But Villiers came with another story. Last year the peons had murdered the manager of one of the estates across the lake. They had stripped him and left him naked on his back, with his sexual organs cut off and put into his mouth, his nose slit and pinned back, the two halves, to his cheeks, with long cactus spines.
“Tell me no more!” said Kate.
She felt there was doom written on the very sky, doom and horror.
She wrote to Don Ramón in Sayula, saying she wanted to go back to Europe. True, she herself had seen no horrors, apart from the bull-fight. And she had had some exquisite moments, as coming to this hotel in the boat. The natives had a certain mystery and beauty, to her. But she could not bear the unease, and the latest sense of horror.
True, the peons were poor. They used to work for twenty cents, American, a day; and now the standard price was fifty cents, or one peso. But then in the old days they received their wage all the year round. Now, only at harvest time or sowing time. No work, no pay. And in the long dry season, it was mostly no work.
“Still,” said the German manager of the hotel, a man who had run a rubber plantation in Tabasco, a sugar plantation in the state of Vera Cruz, and a hacienda growing wheat, maize, oranges, in Jalisco: “Still, it isn’t a question of money with the peons. It doesn’t start with the peons. It starts in Mexico City, with a lot of malcontents who want to put their spoke in the wheel, and who lay hold of pious catchwords, to catch the poor. There’s no more in it than that. Then the agitators go round and infect the peons. It is nothing but a sort of infectious disease, like syphilis, all this revolution and socialism.”
“But why does no one oppose it,” said Kate. “Why don’t the hacendados put up a fight, instead of caving in and running away?”
“The Mexican hacendado!” The man’s German eyes gave out a spark. “The Mexican gentleman is such a brave man, that while the soldier is violating his wife on the bed, he is hiding under the bed and holding his breath so they shan’t find him. He’s as brave as that.”
Kate looked away uncomfortably.
“They all want the United States to intervene. They hate the Americans; but they want the United States to intervene, to save them their money and their property. That’s how brave they are! They hate the Americans personally, but they love them because they can look after money and property. So they want the United States to annex Mexico, the beloved patria; leaving the marvellous green and white and red flag, and the eagle with the snake in its claws, for the sake of appearances and honour! They’re simply bottled full of honour; of that sort.”