Clash of Star-Kings Read Online Free PDF Page B

dully.
    “Jacob, you are busy?” Luis asked, entering the long room with its yellow-washed walls and long trestle table laden with piles of books and papers.
    Luis, entering, had no more substance or reality to Jacob Clay than, say, the Ghost of Purim Yet to Come. He thought of a sentence he wanted for his next paragraph, and smiled, vaguely. Luis, encouraged by the smile, came in and sat down in the cane-bottomed chair with the red, white, blue and green floral designs. Jacob jotted down the sentence in pencil; it was not quite ready to go through the typewriter. He looked up and gazed abstractedly at Luis in the chair, not altogether noticing either of them.
    “I can speak to you in confidence and in Español?” asked Luis. “I may to make the light?”
    Jacob muttered, “Sí, sí …” without more than barely understanding the question. It was getting on towards dusk. He peered up at the light, scowling. The light went on. Good. He began to reflect on the sentence. Absurd, that he should allow one paragraph to hold up this whole damned piece, but … mmm … how did it go, now? ahhh …
He was not merely overwhelmed by this new calamity, he was by it
… yeah … okay … mmm … so:
He was?
what? by it….
    “You are very kindly.
Bueno. Entonces, mira, Jacobo
— ” Luis began his confidences, haltingly to begin with, but with gradually increasing fluency. He felt no contradiction in explaining his secret problems to a foreigner; indeed, had Jacob
not
been a foreigner, Luis would never have dreamed of making him a confidant. True, Luis distrusted … feared … hated those of lighter skins — but only those of lighter skins who were
Mexicans
. It was they, after all, who had snubbed him; not the gringos, to whom all Mexicans were alike. Jacobo was as polite to him as he was to Don Umberto, the Municipal President. Let Don Umberto mutter about the loss of Tejas and Alta California by gringo conquest, gringo theft. How many thousands of hectares of
ejido
lands had not Don Umberto’s townsmen acquired that had once been conquered and thefted from the Moxtomí! It was not the Moxtomi, after all, who had lost Tejas and Alta California. Luis was as indifferent to the yanqui conquests there as any African nationalist was to Russian conquests in central or eastern Asia. It was his own losses he resented, not losses in general, and the enemies of his enemies he regarded as his friends.
    “Entiende, Jacobo, ayer en las montañas …”
he said, earnestly
.
    Jacob regarded him, serenely and unseeingly.
He was not only overwhelmed by this new calamity, he was — he was — he was
— Okay, he was what? washed out? flooded out? No … no … no … But something like it. Luis was talking. Luis was asking something. Who knows what. Jacob Clay made a sympathetic noise, continued to search his mind for the
mot juste
.
    • • •
    Robert Macauley smiled a smile of anticipated pleasure and stroked his golden mustache. A chance had been given him to enlarge on his favorite subject, The Secret History of Mexico. Usually he liked to reveal new entries for The Worst Thing That Happened to Mexico (“The worst thing that happened to Mexico was the expulsion of the Jesuits; literacy dropped seventy percent in a generation,” or “The worst thing that happened to Mexico was the publication of the Papal Bull against Freemasonry; liberalism and religion were divorced forever.”), but Little-Known Insights he cherished almost as much. Sarah’s question was right up his alley.
    “ ‘Who was the Holy Hermit of the Sacred Mountain?’ ” he repeated. “That’s a good question. Let’s precede it with another one. ‘Why is the Sacred Mountain sacred?’ Hey? I suppose that this town has been rebuilt a dozen times at least, since the Conquest … but I bet that if you traced on a map the route this procession will be taking you’d have a pretty good outline of its original boundaries and axis. Now, obviously, the Sacred Mountain