Читать книгу The Plumed Serpent. Historical Novel - Life and Love after the Mexico Revolution онлайн

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‘From Mexico?’

‘Yes. I feel I want to go away from it and never, never see it again. It is so oppressive and gruesome.’

‘Try it a little longer,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you will feel differently. But perhaps not,’ he ended vaguely, driftingly.

She could feel in him a sort of yearning towards her. As if a sort of appeal came to her from him, from his physical heart in his breast. As if the very heart gave out dark rays of seeking and yearning. She glimpsed this now for the first time, quite apart from the talking, and it made her shy.

‘And does everything in Mexico oppress you?’ he added, almost shyly, but with a touch of mockery, looking at her with a troubled naïve face that had its age heavy and resistant beneath the surface.

‘Almost everything!’ she said. ‘It ALWAYS makes my heart sink. Like the eyes of the men in the big hats — I call them the peons. Their eyes have no middle to them. Those big handsome men, under their big hats, they aren’t really there. They have no centre, no real I. Their middle is a raging black hole, like the middle of a maelstrom.’