them, the one without uniform, goes on. “Chata.”

“Any last name?”

“We use no second name among us.” That is the other race, two names for every one person.

“And the old one?”

“Mother of Chata.”

“And who is the man here?”

“In the mountains. That way, far that way. He goes to look for silver. He works it when he finds it. He has been long gone, but he will come soon now, the time is drawing near.”

“Now listen. A woman entered here, some time three weeks ago. A woman with a child. A nortena, a gringa, understand? One of those from up there. She has not been seen again. She did not go back there to where she came from. To the great City of Mexico. In the City of Mexico the consul of her country has asked the police to find out where she is. The police of the City of Mexico have asked us to learn what became of her.”

Both heads shake. “No. No woman entered here.”

He turns to the one in uniform. “Bring him in a minute.”

The hired-car driver shuffles forward, escorted by the uniform.

Chata looks at him gravely, no more. Gravely but untroubledly.

“This man says he brought her here. She got out. He went back without her.”

Both heads nod now. The young one that their eyes are on, the old one disregarded in the background.

“There was a knock upon our door, one such day, many days ago. A woman with a child stood there, from another place. She spoke, and we could not understand her speech. She showed us a paper, but we cannot read writing. We closed the door. She did not knock again.”

He turns on the hired-car driver. “Did you see them admit her?”

“No, Señor,” the latter falters, too frightened to tell anything but the truth. “I only let her out somewhere along here. I did not wait to see where she went. It was late, and I wanted to get back to my woman. I had driven her all the way from Tapatzingo, where the train stops.”

“Then you did not see her come in here?”

“I did not see her go in anywhere. I turned around and went the other way, and it was getting dark.”

“This child here, does it look like the one she had with her?”

“I could not see it, she held it to her.”

“This is the child of my man,” Chata says with sultry dignity. “He has yellow hair like this. Tell, then.”

“Her man is gringo, everyone has seen him. She had a gringo child a while ago, everyone knows that,” the man stammers unhappily.

“Then you, perhaps, know more about where she went, than these two do! You did bring her out this way! Take him outside and hold him. At least I’ll have something to report on.”

The policeman drags him out again, pleading and whining. “No, Señor, no! I do not know — I drove back without her! For the love of God, Señor, the love of God!”

He turns to Chata. “Show me this house. I want to see it.”

She shows it to him, room by room. Rooms that know nothing, can tell nothing. Then back to the patio again. The other one is waiting for him there, alone now.

“And this pozo? It seems cleaner, newer, this tiling, than elsewhere around it.” He taps his foot on it.

“It kept falling in, around the sides. Cement was put around them to hold the dirt back.”

“Who had it done?”

“It was the order of my man, before he left. It made our water bad. He told two men to do it for him while he was away.”

“And who carried it out?”

“Fulgencio and his nephew, in the town. They did not come right away, and they took long, but finally they finished.”

He jotted the name. “We will ask.”

She nodded acquiescently. “They will tell.”

He takes his foot off it at last, moves away. He seems to be finished, he seems to be about to go. Then suddenly, curtly, “Come.” And he flexes his finger for her benefit.

For the first time her face shows something. The skin draws back rearward of her eyes, pulling them oblique.

“Where?” she whispers.

“To the town. To Tapatzingo. To the headquarters.”

She shakes her head repeatedly, mutely appalled. Creeps backward a step with each shake. Yet even now it is less than outright fear; it is more an unreasoning obstinacy. An awe in the face of something one is too simple to understand. The cringing of a wide-eyed child.

“Nothing will happen to you,” he says impatiently. “You won’t be held. Just to sign a paper. A statement for you to put your name to.”

Her back has come to rest against one of the archway supports now. She can retreat no further. She cowers against it, then sinks down, then turns and clasps her arms about it, holding onto it in desperate appeal.

“I cannot write. I do not know how to make those marks.”

He is standing over her now, trying to reason with her.

“Valgame dios! What a criatura!”

She transfers her embrace suddenly from the inanimate pilaster to his legs, winding her arms about them in supplication.

“No, patrón, no! Don’t take me to Tapatzingo! They’ll keep me there. I know how they treat our kind. I’ll never get back again.”

Her eyes plead upward at him, dark pools of mournfulness.

He looks more closely at her, as if seeming to see her face for the first time. Or at least as if seeming to see it as a woman’s face and not just that of a witness.

“And you like this gringo you house with?” he remarks at a tangent. “Why did you not go with one of your own?”

“One goes with the man who chooses one.”

“Women are thus,” he admits patronizingly. Asi son las mujeres.

She releases his pinioned legs, but still crouches at his feet, looking questioningly upward.

He is still studying her face. “He could have done worse.” He reaches down and wags her chin a little with two pinched fingers.

She rises, slowly turns away from him. She does not smile. Her coquetry is more basic than the shallow superficiality of a smile. More gripping in its pull. It is in the slow, enfolding way she draws her reboso tight about her and hugs it to her shoulders and her waist. It is in the very way she walks. It is in the coalescing of the sunlit dust-motes all about her in the air as she passes, forming almost a haze, a passional halo.

In fact, she gives him not another look. Yet every step of the way she pulls his eyes with her. And as she passes where a flowering plant stands in a green glazed mould, she tears one of the flowers off. She doesn’t drop it, just carries it along with her in her hand.

She approaches one of the room-openings, and still without turning, still without looking back, goes within.

He stands there staring at the empty doorway.

The old woman squats down by the child, takes it up, and lowers her head as if attentively waiting.

He looks at the policeman, and the policeman at him, and everything that was unspoken until now is spoken in that look between them.

“Wait for me outside the house. I’ll be out later.”

The policeman goes outside and closes the wall-door after him.

Later she comes out of the room by herself, ahead of the man. She rejoins the old woman and child, and squats down by them on her knees and heels. The old woman passes the child into her arms. She rocks it lullingly, looks down at it protectively, touches a speck from its brow with one finger. She is placid, self-assured.

Then the man comes out again. He is tracing one side of his mustache with the edge of one finger.

He comes and stops, standing over her, as he did when he and the other one first came in here.

He smiles a little, very sparingly, with only the corner of his mouth. Half-indulgently, half-contemptuously.

He speaks. But to whom?

Scarcely to her, for his eyes go up over her, stare thoughtfully over her head; and the policeman isn’t present to be addressed. To his own sense of duty, perhaps, reassuring it. “Well — you don’t need to come in, then, most likely. You’ve told me all you can. No need to question you further. I can attend to the paper myself. And we always have the driver, anyway, if they want to go ahead with it.”

He turns on his heel. His long shadow undulates off her.

“Adios, india,” he flings carelessly at her over his shoulder, from the wall-door.

“Adios, patrón,” she murmurs obsequiously.

The old woman goes over to the door in his wake, to make sure it is shut fast from the inside. Comes back, sinks down again.

Nothing is said.

In the purple bloodshed of a sunset afterglow, the tired horse brings its tired rider to a halt before the biscuit-colored wall with the bougainvillea unravelling along it. Having ridden the day, having ridden the night, and many days and many nights, the ride is at last done.

For a moment they stand there, both motionless, horse with its neck slanted to ground, rider with his head dropped almost to saddle-grip. He has been riding asleep for the past hour or so. But riding true, for the horse knows the way.

Then the man stirs, raises his head, slings his leg off, comes to the ground. Face mahogany from the high sierra sun, golden glisten filming its lower part, like dust of that other metal, the one even more precious than that he seeks and lives by. Dust-paled shirt opened to the navel. Service automatic of another country, of another army, that both once were his, bedded at his groin. Bulging saddle-bags upon the burro tethered behind, of ore, of precious crushed rock, to be taken to the assay office down at Tapatzingo. Blue eyes that have forgotten all their ties, and thus will stay young as they are now forever. Bill Taylor’s home. Bill Taylor, once of Iowa, once of Colorado.

Home? What is home? Home is where a house is that you come back to when the rainy season is about to begin, to wait until the next dry season comes around. Home is where your woman is, that you come back to in the intervals between a greater love — the only real love — the lust for riches buried in the earth, that are your own if you can find them.

Perhaps you do not call it home, even to yourself. Perhaps you call them “my house”, “my woman”. What if there was another “my house”, “my woman”, before this one? It makes no difference. This woman is enough for now.

Perhaps the guns sounded too loud at Anzio or at Omaha Beach, at Guadalcanal or at Okinawa. Perhaps when they stilled again some kind of strength had been blasted from you that other men still have. And then again perhaps it was some kind of weakness that other men still have. What is strength, what is weakness, what is loyalty, what is perfidy?

The guns taught only one thing, but they taught it well: of what consequence is life? Of what consequence is a man? And, therefore, of what consequence if he tramples love in one place and goes to find it in the next? The little moment that he has, let him be at peace, far from the guns and all that remind him of them.

So the man who once was Bill Taylor has come back to his house, in the dusk, in the mountains, in Anahuac.

He doesn’t have to knock, the soft hoof-plod of his horse has long ago been heard, has sent its long-awaited message. Of what use is a house to a man if he must knock before he enters? The door swings wide, as it never does and never will to anyone but him. Flitting of a figure, firefly-quick, and Chata is entwined about him.

He goes in, faltering a little from long weariness, from long disuse of his legs, she welded to his side, half-supporting, already resting, restoring him, as is a woman’s reason for being.

The door closes behind them. She palms him to wait, then whisks away.

He stands there, looking about.

She comes back, holding something bebundled in her arms.

“What happened to the roses?” he asks dimly.

She does not answer. She is holding something up toward him, white teeth proudly displayed in her face. The one moment in a woman’s whole life. The moment of fulfilment. “Your son,” she breathes dutifully.

Who can think of roses when he has a son?

Two of the tiles that Fulgencio had laid began to part. Slowly. So slowly who could say they had not always been that way? And yet they had not. Since they could not part horizontally because of the other tiles all around them, their parting was vertical, they began to slant upward out of true. At last the strain became too great. They had no resiliency by which to slant along the one side, remain flat along the other. They cracked along the line of greatest strain, and then they crumbled there, disintegrated into a mosaic. And then the smaller, lighter pieces were disturbed still more, and finally lay about like scattered pebbles, out of their original bed.

And then it began to grow. The new rosebush.

There had been rosebushes there before. Why should there not be one there now again?

It was full-grown now, the new rosebush. And he had gone and come again, Bill Taylor; and gone, and come again. Then suddenly, in the time for roses to bloom, it burst into flower. Like a splattering of blood, drenching that one particular part of the patio. Every rose as red as the heart.

He smiled with pleasant surprise when he first saw it, and he said how beautiful it was. He called to her and made her come out there where he was and stand beside him and take the sight in.

“Look. Look what we have now. I always liked them better than the white ones.”

“I already saw them,” she said sullenly. “You are only seeing them now for the first time, but I saw them many days ago, coming through little by little.”

And she tried to move away, but he held her there by the shoulder, in command. “Take good care of it now. Water it. Treat it well.”

In a few days he noticed that the sun was scorching it, that the leaves were burning here and there.

He called her out there, and his face was dark. His voice was harsh and curt, as when you speak to a disobedient dog. “Didn’t I tell you to look after this rosebush?

Why haven’t you? Water it now! Water it well!”

She obeyed him. She had to. But as she moved about it, tending to it, on her face, turned from him, there was the ancient hatred of woman for woman, when there is but one man between the two of them.

She watered it the next day, and the next. It throve, it flourished, jeering at her with liquid diamonds dangling from each leaf, and pearls of moisture rolling lazily about the crevices of its tight-packed satin petals. And when his eyes were not upon her, and she struck at it viciously with her hand, it bit back at her, and tore a drop of blood from her palm.

Of what use to move around the ground on two firm feet, to be warm, to be flesh, if his eyes scarce rested on you any more? Or if they did, no longer saw you as they once had, but went right through you as if you were not there?

Of what use to have buried her in the ground if he stayed now always closer to her than to you, moving his chair now by her out there in the sun? If he put his face down close to her and inhaled the memory of her and the essence of her soul?

She filled the patio with her sad perfume, and even in the very act of breathing in itself, he drew something of her into himself, and they became one.

She held sibilant conference with the old woman beside the brazero in the evening as they prepared his meal. “It is she. She has come back again. He puts his face down close, down close to her many red mouths, and she whispers to him. She tries to tell him that she lies there, she tries to tell him that his son was given him by her and not by me.”

The old woman nodded sagely. These things are so. “Then you must do again as you did once before. There is no other way.”

“He will be angered as the thunder rolling in a mountain gorge.”

“Better a blow from a man’s hand than to lose him to another woman.”

Again the night of a full moon, again she crept forth, hands to ground, as she had once before. This time from his very side, from his very bed. Again a knife between her teeth blazed intermittently in the moonlight. But this time she didn’t creep sideward along the portico, from room-entry to room-entry; this time she paced her way straight outward into mid-patio. And this time her reboso was twined tight about her, not cast off; for the victim had no ears with which to hear her should the garment impede or betray; and the victim had no feet on which to start up and run away.

Slowly she toiled and undulated under the enormous spotlight of the moon. Nearer, nearer. Until the shadows of the little leaves made black freckles on her back.

Nearer, nearer. To kill a second time the same rival.

Nearer, nearer. To where the rosebush lay floating on layers of moon-smoke.

They found her the next morning, he and the old woman. They found the mute evidences of the struggle there had been; like a contest between two active agencies, between two opposing wills. A struggle in the silent moonlight.

There was a place where the tiled surfacing, the cement shoring, faultily applied by the pulque-drugged Fulgencio and his nephew, had given way and dislodged itself over the lip of the well and down into it, as had been its wont before the repairs were applied. Too much weight incautiously brought too near the edge, in some terrible, oblivious throe of fury or of self-preservation.

Over this ravage the rosebush, stricken, gashed along its stem, stretched taut, bent like a bow; at one end its manifold roots still clinging tenaciously to the soil, like countless crooked grasping fingers; at the other its flowered head, captive but unsubdued, dipping downward into the mouth of the well.

And from its thorns, caught fast in a confusion hopeless of extrication, it supported two opposite ends of the reboso, whipped and wound and spiralled together into one, from some aimless swaying and counter-swaying weight at the other end.

A weight that had stopped swaying long before the moon waned; that hung straight and limp now, hugging the wall of the well. Head sharply askew, as if listening to the mocking voice whispering through from the soil alongside, where the roots of the rosebush found their source.

No water had touched her. She had not died the death of water. She had died the death that comes without a sound, the death that is like the snapping of a twig, of a broken neck.

They lifted her up. They laid her tenderly there upon the ground.

She did not move. The rosebush did; it slowly righted to upward. Leaving upon the ground a profusion of petals, like drops of blood shed in combat.

The rosebush lived, but she was dead.

Now he sits there in the sun, by the rosebush; the world forgotten, other places that once were home, other times, other loves, forgotten. It is good to sit there in the sun, your son playing at your feet. This is a better love, this is the only lasting love. For a woman dies when you do, but a son lives on. He is you and you are he, and thus you do not die at all.

And when his eyes close in the sun and he dozes, as a man does when his youth is running out, perhaps now and then a petal will fall upon his head or upon his shoulder from some near-curving branch, and lie there still. Light as a caress. Light as a kiss unseen from someone who loves you and watches over you.

The old woman squats at hand, watchful over the child. The old woman has remained, ignored. Like a dog, like a stone. Unspeaking and unspoken to.

Her eyes reveal nothing. Her lips say nothing. They will never say anything, for thus it is in Anahuac.

But the heart knows. The skies that look forever down on Anahuac know. The moon knows.