"Perhaps to-morrow," he said. I noticed that the band was playing no longer. "It appears," he continued, "that there are other Pastores at Doña Perdita's house. They tell me that those who were to have performed here have gone up there to see them. And the musicians have also gone up there. For the past half-hour I have been considering seriously going up there myself."
We left him, still considering seriously; the rest of the audience had settled down for an evening of pleasant gossip, having apparently forgotten the Pastores altogether. Outside, the ticket-taker with our peso had long since gathered his companions to him and sought the pleasing hilarity of a cantina.
And so we strolled slowly up the street toward the edge of town where the whitewashed plaster walls of rich men's houses give way to the undecorated adobes of the poor. There all pretense of streets ended, and we went along burro paths between huts scattered according to their owners' whims, through dilapidated corrals to the house of the widow of Don Tomas. It was built of sun-dried mud bricks, jutting part way into the mountain itself, and looked as the stable of Bethlehem must have looked. As if to carry out the analogy, a great cow lay in the moonlight just beneath the window, breathing and chewing her cud. Through the window and the door, over a throng of heads, we could see candle light playing on the ceiling and hear a whining chant sung by girlish voices, and the beat of crooks keeping time on the floor with jingling bells.
It was a low, dirt-floored, whitewashed room, raftered and wattled with mud above, like any peasant dwelling in Italy or Palestine. At the end farthest from the door was a little table heaped with paper flowers where two tall church candles burned. Above it, on the wall, hung a chromo of the Virgin and Child. And in the middle of the flowers was set a tiny wooden model of a cradle in which lay a leaden doll to represent the Infant Jesus. All the rest of the room, except for a small space in the middle of the floor, was packed with humanity: a fringe of children sitting cross-legged around the stage, half-grown-ups and girls kneeling, and behind them, until they choked the doorway, blanketed peons with their hats off, eager and curious. By some exquisite chance, a woman sat next to the altar, her breast exposed as she nursed her baby. Other women with their babies stood along the wall on both sides of her, except for a narrow, curtained entrance into another room where we could hear the giggling of the performers.
"Has it begun?" I asked a boy next to me.
"No," he answered; "they just came out to sing a song to see if the stage was big enough."
It was a merry, noisy crowd, bandying jokes and gossip across each others' heads. Many of the men were exhilarated with aguardiente, singing snatches of ribald songs with their arms around each other's shoulders, and breaking out every now and then into fierce little quarrels that might have led to anything—for they were all armed. And right in the middle of everything a voice said:
"S-s-sh! They are going to begin now!"
The curtain was lifted, and Lucifer, hurled from Heaven because of his invincible pride, stood before us. It was a young girl—all the performers are girls, in distinction to the pre-Elizabethan miracle plays, where the actors were boys. She wore a costume whose every part had been handed down from immeasurable antiquity. It was red, of course—red leather—the conventional medieval color for devils. But the exciting thing about it was that it was evidently the traditional rendering of the uniform of a Roman legionary (and the Roman soldiers who crucified Christ were considered a little less than devils in the Middle Ages). She wore a wide, skirted doublet of red leather, under which were scalloped trousers, falling almost to the shoe tops. There doesn't seem to be much connection here until you remember that the Roman legionaries in Britain and in Spain wore leather trousers. Her helmet was greatly distorted, because feathers and flowers had been fastened to it; but underneath you could trace the resemblance to the Roman helmet. A cuirass covered her breast and back; instead of steel it was made of small mirrors. And a sword hung at her side. Drawing the sword, she strutted about, pitching her voice to imitate a man's:
"Yo soy luz; ay en mi nombre se vet
Pues con la luz
Que baje
Todo el abismo encendi——"