“You do not make it pleasant for me, Carlota.”
“How can I? You know I think you are wrong. When I listened to you last night—there is something so beautiful in it all—and yet so monstrous. So monstrous!—Oh! I think to myself: What is this man doing? This man of all men, who might be such a blessing to his country and mankind—”
“Well,” said Ramón. “And what is he instead?”
“You know! You know! I can’t bear it.—It isn’t for you to save Mexico, Ramón. Christ has already saved it.”
“It seems to me not so.”
“He has! He has! And He made you the wonderful being that you are, so that you should work out the salvation, in the name of Christ and of love. Instead of which—”
“Instead of which, Carlota, I try something else.—But believe me, if the real Christ has not been able to save Mexico,—and He hasn’t—then I am sure, the white Anti-Christ of Charity, and socialism, and politics, and reform, will only succeed in finally destroying her. That, and that alone makes me take my stand.—You, Carlota, with your charity works and your pity: and men like Benito Juarez, with their Reform and their Liberty: and the rest of the benevolent people, politicians and socialists and so forth, surcharged with pity for living men, in their mouths, but really with hate—the hate of the materialist have-nots for the materialist haves: they are the Anti-Christ. The old world, that’s just the world. But the new world, that wants to save the People, this is the Anti-Christ. This is Christ with real poison in the communion cup.—And for this reason I step out of my ordinary privacy and individuality. I don’t want everybody poisoned. About the great mass I don’t care. But I don’t want everybody poisoned.”
“How can you be so sure that you yourself are not a poisoner of the people?—I think you are.”
“Think it then. I think of you, Carlota, merely that you have not been able to come to your complete, final womanhood: which is a different thing from the old womanhoods.”
“Womanhood is always the same.”