Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [167]
3
The stone of the Moorish arches around the courtyard of the Casa Gutierrez was twisted like rope, and looked as soft. The stairway was the finest in Morelia. The ladies posed for her at the head of the steps, black against the pink stone, docile, smiling, their faces pale and soft like the faces of nuns. But when the mozos led out into the court a great clatter of horses and mules, the artist turned the page of her sketchbook and crowded to the balustrade with the others.
Again she was struck by the contrast with Leadville. There, when Oliver and Frank went out on a mine inspection, they wore buckskin and corduroy and battered felt hats. They creaked up into fifty-dollar Whitman saddles and yanked the lead rope of a packhorse carrying a pair of bedrolls, a few cans of beans and a slab of bacon and a frying pan, a loaf or two of bread, a pick and shovel and geologist’s hammer. The tarp that covered the load by day would cover their beds at night.
Down below her, Oliver was the only familiar thing, and he, wearing what he would have worn in Colorado, looked very shabby to her critical eye. Don Pedro Gutierrez, supplying mules and horses and servants for the expedition, was clearly bent on upholding the prestige of his family and impressing the engineers of two syndicates. He stood just at the gate, with all the seethe and clatter of twenty-five mules, a half dozen saddle horses, and eight servants under his eye, and coerced it into ceremonious order.
No corduroy or stained buckskins for him. His tight leather trousers, belled at the bottom, were embroidered down the seams. His leather jacket was gorgeous with togs and silver buttons and embroidered frogs. His white beaver hat had a brim like a halo, and around it for a band was wound a silver cord. His boots looked as soft as gloves, his silver spurs were wheels. A serape of great price was folded narrow and tossed over one shoulder. He might have been ridiculous; instead he was close to magnificent. Susan, seeing him at breakfast the morning before, had thought him the sort of little dark man of fifty who might have sold dry goods on Sixth Avenue, but she revised her opinion as she labored to catch his likeness from the corredor. His family went back to the Conquest, he owned great ranches and historic mines, he would have scorned to measure the extent of his lands. Standing by the gateway he moved the sweating servants with an eyebrow, directed them with half-inch movements of his head.
In her quick sketch, Don Pedro’s small, quiet, ornate figure came forward, larger than life, dominating all that swarming activity and the other figures who might have competed for attention. Oliver, Simpson, Don Gustavo, grown men capable of decision and authority, stood back against the wall smoking cigars and leaving everything to Don Pedro. Trying to catch in some expression or posture the authority that flowed from him, she thought of other kinds of authority she had observed in other men–Ferd Ward’s utterly confident money power, Thomas Hudson’s mixture of sensibility and probity, Lawrence Kendall’s tight-mouthed rigor, Conrad Prager’s savoir faire, Oliver’s promptness in a crisis. Don Pedro, gaudy as a ringmaster in his noisy courtyard, was more impressive than any of them.
Like the shaped stone, the fully formed architecture, the household with its routines as fixed as holy offices, he represented a civilized continuity unbroken even by transplantation to a new country. He expressed a security of habit such as that which made Milton dear to her, but older, more cultivated, and with more power to shape the individual to the group image. The Inquisition spoke through him, Ferdinand and Isabella, the conquistadors. The black-clad,