Was this thing true, the same of both of them?—that alone, they were next to nothing? Each of them, separate, next to nothing. Apart in a sort of grey, mechanical twilight, without a star?
And together, in strange reciprocity, flashing darkly till the Morning Star rose between them?
He would say to her, as Ramón had said of Carlota: “Soul! No; you have no soul of your own. You have at best only half a soul. It takes a man and a woman together to make a soul. The soul is the Morning Star, emerging from the two. One alone cannot have a soul.”
This Ramón said. And she knew it conveyed what Cipriano really felt. Cipriano could not see Kate as a being by herself. And if he lived a thousand more years, he would never see her as such. He would see her only as reciprocal to himself. As the balance of him, and the correspondence on the other side of heaven.
“Let the Morning Star rise between us,” he would say. “Alone you are nothing, and I am manqué. But together we are the wings of the Morning.”
Was it true? Was this the final answer to man’s assertion of individuality?
Was it true? And was it her sacred duty to sit beside him in the green dress of Malintzi, in the church, the goddess admitting her halfness? Her halfness! Was there no star of the single soul? Was that all an illusion?
Was the individual an illusion? Man, any man, every, man, by himself just a fragment, knowing no Morning Star? And every woman the same; by herself, starless and fragmentary. Even in the relation to the innermost God, still fragmentary and unblest.