Conrad Aiken - A Heart for the Gods of Mexico

And then the Great Divide; in no time at all, in a single flash, they had come upon it — after the interminable dull landscape, featureless as the arid and somehow so bloodless and soulless people who dwelt on its surface, but with something dreadful and eternal about them, too, a melancholy defeated persistence — after this sad land what a relief to foresee this symbol of power and magnificence, in all its rank majesty. It was odd; they had waited at the windows, all three of them, for a half-hour or more, feeling as if by some queer terrestrial empathy that it was near, and that when they at last saw it they would experience something very definite, a sort of secret baptism in the holy waters of their own land.

“It’s only then,” said Noni, half kneeling, half standing, by the window, “that we shall become really indigenous. Really belong. Don’t you feel that, Gil? Don’t you feel that, Blom? Indigenes !”

“ Indigenes, ” Gil said. “What words you do think up, Noni.”

“Noni reads the dictionary for fun.”

“And with profit, I assure you! Did I tell you about the worm?”

“ What worm.”

“The earthworm, Blom. Just the earthworm! But according to Mr. Webster — you’d never believe it — he’s a ‘burrowing, terrestrial, megadrilic worm.’ And the megadrilic, I think you’ll admit, is something to think about. And have you noticed, you two—”

She broke off, looking more intently at the swift landscape, a flock of starlings swooping low over a cornfield, spreading out flat like a wave on a beach, then as quickly mounting again in cloudform. Her hand was against the glass.

“Have you noticed that we’ve come straight into summer, already? This year we shall have no spring. We’ve come through it, overnight.…”

Blom stared, amused.

“It’s true. Wonderful observant Noni! And a fascinating idea. We’ve dived right through it — as if the train were a swimmer, and spring a northward-breaking wave of flower and leaf, a surf of blossom, across the whole continent—”

“Yes, the corn is half-grown. And in Boston, and the Berkshires, the leaves were only beginning—”

“No spring for us , this year!”

“It’s a little sad …”

They were all silent, watching the changing land, the land which now rapidly divulged itself in long, parallel hollows, as if at some time channeled and flood-swept. Shacks, shanties, tiny Negro settlements. And then what was unmistakably a levee — and the ramshackle huts of squatters, on the foreshore — rowboats in gardens tied to shabby porches, rowboats riding the lush inland grass — and suddenly sure enough, the river—!

“Ah,” said Noni, “the Mississippi — the father of waters — now we can go home!”

“Go home—?” said Gil.

Her hands on the sill, looking downward from the bridge at the wide brown water, and as if somehow extraordinarily at peace, Noni gave a little sigh.

“Yes, Gil, go home. Go anywhere , I mean — go where we’ve got to go! Do you see what I mean?”

Gil shook his head, amused. He was himself gazing down at the river, entranced.

“She’s off again!” he said.

“Go to Mexico, for instance — or even back to Boston! I feel as if in the twinkling of an eye — or while, in fact, we were crossing that bridge — my soul had shot under water all the way down to New Orleans, even into the Gulf of Mexico, and back again. And now it belongs to me.…”

In a wide slow circle the train turned southward, bent its course parallel with the river, and the somber walls of the city came to meet them. East St. Louis, St. Louis — already the train felt empty, a little desolate and abandoned; its sounds were becoming subdued; the little cries from the trucks and wheels, as they slipped from one switch to another, one track to another, jolting slightly, were minor and musical; they had almost arrived, they were almost there. Almost there? No such thing, nothing so simple as that. They were only beginning! But if Noni could feel — or was it an incomparable piece of acting? — this astonishing sense of peace — or begin, as she seemed to be doing, to let go —

He looked ahead, as they assembled the bags and coats once more, to the days to come; allowed them to flow forward into the present, and to mingle with the immediate; and now it was Little Rock and Texarkana, Palestine and Troup and San Antonio, Laredo and Monterey and Mexico City, the mountains and the jungle, that came alongside with the bobbing and running caps of the Red Caps, the rumbling trucks, the roar of steam against the grimed glass roof of the great station. They were walking with the future. The future joined them as they checked the bags at the kiosk, as they drank cold beer out of tall glasses and ate lunch in the station restaurant, as they inquired about the train, to make sure, and as they walked through the wind and dust of the St. Louis streets toward the river. Fantastic city, down-at-heel jumble of romantic past and shoddy present; skyscrapers, Parthenons, monoliths, and then the old quarter of tumbledown but somehow dignified and beautiful red-brick and clapboard houses, somber or florid, where once the life of the city had flowed fastest. Meretricious, the whole thing — streets that were spacious, but without beauty, buildings that were massive and elaborate, but nevertheless looked as hollow and impermanent as the cream-puff fantasies of a world’s fair, something indescribably dreary and provincial and — yes, Noni found the word— temporary , about the whole place. The wilderness would come back — the wilderness had never really been defeated, here; it waited around the corner, waited for the dark.… A beauty parlor, with wide window, from which fixed doll-like faces stared at the pedestrians outside, while a bedizened beauty, with heavily enameled mouth, stood grinning at the open door and beckoned them in … “ Specializing in Photos for Chauffeurs .” Shabby little shops, dreary shirts and socks, taverns and beer parlors. In one of these, on a corner, they stopped for beer and to ask their way to the river — over the radio a baseball game was coming from Shibe Park. And remember, folks, this broadcast comes to you by courtesy of — and now somebody’s down there warming up, I’ll tell you who it is in a minute — yes, just as I thought —!

“You’re sure you’re not too tired, Noni?”

“No, Blom, I want to go. I want to put my hands in it.”

“Well, you two are certainly romantic!”

Gil was peevish; Gil disliked the wind and dust, the long walk, proceeded with lowered head, his felt hat pulled down on his forehead. But the slum streets, the decrepit old buildings on the dingy slope to the river, broken windows, crumbling walls, old gray stone and brick, shutters hanging awry, cheap lodgings — ten cents a night, five cents a night — in houses which a century since had been the city’s best — this was extraordinary, deeply exciting. Here the past became vivid, became rank and real; like a conch shell held to the ear these ruins gave off an echo of the south and the sea: deep south, deep sea. And inland two thousand miles! The south had crept up the river, that was it, there was a foreign feeling here, and something mortuary too: it was like a dead seaport of the south, maritime but defunct. And sinister, also; a gangsters’ paradise, smelling of beer and brothels. The sloping streets of cobbles were almost covered with tin beer-bottle tops. Here and there, an old ruin which had once been a thriving river hotel, full of violent life, the life of the Mississippi. Here Mark Twain had walked.

And under the iron-dark structure of the elevated railroad, the very viaduct over which they had themselves slowly entered the city, they came to the wide granite-paved beach of the majestic river, walked slowly down to it. Like tide marks left by the sea, lines of gray and withered flotsam — driftwood, barrel staves, empty bottles, tin cans, slivers of wood silvered with age, peeled branches polished like horn, eggshells, orange peels — marked the many levels at which during the winter the great river had stood. An enormous beach; against which the dark water slid with sleepy power, the brown eddies moving swiftly downstream as they coiled sparkling in the sunlight. A little way upstream, two river boats rotted at a landing stage, twin-smokestacked — the smokestacks with coronetted tops. Noni dipped her hand in the water.