(Once more providence spared Mexico. In the war of 1914, Germany drafted a secret note proposing an alliance against the United States, offering in return the restitution of what could hardly be called the Mexican Alsace-Lorraine, the states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Utah and Nevada. In a moment of abstraction, Dr Albrecht, a member of the German Embassy, left the dispatch case with the draft in a carriage of the Third Avenue Elevated Railway of New York City. The contents were published in the N. Y. World. Mexico remained neutral.)
All through the pleasant lazy day, the slow southward climb; and, gradually, with it, the country unfolds, ingredients multiply. There are trees now, rain-washed, and fields; young corn growing in small patches on the slopes; and a line and another line of mountains, delicate on the horizon.
This is the state with the name of a saint, San Luís Potosí. Already there are glimpses, too fragmentary, of churches and ruins. We are still sealed in our air-cooling, but on the platforms between coaches one can stand and breathe the warm live air of summer. At any moment now we shall be passing, unrecorded, the Tropic of Cancer. It is here that we enter the Tierra Templada, the mild lands, and it is here that the known Mexico begins, the Mexico of the wonderful climate, the Mexico of history and archæology, the traveller’s Mexico. Here, between the Twenty-second Parallel and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, between the Pacific and the Gulf, on the Mesa, in the two Sierras, down on the hot strips of Coast and the flats of Yucatan: everything happened – the Aztecs and the Conquest, the Silver-rush and Colonial Spain, the Inquisition and the War of Independence, the Nineteenth Century of Revolutions and Hacienda Life, of the Church Rampant and the Church at Bay; General Santa Anna, always treacherous, always defeated, rattling his wooden leg for office, and Juarez tough with Robespierrean obstinacy and virtue; the shadowy reign of Maximilian and the harsh, prosperous reign of Diaz; Civil War, Banditry, Partition of the Land, President Calles and President Cardenas, the Oilrush and the March of US Time.
Here it is then, the heartland of Mexico, the oldest country in the New World, where Montezuma lived in flowered splendour among the lily-ponds and volcanoes of Tenochtitlán; where an arbitrary, finicking and inhuman set of concepts was frozen into some of the world’s most terrifying piles of stone; where Cortez walked a year into the unknown, the blank unmeasured ranges of no return, with a bravery inconceivable in an age of doubt; where the silver was discovered that built the Armada, and the Spanish Viceroys and Judges sat stiff with gold and dignities, wifeless, among the wealth and waste and procrastination of New Spain; where the law’s delay meant four years’ wait for a letter from Madrid, where the plaster images of angels wore Aztec feathers, where bishops burnt mathematical data in public places and priests started a Boston Tea Party because they might not breed silk-worms; where highwaymen shared their spoils with cabinet ministers, where a Stendhalian Indian second-lieutenant had himself crowned Emperor at the age of twenty-four, and Creole ladies went to Mass covered in diamonds leading pet leopards; where nuns lived and died for eighty years in secret cupboards, where squires were knifed in silence at high noon, and women in crinolines sat at banquet among the flies at Vera Cruz to welcome the Austrian Archduke who had come to pit the liberalism of enlightened princes against powers he neither understood nor suspected while the messengers of treason sped already along the uncertain roads; where at the Haciendas the family sat down to dinner thirty every day but the chairs had to be brought in from the bedrooms, where the peon’s yearly wage was paid in small copper coin and the haciendado lost his crop in louis d’or in a week at Monte; where the monuments to the devouring sun are indestructible, where baroque façades are writ in sandstone, and the markets are full of tourists and beads.
Everything happened, and little was changed. There was the confusion, glitter and violence of shifting power but the birth-and deathrates remained unchecked. Indians, always other Indians, move and move about the unending hills with great loads upon their backs, sit and stare in the market-place, hour into hour, then cluster into one of their sudden pilgrimages and slowly swarm over the countryside in a massed crawl in search of a new face of the Mother of God.
Someone has come in to say that we shall be in Mexico City some time tomorrow morning and not very late after all. Everybody is getting restless. I have laid out a patience on a table kindly cleared for me by the rightful occupants. Two boys are dithering by the sides of my seat. They are terribly polite.
‘Please, M’am, what kind of cards are these?’
They are very small patience cards that used to be made in Vienna before the war, and I dare say are made there again.
‘Have you ever seen such cute cards, Jeff? Aren’t they cute? Come and look at these cute cards, Fleecy-May. Miss Carter, M’am, come and look at these cards, have you ever seen such cute cards, Miss Carter, M’am?’
‘Now Braxton, you must not disturb the lady.’
‘What kind of solitaire is this, M’am?’
‘Miss Milligan.’ It is almost my favourite patience and it hardly ever comes out. It needs much concentration.
‘My Grandpa does one just like that.’
‘Oh the Jack, M’am! The Jack of Diamonds on the Black Ten.’
‘The Jack doesn’t go on the Ten, Dope, the Jack goes on the Queen. Doesn’t the Jack go on the Queen, M’am?’
‘Braxton Bragg Jones, will you leave the lady alone,’ says Miss Carter.
‘Oh, not at all,’ I say, ‘it’s perfectly all right. Please.’
It does not come out. I could still use the privilege of waiving, but Braxton Bragg and Jefferson are beginning to get bored with Miss Milligan. I am shamed into starting something quick and simple with a spectacular lay-out.
As the train moves through the evening, the country grows more and more lovely, open and enriched. There are oxen in the fields, mulberry trees make garlands on the slopes, villages and churches stand out pink and gold in an extraordinarily limpid light as though the windows of our carriage were cut in crystal.
I start a conversation – so good for one’s Spanish – with the officer from Monterrey. Our exchange of the civilities takes this form.
‘Where do you come from?’ I am asked.
‘America.’
‘This is America.’
‘From North America.’
‘This is North America.’
‘From the United States.’
‘These are the United States, Estados Unidos Mexicanos.’
‘I see. Oh dear. Then the Señora here,’ I point to E, ‘is what? Not an American? Not a North American? What is she?’
‘Yanqui. La Señora es Yanqui.’
‘But only North Americans are called Yankees … I mean only Americans from the North of the United States … I mean only North Americans from the States … North Americans from the North … I mean only Yankees from the Northern States are called Yankees.’
‘Por favor?’
In happier days it used to be one’s custom to read about a country before one went there. One made out a library list, consulted learned friends, then buckled down through the winter evenings. This time I did nothing of the sort. Yet there is a kind of jumbled residue; I find that at one time and another, here and there, I must have read a certain amount about Mexico. The kind of books that come one’s way through the years, nothing systematic or, except for Madame Calderon, recent. Prescott’s Conquest when I was quite young, and by no means all of it. Cortez’ letters. Volumes on Maximilian and Carlota, none of them really good and all of them fascinating. Travel miscellany of the French Occupation always called something like Le Siège de Puebla: Souvenir d’une Campagne ou Cinq Ans au Mexique par un Officier de Marine en Retraite, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, Attaché à l’Etat-Major du Maréchal Bazaine. Excruciating volumes where sometimes a mad, enchanting detail of farm kitchen or highway robbery pierced through the purple lull of pre-impressionist descriptions où jallissaient les cimes majestueuses et enneigées du vénérable Po
pocatepetl.
The writer who first made people of my generation aware of Mexico as a contemporary reality was D. H. Lawrence in his letters, Mornings in Mexico and The Plumed Serpent. Mornings in Mexico had a lyrical quality, spontaneous, warmed, like a long stroll in the sun. The Plumed Serpent was full of fear and violence, and Lawrence loudly kept the reader’s nose to the grindstone: he had to loathe the crowds in the Bull Ring, he had to be awed by the native ritual. Perhaps the reality, for better or for worse, was Lawrence’s rather than Mexico’s. There were two realities actually. The Mornings were written down in the South at Oaxaca, in the Zapotec country; The Plumed Serpent in the West at Chapala, by a lake. I never liked The Plumed Serpent. It seemed portentous without good reason. Something was being constantly expostulated and one never knew quite what, though at times one was forced into accepting it at its created face-value. And Lawrence’s mysterious Indians, those repositories of power, wisdom and evil, remained after chapters and chapters of protesting very mysterious Indians indeed.
Nor were those stacks of littérature engagée particularly enlightening. One read one book and became convinced that the Mexican Indians lived outside the grip of economic cycles in a wise man’s paradise of handicrafts; one read another and was left with the impression that they were the conscious pioneers of an awakening working-class. There were villains – the Mexican Diet, so lowering; Drink; Oil; the Church; the Persecution of the Church; President Cardenas, so like Stalin and that Man in the White House. Panacea – Partition of the Land; Irrigation; Confiscation of Foreign Holdings; the Church; the Closing of the Church; President Cardenas, so like Lenin and FDR.
The thirties were the wrong time to be much stirred by the Diaz controversy: Good Don Porfirio or the Despot? One knew that he had been a practical man in a vulgar era, a champion of order and a business promoter in a land of sloth and anarchy, who gaoled his opponents, cooked his elections and had no truck with the liberty of the press. It did seem rather mild and remote and old-fashioned; Diaz had been dead a long time and it was all very much in another country. Now I constantly hear his name on the train.
There is an air of expectancy in our coach, a feeling of the last night on board. The boys and girls are singing. The mistresses try to hush them but look awfully pleased themselves. The porter, however, is already banging up the beds. Everybody protests and it does no good. Pillow fights are in the air. I escape to the dining-car for some beer. One of the mistresses – what is called a nice type of woman – has escaped too.
‘What is it really like?’ I ask her.
‘Mexico? You will see marvels,’ she said with a look of illumination.
Prompted by some excitement, I wake and decide to get up at seven which is not my habit. I struggle into some clothes inside my buttoned tent and go to the dining-car where the windows are down at last and the air is flowing in clean and sharp, fresh with morning. And there under an intense light sky lies a shining plain succulent with sugar-cane and corn among the cacti, a bright rich tropical country miraculously laved: green, green, green, the Valley of Mexico.
CHAPTER THREE
Mexico City: First Clash
A day or so must elapse before I can satisfy my curiosity by going out, while the necessary arrangements are making concerning carriages and horses, or mules, servants etc … for there is no walking, which in Mexico is considered wholly unfashionable … nor is it difficult to forsee, even from once passing through the streets, that only the more solid-built English carriages will stand the wear and tear of a Mexican life, and the comparatively flimsy coaches which roll over the well-paved streets of New York, will not endure for any length of time.
MADAME CALDERON DE LA BARCA
THE FIRST impact of Mexico City is physical, immensely physical. Sun, Altitude, Movement, Smells, Noise. And it is inescapable. There is no taking refuge in one more insulating shell, no use sitting in the hotel bedroom fumbling with guide books: it is here, one is in it. A dazzling live sun beats in through a window; geranium scented white-washed cool comes from the patio; ear-drums are fluttering, dizziness fills the head as one is bending over a suitcase, one is eight thousand feet above the sea and the air one breathes is charged with lightness. So dazed, tempted, buoyed, one wanders out and like the stranger at the party who was handed a very large glass of champagne at the door, one floats along the streets in uncertain bliss, swept into rapids of doing, hooting, selling. Everything is agitated, crowded, spilling over; the pavements are narrow and covered with fruit. As one picks one’s way over mangoes and avocado pears, one is tumbled into the gutter by a water-carrier, avoids a Buick saloon and a basin of live charcoal, skips up again scaring a tethered chicken, shies from an exposed deformity and bumps into a Red Indian gentleman in a tight black suit. Now a parrot shrieks at one from an upper window, lottery tickets flutter in one’s face, one’s foot is trodden on by a goat and one’s skirt clutched at by a baby with the face of an idol. A person long confined to the consistent North may well imagine himself returned to one of the large Mediterranean ports, Naples perhaps: there are the people at once lounging and pressing, there is that oozing into the streets of business and domesticity; the show of motor traffic zigzagged by walking beasts; the lumps of country life, peasants and donkey carts, jars and straw, pushing their way along the pavements; there are the overflowing trams, the size and blaze of the Vermouth advertisements, the inky office clothes, the rich open food shops strung with great hams and cheeses, and the shoddy store with the mean bedroom suite; the ragged children, the carved fronts of palaces and the seven gimcrack skyscrapers. Nothing is lacking: monster cafés, Carpet Turks, the plate-glass window of the aeroplane agency, funeral wreaths for sale at every corner and that unconvincing air of urban modernity. One looks, one snuffs, one breathes – familiar, haunting, long-missed, memories and present merge, and for a happy quarter of an hour one is plunged into the loved element of lost travels. Then Something Else creeps in. Something Else was always here. These were not the looks, not the gestures. Where is the openness of Italy, that ready bosom? This summer does not have the Southern warmth, that round hug as from a fellow creature. Here, a vertical sun aims at one’s head like a dagger – how well the Aztecs read its nature – while the layers of the air remain inviolate like mountain streams, cool, fine, flowing, as though refreshed by some bubbling spring. Europe is six thousand miles across the seas and this glacier city in a tropical latitude has never, never been touched by the Mediterranean. In a minor, a comfortable, loop-holed, mitigated way, one faces what Cortez faced in the absolute five hundred years ago: the unknown.
Well what does one do? Where does one begin, where does one turn to first? Here we are in the capital of this immense country and we know nothing of either. We don’t know anybody. We hardly know the language. We have an idea of what there is to see, but we do not know where anything is from where, nor how to get there. We do not have much money to spend, and we have much too much luggage. Winter clothes and clothes for the tropics, town clothes and country clothes and the bottom of our bags are falling out with books. We have a few letters of introduction. They are not promising. From vague friends to their vague friends, Europeans with uncertain addresses who are supposed to have gone to Mexico before the war. Guillermo had pressed a letter into my hand at the station; a German name covered most of the envelope. ‘Great friends,’ he had said, ‘they have had such trouble with their papers.’ E had been told to put her name down at the American Embassy. Nobody seemed to know any Mexicans. No one had written to people running a mine or a sugar place; or heard of some local sage, a Norman Douglas of the Latin Americas, who knew everything, the people and the stories, plants and old brawls, how to keep the bores at bay and where to get good wine.
God be praised we have a roof over our heads and it is not the roof of the Pensión Hernandez. The spirit that made us fall in with Guillermo’s suggestion has waned, already there is a South-wind change. A man on the train told us about a small hotel, Mexican run,
in front of a park. To this we drove from the station, and found a Colonial palace with a weather-beaten pink façade. Of course there were rooms. We have a whole suiteful of them. Bedrooms and sitting-room and dressing-room, and a kind of pantry with a sink, a bathroom and a trunk closet and a cupboard with a sky-light. Everything clean as clean and chock-full of imitation Spanish furniture, straight-backed tapestry chairs, twisty iron lamps with weak bulbs. There is a balcony on to the square and a terrace on to the patio. The patio has a pleasant Moorish shape; it is whitewashed, full of flowers, with a fountain in the middle and goldfish in the fountain, and all of it for thirty shillings a day.
A Visit to Don Otavio Page 3
