The first step obviously is luncheon. Time, too, we were off the streets. That sun! E’s face is a most peculiar colour. One had been warned to take it easy. One had been warned not to drink the water, to keep one’s head covered, to have typhoid injections, beware of chile, stay in after dark, never to touch ice, eat lettuce, butter, shell-fish, goat cheese, cream, uncooked fruit … We turned into a restaurant. I had a small deposit of past tourist Spanish to draw on; it did not flow, but it was equal to ordering the comida corrida, the table d’hôte luncheon. Every table is occupied with what in an Anglo-Saxon country would be a party but here seems just the family. Complexions are either café-au-lait, nourished chestnut, glowing copper, or milky mauve and dirty yellow. Everybody looks either quite exquisite or too monstrous to be true, without any transitional age between flowering ephebe and oozing hippopotamus. The male ephebes are dressed in extreme, skin-tight versions of California sports clothes, shiny, gabardiny, belted slack-suits in ice-cream colours, pistachio and rich chocolate; their elders are compressed in the darkest, dingiest kind of ready-made business outfits, and ladies of all proportions draped in lengths of sleezy material in the more decorative solid colours, blood orange, emerald, chrome yellow, azure. There is a wait of twenty-five minutes, then a succession of courses is deposited before us in a breathless rush. We dip our spoons into the soup, a delicious cream of vegetable that would have done honour to a private house in the French Provinces before the war of 1870, when two small platefuls of rice symmetrically embellished with peas and pimento appear at our elbows.
‘Y aquí la sopa seca.’ The dry soup.
We are still trying to enjoy the wet one, when the eggs are there: two flat, round, brown omelets.
Nothing is whisked away before it is finished, only more and more courses are put in front of us in two waxing semi-circles of cooling dishes. Two spiny fishes covered in tomato sauce. Two platefuls of beef stew with spices. Two bowlfuls of vegetable marrow swimming in fresh cream. Two thin beef-steaks like the soles of children’s shoes. Two platters of lettuce and radishes in an artistic pattern. Two platefuls of bird bones, lean drumstick and pointed wing smeared with some brown substance. Two platefuls of mashed black beans; two saucers with fruit stewed in treacle. A basket of rolls, all slightly sweet; and a stack of tortillas, limp, cold, pallid pancakes made of maize and mortar. We eat heartily of everything. Everything tastes good, nearly everything is good. Only the chicken has given its best to a long and strenuous life and the stock pot, and the stewed fruit is too sticky for anyone above the age of six. The eggs, the stew, the vegetables, the salad, rice and beans are very good indeed. Nothing remotely equals the quality of the soup. We are drinking a bottled beer, called Carta Blanca, and find it excellent. At an early stage of the meal we had been asked whether we desired chocolate or coffee at the end of it, and accordingly a large cupful was placed at once at the end of the line with another basket of frankly sugared rolls. This pan dulce and the coffee are included in the lunch. The bill for the two of us, beer and all, comes to nine pesos, that is something under ten shillings.
It is four o’clock and the sun has not budged from its central position in the sky. We do not fool with hats and shade, but return to the hotel by cab. I close the shutters, lie down, and when I wake I do not know where I am nor where I was just now. I hardly know who I am. These pieces of escaped knowledge seem immediately paramount; hardly awake I struggle to fill the blanks as though it were for air. When identity is cleared, I cannot put a finger on my time, this is When? At last the place, too, clicks into place. It must have taken half a minute, a minute, to catch up with my supposed reality. It seemed much longer. One sleeps like this perhaps two or three times in a life and one never forgets these moments of coming to. That intense pang of regret. For what? The boundless promise of that unfilled space before memory rushed in? Or for the so hermetically forgotten region before waking, for the where-we-were in that sleep which we cannot know but which left such a taste of happiness? This time reaction is reversed, opportunity lies before not behind, adjustment is a joy. I am at the edge of Mexico – I rush to the window. It must have been raining. It has. This is the rainy season, and it does every afternoon from May till October. The square looks washed, water glistens on leaves and the sky is still wildly dramatic like an El Greco landscape. Half the male citizenry is unbuttoning their American mackintoshes and shaking the water out of the brims of their sombreros; the other half is huddling in soaked white cotton pyjamas, their chins and shoulders wrapped in those thin, gaudy horse blankets known as sarapes in the arts and crafts. It is no longer hot, only mild like a spring evening. Two hours ago we were in August, now it is April.
I take a look at a plan and set out. I cross the Alameda, a rather glum squareful of vegetation cherished as a park. It was started, like so much else in Mexico, in honour of some anniversary of Independence, and its plant life seems to be all rubber trees. I come out into Avenida Juarez ablare with juke-box, movie theatre, haberdashery and soft-drink parlour. Our street, Avenida Hidalgo, was handsome if run down – a length of slummy palacios with oddments of Aztec masonry encrusted in their sixteenth-century façades, and no shops but a line of flower stalls selling funeral pièces montées, huge wreaths and crosses worked with beads, filigree and mother-of-pearl skulls. The wrong side of the Alameda, we are later told. The right side looks like the Strand.
I walk on and am stunned by the sight of as amazing a structure as I could ever hope to see. It is the National Theatre and was obviously built by Diaz and in the early nineteen-hundreds. I had best leave the description of this masterpiece of eclecticism to Terry:
El Teatro Nacionál, an imposing composite structure of shimmering marble, precious woods, bronze, stained glass and minor enrichments, stands on the E end of the Alameda … It … cost upwards of thirty-five million pesos. The original plans, the work of the Italian Adamo Boari (who designed the nearby Central Post Office) called for a National Theatre superior to any on the continent … The Palacio presents a strikingly harmonious blend of various architectural styles … When about half-completed the enormously heavy structure began slowly to sink into the spongy subsoil. It has sunk nearly five feet below the original level.
This sounds an optimistic note. But no, the Teatro Nacionál is no iceberg, there are still some three hundred feet to sink.
When I reach the centre it is quite suddenly night. On Avenida Francesco Madero – a murdered President – the shops are bright with neons. Wells Fargo, where I had hoped to collect some letters, keep American hours and are closed. Everything else is open and bustling. After the three-hour lunch, the siesta and the rains, a new lease of business begins at about eight. The food shops are as good as they look. Great sacks of coffee in the bean, York hams and Parma hams, gorgonzolas, olive oil.
‘May I buy all the ham I want?’ I feel compelled to ask.
‘How many hams, Señora?’
I have no intention of leaving this entrancing shop. It is as clean as it is lavish, and they are so polite … One might be at Fortnum’s. Only this is more expansive: that warm smell of roasting coffee and fresh bread. And the wines! Rows and rows of claret, pretty names and sonorous names of Deuxième Crus, Château Gruaud-Larose-Sarget, Château Pichon-Longueville, Château Ducru-Beaucaillou, alas all are expensive. A tray of small hot pasties is brought in, mille feuilles bubbling with butter.
‘¿Qué hay en el interiór?’
‘Anchovy, cheese, chicken.’
I have some done up to take back to E. There is French brandy, Scotch whisky, Campari Bitter, none of them really ruinous, but none of them cheap. Decidedly, the local produce. I get a quart of Bacardi rum, the best, darkest kind. Five pesos. A peso is almost exactly a shilling. And a bottle of Mexican brandy. The name of this unknown quantity is appropriate, Cinco Equis, Five X’s. It costs nine pesos and has three stars. We shall see.
As I leave the shop, a small child relieves me of my parcels. She does it with dignity, hinting that
it is not so much her wish to earn a tip, as that it is not suitable for me to go about the streets with bottles done up in brown paper and half a dozen meat pasties dangling from my fingers by a string. I do not like being fetched and carried for by persons older or smaller than myself, but realise that here I must submit to so comfortable a custom. There are more shops like the first, and thanks to my companion I am now free to enjoy them all. I buy a bottle of tequila (two pesos a quart and every pint guaranteed to give DTs.), succumb to Campari, but resist Spanish Pernod. After these additions I have a suite. But it is always the first child who receives the parcels from my hands and distributes them among the other tots. We have some stilted conversation. A young man is sitting on the pavement outside a branch of His Master’s Voice with six avocado pears for sale. He shifts them before him in a pattern and as they are moved about in the dusk the avocados look like trained mice. I buy his stock. He has nothing to wrap it up in, so my head-child commandeers three passing babies with two empty hands each. The notion of having acquired half a dozen avocado pears for threepence makes me slightly light-headed. I do not buy the two puppies from the man who came rushing out of a church, but I buy a pineapple, a heap of papayas, a straw hat, some plums, some sweets for the porters (squeamishness about plain money to children), some hot chestnuts and some flowers: two armloads of tuberoses, and they too cost next to nothing. As we trail back through the business streets, Bolivar and Cinco del Mayo, and the pitch black Alameda, I feel like the Pied Piper. In the lobby, the children accept their fruit drops and pennies with self-possession. They thank me and express wishes for my well-being in this world and the next, que Dios la proteja, que la vaya bien, hand their parcels to a rather older hotel child and depart like well-bred guests at an Edwardian dinner-party without haste or lingering.
I had the impression that the desk clerk was obscurely distressed by my purchases. Sure enough, ten minutes later we are visited by the housekeeper. She looks Spanish, one of those neat, middle-aged, efficient Latin women who are so much better at their linen cupboards than one can ever hope to be at anything. She does not come to the point. Does Mexico please us?
Oh, indeed.
‘Yes, it is pretty.’ We were not displeased by the rains?
We reassure her.
The hotel is also to our taste?
We try to say how pleased we are.
Yet those flowers. We did not like their flowers?
The vases were already filled with lilac and narcissus. Mexican hotels, that is Mexican-run hotels in Mexico, put flowers in their guest rooms with the towels and the bottle of drinking water. Fresh flowers every day, all year round. I try to explain that we had not been aware of this charming practice. We are not believed. The housekeeper leaves in a confusion of mutual apologies. Then the boy comes in from behind the door and bears away the lilac and narcissi. Next day, a great sheaf of tuberoses appears in my bedroom, and all during our stay there are fresh tuberoses every morning. I love them, and I am delighted.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mexico City: Climates & a Dinner
Glaciers, soleils d’argent, flots nacreux, cieux de braises …
THERE ARE THREE CLIMATIC ZONES in Mexico, one hot, one cold, one temperate. The Tierras Calientes, Fría and Templada. The Hot Zone is very hot, the Cold not as cold as it sounds; the Temperate is celestial perfection.
It is also the most inhabited portion of the Republic – the best part of the Mesa Central lies in Tierra Templada. Yet this plateau is not a temperate place at all: the mildness is luxuriant and dynamic, the temperance the product of the clash between two intemperances. It is a tropical region anomalously cool, combining the geographical extremes of Switzerland and Central Africa, high as Mont-Blanc, equatorial as the Sahara. At sea-level, the Mexican latitudes would be desert and jungle; in the north, the Mexican heights would be Alpine wastes. Joined, these excesses of parallel and altitude created a perennial Simla better than Simla. As a matter of recorded fact, the annual mean temperatures of the Tierra Templada vary between 66° and 73° Fahrenheit. The average rainfall is some 80 inches a year and concentrated within four months, June to October. In terms of human experience this means: it is always warm; it is never hot; it is never cold. It only rains in season and when it does it pours at fixed and regular hours, and afterwards the air again is dry and light, leaves and fields shine, there is no damp, no mud, no dripping, only a great new freshness.
Grey days are unknown. Except for a few minutes of dramatic preparation for the actual burst, the sky is always clear. There is little difference in the weather between July and February; it may get rather warm in the late spring and there are chilly evenings when the wind is blowing from the Coast, yet a person with a change of clothes suitable for an exceptionally fine English June, a blanket and a hut made of waterproof leaves and bamboo canes, would be comfortable day and night from one end of the year to the other. Ownership of a mud cottage and some pine cones for a fire around Christmas would assure a sybaritic existence. This opens, and shuts, economic vistas. A promoter from Germany, Gruening, tells us in his wonderfully detailed History of Mexico, arrived some time in the nineteenth century full of business projects, and departed so disgusted that he wrote a long and angry volume on the natives’ cursed lack of wants, their verdammte Beduerfnigslosigkeit. He should see them now, poor man, sipping their Coca-Colas.
The second zone is at sea-level and frankly tropical. Hundreds of miles of jungle, beach and silted port on the Pacific. The Gulf, with Vera Cruz, the oil trade, coffee fincas and a certain commercial bustle. The deep South: Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche – swamps and forests, the Graham Greene country of The Lawless Roads; Yucatan and the pre-Columbian ruins. The third zone is not a region but a number of separate points of especial altitude. It is a matter of exposure, on the whole every place above seven thousand feet is considered to be Terra Fría.
Thus Mexico City belongs to the cold land. It is, however, a rule unto itself. It has four distinct climates, one for the night – which is bitter – and three for every day. In the morning we are on the coast of New England. It is autumn. A golden late September; the air is brisk but informed with warmth, luminous with sun. The kind of morning when one cannot bear to be in bed, when numbed insects stir to a new lease and one picks up one’s teacup and walks out into the garden. Here the unexpected gift comes every day. Breakfast is laid in the patio: there is fruit, the absurd goldfish are swishing in the fountain and everything smells of geranium; warmth lies gently across one’s shoulders; E has ceased to talk politics, the housekeeper stops to chat, the boy comes running with hot rolls and butter … It is good to be alive.
At eleven, the climate becomes continental. It is the height of summer on the top of a mountain. The sun is burning, brilliant, not to be fooled with; the fond de l’air cool and flowing like fine water. One feels tremendously exhilarated, charged with energy. This is the time of day when I like to pick my way through the streets, walk slowly across the Cathedral Square under the shade of the brim of my hat. This full noon lasts for several hours. Then comes the cloud-burst and through the early evening, rain falls with the sound of rain falling in the hot countries all over the world, in Egypt, in Burma … Later, it is a spring evening in a large city: mild, tenuous, nostalgic, laid out to be long. It is not long. Darkness descends with a sudden extinguishing sweep like the cover on the canary’s cage. Energy ebbs, the heart contracts with fear. This is no time to be out in the streets, this is the hour of return, of the house, the hearth, the familiar ritual. Alors, il s’est retiré dans son intérieur.
The hotel room is desolate, the lamp dim. There is nothing then but the panicked dash for the clean, well-lighted places.
There are none. The current is wretched all over the city. The story goes that the last President’s brother is still selling power across the border. There are no cafés, no pubs, only bars for men and huge pastry-shops. You do not dine before ten, unless you are willing to eat waffles in a pharmacy got up like
a mosque at Sanborn’s astonishing emporium; the cinemas waste no money on illumination; there is going to be a concert on Friday week … Some of the hotel bars are open to women. They are full of tourists and Mexicans emphatically without wives. Besides, this is not a good country to drink in: in daytime one does not want it at all, and at night one wants it too much.
We decide to have dinner at X’s, a French restaurant that enjoys a reputation in the hemisphere. We push through the doors. One night in the early nineteen-thirties, a friend was good enough to take me to a restaurant in London which in its day had been a very famous restaurant indeed. The list of its patrons was literary and glamorous, the wine and cooking admirable; it had a speakeasy cachet. Our elders and betters had talked and drunk there through the nights of the First War when they were young and notorious; they had dined there in the twenties when they were well-known and middle-aged. It had had the honours of at least five contemporary novels. Let us call it Spisa’s. I had never been there, and I believe it was my twentieth birthday, or the eve of my twentieth birthday. When we got to Spisa’s the shutters were down, the dining-room was dark and the owner dying. I mean literally dying. Mr S was on his death-bed and the priest had just been. My friend was a face from the better days, so they were much touched to see her at this hour. She was also a Catholic. They took her in to Mr S’s where she stayed in prayer for some time. I was put into a parlour where an Austrian waiter and an Italian waiter were saying their rosaries. I had no rosary, but the Italian waiter went and found me one. Later they would not let us go but insisted that we have our dinner. They sent out for some chops and lager from the pub in Charlotte Street and made us eat it in the dining-room. There was just one lamp lit above our table, otherwise it was quite dark. As we ate people came to us and whispered to my friend in Italian. I could see she had been weeping. Presently we walked home and later became quite unreasonably gay.
A Visit to Don Otavio Page 4
