“Ah, no it isn’t! Neither is manhood.”
“But what do you think you can do? What do you think this Quetzalcoatl nonsense amounts to?”
“Quetzalcoatl is just a living word, for these people, no more. All I want them to do is to find the beginnings of the way to their own manhood, their own womanhood. Men are not yet men in full, and women are not yet women. They are all half and half, incoherent, part horrible, part pathetic, part good creatures. Half arrived.—I mean you as well, Carlota. I mean all the world.—But these people don’t assert any righteousness of their own, these Mexican people of ours. That makes me think that grace is still with them. And so, having got hold of some kind of clue to my own whole manhood, it is part of me now to try with them.”
“You will fail.”
“I shan’t. Whatever happens to me, there will be a new vibration, a new call in the air, and a new answer inside some men.”
“They will betray you.—Do you know what even your friend Toussaint said of you?—Ramón Carrasco’s future is just the past of mankind.”
“A great deal of it is the past. Naturally Toussaint sees that part.”
“But the boys don’t believe in you. Instinctively, they disbelieve. Cyprian said to me, when I went to see him: ‘Is father doing any more of that silly talk about old gods coming back, mother? I wish he wouldn’t. It would be pretty nasty for us if he got himself into the newspapers with it.’”
Ramón laughed.
“Little boys,” he said, “are like little gramaphones. They only talk according to the record that’s put into them.”