27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays (7 page)

You say that the woman Elena never allowed you freely the right of marriage?

R
ANCHER:

Never freely, and never otherwise.

It was no marriage.

They have compared her to water—and water, indeed, she was.

Water that ran through my fingers when I was athirst.

Oh, from the time that I worked at Casa Blanca,

a laborer for her people, as they have mentioned,

I knew there was something obscure—subterranean—cool—from which she drew her persistence,

when by all rights of what I felt to be nature, she should have dried—as fields in a rainless summer, a summer like this one that presently starves our grain-fields, she should have dried, this seemingly loveless woman, and
yet
she
didn’t.

Yes, she was cool, she was water, even as they have described her—

but water sealed under the rock—where I was concerned.

I burned.

I burned.

I burned . . .

(
Three dissonant notes are sounded on the guitar. There is a
feverish, incessant rustling sound like wind in a heap of dead leaves.
)

R
ANCHER:
(
hoarsely
)

I finally said to her once, in the late afternoon it was, and she stood in the doorway . . .

(
The dissonant notes are repeated. The rustling is louder. A sound of mocking laughter outside the door, sudden and brief.

The Desert Elena appears. It is the same lost girl, but not as the brother had seen her. This is the vision of the loveless bride, the water sealed under rock from the lover’s thirst
—
not the green of the mountains and the clear swift streams, but the sun-parched desert. Her figure is closely sheathed in a coarse-fibered bleached material, her hair bound tight to her skull. She bears a vessel in either hand, like balanced scales, one containing a cactus, the other a wooden grave-cross with a wreath of dry, artificial flowers on it. Only The Rancher observes her.
)

R
ANCHER:

‘Woman,’ I said to her, ‘Woman, what keeps you alive?’

‘What keeps you sparkling so, you make-believe fountain?’

(
to the vision
)

‘You and the desert,’ I told her,

‘You are sisters—sisters beneath the skin!’

But even the desert is sometimes pregnant with something,

distorted progeny,

twisted, dry, imbecilic,

gives birth to the cacti, the waterless Judas tree.

The blood of the root makes liquor to scorch the brain and put foul oaths on the tongue.

But you—you, woman, bear nothing, nothing ever but death—which is all you will get with your pitiful—stone kind of body.

E
LENA:
Oh, no—I will get something more.

T
HE
J
UDGE:

More? You will get something more?

Where will it come from—lovely, smiling lady?

(
The dead leaves rustle.
)

Will it come singing and shouting and plunging bare-back

down canyons

and run like wild birds home to Sangre de Cristo

when August crazes the sky?

E
LENA:
(
smiling
)
Yes!

R
ANCHER:
(
to the Judge
)

Yes, she admitted, yes!

For in their house, these people from Casa Blanca—no one can say they fear to speak the truth!
ELENA:

Perhaps it will come as you say—but until then

The fences are broken—mend them.

The moon is needing a new coat of white-wash on it!

Attend to that, repair man! Those are your duties.

But keep your hands off me!

R
ANCHER:
My hands are empty—starved!

E
LENA:
Fill them with chicken-feathers! Or buzzard-feathers.

R
ANCHER:
My lips are dry.

E
LENA:

Then drink from the cistern. Or if the cistern is empty, moisten your lips with the hungry blood of the fox that kills our fowls.

R
ANCHER:
The fox-blood burns!

E
LENA:

Mine, too.

I have no coolness for you:

my hands are made of the stuff in the dried sulphur pools.

These are my gifts: the cactus, the bleached grave-cross with the wreath of dead
vines on it.

Listen! The wind, when it blows, is rattling dry castanets in the restless grave-yard.

The old monks whittle—they make prayer-beads in the cellar.

Their fingers are getting too stiff to continue the work.

They dread the bells. For the bells are heavy and iron and have no wetness in them.

The bones of the dead have cracked from lack of moisture.

The sisters come out in a quick and steady file and their black skirts whisper dryer and dryer and dryer, until they halt before their desperate march has reached the river.

The river has turned underground.

The sisters crumble: beneath their black skirts crumble, the skirts are blown and the granular salty bodies go whispering off among the lifeless grasses . . .

I must go too,

For I, like these, have glanced at a burning city.

Now let me go!

(
She turns austerely and moves away from the door. Three dissonant notes on the guitar and the sound of dead rustling leaves is repeated. A yellow flash of lightning in the portal, now vacant, and the sound of wind.
)

R
ANCHER:

My hand shot-out, whip-like, to catch at her wrist,

But she had gone . . .

My wife—that make-believe fountain—had fled from the door.

(
He covers his face with his hands.
)

T
HE
J
UDGE:
(
rising
)

Player, give us the music of wind that promises rain.

The time is dry.

But clouds have come,

and the sound of thunder is welcome.

Now let the Indian women tread the earth in the dance that destroys the locust!

(
The three white-robed women rise from their bench and move in front. They perform a slow, angular dance to drums and guitar. Their movements slow. The music softens. The dance and the music become a reticent background for the speech.
)

R
ANCHER:

Elena had fled through the door as the storm broke on us.

She had fled through the open door, out over the fields

darkening down the valley where rain was advancing its tall silent squadrons of silver.

Her figure was lost in a sudden convulsion of shadows heaved by the eucalyptus.

(
The dancers raise their arms.
)

The rain came down as sound of rapturous trumpets rolled over the earth,

and still

the delicate warmthless yellow

of late afternoon persisted

behind

that transparent curtain of silver.

At once the clouds

had changed their weight into motion,

their inkiness thinned, their cumulous forms rose higher, their edges were stirred as radiant feathers, upwards, above the mountains.

(
Distant choral singing. Wordless. “La Golondrina” is woven into the music.
)

R
ANCHER:

A treble choir now sang in the eucalyptus, an Angelus rang!

(
Bells
)

The whole wide vault of the valley, the sweep of the plain assumed a curious lightness under the rain.

The birds already, the swallows,

before the rainstorm ceased,

had begun to climb the atmosphere’s clean spirals.

Ethereal wine

intoxicated these tipplers,

their notes were wild and prodigal as fool’s silver.

The moon, unshining, blank, bone-like, stood over the Lobos mountains and grinned and grinned like a speechless idiot where the cloud-mass thinned . . .

I saw her once more—briefly, running along by the fence at the end of the meadow.

The long and tremendous song of the eucalyptus described this flight:

the shoulders inclined stiffly forward,

the arms flung out, throat arched,

more as though drunk with a kind of heroic abandon—than blinded—by fright.

(
He covers his face.
)

Forgive me . . .

(
The cloud that darkened the sun passes over. The stream of
fierce sunlight returns through the door and the windows. The women return to the bench.
)

S
CENE
III

(
The Judge pours water from a gourd to wet his handkerchief and wipes his forehead.
)

T
HE
J
UDGE:

The clouds have cheated again—and crossed away.

Our friend the sun comes back like an enemy now.

We want the rain—the coolness—the shade . . .

It is not given us yet.

T
HE
W
OMEN:
(
softly chanting
)

Rojo
—
rojo

Rojo de sangre es el sol.

T
HE
J
UDGE:

It is the lack of what he desires most keenly that twists a man out of nature.

When you were a boy, my friend from Casa Rojo, you were gentle—withdrew too much from the world.

This reticence, almost noble, persisted through youth,

but later, as you grew older,

an emptiness, still unfilled, became a cellar,

a cellar into which blackness dripped and trickled,

a slow, corrosive seepage.

Then the reticence was no longer noble—but locked—resentful, and breeding a need for destruction.

What was clear?

R
ANCHER:
Nothing was clear.

T
HE
J
UDGE:
What was straight?

R
ANCHER:
Nothing was straight.

T
HE
J
UDGE:
How did the light come through?

R
ANCHER:
Through the crookedest entrance, the narrowest area-way!

T
HE
J
UDGE:
And where you walked—what was it you walked among?

R
ANCHER:
A pile of my own dead bones—like discarded lumber.

T
HE
J
UDGE:
The day was still.

R
ANCHER:
Oppressively still.

T
HE
J
UDGE:

Noon—breathless. The sky was vacant.

White—plague-like—exhausted.

R
ANCHER:

Once it disgorged a turbulent swarm of locusts.

Heat made wave-like motions over the terrible desert statement of distance.

Giants came down, invisibly, pounding huge—huge—drums!

T
HE
W
OMEN:
(
softly
)

Rojo
—
rojo

rojo de sangre es el sol!

(
A low drumming
)

R
ANCHER:

Drummers!

Drummers!

Go back under my skull.

There is a time for nightmare’s reality later!

Ahhh—ahhh—with disgust.

With fur on the tongue,

with mucous-inflamed eyeballs,

fever enlarging the horrible chamber at night!

T
HE
W
OMEN:

Rojo
—
rojo

rojo de sangre es el sol!

R
ANCHER:

Now do you wonder

that with no divining rod excepting my thirst

I looked for coolness of springs in the woman’s body?

That finding none,

or finding it being cut off—drained away

at the source—by the least suspected,

I struck?

And
struck?

And tore the false rock open?

T
HE
W
OMEN:
Rojo
—
rojo.

R
ANCHER:

I own my guilt.

I own it before you ranchers, before you women.

I say that I struck with an axe at the wife’s false body and would have struck him, too, but my strength went from me.

I found the two together and clove them apart with that—the axe.

No more,

there is no more.

T
HE
W
OMEN:

Rojo de sangre es el sol!

Rojo
—
rojo.

Rojo de sangre es el sol!

(
The Rancher sinks to the bench. The Son rises. A cloud again passes over the sky. There is a glimmer of lightning and the fretful murmur of wind. A dimness replaces the glare
that was in the room. The women murmur and draw their shawls about them.
)

S
ON:
(
facing The Rancher
)

You shall not defame her,

nor shall you defile her,

this quicksilver girl,

this skyward diver,

this searcher after pearls,

terrestrial striver!

Blue—

Blue—

Immortally blue

is space at last . . .

I think she always knew that she would be lost in it.

Lost in it? Where!

In which if any direction!

Player, with music lead us!

Lead us—Where?

(
The Guitar Player, with an assenting smile, rises by the door.
)

S
ON:
(
with gestures of infinite longing
)

O stallion lover the night is your raped white mare!

The meadow grasses continued entirely too far beyond where the gate—is broken in several places.

Cling to it, dark child, till it carries you further than ever.

O make it swing out to the wildest and openest places!

The most—indestructible places!