PARTISAN REVIEW
hoarsely. He tried to stuff them into her hands. I don't want your
money, she answered. Then after a slight pause she ·muttered,
Give it to them. She jerked her head toward the door beyond
which the family were now preparing noisily for supper. He felt
defeated altogether. He sighed and looked down at his hands. Her
own hands lifted, then, and reached falteringly toward his head.
Rubio, she whispered, the word for blond. Tiredly one of her hands
dropped down his body to see if he desired her, and discovering that
he did not, she smiled at him sadly and let her eyes fall shut. She
seemed to be falling asleep; so then he leaned over and kissed her
gently at the edge of her large mouth. Morena, he whispered, which
was the word for dark one. Instantly the long bony arms flung about
him an embrace which took his breath. She pressed their faces pain–
fully together, her Indian cheekbones bruising
his
softer flesh. Scalding
tears and the pressure of those gaunt arms broke finally all the way
through the encrusted shell of
his
ego, which had never before been
broken all the way through, and he was released. He was let out of
the small but apparently rather light and comfortable room of
his
known self into a space that lacked the comfort of
limits.
He entered
a space of bewildering dark and immensity, and yet not dark, of
which light is really the darker side of the sphere. He was not at
home in it. It gave him unbearable fright, and so he crawled back.
He crawled back out of the gaunt embrace of the girl. I will come
back in the morning, he said to the girl as he rose from beside the
pallet and crawled back into the small room he was secure in....
When he returned in the morning, the atmosphere of his recep–
tion was different. There was an air of excitement in the place that
he could not fathom, and all of the women seemed to have on their
best clothes. He thought perhaps it was because of the money that he
had left in the sick-room. He started to cross to that room, but the
old woman plucked his sleeve and pointed toward another. She led
him
into the parlor of the house and he was astonished to find that
they had moved the girl there. Because he did not understand their
speech, he could not realize at first that she had died in the night:
this he did not realize until he had picked up her hand, nearly as
dark as a negro's, and found it cool and stiffened. They had dressed
her in white, a night-gown of clean white linen that shone with
starch, and when he released the hand, the oldest woman advanced
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