“Ah, yes, you feel cold! You must take care in the nights, now. Sometimes in the rainy season the nights are very cold. You must be ready with an extra blanket. And the servants, poor things, they just lie and shudder, and they get up in the morning like corpses.—But the sun soon warms them again, and they seem to think they must bear what comes. So they complain sometimes, but still they don’t provide.”
The wind had gone, suddenly. Kate was uneasy, uneasy, with the smell of water, almost of ice, in her nostrils, and her blood still hot and dark. She got up and went again to the terrace. Cipriano was still standing there, motionless and inscrutable, like a monument, in his red and dark serape.
The rain was abating. Down below in the garden, two barefooted women-servants were running through the water, in the faint light of the zaguan lamp, running across the garden and putting ollas, and square gasoline cans under the arching spouts of water that seethed down from the roof, then darting away while they filled, then struggling in with the frothy vessel. It would save making trips to the lake, for water.
“What do you think of us?” Cipriano said to her.
“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?”