Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/222
“It is strange to me,” she replied, wondering and a little awed by the night.
“Good, no?” he said, in an exultant tone.
“A little scaring,” she replied, with a slight laugh.
“When you are used to it,” he said, “it seems natural, no? It seems natural so—as it is. And when you go to a country like England, where all is so safe and ready-made, then you miss it. You keep saying to yourself: ‘What am I missing? What is it that is not here?’”
He seemed to be gloating in his native darkness. It was curious, that though he spoke such good English, it seemed always foreign to her, more foreign than Doña Carlota’s Spanish.
“I can’t understand that people want to have everything, all life, no?—so safe and ready-made as in England and America. It is good to be awake. On the qui vive, no?”
“Perhaps,” she said.
“So I like it,” he said, “when Ramón tells the people the earth is alive, and the sky has a big bird in it, that you don’t see. I think it is true. Certainly! And it is good to know it, because then one is on the qui vive, no?
“But it’s tiring to be always on the qui vive,” she said..
“Why? Why tiring? No, I think, on the contrary, it is refreshing.—Ah, you should marry, and live in Mexico. At last, I am sure, you wouuld like it. You would keep waking up more and more to it.”
“Or else going more and more deadened,” she said. “That is how most foreigners go, it seems to me.”
“Why deadened?” he said to her. “I don’t understand. Why deadened? Here you have a country where night is night, and rain comes down and you know it. And you have a people with whom you must be on the qui vive all the time, all the time. And that is very good, no? You don’t go sleepy. Like a pear! Don’t you say a pear goes sleepy, no?—cuando se echa a perder?”
“Yes!” she said.
“And here you have also Ramón. How does Ramón seem to you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to say anything. But I do think he is almost too much: too far.—And I don’t think he is Mexican.”
“Why not? Why not Mexican? He is Mexican.”