Conrad Aiken - A Heart for the Gods of Mexico

“Next day. I’m finishing this on the train, so forgive the rocky handwriting. The Sunshine Special is rushing us into Texas, and all day, think of it, we shall do nothing but cross Texas. Noni and Gil are washing — I’m waiting for breakfast. These so-called De Luxe Coaches aren’t bad: but none of us did much sleeping, I’m afraid. We were grieved when they took away an extremely nice smoking car, with adjustable seat backs — very comfortable; but damn it, after we’d got our bags into it we found they were going to yank it off during the night. Almost the best thing so far was coming down the river from St. Louis — really magical. I wish there’d been more of it. We followed the river for about half an hour, at dusk — very fine — it’s an astonishing river — dark little bayous with flat-bottomed rowboats tied up under tropical trees — nice old farmhouses with lawns going down to the shore — levees, islands, ragged trees sticking up out of deep water where islands or points use to be — the general impression of something marvelously untamed. Noni ate it alive. Here come Noni and Gil now — I’ll finish this, and put it off at the next station — Arp, or Troup, or something. And I’ll of course drop you a line when we get to M. Remember, please, Clint, all this under your hat. Yrs., B.

“If any of this letter doesn’t make sense, remember, too, that I haven’t had any sleep to speak of for two nights. We’re all beginning to feel very odd and vague — as if we’d somehow stepped right out of time. Damned funny! It’s a sort of dream state you get into, everything telescopes and foreshortens — something like a fever. Not unpleasant, in a way, either, for in some respects your faculties actually seem sharpened — perhaps only fitfully, and perhaps it’s an illusion!..”

Dream state. The dream state of Missouri, or Arkansas, or Texas .…

The dream state of Mexico .…

In the smoking car Gil talked about Little Rock. He was not sure whether he had really seen it, in the middle of the night, or had only had a dream about it. On the deserted platform, talking to a man with a broom, a Negro porter had taken his visored porter’s cap out of a paper bag, replaced it with the straw hat which he had just been wearing. Then there had been stately buildings of marble, a glowing capitol on a hill, palladian lamplit walls, miles of lights, along a river, and the train turning west.…

“It sounds like a dream.”

“The town does. But the porter with the paper bag—?”

“And anyway, at least we didn’t have to change. We were left alone to not sleep.”

“Yeah. To not sleep.…”

They closed their eyes and opened them again; again closed them, again opened them. Thou hast nor youth nor age, but, as it were, an after-dinner sleep. The rich country divulged hills, the hills divulged an oil-derrick or two, then others; suddenly like a blond angel in the bright sunlight, unbelievable, the tall fierce flame of a natural-gas well blazed pale yellow in the morning, and another, and a third. The fantastic landscape of skeletal derricks, singly or in groups or rows, stretching away as far as one could see in the broken country, had a sort of natural beauty, it was like something which had actually grown out of the earth. Of some, the pumps were motionless; of others they worked slowly, at the bottom of the derrick, like the lazy kicking of a grasshopper’s leg. Oil lands. The surface of the ground looked brown and rusty here and there, as if oil-soaked; pools of shallow scum lay among blighted trees and bushes; junk-heaps of scrap metal, oil tanks like immense mushrooms, bright ugly little towns as new as varnish. And Gil was reading aloud, his ascetic face wrinkled with amusement:

“The picture is a reproduction of William Harden Foster’s famous painting—”

“Famous—?”

“Yes, famous painting, ‘The Sunshine Special.’ The floral border combines the State Flower of each of the eleven States—”

“It’s very pretty, all except the chu-chu.”

“The Apple Blossom for instance — listen! — is a beautiful pink and white flower chosen by Arkansas because of its outstanding value, both commercial and esthetic. It is described by the legislature as a delight to the eye that ripens into a joy to the palate.”

“Just the same, my darling, I think it’s a very pretty plate.”

“The Wood Violet was chosen by Illinois because of its great beauty and appeal, its modest retiring nature — like Noni — and because it grows so profusely in the State.”

“It’s very beautiful English!”

“And you may not know it, but the Passion Flower, or Maypop — don’t you like Maypop? — was selected by the State Horticultural Society of Tennessee as its representative flower. It bears a fruit as large as an egg and very sweet, whose taste pleases exceedingly or repels very strongly.”

“Well, which?”

“And surely the sunflower can’t be, as it says here, the only genuine American flower — what about goldenrod, Noni? what about Indian pipes? what about the lady’s slipper—?”

“Just the same, it’s a very pretty plate, and I like the magnolias, even if they do look like water lilies—”

She was smiling down at the plate, her two hands laid at either side of it, she was smiling, but now she was looking very tired, very white, and it seemed odd that Gil should not have noticed it — or had he? It was absurd, the whole thing was crazy, saving money like this — sitting up all night for three nights — just in order that she might die, and perhaps even hastening it by the very economy. It was cruel. And it was not the less cruel for being self-imposed by Noni herself. He said:

“And now it’s San Anton. And then it’s Laredo. And then it’s Mexico. All I can say is I hope to God there’ll be a letter from Hambo telling us how to get there, and all about the lawyers. And gosh, how I wish we spoke Spanish! Noni, if you’d only spent less time on Bach and more on education—”

They finished the Scotch: they finished the bourbon. The paper cups leaked, even when doubled and trebled, they fell from the window sills and rolled on the floor, to be swept up by the porter with a reproachful eye. “The Megha Duta is throughout in the measure called Mandakranta, from the word ‘Manda,’ slow, and ‘kram,’ advance; in fact, it may be rendered by ‘Slow Coach’ in English. The following is the extract above alluded to: ‘If the four first syllables at the beginning of the verse (O thou sweet lotus-smelling little flirt), then the tenth, eleventh, and afterwards the two which come after the twelfth, and the two others which are last, are long, with a caesura after the fourth, sixth, seventh syllables, the best poets (my plump little darling), call it a MANDAKRANTA.’” A Mandakranta to Mexico , Noni said, a winding Mandakranta. And what sentences ! “The women there are with the lotus in the hand.… In the locks is interlaced the new-blown jasmine; the beauty of the face is colored a pale white with the pollen-bearing Lodra; the fresh Kuravaka is twined in the luxuriant hair; behind the pretty ear is placed the Sarisha; and, at the hair-parting, the Nipas, which spring up at thy approach.… Where, having women for companions, the Yakshas revel on palace terraces inlaid with precious stones, so bright with stones indeed that they look as if they were paved with flowers; where, in the starlight, they grow drunk on the aphrodisiac juice of the kalpa tree, while drums, soft and deep as thine, are gently beaten; there — O Cloud! — by the Mandara blossoms fallen from the hair in agitation, by the golden lotus broken in pieces and dropped from the ear, by the pearls on their bright breasts, and the necklaces, at the rising of the sun are disclosed the nightly ways of loving women.… In vain do they, covered with shame, throw a handful of churna on the jewel lamps with lofty flames.…”