قراءة كتاب When the Owl Cries

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When the Owl Cries

When the Owl Cries

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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and artist, born in Moberly, Missouri, and educated at Oberlin College, the University of Arizona, the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City, and the Instituto de Bellas Artes in Guadalajara. His work can be divided into three categories: He is the author of many novels, short stories, and poems; second, as a fine artist, his drawings, illustrations, and paintings have been exhibited in more than 40 one-man shows in leading galleries, including the Los Angeles County Museum, the Atlanta Art Museum, the Bancroft Library, the Richmond Art Institute, the Brooks Museum, the Instituto-Mexicano-Norteamericano in Mexico City, and many other galleries; and, third, he devoted much of his life to the most comprehensive study of the haciendas of Mexico that has been undertaken.

350 of his pen-and-ink illustrations of the haciendas and more than 1,000 hacienda photographs make up the Paul Alexander Bartlett Collection held by the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection of the University of Texas, and form part of a second diversified collection held by the American Heritage Center of the University of Wyoming, which also includes an archive of Bartlett's literary work, fine art, and letters. A third archive consisting primarily of Bartlett's literary work is held by the Department of Special Collections at UCLA.

Paul Alexander Bartlett's fiction has been commended by many authors, among them Pearl Buck, Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, James Michener, Upton Sinclair, Evelyn Eaton, and many others. He was the recipient of many grants, awards, and fellowships, from such organizations as the Leopold Schepp Foundation, the Edward MacDowell Association, the New School for Social Research, the Huntington Hartford Foundation, the Montalvo Foundation, Yaddo, and the Carnegie Foundation.

His wife, Elizabeth Bartlett, a widely published and internationally commended poet, is the author of seventeen published books of poetry, numerous poems, short stories, and essays in leading literary quarterlies and anthologies, and, as the founder of Literary Olympics, Inc., is the editor of a series of multi-language volumes of international poetry that honor the work of outstanding contemporary poets.

Their only child (me) inherited their writer's gene and has published a number of books and articles in the fields of philosophy and psychology.




Map of the Hacienda de Petaca, where When the Owl Cries takes place.

Plan of the Hacienda Petaca, Colima, Mexico
Plan of the Hacienda Petaca, Colima, Mexico
(Click on the image for a larger version)




When the Owl Cries


1

A tattered mass of yellow cloud hung over the great Mexican volcano. Above the broad lagoon, between the volcano and the hacienda house, a flock of herons flew lazily, carrying their white with consummate ease. Their wings took them in a low line above the water. The surface wore a yellowish cast—like weathered lichen, wrinkled along the shores. Some of this yellowish cast spattered the upper slopes of the 14,000-foot peak, where badly eroded lava sides creased to form a cone.

Raul Medina noticed the odd colors as he sat in his garden. He stared at herons and lagoon and volcano and frowned. He was dressed in a gray suit, a short, well built man with a scrubby head of brown hair and eyebrows like twisted cigarette tobacco, his eyes dark brown spoked with gray, his mouth thin but kindly, his face a little meaty for a man in his middle thirties who had lived an outdoor life. As he gazed toward the Colima volcano he rubbed his strong, fibrous hands together. His mind went back in time: he remembered that the curious lagoon and mountain colors had appeared when he was nineteen or twenty; in those days, the cone had blasted open and thrown flames and lava and doused the area with cinders and ashes and shaken down walls.

Raul's thoughts switched to everyday problems. Yesterday a milch cow had died, the poultry had gotten out of their pen, a mule had ripped a tendon on a stone fence, a cowboy lay seriously ill. Manuel Boaz, Raul's personal servant, had come to him after supper, as he sat on the veranda with others, and whispered that the night before an owl had hooted on the roof of the house.

"We haven't heard it for a long time, Don Raul. Someone will die. Your father has been getting worse ... perhaps his time has come. It's not a good sign."

Raul had laughed at him, and waved him away—watched his cigarette disappear in the dark.

The moon was rising above the lagoon; the last streaks in the sunset sky had gone; Raul got up and leaned on top the rough adobe wall surrounding his garden. The granular adobes, still warm after the long sunny day, felt good to his arms. It seemed to Raul that Lucienne von Humboldt was beside him, that they were looking at the moonlight. He felt her kiss on his cheek. They had loved each other a long time, maybe since childhood. It had been weeks since they had seen each other; he tried to plan their next meeting. Cool fingers touched his arm, and he glanced up to see his wife.

"What are you doing here?" Angelina asked, in her husky voice.

"Just watching the moon," he said, wishing she would remove her hand.

Standing beside him, she was just a bit shorter than he, willowy, almost frail. She had what Mexican aristocrats called a "French face," though she was as Mexican as Raul. Her features were tight-skinned features, molded and balanced. Her eyes were blue. She wore her black hair braided in an elaborate bun at the back of her head.

"Whenever you come out into the garden by yourself I know you're troubled. Why, you slipped away from supper before all of us finished. What's wrong?" She was obviously displeased.

"Look at that moon," he said, his mind still on Lucienne.

"A three-quarter moon," she said. "We've seen it before ... I like the way the light trails over the water."

"The lagoon was yellow, even after the sun had set. So was the cone," he said.

"I can tell by your voice that you're worried," she said.

"I suppose I am," he admitted, thinking of the hacienda.

"What is it, then?"

"The usual problems." Then he realized how much more weighed on him, and said, speaking tersely: "It's the way things are headed. Time is bursting around us. I feel things are going badly; it's the people, our hacienda people; I detect undercurrents; it's something hard to describe. Petaca means so much to me, the lagoon, the horses, cattle, the house ... I feel undermined." His words rushed out of him.

"Nothing is so wrong we can't remedy it," she said, annoyed.

"But that's not true, Angelina," he said, his voice cutting across hers. "Petaca can't go on as it has in the past. You must understand. It's more than a conflict with my father and his ideas." His tongue slowed down. "He lies in his room, arm and leg useless. He has always hated the peasants; they've never been his workers—only chattel. My idea of improving their lot is a joke to him. And now there's increasing disapproval at other haciendas; men are sick of the way they have been managed; they want to breathe ... it's freedom they're after."

"Don't be worried, Raul. Perhaps the craving for freedom is not so widespread as you think."

Raul sighed. Angelina never grasped hacienda problems; she cared little at heart about any serious matters. Something seemed to shut her off. She had never loved Petaca, never known what it was to feel the bite of wind, the power of seeds sprouting, the rasp of the mill wheel, or the breadth of sky.

Somewhere in

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