VIVA MEXICO!




                     Books by Charles M. Flandrau


                             VIVA MEXICO!

                       _16mo. Cloth, $1.25 net_


                              PREJUDICES

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                        THE DIARY OF A FRESHMAN

                      _12mo. Cloth, 75 cents net_


                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
                               NEW YORK




                             VIVA MEXICO!


                                  By

                        CHARLES MACOMB FLANDRAU

                  Author of “Harvard Episodes,” “The
                      Diary of a Freshman,” etc.


                       [Illustration: colophon]


                          NEW YORK AND LONDON
                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
                                 1912




                          COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY
                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY


                      _Published September, 1908_


                Printed in the United States of America




                                  TO

                             DON GUILLERMO

                            OF THE FINCA DE
                            SANTA MARGARITA


  For permission to reprint the chapters of this book that originally
         appeared in _The Bellman_, I beg to thank the editor.

                                 RIGHT
                               C. M. F.




                             VIVA MEXICO!




I


Neither tourists nor persons of fashion seem to have discovered that the
trip by water from New York to Vera Cruz is both interesting and
agreeable. But perhaps to tourists and persons of fashion it wouldn’t
be. For, although the former enjoy having traveled, they rarely enjoy
traveling, and the travels of the latter would be pointless, as a rule,
if they failed to involve the constant hope of social activity and its
occasional fulfillment. By tourists I mean--and without disparagement of
at least their preference--persons who prefer to visit a country in
bands of from fifteen to five hundred rather than in a manner less
expeditionary; and persons of fashion I am able even more accurately to
define to my own satisfaction by saying they are the kind of persons to
whom the wives of American ambassadors in Europe are polite. Probably to
neither of these globe-trotting but alien classes would the voyage from
New York to Vera Cruz appeal. For the tourist it is too slow and long.
There are whole days when there is nothing for the man in charge of him
to expound through his megaphone; whole days when there is nothing to do
but contemplate a cloudless sky and a semitropical sea. Thoroughly to
delight in the protracted contemplation of such spacious blueness
overhead and of so much placid green water underneath, one must be
either very lazy or very contemplative. Tourists, of course, are
neither, and while persons of fashion are sometimes both, they are given
to contemplating the beauties of nature from points of vantage favorable
also to the contemplation of one another.

Emphatically the deck of a Ward line steamer is not one of these. A
preliminary investigation just before the ship sails rarely results in
the discovery of what a certain type of American classifies as “nice
people.” When nice people take sea voyages they usually go to Europe;
and so there is an additional anticipatory thrill on embarking for
Mexico in the certainty that there won’t be any merely nice people on
board. The ship will be crowded--so crowded, in fact, that at Havana and
Progreso (which is the port of Merida in the Mexican State of Yucatan)
the company’s agents will distractedly swoop down on you and try to
convince you that it is to your everlasting advantage to abandon a lower
berth in the stateroom long experience has enabled you to select, for an
upper berth in a room you happen to know is small, hot, and near the
steerage. If you are amiable you laugh at them, but if, as is customary,
you and the company have had a fierce disgusto before sailing and you
are therefore not amiable, you express yourself without restraint and
then run to the rail to watch the agents depart in their launch, with
gestures that more literally resemble the traditional tearing of hair,
wringing of hands, and rending of garments than any you have yet
observed.

The ships are crowded, but not with the kind of people who set sail in
search of pleasure, or the Beyreuth festival, or health, or the London
season, or clothes, or the Kiel regatta, or merely because they are
temporarily hard up and have to economize for a time by dismissing the
servants, closing all three houses, and living very simply in nine
ballrooms at Claridge’s or the Ritz. With people bound for Latin
America, Fate somehow seems more actively occupied, on more intimate,
more intrusive terms than it is with people on the way to somewhere
else. Most of them are going, one gradually discovers, not just to see
what it is like, or because they have seen and have chosen to return,
but because circumstances in their wonderful, lucid way have combined to
send them there.

My roommates--I can’t afford a whole stateroom--have usually detested
their destinations from experience or dreaded them from hearsay. One, a
silent, earnest-looking young man who was fond of playing solitaire and
reading the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, always spent his winters in the
hot countries, not because he liked them, but because his profession of
“looping the loop” on a bicycle could be continuously pursued only in
climates salubrious to the circus. Another, a grizzled old Wisconsin
timber cruiser, was being sent, much against his will, to make a report
on some Cuban forest lands.

“It is a queer, strange thing,” he confided in me when we parted in
Havana harbor, “that a man of my age and morals won’t be able even to
get drunk without the help o’ that”--and he nodded toward the ladylike
little interpreter who had come out to meet him and take charge of him
during his stay.

Still another struck me at first as a provincial and tedious New
Englander until I found out his mission. His inside coat pocket was
stuffed with photographs of his numerous children, and he had a horror
of snakes and tarantulas that he often expressed much as one of Miss
Wilkins’s heroines might express her horror of mice. Like all persons
who share the same dread and are about to make a first visit to the
tropics, he conferred on reptiles and poisonous insects a kind of civic
importance that they themselves under no circumstances assume. He had a
haunting idea that the entire toxical population of Guatemala would be
lined up at the railway station to receive him. But when it came out
that he was being sent twenty-six hundred miles for the sole purpose of
splicing a rope--a matter, he said, of a few hours at the most--I was
compelled to see him in a light not only different but almost romantic.
Somewhere in darkest Guatemala there was a rope four and a half miles
long. It broke, and my roommate, who had never been farther south than
Summer Street nor farther west than West Newton--localities between
which he had vibrated daily for many years--was, it seemed, the one
human being among all the human beings from Guatemala to Boston who was
capable of splicing it. As the rope had cost three thousand dollars it
was distinctly less expensive to import a West Newtonian than to import
another rope.

Then, too, I once between Havana and Vera Cruz had as a roommate a
“confidence man”--a broadening and therefore a valuable experience. One
is not often given the privilege of living for five days with a
confidence man on terms of confidence. He was a tall, lank, sandy-haired
creature of about forty, with a Roman nose, a splendid mustache,
unemotional, gray-green eyes, a diamond ring, and suspenders, as well as
a belt; the sort of looking person whom twenty-five years ago British
playwrights would have seized upon as “a typical American.” In a
bloodless fashion his whole existence was “a carnival of crime”--a
succession of scurvy tricks, heartless swindles, lies, frauds, and, now
and then, candid, undisguised thefts. Sometimes, as when he sold jewelry
and bric-a-brac at auction, his dealings were with the semi-intelligent
well-to-do, but more often he exerted himself among the credulous poor,
as when he unloaded brass watch cases filled with tacks on negroes at
Texas fairs. His marked playing cards and loaded dice, which he showed
and explained to me with much amiable vanity, were very ingenious, and I
found our long, cheerful discussions on the technic of his art most
helpful. His contributions to them, in fact, threw upon certain phases
of sociology a brilliant and authoritative light that I defy anyone to
get out of a book or put into it. From instinct, from habit, from love
of the work, he was an almost thoroughly consistent scoundrel, and it
was a shock to discover by the end of the voyage that the thing about
him I most objected to was his wearing suspenders as well as a belt.

There is always a brave and hopeful little band of actors on
board--usually an American stock company on the way to its financial and
artistic doom in the City of Mexico. And it is invariably named after
the beautiful young lady who has hypnotized some middle-aged Mexican
patron saint of the drama into guaranteeing everybody six weeks’ salary
and a return ticket. If it isn’t the Beryl Smith Company it is sure to
be the Company of Hazel Jones or Gladys Robinson, and Beryl (or Hazel or
Gladys) is so beautiful that she can stand unhatted and unveiled in the
midday sunlight of the Gulf--beauty knows no more merciless
test--without making you wish she wouldn’t. Furthermore, you continue to
think her hair the loveliest color you have ever seen, even after--with
an extremely elegant gesture--she tosses her chewing gum overboard and
languidly tells you how she does it.

But her tragedy, like that of her more hardworking associates, is a
great inability to hold anyone’s attention except when she is off the
stage. If actors could only arrange in some way to charge admission to
their semi-private existence, acting as a profession would be less of a
gamble. For it is an unexplained fact that, however obscure,
inconspicuous, and well-behaved they may be, actors and actresses
excite, when they are not acting, more curiosity, speculation, and
comment than any other class. Start the rumor on shipboard that a
certain quiet, unattached young woman, who wears a shabby mackintosh,
common-sense shoes and a last year’s hat, is a third-rate actress, and
the center of the deck at once becomes hers. A few days later, however,
when she turns out to be a first-rate physician or the professor of
Pre-Christian Hebrew literature at Bryn Mawr, her value as a
conversational resource drops instantly to nothing.

But if on the voyage to Mexico one’s compatriots strike, to fall back on
the cant phrase, a diverting “note,” the Cubans, the Spaniards, the
Yucatecans, and the Mexicans in general strike whole chords. To set sail
for anywhere, even Duluth, has always seemed to me considerably more
than merely a practical step toward transporting myself from one place
to another. On going aboard a ship I can’t--and would not if I
could--rid myself of the sensation that there is something improbable
and adventurous about me; that everybody, from the captain to the
sixty-year-old cockney stewardess, is about to engage in “deeds of love
and high emprise.” The sudden translation from Forty-second Street to
the deck of any steamer bound for foreign parts has a thrill in it, but
if the destination be the tropics, there is more than one. They are
incited by the presence of so many slim, sallow, gesticulating men, and
stout, powdered, gayly (and badly) dressed women, by the surprisingly
variegated inflections and minor cadences of the Spanish language, by
the first penetrating whiff of exotic tobacco smoke from the cigarette
of a coffee-colored old lady with a mustache, from the very shape and
quality of the luggage as it is hoisted over the side or carried up by
the army of negro porters; the most un-Anglo-Saxon luggage conceivable.
They travel, the Latin-Americans, with incredible amounts of it, and the
sight of it always makes me wonder whether they have ever traveled
before or ever expect to travel again. For it consists chiefly of
gigantic, smashed-in paper band-boxes, satchels precariously fashioned
out of something that tries hard to look like leather and doesn’t in the
least succeed, pale blue or pink trunks that for some occult reason are
narrower at the bottom than at the top and might be either small,
frivolous coffins or large, forbidding cradles, corpulent bales of
heaven knows what covered with matting, baskets covered with newspapers,
articles of wearing apparel covered with confusion, and fifty other
things covered with nothing at all. Once at the Wall Street wharf I saw
a young Mexican get out of a Holland House omnibus bearing in his hand a
parrot cage stuffed full of shoes. It seemed to me at the time a
delirious incident, and I remembered it. But I doubt that, after having
lived in Mexico, I should now notice or remember it at all. He was a
very charming young person whose mother had been a lady in waiting to
the Empress Carlotta, and he was on his way back from Belgium, where he
goes once a year to sink on his knee and kiss the aged Carlotta’s hand.

Oh, yes, there is always a thrill in it--this setting sail for the hot
countries. It begins on the dock, slightly increases as one steams past
the low, monotonous coast of Florida, becomes disturbing in the
exquisite little harbor of Havana, and at Progreso, where for
thirty-six hours one stares at the shallow, green gulf water, the
indolent sharks and the stretch of sand and palm trees wavering in heat,
that is Yucatan, it enslaves one like a drug of which one disapproves,
but to which one nevertheless succumbs. One afternoon at sunset, before
we had even sighted land, a little French boy accurately summed up for
us the vague and various sensations that, during the last few hours of
the hot afternoon, had stolen over us all. He had been born in Yucatan
and was returning there with his father after a first visit to France.
Suddenly in his race around the deck with some other children he stopped
short, glanced at the group of half-dozing, half-fanning women in
steamer chairs, at the listless men against the rail, at the calm,
lemon-colored sky and the floating islands of seaweed on the green
water. Then, throwing back his head, he closed his eyes, drew a long
appreciative breath and, with his eyes still closed, exclaimed
luxuriously: “Ah-h-h, on sent les pays chauds!”




II


At first you are both amazed and annoyed by what seems like not only
lack of curiosity but positive ignorance on the part of Americans who
live in Mexico. As a new arrival, I had an admirable thirst for
information which I endeavored to slake at what I supposed were
fountains of knowledge as well as of afternoon tea. The tea was
delicious and plentiful; but the knowledge simply did not exist.

“What is the population of Barranca?” you ask of an intelligent
compatriot who has lived in Barranca for ten years.

“Why, I don’t know exactly,” he replies, as if the question were an
interesting one that had never before occurred to him.

“Oh, I don’t mean exactly--but is it eight thousand, or fourteen, or
twenty-five? It’s rather difficult for a stranger to form an idea; the
towns are built so differently from ours. Although they may not be
really large, they are so compact that they look more populous and
‘citified’ than places of the same size in the United States,” you
explain.

“Yes, that’s very true, and it _is_ difficult,” he agrees.

“Do you suppose I could find out anywhere? Do they ever take the
census?” you pursue.

“The census? Why, I don’t know about that. But there’s Smith on the
bench over there having his shoes shined. He’s been in the country for
fifteen years--he’ll be able to tell you. Smith, I want to introduce a
friend of mine who is very anxious to know the population of Barranca
and whether they ever take the census.”

“The census?” muses Smith, ignoring the population entirely. “I don’t
know if they take the census, but they take your taxes with great
regularity,” he declares with a laugh. Then follows a pleasant ten
minutes with Smith, during which the reason of your introduction to him
does not recur, and after precisely the same thing has happened several
other times with several other persons, you would almost rather start a
revolution than an inquiry into the population of Barranca.

The specific instance is perhaps a trivial one, but it is typical, and,
as I said, you are for a time amazed and irritated, on asking
intelligent questions about the federal and state governments, the
judiciary, the army, education, morality, and even so obvious a matter
as the climate, to receive from American acquaintances replies that are
never accurate and rarely as much as inaccurately definite. Some of them
frankly admit that, as they never have had personal relations with the
establishments you seek to learn about (barring the climate), they have
not taken the trouble to inform themselves. Others appear to experience
a belated regret at their long indifference, promise to look the matter
up and let you know. But they never do, and it is rather discouraging.
You yearn to acquire a respectably comprehensive idea of the conditions
in which you are living, yet the only people with whom you can carry on
any but a most staccato and indispensable conversation are unable to
throw light. So, being the only one really intelligent foreigner in the
republic, you resort to the medium of art, and begin to read books.

Everyone you know has at some time or other read and enjoyed Prescott’s
“Conquest,” but it does not emerge that on the subject of Mexico they
have ever read anything else, and for a while you quietly revel in your
mental alertness and superior intelligence. You are learning all about
the country--its institutions and laws, its products and habits--while
your listless friends still sit in darkness. Then one fine morning
something happens--something of no especial importance, but something
that nevertheless serves to insert the thin edge of suspicion’s wedge
between you and your learning.

You have, for instance, read that “in virtue of the constitution adopted
February 5, 1857, arrest is prohibited, save in the case of crimes
meriting corporal punishment,” and it has seemed to you a wise and just
provision. You have also, let us say, employed two competent stone
masons to build a coffee tank, a fireplace, a pigpen, or some such
useful accessory of life in the tropics, and you become much disturbed
when, after they have worked steadily and well for three or four days,
they fail to appear. That afternoon as you stroll through the plaza
lamenting their perfidy, you are astonished at receiving two friendly,
sheepish greetings from two sheepish, friendly stone masons who are
engaged in laying municipal cobblestones, together with thirty or forty
other prisoners, under the eyes of several heavily armed policemen.
Unmistakably they are your masons, and with much bewilderment you demand
of Smith--who, no doubt, is strolling with you--just what it means.

“It merely means,” Smith explains, “that the town is repairing part of
the plaza pavement and needs competent masons. So they arrested yours.”

“But on what grounds?”

“Oh, drunkenness probably.”

“Do you suppose they were drunk? They seemed like very steady men.”

“Why, they may have been a trifle elated,” Smith laughs. “The assumption
that they were isn’t a particularly startling one in this part of the
world. But that wasn’t why they were arrested. They were arrested
because they were good masons and the city happens to need them. If they
hadn’t been drunk, some one would have been sent out to make them
so--never, unfortunately, a very arduous undertaking.”

“Oh, indeed; how simple and efficacious!” you murmur, and go home to
read some more.

Still other wise and just provisions of the same excellent document are
that no person may be obliged to work for another person without freely
consenting so to work, nor without receiving just remuneration, and that
imprisonment for debts of a purely civil nature is prohibited. But as
your Spanish gradually improves and you are able to have more sustained
talks with the natives, you learn that the entire lives of a great
number of peones working on haciendas contain two alternatives, one of
which is practical slavery and the other imprisonment for debt to his
employer.

A young man goes to work on, say, a sugar plantation for the magnificent
wages of thirty-six Mexican cents a day. In the course of time--usually
a very short time--he acquires a family. If he acquires it after certain
preliminary formalities, such as a marriage ceremony and its attendant
festivities, his employer has loaned him the forty or fifty
pesos--unpayable sum--necessary to defray the costs of the priest and
the piper, and the young man’s eternal indebtedness begins from the
beginning. If, however, there are no formalities, the financial burden
is not assumed until the birth of the first child.

Mexicans of every station adore their children, and even when, as
frequently happens among the lower classes, the parents are neither
civilly nor religiously married (in Mexico only the civil ceremony is
recognized by the law) nothing is too good or too expensive for the
offspring. They are baptized and, if the informal union of the parents
lasts long enough, they are confirmed. But in Mexico, as elsewhere, the
kingdom of heaven costs money, and this money the young man’s employer
cheerfully advances. Then in the natural march of events some one dies.
Death, of course, all the world over, has become one of our grossest
extravagances. Again the employer delightedly pays.

Now he has the young man--no longer so young--exactly where his sugar
plantation wants him. On thirty-six cents a day there is no possibility
of a laborer’s paying a debt of a hundred or more pesos and moving away,
and if he attempts to depart without paying it, a word from the
hacendado to his friend the jefe politico would suffice to land him in
jail and keep him there. It is impossible to deny that on some
haciendas, perhaps on many, this form of slavery is a happier, a more
comfortable arrangement than would be the freedom so energetically
insisted on in the constitution. Still, slavery is neither a pretty word
nor a pretty idea, and yet, in spite of the constitution, the idea
obtains in Mexico quite as it obtains in the United States.

Then again you read with satisfaction that among other forms of
freedom--“freedom of education, freedom to exercise the liberal
professions, freedom of thought,” and so on--the freedom of the press is
guaranteed; guaranteed, that is to say, with the reservation that
“private rights and the public peace shall not be violated.” The manner
in which this reservation can be construed, however, does not occur to
you until you read in _El Imparcial_ or in the _Mexican Herald_--the
best Spanish and American daily papers--an account of, let us say, a
strike of the mill operatives at Orizaba, and then, a week later, chance
to learn what actually happened.

“I see by the _Herald_ that you had a little strike at Orizaba the other
day,” you remark to the middle-aged British manager of a large Orizaba
jute mill, with whom you find yourself in the same swimming pond at the
baths of Tehuacan. “The _Herald_ said that in a clash with the troops
several strikers were killed and twenty-five were injured.”

“Did it indeed?” remarks the manager dryly, and later, when you are
sitting together in the sun after your bath, he explains that the strike
was an incipient revolution engineered by a junta in St. Louis, that the
Government sent down a regiment from the City of Mexico, that in an
impromptu sort of way six hundred strikers were immediately shot, and
that the next morning thirty-four were formally, elaborately, and
officially executed. This prompt and heroic measure, he informs you,
ended both the strike and the incipient revolution, and as you compare
what you have read in the papers with what is the truth, you can tell
yourself that it has also ended your illusions as to the freedom of the
Mexican press.

In fact you begin to realize why, when you ask American residents of the
country for information, their replies are usually so vague, so
contradictory, so uninforming. It is not, as a rule, because they know
too little, but because they know too much. Theoretical Mexico--the
Mexico of constitutions, reform laws, statutes, and books of travel--has
ceased, long since, vitally to concern them. It is Mexico as they day by
day find it that interests them and that in the least counts. And
practical, every-day Mexico is an entirely different, infinitely more
mysterious, fascinating affair.

“Does it rain here in summer as much as it does in winter?” I once asked
a Mexican lady in a saturated mountain village in the State of Vera
Cruz.

“No hay reglas fijas, señor” (there are no fixed rules), she replied,
after a thoughtful silence, with a shrug.

No hay reglas fijas! It is not perhaps a detailed description of the
great Don Porfirio’s republic, but it is a consummate epitome, and once
you have committed it to memory and “taken it to heart,” your literary
pursuits begin to languish. After traveling for three weeks in Mexico,
almost anyone can write an entertaining and oracular volume, but after
living there for several years, the oracle--unless subsidized by the
Government--has a tendency to become dumb. For, in a country where
theory and practice are so at variance, personal experience becomes the
chart by which one is accustomed to steer, and although it is a valuable
one, it may, for a hundred quaint reasons, be entirely different from
that of the man whose ranch, or mine, or coffee place adjoins one’s own.

In just this, I feel sure, lies much of the indisputable charm of
Mexico. No hay reglas fijas. Everyone’s experience is different, and
everyone, in a sense, is a pioneer groping his way--like Cortés on his
prodigious march up from the sea. One never knows, from the largest to
the smallest circumstances of life, just what to expect, and Ultimate
Truth abideth not. This is not so much because Mexicans are instinctive
and facile liars, as because the usual methods of ascertaining and
disseminating news are not employed. At home we demand facts and get
them. In Mexico one subsists on rumor and never demands anything. A
well-regulated, systematic, and precise person always detests Mexico and
can rarely bring himself to say a kind word about anything in it,
including the scenery. But if one is not inclined to exaggerate the
importance of exactitude and is perpetually interested in the casual,
the florid, and the problematic, Mexico is one long, carelessly written
but absorbing romance.




III


Superficially, Mexico is a prolonged romance. For even its brutal
realities--of which there are many--are the realities of an intensely
pictorial people among surroundings that, to Northern eyes, are never
quite commonplace. I once, for instance, saw a plucky little policeman
shoot and kill an insanely drunken shoemaker who, in the marketplace a
few minutes before, apropos of nothing except the fact that he _was_
insanely drunk, had cut the throat of a young milkman. The policeman
pursued him in his mad flight for home and, just as they passed me on a
deserted street near the outskirts of the town, returned a quick stab in
the stomach from the shoemaker’s knife (still reeking with the milkman’s
blood) by a revolver shot. They then both collapsed in a mud puddle, and
to me was appointed the rôle of arousing the neighborhood, unbuttoning
the policeman’s clothes and slipping two pillows under his pale, brave
head.

Of course it was the most squalid of incidents; precisely what happens
every little while in New York and Pittsburg and San Francisco, and
every few minutes, so we are told, in Chicago. But in Barranca, somehow,
the squalor of the affair could not successfully compete with the
dramatic interest and the stage-setting. The people who emerged from
their blue and pink and yellow and green houses at my alarm (no one in
Mexico is alarmed by the sound of firearms) the distracted widow--who,
however, postponed complete distraction until after she had carefully
gone through her dead husband’s pockets--the pompous arrival of the
chief of police, the color and costuming and arrangement of it all, were
far too like the last scenes of “Carmen” or “Cavalleria Rusticana” to
permit of one’s experiencing any but an agreeably theatrical sensation
of horror.

I strolled away after the shoemaker was removed to the police station
and the canvas-covered litter had been sent back for the gasping
policeman, asking myself by what strange alchemy drunkenness, murder,
and retribution in a mud puddle could be made so entertaining. The
brutish spectacle, I realized, ought to have shocked me, and the
remainder of my walk should have been spent in reflecting that the world
was a very wicked place. But I had not been shocked at all, and the
world just then seemed not so much wicked as unusually interesting. And
this, I flatter myself, was not on my part a moral obtuseness, but an
innate quality of the general Mexican scene. For it is always pictorial
and always dramatic; it is not only invariably a painting, but the kind
of painting that tells a story. Paintings that tell stories are declared
by critics to be “bad art.” Perhaps this is why so many travelers in
Mexico find so little to admire.

At first, I confess, almost everybody in the republic looks like a
home-made cigar. But when your eyes have become properly focused, it is
difficult to remember having thought of so cheap a comparison. Whether
your relations with the people be agreeable or otherwise, you cannot but
admit, after becoming used to the type, that there is among all classes
an extraordinary amount of beauty. In every Mexican crowd there are,
naturally, a great many ugly persons and plain persons and
average-looking persons. An omnipotent Creator for, no doubt, some
perfectly good reason that surpasseth all my little understanding,
chooses, in perpetuating the human race, to depart, as a rule, very far
from perfection and even from charm. But in Mexico, although the
departure can be as far, it is somehow not as frequent.

In its way, the mixture of Spaniard and tropical Indian--which was the
original recipe for making the contemporary Mexican--is physically a
pleasing one. It isn’t our way, but one doesn’t after a while find it
less attractive for that. The Indians, in the part of Mexico I happen to
know best, have at least the outward characteristics of a “gentle” race.
Even when they are tall, they are inevitably and--one might almost
say--incorrigibly plump. One never ceases to marvel at the superhuman
strength existing beneath the pretty and effeminate modeling of their
arms and legs and backs. Except when they grow old and wither up, which
they do, like all tropical races, while they are still young, they yet
display no angles. However great may be their muscular development from
trotting up and down perpendicular mountain trails with incredible loads
of corn, or pottery, or tiles, or firewood, or human beings on their
backs, the muscles themselves never stand out. The legs of an American
“strong man” look usually like an anatomical chart, but the legs of the
most powerful Totonac Indian--and the power of many of them is beyond
belief--would serve admirably as one of those idealized extremities on
which women’s hosiery is displayed in shop windows. In spite of their
constantly surprising exhibitions both of unpremeditated strength and
long endurance, there is in the general aspect of their physique more of
prettiness than of vigor, more grace than virility.

With these people and others like them, the Spaniards began to mingle in
the year 1519, and from the union of Spanish men and aboriginal women
sprang the Mexican of to-day. In them the physical traits of both races
are obvious. If, by alliance, the native lost some of his round, sleek
modeling, the conqueror renounced much of his gauntness and austerity.
For the modern Mexican, roughly speaking, is neither a rugged type nor
an unmanly one. He is, as a rule, a “spare,” small-waisted creature
whose muscles, when he has any, show--unlike those of the pure
Indian--in the ordinary way, but whose small feet and slender, beautiful
hands are deceptive. A cargador of my acquaintance, whose hands are like
those of a slim girl, and who, if he wore shoes, would require a narrow
five, thinks nothing of transporting on his back from the railway
station to the center of the town, a distance of more than a mile up a
steep hill, a gigantic trunk (the kind that used to be known as a
“Saratoga”), a smaller trunk, half a dozen “dress-suit cases,” a bundle
of rugs, and a steamer chair. They by no means lack strength, but it is
more often than not concealed in a body all sallow slenderness and
grace. And gracefulness in a nation is a characteristic no good American
fresh from “God’s country”--whatever that patriotic if strangely
un-Christian phrase may mean--can in his heart of hearts forgive. The
typical Mexican, although not effeminately, is delicately formed, and,
in addition to the prevailing lightness and sensitiveness of his
structure, a great factor in the general high average of his good looks
is the almost complete elimination of the matter of complexion.

With Northern races it is difficult to disassociate the thought of
beauty in either sex from a certain clear glowing quality of the
epidermis known as “a complexion.” But in Mexico this consideration--in
spite of the quarter of an inch of powder which the ladies of the upper
classes apply to their faces on a substratum of glycerin--does not
enter. You know that even under the powder all Mexican complexions
approximate a satisfactory café au lait standard, and that, if the
owners are not positively suffering from smallpox, they are all good.
They impress you, after your eyes become acclimated, as being an
extraordinarily ornamental race, and it is always amusing to notice
that, however strong may be the aversion to them of an American or
British resident, he cannot refrain now and then from an involuntary
tribute to their unconscious habit of quietly or violently “composing”
themselves at every moment of their lives into some kind of a frameable
picture.

“I hate ’em all,” an American building contractor once exclaimed to me
with deep sincerity. “But,” he added, “after my work is over for the
day, I like to sit on a bench in the plaza and look at ’em. I sit there
a couple of hours every evening. Even when the rascals ain’t doing
anything in particular, you always sort of feel as if there was
something doing.”

This feeling--for the accurate description of which I was truly
grateful--is largely responsible in Mexico for the plaza and balcony
habit that one immediately acquires and that becomes one’s chief form of
diversion. In a small city of the United States or in England, even a
person of unlimited leisure would have to be doddering, or an invalid or
a tramp, before he would consent to sit daily for two or three hours on
a bench in a public square, or lean over a balcony watching the same
people pursue their ordinary vocations in the street below. The monotony
of the thing, the procession’s dead level of prosperous mediocrity,
would very soon prove intolerable, and he would find some one, anyone,
to talk to or endeavor to forget himself in a book or a newspaper.

In Mexico, however, complete idleness is rarely a bore. “Even when the
rascals ain’t doing anything in particular, you always sort of feel as
if there was something doing.” One afternoon in a small Mexican town I
kept tab from my balcony on what, for about eight minutes, took place in
the street below. Although the town was small and the day an unusually
quiet one, owing to a fiesta in the neighborhood to which many of the
inhabitants had gone, there was no dearth of incident against the usual
background of big-hatted cargadores waiting for employment in the middle
of the street; of burros, each with four large cobblestones in a box on
its back; of biblical-looking girls (an endless stream of them) bearing
huge water-jars to and from a circular fountain lined with pale-blue
tiles; of old men who wail at intervals that they are selling pineapple
ice cream; of old women with handfuls of white and yellow and green
lottery tickets; of basket sellers and sellers of flowers (the kind of
adorable bouquets that haven’t been seen anywhere else since the early
seventies; composed of damp moss, tinfoil, toothpicks, a lace petticoat,
a wooden handle, and, yes, some flowers arranged in circles according to
color); of mozos who you feel sure have been sent on an errand and told
to “come right back,” but who have apparently no intention of returning
for several hours; of ladies draped in black lace on their way to
meditate in church; of hundreds of other leisurely moving figures that
were as a bright-colored, shifting chorus to the more striking episodes.

Item one (so runs my page of hasty notes): Three rather fragile-looking
young men swinging along with a grand piano on their heads. Under my
window they all stop a moment to let one of them ask a passerby to stick
a cigarette in his mouth and light it, which is duly done.

Item two: A flock of sheep followed by a shepherd in clean white cotton
with a crimson sarape around his shoulders. He looks like Vedder’s
Lazarus. The sheep have just piled into the open door of the hotel and
are trying to come upstairs. In the excitement a new-born lamb has its
leg hurt. The shepherd gathers it in his arms, wraps it in the sarape,
thoughtfully kisses it twice on the head and proceeds.

Item three: A funeral. As there are only three streets in this place
that aren’t built up and down a mountain side, there are no vehicles,
and coffins, like everything else, are carried on men’s backs. This is
an unusually expensive coffin, but then of course the silver handles are
only hired for the occasion. They’ll be removed at the grave, as
otherwise they would be dug up and stolen. I wonder why women so rarely
go to funerals here? There is a string of men a block long, but no
women. Some of them (probably relatives) have in their hands lighted
candles tied with crape. They are nice, fat candles and don’t blow out.
Everybody in the street takes his hat off as the cortége passes.

Item four: The daily pack train of mules from the Concepción sugar
hacienda. There must be two hundred and fifty of them, and their hoofs
clatter on the cobblestones like magnified hail. The street is jammed
with them, and where the sidewalk narrows to almost nothing, people are
trying to efface themselves against the wall. A wonderful exhibition of
movement and color in the blazing sunlight: the warm seal-brown of the
mules, the paler yellow-brown of the burlap in which are wrapped the
conical sugar loaves (eight to a mule), with the arrieros in yellow
straw hats, brilliant blue shirts and scarlet waist bandas bringing up
the rear.

Item five: A dog fight.

Item six: Another and much worse dog fight.

Item seven: An Indian woman with apparently a whole poultry farm half
concealed upon her person. She calls up to ask if I would like to buy a
chicken. Why on earth should a young man on a balcony of a hotel bedroom
like to buy a chicken?

Item eight: An acquaintance makes a megaphone of his hands and inquires
if I am very busy. I reply, “Yes, frightfully,” and we adjourn to the
plaza for the afternoon.




IV


The inability of people in general to think for themselves--the
inevitableness with which they welcome an opinion, a phrase, a
catchword, if it be sufficiently indiscriminating and easy to remember,
and the fashion in which they then solemnly echo it, are never more
displayed than when they are commenting upon a race not their own.
Sometimes this rubber-stamp sort of criticism is eulogistic in tone as
when, for instance, a few years ago it was impossible in the United
States to speak of the Japanese without calling forth from some tedious
sounding-board, who couldn’t have told a Jap from a Filipino, the
profound exclamation: “What a wonderful little people they are!” But
more often than not, ignorant criticism of a foreign country is also
adverse. For one nation cannot altogether understand another, and if it
is true that “to understand everything is to pardon everything,” it must
also be true that unforgiveness is one of the penalties of being
misunderstood.

It is the vast throng of fairly well educated “people in general” who
are forever divulging the news that “Englishmen have no sense of humor,”
that “the French are very immoral,” that “all Italians steal and none of
them wash,” that “every German eats with his knife and keeps his bedroom
windows closed at night,” that “the inhabitants of Russia are barbarians
with a veneer of civilization” (how they cherish that word “veneer”!),
and that “the Scotch are stingy.”

The formula employed in the case of Mexicans runs usually something like
this: “They’re the laziest people in the world, and although they seem
to treat you politely they are all treacherous and dishonest. Their
politeness is merely on the surface; it doesn’t come from the heart”--as
does the exquisite courtesy we are so accustomed to receive from
everybody in the United States, one is tempted to add, without, however,
doing so. For what, after all, is the use of entering into a discussion
with the sort of person who supposes that his own or anyone’s else
politeness “comes from the heart,” or has, in fact, anything to do with
the heart? Politeness, of course, is, all the world over, just the
pleasing surface quality we should expect it to be from the derivation
of the word. Even in Kansas or South Boston we do not necessarily wish
to die for the old gentleman whom we allow to pass through the doorway
first, and the act of taking off one’s hat to a lady scarcely convicts
one of a secret passion for her. But it is odd what depths are demanded
of Mexican politeness, which--except for the fact that there is much
more of it--is, like our own, an outward “polish” and nothing else.

If, however, there is anything valuable in politeness as such, the
Mexicans have over us at least one extensive advantage. For in Mexico
the habit of politeness in its most elaborate form is so universal that
the very occasional lack of it in anybody gives one the sensation of
being not only surprised but somewhat hurt. If, for instance, a
street-car conductor in taking my ticket should fail to say “Thank you,”
and neglect on receiving it to make toward me a short, quick gesture of
the hand--something between a wave and flourish--I should realize that,
as far as I was concerned, his manners had not risen to the ordinary
standard, and wonder why he had chosen to be indifferent and rather
rude. This naturally would not apply in the City of Mexico, where, as in
all great capitals, the mixture of nationalities has had a noticeable
influence upon many native characteristics. But in provincial
Mexico--wherever there was a street car--it would be true.

In riding along a country road it is likely to be considered an example
of gringo brutalidad if one does not speak to every man, woman, and
child one meets or overtakes. And completely to fulfill the requirements
of rural etiquette, the greeting must be not collective but individual;
everybody in one group murmurs something--usually “Adiós”--for the
especial benefit of everybody in the other. The first time I took part
in this--as it seemed to me then--extraordinary performance, my party of
three had met another party of equal number on a narrow path in the
mountains, and as we scraped past one another, the word adiós in tired
but distinct tones was uttered exactly eighteen times--a positive litany
of salutation that nearly caused me to roll off my mule. It is a polite
sociable custom and I like it, but under certain circumstances it can
become more exhausting than one would suppose. In approaching--on Sunday
afternoon, toward the end of a long hot ride--a certain little town
(which no doubt is to-day very much as it was when Cortés three hundred
and eighty-seven years ago mentioned it in one of his letters to Charles
V) I have met as many as three hundred persons returning from market to
their ranchitos and villages. Adiós is a beautiful word, but--well,
after one has said it and nothing else with a parched throat and an air
of sincerity for the three hundredth time, one no longer much cares.
However, if you don’t know the returning marketers it is safe to assume
that they all know a great deal about you, and for a variety of reasons
it is well, however tired one may be, to observe the convention.

With the pure-blooded Indians along the Gulf coast there is, when they
happen to know you, an elaborateness about your meetings and partings on
the road that amounts to a kind of ritual. The sparkling conversation
that follows is an ordinary example and an accurate translation of what
is said. During its progress, hands are grasped and shaken several
times--the number being in direct ratio to the number of drinks your
friend has had during the day.

“Good day, Don Carlitos. How are you?”

“Good day, Vicente” (or Guadalupe or Ipifigenio). “Very well, thank you.
How are you?”

“Thanks to God, there is no change! How are Don Guillermo and your
mamma?”

“Many thanks, they are as always.” (A pause.) “The roads are bad.”

“Yes, senõr, very bad. Is there much coffee?”

“Enough.”

“I am coming to pick next week.” (He really isn’t and he knows I know he
isn’t--but the remark delicately suggests that there is no ill feeling.)

“Come when you wish to. Well, until we meet again.”

“Until we meet again--if God wishes it. May you go with God!”

“Many thanks, Vicente” (or Ipifigenio or Guadalupe). “Remain with God!”

“Thank you, senõr--if God wishes it.”

“Adiós.”

“Adiós.”

Toward women we are everywhere accustomed to a display of more or less
politeness, but in Mexico, under the ordinary circumstances of life, men
of all classes are polite to one another. Acquaintances take off their
hats both when they meet and part, and I have heard a half-naked laborer
bent double under a sack of coffee-berries murmur, “With your
permission,” as he passed in front of a bricklayer who was repairing a
wall. Even the children--who are not renowned in other lands for
observing any particular code of etiquette among themselves--treat one
another, as a rule, with an astonishing consideration. Once in the
plaza at Tehuacan I found myself behind three little boys of about six
or seven who were sedately strolling around and around while the band
played, quite in the manner of their elders. One of them had a cent, and
after asking the other two how they would most enjoy having it invested,
he bought from a dulcero one of those small, fragile creations of egg
and sugar known, I believe, as a “kiss.” This he at once undertook to
divide, with the result that when the guests had each received a pinch
of the ethereal structure, there was nothing left for the host but two
or three of his own sticky little fingers. He looked a trifle surprised
for a moment, and I thought it would be only natural and right for him
to demand a taste of the others. But instead of that he merely licked
his fingers in silence and then resumed the promenade where it had been
left off. However, the general seraphicness of Mexican children is a
chapter in itself.

“Is that your horse?” you ask of a stranger with whom you have entered
into conversation on the road.

“No, señor--it is yours,” he is likely to reply with a slight bow. And
perhaps it is by reason of formulæ like this that the great public
characterizes Mexican politeness as “all on the surface--not from the
heart.” The stranger’s answer, naturally, is just a pretty phrase. But
all politeness is largely verbal and the only difference between the
politeness of Mexico and the politeness of other countries consists of
the fact that, first, the Spanish language is immensely rich in pretty
phrases, and, secondly, that literally everyone makes use of them.

One of the most amusing manifestations of the state of mind known as
“patriotism” is the fact that every nation is thoroughly convinced of
the dishonesty of every other. From end to end of Europe the United
States is, and for a long time has been, a synonym of political and
financial corruption. We are popularly supposed to be a nation of sharks
who have all grown fabulously rich by the simple, effective method of
eating one another--and everybody else--up. This is not perhaps the
topic the French ambassador picks out to expound at White House dinners,
nor does it form the burden of the Duke of Abruzzi’s remarks on the
occasion of planting a tree at Washington’s tomb. It is merely a
conviction of the great majority of their fellow countrymen at home. On
the other hand, very few persons with a drop of Anglo-Saxon blood in
them can bring themselves to admit--much less to feel--that the “Latin”
races have any but a shallow and versatile conception of honesty and
truth. It is a provision of nature that one’s own people should have a
monopoly of all the virtues. Uncle John, who was given short change for
a napoleon by a waiter at the Jardin de Paris, is more than sustained in
his original opinion of the French. And Aunt Lizzie, who paid a dollar
and a half for a trunk strap at the leading harness shop of Pekin,
Illinois, and then had it stolen at the Laredo customhouse, will all her
life believe that the chief occupation of everyone in Mexico, from
President Diaz down, is the theft of trunk straps. This sounds like
trifling--but it is the way in which one country’s opinion of another is
really formed.

A discussion of the comparative honesty of nations must always be a
futile undertaking, as a considerable number of persons in every country
are dishonest. I know for a fact that when Aunt Lizzie alighted at
Laredo to have her trunk examined, she saw the strap “with her own
eyes,” and that somewhere between the border and her final destination
it miraculously disappeared. On the other hand, I always leave
everything I own scattered about my room in Mexican hotels, because I
am lazy, and various articles that I should regret to lose I have
sometimes forgotten to pack, because I am careless. But nothing has ever
been stolen from me in Mexico, and when I have requested the innkeeper
by letter or telegram, “Please to send me the two diamond tiaras
together with the emerald stomacher I inadvertently left in the second
drawer of the washstand,” they have invariably come to me by return
express--neither of which experiences (Aunt Lizzie’s and mine) proves
anything whatever about anybody.

The question of “laziness” would be easy to dispose of if one could
simply say that just as there are honest and dishonest Mexicans, there
are indolent and energetic Mexicans. But somehow one can’t. Many of them
are extremely industrious, many of them work, when they do work, as hard
and as long as it is possible for human beings to bear fatigue--and yet,
of what we know as “energy,” I have seen little or nothing. For whatever
may be the word’s precise definition, it expresses to most of us an
adequate power operating under the lash of a perpetual desire to get
something done. In Mexico there are many kinds of adequate power, but
apparently the desire to get anything done does not exist. The
inhabitants, from peon to professional man, conduct their affairs as if
everybody were going “to live,” as Marcus Aurelius says, “ten thousand
years!”

Among the lower classes, even leaving out of consideration the influence
of a tropical and semitropical climate, it is not difficult to account
for this lack of energy. No people whose diet consists chiefly of
tortillas, chile, black coffee, and cigarettes are ever going to be
lashed by the desire to accomplish. This is the diet of babies as soon
as they are weaned. I have heard proud mothers at country dances compare
notes, while their men were playing monte around a kerosene torch stuck
in the ground.

“My little boy”--aged three--“won’t _look_ at a tortilla unless it is
covered with chile,” one of them explains.

“Does he cry for coffee?” inquires another. “My baby”--aged two and a
half--“screams and cries unless we give her coffee three and four times
a day.” It is not surprising that a population perpetually in the throes
of intestinal disorder should be somewhat lacking in energy.

Furthermore, they are a religious, or rather a superstitious people,
given to observing as many of the innumerable feasts on the calendar as
is compatible with making both ends approach--one hesitates to say
meet. The entire working force of an isolated ranch will abruptly cease
from its labors on hearing from some meddlesome passerby that in more
populous localities the day is being celebrated. That it is, may or may
not be a fact, and if a supply of liquor cannot be procured there is no
very definite way of enjoying unpremeditated idleness. But a fiesta is a
fiesta, and everyone stands about all day unwilling to work, unable to
play--the prey of ennui and capricious tempers.

Possibly it is mere hair splitting to draw a distinction between
laziness and lack of energy, but although climate and heredity will
abide and continue to restrain the lower classes from undue continuity
of effort, even as they still do the wealthy and educated, it is not
fantastic to believe that education and a more nourishing, less
emotional diet (both are on the way) will stimulate in the Mexican
people some of the latent qualities that will absolve them from the
popular reproach of laziness.




V


One December morning, while I was aimlessly strolling in the white, dry
sunlight of Puebla, I wandered into the cathedral. The semireligious,
semiculinary festival known as Christmas had come and gone for me in
Jalapa, but as soon as I went into the church and walked beyond the
choir, the awkward situation of which in Spanish cathedrals shows on the
part of catholics an unusual indifference to general impressiveness, it
was apparent--gorgeously, overwhelmingly apparent--that here Christmas
still lingered. This cathedral is always gorgeous and always somewhat
overpowering, for, unlike any other I can recall, that which, perhaps,
was the original scheme of decoration looks as if it had been completed
a few moments before one’s arrival. We have learned to expect in these
places worn surfaces, tarnished gilt, a sense of invisible dust and
tones instead of colors. So few of them look as they were intended to
look that, just as we prefer Greek statues unpainted, we prefer the
decorations of cathedrals to be in the nature of exquisite effacement.
In the great church of Puebla, however, little is exquisite and
certainly nothing is effaced. On entering, one is at first only
surprised that an edifice so respectably old can be so jauntily new. But
when, during mass, one passes slightly before the choir, and is
confronted by the first possible view of any amplitude, it is something
more than rhetoric to say that for a moment the cathedral of Puebla is
overpowering.

The use of gold leaf in decoration is like money. A little is pleasant,
merely too much is vulgar; but a positively staggering amount of it
seems to justify itself. My own income is not vulgar; neither is Mr.
Rockefeller’s. The ordinary white and gold drawing-room done by the
local upholsterer is atrociously vulgar, but the cathedral of Puebla is
not. Gold--polished, glittering, shameless gold--blazes down and up and
across at one; from the stone rosettes in the vaulting overhead, from
the grilles in front of the chapels, from the railings between which the
priests walk to altar and choir, from the onyx pulpit and the barricade
of gigantic candlesticks in front of the altar, from the altar
itself--one of those carefully insane eighteenth-century affairs, in
which a frankly pagan tiempolito and great lumps of Christian symbolism
have become gloriously muddled for all time. Gold flashes in the long
straight sun shafts overhead, twinkles in the candle flames, glitters
from the censers and the chains of the censers. The back of the priest
at the altar is incrusted with gold, and to-day--for Christmas
lingers--all the pillars from capital to base are swathed in the finest
of crimson velvet, fringed with gold. It isn’t vulgar, it isn’t even
gaudy. It has surpassed all that and has entered into the realm of the
bewildering--the flabbergastric.

As I sank upon one of the sparsely occupied benches “para los señores,”
there was exhaled from the organ, somewhere behind and above me, a dozen
or more bars of Chopin. During the many sartorial interims of the mass
the organ coquetted frequently with Chopin as well as with Saint-Saëns,
Massenet, and Gounod in some of his less popular but as successfully
cloying moments--and never anywhere have I seen so much incense. As a
rule, unless one sits well forward in churches, the incense only
tantalizes. Swing and jerk as the little boys may, it persists in
clinging to the altar and the priests, in being sucked into the draught
of the candle flames and then floating up to the sunlight of the dome.
It rarely reaches the populace until it has become cool and thin. At
Puebla they may be more prodigal of it, or they may use a different
kind. It at any rate belches out at one in fat, satiating clouds of
pearl-gray and sea-blue, and what with Chopin and all the little gasping
flames, the rich, deliberate, incrusted group about the altar, the
forest of crimson pillars and the surfeit of gold, I experienced one of
those agreeable, harmless, ecclesiastical debauches that in Mexico,
where the apparatus of worship does not often rise above the tawdry, and
the music is almost always execrable, are perforce rare.

Toward the end of it, the central and most splendid figure among those
at the altar turned to execute some symbolic gesture and I recognized
his grace, the Bishop. More than half incrusted with gold and, for the
rest, swathed in white lace over purple, he was far more splendid than
when, two years before, he had confirmed my godchild Geronimo, son of
Felipe, in the weatherworn church at Mizantla. But he was none the less
the same poisonous-looking old body with whom on that occasion I had had
“words.” I recognized, among other things, his fat, overhanging
underlip. By its own weight it fell outward from his lower teeth, turned
half about and disclosed a rubbery inside that, with its blue veins
against a background of congested red, had reminded me, I remember, of a
piece of German fancy-work. Undoubtedly it was his grace on a visit to a
neighboring see and officiating through the courtesy of a brother bishop
in the great cathedral.

Strange, I thought, that such a looking old person should be associated
in my mind with so pretty an incident and so springlike a day. For the
sight of him took me back, as the saying is, to a hot, radiant February
morning when the sun blazed down upon the ranch for the first time in
two weeks and I had ridden into the village to have Geronimo, a charming
child of six, confirmed. There was the inevitable Mexican delay in
starting, while horses and mules fled around the pasture refusing to be
caught, while the cook made out “la lista”--three cents worth of this
and six cents worth of that--while mislaid tenates were found, provided
with string handles and hung over pommels. But we staggered off at
last--Felipe leading on foot with a sky-blue bundle under one arm (it
was a clean pair of trousers) and his loose white drawers rolled up to
his thighs. I wondered why, on this great occasion, he did not wear the
neckerchief of mauve silk we had given him at Christmas until a moment
later I discovered it in two pieces around the necks of his wife and
Geronimo. His wife followed him on a horse, and Geronimo, astride at her
back, clutched at her waist with one hand and with the other attempted
most of the way in to prevent his cartwheel of a hat from bumping
against his mother’s shoulder blades in front and falling off behind.
Then a San Juan Indian in fluttering white, bearing on his back Felipe’s
sick baby in a basket, pattered along over the mudholes with the aid of
a staff. Trinidad, the mayordomo, followed next on his horse, and I came
last on a mule, from where I could see the others vanishing one by one
into the shady jungle, scrambling below me down wet, rocky hillsides and
stringing through the hot pastures full of damp, sweet vapors and hidden
birds that paused and listened to their own languid voices.

The river was high and swift after the rain, and for those who counted
on another’s legs to get them across, there was the interminable three
or four minutes when one takes a reef in one’s own, unconditionally
surrenders to the steed, tries not to look down at the water, and with a
pinched smile at the opposite shore reflects that: “If the beast keeps
three or even two of his little hoofs on the stones at the same time
until we reach the sand bar--how trivial! But if he doesn’t he will go
swirling downstream like an empty barrel, my head will smash against the
first boulder, and it will all be very sad.”

The bishop’s advent had, if not quite the importance of a fiesta, at
least the enlivening qualities of a fiestita. There was so much movement
and talk and color in the drowsy town, and so many drunken Indians shook
hands with me and patted me on the back, that if it had not been
Thursday, I should have known it was Sunday. The bishop had not been to
Mizantla for some said five and others eight years. But in either period
it seems that unconfirmed children pile up amazingly. Grouped about the
weed-grown open space on the church’s shady side there were almost four
hundred of them, not including parents and godparents, and this was the
second of the three days’ opportunity.

But there was the same vagueness as to when the ceremony would begin
that there had been about the date of the previous visit. Some,
remembering perhaps that most gringos have an inscrutable prejudice in
favor of the definite, courteously named an hour--any hour; two, five,
half past six. Others recalled that evening was the time, while a few
assured me the bishop had come and gone the day before. Nobody, however,
seemed to care, and I asked myself as Felipe and Geronimo and I sat on a
crumbling parapet and watched the bright colored crowd: “Why should I
care? What difference does it make whether I sit here in the shade or in
the shade at the ranch?”

But at last there began to be a slow activity--a going in and a coming
out at the door of the priest’s house. I watched people go in
empty-handed and come out with a slip of paper in one hand and a long
yellow candle in the other. The slip of paper left me cold, but the
tapering yellow candle mystically called. In Jalapa I had often stood
for an hour staring at the moderate revolutions of the great hoop on
which the pendent wicks grow fatter and fatter as the velero patiently
bathes them in boiling tallow, and I had yearned to possess one. Yet,
heretofore, I had denied myself; the desire, it seemed to me, was like
that craving for heirlooms and ancestors on the part of persons to whom
such innocent sensualities have been cruelly denied. To-day, however,
long virtue was to have a short, vicarious reward, for Geronimo’s little
soul was at the moment entirely in my hands, and it was but proper that
his way to heaven should be lighted by a blessed candle. So when I came
out of the priest’s house I, too, had one (“Bang! went saxpence”) as
well as the “certificate of confirmation” (“Bang!” went another), on
which was written my godchild’s name, and the names of his parents and
my name. It took hours for everyone to be supplied, but they were as
nothing compared to the hours we waited in the church for the bishop.
Except in front of the altar, the nave had been fenced off by a
continuous line of benches facing inward, and on these the children
stood with their sponsors behind them. Like most Mexican children, their
behavior was admirable. They rarely cry, they rarely quarrel, and their
capacity for amusing themselves with nothing is without limit. Had I the
ordering of this strange, unhappy world, I think all children would be
born Mexican and remain so until they were fifteen.

That they in a measure outgrow their youthful serenity, however, seemed
to be proved by exhausted relatives all about me who, after the first
hour of waiting, began to roll their eyes when they met mine and
dispatch a succession of Sister Annes to peer through the windows of the
priest’s sala. “Está dormiendo” (he is sleeping), in a hoarse whisper,
was repeated so often that--my breakfast had been a cup of chocolate and
a cigarette--the hinges in my knees began to work both ways, and just
outside the church door I recklessly bought and ate something (it
cauterized me as it went down) wrapped in a tortilla. When I returned,
the bishop, with three priests behind him, was standing at the top of
the altar steps. He was wearing his miter and the tips of his fingers
lightly touched one another, as a bishop’s fingers should, on the apex
of his stomach. It was a thrilling moment.

Then, combining, in a quite wonderful fashion, extreme rapidity with an
air of ecclesiastical calm, he made his confirmatory way down one side
of the nave, across the end, and up the other, preceded by one priest
and followed by two. The first gathered up the certificates (no laying
on of hands unless one has paid one’s twenty-five centavos) and read the
name of the child next in line to the bishop, who murmured the
appropriate formula, made a tiny sign of the cross on a tiny forehead
with the end of a large, dirty thumb, and moved on. The second, with a
bit of absorbent cotton dipped in oil, swabbed the spot on which the
cross had been signed, while the third, taking advantage of the general
rapture, gently relieved everyone of his blessed candle (it had never
been lighted) and carried it away to be sold again.

But by the time the first priest reached my family party he had grown
tired and careless. Instead of collecting the certificates singly, he
began to take them in twos and threes with the result that they became
mixed, and Geronimo was confirmed, not as Geronimo, but as “Saturnina,”
which happened to be the name of the little snubnosed Totonac girl
standing next to him. When I realized what had happened, I protested.
Whereupon his grace and I proceeded to have “words.” With exceeding
bitterness he then reperformed the rite, and if the eyes of the first
priest could have killed, I should have withered on my slender stalk.
The priest with the cotton also sought to annihilate me with an
undertoned remark to the effect that my conduct was a “barbaridad,” but
the third was not only sinpatico--he was farther away from the bishop.
As, with much tenderness, he disengaged Geronimo’s reluctant fingers
from the candle, he severely looked at me and winked.

Then we wandered down to the shabby little plaza, where I bought
Geronimo some toys and Felipe wanted to buy me a drink. But as Felipe
was still looking prematurely old as the result of something
suspiciously like delirium tremens a few weeks before, I sanctimoniously
declined and bade them good-by.

There is no twilight in those tropics, and before the mayordomo and I
reached home, darkness gathered in the deep valley, crept behind us up
the mountainside, and all at once, as they say in Spanish, “it nighted.”
It was impossible to see the trail or even the sky, and we lurched on
and on as through an interminable world of black velvet. Most of the way
I kept my eyes shut--crouching down on the pommel to escape overhanging
vines and the terrible outstretched fingers of mala mujer. Twice we lost
our hats, and once my mule stuck deep and fast in the mud until we
jumped into it ourselves and pulled him out. On this road after dark it
is usually difficult to think of anything except that in a little while
one’s neck will be broken; but that evening, with my eyelids squeezed
together and my feet prudently hanging free of the stirrups, I kept
recalling Felipe’s clumsy, charming devotion to his ethereal little son
and the satisfaction he had unconsciously displayed when Geronimo
toddled out of the church--confirmed.

Although Felipe gets frightfully drunk, neglects his wife for other
women, and regards a machete as the most convincing form of argument, he
has excellent qualities; but I shouldn’t think of him as religious
exactly. And yet--and yet--Felipe and his wife are really married (it
seems rather snobbish of them, but it’s a fact), and from the knowledge
that his children have been baptized by the priest and confirmed by the
bishop, he gets some sort of an agreeable sensation.




VI


Why people are what they are is always an interesting subject on which
to exert one’s talents, however slight, for observation and inference.
On an isolated Mexican farm one spends many odd moments in considering
and attempting to explain the traits of the people who condescend to
work for one. For most of the problems of one’s daily life there arise
from those traits, and by them, all are complicated. The amicable
relations between employer and employed everywhere is one that
necessitates on the former’s part considerable tact to preserve, but in
Mexico both the nation’s history and the people’s temperament combine to
render the situation one of unusual delicacy.

In 1519 Spain and the Roman Catholic Church affixed themselves to
Mexico’s throat and were with extreme difficulty detached from it only
after three hundred years. During most of that time, in addition to the
fact that the Church got possession actually of something more than a
third of the country’s entire property, “real, personal, and mixed,”
the metaphorical expression, “he could not call his soul his own,” was
true of the inhabitants in its baldest, its most literal sense. To call
one’s soul one’s own in Mexico between the years 1527 and 1820 was to be
tried in secret by the Holy Office of the Inquisition and then turned
over to the secular authorities--a formality that deceived no one--to be
either publicly strangled and then burned, or burned without even the
preliminary solace of strangulation. “The principal crimes of which the
Holy Office took cognizance,” we read, “were heresy, sorcery, withcraft,
polygamy, seduction, imposture, and personation”--a tolerably elastic
category. Without the slightest difficulty it could be stretched to
cover anyone “not in sympathy with the work,” and during the period in
which the Holy Office was exercised it covered many.

It is true the royal order by which the Inquisition was formally
established in Mexico exempted Indians from its jurisdiction, but when
the clause was observed--which it was not in the case of Indians who
displayed a capacity for thought--it was almost the only form of
oppression from which, under the bigoted and avaricious rule of Spain,
they were exempt. Until the advent of the conquerors this part of the
new world had been, for no one knows how long, a slaughterhouse of the
gods. Spain and the Church continued a carnage of their own in the name
of God.

The limited scope of these impressions permits of scarcely a reference
to Mexico’s history. I can only assert that almost every phase of it is
imbedded in layer upon layer of the rottenest type of ecclesiastical
politics and that the great mass of the people to-day reflects--in a
fashion curiously modified at unexpected moments by the national
awakening--its generations of mental and physical subjection. For
whatever, from time to time, has happened to be the form of government,
the people have never enjoyed any large measure of freedom. Even now,
with an acute, patriotic, and enlightened president at the head of the
nation, Mexico--and quite inevitably--is not a republic, but a military
Diazpotism.

In the name of gods and of God, of kings, dictators, popes, generals,
emperors, and presidents, the people of Mexico have been treated, one
would be inclined to say, like so many head of irresponsible cattle, if
cattle, as a rule, were not treated more solicitously. And this general
tendency of the governor toward the governed has accentuated certain
traits easy enough to isolate and describe, if they were not
complicated by the facts that: First, the Mexican of to-day naturally
has many characteristics in common with the Spaniard who begat him and
whom he still hates; second, that the nation is becoming more and more
conscious of itself as a nation, and, third, that in a multitude of
petty ways a kind of mediæval tyranny is still often exercised by the
very persons who, as officials of a theoretically excellent republic,
ought to stand for all that is liberal and just.

Now, if the attitude of a Mexican peon were always consistently that of
the oppressed and patient creature who looks upon his patrón as
omnipotent and omniscient, or if it were always that of the highfalutin
Spaniard whom at times he so much resembles--or, if it were always that
of Young Mexico, conscious of at least his theoretical independence and
in theory “as good as anybody,” there would be little difficulty in
getting along with him; one would know at any given moment how to treat
him. But as a matter of fact it is a rather intricate combination of all
three, and one can rarely predict which he will choose to exhibit. Add
to this an incredible depth of superstition that is both innate and very
carefully encouraged by the Church, and it is not difficult to see why
an employer in certain parts of Mexico is compelled to treat his
laborers much as one has to treat nervous and unreasonable children.

Although they are hired and receive wages on various terms of agreement,
the normal relation between the proprietor of, say, a café finca of
moderate size and the people who work for him, suggests in many respects
the relation that existed before the Civil War between our Southerners
of the better type and their slaves. Some of the people have small farms
of their own in the neigborhood, but when they go to work for any length
of time they usually close their houses and live on the ranch of their
employer in one-roomed huts built by the patrón at a cost--if they are
made of bamboo--of from six to ten dollars an edifice. Closing their
houses for the coffee-picking season consists of gathering up four or
five primitive pottery cooking utensils, several babies, a pair of thin
and faded sarapes, calling to the dogs and strolling out of the door.
Under ordinary amicable circumstances they are disposed to look up to
the patrón, to be flattered by his notice of them--to regard him, in
fact, as of different and finer clay than themselves. And when this
lowly and dependent mood is upon them there is not only nothing the
señor cannot, in their opinion, accomplish if he desires to--there are
no demands upon his time, his money, his implements, and his sympathies
that they hesitate to make. The proprietor of a far-away ranch acquires
a certain proficiency in the performance of almost every kindly office,
from obstetrics to closing the eyes of the dead.

One Agapito, whose baby died on our place, informed us--after we had
sufficiently condoled and he had cheerfully assured us that the baby was
“better off with God”--that it would give him and his wife great
pleasure to pay us the compliment of having the wake in our sala! There,
of course, was a delicate situation at once. Agapito yearned for the
prestige that would be his if we permitted him to suspend his dead
baby--dressed in mosquito netting and orange blossoms--against the sala
wall and leave it there to the edification of the countryside for a day
and a night. To refuse was, without doubt, to offend him; but to consent
was to establish a somewhat ghastly precedent impossible in subsequent
cases of affliction to ignore. As my brother declared, when we withdrew
to discuss the matter, one had to choose between hurting Agapito’s
feelings and turning the sala into a perpetual morgue. Agapito was in
several respects an efficient and valuable person. He could even
persuade the machine for dispulping coffee-berries to work smoothly
when--as they express it--“it does not wish to.” But, nevertheless, with
much regret we decided to hurt Agapito’s feelings. Like children they do
not shrink from making naïvely preposterous demands upon one, and like
children their sense of obligation is almost entirely lacking. They are
given to bringing one presents of oranges and bananas, or inedible blood
puddings and cakes when they kill a pig or have a party, but they are
rarely incited to display appreciation of kindness--even when it would
be easy for them to do so--in a way that counts.

One afternoon, during the busiest season of the year on a coffee ranch,
all the coffee-pickers--men, women, and children--with the exception of
one family, suddenly struck. When asked what the trouble was, the
spokesman in a florid and pompous address declared that they were “all
brothers and must pick together or not at all.” It came out during the
interview that the father of the family who had not struck had received
permission for himself, his wife, and six small children to pick in a
block of coffee by themselves, and to this the others had been induced
to object. Why they objected they could not say, because they did not
know. It was explained to them that the man had wished his family to
work apart for the sole and sensible reason that, first, he and his wife
could take better care of the children when they were not scattered
among the crowd, and, secondly, that as the trees of the particular
block he had asked to be allowed to pick in were younger and smaller
than the others, the children had less difficulty in reaching the
branches. He not only derived no financial advantage from the change, he
was voluntarily making some sacrifice by going to pick where the coffee,
owing to the youth of the trees, was less abundant.

“Don’t you see that this is the truth and all there is to it?” the
strikers were asked.

“Yes.”

“And now that it has been explained, won’t you go back to work?”

“No.”

“But why not?”

“Because.”

“Because what?”

“Because we must all pick together.”

A strike for higher wages or shorter hours or more and better food is
usual and always comprehensible anywhere, but one has to go to Mexico, I
imagine, to experience a strike that involves neither a question of
material advantage nor of abstract principle. It was recalled to them
that the fact of their being “all brothers” did not operate against
their eloping with one another’s wives and slashing one another with
machetes in the mazy dance whenever they felt so inclined--a reflection
that produced much merriment, especially among the ladies. But upon the
point at issue it had no effect whatever, and irritating as it was to be
forced into submitting to this sort of thing, before work could be
resumed the family of eight had to be sent for and told to pick with the
others. All these people were indebted to their employer for loans, for
medicines--for assistance of various kinds too numerous to mention or to
remember, and, in their way, they liked him and liked the ranch. I can
account for such inconsiderate imbecility only by supposing that after
generations of oppression the desire among an ignorant and emotional
people to assert their independence in small matters becomes
irresistible from time to time, even when they cannot discover that
their rights have been in any way infringed upon.

However, their rights _are_ constantly infringed upon in the most
obvious and brazen manner, and knowledge of this undoubtedly contributes
to their uncomfortable habit of vibrating between an attitude of
doglike trust and one of the most exaggerated suspicion. Last year, for
example, a stone bridge was being built in a small town some six or
eight miles away from our ranch. As the heavy summer rains were but a
few months off, it was desirable that the bridge should be completed.
Labor, however, was exceedingly scarce, and for a long time the work
made no visible progress. At first the authorities resorted to the usual
plan of making arrests for drunkenness and obliging the victims to haul
stones and mortar, but as this immediately resulted in the exercise of
unusual self-restraint on the part of the populace, the jefe político
evolved the quaint conceit of detaining every able-bodied man who
appeared in town without trousers! The Indians in that part of the
country, and many of the people who are not pure Indian, wear, instead
of the skin-tight Mexican trousers, a pair of long, loose white cotton
drawers resembling in cut and fit the lower part of a suit of pajamas.
They are not only a perfectly respectable garment, they are vastly more
practical and comfortable than the pantalones, inasmuch as they can be
rolled above the knee and, in a land of mud and streams, kept clean and
dry. But until the jefe had acquired a force sufficient to complete the
bridge, he arrested everybody who wore them. A law had been passed, he
said, declaring them to be indecent. Just when the law had been passed
and by whom he did not trouble to explain. Among the small rancheros of
the neighborhood who did not own a pair of trousers, the edict caused
not only inconvenience but now and then positive hardship. Many of them
who had not heard of it and innocently attended church or market were
sent to bridge-building for indefinite periods when they ought to have
been at home harvesting their corn. Their crops were either spoiled or
stolen. The Indians on our place did not dare venture into town for
supplies until we bought a pair of trousers for lending purposes.
“Trinidad (or Lucio, or Jesús) is going to town and begs that you will
do him the favor of lending him the pants,” was an almost daily request
for weeks.[1]

[1] Since I wrote the above, the following item of news appeared in the
_Mexican Herald_ of February 11, 1908:

                        FORCED TO WEAR TROUSERS
                    MOUNTAINEERS AROUND GUANAJUATO
                         PREFER TO PAY FINES.

Special Dispatch to the _Herald_.

GUANAJUATO, February 10th.--The local treasury will soon be full
to overflowing from the numerous fines collected from sons of the
mountains who daily endeavor to enter this ancient town clad in cotton
drawers. The law is strict in this particular, and the police in the
suburbs have strict orders to see that no peon enters the town without
a pair of factory-made trousers.

[It would be interesting to know who, in Guanajuato, owns the largest
interest in the local trousers factory.]

I remember one jefe político to whom it occurred that he might start a
butcher shop and ruin the business of the only other butcher shop in
town, which was kept by a man he happened to dislike. When he had
completed his arrangements for the sale of meat, he caused a rumor to
circulate among the lower classes to the effect that life would be a
gladder, sweeter thing for all concerned if the meat he was now prepared
to dispense should find a market both ready and sustained. To the
American and English rancheros of the neighborhod he had letters written
by various friends of his who happened to know them; courteous not to
say punctilious letters that, however, contained somewhere between the
lines an ominous rumble. “I thought it might interest you to learn that
H--, the jefe, has opened a butcher shop and would consider it an honor
if you were to favor him with your patronage, instead of bestowing it
upon his competitor,” the letters ran in part. Though somewhat more
rhetorical, it all sounded to the unattuned ear as innocent as any of
the numerous advertisements one receives by post in the course of a week
at home. But it wasn’t. In a “republic,” where the governors of the
various states must be without question the political friends of the
president, and the jefes are usually, with no more question, the
political friends of the governors, the suggestion that a jefe would not
object to one’s purchasing beefsteaks from him is not lightly to be
ignored. The local jefe can, in a hundred subtle ways, make one’s
residence in Mexico extremely difficult and disagreeable. Every
foreigner who received one of the inspired epistles changed his butcher
the next day. Another jefe of my acquaintance--a rather charming
man--decided to pave a certain country road chiefly because it went
through some land owned by his brother. As most of the able-bodied
convicts of that district were engaged in paving a much more important
highway and he could not very well draw upon their forces, he
magnificently sent out a messenger who floundered through the mud from
ranch to ranch, announcing to the countryside that henceforth every man
would have to labor, without compensation, one day in eight upon the
road. Now, to most of the people who received the message, this
particular road was of no importance; they rarely used it and they
owned no land through which it ran. And yet--whether from the habit of
submitting to tyranny, or from guilty consciences, I don’t know--many
responded with their time and their toil. When asked, as we frequently
were, for advice on the subject, we refrained from giving any.

The habit of suspicion and the impulse to make, for no very definite
reason, little displays of personal independence would tax one’s
patience and amiability to the utmost if one did not keep on hand a
reserve fund of these qualities with which to fortify oneself against
frequent exhibitions of Mexican honor. In referring to this somewhat
rococo subject, it is perhaps but fair for me to admit that even so
comparatively simple a matter as the Anglo-Saxon sense of honor presents
certain difficulties to my understanding. Explain and expound as many
intelligent gentlemen have to me, for instance, I have never been able
to grasp why it is so much more dishonorable to evade one’s gambling
debts than it is to evade one’s laundress. Therefore I do not feel
competent to throw a great light upon the kind of honor that obtains in
Mexico. I can only observe that, like politeness, smallpox, and fine
weather, it is very prevalent, and record an example or two of the many
that arise in my memory, by way of illustrating one of the obstacles in
the employer’s path.

A few winters ago we hired a youth to bring our letters and fresh meat
every day from the town to the ranch. He performed this monotonous
service with commendable regularity, and with a regularity not so
commendable always cut off at least a quarter of the meat after leaving
the butcher shop and gave it to his mother who lived in town.
Furthermore, when the workmen on the place intrusted him with letters to
post on his return, he posted them if they were stamped, but scattered
them in fragments if they were not, and pocketed the money. We knew he
did both these things because we found and identified some of the
epistolary fragments, and his mother had the monumental brass to
complain to the butcher when the meat was tough! But even so, he was a
convenience--none of the laborers could be regularly spared at the
time--and we made no moan. One day, however, it was impossible to ignore
the matter; he arrived with a bit of beefsteak about as large as a
mutton chop and had the effrontery, as we thought, to deliver it without
a word of explanation. So, as the imposition had been going on for at
least six weeks, he was as kindly as possible, most unfortunately,
accused. Then followed an exhibition of outraged innocence such as I
have never before seen. He turned a kind of Nile green; he clenched his
fist and beat upon his chest. He made an impassioned address in which he
declared that, although his family was poor and needed the twenty-five
centavos a day we paid him, he could not continue to work for anyone who
had sought to cast a reflection upon his spotless honor; and he ended by
bursting into tears and sobbing for ten minutes with his head on a bag
of coffee.

The tragic, humorous, and altogether grotesque part of the affair was
that on this particular day for the first time, no doubt, since we had
employed him, he _hadn’t_ stolen the meat! We learned from the butcher a
few hours afterwards that there had been scarcely any beefsteak in the
shop when the boy had called, but that he had sent a few ounces,
thinking it was better than nothing at all. We lost our messenger; his
mother would not allow him to work for persons who doubted his honesty.

A friend of mine had in his employ an old man--an ex-bullfighter--who
took care of the horses and accompanied the various members of the
family when they went for a ride. He was given to gambling, and on one
occasion when he had lost all his money but could not bring himself to
leave the game, he gambled away a saddle and bridle of his employer.
Shortly afterwards my friend recognized them in the window of a harness
shop and bought them back, without, however, mentioning the fact to old
Preciliano, who, when casually asked where they were, replied quite as
casually that at the public stable where the horses were kept they had
become mixed with some other equipment and taken away by mistake. He
explained that he knew the distant ranchero who had inadvertently done
this and that steps had been taken to have them returned. For several
weeks my friend amused himself by asking for--and getting--minute
details of the saddle’s whereabouts and the probable date of its
arrival, and then one day he abruptly accused Preciliano of having lost
it in a game of cards.

This was followed by almost exactly a repetition of the performance we
had been given by the meat-and-letter boy. Preciliano was not only
astonished that the señor could for a moment imagine such a thing, he
was hurt--wounded--cruelly smitten in his old age by the hand he had
never seen raised except in kindness. All was lost save honor. That,
thank God, he could still retain--but not there; not under that roof.
He could not remain covered with shame in the shadow of so hideous a
suspicion. Honor demanded that he should “separate” himself at
once--honor demanded all sorts of things in this vein until my friend,
who said he was positively beginning to believe Preciliano very much as
Preciliano believed himself, suddenly stooped down and pulled the saddle
and bridle from under the table. Collapse. Tears. Forgiveness. Tableau.

Preciliano subsequently left this family--gave up an agreeable and
lucrative position--because the wife of the employer thoughtfully
suggested that, on account of his advancing years, it would be wiser of
him not to exercise a certain imperfectly broken horse. He was “covered
with shame” and sorrowfully bade them farewell.




VII


Here is a letter from a coffee plantation:

When I got back in October, they received me with formalities--gave me a
kind of Roman triumph. If it hadn’t been so pathetic I should have
laughed; if it hadn’t been so funny I should have cried. For I had been
fourteen hours on a slow-climbing mule, and you know--or rather you
don’t know--how the last interminable two hours of that kind of riding
unstrings one. Being Mexican, everything about the Roman triumph went
wrong and fell perfectly flat. In the first place they expected me a day
earlier, and when I didn’t arrive they decided--Heaven knows why--that I
wouldn’t come the next day, but the day after. In the meanwhile I
appeared late in the afternoon of the day between. They had built in
front of the piazza a wobbly arch of great glossy leaves and red
flowers, and from post to post had hung chains of red, white, and green
tissue paper. But the arch, of course, had blown down in the night and
most of the paper garlands had been rained on and were hanging limply
to the posts. All this, they assured me, would have been repaired had I
arrived a day later, and I marveled at my self-control as I
enthusiastically admired the beauty of a welcoming arch lying prostrate
in the mud.

It had been the pleasant intention of everyone to assemble and welcome
me home, and when at the entrance to the ranch the Indian who lives
there gave a prolonged, falsetto cry (un grito)--the signal agreed
on--and I rode up the slope to the clanging of the bell we ring to call
in the pickers, and the detonations of those terrible Mexican rockets
that give no light but rend the sky apart, I had a feeling as of a
concourse awaiting me. The concourse, however, had given me up until the
next day, and when I got off my mule I found that the entire festivities
were being conducted by Manuel the house-boy, Rosalía the cook, and
Trinidad the mayordomo. Trinidad shot off all six cartridges in his
revolver and then shook hands with me. Rosalía was attached to the bell
rope--Manuel was manipulating the rockets. At that moment I knew exactly
how the hero feels when the peasantry (no doubt such plays are now
extinct) exclaims: “The young squire comes of age to-day. Hurray,
hurray, hurray! There will be great doings up at the hall. Hurray,
hurray, hurray!” It was all so well meant that when I went into my
bedroom I could not bring myself to scold at what I found there. On the
clean, brown cedar walls they had pasted pictures--advertisements of
sewing machines and breakfast foods and automobiles, cut from the back
pages of magazines and slapped on anywhere. They see but few pictures,
and ours, although rather meaningless to them, are fascinating. A
picture is a picture, and my walls were covered with them; but I
pretended to be greatly pleased. Since then I have been quietly soaking
them off at the tactful rate of about two a week.

Trinidad, the new mayordomo, seems to have done well in my absence. He
planted thirty-five thousand new coffee trees with an intelligence
positively human. Casimiro, his predecessor, and I parted last year--not
in anger, only in sorrow. Casimiro had been a highwayman--a bandit. His
police record, they say, makes creepy reading on dark and windy nights.
That, however, I never took in consideration. It was only when he began
to gamble and to make good his losses by selling me my own corn and
pocketing the money that we bade each other good-by. There was no scene.
When I told him such things could not go on, he gravely agreed with me
that they couldn’t, and without resentment departed the next morning.
They are strange people. When they do lose control of themselves they go
to any lengths; there is likely to be a scene more than worth the price
of admission. Somebody usually gets killed. But nothing short of this
would seem to be, as a rule, worth while, and on the surface their
manner is one of indifference--detachment. Trinidad, who took Casimiro’s
place, rose, so to speak, from the ranks. He was an arriero for seven
years and then drifted here as a day laborer. But he understands coffee,
and the experiment of suddenly placing him over all the others has so
far been a success.

What a watchful eye the authorities keep on them even in far-away places
like this! The instant Trinidad ceased to be a common laborer on
whatever he could earn a day by picking coffee, hauling firewood,
cleaning the trees, and received a salary of thirty-five pesos a month,
his taxes were raised. They all pay a monthly tax (the “contribución” it
is called) of a few centavos, although what most of them, owning
absolutely nothing, are taxed for, it would be hard to say, unless it be
for breathing the air of heaven--for being alive at all. He tried to
keep secret the fact of his advancement, but it became known of course,
and his tax, to his great disgust, was raised fifteen or twenty cents.

Last week we had our first picking of the year and, weather permitting
(which it won’t be), we shall pick with more or less continuity for the
next four months. Coffee is different from other crops (“not like other
girls”) and often inclines me to believe it has acquired some of its
characteristics from prolonged and intimate contact with the hands that
pick it. For quite in the Mexican manner it cannot bring itself to do
anything so definite and thorough as to ripen--like wheat or corn or
potatoes--all at once. A few berries turn red on every tree and have to
be removed before they fall off. By the time this has been done from one
end of the place to the other, more have ripened and reddened and the
pickers begin again. “Poco á poco--not to-day shall we be ready for you,
but to-morrow, or perhaps next week. To do anything so final--in fact,
to be ready on any specific date is not the custom of the country,” the
trees seem to say. However, it is just as well. Nature apparently knew
what she was doing. To pick the berries properly requires skill and
time, and if they all ripened at once one could not take care of them.

Beyond the fact that you “don’t take sugar, thank you,” and like to have
the cream poured in first, do you know anything about coffee? Did you
know that the pretty, fussy trees (they are really more like large
shrubs) won’t grow in the sun and won’t grow in the shade, but have to
be given companionship in the form of other trees that, high above them,
permit just enough and not too much sunlight to filter mildly in? And
that unless you twist off the berries in a persuasive, almost gentle
fashion, you so hurt their feelings that in the spring they may refuse
to flower? And that the branches are so brittle, they have a way of
cracking off from the weight of their own crop? And that wherever there
is coffee there is also a tough, graceful little vine about as thick as
a telegraph wire which, if left uncut, winds itself around and around a
tree, finally strangling it to death as a snake strangles a rabbit?

When I see the brown hands of the pickers fluttering like nimble birds
among the branches, and think of the eight patient processes to which
the little berries must be subjected before they can become a cup of
drinkable coffee, I often wonder how and by whom their secret was
wrested from them. Was it an accident like the original whitening of
sugar, when--so we used to be told--a chicken with clay on its feet ran
over a mound of crude, brown crystals? Or did a dejected Arabian, having
heard all his life that (like the tomato of our grandmothers’) it was a
deadly thing, attempt by drinking it to assuage forever a hopeless
passion for some bulbul of the desert, and then find himself not dead,
but waking? A careless woman drops a bottle of bluing into a vat of wood
pulp and lo! for the first time we have colored writing paper. But no
one ever inadvertently picked, dispulped, fermented, washed, dried,
hulled, roasted, ground, and boiled coffee, and unless most of these
things are done to it, it is of no possible use.

After the coffee is picked it is brought home in sacks, measured, and
run through the dispulper, a machine that removes the tough red, outer
skin. Every berry (except the pea berry--a freak) is composed of two
beans, and these are covered with a sweet, slimy substance known as the
“honey,” which has to ferment and rot before the beans may be washed.
Washing simply removes the honey and those pieces of the outer skin that
have escaped the teeth of the machine and flowed from the front end
where they weren’t wanted. Four or five changes of water are made in the
course of the operation, and toward the last, when the rotted honey has
been washed away, leaving the beans hard and clean in their coverings of
parchment, one of the men takes off his trousers, rolls up his drawers,
and knee deep in the heavy mixture of coffee and water drags his feet as
rapidly as he can around the cement washing tank until the whole mass is
in motion with a swirling eddy in the center. Into the eddy gravitate
all the impurities--the foreign substances--the dead leaves and twigs
and unwelcome hulls, and when they all seem to be there, the man deftly
scoops them up with his hands and tosses them over the side. Then, if it
be a fine hot day, the soggy mess is shoveled on the asoleadero
(literally, the sunning place), an immense sloping stone platform
covered with smooth cement, and there it is spread out to dry while men
in their bare feet constantly turn it over with wooden hoes in order
that the beans may receive the sun equally on all sides.

It sounds simple, and if one numbered among one’s employees a Joshua who
could command the sun to stand still when one wished it to, it doubtless
would be. But no matter how much coffee there may be spread out on the
asoleadero, the sun not only loses its force at a certain hour and then
inconsiderately sets, it sometimes refuses for weeks at a time to show
itself at all. During these dreary eternities the half-dried coffee is
stowed away in sacks or, when it is too wet to dispose of in this manner
without danger of molding, it is heaped up in ridges on the asoleadero
and covered. When it rains, work of all kinds in connection with the
coffee necessarily ceases. The dryers cannot dry and the pickers cannot
pick. Even when it is not actually raining the pickers won’t go out if
the trees are still wet. For the water from the shaken branches chills
and stiffens their bloodless hands and soaks through their cotton
clothes to the skin. If one’s plantation and one’s annual crop are large
enough to justify the expense, one may defy the sun by investing in what
is known as a secadero--a machine for drying coffee by artificial heat.
But I haven’t arrived at one of these two-thousand-dollar
sun-scorners--yet.

That is as far as I go with my coffee--I pick it, dispulp it, wash it,
dry it, and sell it. But while the first four of these performances
sometimes bid fair to worry me into my grave before my prime, and the
fourth at least is of vital importance, as the flavor of coffee may
certainly be marred, if not made, in the drying, they are but the
prelude to what is eventually done to it before you critically sip it
and declare it to be good or bad. Women and children pick it over by
hand, separating it into different classes; it is then run through one
machine that divests it of its parchment covering; another, with the
uncanny precision of mindless things, gropes for beans that happen to be
of exactly the same shape, wonderfully finds them, and drops them into
their respective places; while at the same time it is throwing out every
bean that either nature or the dispulping machine has in the slightest
degree mutilated. The sensitiveness and apperception of this iron and
wooden box far exceed my own. Often I am unable to see the difference
between the beans it has chosen to disgorge into one sack and the beans
it has relegated to another--to feel the justice of its irrevocable
decisions. But they are always just, and every bean it drops into the
defective sack will be found, on examination, to be defective. Then
there is still another machine for polishing the bean--rubbing off the
delicate, tissue-paper membrane that covers it inside of the parchment.
This process does not affect the flavor. In fact nothing affects the
flavor of coffee after it has once been dried; but the separation and
the polishing give it what is known to the trade as “style.” And in the
trade there is as much poppycock about coffee as there is about wine and
cigars. When you telephone to your grocer for a mixture of Mocha and
Java do you by any chance imagine that you are going to receive coffee
from Arabia and the Dutch islands? What you do receive, the coffee kings
alone know. There are, I have been told, a few sacks of real Mocha in
the United States, just as there are a few real Vandykes and Holbeins,
and if you are very lucky indeed, the Mocha in your mixture will have
been grown in Mexico.

Sometimes at the height of the picking season the day is not long
enough, the washing tanks are not large enough, and the workers are not
numerous enough to attend to both the coffee-drying on the asoleadero
and the growing pile of berries that are constantly being carried in
from the trees. When this happens the dispulping has to be done at
night, and until four or five in the morning the monotonous plaint of
the machine, grinding, grinding like the mills of some insatiable
Mexican god, comes faintly over from the tanks. Under a flaring torch
and fortified with a bottle of aguardiente the men take turns through
the long night at filling the hopper and turning the heavy wheel,
bursting now and then into wild, improvised recitatives that are
answered by whomever happens for the moment to be most illuminated by
either the aguardiente or the divine fire. They begin to improvise to
this rapid, savage burst of a few minor phrases from the time they are
children. Almost any grown man can do it, although there is a standard
of excellence in the art (I have begun to detect it when I hear it),
recognized among themselves, that only a few attain. It takes into
consideration both the singer’s gift for dramatic or lyric invention and
the quality of his voice, a loud, strained tenor with falsetto
embellishments being the most desirable. I have heard Censio, the
mayordomo’s little boy, aged three or four, singing, for an hour at a
time, sincere and simple eulogies of his father’s cows. Since I brought
him a small patrol wagon drawn by two spirited iron horses his voice,
however, is no longer lifted in commemoration of “O mis vacas! O mis
vacas! O mis vacas!” but of “O mis caballitos! O mis caballitos! O mis
caballitos!” They improvise, too, at the dances, where the music is
usually a harp and a jarana--breaking in anywhere, saying their say, and
then waiting for the reply. Women rarely take part in these
Tannhäuseresque diversions, although I remember one woman at a dance on
my own piazza who got up and proceeded to chant with a wealth of
personal and rather embarrassing detail the story of her recent
desertion by the man she loved. He had of course deserted her for some
one else, and at the end of her remarkable narrative she sang, in a
perfect debauch of emotion and self-pity: “But I am of a forgiving
nature! Come back, come back, my rose, my heart, my soul--the bed is big
enough for three!” Sometimes when there is a dance at a neighboring
ranch the harpist and his son, who plays the jarana, stop at my place on
their way home in the morning and play to me (the son also improvises)
while I am at breakfast. The harpist is always drunk, and his
instrument, after a night of hard work, out of tune. He appeared not
long ago when I had staying with me a Boston lawyer--my only visitor so
far this year.

“Isn’t it horrible to eat soft boiled eggs and toast in this
pandemonium,” I called to him across the breakfast table.

“No,” he answered, “it’s splendid--it’s just like being an Irish king.”
The harpist was drunker than usual that morning when he rode away with
his harp in front of him on the pommel of his saddle, his son trudging
along behind, and when he reached the middle of the river he fell off
his horse and was nearly drowned. Later I saw what was once a harp
hanging in midstream to a rock. A shattered harp clinging to a cruel
rock surrounded by rushing water! I’m sure it was beautifully symbolical
of something--but what?

The harpist and the mother of the boy who assists him at dances were
really married, he told me, but they haven’t lived together for years.
Since then the boy has had a succession of informal stepmothers who
never stayed very long, and just recently the harpist has really married
again. In fact, the harpist’s home life is typical of the matrimonial
situation here, which for many reasons is endlessly interesting. Among
the lower classes in Mexico “free love” is not the sociological
experiment it sometimes tries to be in more civilized communities. It is
a convention, an institution, and, in the existing condition of affairs,
a necessity. Let me explain.

The Mexicans are an excessively passionate people and their passions
develop at an early age (I employ the words in a specific sense), not
only because nature has so ordered it, but because, owing to the way in
which they live--whole families, not to mention animals, in a small,
one-roomed house--the elemental facts of life are known to them from
the time they can see with their eyes and hear with their ears. For a
Mexican child of seven or eight among the lower classes, there are no
mysteries. Boys of fifteen have had their affairs with older women; boys
of seventeen are usually strongly attracted by some one person whom they
would like to marry. And just at this interesting and important crisis
the Church furnishes the spectator with one of its disappointing and
somewhat gross exhibitions.

It seems to have been proven that for people in general certain rigid
social laws are a comfort and an aid to a higher, steadier standard of
thought and life. In communities where such usages obtain, the ordinary
person, in taking unto himself a wife, does so with a feeling of
finality. On one’s wedding day, but little thought is given, I fancy, to
the legal loopholes of escape. It strikes one as strange, as wicked
even, that a powerful Church (a Church, moreover, that regards marriage
as a sacrament) should deliberately place insuperable obstacles in the
path of persons who for the time being, at least, have every desire to
tread the straight and narrow way. This, to its shame, the Church in
Mexico does.

The only legally valid marriage ceremony in Mexico is the civil
ceremony, but to a Mexican peon the civil ceremony means nothing
whatever; he can’t grasp its significance, and there is nothing in the
prosaic, businesslike proceeding to touch his heart and stir his
imagination. The only ceremony he recognizes is one conducted by a
priest in a church. When he is married by a priest he believes himself
to be married--which for moral and spiritual purposes is just as
valuable as if he actually were. One would suppose that the Church would
recognize this and encourage unions of more or less stability by making
marriage inexpensive and easy. If it had the slightest desire to elevate
the lower classes in Mexico from their frankly bestial attitude toward
the marital relation--to inculcate ideas different and finer than those
maintained by their chickens and their pigs--it could long since easily
have done so. But quite simply it has no such desire. In the morality of
the masses it shows no interest. For performing the marriage ceremony it
charges much more than poor people can pay without going into debt. Now
and then they go into debt; more often they dispense with the ceremony.
On my ranch, for instance, very few of the “married” people are married.
Almost every grown man lives with a woman who makes his tortillas and
bears him children, and about some of these households there is an air
of permanence and content. But with the death of mutual desire there is
nothing that tends to turn the scale in favor of permanence; no sense of
obligation, no respect for a vague authority higher and better than
oneself, no adverse public opinion. Half an hour of ennui, or some one
seen for a moment from a new point of view--and all is over. The man
goes his way, the woman hers. The children, retaining their father’s
name, remain, as a rule, with the mother. And soon there is a new set of
combinations. One woman who worked here had three small
children--everyone with a different surname; the name of its father.
While here, she kept house with the mayordomo, who for no reason in
particular had wearied of the wife he had married in church. No one
thought it odd that she should have three children by different men, or
that she should live with the mayordomo, or that the mayordomo should
tire of his wife and live with her. As a matter of fact there was
nothing odd about it. No one was doing wrong, no one was “flying in the
face of public opinion.” She and the three men who had successively
deserted her, the mayordomo who found it convenient to form an alliance
with her, and his wife, who betook herself to a neighboring ranch and
annexed a boy of sixteen, were all simply living their lives in
accordance with the promptings they had never been taught to resist. It
is not unusual to hear a mother, in a moment of irritation, exclaim, as
she gives her child a slap, “Hijo de quien sabe quien!” (Child of who
knows whom!) At an early age when they first fall in love they would, I
think, almost always prefer to be married. But where get the ten pesos,
without which the Church refuses to make them man and wife? The idea of
saving and waiting is to them, of course, utterly preposterous? Why
should it not be? What tangible advantage to them would there be in
postponement? The Church, which has always been successful in developing
and maintaining prejudices, could have developed, had it wished to, the
strongest prejudice in favor of matrimony, and the permanence of the
marriage tie. But it has not done so, and now, even when peons do have
the religious ceremony performed, they do not consider it binding. After
having gone to so much expense, they are not likely to separate so soon;
but that is all. One of the men here has been married three or four
times and on every occasion he has treated himself to a religious
ceremony with quite a splendid dance afterwards. As he is a skilled
mason who commands good wages and has no bad habits (except that of
getting married every little while), he can afford it. He is a genial
sort of a creature and I think he enjoys having weddings very much as
some persons enjoy having dinner parties. Sometimes he deserts his wives
and sometimes they desert him. Of course I don’t know, but I have an
idea that to have been married to him at one time or another carries
with it considerable prestige. And yet you ask me if I am not now and
then homesick for New York!

Or did you merely ask me if I didn’t find this kind of a life
desperately lonely? Everybody at home has asked me this until I have
come to believe that the modern American’s greatest dread, greater even
than the dread of sickness or of death, is the dread of being alone. But
although I no longer have it, I am able to understand it. For I can
vividly remember the time when there were scarcely any circumstances I
could not control sufficiently to insure me constant companionship. It
was novel and pleasant occasionally to putter alone for a few hours in
one’s room, or in solitude to lose oneself in an absorbing book, with
the half-formed purpose of soon finding somebody with whom to discuss
it. But to walk alone, to dine alone, to go to the theater alone--to
think alone! To be, in a word, for any length of time, on one’s own
hands--face to face with nothing but oneself! I could not possibly
describe the restlessness, the sense of “missing something,” the acute
melancholy I have experienced on the rare occasions when in those days
the improbable happened and for an afternoon and evening I was
left--alone. Just when and how the change came I have no idea. Without
at the moment feeling them, one acquires persistent little lines that
extend from the outer corners of one’s eyes and almost meet the gray
hairs below and behind one’s temples. The capacity--the talent--for
being alone comes to some in the same way. With me it has been as
gradual as the accentuation of the streaks across my forehead, or the
somewhat premature blanching of the hair around my ears. I only know
that it has come and that I am glad of it. I can be--and I sometimes
am--alone indefinitely for weeks--for months--without feeling that life
is passing me by. I may not, on the one hand, have periods of great
gayety, but on the other there is a placid kind of satisfaction, more or
less continuous, in realizing that one’s resources are a greater
comfort than one’s limitations are a distress. At first I was rather
vain, I confess, of the facility with which I could “do without”; I used
to find myself picturing certain old friends in these surroundings and
despising their very probable anguish. One, I felt sure, would find his
solace by perpetually dwelling in imagination upon his little triumphs
of the past (there are so many kinds of little past triumphs)--in
seeking to span the unspanable gulfs behind him with innumerable
epistolary bridges. The eyes of another would be fixed on the far
horizon; he would live through the interminable days, as so many persons
live through their lives, hovering upon the brink of a vague, wonderful
something that doesn’t happen. Another would take to aguardiente, which
is worse, they say, than morphine, and thenceforward his career would
consist of trying to break himself of the habit.

But I hope I have got over being vain--indeed, I’ve got over being a lot
of things. Solitude is a great chastener when once you accept it. It
quietly eliminates all sorts of traits that were a part of you--among
others, the desire to pose, to keep your best foot forever in evidence,
to impress people as being something you would like to have them think
you are even when you aren’t. Some men I know are able to pose in
solitude; had they valets they no doubt would be heroes to them. But I
find it the hardest kind of work myself, and as I am lazy I have stopped
trying. To act without an audience is so tiresome and unprofitable that
you gradually give it up and at last forget how to act at all. For you
become more interested in making the acquaintance of yourself as you
really are; which is a meeting that, in the haunts of men, rarely takes
place. It is gratifying, for example, to discover that you prefer to be
clean rather than dirty even when there is no one but God to care which
you are; just as it is amusing to note, however, that for scrupulous
cleanliness you are not inclined to make superhuman sacrifices, although
you used to believe you were. Clothes you learn, with something of a
shock, have for you no interest whatever. You come to believe that all
your life you have spent money in unnecessary raiment to please yourself
only in so far as it is pleasant to gain the approval of others. You
learn to regard dress merely as a covering, a precaution. For its color
and its cut you care nothing.

But the greatest gift in the power of loneliness to bestow is the
realization that life does not consist either of wallowing in the past
or of peering anxiously at the future; and it is appalling to
contemplate the great number of often painful steps by which one arrives
at a truth so old, so obvious, and so frequently expressed. It is good
for one to appreciate that life is now. Whether it offers little or
much, life is now--this day--this hour--and is probably the only
experience of the kind one is to have. As the doctor said to the woman
who complained that she did not like the night air: “Madam, during
certain hours of every twenty-four, night air is the only air there is.”
Solitude performs the inestimable service of letting us discover that it
is our lives we are at every moment passing through, and not some
useless, ugly, interpolated interval between what has been and what is
to come. Life does not know such intervals. They can have no separate
identity for they are life itself, and to realize this makes what has
seemed long and without value, both precious and fleeting. The fleeting
present may not be just what we once dreamed it might be, but it has the
advantage of being present, whereas our past is dead and our future may
never be born.

So you see, I am not lonely--or I mean, when I _am_ lonely (for
everyone is lonely), I try to regard it as a purely objective
affliction, like the sting of a wasp, or the hot blister that comes when
you carelessly touch a leaf of mala mujer. For minor objective
afflictions there is always some sort of an alleviator, and for
loneliness I have found a remedy in reflecting that the sensation itself
is never as interesting or as important as the circumstances that cause
it. All of which brings me back again to this hillside clearing in the
jungle with its lovely views, its outrageous climate, its mysterious
people, its insidious fascination. Do you ever have a feeling of
skepticism as to the continued existence of places you are no longer in?
I can shut my eyes and see Boston and New York and Paris, for instance,
as they are in their characteristic ways at almost any hour of the day
or night. I know just how the people in certain quarters are conducting
themselves, where they are going next, and what they will say and do
when they arrive. But I don’t altogether believe in it. It doesn’t seem
possible, somehow, that they are going ceaselessly on and on when I am
not there to see. Something happens to places where I no longer am.
Until I go back to them I’m sure they must be white and blank like the
screen in a cinematograph performance between the end of one film and
the beginning of the next. Just at present, nowhere is particularly
existent but here.

It is a cloudless, burning day, the best kind of a day for coffee, and
the asoleadero is covered with it. Through the house there is a slight
stir of air, and the fact that the house-boy has just swept the floor
with wet tea leaves left over from several breakfasts, makes the breeze
for the moment seem cool--which it isn’t. On such a day one is grateful
for the bareness of a room--the smooth, unadorned walls, the hard, cool
chairs. From the asoleadero comes without ceasing the harsh, hollow
sound of the wooden hoes as they turn the coffee over in the sun and
scrape against the cement. It is a hot and drowsy sound; the Mexican
equivalent of the sound made by a lawn mower in an American “front yard”
in August. It would send me to sleep, I think, if it were not
counteracted by the peculiar rustling of a clump of banana trees outside
the window. The slightest breath of air puts their torn ribbons into
motion that is a prolonged patter, indistinguishable usually from the
patter of rain. To-day it is more like the plashing of a fountain--a
fountain that, on account of the goldfish, plashes gently. Whenever we
need rain--and in the middle of the night I wake up and seem to hear
it--it turns out to be the banana trees; but when “too much water has
fallen,” as they say here, and I persuade myself that this time it is
only a fluttering in the banana trees, it is always rain. The whole
landscape is suspended in heat haze (“swooning” is the word I should
like to use, but I shan’t), from the bamboo trees nodding against the
sky on the crest of the hill behind the house, through the café tal in
front of it, down, down the long valley between extinct, woolly looking
volcanoes--thirty miles away to the sea. The sea, for some reason, never
looks from this distance like the sea; it is not flat but perpendicular.
I should have thought it a pale-blue wall across the valley’s lower end.
In an untiled corner of the piazza some chickens are taking dust baths
and talking scandal in low tones; the burro, near by, has curled up in
the shade like a dog and gone to sleep. I used to think I should never
allow chickens to take dust baths, or burros to doze on my piazza. It
seemed dreadfully squalid to permit it. Yet I have long since come to
it. What can one do? Es el costumbre del pais. So, also, is the custom
of letting a few fastidious hens lay eggs in one’s bed. But I have
always been very firm about that.

Except for the chickens and the burro, the two men on the asoleadero, a
buzzard resting on the limb of a dead tree, and one of the dogs who has
sneaked into the house to get rid of the flies, and who thinks that
because I didn’t turn him out I didn’t see him, there is apparently
nothing alive in the whole world. And their animation is but a tranquil
stupor. It does not seem as if anything could ever happen here to
disturb one. I’m sure I look as if I had been dreaming forever, but so
far to-day (it is only half past two) there have been the following
demands upon my time and attention:

At seven, one of the men tapped on my window and said he was going to
town, so I got up, wrote a note for him to post, made out the list for
the grocer--sugar, onions, flour, bread, a new bottle of olive oil, two
brooms, and a mouse trap--and gave him a hundred-peso bill to change
somewhere in the village into silver, as to-morrow is pay day. It is
inconvenient, but in the country one has to pay wages--even enormous
sums like five and ten pesos--in silver. Indians don’t understand paper
money as a rule and won’t take it; the others, too, are sometimes
suspicious of it--which is a survival, I suppose, of the time when
several different governments were trying to run Mexico at once and the
bank notes of one state were not accepted in another. At least that is
the only way I can account for their reluctance to be paid in good paper
money. A man I know got tired of sending every week to town for bags of
silver, and told the people on his place that a law had been passed (Oh,
those laws!) permitting an employer to pay only half as much as he owed
to persons who refused bills. Thereafter bills were not scorned. No
doubt I could say something of the same kind, but more than enough laws
of this sort are “passed” in darkest Mexico as it is. I shouldn’t care
to be responsible for another. In the kitchen there were no evidences of
activity on the part of Rosalia, and as I was beginning to be hungry I
knocked on her door and asked her (although I knew only too well) what
was the matter. She moaned back that she was very sick and believed she
was going to die. I didn’t tell her I hoped she would, although the
thought occurred to me. For the trouble with Doña Rosalía was that she
went to a dance last night at a little ranch next to mine, stayed until
half past four, and was carried home stinko. This I had gleaned from
Ramón (he who went to town), who had helped to carry her. With the
ladies at the party she had consumed many glasses of a comparatively
harmless although repulsive mixture of eggs, sugar, milk, and brandy,
prettily named ronpoco. With the gentlemen, however, she had laughingly
tossed off eight or ten drinks of aguardiente, not to record an
occasional glass of sherry, until at last the gentlemen were obliged
laughingly to toss her by the head and feet into a corner, where she lay
until they carried her home in the rosy dawn. I don’t know what to do
about Rosalía. She is an odious woman. If she would content herself with
one lover--somebody I know--I shouldn’t mind in the least. But she has a
different one every week--persons I’ve never laid eyes on usually--and
it makes me nervous to think that there are strange men in the house at
night. Recently I have resorted to locking the kitchen door at a
respectable hour and removing the key, which has made her furious, as I
have not been in the habit of locking any doors and as I did it without
offering an explanation. Her room, furthermore, is without a window. I
shouldn’t be surprised if she tried to poison me; they are great little
poisoners. So I had to stand for half an hour or more fanning a fire
built of green, damp wood, and getting my own breakfast--an orange, a
cup of tea, some eggs, and a roll without butter. The butter habit has
been eliminated along with many others. I could get good, pure American
butter dyed with carrot juice and preserved in boracic or salicylic
acid, by sending to the City of Mexico, but it is too much bother.

After breakfast I walked over to where they are picking. I can’t, of
course, help in the picking, but frequent, unexpected appearances on my
part are not without value. If they were sure I weren’t coming they
would, in their zeal to tear off many berries quickly (they are paid by
the amount they pick), break the branches and injure the trees. As they
have no respect for their own property I suppose it would be fatuous to
count on any respect for mine. When I got back to the house I began to
write to you, but before I had covered half a page, one Lucio appeared
on the piazza, apparently for the purpose of chatting interminably about
the weather, the coffee, the fact that some one had died and some one
else was about to be born; none of which topics had anything to do with
the real object of his visit. Three quarters of an hour went by before
he could bring himself to ask me to lend him money with which to buy two
marvelously beautiful pigs. I was kind, but I was firm. I don’t mind
lending money for most needs, but I refuse to encourage hogriculture. It
is too harrowing. When they keep pigs, no day goes by that the poor,
obese things do not escape and, helplessly rolling and stumbling down
the hill, squeal past the house with a dog attached to every ear.
Besides, they root up the young coffee trees. No, Lucio, no. Chickens,
ducks, turkeys, cows, lions, and tigers if you must, but not pigs.
Lucio--inscrutable person that he is--perfectly agrees with me. As he
says good-by one would think he had originally come not to praise pigs
but to protest against them. After his departure there are at least
fifteen minutes of absolute quiet.

Then arrive a party of four--two men and two women--respectable-looking,
well-mannered people, who stand on the piazza, saying good morning and
inquiring after my health. I have never seen them before, but I stop my
letter and go out to talk to them, wondering all the while where they
have come from and what they want--for, of course, they want something;
everybody always does. For an interminable time their object does not
emerge and in the face of such pretty, pleasant manners it is out of the
question for me bluntly to demand, “What have you come for?” In despair
I ask them if they would like to see the house, and as they stand in my
bare sala, commenting in awed undertones, I have a sudden penetrating
flash of insight into the relativeness of earthly grandeur. To me the
sala is the clean, ascetic habitation of one who has not only realized
what is and what is not essential, but who realizes that every new nail,
pane of glass, tin of paint, and cake of soap is brought sixty or
seventy miles through seas of mud and down a precipice three or four
thousand feet high on the back of a weary mule. To them, the simple
interior is a miracle of ingenious luxury. They gaze at the clumsy
fireplace, touch it, try to see daylight through the chimney and fail to
grasp its purpose, although they revere it as something superbly
unnecessary that cost untold sums. The plated candlesticks on the table
are too bewildering to remark on at all; they will refer to them on the
way home. The kitchen range at first means nothing to anyone, but when I
account for it as an American brasero the women are enthralled. One of
them confesses she thought it was a musical instrument--the kind they
have in church! There is nothing more to exhibit, nothing more to talk
about, so during a general silence one of the men asks me if I will sell
them a little corn--enough to keep them for two days--and I know they
have come to the point at last. They work on a ranch a mile or so away
and the owner, an Englishman, who lives in town, has forgotten or
neglected to supply them; they have none left for their tortillas. I am
not at all anxious to part with any of my corn, but I desire to be
obliging both to them and the Englishman, who, of course, will be told
of it the next time he rides out to his ranch. The house-boy having
disappeared in search of firewood, I have to measure the corn myself;
all of which takes time.

Next, a little boy to buy a pound of lard. (As a convenience I sell lard
at cost.) Then a little girl to say her mother is tired and would like a
drink of aguardiente. As her mother cooks for eighteen men who are
working here temporarily without their families, no doubt she deserves
one. Anyhow she gets it. Rosalía and the house-boy usually dole out
corn, lard, and aguardiente, but Rosalia is still in a trance and the
boy has not returned. Then Ezequiel, father of Candelario, stops on his
way over to the coffee tanks to tell me that Candelario is sick and he
would like me to prescribe. As Candelario is one of my godchildren I
have to show more interest in him than I feel.

“He’s always sick, Ezequiel,” I answer; “my medicines don’t seem to do
him good!” Ezequiel agrees with me that they don’t. “Except for his
stomach, which is swollen, he has been getting thinner and weaker for a
long time. Have you any idea of the cause?” Ezequiel, staring fixedly at
his toes, confesses that he has.

“What is it?”

“I am ashamed to tell you.”

“Don’t be ashamed; I shan’t speak of it, and if I know the cause I may
be able to do some good.” Ezequiel, still intent upon his toes, suddenly
looks up and blurts out:

“He’s a dirt eater.”

“Oh, well--that accounts for it. Why don’t you make him stop?” I ask, at
which Candelario’s father shrugs hopelessly.

And well he may, for dirt eating seems to be a habit or a vice or a
disease, impossible to cure. Many of them have it--grown persons as well
as children--and in the interest of science, or morbid curiosity,
perhaps, I have tried, but with little success, to get some definite
information on the subject. Nobody here who drinks to excess objects to
admitting he is a drunkard. He will refer to himself rather proudly as
“hombre perdido” (a lost man), and expect to be patted on the back. But
I have known a dirt eater to deny he was one even after a surgeon, to
save his life, had operated on him and removed large quantities of dirt.
As the habit is considered a shameful one, information at first hand is
impossible to acquire. Candelario, for instance, is only seven, but
although his father and mother know he is a dirt eater, they have never
caught him in the act. “We have watched him all day sometimes,” Ezequiel
declared, “every minute; and he would lie awake at night until we were
both asleep and then crawl out of the house to get it.” Whether there is
a particular kind of soil to which the victims are addicted or whether
any sufficiently gritty substance will do, I don’t know; neither does
Ezequiel. Among foreigners here the theory is that their stomachs have
become apathetic to the assaults of chile and demand an even more brutal
form of irritation. General emaciation and an abdominal toy balloon are
the outward and visible signs of the habit which can be broken they say
only by death. One woman on the place died of it last year, and her
seventeen-year-old son, who must have begun at an early age as his
physical development is that of a sickly child of ten, is not long for
this world. There was nothing I could do for my unfortunate little
godchild, and Ezequiel walked slowly away, looking as depressed as I
felt. For Candelario is a handsome, intelligent little boy and deserves
a better fate. But--“esterá mejor con Dios!” (He’ll be better off with
God.)

From then until luncheon there is comparative peace. That is to say,
when I am disturbed I am not disturbed for long at a time. A breathless
woman comes to “get something” for her husband who has just been bitten
in the foot by a snake. As she is scared, she omits the customary
preludes and I get rid of her within ten minutes. I have a hypodermic
injection for snake bites that comes from Belgium in little sealed
bottles and seems to be efficacious, but as the snake that bit her
husband was very small (a bravo amarillo, I think she named it), and as
he had been bitten, unsuccessfully, four years ago by another member of
the same family, I do not waste one on him. Instead, I send him several
drinks of ammonia and water which may or may not have any effect on
snake bites. To tell the truth, I don’t care. The house-boy on returning
from the mountain with a mule-load of firewood declares that the
occasion is auspicious for anointing one of the dogs who has the mange.
As the application of the salve is painful to the dog who endeavors to
bite the boy, it is necessary for me to pat the poor thing’s head and
engage him in conversation while the boy craftily dabs and smears in the
rear. When this precarious performance is taking place I notice a
turkey, a magnificent and sedate bird, who seems completely to have lost
his ordinarily fine mind. He is rushing about in a most agonized
fashion, beating his head in the dust, at times pausing and--perhaps I
imagine it--turning pale and looking as if he were about to faint.

“Manuel--what on earth is the matter with him? He has gone crazy,” I
exclaim.

“Oh, no,” Manuel placidly answers, “he fought so much with the other
turkeys and with some of the roosters as well, that I stuck a feather
through his nostrils. I thought it might _divert his attention_.” And he
smilingly waits for me to praise his thoughtful ingenuity.

It takes us fifteen minutes to catch the distracted turkey and remove
the feather. By that time I am, in every sense, too overheated to permit
myself to talk to Manuel on the subject of cruelty to animals. Some time
when I have just had a bath, put on a fresh suit of white clothes, and
am feeling altogether cool and calm and kind, I shall tell him a few
things. But to what end? If he had been willfully, deliberately cruel to
the turkey there might be some hope of converting him--of bringing about
a change of heart. But he wasn’t consciously cruel. Like most Mexicans
he is fond of animals. In fact, there is in Mexico more emotion expended
on pet animals than in any country I know. They make pets of their sheep
and their pigs, and one frequently sees a child sitting in a doorway or
by the roadside nursing a contented chicken. Yet in emotion it more
often than not begins and ends. Their lack of real kindness, of
consideration, of thought, in a word, is infuriating. Everyone on the
ranch has dogs, and at times they are petted, played with, admired, and
called by affectionate names--but they are never fed. I have seen a
family go into ecstasies for hours at a time over six new-born puppies
and then merely shrug and change the subject when it was suggested that
they ought to feed the pitifully thin little mother. The national love
of grace and beauty renders them sensitive to the beauty and grace of
animals, but to their comforts, even their necessities, they are blind
and therefore indifferent. They are all rather incapable of divided
feelings. Manuel had not the slightest feeling of compassion for the
turkey’s torture. The fact that he had prevented the bird from fighting
was all sufficient and left no room in his intelligence for any other.

Rosalía heroically manages to cook and serve my luncheon, and as she
drags herself in and out, the color of a faded lettuce leaf, with her
rebozo over one eye, I almost feel sorry for her. But I steel my heart
and make no comment either on her illness or her partial recovery. After
luncheon I again take my intermittent pen in hand and immediately throw
it down. There is a scurrying of bare feet on the piazza, and six of the
carpenter’s sons gather about the door. They are all crying and,
although it is no doubt physiologically impossible, they are all about
ten years old. The carpenter has eight sons, but one is noticeably
younger and the other is an infant in arms.

“What has happened?” I ask serenely; for I have grown to regard battle,
murder, and sudden death as conventional forms of relaxation. Six,
sobbing, simultaneous versions of the tragedy leave me ignorant.

“Now, one of you come in--you, Florenzio--and tell me about it. All the
others go around to the kitchen and tell Doña Rosalía. Now then,
Florenzio, be a man and stop crying. What is it?” I demand. Florenzio’s
narrative has moments of coherence. His father (usually the best of
fathers) went to the dance last night and came home drunk (he rarely
drinks). This morning, as he felt so badly, he tried to “cure” himself
(they always do) by drinking a little more. By ten o’clock he was all
right, and then--and then, “_he passed the cure_!” (This, I think, is
one of the most delightful phrases in the language.) After he had
“passed the cure” he suddenly went crazy, smashed all the cooking
utensils on the floor, and ended by seizing a stick of wood from the
brasero and beating his wife to a pulp. Then tearing the baby from her
breast he reeled with it into the jungle.

“All of which, my dear Florenzio,” I feel like saying, “is dramatic and
fascinating--but where do _I_ come in? I can’t undertake to pursue your
estimable father into the jungle, and I have no desire to inspect the
maternal pulp. Why have you come to _me_?” But, of course, I say nothing
of the kind. Instead, I am sympathetic and aghast and, surrounded by six
fluttering little carpenters, go over to their hut, exclaim at the
broken pottery, condole with the pulp, moan about the evils of drink,
declare that everything will come out satisfactorily in the end, and
leave them tear-blotted but not without interest in the future.

What, however, was in my thoughts throughout the visit was not the
immediate distress of this particular family, but the long distress
which, it sometimes seems to me, is the life of all of them. The house
was typical of the houses on my place--of the houses everywhere in this
part of the country, and I groaned that it should be. A small inclosure
of bamboo, fourteen feet by twelve perhaps, the steep, pointed roof
covered with rough, hand-made shingles of a soft wood that soon rots and
leaks. The bamboo, being no more than a lattice, affords but slight
protection from a slanting rain and none whatever from the wind; the
dirt floor, therefore, is damp everywhere, and near the walls muddy. At
one end is a brasero--not the neat, tiled affair for charcoal, with
holes on top and draughts in the side that one sees in towns, but a kind
of box made of logs, raised from the ground on rough legs and filled
with hard earth. A small fire of green wood smolders in the center of
this, filling the room from time to time with blinding smoke, and around
it (before the carpenter passed his cure) were three or four jars of
coarse brown pottery, and a thin round platter of unglazed earthenware
on which are baked the tortillas. Near by is a black stone with a
slight concavity on its upper surface and a primitive rolling pin of the
same substance resting upon it. On the floor in the corner are some
frayed petates--thin mats woven of palm or rushes. This is all, and this
is home. At night the family huddles together for warmth with nothing
but the petates between them and the damp ground. They sleep in their
clothes and try to cover themselves with their well-worn sarapes.

In a perpetually warm climate there is nothing deplorable about such
habitations, but from November to March the tierra templada is not
perpetually warm; it is for weeks at a time searchingly cold. The
thermometer often goes down to forty (Fahrenheit), and forty with a mad,
wet wind blowing through the house is agony to a person in cotton
pajamas, trying to seek repose in a mud puddle. During a protracted
norther the sadness of their faces, the languor of their movements--the
silent, patient wretchedness of them is indescribably depressing. A week
or so ago during a norther, when I was taking a walk between the end of
one cloud burst and the beginning of the next, I stopped to pay my
respects to a baby who had been born a few days before. The mother was
vigorously kneading corn with her stone rolling pin and the baby,
absolutely naked on a blanket, was having a chill.

“The poor little thing is very cold; it is shaking all over,” I
remarked.

“Yes, it has had chills ever since it came,” the woman answered.

“But in weather like this you ought to cover it,” I insisted.

“It doesn’t seem to wish to be covered,” was the reply. Upon which I
observed that it was a very pretty baby, and departed in tears. When one
lives among them one marvels, not like the tourist of a week, that they
are dirty, but that under the circumstances they are as clean as they
are; not that so many of them are continually sick, but that any of them
are ever well; not that they love to get drunk, but that they can bear
to remain sober.

And yet, even in cold, wet weather I am sure some of my pity is wasted.
If that baby lives and grows to manhood, a damp petate on the ground and
a thin blanket will be the only bed in its recollection; a hut of
openwork bamboo (or, at the most elaborate, of rough boards an inch
apart) its only shelter from the rain and wind. Furthermore, a human
being is never suffering as acutely as one sometimes thinks he is, if
he fails to take advantage of every available means of alleviating his
condition. Often when the faces of these people are wan with cold, I
have asked them why they do not stuff the cracks in their houses and
keep out the wind. The jungle a hundred yards away is all the year
luxuriant with great waterproof leaves, which when hung on walls or
piled on roofs are as impermeable as if they were patented and cost
money. No one is ignorant of their use, for the north side of almost
every house (it is from the north that the cold winds blow here) is
adorned with them. But why only the north side? If I knew beforehand
that I should have to spend a week in one of these huts I should, with a
machete and two or three hours of effort, make it warm and habitable.
But they, knowing that they will live and die in one, barely protect the
north side, sheath their machetes, cover their noses with their sarapes,
and shiver in silence. To the question, “Why don’t you make your house
warm and dry with leaves?” I have never been given a definite or
satisfactory answer. So sketchy and evasive have been the replies that I
am actually unable to remember what any of them were. In fact, Mexicans
have a genius for stringing words upon a flashing chain of shrugs and
smiles--of presenting you with a verbal rosary which later you find
yourself unable to tell.

Such, so far, has been my day. The general outline of the rest of it I
could draw with closed eyes. In another hour the sun will have begun to
lose its drying powers and I shall go over to the asoleadero to watch
the men pack the half-dried coffee into bags and pile them up under
cover for the night. By that time the pickers will have begun to
straggle back through the trees--the women and children talking in
tired, quiet voices, the men silent and bent double under their loads of
berries. Where we are--with a hill between us and the western sky--dusk
will overtake us while the mountains opposite and the distant gulf are
still tinted with sunset lights of unimagined delicacy; we shall have to
measure the berries and record the amounts picked by the flame of a
torch. Then everyone will mysteriously fade away among the trees, and
before going back to the house I shall linger alone a moment to look at
the black tracery of the bamboo plumes against the yellow afterglow,
with a single star trembling through an azure lake above them--perhaps I
shall wait for the moon to come out of the gulf and disperse the silver
moon mist that already has begun to gather on the horizon. The world
will seem to be a very quiet one--not silent with the intense and
terrifying silence of desert places, but peacefully, domestically
silent. For through the brief twilight will drift detached and softened
notes of life--the pat, pat, patting of a tortilla, the disembodied
rhythm of a guitar, the baying of a hound.

At dinner Rosalía will have sufficiently recovered to relate to me, as
she comes and goes from the kitchen, all she can remember about the
dance of the night before--new scandals to gloat over, new elopements to
prophesy. What she can’t remember she will gliby invent. The mayordomo
will come in to report on the coffee, the house-boy will tell me who has
bought corn and lard, and in what amounts. (He can’t write but he has
the memory of a phonograph.) If the novel you sent me--it came
yesterday--is as good as you say it is, I shall forget for the next few
hours that Mexico was ever discovered. I used to wonder in bookstores
how anyone could have the effrontery to print another book, but now,
since they have entirely taken the place that used to be filled for me
by more or less intelligent conversation, I feel like composing a letter
of thanks for every new writer I hear of. Before going to bed I shall
walk around the piazza to see that none of the men who have been
chatting in the moonlight have set the place on fire with their
cigarettes. One night I stooped down to pick up my little black dog who
sleeps there, exclaiming as I clutched him, “Kitsy, kitsy, kitsy--who’s
uncle’s darling!” or some equally dignified remark. But it wasn’t the
little black dog at all--it was the head of an Indian who was spending
the night there, covered, except for his shock of hair, with empty
coffee sacks. To-morrow will be just like to-day.

But perhaps I should not say exactly that, for I recall the reply of the
German clerk who was asked if he did not find his occupation monotonous.
“Why, no,” he said. “To-day, for instance, I am dating everything June
3d. To-morrow, I shall write June 4th, and the day after, June 5th. You
see--in my work there is constant variety.” And so it is here.
To-morrow, no doubt, it will be wet and cool instead of dry and hot; the
dispulpador may refuse to work (it is almost time for it to get out of
order again), and I have a feeling that the bamboo trough, in which the
water runs a quarter of a mile from its source to the washing tanks, is
about due to collapse somewhere. Then, someone will have a quarrel with
his wife and come to tell me that they are going to leave. This is a
most inexplicable phase of them. When they have a quarrel their one
idea, apparently, is to pack up their few possessions and seek a change
of scene. If it were to get rid of each other I could understand it; but
they often depart together! After dark a clacuache (I don’t know how to
spell him, but that is the way he is pronounced) may sneak upon the
chickens and succeed in getting one of them. Not long ago a wild
boar--we have them here; small but fierce--trotted out of the jungle and
attacked a young girl who was sewing in front of her family residence.
She happened to be alone and the little brute would have killed her if
some dogs had not come to her rescue. Perhaps it will happen again. A
few nights ago while I was reading in the sala, I heard a light clatter
of hoofs on the tiles of the piazza. When I turned from the lamp to look
out, a deer stood peering in at me through the open door. For a quarter
of a minute I almost believed he would end by coming in and putting his
head on my lap; I sat so motionless and tried so hard to will him to.
But he reared back and the doorway was once more a frame without a
picture. The next afternoon some one on the place shot a deer and tried
to sell me a piece of it, but, although I hadn’t had meat for days, I
couldn’t bring myself to buy any. Then, too, it is about time for
somebody--somebody very young or very old--to die. Death here is more
than death; it is a social opportunity. I always go to the wakes, both
because I know my presence adds interest and éclat to the occasions and
because I enjoy them. Everybody (except me) sits on the floor--the women
draped in their rebozos as if they were in church--while the deceased,
in a corner of the room, with candles at its head and feet, and wild
flowers on the wall above it, seems somehow to take a pallid interest in
what goes on. I do not sit on the floor because the bereaved family has
borrowed a chair from Rosalía in the hope that I would come. But when I
take possession of it I, of course, do not let on that I know it belongs
to me. For an hour, perhaps, while other guests silently emerge from the
jungle and sidle quietly into the room, the conversation is in
undertones and fragmentary. The dead is referred to with affection or
respect; the most conventional conventions are, in a word, observed.
Later, however, refreshments are handed about by the surviving members
of the household; the ladies partake of sherry, the gentlemen outside
relieve the tension with aguardiente. Gradually the atmosphere of the
gathering becomes less formal; talk is more sustained and resumes the
flexibility of every day. Trinidad indulges in a prolonged reminiscence
which Rosalía caps with a brilliant and slightly indecent anecdote that
makes everyone laugh. Outside the men have another drink of aguardiente,
and seating themselves on the ground begin to play cards by the light of
a torch. Suddenly there is a dog fight. In some way the writhing,
shrieking, frantic, hairy bodies roll past the card players and into the
room among the women and children. Everyone screams, and from my chair
(I am now not sitting, but standing on it) the floor is an indescribable
chaos. After this it is impossible to reconstruct a house of sorrow. The
deceased is not exactly forgotten, but it no longer usurps the center of
the stage. No one can quite resume the mood in which he came, and from
then on the wake is in every respect like a dance except for the facts
that there is a dead person in the room and that there is no dancing. In
the small hours, some thrifty guest opens a cantina and does a good
business in aguardiente and sherry, in tortillas, tamales, bread, and
coffee. I do not often stay so late.

Now and then I have to go to the village and be godfather for some
infant born on the place, and occasionally the festivities that follow a
wedding--the dancing and drinking, card playing and fighting--vary the
monotony of my long, quiet evenings. Last year a man I know, who has a
cattle ranch a day and a half away from here, issued a general
invitation to the countryside to come to his place and be married free
of charge. He built a temporary chapel and hired a priest and for two
days the hymeneal torch flamed as it never had in that part of the world
before. So many persons took advantage of the opportunity that the
priest, who began by marrying a couple at a time, was obliged toward the
last to line them up in little squads of six and eight and ten and let
them have it, so to speak, by the wholesale. It was pathetic to see old
men and women with their children and their children’s children all
waiting in the same group to be married.

Once in a long, long while I have a visitor--a real visitor I mean; some
one who stays a week or two, sits opposite me at meals and, to all
intents and purposes, talks my own language. You can scarcely--in fact,
you cannot at all--imagine just what this means, or the light in which I
view it. It is a different light; “a light that never was” in
localities where, in the matter of companionship for an evening, there
is an embarrassment of choice--where one becomes a kind of selfish,
social epicure. You know how you go into your club sometimes at half
past six or seven, wondering vaguely with whom you will dine. There are
fifteen or twenty more or less civilized young men sitting about
drinking cocktails, over whom, as you pretend to be reading the
headlines of the evening paper, you cast an appraising eye. Most of them
are going to dine at the club and almost any one of them would suggest
your joining his group if you gave him the necessary chance. But,
unwilling to commit yourself, you let the time slip by and, unless you
see somebody in whom you are especially interested, you end by dining
with the newspaper. Or if you do bind yourself to any particular party
and table and hour, you often find yourself regretting the act even
while you commit it. You haven’t, after all, really anything in common
with the persons in whose company you are destined to spend the next
hour and a half, you reflect, and a thousand such dinners would bring
you no nearer to them.

But in a place like this how different it is! It is the difference
between looking at things through a telescope and through a microscope.
At home we have opportunity and time only to make use of the larger,
sketchier instrument; after we pass a certain age we rarely learn to
know anyone with the searching intimacy that was the point and joy and
sorrow of our earlier friendships. Here, however, not from inclination
but from force of circumstances, there is now and then a pale afterglow
of the old relations. A visitor here is necessarily an isolated
specimen, and as such he is obliged for the time being to regard me. For
a week or so we see each other at rather terribly close range and the
experience is valuable. For it sends home to roost still another
platitude, and it is only by accepting and realizing the truth of
platitudes that we grow wise and tolerant and kinder. It used to bore me
beyond the power of expression to read or to be told that “everybody has
good qualities and an interesting side, if you only know how to get at
them,” and I still would enjoy kicking the person who informs me of this
fact with the air of one who lives on the heights, yet who is not above
showing the way to others groping in the valley. But although I have not
yet arrived at the point where I like to acknowledge it, I have learned
to believe that it is true. Perhaps it was to this end that I was sent
here. Quien sabe?




VIII


Wealth, education, and travel often combine to render unimportant,
persons who, had they stayed at home in a state of comparative poverty
and ignorance, would, perhaps, have been worthy of one’s serious
consideration. For money, books, and the habit of “going a journey” tend
to draw their possessors toward the symmetrical eddy known as “society,”
and society cannot for long endure anything essentially unlike itself.
One’s lot may be cast in New York, Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Rome,
Madrid, or the City of Mexico, but in so far as one is “in society” in
any of those places one conforms, outwardly at least, to a system of
ethics, etiquette, dress, food, drink, and division of time that
obtains, with a few local differences, in all the others. My
acquaintance among Mexicans of wealth, education, and extensive
experience is not, I confess, numerous, but it is sufficient constantly
to remind me of that ever-increasing “smallness of the world” we hear so
much about, and to impress upon me how distressingly nice and similar
are persons the world over who have money, education, the habit of
society, and little else. One Mexican family I happened not long ago to
see every day for three months was an excellent example of this
pleasant, cosmopolitan blight. They somehow ought to have been as florid
and real, as indigenous to the volcanic soil, as were the hundred and
fifty others (we were at a small “health resort”) who had gathered under
the same roof from all parts of the republic. Papa _ought_ to have
joined in the noisy, frantic games in the sala after dinner and with a
complete and engaging lack of self-consciousness made a monkey of
himself, as did the other men; mamma _ought_ to have come to breakfast
in an unbelted dressing sack with her long, black, wet hair hanging down
her back against a blue or yellow bath towel attached by safety pins to
her shoulders, as did her lady compatriots. The little daughter _ought_
to have worn beruffled dresses of some inexpensive but gaudy fabric
(scarlet gingham trimmed with coarse lace, for instance), and on Sunday
a pair of rather soiled, high-buttoned shoes of white or pale-blue kid.
The son--a youth of twenty-two--_ought_ to have been an infinitely more
tropical young man than he was; more emphatic and gesticulative in
conversation, more obviously satisfied with himself, and as to his
clothes, just a trifle wrong in every important detail.

But papa, who was a lawyer of some note, had been in the diplomatic
service, and although one evening he did gravely take part in a game of
“Button! button! Who’s got the button?” he never permitted himself the
graceful and popular diversion of dredging with his teeth for ten-cent
pieces in a bowl of flour. Mamma not only did not squalidly appear at
breakfast with her hair down--she did not appear at breakfast at all.
The little girl dressed sometimes in the English fashion, sometimes in
the French, and at all times was able to chatter fluently and
idiomatically in four languages. The young man, in spite of his American
and English clothes, could not have been mistaken for an American or an
Englishman, but he might have been, at first sight, almost anything
else. They had lived abroad--in France, in Belgium, in Germany--and they
had lost their tags. They very much resembled the sort of persons one is
invited to meet at dinner almost anywhere; persons who wear the right
clothes, use the right fork, who neither come too early nor stay too
late and to whom it is second nature to talk for three hours about
nothing at all, with ease, amiability, and an appearance of interest.

Their house in the City of Mexico was like themselves. It had, so to
speak, been born Mexican and then denationalized. For although it had
been built with a patio and tiled floors on the assumption that the
climate of Mexico is hot, it had acquired half a dozen fireplaces, a
complete epidermis of Oriental rugs, pretty and comfortable furniture,
pictures that did not merely make one giggle, bric-a-brac that did not
merely make one sick, a distinct personality, an atmosphere of comfort
and all the other attributes a genuinely Mexican interior invariably
lacks. It would be amusing to blindfold somebody in New York or London,
transport him on a magic carpet to one of the señora’s dinner parties or
afternoons at home, and ask him to guess where he was.

However much at a loss he might be for an answer in this particular
instance, it would be impossible for him, on the other hand, to mistake
his whereabouts could he be suddenly wafted to the little coffee town of
Rebozo and set down in the abode of my friend, Don Juan Valera. For
although it is said that Don Juan’s estimable wife has the tidy sum of a
million dollars coming to her on the death of her father, and Don Juan
has proved himself as discreet in the coffee business as he was in the
business of matrimony, he is not a citizen of the world. A visit to Don
Juan’s is an all-day affair--exhausting, ruinous to the digestion, quite
delightful, and Mexican from beginning to end. In fact, there is about
provincial Mexican hospitality a quality for which I can think of no
more descriptive phrase than “old-fashioned.” It has a simplicity, a
completeness, an amplitude that, to one who is accustomed to the quick,
well-ordered festivities of modern civilization, seem to belong to a
remote period, the period of “old times.” We left Barranca at half past
eight in the morning--enthusiastic, vivacious, amiable, and, in
appearance, not, I am told, unprepossessing. We returned at seven in the
evening--depleted, silent, irritable, and ages older-looking than our
ages.

The train to Rebozo, where lives Don Juan, slides circuitously down the
foothills through almost a tunnel of tropical vegetation and emerges at
last in one of the great gardens of the world. One does not soon grow
indifferent to tropical foliage. Even when one has come to the
conclusion that there is after all nothing more wonderful in a gully
full of plumelike ferns, twenty and thirty feet high, than in a row of
familiar elm or maple trees, one involuntarily hangs out of the window
to marvel at the ferns. The green, damp jungle depths, partly veiled in
smoky vapor that detaches itself, sails diagonally up the hillside and
then shreds into nothingness as the hot sunlight finds its way through
the trees, recall “transformation scenes” at the theater, or
long-forgotten pictures in old geographies. It is difficult for a
Northerner simply to take their beauty for granted, as he does the
beauty of trees and shrubs at home, for there is about nature in the
tropics always a suggestion of mystery, suffocation--evil. I do not know
if it is because one is reasonably suspicious of venomous snakes,
poisonous plants, and nameless, terrifying insects, but tropical nature,
however exquisite, inspires neither confidence nor affection. The poet
who first apostrophized “Mother Nature” never put on a pair of
poison-proof gloves and endeavored to hack a path through jungle with a
machete. In the tropics, the bosom of Mother Nature does not invite her
children to repose.

Don Juan met us at the train--which deposits its passengers in the
middle of Rebozo’s principal street--and, as it was still early in the
morning and there were nine hours of sixty minutes each ahead of us,
most of which we were aware would have to be consumed in sawing
conversational wood at Don Juan’s, we called first upon the family of
Don Pedro Valasquez--another local coffee magnate. Don Pedro’s wife--in
a pink cotton wrapper, with her hair down, but heavily powdered and
asphyxiatingly perfumed--had no doubt seen us get off the train, for she
met us at the front door, kissed the two girls in our party (who, after
calling on Mexican ladies, always declare they have contracted
lead-poisoning), and, chattering like a strange but kindly bird, took us
into the sala.

There is in all truly Mexican salas a striking--a depressing--similarity
one does not notice in the drawing-rooms of other countries. It is as if
there were, somewhere in the republic, a sort of standard sala--just as
there is in a glass case at Washington a standard of weight and a
standard of measurement--which all the other salas try, now humbly, now
magnificently, to approximate. I have sat in many Mexican salas and I
have peeped from the street into many more, but it would be difficult if
not impossible for me to know whether I were in the house of Don This
rather than in the house of Don That, if none of the family were present
to give me a clew. They are all long and high and bleak. In the exact
geometric center is a table with nothing on it but its chilly marble
top. Over it hangs an electric chandelier (the unshaded incandescent
light, like a bad deed in an excellent world, casts its little beam
almost everywhere in Mexico), the size and elaborateness of which is a
tolerably accurate symptom of the owner’s wealth and position. Around
the walls is placed at intervals, as regular as the architecture will
allow, a “set” of furniture--usually of Austrian bentwood with rattan
seats and backs--the kind that looks as if it were made of gas pipe
painted black. Near the heavily barred windows, where they can be
admired by the passers-by, are other marble-topped tables laden with
trivial imported objects of china and glass and metal: bisque figurines
painted in gay colors, little ornate vases that could not hold a single
flower, fanciful inkstands, and statuettes of animals--rabbits and dogs
and owls--standing about on mats horribly evolved out of worsted and
beads. The few pictures are usually vivid in color and obvious in
sentiment.

In fact, the prominence given in Mexican houses to advertisements of
brewers and grocers--calendars portraying, for example, a red-cheeked
young person with two horticulturally improbable cherries dangling from
her faultless mouth--is indicative of the warm, bright school of art for
which the nation really cares. The floor is of tiles--sometimes
light-colored and ornamented, but more often dark-red and plain--and the
ceiling is almost invariably a false ceiling of painted canvas that
eventually sags a trifle and somewhat disturbs a stranger accustomed to
ceilings of plaster by spectrally rising and falling in the breeze. In
hot weather the bareness and hardness and cleanliness of these places,
the absence of upholstery and yielding surfaces, the fact that the
floors can be sprinkled and swabbed off with a wet mop, are most
agreeable. But whereas in some parts of Mexico one or two days of a
month may be warm and the other twenty-nine or thirty cool or even cold,
the sala, with its inevitable echo, frozen floors, and pitiless
draughts, is usually as inviting as a mortuary chapel. Don Pedro’s,
besides containing precisely what I have enumerated, had an upright
piano, a canary, and a phonograph, and if I had needed any proof of the
fact that Mexican nerves are of an entirely different quality from our
own, the hour and a half we spent there would have supplied it.

In the first place, when “entertaining company” in Mexico everybody
talks all the time, nobody listens, and the voices of the women are
more often than not loud and harsh. When they hit upon a subject with
possibilities in the way of narrative and detail, they cling to it,
develop it, expand it, and exhaust it, and then go back and do it all
over again. On this occasion the topic that naturally suggested itself
when Don Pedro appeared, limping slightly and leaning on the arm of one
of his daughters, was the accident he had met with some months before
while out riding with three of the Americans who were now calling on
him. There was the usual preliminary skirmish of politeness, and then
followed the conversational engagement. It lasted for an hour and a
quarter, and except for the fact that during its progress one of my
compatriots developed a headache and I became temporarily deaf, it was
no doubt a draw. Don Pedro told _his_ story, which began with the
pedigree and biography of the horse that had thrown him, the combination
of circumstances that had led up to his riding him instead of some other
horse, the nature of the weather on that historical morning, the
condition of the roads, the various careless happy thoughts and remarks
he had indulged in just before the fatal moment, the fatal moment
itself, the sensations and reflections of a Mexican gentleman on
returning to consciousness after a bump on the head----

But it must not be supposed that anyone except me (who had not been
present at the accident) was listening to Don Pedro or paying the
slightest attention to him. His wife, with hands outstretched and flung
in the air, with eyes now rolling, now flashing, was screaming _her_
version; just how she had spent her time between the departure of the
blithesome cavalcade and its unexpected appearance with a litter in its
midst; what she had unsuspectingly remarked to her daughter and one of
the servants when first she descried it; what they had respectively
replied; what she did next, and what she did after that and the
sensations of a Mexican lady on hearing that her husband had been thrown
from his horse and rendered unconscious----

My three American friends, who live in Mexico and have learned how to
project themselves into the spirit of every social situation, were
meeting the demands of the moment by bellowing _their_ more or less
fictitious tales, and in the narrow street beyond the long open windows,
the train we had just left (it was so near we could have leaned out and
touched it) was making wholly unsuccessful efforts to return to
Barranca. The whistle and bell of the engine shrieked and rang
incessantly, the cars separated in an agony of noise and then
slam-banged together again and again and again. Most of the time the
engine was in front of the house sending a geyser of hoarse steam
through one of the sala windows. When the six simultaneous narratives
were nearing their climaxes and the train was at its loudest, a little
girl came into the room, sat down at the piano, and began to practice
scales, a little boy appeared from the patio for the purpose of making
the phonograph play the sextette from “Lucia,” as rendered by four
trombones and two cornets, and the canary bird went abruptly and
completely mad. Most of this lasted without surcease for an hour and a
quarter. The last fifteen minutes we spent in saying good-by. The señora
kissed the two ladies before we left the sala, and again at the door.
They were more than ordinarily convinced that they had contracted
lead-poisoning. Then we strolled away to the house of Don Juan Valera,
where we were received by Don Juan’s wife and five enchanting children,
his mother who had come over from a neighboring village to cook her
son’s birthday dinner (she was ninety-three and as bald as an egg), and
an orchestra of fourteen pieces.

No doubt one could become hardened to sitting all morning at one end of
a parlor, gravely listening to the waltzes and two-steps of an orchestra
at the other, and after every selection even more gravely adjourning
with one’s host and the musicians to the dining room for a glass of
cognac. But there is about the first morning spent in this fashion a
ghastly charm. As the ladies did not take cognac, upon them devolved the
less invigorating task of preserving unbroken during our frequent
absences the thread of conversation, and I groveled before them in
admiration every time I returned and found that the children and the
weather as topics had not even begun to be exhausted. There was all the
more to say about the weather by reason of the fact that there had been
recently so little of it--rain had refused to fall for weeks and the
coffee trees, laden with buds, were unable to flower. With the crop in
imminent peril--with hundreds of thousands of dollars ready to dry up
and blow away all around us--we could still experience a kind of social
gratitude for the calamity, and toward noon I began to feel that among
the many kindly acts of our host, his having had in all, six children
instead of only one or two was perhaps the kindliest. Race suicide on
his part would have been not only race suicide but conversational
murder. The eldest boy was at a Southern school in the United States,
and (this, however, did not emerge during our visit; Don Juan perhaps
did not know of it) he had on arriving, before the school opened, much
to his amazement, been refused admittance, on account of his fine, dark
skin (grandmamma was an Indian), to one hotel after another. The
explanation of the person in charge of him to the effect that he was no
more of African extraction than were the elegant young hotel clerks
themselves, was unproductive of results.

“I don’t care what he is--he isn’t white,” was their unanimous verdict,
and he found refuge at last in an obscure boarding house. But apparently
he had lived down prejudice even in the South, for while Don Juan was
proud of the progress he had made in his studies, he was positively vain
of his success with the ladies, although still somewhat at a loss to
account for the state of affairs that rendered such admitted conquests
possible. As modestly as he could he conveyed to us that the girls were
“crazy” about Juanito, hastening to declare, as a parent should, that
for his part he did not see precisely why.

“No doubt it is because Juanito is a novelty to them,” he sought to
explain. “You know how women are; always attracted by something new. On
Sunday afternoons they take long walks with him--but all alone, _all
alone_. No mother, father, brother--no one. And afterwards they invite
him in to supper. But nothing wrong--nothing wrong” (Juanito was not
quite fifteen), he added, closing his eyes and solemnly waving his
finger in front of his face.

The dinner (it was announced at last) was a revelation in the
possibilities of Mexican cooking, and although the multitude of dishes
were not new to me their savor was. Grandmamma cooked from recipes
(“muy, muy antiguas,” they were) whose origins had been obscured by
subsequent history, and almost a century had in no way impaired her
sense of taste or her lightness of touch. Even her tortillas were
delicious, and a tortilla is a melancholy form of nourishment. The mole
(a turkey soaked in a rich, mahogany-colored sauce, composed of from
twenty to half a hundred different ingredients) was of course the
dinner’s climax--it always is--and afterwards, as the old lady did not
come to the table, we all went to the kitchen to congratulate her and
shake her hand while the maids who had been helping her looked on in
ecstasy.

“She doesn’t come to the table because she has only one tooth,” her son
explained as he gently caused her to display it, much as one exhibits
the dental deficiencies of an old and well-beloved horse, “and on top
there is no hair--none at all. You see--it’s all bare, just like
parchment. She’s a wonderful woman,” he declared, as he slid his finger
back and forth on her skull.

Then we were shown the house; even--before we realized what was about to
happen--the new bathroom, to whose undoubted conveniences Don Juan
artlessly called out attention, and after examining separately every
plant in the patio, we returned to the sala, where the darling weather
proceeded almost immediately to save not only the situation but the
coffee crop. A series of cloud-bursts kept us all at the open windows
fascinated, as for some reason one always is by the hissing of rain and
the violent activities of tin waterspouts, until their sudden cessation
enabled us to stroll out, accompanied by Don Juan and the children, to
visit the town’s famous gardens for growing violets, azaleas, camelias,
roses, and gardenias for the market. There did not seem to be many of
them, but it was only later, when Don Pedro and his wife came to the
train with their arms full, that we knew why.

In two hours the coffee had flowered, and as the train lurched back to
Barranca in the green, uncanny, storm-washed light, through acres and
acres and acres of white coffee blossoms, it was difficult not to
believe that there had been in the tropics a fall of snow.




IX


It is significant that the most entertaining as well as the most
essentially true book on Mexico that I have been able to find was
written during the years 1840 and 1841, by Madame Calderon de la Barca.
Although from this name one does not, perhaps, at once jump to the
conclusion that the writer was Scotch, the fact that she was becomes
somewhat more credible on discovering her to have been born “Ingalls.”
She was, in a word, the wife of the first minister Spain condescended to
send to Mexico after that dissatisfied country had, in the time-honored
phrase, “thrown off the yoke,” and she must have been a most intelligent
and charming young person.

Of course, I have spent far too much time in and about Boston not to
have observed that delightful books are often written by odious women,
and what persuades me that my belief in Madame Calderon’s charm is not
misplaced is the fact that she never knew she was writing a book at all.
“It consists of letters written to the members of her family, and
really not intended originally--however incredible the assertion--for
publication,” says Prescott the historian, in his short preface to the
volume. It was Prescott who urged her to print them, but even he could
not induce her actually to reveal her name. I say “actually,” as she
resorted on the title page to the quaint form of anonymity that
consisted of signing herself “Madame C--de la B--,” a proceeding always
suggestive of the manner in which the two-hundred-pound soprano of
Mozart opera holds a minute, black velvet mask a foot and a half away
from her face and instantly becomes invisible to the naked eye.

But what strikes me as significant when I open Madame Calderon’s letters
at random and read a page or two almost anywhere is that, while the book
has long since been out of print, it is essentially not out of date. For
although in sixty-six years many historical things have happened in
Mexico--revolutions, sudden and astonishing changes of government, the
complete and wonderful disestablishment of the Church, foreign invasions
both bloody and peaceful--one may still read Madame Calderon and verify
much that she says simply by glancing out of the window. Momentous
changes have without doubt taken place: there are now freedom of
religious belief and facilities for acquiring an education, where in her
time there was only a priest with hell in one hand and a yawning purse
in the other; there now are railways and an excellent post and telegraph
service, where formerly there were, so to speak, nothing but brigands.
The parents of an Englishwoman I know in Mexico, who as a young bride
and groom landed at Vera Cruz just sixty years ago, were held up and
robbed three times during their journey from the coast to Barranca. They
were in a coach with other passengers; and the first bandits they
encountered took merely their money. The second deprived them of their
watches and jewelry, but the third, enraged at finding them without
valuables of any kind, stripped everybody--including the driver--to the
skin. Stark naked, the coachload for eight hours pursued its embarrassed
way and stark naked it drove into the patio of the Barranca inn. To-day
in Mexico one may occasionally be held up on the road, just as one may
be held up in Wyoming or Vermont, but brigandage as a lucrative career
for young men of courage has been suppressed. Madame Calderon did not
seem to think it at all unlikely that the masked bandits who separated
ladies from their jewels on the way home from a ball at three in the
morning were the dashing army officers with whom the ladies had been
dancing and flirting a short time before.

Those days are passed, and yet Mexico always seems to me very much as it
was when the observant Scotchwoman wrote her long and vivid letters.
There have been “events,” and reforms, and innovations that
unquestionably have had their influence on somebody, but the great
masses appear to have been quite uninfluenced. Even the large
towns--with the exception of the City of Mexico and Guadalajara, both of
which seem in many respects to become more cosmopolitan every week--may
still be recognized from Madame Calderon’s description of them and their
inhabitants. As recently as this year (1908) it was impossible, at the
best hotel in Puebla (a capital with a population of at least a hundred
thousand), to get breakfast, if one was obliged to leave by the
half-past-six A.M. train for Jalapa.

“It is not the custom to serve breakfast so early,” said the mozo, who
was arranging my bed for the night, when I ordered soft-boiled eggs and
chocolate to be sent up at half past five for my mother and brother and
me. He was a handsome boy, shivering in a dark-brown sarape stamped all
over with white horseshoes.

“But my God, amigo mio!” I protested, “why _isn’t_ it the custom? Before
a long journey even the most spiritual of us must fortify ourselves.”

“The milkman does not come from the country until six,” he then
explained, “and the cook never lights the brasero until half past.
Without milk and fire, how can one breakfast?”

To a person of resource (I am a person of resource) such a state of
affairs is immaterial. For at half past five (with the ghastly before
dawn cheerfulness that some of us at last painfully acquire) I was
making my toilet with one hand and, on two alcohol lamps, boiling eggs
and preparing chocolate with the other--as in Mexico I had done
innumerable times before. But for the uninitiated and the
resourceless--the American traveler in Mexico is usually both--what a
situation!

A railway--an engineering marvel that in its construction again and
again achieved the impossible--has bisected the country for almost
thirty years; but I know many adult Mexicans of considerable
intelligence, in their own circumscribed, tropical way, who have lived
all their lives within sixty or seventy miles of the track without ever
having seen it. Sixty-six years ago France must have been decidedly
more French, and Italy must have been infinitely more Italian, than they
are to-day, yet Mexico apparently is but slightly less Mexican.

From Madame Calderon, and from her only, was I able to learn the exact
religious import of the nine dances (posadas, they are called), given
everywhere in Mexico just before Christmas. I knew they were given, for
I had gone to them and enjoyed myself, but just why there were nine of
them and just why they should all be held in quick succession
immediately before Christmas, was something neither my American nor my
Mexican acquaintances--in spite of their polite efforts to recollect a
pretty legend, they had forgotten--ever made altogether clear. Madame
Calderon, however, was more satisfactory, and I can do no better than
quote her: “This is the last night of what are called the Posadas,” she
writes, “a curious mixture of religion and amusement, but extremely
pretty. The meaning is this: At the time that the decree went forth from
Cæsar Augustus that ‘all the world should be taxed,’ the Virgin and
Joseph, having come out of Galilee to Judæa to be inscribed for the
taxation, found Bethlehem so full of people who had arrived from all
parts of the world that they wandered about for nine days without
finding admittance to any house or tavern, and on the ninth day took
shelter in a manger, where the Savior was born.”

“Posada” means an inn or lodging house, and the “curious” religious
preliminaries to the nine dancing parties called “posadas” are all
symbolical of the efforts of Joseph and Mary to find a resting place for
the night. The posada Madame Calderon describes took place in a private
house in the City of Mexico more than half a century ago; the last one I
went to was held less than a year ago in the casino of a small town in
the tierra templada. But except for some slight historical differences,
either one might have been the other. “We went to the Marquesa’s at
eight o’clock, and about nine the ceremony commenced,” writes Madame
Calderon. And in this sentence lurks, perhaps, the greatest difference.
For at the casino of Barranca I found no marquesas. Most of the
pure-blooded Spaniards one meets in Mexico are either priests or
grocers, and if any of them is a marqués--as is very possible--he has
long ago tactfully pretended to forget it.

The casino at Barranca in itself throws some light on Mexican character.
For a small town it is an elaborate structure--built about an impressive
patio, with two large ballrooms and a supper room upstairs and smaller
rooms below for cards and billiard tables. In England or in the United
States these ground-floor apartments would be adequately furnished,
supplied with periodicals and newspapers, regarded as a man’s club and
used as such. But in Mexico, a club, as we understand such an
institution, seems, outside of the capital, to make little appeal. The
satisfaction that Brown and Robinson extract from reading their evening
paper and sipping their whisky-and-soda under a roof whose shelter may
not be sought by Smith and Jones, is a satisfaction the Mexican in
general has yet to discover. The reading room in the casino of Barranca
contains nothing to read, the billiard tables are rarely played upon,
and the card room is not often occupied except on the night of a dance,
when a few middle-aged men whose wives and daughters are upstairs in the
ballroom endeavor to keep themselves awake over a mild game of poker.
The truth is that in Mexico the real clubs are the plaza and the most
centrally situated café. It is there that one goes to read the paper, to
smoke a cigar, to have one’s boots polished, to sit awhile on a bench
and talk to friends--to take a drink or have a game of cards or
billiards. It is there and not in the cold, dreary rooms of the casino,
that the gentlemen of Barranca may usually be found when, for the
moment, they haven’t anything in particular to do. The plaza and the
café are for every day; the casino is for occasions.

The greatest occasions are the nine posadas, all of which are exactly
alike with the exception of the last, when a piñata (the grab-bag of
one’s childhood days) is suspended from the ceiling and finally induced
to disgorge its treasures by a blindfolded young lady, who succeeds in
demolishing it with a cane. On arriving, one is graciously received by
an appallingly powdered reception committee, and when all the guests
have assembled, partners are chosen, a procession is formed, everyone is
given a lighted candle, the incandescent lamps are extinguished and,
singing verse after verse that tells of the wanderings of Joseph and
Mary, the party marches around and around the upper floor of the patio.
When the night is clear and there is a moon, as happened to be the case
at the last posada I went to, the performance, as Madame Calderon says,
is “exceedingly pretty.” Finally the procession stops in front of a
closed door and sings, on the part of the Holy Family, a request for
admittance. In an interesting change of key, a chorus of voices behind
the door refuses to unlock. Mary and Joseph reply (always in song) that
the night is cold and dark--the wind blows hard. Again they ask for
shelter, and again they are refused. At this, Mary in a last verse
reveals the fact that she is the Queen of Heaven--whereupon the door is
instantly opened and the procession enters and disbands; not, however,
before everyone has kissed a little image of the Infant Jesus reposing
on a bed of leaves and flowers. After this ceremony--which no one seems
to take at all seriously--the orchestra strikes up a two-step and the
dance begins. Precisely this happens every evening--Sunday is an
exception--for nine nights before Christmas, all over Mexico.

“Are there any girls you would like to meet?” inquired a Mexican friend
of mine one evening, after Joseph and Mary had been admitted and the
first dance was just beginning.

“Why, yes--introduce me to the tall girl in blue,” I answered,
indicating an aristocratic young person whose gown had rue de la Paix
written all over it and who, in the matter of powder, combined Mexican
quantity with Parisian art.

“Oh--she’s the governor’s daughter,” my friend hesitated.

“Well, I care not who makes the daughters of a country, if I can make
their acquaintance,” I attempted to say in Spanish. It ended with my
dancing several times with her, and I was much interested to note what
an isolated and rather somber evening she spent. She was agreeable and
beautifully dressed--but she was the governor’s daughter, and the local
youths for that reason were afraid of her and admired her at a distance.
At an early hour she went home with her brother. He was the only person
present in evening dress, and when he returned after escorting his
sister home, he wore a frock coat. I have never been able to decide
whether he made the change because he felt uncomfortable himself or
because he wished to put the rest of us at our ease.




X


Once, in the United States I had to wait five hours for a train in a
large prohibition town--a town that for many years has been a bright
jewel in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s crown of glory. As I
was ignorant of this fact at the time, I asked one of the
intellectual-looking waitresses at the hotel where I was eating my
luncheon to bring me a bottle of beer. From the manner in which she
snubbed me, I supposed the fair, pure city not only did not tolerate
beer, but did not tolerate even the mention of beer. After luncheon,
while I was sitting on the hotel piazza, I noticed that a great many men
darted into an alley just opposite, passed through a doorway and never
returned. As the hour grew later their numbers increased until the door
was held open by an almost continuous stream. At times the room beyond
the door apparently became so crowded that the men in the alley would
form a long queue and patiently await their turn to enter. Thinking it
might be a show of some sort, I made inquiries of a policeman, who,
much amused at my innocence, replied: “Didn’t you ever see a man take a
drink before?” Hundreds of men went in at the door during the afternoon
and emerged, it seemed, from a smug-looking grocery store on another
street. And everybody was satisfied: the good ladies of the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union, who apparently can always be appeased by a
bit of legislation; the inhabitants of the town, who drank as deep and
as often as they pleased. I was young at the time, and although I have
since discovered with much amusement and some gratification that the law
which prevents a man from obtaining a drink, when he really wants one,
has yet to be devised, the incident made a lasting impression on me. I
often recall my afternoon in the State of Maine, the alley, the little
door, the stream of men of every station in life.

In Mexico I have recalled it time and again, as I gradually learned
something about the theoretical and the actual relations between the
state and the Church. For there is, on the one hand, precisely the same
stern attitude of the state toward religion (which in Mexico really
means Roman Catholicism), and on the other the same official wink. In
1859 the great Benito Juarez proclaimed his highly desirable Reform
Laws, and in so doing simply wiped from the slate the various
complications that had kept the clerical party and the liberal party,
from one end of the country to the other, in a state of bloody war for
fifty years. At one time every public institution in Mexico was owned
and managed by the Church. Every hospital, every school, every asylum
was church property. Even some of the theaters were of religious origin.
So great a portion of the country’s wealth was in the hands of the
priests that trade of all kinds was seriously hindered. To some extent
this state of affairs was alleviated even before the sweeping
proclamation of Juarez in 1859, but after it the claws of the Church in
Mexico seemed to be effectually extracted for all time. All the
remaining monastic orders were disestablished by a stroke of the pen,
and church property became national property. The cathedrals and
churches are now owned by the state and lent, so to speak, to the Church
for religious purposes. You can’t, according to the law, become a monk
or a nun in Mexico, even if you wish to; church bells may not ring for
more than one minute (I think it is one minute) at a time, and priests
may not either wear, on the streets, a distinctively clerical costume
or, in a religious capacity, accompany a funeral to the cemetery. (I
confess that, although I believe enthusiastically in every measure,
however brutal, that effectively restrains the Lord’s ambassadors from
meddling in secular affairs, I have never been able to see the point of
prohibiting a religious ceremony at a grave.) Once upon a time an
English bishop who disembarked at Vera Cruz in the humorous costume to
which his position in England entitled him, was, with a considerable
flourish of trumpets, promptly arrested and compelled to change his
clothes. The laws are there; they are extremely explicit, and now and
then, as in the case of the English bishop, they are, for the
pacification of the rabidly anticlerical, noisily enforced, but----

The President, in a word, is a person of great good sense, and I have
gathered from the ultraclerical, profoundly monarchistic remarks of my
friend Father O’Neil, who of course detests him, that in matters
ecclesiastical he is inclined to let the letter of the law take care of
itself. Father O’Neil doesn’t know that I have derived any such
impression from our long and interesting talks together, and I have
never told him.

“Why is it the authorities don’t arrest you?” I inquired of him one day
when he had been holding forth on the indignities the Church was forever
suffering at the hands of the Government. For he does not hesitate to
appear on the streets in the whole paraphernalia.

“Ah, they will some day,” he hopefully replied. And it was Father O’Neil
also who told me that there were to-day between thirty and forty
convents running full blast in the City of Mexico alone. That they are
is against the law, but, after all, the channels through which they used
to work great harm have been closed, and there are a number of persons
in every community of human beings who are able to satisfy their
temperamental needs--to enjoy life--only by walling themselves up with
others similarly disposed and wearing garments of a particular shape and
fabric. Once in so often the anti-clericals explode quite in the manner
of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in the United States, declare
that these illicit survivals must go, that such things must not be, and
compel the police to make a raid. But the police, it is said, never
discover anything on these expeditions beyond some demure ladies in
ordinary dress, who do not appear to understand the sudden intrusion and
who declare the place to be a poor but honest boarding house. When the
police retire, the ladies get their veils and habits from the cellar
where they have hidden them, put them on, and proceed with the life
meditative, as before. That they are never taken unawares, Father
O’Neil assures me, is due to the piety of the Señora Carmen Rubio de
Diaz, the President’s wife.

All of which helps one to believe that the President is a statesman and
a diplomat--that he does not care if people swim, as long as they do not
go too near the water. And that to be a successful president in Mexico
is a task of considerable difficulty might be inferred from a trivial
incident which took place some years ago. In receiving new envoys from
foreign countries the President is invariably happy in the phrasing of
his short speech of welcome--which, perhaps, does not seem altogether
remarkable when one learns that he is always furnished with a copy of
the newly arrived diplomat’s extemporaneous remarks a week before they
are delivered. On one occasion a foreign minister misguidedly undertook
to improve upon his discourse between the time it had been submitted and
approved and the hour at which he was officially received. With the best
intentions he inserted several things that the President, who is
distinctly “onto his job,” would have quietly deleted had he seen them.
The particular sentence that caused trouble was one in which the
unsuspecting envoy invoked God to be prodigal of His blessings upon Don
Porfirio’s distinguished head. The anticlerical element--it can scarcely
be called a party--was immediately incensed. It has a strong prejudice
against God, and of the fact that the President had, as it were,
officially recognized Him, it endeavored to make a political issue. The
President was much annoyed by the affair, and the diplomat horrified. It
has not happened again.

Father O’Neil is an American by way (on the part of his grandparents) of
Ireland; but for many years he has been a Roman Catholic priest in
Mexico, and he is one of those baffling, rather fascinating Roman
Catholic enigmas that I have grown accustomed to meeting in lonely,
far-away places. He is forty years old; a person of education,
cultivated tastes, and great charm of manner. For years he was priest of
a fever-stricken parish on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec until at last he
got yellow fever himself and was obliged, in order to remain alive, to
seek a higher altitude. When I knew him he was filling (at a salary of
three hundred dollars a year) a quaint position in an isolated spot with
a queer little history.

In the seventeenth century some Spanish monks founded a monastery in a
very beautiful part of the great Mexican plateau. The monastery
lasted--as an institution--for just a hundred years, at the end of which
time, for reasons that do not appear in the records of the place, all
the monks, with the exception of one, set sail for Spain. Those who left
divided the money among them; the one who remained received the
buildings and the land. He, by the Pope’s dispensation, was permitted to
marry, which he straightway did and begat a large family. His
descendants have always owned the estate, and although the present
members of the family do not live there, they still observe the wishes
of the original owner by perpetually having a priest--a sort of family
chaplain--in residence. When I met Father O’Neil, he was the chaplain.
His entire duties consisted of saying eleven low masses a month (why
eleven he did not know, except that this number had been stipulated for
in the will of the late possessor) and taking care of the exquisite old
vestments and gold service that dated from the place’s founding. Very
few persons ever went to the masses, and he confided in me that when
absolutely no one was present he did not even pretend to say them. An
agreeable man, a man of ability, fond of conversation, companionship,
and good living.

“What fanatical zeal he must have,” I at first thought, “in order to
exile himself to a locality that, however beautiful, is absolutely
deficient in everything he so greatly enjoys.” There were weeks at a
stretch when he had no one to speak to but his mozo or the country folk
who occasionally dropped in for the purpose of ascending the monastery’s
sacred stairs on their knees. Although interested in books and an acute
critic of them, he had literally none.

“On three hundred a year one’s library grows slowly,” he once remarked
to me. But as I came to know him better I discovered with amazement that
he was not only not a devout man--he was one of the most essentially,
innately irreligious persons I have ever met. The religious temperament
and point of view--especially the Christian-religious point of
view--bored him indescribably, and he usually spoke to me of his
activities as a priest as if they were some sort of a tedious necessity.
I saw him every few days for a whole winter, and in his long, cool, bare
sala, adorned only with some of the monastic relics and a portrait of
the monk who had remained in Mexico and founded the family, we discussed
many things--but I never could manage to maintain a satisfactory
discussion on the subject of _him_. When, for instance he would, in the
most casual tone imaginable, exclaim: “Oh, by the way, don’t write up
any of those yarns I told you the other evening, as I got them all in
the confessional,” there were several leading questions I could have
asked. For the fact that he could be amusing with the secrets of the
confessional jarred even on me. But I never did. Once when I inquired if
something or other had not surprised him, he replied: “My dear boy, I
have belonged to three exceedingly illuminating professions: journalism,
the law, and the Church; I am _never_ surprised.” Why had he left the
first two, in either of which one could easily imagine him successful
and happy, for the third, where he was neither one nor the other? And
why was he buried alive in the interior of Mexico, endeavoring to exist
on three hundred dollars a year, when he loved the world and candidly
admitted that he enjoyed few things as much as he enjoyed spending
money? I somehow hope I shall never find out.

Late one afternoon, when he was walking part of the way home with me, he
stopped to have his hand kissed by an old Indian woman who kept a small
cantina by the roadside. Doña Rosario invited us to have a drink at her
expense, but insisted on serving it in a small inner room, rather than
in the cantina proper, where half a dozen laborers were standing at the
bar.

“I wouldn’t ask the padrecito to drink with such common persons,” she
explained.

“But I don’t mind, Doña Rosario,” the priest assured her with a laugh.
“We’re all made of the same clay.”

“So are cream pitchers and slop-jars; but they are not used for the same
purposes,” Dona Rosario prettily replied.

“Sometimes they _are_,” he murmured to me in English as he swallowed his
drink, and I’ve often wondered just what he meant.




XI


What I am about to say will be of interest only to persons who for one
reason or another are on the verge of a first trip to Mexico, as it will
have to do chiefly with bald facts about the conditions of travel in the
republic--railway trains, luggage, cabs, hotels, restaurants (there
aren’t any), baths, beds, bottled water, butter--anything indeed that
occurs to me as relevant to the matter of travel. I know beforehand that
my attempt to make a few practical, sensible remarks on the subject will
prove unsatisfactory--perhaps exasperating. After one has lived in
Mexico any length of time one completely forgets the point of view of
persons who have never been there. So if I happen to leave out the one
thing dear reader most wishes to be informed upon, I humbly hope I may
be forgiven; for if I might choose between writing about such affairs
and being broken on the wheel, I should immediately inquire the nearest
way to the wheel. Suggestions as to routes of travel, excursions, and
“sights,” I omit deliberately, as all the Mexican railways publish
attractive, illustrated folders that treat of these with much greater
lucidity than I ever hope to attain.

Conventionally speaking, traveling in Mexico is uncomfortable. By this I
don’t mean that a person in ordinary health is subjected to hardships,
but merely that trains and hotels always lack the pleasing frills to
which one is accustomed in the United States and Europe. A train is a
means of transporting yourself and your belongings from one place to
another and nothing else. Americans--and with reason--look upon their
best trains as this and considerably more. The Mexican cars follow the
American plan of a middle aisle with exits at either end, and, as in
Europe, are usually of the first, second, and third class. A first-class
car resembles in every respect what is known in the United States as “a
coach” (as distinguished from a sleeping and a parlor car)--even to its
squalor. Furthermore, as there are rarely enough of them they are almost
always crowded. I have often noticed that Mexicans, generally speaking,
either can afford to travel first class, or can’t afford to travel
second. The second-class car is therefore sometimes comparatively empty
and endurable when the other two are neither. Even after buying a
first-class ticket I have more than once found it worth while to sit in
a second-class car; but naturally this is not always true. Second-class
cars for some reason are gradually being abolished.

In many of the larger places--the City of Mexico, Guadalajara, Puebla,
Vera Cruz--you can buy tickets at the railway’s city office and then at
the station check luggage at any time. It is invariably a saving of good
temper, anxiety, and comfort to do so, for the ticket window at the
station (surrounded by a dense crowd of the unwashed) does not open
until half an hour or twenty minutes before the train leaves, and it
takes longer to check luggage in Mexico than in any country in which I
have traveled. The system, in its final results, is precisely that of
the United States; the things are weighed, one is charged for an excess
of one hundred and fifty pounds on every first-class ticket, and given
in some cases a separate cardboard check for every piece, and in others
a printed, filled-in receipt for all of them on a slip of paper. But why
so simple a process should take so much time I have not been able to
learn. Recently in Vera Cruz it required at the station of the
Interoceanico railway three quarters of an hour and the combined
intellectual and physical efforts of two clerks and three cargadores
(working hard all the time) to furnish me with checks for six trunks and
several smaller pieces. Fortunately I had gone there long before train
time and was the only passenger in the station. It is but fair to admit
that there was a slight hitch in the proceedings--five or six
minutes--when darkness overtook us before the electric light was turned
on and some one had to rush out and buy a candle in order that work
could be resumed (this in one of the great seaports of the world!), but
all the rest of the time was consumed in checking the trunks. For each
trunk they seem to write half a page of memoranda in a book, pausing now
and then to lean back and look at the ceiling as if in the throes of
composing a sonnet. All things considered, it is well in Mexico to allow
yourself at the railway station what would seem in other countries a
foolish amount of time.

In some of the towns most visited by tourists the trains are now met by
English-speaking interpreters from the various hotels, who, by taking
charge of the checks and baggage, make the arrival and departure of even
persons who are new to the country and speak no Spanish a simple and
painless matter. When this does not happen, however, you may put
yourself with perfect confidence into the hands of a licensed
cargador--a licensed cargador being a porter with a numbered brass tag
suspended about his neck on a string. Outside of the City of Mexico I
have never known a licensed cargador who was not, in at least the
practice of his profession, entirely capable and honest. He will carry
your hand bags to a cab, or in places where there are no cabs, to the
street car that invariably passes near the best hotels, and a short time
afterwards--if you have intrusted him with your checks--arrive at the
hotel with your trunks. For carrying hand bags from the train to the cab
or street, twenty-five centavos is ample. The charge for taking trunks
from the station to the hotel is usually fifty centavos apiece. As a
measure of absolute safety, although it is hardly necessary, you may
remove a cargador’s tag from his neck and keep it as a hostage until you
receive your trunks. A cargador with a license is for all reasons
preferable to one without. Being licensed by the city government, he has
a definite status which he hesitates to imperil. By retaining his tag,
or noting and remembering his number, you have an infallible means of
identifying him in case your trunks should fail to arrive. But they
always do arrive.

Except in the City of Mexico you are rarely tempted to get into a cab;
you prefer either to walk or to make use of the street cars which will
always take you anywhere worth going to. In the capital, however,
although the electric-car service is excellent, cabs seem to be a
necessity. They are of two classes and the cost of riding in them is
fixed by law, but unless you find out beforehand from some one who is
informed upon the subject exactly how much you ought to pay, the cabman
will demand several times his legal fare. On fête days and Sundays, and
between the hours of midnight and six in the morning, the fare is
double.

If your train leaves at an early hour in the morning, you cannot get
breakfast at the hotels; coffee and rolls, or pan dulce--a slightly
sweetened cross between bread and cake--is usually served somewhere in
the station. There are no dining cars; the train instead stops at decent
intervals at stations provided with clean and adequate Chinese
restaurants. Even when the train is very late there is no need of being
hungry; at almost every station women and girls walk up and down the
platform selling fruit, pulque, and tortillas covered with strange,
smeary condiments that taste much better than they look. One of these
decorated tortillas and a glass of pulque may not exactly satisfy the
appetite, but they effectually kill it. Pulque--a thin fluid resembling
water that has been poured into a receptacle in which a little milk had
been carelessly left--tastes like a kind of degenerate buttermilk, and
in the middle of a hot journey is delicious and refreshing. It is
derived from the sap of the maguey plant and is often spoken of as “the
national drink.” This somehow strikes me as a misnomer. Pulque is
certainly peculiar to Mexico and on the highlands it is drunk in
enormous quantities. But in the tierra caliente and the tierra templada
where maguey does not grow, what pulque there is has to be brought from
a distance and is neither good nor very popular. In the lowlands fiery
derivatives of the sugar cane are much more prevalent. Although I have
had irrefutable ocular evidence to the effect that pulque, when drunk in
sufficient quantities, is extremely intoxicating, it is difficult after
only a glass or two to believe so. But I have drunk it only in the
country, where it is fresh and comparatively pure. In towns it is
invariably doctored and injurious.

If you are not too warm and too tired and too cross, a Mexican railway
journey is infinitely more amusing than trips by rail elsewhere. In the
first place smoking, except in sleeping cars, is nowhere prohibited, and
smoking would tend to promote sociability even if Mexicans on trains
were not always eager to talk at any hour of the day or night. In a
crowded car the volume of conversation is at times appalling. It is not
perhaps deeply interesting, but it is always amiable, vivacious, and
incessant, and if you show the slightest desire to participate you are
never made to feel unwelcome.

The Anglo-Saxon shibboleth of travel is, I should say, neatness and
reserve. We do not keep on adding to our carefully calculated luggage
after we have once settled ourselves in a train, and we are not inclined
to forsake our book or our magazine for a casual acquaintance unless we
have some reason to believe the exchange will be profitable. Mexicans,
on the other hand, are in an engaging fashion the most slovenly and
expansive little travelers imaginable. For laden though they be with all
manner of flimsy baggage, they impulsively buy everything that is thrust
at them--if it takes up enough room and is sufficiently useless--and
talk to everyone in sight.

The train, for instance, stops at a lonely station in a vast dun-colored
plain, planted everywhere in straight, never-ending lines of maguey. At
the foot of the bare mountains in the distance, and seen through a faint
haze of dust, is the high white inclosure around the buildings of an
hacienda with the tiled dome and towers of its private church
glittering in the sunlight. Two antique, high-hung carriages with dusty
leather curtains, each drawn by a pair of mules, are at one side of the
station, and standing near by a neat mozo, with a smart straw sombrero
(a Mexican hat, more than other hats takes on something of the nature of
its owner), and a narrowly folded red sarape reposing--Heaven knows how;
I can’t carry one that way--on his left shoulder, is holding three
saddle horses. The antique carriages--they look as if they dated from
the time of Maximilian, and probably do--have brought the hacendado, his
imposing wife, two babies, three older children, a nurse for each baby,
and two dressy, hatless young ladies, from the house to the train. One
of the horses was ridden by a mozo who is to accompany the family on its
travels (he, however, goes second class), the second brought the mozo
who is to lead back the horse of the first, while the third--a finer
animal who objects to trains and whose head has been left tightly
checked for the benefit of the passengers--carried a slender young man,
presumably the son, who has come to see the others off. Mamma is not yet
middle-aged, but her figure--her waist line--is but a reminiscence; has
passed in fact into Mexican history. She wears a heavy brown woolen
skirt (the thermometer stands at about 92°), a rebozo twisted around
her arms and across her back as if she were a lady Laocoon, and a shirt
waist of white cashmere covered with large crimson polka dots; the kind
of material that makes one feel as if a very methodical person had had
the nose-bleed. Papa has on skin-tight trousers of shepherd’s plaid, a
“boiled” shirt with a turned-over collar (clean--but they wilted on the
drive), a plain black jacket that extends only a few inches below his
belt, a flowing silk necktie of the peculiarly beautiful shade of
scarlet one usually sees in the neckties of rurales, a small but
businesslike revolver in a holster at his hip, and a shaggy, gray beaver
sombrero embroidered around the brim in gold and silver flowers,
weighing about two pounds and costing at least seventy-five or a hundred
pesos. The older children--little girls--and the two dressy, hatless
young ladies are in what might be called the Franco-Mexican style of
traveling costume; thin summer dresses of bright pink and yellow and
blue and white materials made with many little tucks and frills and
ruffles, and adorned with narrow bands of coarse white lace applied in a
rather irrelevant fashion with here and there a knot of soiled white
satin ribbon. Besides a goodly number of venerable valises they have
brought with them the usual collection of cardboard hat boxes and
tenates (a kind of flexible basket without handles, made of matting).
Some of their effects are informally wrapped in bath towels of pleasing
hues. It takes much time, a whirlwind of talk and all the remaining
space in the car, to stow away everybody and everything; then as the
train moves from the station there is a shrill chorus of good-bys and a
prolonged wiggling of fingers through the windows at the son on the
platform.

As it is only two o’clock in the afternoon, they undoubtedly were
fortified by an elaborate midday meal about an hour and a half before,
but at the next station oranges are offered for sale, so papa through
the window buys a dozen oranges and everybody, maids and all--except the
youngest baby--eats one. A few stations farther on we pass through a
kind of an oasis where flowers are grown for the market. Short sections
of the trunk of a banana tree, hollowed out, stopped at both ends and
filled with gardenias, are held up to the window. Everyone exclaims, “Oh
qué bonitas!” and as they have more things now than they can take care
of, mamma buys one of them and, after a short mental struggle, the elder
of the dressy young ladies buys another.

“How fragrant they are!” you murmur as the sweet, opaque scent of the
gardenias begins to join forces with the tobacco smoke and the
lingering smell of the eleven oranges. Papa, delighted, at once picks
out one of the largest flowers and hands it to you across the aisle.
Your thanks are profuse and there is a moment of intensely interested
silence while you smell it and put it in your button-hole. Then you ask
mamma what they are called in Spanish, and after she tells
you--repeating the name emphatically four or five times--she asks you if
they grow in your country. You reply yes, but that they are
expensive--costing in midwinter sometimes as much as a dollar gold
apiece. This announcement creates a tremendous sensation on the part of
everyone, as mamma didn’t pay a fifth of that sum for all of them. One
of the dressy young ladies says she is going to count hers to see how
much they would come to in the United States in midwinter; and now the
bark of conversation having been successfully launched, you sail
pleasantly along in it until the next station, where one of the three
little girls interrupts with the exclamation that on the platform she
sees some papayas. A papaya being a bulky, heavy fruit of irregular
shape and the size of a large squash, papa naturally leans out of the
window and acquires two--buying the second one, he explains, in case he
should be disappointed in the flavor of the first. But before the
opening of the papaya you excuse yourself and go into another car, for
without a plate and a knife and a spoon, a papaya, like a mango, can be
successfully managed only while naked in a bath tub. After it is all
over, however, you return for more talk, and for days afterwards, if
your destination happens to be the same, you and papa wriggle fingers at
each other from passing cabs, and you and mamma and the two dressy young
ladies (who still haven’t hats) bow as old friends. But about hotels----

They are, broadly speaking, of three kinds. First, the ordinary “best
hotel” and next best hotel of the place, conducted by Mexicans who have
gradually made concessions to progress until their establishments are
equipped with electric lights, electric bells (sometimes), sanitary
plumbing, wire-spring mattresses (or whatever they are called), some
comfortable chairs in either the patio or the sala, and cooks whose
dishes, although native in conception, are yet conservative in the
matter of chile and lard. Secondly, there is the occasional hotel kept
by an American family, whose advertisements emphasize the fact that here
you will enjoy the delights of “American home cooking.” And, finally,
there is what is known in Mexico as a mesón: a combination of lodging
house for man and stable for his horses and mules.

The ordinary best and second-best hotels in Mexican towns I have grown
to regard as exceedingly creditable and satisfactory places in which to
abide. They are not luxurious; tiled floors, with a strip of carpet or
matting at the bedside, calcimined walls without pictures, just
sufficient furniture, and high, austere ceilings, are not our idea of
luxury. But as long as they preserve their distinctly Mexican
characteristics they are, contrary to the conventional idea of the
country, above all, clean. I have rarely been in a Mexican hotel where
the chambermaids (who are usually men) did not all but drive me insane
with their endless mopping and dusting and scouring and polishing of my
ascetic bedroom. When, however, as sometimes happens, the proprietor of
the “best” hotel becomes desirous of upholstered chairs and carpets, it
is well, I think, to patronize the still Mexican second best. Few things
are more lovable than carpets and upholstery worn shabby by those we
care for, but nothing is more squalid and repulsive than the evidence of
unknown contacts paid for by the day or week. The hotels, as a rule, are
of two stories built around a tiled patio, full of flowers and plants,
and open to the sky. The more expensive rooms have windows looking upon
the street, and in cold or gloomy weather have the advantage of being
lighter and warmer than the others. In very hot weather, however, the
cheap rooms--dim, windowless, and opening only on the patio--are
sometimes preferable. Prices vary slightly in different places and at
different seasons, but at their highest they are never really
exorbitant, outside of the Capital. Board and lodging costs anywhere
from two and a half to five pesos a day, according to the situation of
your room, and, unlike European hotels, this includes everything. There
are none of the extra charges for light, attendance, “covers,” and so
on, that in Europe so annoy the American traveler. At one hotel at
Cuernavaca, during the tourist season, rooms and board are as high as
six pesos a day, but this lasts only a short time, and is, after all,
not so ruinous as it sounds when you think of it as three American
dollars rather than six Mexican pesos. For a peso or so less you can, if
you wish, take a room at a hotel without board; but unless you happen to
have friends in town who keep house, and with whom you constantly lunch
and dine, there is no advantage in doing so, as the best restaurant is
invariably that of the best hotel. When I said that there were no
restaurants in Mexico, I merely meant that while the various native
fondas and cafés where meals are served are sometimes clean and
adequate, they do not offer any of those attractions that in the cities
of Europe, and a very few cities of the United States, tempt one from
one’s ordinary existence. There is in Mexico no “restaurant life” (for
want of a better term), no lavishly appointed interiors where you may go
to watch well-dressed people spending a great deal of money, listening
to music, and eating things they are unaccustomed to at home.

The meals in Mexican hotels are: Breakfast, from about seven to half
past nine, consisting of coffee, chocolate, or tea, and pan dulce or
rolls. Eggs and meat are extra. To a few teaspoonfuls of excessively
strong coffee is added a cupful of boiling milk. Mexican coffee is
excellent in itself, but the native habit of overroasting it makes its
flavor harsh. As milk is almost always boiled in Mexico, cream is
unknown. Chocolate is good everywhere, although it is difficult at first
to reconcile yourself to the custom, in some places, of flavoring it
with cinnamon. Persons who like tea for breakfast, or at any time,
should travel with their own.

At dinner--from noon to about half past two--you are given soup,
sometimes fish, eggs always (cooked in any way you please), meat
(beefsteak or roast beef), chicken (or another kind of meat), with salad
if you ask for it, frijoles (a paste of black beans), a dessert
(preserves of some sort, rarely pastry), fruit, and coffee. All of which
sounds rather better than it ever is. The dinner is served in courses,
and in some hotels you are expected to use the same knife and fork
throughout. You never have any desire to eat or, after the first day or
so, to try everything. The soups are well flavored and nourishing, the
eggs are always fresh, the frijoles preserve a certain standard
throughout the country, which you appreciate if you like frijoles,
either the chicken or one of the meats is as a rule possible--and after
all, soup, eggs, frijoles, another vegetable, a meat, lettuce, and fruit
ought to be enough. The hard rolls you get everywhere are of good
quality and well baked. Butter, fortunately, is almost nonexistent, as
it is very bad. The only edible butter in Mexico is made in Kansas, and
can be bought in convenient one-pound packages at the leading grocery
stores in the City of Mexico, and also in some of the smaller towns.
There is no objection whatever to your taking your own tea and butter,
or anything else that contributes to your comfort, into the dining room
of Mexican hotels. Except during the hours at which meals are served,
you cannot get anything to eat. Persons who are accustomed to some form
of refreshment before going to bed should keep it in their rooms.

Supper--from half past six until about nine o’clock--is, except for the
omission of eggs, very much like dinner, although somewhat less
elaborate in small places. (I employ the terms dinner and supper rather
than luncheon and dinner, as they are the literal translations of the
Spanish words comida and cena.)

“Don’t monkey with Mexican microbes! A stitch in time may save six weeks
in the hospital! Let the other fellow run the risk of typhoid, if he
wishes to!”--so runs, in part, the advertisement of a certain bottling
company in Mexico. The fact that the advice is primarily intended to
increase the sales of the firm in question does not render it the less
sound. Mexicans are peculiarly ignorant of the principles of sanitation,
and careless of them even when informed. Typhus, typhoid, and smallpox
are prevalent in the City of Mexico all the year round, although, either
through indifference or a reluctance to admit it, cases are not
reported in the newspapers until the frequency of funerals begins to
cast a universal gloom. Impure water may or may not have any bearing
upon typhus and smallpox; upon typhoid, however, it has. In many of the
smaller towns the water, brought as it is in pipes from a distance, is
pure and healthful, but you cannot be sure of just what happens to it
after it has arrived. It is far more prudent, unless you are keeping
house and can boil water, to drink a pure, bottled mineral water. The
most convenient--for the simple reason that it can be bought at almost
any bar from end to end of the country--is the Tehuacan water (Agua
Tehuacan) bottled at Tehuacan by several companies; the San Lorenzo, the
Cruz Roja, and El Riego, the chemical analysis of all the waters being
about the same. It is light, refreshing, absolutely pure, and bottled by
machinery with every precaution. The water from the Cruz Roja spring, in
fact, is not even exposed to the air from the time it enters a pipe
underground to when it is forced, a moment later, into a bottle and
sealed.

Few beds in Mexico have arrived at the sybaritic luxury of feather
pillows. The national pillow is a narrow, long, unsympathetic
contrivance tightly stuffed with hair, or something more unyielding.
You should travel with your own pillow, and also with a blanket or a
steamer rug. Also, few hotels have facilities for bathing. To take a
bath, one goes out to a bathing establishment (there are always
several), where hot and cold water, clean towels, and soap are plentiful
and cheap. As the Anglo-Saxon cold bath has little relation to
cleanliness, and is merely either an affectation on the part of persons
who don’t enjoy it or a pleasant shock to the system on the part of
those who do, it may be dispensed with or taken in a basin.

At night, hotels lock their massive front doors at ten or half past, but
a porter sleeping on the floor just inside admits you at any hour. All
over the world, servants like to be tipped, and the custom of tipping
obtains in Mexico as elsewhere, but as yet it has remained within decent
bounds. A mozo in a Mexican hotel is pleased, and sometimes surprised,
by what his European or American equivalent would probably scorn.

To make a point of such trivial matters as matches, candles, keys, and
door knobs will probably seem as if I were going out of my way, but in
Mexico I have been the amused witness of so much real anguish occasioned
by the presence or absence of these prosaic implements that in regard
to them I feel a certain responsibility. Almost everywhere there are
incandescent lights in Mexican hotels, but in some places the power is
turned off at midnight, or half an hour later, and, as happens in all
countries, the lights, at inopportune moments now and then, go out. When
they do go out, you grope helplessly in darkness, for it is not
customary to foresee such emergencies and supply the bedrooms with
matches and candles. A candle and a box of matches in your traveling bag
may never be needed, but when they are needed they are needed instantly,
and you will be glad you have them. Door knobs in Mexico, for absolutely
no reason whatever, are placed so near the frame of the door that it is
almost impossible to grasp them without pinching your fingers, and in
order to lock or unlock a door the key, as a rule, must be inserted
upside down, and then turned the wrong way.

The following notice (it hung, printed and framed, in the sala of a
Mexican hotel) will, I feel sure, prove of interest to the student of
language:

“It is not permitted for any whatsoever motive to use this saloon to
eat, or for games of ball or others that could prejudice the
tranquillity of the passengers, or furthermore to remove the furnitures
from their respective sites. At eleven of the clock the Administrador
will usurp the right to order the extinguishment of the lamp without
permitting of observations.”

The second kind of hotel (the hotel kept by an American) possesses the
various defects of a Mexican establishment, with several others all its
own. It is rarely as clean as a Mexican hotel, and the “home cooking” so
insisted upon in the advertisements merely means that the cooking is of
the kind the proprietress was accustomed to before her emigration--which
does not necessarily recommend it. “American cooking” or “home cooking”
is no better than any other kind of cooking when it is bad. You don’t
eat through sentiment or patriotism, but through necessity. Among this
class of hotel I feel it is only honest to except one at Cuernavaca,
which has charming rooms, a most exquisite patio, and an “American
table” about as good as that of the average New England summer boarding
house.

Few Americans who are traveling for pleasure in Mexico will be likely to
patronize what is known as a mesón. It would not have occurred to me to
do so had I not slept in them in small towns off the line of the
railway, where there is no place else to stay. When traveling on a horse
or a mule, a night’s lodging for the steed is, of course, even more
essential than for the rider, and the mesón, as I have said, is a
combination of inn and stable. Primitive and comfortless as they often
are, they have for me a fascination--the fascination of something read
and thought of in childhood that in later life suddenly and unexpectedly
comes true. A Mexican mesón, with its bare little bedrooms on one side
of the great courtyard and its stalls for the animals on the other; with
its clatter of arriving and departing mule trains, its neighing and
braying and shoeing and currying, its litter of equipment and
freight--saddles, bridles, preposterous spurs, pack saddles, saddle
bags, saddle blankets, conical sugar loaves and casks of aguardiente
from some sugar hacienda, boxes, bales, sacks of coffee--its stiff and
weary travelers, its swearing, swaggering arrieros--it is the Spain of
the story-books, the Spain of Don Quixote. You fall asleep at an early
hour to the rhythmic crunching of mules’ teeth on cane leaves and corn,
and you are awakened in the cold dark by the voice of your mozo slowly
and solemnly proclaiming: “Señor, es de dia.” (It is day.)

I perhaps should not have mentioned the mesón if its attraction for me
had not led me to try it in cities where there was no necessity to. Even
in the cities and large towns it is still a primitive institution, but
it is always inexpensive, and the rooms in those of the better class are
clean. I have had a well-lighted room of ample size, with a comfortable
bed, a washstand, a table, two chairs, a row of hooks to hang clothes
on, and an attentive mozo usually within call, for seventy-five centavos
(thirty-seven and a half cents) a day. There are no restaurants attached
to these places, and absolutely no one in them speaks English.

In fact, although Mexicans are becoming more and more interested in
English, and are everywhere studying the language, it is as yet not very
coherently spoken by the natives with whom a traveler is likely to come
in contact. A few sentences by a clerk in a shop, half a dozen
disconnected words by a waiter in a hotel, are about the extent of what
you hear among the working classes. And yet, with no knowledge of
Spanish, you can, without mishap or difficulty, travel by rail almost
anywhere in Mexico. The country is accustomed to travelers who do not
speak its language, and more often than not knows instinctively and from
habit what they want next. Of course, to be able to ask questions and
understand the answers is both a convenience and a pleasure; but it is
surprising how far a very few words of Spanish on the one hand and
English on the other will carry you in comparative peace of mind. When
the worst comes to the worst, as by an unforeseen combination of
circumstances it sometimes does, and you are on the point of losing your
reason or, what is much worse, your temper, the inevitable kind lady or
kind gentleman, who is to be found in every country and who knows
everything, always appears at the proper moment, asks if he can be of
any assistance, and sends you on your way rejoicing. In any event, in
provincial Mexico nothing unpleasant is likely to happen to you.

Just what is the attitude toward foreigners of the people in general it
is difficult--impossible, even--to find out. A year or so ago, several
weeks before the 16th of September (the anniversary of Hidalgo’s
Declaration of Independence), it was widely announced in the newspapers
of the United States that far-reaching plans had been laid by the lower
classes in Mexico to observe the national festival by killing all
foreigners. “Mexico for Mexicans” was to be the motto of the future.
This quaint conceit--evolved, without doubt, by the pestiferous
revolutionary junta in Saint Louis--was not much heard of by foreigners
in Mexico; but then, in Mexico very little is heard of. A few timid
persons remained at home during the day, but the day passed off without
bloodshed, and the rumor was decided to have been only a rumor. That
there was, however, more to it than was generally supposed (although how
much more it would be impossible to find out) was evident from the fact
that the Government quietly and inconspicuously took notice of it. In
one place, where I have some American friends living on the edge of
town--almost in the country--two rurales, heavily armed as usual,
sauntered out to their houses at an early hour of the morning, and
remained there all day and until late that night. As they spent the time
in chatting and smoking with acquaintances who happened to pass by, it
was not obvious that they were there for any especial purpose. But they
were there, although they had never been there before and have never
been there since. In another town a group of noisy hoodlums went at
night to the house of one of the consuls (not the Spanish consul, by the
way, which would have been more or less natural) with the intention of
“doing something,” just what, they themselves apparently did not know.
Here, also, were two rurales, and at sight of them the intentions of the
little mob prudently underwent a collapse. The spokesman soon summoned
sufficient courage to request that they please be allowed to break a few
windows if they promised to go no farther, but the rurales replied that
the first man who even stooped to pick up a stone would be shot.
Whereupon the crowd retired. (It is irrelevant, but also amusing, to
record that on the retreat the members of the gang got into a quarrel
among themselves, during which two of them were stabbed and killed.)
Beyond an admirable preparedness on the part of the Government, this
proves little, as the consul in question was personally most unpopular
with the people of the town. But it of course proves something--or the
Government wouldn’t have been so prepared--although I find it difficult
to see in it a proof of hostility toward foreigners on the part of the
great mass of the Mexican people. If they do feel unkindly toward us,
they are adepts in prolonged and continuous deception, for they are
universally responsive to friendly overtures.

On the whole, I should not advise an invalid to go to Mexico, for I have
met invalids there who, although they perhaps might not have been happy
anywhere, struck me as being for many unavoidable reasons more unhappy
in Mexico than they would have been had they sought a warm climate
nearer home. There are a few enchanting places in Mexico where the
weather is warm and reasonably equable all winter, but very few. And
when Mexico is cold, it is dreary even for the robust. Its changes of
temperature are sudden and penetrating, and, except in one or two hotels
in the capital (an impossible place for invalids of any kind),
artificial heat is practically unknown. The problem of simple,
nourishing food is an insoluble problem unless you keep house; only by
exercising self-restraint as regards Mexican cooking can well persons
remain well. There are no hotels that in the slightest degree take into
consideration the needs, the whims, the capricious hours, the endless
exigencies of the sick, and anyone whose well-being is dependent upon
warm rooms, good milk, quiet (the country is incessantly noisy with the
noise of animals and bells and human beings), or upon all or any of the
little, expensive niceties of modern civilization, had better
indefinitely postpone his visit.




XII


A few days ago a friend of mine in writing to me from home said in his
letter: “I notice that now and then you refer casually to ‘an American
man’ or ‘an English woman who lives here,’ and although I know there
must be Americans and English living in Mexico as well as everywhere
else, it always gives me a feeling of incredulity to hear that there
are. I suppose I ought merely to consider the fact that you are there
and then multiply you by a hundred or a thousand--or ten thousand
perhaps; I have no idea, of course, how many. But to tell the truth I
never altogether believe that _you_ go to Mexico when you say you do.
You go somewhere, but is it really Mexico? Why _should_ anyone go to
Mexico? It seems such a perverse--such a positively morbid thing to do.
And then, the address--that impossible address you leave behind you!
Honestly, are there any Americans and English down there (or is it ‘up’
or ‘across’ or ‘over’--I literally have forgotten just where it is), and
if so, why are they there? What are they like? How do they amuse
themselves?”

When I read his letter I recalled an evening several years ago at my
brother’s coffee place--sixty miles from anywhere in particular. As it
was in winter, or the “dry season,” it had been raining (I don’t
exaggerate), with but one or two brief intermissions, for twenty-four
days. In that part of the republic the chief difference between the dry
season and the rainy lies in the fact that during the rainy season it
rains with much regularity for a few hours every afternoon and during
the dry season it rains with even greater regularity all the time. As
the river was swollen and unfordable we had not been able for days to
send to the village--an hour’s ride away--for provisions. Meat, of
course, we did not have. In a tropical and iceless country, unless one
can have fresh meat every day, one does not have it at all. We had run
out of potatoes, we had run out of bread (baker’s bread in Mexico is
good everywhere)--we had run out of flour. There were twenty-five or
thirty chickens roosting on a convenient tree, but in our foolish,
improvident way we had allowed ourselves to become fond of the chickens
and I have an incorrigible prejudice against eating anything that has
engaged my affections when in life. So we dined on a tin of sardines,
some chile verde and a pile of tortillas, which are not bad when patted
thin and toasted to a crisp. Probably because there were forty thousand
pounds of excellent coffee piled up in sacks on the piazza, we washed
down this banquet with draughts of Sir Thomas Lipton’s mediocre tea. The
evening was cold--as bitterly cold as it can be only in a thoroughly
tropical country when the temperature drops to forty-three and a
screaming wind is forcing the rain through spaces between the tiles
overhead. We had also run out of petroleum, and the flames of the
candles on the dinner table were more often than not blue and
horizontal. But somehow we dined with great gayety and talked all the
time. I remember how my brother summoned Concha the cook, and
courteously attracted her attention to the fact that she had evidently
dropped the teapot on the untiled kitchen floor--that the spout was
clogged with mud and that it did not “wish to pour,” and how he again
summoned her for the purpose of declaring that the three dead wasps he
had just fished out of the chile no doubt accounted perfectly for its
unusually delicious flavor. We had scarcely anything to eat, but
socially the dinner was a great success. Immediately afterwards we both
went to bed--each with a reading candle, a book and a hot-water bag.
After half an hour’s silence my brother irrelevantly exclaimed:

“What very agreeable people one runs across in queer, out-of-the-way
places!”

“Who on earth are you thinking of now?” I inquired.

“Why, I was thinking of _us_!” he placidly replied, and went on with his
reading.

Perhaps we had been agreeable. At any rate we were in a queer
out-of-the-way place, that is if any place is queer and out of the way,
which I am beginning rather to doubt. Since then I have often remembered
that evening--how, just before it grew dark, the tattered banana trees
writhed like gigantic seaweed in the wind, and the cold rain hissed from
the spouts on the roof in graceful, crystal tubes. Here and there the
light of a brazero in a laborer’s bamboo hut flared for an instant
through the coffee trees. On the piazza, the tired Indians, shivering in
their flimsy, cotton garments, had covered themselves with matting and
empty coffee sacks and were trying to sleep. In the kitchen doorway a
very old, white-bearded man was improvising poetry--sometimes
sentimental, sometimes heroic, sometimes obscene--to a huddled and
enthralled audience all big hats, crimson blankets, and beautiful eyes.
Apart from this group, Saturnino was causing a jarana to throb in a most
syncopated, minor, and emotional fashion. A jarana is a primitive guitar
whose sounding board consists usually of an armadillo’s shell. (Poor
Saturnino! He is now in indefinite solitary confinement for having,
apropos of nothing except a slip of a girl, disemboweled one of his
neighbors with a machete. And he was such a gentle, thoughtful creature!
I don’t quite understand it.) During dinner we discussed, among other
things, Tolstoi’s “War and Peace” which we had just finished, and while
agreeing that it was the greatest novel we had ever read or ever
expected to read (an opinion I still possess), we did not agree about
Tolstoi’s characteristically cocksure remarks on the subject of
predestination and freedom of the will. As neither of us had studied
philosophy we were unable to command the special terminology--the
specific jargon that always makes a philosophic discussion seem so
profound, and our colloquial efforts to express ourselves were at times
piquant. In the midst of it a tarantula slithered across the tablecloth
and I squashed him with a candlestick as he was about to disappear over
the table’s edge. Of course we disputed as to whether or not, in the
original conception of the universe, God had sketched the career of the
tarantula in its relation to that of the candlestick and mine, and--yes,
on looking back, I feel sure we were both very agreeable.

But what I imagine I am trying to get at is that I have so often
wonderingly contrasted the general scene with our being there at all,
and then have remembered the simple, prosaic circumstances that had
placed us in the midst of it. In a way, it is a pity one _can_ remember
such things; the act renders it so impossible to pose to oneself as
picturesque. And, furthermore, it tends to shake one’s belief in the
picturesqueness of one’s American and English acquaintances. (Perhaps I
mean “romance” rather than picturesqueness, for compared to the fatuity
of importing picturesqueness into Mexico, the carrying of coals to
Newcastle would be a stroke of commercial genius.) At first there seems
to be something romantic about all of one’s compatriots who live in
small Mexican towns, or on far-away ranches, plantations, fincas,
haciendas--or whatever their property happens to be called. To the newly
arrived there is a sort of thrill merely in the fashion in which they
take their florid, pictorial environment for granted. I shall not forget
my first New Year’s Day in Mexico.

Until the day before, I had never been in the country, and there was
something ecstatic in the vividness of not only the day as a whole, but
of every detail of color, form, temperature, personality, and
conversation. It seemed as if everything in turn leaped out and seized
hold of me, and now, long afterwards, I recall it as one of those
marvelous days without either half tones or perspective, on which every
separate fact is brilliant, and all are of equal importance. Only once
since then has Mexico had just the same memorable effect upon me, and
that was one night in the little plaza of Jalapa when, as the front
doors of the cathedral swung open and the crowd within swarmed down the
steps in the moonlight, the band abruptly crashed into the
bullfightingest part of “Carmen.”

In the tepid, springlike afternoon I pushed back a five-barred gate, and
through a pasture, where horses stopped grazing to snuff at me, over a
wall of piled stones covered with heliotrope, I strolled up between
banana trees to a yellow, stucco-covered house on the hillside. The way
to the piazza was through a tunnel of pale-yellow roses with pink
centers and on the piazza was an American lady, an American gentleman, a
great many languorous-looking chairs, and two gallons of eggnog in a
bowl of Indian pottery. All of the small Anglo-Saxon colony and a few
others had been asked to drop in during the afternoon, but I was the
first to arrive, and I remember that the necessary interchange of
commonplace civilities with my hosts, the talk of mutual acquaintances
on the boat from New York and the answering of questions about weather
and politics in the United States, seemed unspeakably shallow to one
suddenly confronted by so exquisite and sublime a view. For the view
from the piazza, I hasten to add by way of justifying two words so
opposite in suggestion, was, I afterwards learned, characteristic of the
mountainous, tropical parts of Mexico, and, like most of the views
there, combined both the grandeur, the awfulness of space and height--of
eternal, untrodden snows piercing the thin blue, with the soft velvet
beauty of tropical verdure--the unimaginable delicacy and variety of
color that glows and palpitates in vast areas of tropical foliage seen
at different distances through haze and sunlight. Mountains usually have
an elemental, geologic sex of some sort, and the sex of slumbering,
jungle-covered, tropical mountains is female. There is a symmetry, a
chaste volcanic elegance about them that render them the consorts and
daughters of man-mountains like, say, the Alps, the Rockies, the
mountains of the Caucasus. At their cruelest they are rarely somber;
their precipitous sides and overhanging crags are sheathed in vegetation
of a depth that refines and softens, and the quivering lights and
shadows that at times are apparently all their substance, are the lights
and shadows of those excessively etherealized, vignetted engravings on
the title pages of old gift books.

At the sloping pasture’s lower end the compact, tile-roofed,
white-walled town glared in the January sunlight--a town in a garden,
or, when one for a moment lost sight of the outlying orange groves,
fields of green-gold sugar cane, patches of shimmering corn and clumps
of banana trees--an all-pervasive garden in a town. For compact as the
Oriental-looking little place was, green and purple, yellow and red
sprang from its interstices everywhere as though they had welled up from
the rich plantations below and overflowed. One gazed down upon the trees
of tiny plazas, the dense dark foliage of walled gardens, into shady,
flower-filled patios and sunny, luxuriant, neglected churchyards, and
beyond, the mysterious valley melted away in vast and ever vaster
distances--the illimitable valley of a dream--a vision--an
allegory--slowly rising at last, in tier upon tier of faintly opalescent
volcanoes, the texture of gauze. Up and up and up they lifted and swam
and soared, until, as with a swift concerted escape into the blue and
icy air of heaven, they culminated in the smooth, inaccessible,
swan-like snow upon the peak of Orizaba. Mexico’s four, well-defined
climates, from the blazing summer of the valley, to glittering winter
only some thousands of feet above, were here, I realized, all the year
round, visibly in full blast.

Then other guests began to push back the heavy gate and stroll up the
long slope, and I found myself meeting them and hearing them all talk,
with a thrill as keen--if of a different quality--as that with which I
had gaped at the view. They seemed to me then quite as unreal. There was
about them an impenetrable aura of fiction; they were the plain tales
that Kipling would have lashed to the mast had his hills been
Mexican--had Simla been Barranca.

There was the British consul--a quaint, kindly, charming little man--who
while in the act of delightedly making one pun could scarcely conceal
the eagerness and anxiety with which his mind grappled with the problem
of how to introduce the next. The French consul, too, was of the
gathering, and I don’t know why, but life, somehow, would not have
seemed what it was that day if the French consul had not been
unmistakably a German. He had brought with him a bouquet of pretty
daughters whose English accent and complexions (their mother was
English) and French deportment made of them rather fascinating racial
enigmas. Mrs. Belding liked the girls but confided to me that in general
she considered the foreign manner all “French jeune filledlesticks.”
Mrs. Hammerton, a tall, distinguished-looking, dark-haired English woman
of thirty, was perishing--so Mrs. Belding almost at once informed
me--for a cigar. She had an aged mother, had had a romance (of which no
one spoke, declared Mrs. Belding as she spoke of it), and adored Mexican
cigars. Almost immediately upon my meeting her she let me know in the
prettiest, most cultivated of voices that Mrs. Belding was in the habit
of getting tight.

There were two reasons for Mrs. Hammerton’s postponing just then the
longed-for cigar. One was the Rev. Luke M. Hacket, and the other was his
wife. Mr. and Mrs. Hacket, with an ever-growing band of little Hackets,
had lived for years at Barranca at the expense of many worthy and
unintelligent persons at home. They were there, all unconscious of their
insolence, for the purpose of trying to seduce Roman Catholics away
from their belief and supplying them with another; of substituting a
somewhat colorless and unmagnetic expression of the Christian idea for
one that satisfies not only some of the Mexican’s alert senses, but his
imagination as well. That these efforts at conversion met with scarcely
any success except during a few weeks before Christmas (after which
there was always an abrupt stampede to Rome), did not much concern them
as long as Mrs. Hacket’s lectures in native costume in the basements of
churches at home hypnotized the faithful into contributing to an
institution for which the term “futile” is far too kind. As every child
of the Rev. and Mrs. Luke Hacket received from the board a salary of its
own, the worthy couple had not been idle, and in addition to this simple
method of swelling their revenue, the good man did a tidy little
business in vanilla--buying that fragrant bean at much less than its
market value from the poor and ignorant Indians to whom he distributed
tracts they could not read. Whenever another little Hacket arrived, he
told the board, but the incredibly gullible body knew nothing of his
interest in the vanilla market. As I was a stranger--he took me in. That
is to say, he wished me a happy new year and “touched” me for five
dollars--to go toward the purchase of a new organ for his Sunday school.
I and my money were soon parted. Only afterwards did my hostess have a
chance to tell me that among the colony the new organ was an old
joke--that for many years tourists and visitors had contributed to its
sweeter and, as yet, unheard melodies.

What was it? What is it? No one believed in his creed nor had the
slightest interest in it. What lingering, reminiscent, perhaps in some
instances atavistic misgiving and yearning to reverence, prompted these
ill-assorted exiles to treat with a certain deference a person whom they
really laughed at? There was an unsuspected pathos in it--the pathos of
a world that involuntarily clutches at the straw it knows to be but yet
a straw--the pathos of the exile who for the moment suffers even the
distasteful if it in some way bridges the gulf between him and home. It
was not politeness that restrained Mrs. Hammerton from smoking until the
Hackets at last departed and that had caused our hostess, when she saw
them coming, to discuss seriously with her husband whether or no she
should temporarily banish the eggnog. What was it?

Mrs. Blythe, a slight, pretty woman prettily dressed had come in from
her husband’s ranch the week before for the holidays. In matter-of-fact
tones she was giving her news to Mrs. Garvin, whose son was in charge of
the town’s electric light plant.

“As a rule one doesn’t particularly mind calentura” (chills and fever),
Mrs. Blythe was saying, “although it always leaves me rather weak. But
what was so annoying this time, was the fact that Jack and I both had it
at once and there wasn’t anybody to take care of us. Delfina, the cook,
chose that moment, of all moments, to get bitten in the calf of her leg
by a snake. Horrid woman, Delfina--I’m sure she did it on purpose. Of
course she was much worse than useless, for I had to take care of
_her_--dose her with ammonia and cut live chickens in two and bind them
on the place. You know--the hundred and fifty things one _always_ does
when they get bitten by snakes. If Joaquin the mayordomo had been
around, I shouldn’t have cared. He knows how to cook in a sort of way,
and then, besides, I shouldn’t have been so worried about the coffee
picking. But poor Joaquin was in jail for stabbing his wife--yes, she
died--and the jefe wouldn’t let him out although I sent in a note saying
how much we needed him for the next few weeks. It was deliberately
disobliging of the jefe because we’ve had him to dinner several times
and afterwards Jack always played cards with him and let him cheat. My
temperature didn’t go above a hundred and two and a half, but Jack’s was
a hundred and five off and on for three or four days, and when you pass
the hundred mark, two and a half degrees make a great deal of
difference. He was delirious a lot of the time and of course I couldn’t
let him fuss about the kitchen stove. The worst part was having to crawl
out of bed and drag over to the tanks every afternoon to measure the
coffee when the pickers came in. With Joaquin gone, there was nobody
left who could read the lists and record the amounts. Then just as the
quinine gave out, the river rose and no one could go to the village for
more. Coming at that time of year, it was all really very annoying,” she
declared lightly and passed on to something else.

“Yes, that was how I caught this bad cold,” another woman--whose husband
manufactured coffee sacks--was explaining to some one. “There was the
worst kind of a norther that night; I would have been soaked to the skin
even if I hadn’t slipped on a stone in the dark and fallen into the
brook, and when I finally reached their hut I forgot the condition I was
in. The poor little thing--she was only four--was absolutely rigid and
having convulsion after convulsion. Her screams were frightful--it was
impossible to control her--to get her to tell what the matter was, and
nobody knew what had happened. She had simply given a shriek of terror
and gone into convulsions. There was nothing to do--but
nothing--_nothing_. At the end of an hour and a half she gave a final
shriek and died, and when her poor little clenched fists relaxed, we
found in one of them a dead scorpion. By that time I had begun to be
very chilly and of course it ended in a bad cold. Two lumps please and
no milk.”

A servant in a starched skirt of watermelon pink and a starched white
upper garment like a dressing sack glided out to help with the tea and
cakes. A blue rebozo was draped about her neck and shoulders, her black
hair hung to within a foot and a half of the floor in two fat braids,
and in it, behind her right ear, was a pink camelia the color of her
skirt. Her bare feet were thrust into slippers without heels or backs
and as she slipped about from chair to chair they made a slight dragging
sound on the tiles. Everyone said good afternoon to her as she handed
the teacups, at which she smiled and replied in a respectful fashion
that was, however, perfectly self-possessed.

“Did you hear about those people named Jackson who were here for a few
days last month?” Mrs. Belding asked of the party in general. “You know
they ended up at Cuernavaca and took a furnished house there meaning to
stay all winter. Well, they stayed five days and then left--furious at
Mexico and everyone in it.” And she went on with considerable art and
humor to sketch the brief career of the Jacksons. While they were at the
hotel, before they took possession of their house, she told us, Mrs.
Jackson had engaged servants--a mozo, two maids and a cook. The cook she
stole from the Dressers. It wasn’t at all nice of her to steal the cook
as Mrs. Dresser had gone through a lot of bother for her about the
renting of the house and had helped her to get the other servants. But
Mrs. Jackson offered the creature two dollars more a month, and although
she had lived at the Dressers for six years, she deserted them with a
low, glad cry. Poor Mrs. Dresser rushed over to the Moons and sobbed
when she told about it.

“Don’t you worry, dear,” said Mrs. Moon. “Leave that Jackson viper to
me; I’ll fix her. They move in this afternoon--I’m going up there to
tea--and I promise you that you’ll have your wall-eyed old dish-smasher
hovering over the brasero in your kitchen by noon to-morrow.”

Apparently Mrs. Moon did go to the Jacksons for tea and made herself
most agreeable. “You may not believe it, but she really can once in a
while,” Mrs. Belding interjected. And as Mrs. Jackson had been
conducting a Mexican establishment for about two hours, Mrs. Moon gave
her all kinds of advice on the way to get along with the servants,
ending with: “Of course you must _never_ let the maids go out after dark
even with their mothers, and it’s _fatal_ to give them breakfast. We
simply don’t do it in Mexico--not so much as a drop of coffee until
noon. Breakfast always makes Mexicans insolent.” Then Mrs. Moon, feeling
that she was perhaps overdoing it, left while she saw that Mrs. Jackson
was drinking it in in great, death-dealing gulps.

It was bad enough that night, Mrs. Belding ran on, when the cook and one
of the maids tried to go to the serenata in the plaza. On the strength
of the extra two dollars the cook had bought a new rebozo and wanted to
wear it, and as there was no reason on earth why they shouldn’t go to
the serenata, they were mystified and angry at Mrs. Jackson’s serenely
declaring “No, no,” and locking them in. But the great seal of the
Jacksons’ fate was definitely affixed the next morning when Mrs.
Jackson, up bright and early, with kind firmness, refused to let them
make their coffee. Half an hour later Mrs. Moon experienced the bliss of
seeing the mozo, the cook and the two maids wandering past her
house--all weeping bitterly. Long before midday the cook was back at the
Dressers; and from that moment Mrs. Jackson was blacklisted.

For five days she struggled to engage new servants, but she was believed
to be a woman with a “bad heart.” No one would go to her. She
surrendered and left.

I did not altogether believe this tale of Mrs. Belding’s, nor did I
believe the man who casually told us that a few weeks before, the
authorities had, just in time, interrupted a human sacrifice in an
Indian village some twenty or thirty miles up from the coast. After
nearly four hundred years of Christianity the Indians had, it seemed,
dug up a large stone idol and attempted to revert. Then, too, the remark
of a young girl who had been visiting in Vera Cruz struck me as rather
incredible. “I was there for a month,” she said. “Yes, there was some
yellow fever and a great deal of smallpox--but when you’re having a good
time, who minds smallpox?” It was all so new to me in matter and
manner, so sprinkled with easy references to objects, scenes, and
conditions I had met with only in highfalutin stories lacking the ring
of truth, so ornate with “meandering” (thank you, Robert Browning),
Spanish words whose meaning I did not know. There was also among the men
much coffee talk--a whole new world to one who has always taken for
granted that coffee originates, roasted, ground and done up in
five-pound tins on a grocer’s shelves. But it was all true even to the
interrupted human sacrifice and the fact that some of the shrubs among
the roses and heliotrope near the piazza were coffee trees. Had I never
seen the little colony again I should always have remembered it as a
picturesque, romantic and delightful thing. And how--I told myself as I
sat there listening and looking--they must, away off here, depend upon
one another for society, both in a formal and in an intimate sense! How
they must come together and somewhat wistfully try to forget Mexico in
talking of home in their own language! What it is, after all, to
understand and be understood!--and all that sort of thing. If my first
afternoon with foreigners in Mexico had been my last, I should have
carried away with me a brave, bright colored little picture of much
charm and some pathos. However, since then I have spent with my
compatriots in this interesting land days innumerable.

I fear I am, for the delightful purposes of art, unfortunately
unselective. First impressions have their value; they have, indeed, very
great value, and of a kind quite their own. As my first impression of
Americans in Mexico was the kind I have just been trying to give, and as
it was to me wholly interesting and more agreeable than not, I ought,
perhaps, to let it stand; but somehow I can’t. My inartistic impulse to
keep on and tell all the little I know, instead of stopping at the right
place, is too strong.

There are said to be about thirty thousand American residents in the
Mexican Republic, and the men pursue vocations ranging from that of
tramp to that of president of great and successful business ventures.
There are American doctors and dentists, brakemen, locomotive engineers,
Pullman-car conductors, civil engineers, mining engineers, “promoters,”
grocers, hotel keepers, dealers in curios; there are American
barkeepers, lawyers, stenographers, photographers, artists, clerks,
electricians, and owners of ranches of one kind or another who grow
cattle or coffee or vanilla or sugar or rubber. Many Americans are
managers of some sort--they manage mines or plantations or railways, or
the local interests of some manufacturing or business concern in the
United States. One meets Americans--both men and women--on the streets,
in hotels, in shops, strolling or sitting in the plaza--almost
everywhere in the course of the day’s work, and in the course of the
day’s play, one may drop in at the house of some acquaintance or friend
and have a cup of tea, with the usual accompaniments, at four or half
past. I am speaking now not of the City of Mexico, whose American colony
as a colony I know solely through the “Society” notes of the _Mexican
Herald_. From that authentic source he who runs may read (or he who
reads may run) that on almost any afternoon at the large entertainment
given by Mrs. Brooks for her popular friend, Mrs. Crooks, punch was
served at a refreshment table quaintly decorated with smilax by the
ever-charming Mrs. Snooks. That there are agreeable Americans living in
the city I am sure, because I have met some of them elsewhere. But of
American society in general there I am only competent to suspect that,
like society in most places, it is considerably less important and
entrancing in reality than it is in print.

In the smaller places, even when there are residents of the United
States in numbers sufficiently great to be regarded as a “colony,” there
is absolutely nothing that by any stretch of imagination or spread of
printer’s ink could be called “American society.” The New Year’s Day I
have mentioned seems to me now a kind of freak of nature; I am at a loss
to account for it. For since then my knowledge of Americans in the small
towns has become considerable, and they are not in the least as I
supposed they were. They do not depend upon one another; they do not
come together to talk wistfully of home in the mother tongue; they do
_not_ understand one another, and by one another they are _not_
understood! There is at best about most of their exceedingly few
relations an atmosphere of petty and ungenerous gossip, and at worst a
fog--a positive sand storm of enmity and hatred through which it takes a
really ludicrous amount of delicate navigation successfully to steer
oneself. As a body they simply do not meet. There are, instead, groups
of two, of three, of four, who have tea together (other forms of
entertainment are rarely attempted) chiefly for the purpose of
envitrioling the others. There are among them agreeable groups and truly
charming individuals, but when they allow themselves to assimilate at
all, it is usually in a most reluctant, acid, and malnutritious form (a
singularly repulsive figure of speech, come to think of it) that does no
one any good. It is not unamusing just at first to have a lady inform
you with tremulous lips and in a tense, white voice that if you call on
Mrs. X., you must not expect to call any longer on _her_; and I confess
I have enjoyed learning in great detail just why this one is no longer
speaking to that, and the train of events that led up to Mr. A.’s
finally slapping the face of Mr. B. Yet there are well-defined limits to
intellectual treats of this nature, and one quickly longs for
entertainment at once less dramatic and more varied.

Among the Americans this is difficult to get, although, as I pause and
recall with gratitude and affection some of my friends in Jalapa, for
instance, I am tempted to retract this statement. The trouble lies, I
feel sure, in the fact that, having come from widely dissimilar parts of
the United States, and having had while there affiliations, in many
instances, whose slight difference is still great enough to make a great
difference, they have but little in common. And Mexican towns are
utterly lacking in those diverse interests that at home supply the
women of even very small communities with so many pleasant and harmless,
if artificial, bonds. The Mexican theater is crude and impossible--even
if the fractious ladies knew Spanish sufficiently well to follow rapid
dialogue with enjoyment, which they rarely do. The occasional traveling
opera company, with one wind-busted, middle-aged star who twenty-five
years ago was rumored to have been well received in Rio de Janeiro, is a
torture; there are no notable piano or song recitals, no King’s
Daughters or other pet charities, no D. A. R.’s, no one to interpret the
“Ring and the Book,” or the “Ring of the Niebelungen,” no one to give
chafing-dish lectures or inspire enthusiasm for things like the etchings
of Whistler and the economical cremation of garbage, the abolishment of
child labor, and the encouragement of the backyard beautiful. Beyond the
slight and monotonous cares of housekeeping on a small scale, there is
little to occupy their time; there are, in a word, no varied outlets
available for their normal socio-intellectual energies, and of course
the distressing happens. Even the one or two common bonds they might
have, most unfortunately act not as bonds at all. The “servant problem,”
for instance, small as wages are, serves only to keep them farther
apart, and apparently friendship between two families engaged in the
same kind of enterprise is almost impossible. Very rarely have I seen
two coffee-growers who were not virulently jealous of each other’s
successes, and who would not, in a business way, cut each other’s
throats without a qualm if by doing so they could come out a few dollars
ahead.

Indeed, from the little I have seen and the great deal I have heard of
my countrymen’s business coups in Mexico, I cannot believe that
transplantation has a tendency to elevate one’s ethics. It is, perhaps,
unnecessary to record that I know men in Mexico whose methods of
business are fastidiously honorable with Mexican and compatriot alike,
but they are extremely rare; far more rare than they are at home. If in
Mexico I were forced to choose between trusting in a business matter to
the representations of a Mexican whom I knew and liked and an American
whom I knew and liked, I should, except in one or two cases, where I
should be betting, so to speak, on a certainty, trust the Mexican.

An always interesting phase of the American in Mexico is the annual
invasion of the country, from January to March, by immense parties of
“personally conducted” tourists from the United States. In private
cars--even in private trains--they descend every few days upon the
cities and towns of chief pictorial and historic interest, and just as
the American residents of England, Germany, Italy, and France shudder at
the ancient and honorable name of “Thomas Cook and Sons,” do the
Americans who have chosen Mexico as the land of their adoption shrug and
laugh at the mention of “las turistas.” On general principles, to shrug
and sneer--for in this laugh there always lurks a sneer--merely because
a hundred and fifty amiable creatures have chosen to be herded from one
end of a vast foreign country and back again in two weeks, would seem to
be narrow and pointless. But I have grown to consider it, for principles
quite specific, neither the one nor the other. The American resident’s
sneer is unfortunately a helpless, ineffectual one, but he is without
question sometimes entitled to it.

Somebody once wrote an article--perhaps it was a whole book--which he
called “The Psychology of Crowds.” I did not read it, but many years
ago, when it came out, the title imbedded itself in my mind as a
wonderfully suggestive title that didn’t suggest to me anything at all.
Since then I have had frequent occasion to excavate it, and without
having read a word of the work, I am convinced that I know exactly what
the author meant. Did he, I often wonder, ever study, in his study of
crowds, a crowd of American tourists in Mexico? What a misfortune for
his book if he neglected to! They are, it seems, composed of the most
estimable units of which one can conceive; the sort of persons who make
a “world’s fair” possible; the salt of the earth--“the backbone of the
nation.” And yet when they unite and start out on their travels, a kind
of madness now and then seizes upon them; not continuously, and
sometimes not at all, but now and then. Young girls who, at home, could
be trusted on every occasion to conduct themselves with a kind of
provincial dignity; sensible, middle-aged fathers and mothers of
grown-up families, and old women with white water-waves and gray
lisle-thread gloves, will now and then, when on a tour in Mexico, go out
of their way to do things that make the very peons blush. The great
majority of tourists are, of course, quiet, well-behaved persons who
take an intelligent interest in their travels. It is to the exception I
am referring; the exception by whom the others, alas! are judged.

The least of their crimes is their suddenly acquired mania for being
conspicuous. At home, in their city side streets, their humdrum suburbs,
their placid villages, they have been content for thirty, fifty, seventy
years to pursue their various decent ways, legitimately observed and
clad appropriately to their means and station. But once arrived in the
ancient capital of Montezuma, many of them are inspired in the most
astounding fashion to attract attention to themselves. On Sunday
afternoon, in the crowded Paseo, I have seen, for instance, in cabs,
undoubtedly respectable women from my country with enormous straw
sombreros on their heads, and about their shoulders those brilliant and
hideous “Mexican” sarapes--woven for the tourist trade, it is said, in
Germany. All the rest of the world was, of course, in its Paris best,
and staring at them with amazed eyes. In Mexico the only possible
circumstance under which a native woman of any position whatever would
wear a peon hat would be a hot day in the depths of the country, were
she forced to travel in an open vehicle or on horseback. As for sarapes,
they, of course, are worn only by men. The effect these travelers
produced upon the local mind was somewhat analogous to that which a
party of Mexican ladies would produce upon the mind of New York should
they decide to drive up Fifth Avenue wearing policemen’s helmets and
variegated trousers. Only Mexican women would never do the one, while
American women frequently, from motives I am at a loss to account for,
do the other.

Then, once in a small town to which large parties rarely go, I saw half
a dozen men and women suddenly detach themselves from their crowd on
being told that a certain middle-aged man, bidding good-by to some
guests at his front door, was the governor of the state. At a distance
of from ten to fifteen feet of him they deliberately focused their
kodaks on the group and pressed the button. Afterwards I asked one of
the men with whom the governor had been talking, if the governor had
commented upon the matter. “Why, yes,” was the reply. “He said, with a
shrug, ‘Obviously from the United States,’ and then went on with his
conversation.”

At Tehuacan, one winter, the women in a party of between twenty and
thirty, quite innocently (although most commonly) left behind them an
odious impression that the few resident Americans who happened to be
staying at the place were powerless to eradicate. The man in charge of
them could not speak Spanish, and had with him an interpreter, a
Mexican boy of seventeen or eighteen who knew a moderate amount of
English. He was a pretty-eyed, clever-looking little person, and the
women of the party had come to treat him much as one might treat a pet
animal of docile habits. They would stroke and ruffle his shock of black
hair, pinch his cheeks, “hold hands” with him when walking through the
long corridors, adjust his red cravat if it wasn’t straight, and
coquettishly struggle with one another for the privilege of strolling
with him in the garden. To me it meant no more than a disagreeably
playful exhibition of bad taste, but the Mexicans in the hotel regarded
a young man of eighteen, in his station of life, as being of a
marriageable age, which, of course, he was, and they could not be made
to see in the situation anything but that the American women were in
love with him and unable to conceal it in public. Some of them with
young daughters talked of appealing to the hotel proprietor to eject
persons of this description. In the United States a party of Mexican
women would under no circumstances hold hands with, say, a bellboy, or
stroke the hair of a waiter.

In Puebla it is told that some American tourists ate their luncheon in
the cathedral, threw orange peel and sardine tins on the floor, and upon
leaving washed their hands in the holy water. I don’t vouch for this
story; I merely believe it. And by reason of such things and a hundred
others, the American resident is entitled to his sneer. For he himself,
in at least his relations with the natives, is accustomed to display
something of their courtesy, their dignity. He resents not only the
unfortunate and lasting impression many of his compatriots leave upon
the populace, but its disastrous effect upon the populace itself. When
American tourists, armed with penknives, cut out squares of Gobelin
tapestry from the furniture of the President’s drawing-room, it is
always a simple matter for the President to close Chapultepec to the
public; but when they encourage “humorous” familiarities with
well-mannered, unsophisticated servants and the lower classes generally,
there is no remedy. Chiefly from constant contact with tourists, the cab
drivers of the City of Mexico have become notoriously extortionate and
insolent, and, for the same reason, Cuernavaca, one of the most
beautiful little towns, not only in Mexico, but in the world, may
soon--tourist-ridden as it is--be one of the least attractive. There,
among the cabmen, the hotel employees, the guides, and the mozos who
have horses for hire, the admirable native manner has lamentably
deteriorated. Egged on by underbred Americans, many of them have
themselves become common, impudent, and a bore. They no longer suggest
Mexico. One might almost as well “see Naples and die.”




XIII


When my first New Year’s party dispersed, I walked back to the center of
the town with a man who had lived for many years in Mexico, who had been
everywhere and had done everything, and who seemed to know something
funny or tragic or scandalous about everybody in the world. He loved to
talk, to describe, to recall; and while we had some drinks together at a
café under the sky-blue portales, he aroused my interest in people I
never had heard of and never should see. He told me, among other things,
about the Trawnbeighs.

This, as nearly as I can remember, is what he told me about the
Trawnbeighs:

The Trawnbeighs, he said, were the sort of people who “dressed for
dinner,” even when, as sometimes happened, they had no dinner in the
house to dress for. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that the
Trawnbeighs were English. Indeed, on looking back, I often feel that to
my first apparently flippant statement it is unnecessary to add
_anything_. For to one who knew Mr. and Mrs. Trawnbeigh, Edwina,
Violet, Maud, and Cyril, it was the first and last word on them; their
alpha and omega, together with all that went between. Not that the
statement _is_ flippant--far from it. There is in it a seriousness, a
profundity, an immense philosophic import. At times it has almost moved
me to lift my hat, very much as one does for reasons of state, or
religion, or death.

This, let me hasten to explain, is not at all the way I feel when I put
on evening clothes myself, which I do at least twice out of my every
three hundred and sixty-five opportunities. No born American could feel
that way about his own dress coat. He sometimes thinks he does; he
often--and isn’t it boresome!--pretends he does, but he really doesn’t.
As a matter of unimportant fact, the born American may have “dressed”
every evening of his grown-up life. But if he found himself on an
isolated, played-out Mexican coffee and vanilla finca, with a wife, four
children, a tiled roof that leaked whenever there was a “norther,” an
unsealed sala through the bamboo partitions of which a cold, wet wind
howled sometimes for a week at a time, with no money, no capacity for
making any, no “prospects” and no cook--under these depressing
circumstances it is impossible to conceive of an American dressing for
dinner every night at a quarter before seven in any spirit but one of
ghastly humor.

With the Trawnbeighs’ performance of this sacred rite, however, irony
and humor had nothing to do. The Trawnbeighs had a robust sense of fun
(so, I feel sure, have pumpkins and turnips and the larger varieties of
the nutritious potato family); but humor, when they didn’t recognize it,
bewildered them, and it always struck them as just a trifle underbred
when they did.

Trawnbeigh had come over to Mexico--“come out from England,” he would
have expressed it--as a kind of secretary to his cousin, Sir Somebody
Something, who was building a harbor or a railway or a canal (I don’t
believe Trawnbeigh himself ever knew just what it was) for a British
company down in the hot country. Mrs. Trawnbeigh, with her young, was to
follow on the next steamer a month later; and as she was in mid-ocean
when Sir Somebody suddenly died of yellow fever, she did not learn of
this inopportune event until it was too late to turn back. Still I doubt
whether she would have turned back if she could. For, as Trawnbeigh once
explained to me, at a time when they literally hadn’t enough to eat (a
hail storm had not only destroyed his coffee crop, but had frozen the
roots of most of his trees, and the price of vanilla had fallen from ten
cents a bean to three and a half), leaving England at all, he explained,
had necessitated “burning their bridges behind them.” He did not tell me
the nature of their bridges, nor whether they had made much of a blaze.
In fact, that one vague, inflammatory allusion was the nearest approach
to a personal confidence Trawnbeigh was ever known to make in all his
fifteen years of Mexican life.

The situation, when he met Mrs. Trawnbeigh and the children on the dock
at Vera Cruz, was extremely dreary, and at the end of a month it had
grown much worse, although the Trawnbeighs apparently didn’t think so.
They even spoke and wrote as if their affairs were “looking up a bit.”
For, after a few weeks of visiting among kindly compatriots at Vera Cruz
and Rebozo, Mrs. Trawnbeigh became cook for some English engineers
(there were seven of them) in a sizzling, mosquitoey, feverish mudhole
on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The Trawnbeighs didn’t call it “cook,”
neither did the seven engineers. I don’t believe the engineers even
thought of it as cook. (What Mrs. Trawnbeigh thought of it will never
be known.) How _could_ they when that lady, after feeding the four
little Trawnbeighs (or rather the four young Trawnbeighs; they had never
been little) a meal I think they called “the nursery tea,” managed every
afternoon, within the next two hours, first to create out of nothing a
perfectly edible dinner for nine persons, and, secondly, to receive them
all at seven forty-five in a red-striped, lemon satin ball gown (it
looked like poisonous, wall paper), eleven silver bangles, a cameo
necklace, and an ostrich tip sprouting from the top of her head.
Trawnbeigh, too, was in evening clothes. And they didn’t call it
cooking; they spoke of it as “looking after the mess” or “keeping an eye
on the young chaps’ livers.” Nevertheless, Mrs. Trawnbeigh, daughter of
the late the Honorable Cyril Cosby Godolphin Dundas and the late Clare
Walpurga Emmeline Moate, cooked--and cooked hard--for almost a year; at
the end of which time she was stricken with what she was pleased to
refer to as “a bad go of fevah.”

Fortunately, they were spared having to pass around the hat, although it
would have amounted to that if Trawnbeigh hadn’t, after the pleasant
English fashion, come into some money. In the United States people know
to a cent what they may expect to inherit, and then they sometimes
don’t get it; but in England there seems to be an endless succession of
retired and unmarried army officers who die every little while in Jermyn
Street and leave two thousand pounds to a distant relative they have
never met. Something like this happened to Trawnbeigh, and on the
prospect of his legacy he was able to pull out of the Tehuantepec
mudhole and restore his wife to her usual state of health in the pure
and bracing air of Rebozo.

Various things can be done with two thousand pounds, but just what
_shall_ be done ought to depend very largely on whether they happen to
be one’s first two thousand or one’s last. Trawnbeigh, however, invested
his (“interred” would be a more accurate term) quite as if they never
would be missed. The disposition to be a country gentleman was in
Trawnbeigh’s blood. Indeed, the first impression one received from the
family was that everything they did was in their blood. It never seemed
to me that Trawnbeigh had immediately sunk the whole of his little
fortune in an old, small, and dilapidated coffee place so much because
he was dazzled by the glittering financial future the shameless owner
(another Englishman, by the way) predicted for him, as because to own an
estate and live on it was, so to speak, his natural element. He had
tried, while Mrs. Trawnbeigh was cooking on the Isthmus, to get
“something to do.” But there was really nothing in Mexico he _could_ do.
He was splendidly strong, and in the United States he very cheerfully,
and with no loss of self-respect or point of view, would have
temporarily shoveled wheat or coal, or driven a team, or worked on the
street force, as many another Englishman of noble lineage has done
before and since; but in the tropics an Anglo-Saxon cannot be a day
laborer. He can’t because he can’t. And there was in Mexico no clerical
position open to Trawnbeigh because he did not know Spanish. (It is
significant that after fifteen consecutive years of residence in the
country, _none_ of the Trawnbeighs knew Spanish.) To be, somehow and
somewhere, an English country gentleman of a well-known, slightly
old-fashioned type, was as much Trawnbeigh’s destiny as it is the
destiny of, say, a polar bear to be a polar bear or a camel to be a
camel. As soon as he got his two thousand pounds he became one.

When I first met them all he had been one for about ten years. I had
recently settled in Trawnbeigh’s neighborhood, which in Mexico means
that my ranch was a hard day-and-a-half ride from his, over roads that
are not roads, but merely ditches full of liquefied mud on the level
stretches, and ditches full of assorted boulders on the ascent. So,
although we looked neighborly on a small map, I might not have had the
joy of meeting the Trawnbeighs for years if my mule hadn’t gone lame one
day when I was making the interminable trip to Rebozo. Trawnbeigh’s
place was seven miles from the main road, and as I happened to be near
the parting of the ways when the off hind leg of Catalina began to limp,
I decided to leave her with my mozo at an Indian village until a pack
train should pass by (there is always some one in a pack train who can
remove a bad shoe), while I proceeded on the mozo’s mule to the
Trawnbeighs’. My usual stopping place for the night was five miles
farther on, and the Indian village was--well, it was an Indian village.
Time and again I had been told of Trawnbeigh’s early adventures, and I
felt sure he could “put me up” (as he would have said himself) for the
night. He “put me up” not only that night, but as my mozo didn’t appear
until late the next afternoon, a second night as well. And when I at
last rode away, it was with the feeling of having learned from the
Trawnbeighs a great lesson.

In the first place they couldn’t have expected me; they couldn’t
possibly have expected anyone. And it was a hot afternoon. But as it was
the hour at which people at “home” dropped in for tea, Mrs. Trawnbeigh
and her three plain, heavy looking daughters were perfectly prepared to
dispense hospitality to any number of mythical friends. They had on
hideous but distinctly “dressy” dresses of amazingly stamped materials
known, I believe, as “summer silks,” and they were all four tightly
laced. Current fashion in Paris, London, and New York by no means
insisted on small, smooth, round waists, but the Trawnbeigh women had
them because (as it gradually dawned on me) to have had any other kind
would have been a concession to anatomy and the weather. To anything so
compressible as one’s anatomy, or as vulgarly impartial as the weather,
the Trawnbeighs simply did not concede. I never could get over the
feeling that they all secretly regarded weather in general as a kind of
popular institution, of vital importance only to the middle class.
Cyril, an extremely beautiful young person of twenty-two, who had been
playing tennis (by himself) on the asoleadero, was in “flannels,” and
Trawnbeigh admirably looked the part in gray, middle-aged riding things,
although, as I discovered before leaving, their stable at the time
consisted of one senile burro with ingrowing hoofs.

From the first it all seemed too flawless to be true. I had never
visited in England, but I doubt if there is another country whose
literature gives one so definite and lasting an impression of its “home
life.” Perhaps this is because the life of families of the class to
which the Trawnbeighs belonged proceeds in England by such a series of
definite and traditional episodes. In a household like theirs, the
unexpected must have a devil of a time in finding a chance to happen.
For, during my visit, absolutely nothing happened that I hadn’t long
since chuckled over in making the acquaintance of Jane Austen,
Thackeray, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope; not to mention Ouida (it
was Cyril, of course, who from time to time struck the Ouida note), and
the more laborious performances of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. They all of them
did at every tick of the clock precisely what they ought to have done.
They were a page, the least bit crumpled, torn from “Half Hours with the
Best Authors,” and cast, dear Heaven! upon a hillside in darkest Mexico.

Of course we had tea in the garden. There wasn’t any garden, but we
nevertheless had tea in it. The house would have been cooler, less
glaring, and free from the venomous little rodadoras that stung the
backs of my hands full of microscopic polka dots; but we all strolled
out to a spot some fifty yards away where a bench, half a dozen shaky,
homemade chairs, and a rustic table were most imperfectly shaded by
three tattered banana trees.

“We love to drink tea in the dingle dangle,” Mrs. Trawnbeigh explained.
How the tea tray itself got to the “dingle dangle,” I have only a
general suspicion, for when we arrived it was already there, equipped
with caddy, cozy, a plate of buttered toast, a pot of strawberry jam,
and all the rest of it. But try as I might, I simply could not rid
myself of the feeling that at least two footmen had arranged it all and
then discreetly retired; a feeling that also sought to account for the
tray’s subsequent removal, which took place while Trawnbeigh, Cyril,
Edwina, and I walked over to inspect the asoleadero and washing tanks. I
wanted to look back; but something (the fear, perhaps, of being turned
into a pillar of salt) restrained me.

With most English-speaking persons in that part of the world,
conversation has to do with coffee, coffee and--coffee. The Trawnbeighs,
however, scarcely touched on the insistent topic. While we sat on the
low wall of the dilapidated little asoleadero we discussed pheasant
shooting and the “best places” for haberdashery and “Gladstone bags.”
Cyril, as if it were but a matter of inclination, said he thought he
might go over for the shooting that year; a cousin had asked him “to
make a seventh.” I never found out what this meant and didn’t have the
nerve to ask.

“Bertie shoots the twelfth, doesn’t he?” Edwina here inquired.

To which her brother replied, as if she had shown a distressing
ignorance of some fundamental date in history, like 1066 or 1215,
“Bertie _always_ shoots the twelfth.”

The best place for haberdashery in Mr. Trawnbeigh’s opinion was “the
Stores.” But Cyril preferred a small shop in Bond Street, maintaining
firmly, but with good humor, that it was not merely, as “the pater”
insisted, because the fellow charged more, but because one didn’t “run
the risk of seeing some beastly bounder in a cravat uncommonly like
one’s own.” Trawnbeigh, as a sedate parent bordering on middle age, felt
obliged to stand up for the more economical “Stores,” but it was evident
that he really admired Cyril’s exclusive principles and approved of
them. Edwina cut short the argument with an abrupt question.

“I say,” she inquired anxiously, “has the dressing bell gone yet?” The
dressing bell hadn’t gone, but it soon went. For Mr. Trawnbeigh, after
looking at his watch, bustled off to the house and rang it himself. Then
we withdrew to our respective apartments to dress for dinner.

“I’ve put you in the north wing, old man; there’s always a breeze in the
wing,” my host declared as he ushered me into a bamboo shed they used
apparently for storing corn and iron implements of an agricultural
nature. But there was also in the room a recently made-up cot with real
sheets, a tin bath tub, hot and cold water in two earthenware jars, and
an empty packing case upholstered in oilcloth. When Trawnbeigh spoke of
this last as a “wash-hand-stand,” I knew I had indeed strayed from life
into the realms of mid-Victorian romance.

The breeze Trawnbeigh had referred to developed in the violent Mexican
way, while I was enjoying the bath tub, into an unmistakable norther.
Water fell on the roof like so much lead and then sprang off (some of it
did) in thick, round streams from the tin spouts; the wind screamed in
and out of the tiles overhead, and through the “north wing’s” blurred
windows the writhing banana trees of the “dingle dangle” looked like
strange things one sees in an aquarium. As soon as I could get into my
clothes again--a bath was as far as I was able to live up to the
Trawnbeigh ideal--I went into the sala where the dinner table was
already set with a really heart-rending attempt at splendor. I have said
that nothing happened with which I had not a sort of literary
acquaintance; but I was wrong. While I was standing there wondering how
the Trawnbeighs had been able all those years to keep it up, a window in
the next room blew open with a bang. I ran in to shut it; but before I
reached it, I stopped short and, as hastily and quietly as I could,
tiptoed back to the “wing.” For the next room was the kitchen and at one
end of it Trawnbeigh, in a shabby but perfectly fitting dress-coat, his
trousers rolled up halfway to his knees, was patiently holding an
umbrella over his wife’s sacred dinner gown, while she--bebangled,
becameoed, beplumed, and stripped to the buff--masterfully cooked our
dinner on the brasero.

To me it was all extremely wonderful, and the wonder of it did not
lessen during the five years in which, on my way to and from Rebozo, I
stopped over at the Trawnbeighs’ several times a year. For, although I
knew that they were often financially all but down and out, the endless
red tape of their daily life never struck me as being merely a pathetic
bluff. Their rising bells and dressing bells, their apparent dependence
on all sorts of pleasant accessories that simply did not exist, their
occupations (I mean those on which I did not have to turn a tactful
back, such as “botanizing,” “crewel work,” painting horrible water
colors and composing long lists of British-sounding things to be “sent
out from the Stores”), the informality with which we waited on ourselves
at luncheon and the stately, punctilious manner in which we did
precisely the same thing at dinner, the preordained hour at which Mrs.
Trawnbeigh and the girls each took a candle and said good night, leaving
Trawnbeigh, Cyril, and me to smoke a pipe and “do a whisky peg”
(Trawnbeigh had spent some years in India), the whole inflexibly insular
scheme of their existence was more, infinitely more, than a bluff. It
was a placid, tenacious clinging to the straw of their ideal in a great,
deep sea of poverty, discomfort, and isolation. And it had its reward.

For after fourteen years of Mexican life, Cyril was almost exactly what
he would have been had he never seen the place; and Cyril was the
Trawnbeigh’s one asset of immense value. He was most agreeable to look
at, he was both related to and connected with many of the most
historical-sounding ladies and gentlemen in England, and he had just the
limited, selfish, amiable outlook on the world in general that was sure
(granting the other things) to impress Miss Irene Slapp of Pittsburg as
the height of both breeding and distinction.

Irene Slapp had beauty and distinction of her own. Somehow, although
they all “needed the money,” I don’t believe Cyril would have married
her if she hadn’t. Anyhow, one evening in the City of Mexico he took her
in to dinner at the British Legation where he had been asked to dine as
a matter of course, and before the second entrée, Miss Slapp was
slightly in love with him and very deeply in love with the scheme of
life, the standard, the ideal, or whatever you choose to call it, he had
inherited and had been brought up, under staggering difficulties, to
represent.

“The young beggar has made a pot of money in the States,” Trawnbeigh
gravely informed me after Cyril had spent seven weeks in
Pittsburg--whither he had been persuaded to journey on the Slapp’s
private train.

“And, you know I’ve decided to sell the old place,” he casually remarked
a month or so later. “Yes, yes,” he went on, “the young people are
beginning to leave us.” (I hadn’t noticed any signs of impending flight
on the part of Edwina, Violet, and Maud.) “Mrs. Trawnbeigh and I want to
end our days at home. Slapp believes there’s gold on the place--or would
it be petroleum? He’s welcome to it. After all, I’ve never been
fearfully keen on business.”

And I rode away pondering, as I always did, on the great lesson of the
Trawnbeighs.




XIV


Early in the eighteenth century there went to Mexico from France a boy
of sixteen named Joseph de la Borde. “By his fortunate mining ventures
at Tlalpujahua, Tasco, and Zacatecas,” we read, “he made a fortune of
forty million pesos.” One of these millions he spent in building a
church at Tasco, and another he spent in building a garden at
Cuernavaca. This is all I know about Joseph de la Borde, or, as he was
called in Mexico, José de la Borda, except that he died in Cuernavaca at
the age of seventy-nine and that his portrait--a funny old man in a
white wig and black velvet--hangs among the portraits of other dead and
eminent gentlemen in an obscure corridor of the National Museum. It
might be interesting to learn what became of the remaining thirty-eight
millions; but then again it might not. So I haven’t tried to find out.
It is scarcely probable, however, that at a later date he expressed
himself more notably than he did in the construction of El Jardin Borda.

It lies on a steep hillside behind Cuernavaca, and even if it were not
one of the most beautiful of tangled, neglected, ruined old gardens
anywhere, it would be lovable for the manner in which it tried so hard
to be a French garden and failed. Joseph, it is clear, had the French
passion for formalizing the landscape--for putting Nature into a pretty
strait-jacket; but although he spent much time and a million pesos in
trying to do this at Cuernavaca, he rather wonderfully did not succeed.
No doubt the result pleased him; it surely ought to have. But just as
surely it was not the light, bright, definitely graceful result of which
his French mind had conceived. It was always a little precious to speak
of one thing in terms of another, but nevertheless there is about a
perfect French garden something very musical. The Luxembourg garden is
musical, so is the garden at Versailles; musical with the kind of music
that is as deliberately academic as it is deliberately tuneful. There
was every endeavor to make the Jardin Borda perform on a small scale
with the same blithe elegance of Versailles and the garden of the
Luxembourg; but it was Mexican at heart. Perhaps it foresaw Napoleon
III. At any rate, although it tried to be French, it at the last
refused.

The situation, the flora, and, absurd as it may sound, the technic of
the stone masons who built the architectural features--the walls, the
fountains, the summerhouses, the cascades, and the ponds--all combine to
give the place an individuality, sometimes Spanish, sometimes Mexican,
but French only in the same remote manner in which Shakespeare is
Shakespeare when Madame Bernhardt, instead of exclaiming, “Go. Stand not
upon the order of your going, but go at once,” liquidly burbles: “Allez,
messieurs; allez immédiatement--sans cérémonie!” It hangs precipitously
on the side of a ravine when it should have been level (one is so glad
it is not), and the dense, southern trees--mangoes and sapotes and
Indian laurel--with which it was planted, have long since outgrown the
scale of the place, interlaced and roofed out the sky overhead with an
opaque and somber canopy. They now are not, as they were intended to be,
decorative features of the garden, they are the garden itself; one
cannot see the trees for the forest. In its impermeable shade there are
long, islanded tanks in which many numerous families of ducks and geese
live a strangely secluded, dignified, aristocratic existence--arbors of
roses and jasmine, and heavy, broken old fountains that no longer play
and splash. In fact, all the masonry, and to retain itself on the
hillside the place had to be a mass of masonry, is heavy and simple,
and except for the arbors there are no longer any flowers. Where in the
days of Joseph there no doubt used to be a dazzling carpet of color,
there is now only a tangle of coffee trees. But in Cuernavaca when the
purple and red and pink of growing things under a pitiless sun become
intolerable, the absence of color in the Jardin Borda, except for its
dark and soothing green, is well worth frequently paying the twenty-five
centavos the present owner charges as an admittance fee.

In seventy-five or a hundred years there will be many fine old formal
gardens in the United States--finer than the Borda ever was. Under the
pergolas of some of them there is much tea and pleasant conversation and
one greatly admires their marble furniture imported from Italy--their
careful riot of flowers. But at present it is difficult to forget that
their prevailing color is wealth, and to forget it will take at least
another century. If they have everything that Joseph’s garden lacks,
they all lack the thing it has. For in its twilit arbors and all along
its sad and silent terraces there is at any hour the same poetic mystery
that even at the ages of eight and four sometimes used to affect Don
Guillermo and me when we were turned loose to play and to pick daisies
in the Borghese garden in Rome. The Borghese is extensive and the Borda
is tiny, but history has strolled in both of them and they both seem to
have beautiful, secret sorrows.

I am not like an American woman tourist in Cuernavaca (it was her first
week in the country) who informed me that she sat in the hotel all day
because she was so tired of seeing the streets full of Mexicans! “You
know, we saw a great many Mexicans in Mexico City,” she added in the
aggrieved tone of one who thinks it is high time for a procession of
Swedes or Australians. But in Mexico, as elsewhere, there are mornings
and afternoons when it is good to be out of range of the human voice and
alone with trees, a sheet of water however small, and some animals.

Attached to the grounds is a house--a succession of cool rooms on one
floor, and in passing the open doors and windows of the long, denuded
sala as one begins to descend the main terrace, it is impossible not to
remember for a moment that the place was lived in by Maximilian and
Carlotta. It is impossible, too, especially if the white roses and
jasmine of the arbor are in bloom, not to pay the unfortunate lady and
gentleman the tribute of a sentimental pang. In Mexico one often finds
oneself thinking of Maximilian and Carlotta and, on the whole, with a
kindliness springing, I am sure, chiefly from the facts that they were
young and in love. For politically they were but a pair of stupid
mistakes. History has been kind to Maximilian--far kinder than he
deserved--but standard and respectable history is so timorous of leaving
a wrong impression that it often fails to leave any impression at all.
History to be interesting and valuable should be recorded by persons of
talent and prejudice or by chambermaids who listen at keyholes.

As it is difficult to believe Maximilian a scoundrel, the other belief
most open to one in view of his brief career, is that he was a dull,
ignorant, and fatuous young man who thought it would prove more
diverting to be a Mexican emperor than an Austrian archduke. His
portrait, indeed (the famous one on horseback now in the National
Palace), expresses just this with unconscious cruelty. History often
speaks of him as handsome--an adjective that even the idealized portrait
in question quite fails to justify. Without more chin than Maximilian
ever had, one can be neither handsome nor a successful emperor. He was
amiable and “well disposed,” but his fatuity revealed itself from the
first in the mere fact of his being able to see in himself a logical
claimant to the throne of Mexico in the far-fetched and absurd reason
that led Napoleon III and the Roman Catholic Church to select him. For
he was chosen to adorn this precariously fictitious seat because Mexico
had formerly been a Spanish possession and the house of which he was a
representative had ruled in Spain before the accession of the Bourbons!
Napoleon III naturally was not giving away empires to Bourbons, and
Maximilian was supposed “to reunite the Mexico of 1863 with the
monarchical Mexico of 1821.” To the party of intelligence, progress, and
reform there was about the same amount of right and reason in this as
the inhabitants of France would find in a sudden demand on my part to be
made their chief executive because my name happens to be a French name.

Maximilian “accepted” the crown on two conditions. That he was
pathetically ignorant of at least the subject on which he ought to have
been best informed is clear from one of them, and that he was dull
becomes almost as evident from the other. The first provided that he
should be elected to the throne of Mexico by popular vote; and the
second, that the Emperor Napoleon should give him armed aid as long as
he required it. Now anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of Mexico
knows that a popular election there is an impossibility and always has
been. No one in Mexico is ever elected by popular vote, or ever really
elected at all. It cannot be done at the present time (1908) any more
than it could have been when Maximilian and Carlotta were crowned in the
cathedral in 1864. The inhabitants of Mexico, incredible as it may
sound, speak more than fifty totally different languages and many of
them have never learned Spanish. Some of them in fact--the Yaquis in
Sonora and the Mayas in Yucatan--do not even recognize the Mexican
Government, are still at war with it and are being for this reason
rapidly exterminated, although not as rapidly as would be the case if
the military exterminators did not receive increased pay while engaged
in the congenial pursuit of extermination. When one considers that two
years before the proposed taking of the census in 1910, the Government
is planning a gradual and elaborate campaign of enlightenment in the
hope of allaying the suspicions of the superstitious lower classes and
making a more or less accurate census possible, it is clear that not
even a political dreamer could seriously consider the feasibility of a
genuine popular election. From what I know of many of the inhabitants,
from what I have seen of their complete indifference to anything
outside of their villages and cornfields, I think it highly probable
that many thousands of them tilled their land throughout the entire,
futile “reign” altogether unaware of Maximilian’s existence. Maximilian
was not elected Emperor of Mexico by popular vote, although before he
learned something about his empire, he no doubt thought he had been.

As to the second condition--when Maximilian staked his entire hope of
success upon a promise of Napoleon III, who had on various occasions
somewhat conspicuously shown himself to be as dangerous an adventurer
and as unscrupulous a liar as most of the other members of his offensive
family, Maximilian did something that may be recorded as trusting and
unfortunate, but that is only adequately described as dull. Fatuous,
ignorant, and dull, he not only failed to pull out Napoleon’s chestnuts,
he proceeded to fall into the fire. Except just at first, he was not
wanted in Mexico even by the clerical party responsible for his being
there; for his refusal to abolish the Reform Laws and restore the power
of the Church bitterly disappointed the Church without, however, gaining
for him adherents among those who had fought so long to establish a
republic. Everything he did was preordained to be wrong. He went without
a definite policy and was incapable of evolving one after he arrived.
His three years in Mexico were unproductive of anything except an
enormous debt incurred largely by the silly magnificence of his court, a
great deal of bloodshed and his own execution. He died bravely, one
always reads, but so do hundreds of other persons every day. Before an
audience composed of the entire civilized world, to die bravely ought
not to be a particularly difficult feat. As Alphonse Daudet somewhere
says of Frenchmen, “They can always be brave if there are enough people
looking.” Life was not kind to the young Austrian, but history has been.

And yet, on the sad, silent terraces of the Jardin Borda one always
thinks of Maximilian and Carlotta, and pays them the tribute of a
sentimental pang.




XV


Travelers sometimes complain that “Mexican towns are exactly alike; if
you see one you’ve seen them all,” and while I cannot agree with the
bromidically couched observation I can understand why it is made. They
are not alike, but they are so startlingly different from Northern towns
that one is at first more impressed by this fundamental difference, in
which they all naturally have a family resemblance, than by the less
striking but delightful ways in which they often differ from one
another. Without exception, they are, as art critics used to say of
certain pictures, “painted in a high key,” and where the nature of the
site permits, their rectangularity is positively Philadelphian. In their
center is a public square with a garden, rather formal in intention but
as a rule old enough and luxuriant enough to have lost its original
stiffness. Here there are paths and benches, trees, fountains, flowers,
and a flimsy looking iron and tin band stand one learns at last to like.
At one side is the most important church; the other three are bounded
by shops and arcades. This is the plaza. Every town has one, many of
them have several. But there is always one that more than the others is
a kind of pulsating, civic heart, and it is interesting to note how in
their dimensions they observe the scale of their environment. Big towns
have big plazas, small towns have small plazas, villages have tiny
plazas. In addition to the plaza there is often, in a quieter, more
distant quarter of the community, a park--a tangled, shady,
bird-inhabited spot, with high and aged trees, massive seats of stone or
cement, and a tranquillity that exerts a noticeably benign influence on
all who go to walk or sit there. Whether the houses and buildings are
built of stone or mortar or, as is customary in the smaller places of
the plateau, of sun-dried mud bricks, their effect is the same, for they
are all given a coat of smooth stucco and then calcimined white, or a
pale shade of pink, blue, yellow, buff, or green. Rarely are they of
more than two stories; most of them have balconies on the upper floor,
all have long, heavily barred windows on the lower, and if it were not
for their gayety of color, the perpetual fascination of their
flower-filled patios of which the passer-by gets tantalizing glimpses
through open doorways, and the intellectual interest of the signs on the
shops--their uniform height and the square simplicity of their design
might be monotonous. As it is, a Mexican street, even when empty, is
never monotonous.

Besides the plaza and the park, there is the market place--sometimes
merely an open square in which the venders, under rectangular homemade
parasols, spread their wares upon the ground, but more often an
inclosure equipped with long counters and protected from sun and rain by
a roof. Except in the City of Mexico, Guadalajara, and Merida, one is
not conscious of “residence quarters.” The “best families” (a term
almost as meaningless and as frequently employed in Mexico as in the
United States) live where they please, and they please to live as deeply
as possible in the thick of things. The largest and most elaborate
houses are often scattered between shops and saloons along the busiest
streets, and when one becomes intimate with the country and its
inhabitants it seems natural and agreeable that they should be. For one
cannot live in Mexico without consciously or unconsciously regarding the
superficialities of life from something very like the local point of
view. There is about it an infectious and inevitable quality, and I have
often been both amused and depressed by the manner in which foreigners
who accept the best of everything in Mexico--who grow strong, and revel
in one of its several climates, who make a good living there, who enjoy
its beauty and adopt many of its customs--stupidly deny its attraction
for them, repudiate their sympathy with it. It is customary, almost a
convention, to do so, and one is appalled by the tenacity of
convention’s grasp upon the ordinary mind--by the impregnable dullness
of the normal intellect. I know, for example, Americans who have lived
happily in Mexico for many years. They have, among Mexicans, friends
whom they both respect and admire. Almost all their interests in life
are focused somewhere in the country, and when they are away from it
they look forward with gladness to the time of their return. Yet,
apparent as all this is to one who associates with them, they seem
incapable of translating experience into consciousness and conversation.
You see them leading contented and successful lives, at peace with their
adopted land and almost everything in it; but when they undertake to
discuss their environment, to formulate their opinions, their remarks
are rarely valuable and never appreciative. Instead of simply trying to
give one something of the Mexico they have day by day, month by month,
and year by year met and succumbed to, they appear to take a pride in
parading the old geography, guidebook and tourist dicta that in their
cases, one sees at a glance, are not justified by facts.

“All Mexican servants are thieves and liars,” is the characteristic
pronouncement of an American woman whose household for sixteen years has
been admirably and economically run by the same devoted and honest cook.

“What a filthy lot they are!” exclaims her husband (who observes the
good old custom of taking a bath every Saturday night whether he needs
it or not), as we ride through a Yucatecan village in which most of the
Indian inhabitants scrub from head to foot and put on clean clothes
every day.

“I wouldn’t trust one of them with a cent,” declares some one else, who
has in his office three Mexican clerks to whom he implicitly intrusts
the handling of thousands of dollars.

“I look upon them just as I look upon niggers,” says a Southerner--who
not only doesn’t, but who is gratified by the pleasant position he has
achieved for himself in local, native society. And as such comments are
made with neither malicious intent nor with the “feeling” that would
accompany them were they final deductions from a long series of painful
experiences, one marvels at the phonographic monotony with which they
are endlessly reproduced. Almost always purely verbal, there is behind
them neither thought nor emotion, and they are irritating in much the
same way that checks are irritating when carelessly made out and signed
by persons who have nothing in the bank. They are, I fancy, connected
with a sense of patriotism that has grown habitual and perfunctory, and
I mention them merely by way of illustrating half of my assertion to the
effect that one absorbs something of Mexico both unconsciously and with
deliberateness. A young Englishman of my acquaintance may well supply
the other half.

It is not generally realized that the male inhabitants of Great Britain
do not make a practice of wearing drawers, although such is the strange,
dissembled fact. Now, while the possession of underclothes is not
necessarily indicative of birth and wealth, I have always assumed,
although perhaps with a certain apathy, that the possession of wealth
and birth presupposed underclothes. This, in England at least, does not
seem to be the case, for my young friend, whose name is ancient and
whose purse is well filled, announced to me in Mexico not long ago, with
the naïveté that so often astonishes one in thoroughly sophisticated
persons of his race: “I’ve knocked about a good bit and I’ve come to the
conclusion that there’s usually something to be said for the peculiar
habits of different peoples even if you don’t know exactly what it is.
Since I’ve been in this country I’ve noticed that everybody seems to
wear drawers--even the peons. There must be some reason for
it--connected with the climate very likely--and I’ve taken to wearing
them myself. I don’t particularly care for the things,” he hastened
apologetically to add, “and I dare say they’re all rot, but I’m going to
give them a try. Why don’t you!”

It is natural and agreeable in Mexico to have one’s house in what we
call “the retail district,” for one soon learns to appreciate the
Mexican’s combined love of seclusion and publicity. A dwelling
sandwiched in between the town’s most popular drug and grocery shops is
ideally situated. The nature of its construction--the Moors imposed it
upon Spain and Spain passed it on--insures a fortresslike privacy, while
the site insures the constant movement and color, the manifold, trivial,
human and animal interests without which the life of a Mexican household
would be somewhat empty. Those odd moments consumed by us with magazines
and the book of the week, Mexicans devote to looking out of their sala
windows, with a rarely misplaced confidence in their street’s
potentialities. It never strikes me as strange that _I_ can pass so
many hours in peering at sights so foreign to my race, if not any longer
to my experience, but it is one of the pleasantly surprising traits of
the inhabitants that _their_ interest is just as fresh and perhaps more
insatiable. To me the love affair across the way--carried on as it is
with much holding of hands in the excessive broadness of Mexican
daylight, by a young woman of thirty-eight behind a barred window, and a
young man of forty-two on the narrow sidewalk outside--to me, this
public display of an emotion, ordinarily regarded as rather private, is
most exciting; but even so, I am inclined to believe that after
commenting on such a courtship every afternoon and evening for three and
a half years it would begin to pall. On Mexicans it never seems to. They
do not precisely stare at the spectacle, as a careful unawareness under
the circumstances is considered the proper line to take. But their blind
spots are not situated in the tails of their eyes. However, it does not
necessitate such absorbing matters as affairs of the heart to retain
their attention. They never weary at certain hours of the day of peering
through the bars or leaning over the balconies in contemplation of just
the street’s multifarious but always leisurely movement. It is not often
a noisy movement. The collective Mexican voice--the voice of a group or
even a crowd is musical, and the click of donkey’s hoofs on cobblestones
is a dainty, a positively prim form of commotion.

But should they wish to escape from even these sometimes distinctly
soothing sounds, there is always the patio and the tranquil rooms around
it. They are of all sizes, of all degrees of misery and splendor and of
most shapes, these universal patios, but in the meanest of them there is
an expressed yearning for color and adornment that, even when ill cared
for and squalid, has been at least expressed. It takes the form, most
fortunately, of flowers, with often a fountain in a circular basin of
blue and white tiles. A Mexican patio, in fact, is considerably more
than a courtyard. It is a flower garden surrounded by a house.

In Northern climates the most delightful hour of the day has always been
that in which one comes in from the frosty dusk, lights the lamps,
smashes a smoldering lump of coal into a bright, sudden blaze, draws the
curtain and, in an atmosphere thick with warmth and quiet, sits down to
read or write or rest. In tropical countries one often longs in vain for
this hour. Its impossibility is, I think, a chief cause of homesickness,
and it is long before one accepts with anything like the same sense--a
sense of physical and mental well-being immune from gazes and
intrusions--the Southern equivalent. The Southern equivalent is the hour
in which the sun shines brightest and fiercest, when instead of seeking
warmth one eludes it, half undressed, in dim, bare rooms, under awnings
and behind light, thin screens.

Even when a street for the time being comparatively lacks moving figures
there is for the foreigner a constant amusement in reading the signs
over the doors of shops and more especially those that decorate the
outer walls of pulque joints and cantinas. Their mere perusal, indeed,
may throw a truer, more valuable light upon certain phases of the native
humors and habits of thought than do many works less spontaneous and
more profound. “Jack O’Grady, Sample Room,” or, “Otto Baumholzer,
Saloon,” may or may not make an appeal. But even when it does it is not
an appeal to the intellect and the imagination. In Mexico the proprietor
of a saloon likes to advertise his wares, not so much with his name as
with a sentiment, an allusion--a word or a phrase that poetically
connotes. There are of course a great many serviceable designations of
no particular relevance like the patriotic “Cinco de Mayo,” the
inevitable “Estrella de Oro,” and the frequently met with and rather
meaningless “Cometa de 1843.” They show respectively only a taste for
the national, the brilliant, the surprising. The gift of fancy is not,
after all, to everyone. Even when a foul little corner drunkery,
calcimined sky-blue--with a life-sized lady reposing in a green bower,
painted on its finger-marked exterior--is entitled “El Nido de Amor,” or
when a pink hole in the wall that can be seen for a block and smelled
for two, is named “Las Flores de Abril”--even then one does not
appreciate quite to the full some of the quaint possibilities of just
the ordinary Mexican mind. But a saloon called “El Destino,” another
frankly advertising itself as “La Isla de Sacrificios,” still another
with painted above its door “El Infiernito” (the little hell), a fourth
that calls itself “Al Delirio”--there is in such names food, as one
strolls about any Mexican community, for meditation. Less grim, but as
suggestive and as apt, is “La Seductora.” “La Media Noche” and “Las Aves
de la Noche” (the night birds) always strike a sympathetic chord, while
“El Renacimiento,” “El Valor,” and “El Mensajero de los Dioses” (the
messenger of the gods) gracefully hoist the whole matter into the realm
of the ideal. The subtlest of them, and the one that never fails to
make me laugh as I pass it, is “La Idea!” I regret now that the
opportunity of entering and making the proprietor’s acquaintance has
gone. A man who would name his saloon “La Idea!” ought to be worth
knowing. The thing can be apperceived in so many ways and spoken in so
many different tones of voice, starting, as at once suggests itself,
with the intonation generally imparted to, “Why, the idea!”

One source of dissatisfaction to travelers for whom foreign travel has
always meant Europe, is that there are so few “sights” in Mexican towns.
By “sights” I mean the galleries of sculpture and painting, the palaces
and the castles, the frescoes, the architectural fragments, the tombs,
the relics, and the interminable museums crammed with a dead world’s
junk, over which the conscientious may exhaust their necks and backs.
European cities even as comparatively small as Stockholm and Copenhagen
possess museums where, guidebook in hand, people remain for whole days
examining ugly, labeled little implements fashioned in the stone age,
the bronze age, the iron age, and every city has among other treasures a
few miles of minute, Dutch masters before which to trudge, too weary to
appreciate their marvelous skill or to realize their beauty. But in
Mexican towns there are none of these things, and the traveler whose
days have not been mapped out for him and who is not in the habit of
strolling, of sitting in churches, of shamelessly idling in parks and
plazas, is likely to complain of a lack of occupation. It is difficult
for him to accept the fact that the most notable sight in Mexico is
simply Mexico.

It is difficult, too, for him to reconcile the general outward
conditions of the towns and cities with his preconceived ideas of them,
which is always annoying. Instead of giving an impression of dirt and
neglect, of the repulsive indifference to appearances, and general
“shiftlessness” we are so accustomed to in the small communities of
States like, for instance, Arkansas and Indiana, their best quarters
always, and their more modest districts very often, are perpetually
swept and sprinkled, dazzling with new calcimine and, for thoroughfares
so aged, incredibly neat and gay. About drainage and water works--the
invisible and important--there is still much to deplore, much to hope
for, although improvement is everywhere on the way. But municipal
“appearances” are rigidly maintained; maintained in some instances at
the cost, unfortunately, of qualities that share the secret of the
country’s charm. There is at the present time, for example, a rage--a
madness rather--for renovating, for “doing over” the exteriors of
churches, and in the last four years some of the most impressive
examples of Spanish colonial church architecture have been scraped,
punctured with pointed windows, supplied with gargoyles and porticoes
and then whitewashed. To remember the cathedral at Jalapa as it was, and
to see it now, a jaunty horror half clad in cheap, Gothic clothes that
don’t fit, brings a lump to one’s throat.

The order and security that everywhere appear to reign both by day and
by night are also bewildering in a country popularly supposed to be the
modern fountain-head of lawlessness and melodrama. Besides the small but
businesslike policemen with large, visible revolvers who seem to be on
every corner and who materialize in swarms at the slightest infringement
of the code, the highways are patrolled by that picturesque body of men
known as rurales, of whom there are between four and five thousand.
After the fall of Santa Anna, the organized troop of ranchmen (known as
“cuerados” from the leather clothes they wore) became bandits and gained
for themselves the name of “plateados,” it being their dashing custom
heavily to ornament their garments with silver. In the time of Comonfort
they were turned from their evil ways (no doubt on the theory of its
taking a thief to catch a thief) and transformed into rurales. Under
President Diaz they have attained a high degree of efficiency, and while
their practically limitless powers in isolated and inaccessible parts of
the country are no doubt sometimes abused, their reputation for
fearlessness, supplemented by a revolver, a carbine, and a saber, has a
most chastening influence. One realizes something of the number of
policemen at night, when they deposit their lighted lanterns in the
middle of the streets and there is until dawn a ceaseless concert of
their wailing whistles. You may become as drunk as you wish to in a
cantina and, even with the doors open, talk as loud and as long as you
are able, for cantinas were made to get drunk and talk loud in. But you
must walk quite steadily when you come out--unless your wife or daughter
is laughingly leading you home--or you will be arrested before you reel
ten yards. Even chaperoned by your wife and unmistakably homeward bound,
you will be escorted kindly, almost gently (when you show no
resistance), to the police station if the city happens to need your
services. The combination of quick temper and quicker drink is
responsible for much violence in Mexico, but one rarely sees it. One
rarely sees any form of disorder, and over vice is draped a cloak of
complete invisibility. In most places women of the town are not even
permitted to appear on the streets except at certain hours and in a
capacity sincerely unprofessional. The facility and dispatch with which
one is arrested is conducive to a constant appearance of decorum. Only
in a paternal despotism is such law and order possible. One evening I
myself was arrested for an exceedingly slight and innocent misdemeanor.

“But why do you arrest me? Why don’t you arrest everybody else? I’m not
the only one,” I protested to the policeman with a lightness I was
beginning not to feel.

“You are a foreigner and a gentleman and you ought to set an example to
the ignorant lower classes,” he replied without a smile. It was some
time before I could induce him to let me go.

The frequency of the policemen is equaled (or exceeded, one sometimes
feels) only by the frequency of the churches. And, as if there were not
already thousands more than the souls of any people could possibly need,
new ones are always being built. I was told not long ago of a wealthy
man who, on recently acquiring a vast area of land which he contemplated
turning into a sugar hacienda, began the construction of his “plant”
with a thirty-thousand-dollar church. Their number and the manner in
which they monopolize all the most conspicuous sites, as well as render
conspicuous most of the others, now and then enables even a Roman
Catholic to regard the Laws of Reform with a slightly less bilious eye.
The countryside is dotted with them--the towns and cities crowded by
them. It seems at times as if the streets were but so many convenient
lanes through which to approach them--the shops and houses merely so
many modest dependencies. Pictorially considered, they imbue the
dreariest, most impersonal of landscapes, especially just after sunset,
with a mild and lovely atmosphere of human pathos that one might journey
far without seeing again. But even in Mexico the pictorial sense is
subject to periods of suspended animation during which one’s attitude
toward the churches, or perhaps I should say the Church, is curiously
ill-defined. It is discomposing, on the one hand, to learn of a powerful
bishop whose “wife” and large family of sons and daughters are
complacently taken for granted by his entire diocese--to be warned by a
devout Catholic never under any circumstances to allow one’s American
maid servants to converse with a priest or to enter his house on any
pretext whatever--to appreciate the extreme poverty of the people and
to realize that the entire gigantic corporation is kept running chiefly
by the hard-earned mites with which they hope to save their souls. In
the church of San Miguel (not a particularly large church) at Orizaba, I
once had the curiosity to count the various devices by which the
faithful are hypnotized into leaving their money behind them, and as I
made notes of the little alms boxes in front of all the chapels, at the
doors, and scattered along the nave, many of them with a placard
explaining the use to which the funds were supposed to be put, I could
not but admire the unerring instinct with which the emotions of the race
had been gauged. The system, assisted as it is by a fantastically
dressed lay figure at every placarded box, has for the population of
Orizaba (an excessively religious town) much the same fascination that
is exercised upon me by a penny arcade. There were boxes for “The
Monthly Mass of Jesus,” “For the Marble Cross,” “For the Sick,” “For the
Sick of S. Vincent and S. Paul,” “For Mary Conceived without Sin,” “For
Our Father Jesus Carrying the Cross,” “For Saint Michael,” “For the
Blessed Souls,” “For the Blessed Virgin,” “For Our Lady of Carmen,” and
then, as if the ground had not been tolerably well covered, there were
two boxes, “For the Work of this Parish.” But these were literally less
than half the total number. In addition to the twelve whose uses were
revealed, there were _eighteen others_ whose uses were not, or thirty in
all.

On the other hand, I cannot linger in Mexican churches day after day, as
I have done, watching the Indians glide in, remove the leather bands
from their foreheads, let their chitas slip gently to the pavement, and
then, with straight backs and crossed hands, kneel in reverent ecstasy
before their favorite images, without rejoicing that a profound human
want can be so filled to overflowing. And I cannot but doubt that it
could by any other way we know be filled at all. Three men in Indian
white, who are returning from market to their homes in some distant
village, stop to kneel for fully half an hour without moving before the
chapel of St. Michael. St. Michael happens to be an almost life-sized
female doll with pink silk socks, the stiff skirts of a ballet-dancer
(actually), a pink satin bolero jacket, an imitation diamond necklace, a
blond wig with long curls, and a tin helmet. The two women who accompany
them pray before the figure of Mary Conceived without Sin--whose costume
I prefer not to invite the accusation of sacrilege by recording. The
men are straight-backed, motionless, enthralled. One of the women
suddenly extends her arms with an all-embracing gesture, and rigidly
holds them there--her hands palm upward, as if she expected to receive
the stigmata. What are they all thinking about? But what earthly
difference does it make--if there be a difference so heavenly? No doubt
they are thinking of nothing; thought is not essential to bliss. Then
they get up, and after dropping money in the little slot machines of
Michael, and Mary Conceived without Sin, they proceed on their way,
leaving me glad that for fully half an hour some one in the world has
been happy. For beyond the possibility of a doubt they have been happy,
and have deepened my conviction that the desire to undermine their faith
in Michael and in Mary Conceived without Sin is at best misguided, and
at worst, wicked. “Idolatry and superstition!” one hears groaned from
end to end of Mexico. But why not? They appear to be very comforting,
exalting things. It happens that personally I could derive no spiritual
refreshment from remaining on my knees for half an hour in front of
these dreadful dolls. But there is a statue or two in the Louvre, and
several pictures in Florence, to whom--had I been brought up to believe
them capable of performing miracles--I should find it most agreeable and
beneficial to say my prayers.

So one’s attitude toward the Church in Mexico becomes at the last
curiously ill-defined. The Church is corrupt, grasping, resentful; but
it unquestionably gives millions of people something without which they
would be far more unhappy than they are--something that no other church
could give them.

There are city parks and squares in other countries, but in none do they
play the same intimate and important part in the national domestic life
that they do in Mexico. To one accustomed to associate the “breathing
spaces” with red-nosed tramps and collarless, unemployed men dejectedly
reading wilted newspapers on shabby benches, it would be impossible to
give an idea of what the plaza means to the people of Mexico--of how it
is used by them. It strikes me always as a kind of open-air
drawing-room, not only, as are our own public squares, free to all, but,
unlike them, frequented by all. It is not easy to imagine one’s
acquaintances in the United States putting on their best clothes for the
purpose of strolling around and around the public square of even one of
the smaller cities, to the efforts of a brass band, however good; but
in Mexico one’s acquaintances take an indescribable amount of innocent
pleasure in doing just this on three evenings a week and on Sunday
afternoons as well. And with a simplicity--a democracy--that is a
strange contradiction in a people who have inherited so much
punctilio--such pride of position, they do it together with all the
servants and laborers in town. In the smaller places the men at these
concerts promenade in one direction, while the women, and the women
accompanied by men, revolve in the other; a convenient arrangement that
permits the men to apperceive the charms of the women, and the women to
apperceive the charms of the men without effort or boldness on the part
of either. And everyone is socially so at ease! There is among the rich
and well dressed not the slightest trace of that “certain condescension”
observable, I feel sure, when the duke and the duchess graciously pair
off with the housekeeper and the butler, and among the lower
classes--the maid and men servants, the stone-masons and carpenters, the
cargadores, the clerks, the small shopkeepers--there is neither the
aggressive sense of an equality that does not exist nor a suggestion of
servility. The sons of, say, the governor of the state, and their
companions, will stroll away the evening between two groups of sandaled
Indians with blankets on their shoulders--his daughters in the midst of
a phalanx of laundresses and cooks; the proximity being carried off with
an engaging naturalness, an apparent unawareness of difference on the
part of everyone that is the perfection of good manners. When such
contacts happen with us it is invariably an experiment, never a matter
of course. Our upper classes self-consciously regard themselves as doing
something rather quaint--experiencing a new sensation, while the lower
classes eye them with mixed emotions I have never been able
satisfactorily to analyze.

But the serenatas are the least of it. The plaza is in constant use from
morning until late at night. Ladies stop there on their way home from
church, “dar una vuelta” (to take a turn), as they call it, and to see
and be seen; gentlemen frequently interrupt the labors of the day by
going there to meditate over a cigar; schoolboys find in it a shady,
secluded bench and use it as a study; nurse maids use it as a nursery;
children use its broad, outside walks as a playground; tired workmen use
it as a place of rest. By eleven o’clock at night the whole town will,
at various hours, have passed through it, strolled in it, played, sat,
rested, talked, or thought in it. It is the place to go when in doubt
as to what to do with oneself--the place to investigate, when in doubt
as to where to find some one. The plaza is a kind of social clearing
house--a resource--a solution. I know of nothing quite like it, and
nothing as fertile in the possibilities of innocent diversion. Except
during a downpour of rain, the plaza never disappoints.

I have grown rather tired of reading in magazines that “the City of
Mexico resembles a bit of Paris”; but I have grown much more tired of
the people who have also read it and repeat it as if they had evolved
the comparison unaided--particularly as the City of Mexico doesn’t in
the least resemble a bit of Paris. It resembles absolutely nothing in
the world except itself. To criticise it as having most of the
objectionable features and few of the attractions of a great city would
be unfair; but first telling myself that I _am_ unfair, I always think
of it in those terms. In truth it is a great and wonderful city, and it
grows more wonderful every day; also, I am inclined to believe, more
disagreeable. Unfortunately I did not see it until after I had spent six
months in Mexico--in Vera Cruz, in Jalapa, in Orizaba, in Puebla, in the
depths of the country--and when it finally burst upon me in all its
shallow brilliancy, I felt that I was no longer in Mexico, but without
the compensation of seeming to be somewhere else. I certainly did not
seem to be in Paris. The fact of going to a place for no reason other
than to see what it is like, always stands between me and a proper
appreciation of it. It does, I think, with everyone, although it is not
generally realized and admitted. A certain amount of preoccupation while
visiting a city is essential to receiving just impressions of it. The
formation of judgments should be gradual and unconscious--should
resemble the processes of digestion. I have been in the capital of the
republic half a dozen times, but I have never, so to speak, digested it;
I have merely looked without losing consciousness of the fact that I was
looking, which is conducive to seeing too much on the one hand, and on
the other, too little.

After the jungle and the smaller places, the city impressed me, on
arriving at night, as wonderfully brilliant. There were asphalted
streets, vistas of illuminated shop windows, enormous electric cars, the
inviting glow of theater entrances, a frantic darting of cabs and
automobiles, and swarms of people in a strangely un-Mexican hurry. The
noises and the lights were the noises and the lights of a metropolis.
Even daylight did not, for the first morning and afternoon, have any
appreciable effect upon the general sense of size and effulgence. But
somewhere within forty-eight hours the place, to a mere observer, began
to contract--its glitter became increasingly difficult to discern. It
was not a disappointment exactly, but neither was it “just like a bit of
Paris.” It remained extremely interesting--geographically, historically,
architecturally--but it was oddly lacking in the one quality everybody
is led to believe it has in a superlative degree. Without doubt I shall
be thought trifling to mention it at all. In fact I don’t believe I
_can_ mention it, as I don’t precisely know what it is, and the only way
in which I can hope to make myself even partly clear will sound not only
trifling but foolish. I mean--the City of Mexico lacks the indefinable
quality that makes one either desirous of putting on one’s best clothes,
or regretful that one has not better clothes to put on. To dear reader
this may mean something or it may not. For me it instantly recreates an
atmosphere, recalls certain streets at certain hours in New York, in
Paris, in London--in a few of the less down-at-the-heel, Congoesque
localities of Washington. One may or may not possess the garments in
question. One might not take the trouble to put them on if one did. But
the feeling, I am sure, is known to everyone; the feeling that in some
places there is a pleasantly exacting standard in the amenities of
appearance which one must either approximate, or remain an outsider. In
the City of Mexico one is nowhere subject to such aspirations or
misgivings, in spite of the “palatial residences,” the superb horses,
the weekly display of beauty and fashion. For the place has upon one--it
has at least upon me--the effect of something new and indeterminate and
mongrel, which for a city founded in 1522 is a decidedly curious effect
to exert.

It arises without doubt from the prosperity and growth of the place--the
manner in which it is tearing down and building up and reaching
out--gradually transforming whole streets of old Spanish and Mexican
houses into buildings that are modern and heterogeneous. In its center,
some five or six adjacent streets appear to have been almost wholly so
converted, the final proof of it being that in front of the occasional
elaborately carved old doorway or armorial-bearing façade and
castellated top, one instinctively pauses as in the presence of a
curiosity. Imbedded as they are in unusually unattractive quarters of
purely native origin, these half a dozen business streets suggest a
small city in the heart of a large town. They might, one feels, be
somewhere in Europe, although the multitude of American signs, of
American products, and American residents, by which one is on all sides
confronted, makes it impossible to decide where. There is a surprising
transformation, too, on the left of the Paseo, along the line of the
electric cars on the way to the castle of Chapultepec. (A lady in the
throes of displaying an interest in Mexico exclaimed to me the other
day: “There have been so many earthquakes in Mexico of late that I
suppose Chapultepec is _very_ active!”) The bare, flat territory is
growing an enormous crop of detached dwellings that seek to superimpose
Mexican characteristics upon an American suburban-villa foundation, with
results not always felicitous. Outwardly, at least, much of the city is
being de-Mexicanized, and whereas the traveler, to whom it has been a
gate of entrance, has eyes and adjectives only for its age, its
singularity, its picturesqueness (all of which are indisputably there),
the traveler who sees it last--for whom it is an exit--is more inclined
merely to be discomposed by its uncompleted modernity.

For, not unreasonably, he expects to find there some of the frills of
civilization; luxurious hotels, “smart” restaurants, an embarrassing
choice of cafés and theaters. Such frills as there are, however, succeed
for the most part in being only pretentious and ineffective, like those
a woman tries to make at home after taking notes in front of a
milliner’s window. The leading hotels are all bad--not in the sense of
being uncomfortable, for they are comfortable enough, but in the sense
of purporting to be something they are not. The four I have stayed in
reminded me of a placard I once saw while endeavoring to find something
edible at a railway “eating house” in one of our Western States. “Low
Aim, not Failure is a Crime,” the thing declared with an almost audible
snigger. Surrounded by the second-and third-rate magnificence of the
capital’s best hotels, one longs for the clean, native simplicity of the
provinces. The theaters--that is to say, what one hears and sees in
them--are quite as primitive and tedious as they are elsewhere. A
translated French play now and then proves a temptation, but as it is
customary in Mexican theaters for the prompter to read everybody’s part,
whether he needs assistance or not, in a voice as loud and often louder
than those of the actors, the pleasure of illusion is out of the
question. In fact, it is such a matter of course for the prompter to
yell through a whole play at the top of his lungs (often reading the
lines _after_ the actors instead of ahead of them), that when, as
happens once in a long while, his services are dispensed with, the fact
is proudly advertised! I have several times gleaned from the advance
notices of traveling companies that on such and such a night Señorita
So-and-So would take the leading part in the laughable comedy entitled
“‘Thingumbob,’ sin auxilio de apuntador!” (without the aid of the
prompter.) Nothing in connection with the theater in Mexico has seemed
to me more entertaining than this, unless, perhaps, it is that at the
Teatro Limón in Jalapa, “The management respectfully requests gentlemen
not to bring their firearms to the performances.” Whether or not this
plaintive plea is on the principle of the old “Don’t shoot the organist;
he is doing his best,” I have never been able to learn.

There are saloons in the City of Mexico, hundreds of them, but cafés of
the kind that are such oases in the evenings of France, of Germany, of
Italy, have not (with the exception of the delightful one at the base of
Chapultepec, which, however, is several miles out of town) yet been
invented. In the matter of restaurants (again excepting the distant
Chapultepec) there is no choice whatever, if one happens to be in the
mood to draw a distinction between eating and dining. People talk of the
food at the various hotels, but when speaking of Sylvain’s restaurant
they elegantly refer to the _cuisine_. Sylvain’s is a small, quiet,
dignified, almost somber place where everything, except occasionally the
service, is as wickedly good as it is anywhere in the world, and where
the cost of painting the culinary lily is somewhat less than it is in
establishments of similar excellence in New York (I know of none in the
United States outside of New York) and Europe.

But taking the city as it is (always a sane and sensible line of action)
rather than finding fault with it for not being what one assumed it was
going to be, it has its moments--moments that, as far as my experience
permits me to speak with a semblance of authority, are peculiar to
itself. On Sunday mornings three beautiful allées of the Alameda are
lined with little chairs and roofed with gayly decorated canvas, under
which the world and his wife sit, or very slowly promenade down one side
and up the other in two densely crowded, music-loving streams. It is a
variation of the plaza idea of the smaller places, the variation
consisting in the aloofness of the classes from the masses. And by the
masses in the capital is usually meant, although the distinction is a
loose one, persons who still wear native costume. A cheap, ill-fitting
suit of American cut is a passport to a slightly higher position in the
social scale--which somewhat shoddy conception was responsible a year
ago for the abolishment of the sombreros worn by cabmen. Until then,
these towers of protection had imparted to cab-stands the character and
distinction possessed by no other form of head covering. But now, no
livery having been substituted, the drivers wear dingy felt hats, and
carry battered umbrellas when obliged to sit in the sun.

The band is very large and very good--so large and good, indeed, that
later in the day, at four or five o’clock, as one joins the
ever-increasing throng of carriages, cabs, and automobiles on the Paseo,
one is amazed to discover several others even larger and better, playing
in the magnificent circular glorietas along the drive to Chapultepec. In
the park at the Paseo’s farther end is still another, and whether it
actually does play with more flexibility, feeling, and taste than the
bands I have heard in other countries, or whether the romantic beauty of
the situation--the dusky cypress grove, the steep, craggy rock,
literally dripping with flowers, from which the castle smiles down at
the crowd (it belongs to the smiling, not the frowning family of
castles) the gleam of the lake through aged trees, the happy compromise
between wildness and cultivation--weaves the spell, transmutes brass
into gold, I do not know. The Paseo was begun during the French
intervention, and although its trees and its statues of national
celebrities are alike small for its splendid breadth (the trees,
however, will grow), too much could not be said in praise of the
conception itself, and the manner in which it has been carried out. It
is one of the noblest of avenues and, with the Alameda at one end and
the gardens of Chapultepec at the other, does much in the City of Mexico
to make life worth living there.

The crowd of vehicles increases until there is a compact slow-moving
mass of them creeping past the band stand, into the cypress grove,
around the other side of the park and back again. Many of the carriages
are victorias and landaus of the latest design, the horses drawing them
are superb, the lady occupants are always elaborately dressed and
sometimes notably handsome. So it is odd that most of this wealth and
fashion and beauty seems to shy at servants in livery. There are
equipages with “two men on the box,” complete in every detail, but in
the endless jam of vehicles their number is small. That there are not
more of them seems especially remiss after one has seen the few. For in
English livery a young and good-looking Mexican servant exemplifies more
than any other human being the thing called “style.” As darkness comes
on everyone returns to town to drive in San Francisco Street until half
past eight or nine. This is a most extraordinary sight--the narrow
thoroughfare in the heart of the city so congested with carriages as to
be more or less impassable for two hours--the occupants under the
electric lights more pallid than their powder--the sidewalks packed with
spectators constantly urged by the police to “move on.” It all happens
at the same hour every Sunday, and no one seems to tire.

When I said there were but few “sights” in Mexican cities I made, in the
case of the capital, a mental reservation. Here there are formal,
official, objective points sufficient to keep the intelligent tourist
busy for a week; the cathedral, the Viga canal, the shrine of Guadalupe,
the Monte de Piedad--the National Palace, and the Castle of Chapultepec,
if one cares to measure the red tape necessary to passing within their
historic and deeply interesting portals. Even if one doesn’t, it would,
in my opinion, be a tragedy to leave without seeing, at sunset, the view
of the volcanoes from the top of the rock on which the castle is built;
especially as this can be done by following, without a card of
admission, the steep, winding road past the pretty grottolike entrance
to the President’s elevator, until it ends at the gateway of the famous
military school on the summit. One also goes, of course, to the National
Museum to inspect the small but immensely valuable collection of Aztec
remains (large compared to any other Aztec remains, but small, if one
pauses to recall the remains in general that have remained elsewhere)
and to receive the impression that the pre-Spanish inhabitants of the
country, interesting as they undoubtedly were, had by no means attained
that facility in the various arts which Prescott and other historians
claim for them. After examining their grotesque and terrifying gods, the
incoherent calendar and sacrificial stones, the pottery, the implements,
and the few bits of crude, gold jewelry, one strolls into the small room
in which are left, perhaps, the most tangible evidences of Maximilian’s
“empire,” reflecting that Prescott’s monumental effort is one of the
most entrancing works of fiction one knows. To the unarcheological,
Maximilian’s state coach, almost as overwhelmingly magnificent as the
gilded sledge in which Lillian Russell used to make her entrance in “The
Grand Duchess,” his carriage for ordinary occasions, the saddle he was
in when captured, and the colored fashion plates of his servants’
liveries, are sure to be the museum’s most interesting possessions. Not
without a pardonable touch of malice, in the guise of a grave political
lesson, is the fact that the severely simple, well-worn, eminently
republican vehicle of Benito Juarez is displayed in the same room.

The four or five vast apartments of the Academy of San Carlos (the
national picture gallery) suggests certain aspects of the Louvre, but
their variously sized canvases suggest only the melancholy reflection
that all over the world so many perfectly well-painted pictures are so
perfectly uninteresting. One cannot but except, however, a dozen or more
scattered little landscapes--absolutely faultless examples of the kind
of picture (a very beautiful kind I have grown to think) that the
grandparents of all good Bostonians felt it becoming their means and
station to acquire fifty or sixty years ago in Rome. The Mexican
Government, it no doubt will be surprising to hear, encourages painting
and music by substantial scholarships. Talented students are sent
abroad to study at government expense. One young man I happened to know
was given his opportunity on the strength of an exquisite oil sketch of
the patio of his parents’ house in the white glare of noon. He is in
Paris now, painting pictures of naked women lying on their backs in
vacant lots. Several of them, naturally, have been hung in the Salon.

But the guidebook will enumerate the sights, and the “Seeing Mexico”
electric car will take one to them. Still there is one I do not believe
the book mentions, and I am sure the car does not include. That is the
city itself between five and six o’clock on a fair morning. It several
times has been my good fortune (in disguise) to be obliged to get up at
this hour for the purpose of saying good-by to people who were leaving
on an early train, and in returning all the way on foot from the station
to the Zócalo (as the stupendous square in front of the cathedral is
called) I saw the place, I am happy to remember, in what was literally
as well as figuratively a new light. Beyond a few laborers straggling to
their work, and the men who were making the toilet of the Alameda with
large, green bushes attached to the end of sticks, the city appeared to
be blandly slumbering, and just as the face of some one we know will,
while asleep, surprise us by a rare and unsuspected expression, the
great, unfinished, unsympathetic capital smiled, wisely and a trifle
wearily, in its dreams. It is at this hour, before the mongrel
population has begun to swarm, that one should walk through the Alameda,
inhale the first freshness of the wet roses and lilies, the gardenias
and pansies and heliotrope in the flower market, and, undisturbed among
the trees in front of the majestic cathedral, listen to “the echoed sob
of history.”


THE END


Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

Futhermore=> Furthermore {pg 73}

Oh que bonitas=> Oh qué bonitas {pg 179}

a desert=> a dessert {pg 185}

she as giving=> she was giving {pg 210}

exclaims her hushand=> exclaims her husband {pg 261}

innocent midemeanor=> innocent misdemeanor {pg 272}

of preoccuption while=> of preoccupation while {pg 281}