Mina Loy - Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

Thick within the infinite foliage a sudden wooden seed would fall and stroke to a hush the close lying layers of leaves. In there, in the turbulent jungle entangled, lurked with their strange diplomacies of smell, species of beasts. How would it be to hack through these fortresses of vegetation? To move footloose among violent fowl and fantastic insects haunted by my primeval recognitions? To hold my peace with the stir of the forest, that sibilant silence — — the in-breath of nature, drawing me in a panic of treacherous invitation?

The s-s-stir — — every moment the Night should come crashing through with the incalculable tonnage of his invisible footsteps, to snap the cocos and tear the savage plants — — And something enormous, sentient, inimicable was striding now among the unholy vapours left by the setting of a murderous sun — — — the forestal Jove.

The flesh of the Mexican woman’s face was baked onto the bone and must jar inhumanly to the touch. In her glaucous eyes the memories of her excitements shrapnelled like the flavour of the Chili pod.

Where woman meets woman in out of the way places her first concern is to tender a conversational passport of her chastity, so does the thin-lipped spectre of dishonour drive her buffoons before her even to the end of the earth.

My companion who had fallen thankfully upon half of the eggs and the crude salt, told me how she had had to leave her native town, owing to the misadventurous liaison of her son with a light woman. She was seeking to renew her impeccable occupation as a seamstress elsewhere. I could understand could I not? Her shame and her humiliation before the neighbours who had watched her flower and wither, a virginal tiger lily, before and after her espousals and widowing. And even as she tore the egg with her teeth, did she wrack that light body of her left-hand daughter-in-law for my approval.

Confident that I had now accepted her at a desirable valuation, clucking, and darting appraisals of the passengers on the train, she told me that the bad land of Mexico was populated by the devil’s brood, and that I should save half a peso and probably my life by staying overnight at the apothecary’s to whose good graces she would accompany me.

Every night we got off the train to sleep in some village for fear of the marauding bandits, and after the engine had been put to rights we pulled in at our station.

The streets were unlit and unpaved, only once did we come to a glimmer of light on the wayside. It was shining through the serried chinks of a bamboo structure. I loitered against it, and watched the shadowy pantomime of a small girl swinging a baby to sleep in a grocery box hung from the roof-beam. The petroleum light threw out its infinitesimal gossamer circles of hazy gold, and the streaks of the bamboos interposed their black notes or dissolved, as I moved my face from or toward the nebulous lullaby in silhouette.

As if he had sprung out of the mud beneath our feet, a male form now accompanied us; he had performed some ceremony of etiquette with my companion, and undertook to pick our steps for us to gain the eating house.

As he swept the broken flies from the table-cloth he eyed us with a Spanish cajolery, and when we were served he fell upon his food with the oversatisfaction of a man who has chanced on more than one good thing at once.

A repulsive complacence spread his fat face to a sensuous rhapsody; he looked a low creature, and the wares he was travelling with one surmised to be of inferior quality, but his behaviour as with even the spawn of the Latin races was suave and somewhat entertaining, and the Mexican woman warmed to it.

The apothecary, warned of our approach, opened his door to let the light fall across our path to guide us. His guest chambers were a couple of boarded partitions which had been knocked together casually and did not reach to the ceiling. Two little beds covered with horse blankets furnished the one I was to share with the seamstress.

She lay where the general light pouring over the top marked a new aspect of elation on her face, as she continued in her womanly way, the epic of her virtue.

The last banalities are enriched by an unfamiliar language, and it was a shimmering impression she engraved for me in her peon Spanish, of her girlhood spent in her father’s bar-room. Of stacks of cut glass, coloured syrups, of gardenias, camellias. Of a Count with side whiskers, his phaeton and his Mexican horse of Greek proportions.

Far into the night my drowsiness was punctuated by the sting of a mosquito or a crisis in the seamstress’ drama. For the whiskered Count who was sometimes a Baron, sometimes a deputy, seemed to fling himself into the story and out again through a clattering glass door.

There were entreaties, vows, objurgations, temptation by diamonds, and levelled pistols. And persistently, behind some sort of a carved white counter the seamstress marooned her virtue.

Through the following day we would stop at platforms where objects of ingenuous grace were brought to be sold, such things as willow canes gashed with patterns in the tradition of the Aztecs — — And bronze girls offered their architectural bouquets from the white fields of tuber-roses shrining their coloured centres of tinfoil. Beauties that flew in at the window, and were spirited away as soon as bought.

Sometimes a surprise of nature would curvet past the window to the flying perspective of the passing train. Flat on the stubbly land — — a pond — — a white sheet of sunlight sowed with frail and leafless flushed convolvuli stared at the colourless blaze of sky it reflected, in dazzling innocence — — like a heavenly mirror studded with angelic eyes — — cutting my breath with pure light.

But after noon the sky of the rainy seasons darkened and poured itself onto the earth, and when we came to our pitch black resting place we leapt from the foot board into a deep river of mud; the rain beat us onward to invisible retreats, and the damp voices of extinguished will-o’-the-wisps led us to travellers’ inns.

I found myself in a high foul room where the dust cried out from the horrible stagnation of the ewers and basins of cheap hostelries; alone with the echoes of the planed corridors, the glassy eyes of the host, and the fearful iron of his bunch of keys. For in the black rain I had lost my seamstress who had engaged to house me as safely on this night as on the last; and now she might be scuttling about with her virtue seeking me in the night.

I plunged again into the deluge, and other invisible couriers preceded me to a second rooming house which I supposed must be the one my companion had indicated.

Here under a flickering lamp there huddled a maze of wooden stalls with strange darkness peering over the low partitions.

I insisted that another woman had got off the train and had been anxious for me to join her. But the native hostess disagreed with my arguments — — I described her striped shirt waist — — “Oh don’t trouble yourself, I know who you mean, only,” she neighed with shrilling irony, “she came here with a man.”

I was overwhelmed with the indiscretion, for whichever wooden love-nest had been assigned to them, over its truncated walls, the accusative neighing of the hostess must strike the seamstress’ ear. For I felt forlorn for her hours of protested proprieties which must now appear to her so wasteful. And I crept to my stall wishing that an insistent silence could somehow obliterate my unintentional meddling.

Next morning I met her crawling along the lean planks that across the meadow upon the rain-laden flowers bore their heavier burden of humanity — — there passed us a great couple of spouses like Gothic gods side by side — — and the seamstress as I bid her good-day — — shuffled confusedly before me hiding her key spasmodically in her skirts like a symbol.