“Sink, O Night, among thy mountains, let thy cool, gray shadows fall;Dying brothers, fighting demons, drop thy curtain over all!Through the thickening winter twilight, wide apart the battle rolled,In its sheath the sabre rested, and the cannon’s lips grew cold.“But the noble Mexic women still their holy task pursued,Through that long, dark night of sorrow, worn and faint and lacking food,Over weak and suffering brothers, with a tender care they hung,And the dying foeman blessed them in a strange and Northern tongue.“Not wholly lost, O Father! is this evil world of ours;Upward, through its blood and ashes, spring afresh the Eden flowers;From its smoking hell of battle, Love and Pity send their prayer,And still thy white-winged angels hover dimly in our air!”
“Sink, O Night, among thy mountains, let thy cool, gray shadows fall;Dying brothers, fighting demons, drop thy curtain over all!Through the thickening winter twilight, wide apart the battle rolled,In its sheath the sabre rested, and the cannon’s lips grew cold.“But the noble Mexic women still their holy task pursued,Through that long, dark night of sorrow, worn and faint and lacking food,Over weak and suffering brothers, with a tender care they hung,And the dying foeman blessed them in a strange and Northern tongue.“Not wholly lost, O Father! is this evil world of ours;Upward, through its blood and ashes, spring afresh the Eden flowers;From its smoking hell of battle, Love and Pity send their prayer,And still thy white-winged angels hover dimly in our air!”
“Sink, O Night, among thy mountains, let thy cool, gray shadows fall;Dying brothers, fighting demons, drop thy curtain over all!Through the thickening winter twilight, wide apart the battle rolled,In its sheath the sabre rested, and the cannon’s lips grew cold.
“But the noble Mexic women still their holy task pursued,Through that long, dark night of sorrow, worn and faint and lacking food,Over weak and suffering brothers, with a tender care they hung,And the dying foeman blessed them in a strange and Northern tongue.
“Not wholly lost, O Father! is this evil world of ours;Upward, through its blood and ashes, spring afresh the Eden flowers;From its smoking hell of battle, Love and Pity send their prayer,And still thy white-winged angels hover dimly in our air!”
Near the old French fort is a narrow stream of water, precious as all water is on the plateau. Through irrigating ditches it winds around the hill to the valley, through a winding street, among adobe houses, serving each as it passes, as a laundry, fountain or bath-house. The people on the lower course did not seem to care how the water had been treated before it reached them, but they believe in the old saw: “Where ignorance is bliss,” etc.
Along the hard, sunbaked street we pass and look in upon more squalor than was ever dreamed of in a city. The hovels are built of sun-dried brick, with no windows nor chimneys for ventilation. Within is neither floor nor table nor chair nor bed nor any piece of furniture. Thewomen and children and dogs and men all herd together on the bare floor, or at most on straw mats. Neither shoes nor stockings find a place here. The men wear a presentable suit of white cotton or coarse linen, and are bare-footed, or wear a pair of leather sandals on their feet. These are simply pieces of sole leather under the bottom, held on by thongs passed between the toes to the ankle. Every man is his own shoemaker. The women often wear only a chemisette and neither shoes nor stockings, and when they do wear shoes, they wear no stockings. Privacy is absolutely unknown, in this or any other Mexican city, except in the heart of the city or among foreigners, and it requires the utmost watchfulness on the part of the police to keep a semblance of public decency, even in the city of Mexico; and even then, the Indians are tacitly exempt from punishment for infractions. It must not be understood that this assertion includes everybody, but you must remember that five-sixths of the population is classed as low caste or peons, and strong enough numerically to imprint their influence upon every city in the country. Through almost every city flows a stream of water, and in this hundreds of men and women bathe promiscuously. Some cities require some garment to be worn, but while changing clothes and putting on the bathing suit, they are protected only by the blue sky and the Republic of Mexico.
These hovels are the centers of a great manufacturing industry; within, the women are pounding the fibre from the thick leaves of the aloe or maguey, and making brushes, mats, hammocks, rope and twine. The fibre is verymuch like the unraveled strands of our seagrass rope, and so strong that ordinary wrapping cord must be cut with a knife. The weaving apparatus is crude in the extreme. A post with a windlass and three wooden arms stands in the ground, and a boy turns the windlass. A man walks backwards with a basket of fibre hanging from his neck. Having fastened a thread to each of the arms of the crank, he slowly feeds each lengthening strand as it twists around the windlass. In ten minutes he can twist a thread fifty feet long. The threads are woven any desirable size, the most common being such as is used in making hammocks. As the husband prepares the thread, the wife weaves the mats or hammocks, and goes off to the market to sell. Within such hovels, all the manufacturing of Mexico is carried on, with no machinery anywhere. Of course, without wood, steam is impossible, and water power there is none.
Saltillo is famed for one thing above all others, and that is the beauty of its zerapes. A zerape is a cross between a cloak, a blanket, a shawl and a mat, because it is used for all these. It is the one garment a Mexican prizes next to his hat, thesine qua nonof his attire. The zerape is a hand-woven blanket, with figures and colors that would make Pharaoh’s adopted son turn green with envy. They are woven and worn all over Mexico, but those made in Saltillo are a thing of beauty and a joy forever, to the happy possessor. When the Mexican starts out in the morning, his zerape is folded across his shoulder with the fringed ends nearly touching the ground. If he is hunting work, or going to work, or walking for pleasure,or holding up the sunny side of a street corner to keep it from falling down, the zerape is always there. If he sits down, he either sits upon that zerape or fondly folds it across his lap. When night comes, if he has a home, he spreads that zerape on the dirt floor for his bed. If he has no home, a nice soft corner of the stone pavement is carpeted with his zerape. When morning comes, he goes through the same programme. Many slit a hole through the center and stick their heads through. Those who cannot buy, take an old salt sack and rip it up, and presto! a zerape. In the Torrid Zone on the coast, when the hot sun melts the asphalt pavements, an Indian may be seen comfortably smoking his cigarette, his head covered with a woolen sombrero weighted down with silver ornaments, and several yards of woolen zerape covering his reeking body.
Ephraim is wedded to his idols. If the men are wedded to the zerape, the women are equally inseparable from therebosa. Therebosais a shawl, nothing more—that is from appearance, but with the Mexican women and girls, it is second self. The common gray, cotton article is called arebosa, the finer black article is atapalo, while the lace fabrication is amantilla, but it is of therebosathat we now speak. Hats nor bonnets are ever worn by the women at any time or place, therebosais used instead. It is drawn across the brow until the ends hang down below the waist, then one end is thrown across the opposite shoulder, protecting the neck and making a drapery both picturesque and pleasing. Sometimes she wears it around her shoulders as a shawl. If she has a baby, shelets the slack out in the back, loops the youngster in it and takes a half hitch with the ends in front. It is an every day sight to see caravans of women come to town with large baskets of fruit on their heads, and the black-eyed youngsters tied in therebosaand peeping over the mother’s shoulder. When the mothers sit by the roadside to rest the “Kids” are not unwrapped, but they usually keep the peace until released.
Therebosais the first garment a girl learns to wear, and I might add, until she is quite large it is often the only one. The most remarkable thing about it is, they never cease wearing them. Peep into these hovels, and every woman and girl child will be sitting listlessly on the stone floor, or busily at work with head and ears tightly wrapped up, their sparkling eyes and pleasant faces alone showing. But draw a camera on them, presto! every face is instantly covered. In walking, one or both hands is always engaged in holding the folds under the chin, as no shawl pins are used. The girl of fashion is a combination of painted face, India inked eyebrows and bella-donna eyes, but the ordinary middle class girls have rare beauty sometimes, and a series of faces would make “mighty interesting reading,” but no camera that I have seen can get their faces, unless covered with arebosa.
The prevailing color ofrebosasis as much a distinctive emblem of caste, as any rule in the social decalogue. No high caste woman would dare be seen with a grayrebosa, and though a low caste might be able to buy one of the more costly black ones, I have never seen one do so,and the observance of these social adjuncts is as unchanging as the laws of the Medes and Persians.
Saltillo as seen from the rear is disappointing. Most towns are painted white, but here the dull, wearied-looking sun-baked adobe houses are not pleasing. We visit a high school for young ladies and wonder that all this youthful beauty can bide this dull town, and that reminds me that there is not a mixed school in all Mexico, even the kindergartens being separate. You do not need to visit the primary schools, as you can hear all you wish a block away. The noise that first greets you will remind you of the last inning at the base-ball park when everybody is asking who killed the umpire. There may be three hundred children and each one is studying at the top of his voice, if voices ever have top and bottom, and the priests are stalking among them. The catechism is the first book placed in the hands of the child, and his duty to the church, the priest and the pope, are the first lines he ever learns. This statement will help make plain some other things I shall say later about the religious status of the country.
In the early gray of the July morning, with the chilling fog settling all around us, we draw our heavy wraps about us and leave with no regrets Saltillo, “The Stepping Stone.” We have indeed stepped upon the plateau, and for a hundred and fifty miles the track is as straight as a carpenter’s rule. What a monotony! Desert, yucca palms, cactus, dust. Not a living thing but cactus. No birds, no insects, no rabbits, no snakes—nothing that breathes claims thisfor a home. The railroad authorities did not plan this road for the beauty of its landscape, but for the economy of building. Ten thousand feet above sea-level lies the back-bone of the Cordilleras, and the plain is as level as a floor.
For twelve hundred miles a carriage can travel here without making a road, so while the journey is disappointing to the tourist, the railroad company pats itself on the back for long-headedness.
Away in the distance we see a tiny curl of white dust no larger than a man’s hand, and reaching to heaven. That is the sign of the burro pack-team bearing their bundles of fagots for the hungry maw of the locomotive. Poor little donkeys, not weighing more than three hundred pounds, without bridle or saddle or harness or halter, and without food except as they can argue with the thorns and thistles by the wayside, follow, follow forever the narrow trail to the wood-pile by the railroad track, drop their burden and return.
Surely the earth is round to the donkey. When he was no larger than a kid, he followed his mother along the same trail until he got large enough to carry a pack-saddle himself. That wearied, discouraged look he has always had, even to the twentieth generation. It is a part of his inheritance. He never had any frisky colt days in a pasture, nor did he have to “be broke” to harness when he reached the state of Coahuila and donkeyhood. In fact he was never born, but like Topsy “just growed up,” a burden-bearing burro. From the Rio Grande to Yucatan, he has gridironed the country and impressed it with his stamp. He and his companions have trailed, Indian file, loaded to the guards with silver ore, until his sharp little feet cut the trail so deep that his burden was raked off by the banks. He then started a new trail by the side of that until his little legs are out of sight in the trails cut by his feet in the solid rock; and then repeats, until you may count twenty or more little parallel gridiron paths for hundreds of miles. He has worn through solid rock in a dozen parallel paths, and only the final recorder in the burro paradise can tell how many weary journeys he had to make to write his name so well.
Neither the trolley car nor the bicycle will ever make his shadow grow less; he is a part of the country, as indispensable as water itself. While the Indians load the tender with wood, I follow the fireman and brakeman into the chaparral. They have a pail of water, a wicker basket, and a long stick with a string lasso on the end, and are hunting tarantulas. Being something of a naturalist myself, I was well acquainted with tarantulas, and I promptly told them I had not lost any tarantulas, and if they had nothing better to lose than tarantulas, they needed guardians. To those who have not a speaking acquaintance with his vitriolic majesty, I will say it is a huge hairy spider that will cover the bottom of a tea-cup, and when placed in a saucer is able to grasp the edge all round, so great is the spread of its claws. It is very vindictive and can leap up to a man’s face when making close acquaintance. In Texas I have known its bite to kill a person in twelve hours. I saw one catch a chicken under the wing, and the chicken fell within one minute.
However, I joined the hunters. We first looked for a hole in the ground, and as the hole denotes the size of the tarantula, only the larger ones were sought. When a hole about the circumference of a half dollar was found, one man guarded that with the stick and basket, while the other sought the outlet, for they always have two entrances to their homes. When it was found, the water was poured in, and out he came into the lasso placed over the other hole—and is caught dangling at the end of the stick. What is he good for? To sell. The Mexican is the greatest gambler this side of Monte Carlo. Tomorrow is the fiesta of his patron saint, and he will celebrate. As every one chooses a saint to his liking, and churches and towns do likewise—there is scarcely a day in the calendar that is not somebody’s saint day. Tomorrow he will “knock off” from work, go to the bull-ring and bet his money on the bull or the man, and whichever one gets killed, he is so much loser or winner. He goes to the cock-pit and stakes again, and a bird soon spears another through with his gaff; but a tarantula fight! Bravo! that is a sport royal. In the bull-ring, the bull sometimes gets wounded and bellows to be allowed to go home to his mother. In the cock-pit, a bird gets a gaff pinned through his upper works and decides to settle the fight by arbitration; but a tarantula,Caramba!they simply eat each other up. The only way you can lose money is that the other fellow’s cannibal will eat yours first.
The engineer blows his whistle and calls us in, and we trail again through the white dust to Catorce, a hundred and fifty miles as the crowflies, only no crow ever flies over this Sodom and Gomorrah. Catorce means fourteen, as the mines were discovered by a band of brigands numbering fourteen. You get off at the station and see nothing but a station and three or four pack trains of burros that have just brought in a load of silver. Follow their gridiron trail, and eight miles further you come to Catorce, a city of from ten to twenty thousand people, according to the output of silver, and these people have never heard the rumble of wheels. Ore was first found here in 1790, and for thirty years the silver output was over three million dollars yearly.
There are hundreds of these mines here, and the drainage tunnel of the San Augustin mine runs into the mountain more than a mile and a half and cost a million and a half dollars. Up, up you climb the rocky sides of the mountain, but there is no other way to reach Catorce, and when there, you are in one of the richest spots on earth, where the ore often assays $15,000 to the ton. The streets run forty-five degrees one way, and I suppose they ought to run the same coming back, but if you let go your hold on the street corners, you would fall out of town so fast you could not measure the angle. The only level place in town of course has a plaza and a very fine cathedral. I have made a similar statement several times, which needs no repetition. Whenever you enter a Mexican town you will always find “A very fine plaza and a very fine cathedral.” That copyright phrase will fit anywhere, with sometimes a modification ofveryand a change of church for cathedral.
Catorce is the last town in the temperate zone.A few miles beyond, standing solitary upon the desert like Lot’s wife in the geography, is a pyramid erected by the railroad company. It marks the exact line of the Tropic of Cancer. On the north the legend reads:—
TROPICO DE CANCER.ZONA TEMPLADA.
on the south,
TROPICO DE CANCER.ZONA TORRIDA.
Out of respect to your early teaching in geography you ought to perspire and be exceeding warm in the Torrid Zone, and see all kinds of gay-plumaged birds and jungles of flowers, but the hammer of the iconoclast has shattered one of your long cherished dreams.
The sun was shining upon a landscape over which clouds never hover. You pull your overcoat around you on this cold July day, and look through your closed windows for the other canard—the landscape. The landscape is all there according to the book, and for that you are thankful, but how changed! As far as the eye can reach and ten times farther are beautiful rock-colored rocks, and dust-colored dust and thorny thorns and dust-hidden sky. Where are the flowers? Never were any. And the birds? Never will be any. Not a blade of grass nor a chirp of insect. For forty miles around, or as far as the eye can reach is the dry, parched dust, and the chaparral, sere and yellow.
After a hundred and fifty miles of desert, how welcome is the oasis! Bocas is its name, and the last stopping-place before we reach the great city of San Luis Potosi.
Las Bocas is a fine hacienda and recalls oldfeudal times along the Rhine. Here is a fine old castle with its walled enclosure, its beautiful arched bridge and its herds and flocks and gardens and retinue. By the railroad track is a distillery for making liquid lava from the aloe or maguey plant, which is sold under the name of mescal for the purpose of making men drunk. Those who know say it will eat the lining out of a lead-pipe stomach. I saw a case of delirium tremens which it is guaranteed to give, and I can only liken it to a caged hyena after Lent.
Away in the distance is the snow-white trail of a stone wall, which winds its tortuous path many leagues away to encircle the hacienda de Las Bocas, while within its bounds and feeding upon the rocks and thorns are the thousands of cattle that maintain its opulence. How that kind of food can work such wonders is beyond my ken. When I was in school I learned that cattle have four stomachs. I think one would be quite sufficient for all the food a cow can get from a cactus bush, and a couple of millstones might be helpful in digesting the rocks. No one told me that the rocks were positively a part of the bill of fare, but I pointed to ten miles of rocks enclosed by a wall and asked a man why they fenced in the rocks, and he said it was a pasture, and he ought to know, as he is a native and to the manner born.
Four hundred and seventy-five miles from the Rio Grande, and the only trees seen were upon the little oases watered by tiny streams. We leave the plateau and climb the mountain into the city of San Luis de Potosi.
AND no more satisfactory city can be visited than San Luis, situated in the crater of a fertile valley, while its suburbs extend to the rich silver mines of the mountains which give it name.
The mines have been worked over three hundred years, but the city is only two hundred years old. The mines were discovered to the Spaniards by a pious monk, who named them Potosi, because of the resemblance to the mines of Peru.
Three million dollars annually, are mined. A very unusual thing for Mexico, the railroad station is in the heart of the city. Seventy-five thousand people make their home here, and the law requires all houses to be kept freshly painted; and what a restful revelation it is, with asphalt pavements swept clean each night, and hotels that make a traveler glad. The only drawback to complete happiness is a lack of water. Most cities here draw their water from the mountains in aqueducts, but San Luis has outgrown its supply.
At the public fountains, a stream of water-carriers by hundred stand patiently in line to fill their vessels from the tiny, discouraged stream trickling from the Dolphin’s mouth, and the police stand guard to see that all are served in the order of arrival. All day and all night this pitiful waiting goes on forever. It is like buying tickets for the Symphony concerts in Boston, where the people come before day and buy choice places in the long line of earnest waiters. The water is free, but the successful ones sell to those in the city who do not care to enter the crush, or to the hotels and wealthy ones who can buy. All kinds of vessels are used, but the preference is given to the five-gallon cans that brought kerosene into the city.
With two of these fastened to a shoulder yoke, the men peddle the water at three cents a can. With the women, the favorite is the large Egyptian model earthenware calledolla. With this poised gracefully on one shoulder and elbow, and the opposite hand held across the head to balance, it completes one of the most picturesque scenes so common here. Rebecca at the Well has simply stepped out of the old picture book and assumed her ancient calling. The feature of the profession, however, is a man with a nondescript wheel-barrow which no man can describe.
Rainfall is quite plentiful here, but the porous amygdaloid rocks can not hold it. At present an American citizen is boring an artesian well, and the interest displayed by the citizens is remarkable. All day long hundreds of anxious watchers will stand around the drill, evincing the same interest we used to show at our boarding house when the first strawberry short-cakeof the season was cut, and the anxious boarders were watching to see who would get the strawberry.
The burro train has lost its hold upon San Luis. For three hundred years all the silver was carried to the sea, two hundred and seventy-five miles away, by burros, but now, with two railroads, things have changed. The Mexican National leads to the capital, the Mexican Central to the bay of Tampico.
Here are many fine buildings to see; the Governor’s palace, palace of justice, State capitol, the museum, the library with a hundred thousand volumes, cathedral, and the churches of Carmen, Merced, San Augustin, San Francisco, Military College, and theTeatro de la Paz, one of the finest opera houses in the country.
As in all the cities, the street ears start from the main Plaza, and from here you may visit Guadalupe, Tequisquiapan, the baths of La Soledad, Axcala and Santiago.
In the rainy season, the street cars bear this legend: “There is water in the river.” As a matter of course, the cars do a land-office business as long as the water lasts. The cars lead to thePaseo, a beautiful shaded avenue two miles long, asphalt pavements, and fountains at either end, with the usual scramble for water.
At the extreme end is the church of Guadalupe, with two tall towers, and a fine clock presented by the king of Spain, in return for the gift of the largest single piece of silver ore ever taken from a mine—the mine of San Pedro.
The city of San Luis Potosi is building a hall that is to be the eighth wonder of the world. It has cost millions and will cost millions more. Seven years ago a dozen skilled stonemasons from Pennsylvania were imported to do the ornamental carving on the front. One Fourth of July a member of the party got drunk and killed a Mexican. He was tried and condemned to be shot.
Then arose the certainty that with him in the grave there would be no one to do the fancy carving on the City Hall, so it was decided to keep him at work and shoot him when he had finished. Every day this workman hangs like a fly against the great white wall and pecks away at gargoyles and griffins’ heads, while a file of soldiers stand in the streets looking at him.
His life ends with his job, and the Mexicans say he is the most deliberate workman in the world. At the present rate of progress, by the best obtainable calculations, the front of the City Hall will be sufficiently scrolled and carved about the middle of 1950. All the churches contain valuable paintings.
The most remarkable thing about these cities, there is no noise. There is no steam, no manufactories, no wagons, no drays, and as the people go without shoes, there is no noise of any kind. You may sit on the busiest street here and close your eyes, and feel all the quiet and comfort of a cemetery. Those who like to sleep late in the morning can better appreciate this. The days and nights are of equal length, and you could stop in the most populous hotel in the city and sleep until ten o’clock in the day. No bell-boy, no breakfast bell; just quiet. The one exception to noise is the market place; it was made for noise, and is different from all the others in the country.
In other cities there are several market places which relieve the congestion, but here there is but one. Before daylight the hubbub begins and lasts till noon, and the main building is soon crowded, and its overflow spreads to the four streets which pass it. There are no passing vehicles, so from curb to curb are hundreds of women sitting flat upon the ground with their grayrebosasaround their heads, and their scanty wares spread about. They sell everything, and the streets are redolent with unknown and unsavory odors from the charcoal braziers, from which the designing maid or matron offers her concoctions to the unsuspecting wayfarer.
Of course you try some of these experiments; you do not know what you are eating, but it never kills. This compels me to say that very, very few people eat at home, but go to the market for their meals, going from one stall to the other. Another market feature, green corn is always offered cooked, and the same is true of sweet potatoes. Some people buy their supplies and take them home to be cooked, but green corn and potatoes never. They are both boiled with their jackets on, and if a vendor has a bushel, he or she boils the whole and stacks it up on the pavement, and it may be five or six hours later, the purchaser buys an ear and hulls the grains off and eats his dinner with no salt or accompaniment whatever.
The market is never closed for three hundred and sixty five days in the year. In many stalls are wholesale dealers who supply the retailers. In unloading the corn or grain to put it in bins, there will be half a dozen women or children in the dust under the cart, scrambling for thegrains as they fall from the sacks. When the cart has gone, they winnow all the dust through their hands looking for the missing grain.
These market gatherings are the simon-pure article of the native element, unadulterated by foreign influence. Here are Indians from the mountains, peons from the haciendas and peasants from the surrounding country and the gentry from the city, all hobnobbing together. The usual dress of these women vendors is startling. The Indians wear a string of beads around their necks and one or two yards of coarse cloth fastened wherever it will fit best, and they are dressed up. The peasants wear a string of beads and a chemise which commences too late above and stops too soon below, and all are barefoot. The high-caste women all dress in American or French styles, except that they wear no head gear but their own black hair, and they wear the most ill fitting high-heel, needle-pointed shoes that are made. The national color for Spanish and Mexican women is black. Meet a hundred ladies at a time, and every dress without exception is jet. I rather think it is vanity. We put salt on watermelon to enhance its sweetness by comparison, and so with black hair, black dress and fair skin, the contrast I think was the final end sought.
Elite society never appears on the street here till six o’clock, unless a fiesta or church service calls it out; and before that hour, what careful preparation is had? The hair is usually braided and let alone. A quantity of India ink along the eyebrows make a blacken rapportwith the hair, and a little belladonna in the eyes will add a sparkle that will wither up men’s soulsand scatter them prone at her feet—metaphorically speaking, and when those cheeks have been kalsomined—I mean whitewashed—that is—painted, if the dear ladies will spare my life for mentioning it, and when mi-lady has thus performed her renovation—I mean toilet, and placed her diamonds on her neck where they will show best, and wrapped as to her shoulders with the diaphanous mantilla and steps under the electric light, I tell you she is—is indescribable.
The dress of the men of the lower class is just a kaleidoscope, that’s all. Some of the Indians are dressed like their women, in their long hair and a strip of cloth hung where it hangs the best. The high top straw sombrero or the Panama hat with a string under the chin is the prevailing style, although the more costly woolen hat is represented. White cotton and brown linen constitute the dress goods.
The usual cut of coat is a short jacket or jumper. Others wear a long sack coat, and instead of buttoning it they gather the two corners together and tie them in a knot. This distinctive style has a kind of freemasonry importance in which I was never initiated. Then his pantaloons are white, with the bottom widened immensely. The shepherds have a style all their own. They have a buckskin jacket cut short, and buckskin pantaloons cut long, with a row of buttons on the outside. Then he takes his knife and slits the legs inside and out, from the knee down, then he gathers up the ends and tucks them under his belt, and depends upon his underwear for effect on dress parade. He always scores. Some people might say helooks badly, but with his clan he is in very correct form and why should you object?
The porters, or public drays dress in white cotton, with one leg of their pants rolled up to the knee, leaving the leg bare.
Around his neck he wears a large badge like a policeman’s, with his official number, showing that he is licensed to carry packages, from express money orders to upright pianos. He is the only express wagon here, and is absolutely reliable. He will shoulder your Saratoga and trot a mile without resting. I recall the case of one who stumbled with an American drummer’s trunk on his back, and when the street commissioners gathered up his remains, they were spread over two square yards of pavement. P. S. the trunk was not injured.
Four of thesecargadorswill carry your piano to any part of the city. For moving household goods, they have vans made on the plan of a hospital stretcher, with a man in the shafts at each end, and a rope passing over his shoulders to the shafts, and they will carry a dray load each time. Two dozen chairs by actual count is what I have seen one man carry. The mule has been promoted to the street car, out of respect to the two-legged express wagon.
The dress of the cow-boy and rural police is something to admire. A high sombrero, costing from twelve to fifty dollars, weighted down with monograms and silver ornament.
Leather or buckskin suit with silver buttons from boots to neckband. Silver spurs and silver bridle bits. Saddle whose every piece of ornament is solid silver, a horse-hair lariat, and ifhe is aRurale, a rifle, and he sits his horse like a centaur.
The dude is in a class alone, but he counts one when on dress parade. A tall, black sombrero with silver ornaments. Scarlet jacket, reaching to the waist, and sprayed with silver braid in fantastic designs. Buckskin pantaloons, flaring at the bottom and silver buttons all the way up, and along-side a series of cross-section slashes, interwoven with a beautiful ribbon from spur to waistband. Silver spur and bridle bit, a saddle worth as much as the horse, and a bright nickel-plated revolver buckled around his waist.
At the fashionable hour for promenade, he mounts his horse, and slowly rides over the town and graciously permits the populace to admire him. I think he ought to be knighted for his liberality. Most people who go to that much trouble to shine, generally make you buy a dollar theater ticket for the pleasure of looking at him, strains his constitution and bylaws showing off, and cannot ride a horse at all.
But commend me to the Mexican dude. After he has set the town agog, he turns up a certain avenue, which contains a certain house, projecting from which is a balcony, in which dwells the only girl in town, and, after he has passed in all his silent glory, he throws bouquets at himself for the wonderful impression he has made, and then goes home to undress. Earth cannot hold him much longer. I fear his own ardor and faith in himself will finally sublimate him, but our loss is heaven’s gain. The children; there are no children; they are just vest-pocket editions of old folks. Usually they are dressedin their innocence, but that is a quality of goods that does not last long here. When a boy is old enough to wear anything else, it is exactly like his father’s, tall sombrero, pants that strike his heels, and a red sash around his waist. Suspenders are not worn here. When a girl is no longer innocent, she dresses in arebosa. By wrapping it around her head it reaches her feet. They don’t have much time to be little for they marry at eleven and twelve. The upper class men, of course dress as Americans, but Paris sets the fashion in Mexico always. All these things you see at the market in San Luis Potosi, but you see them in hundreds, while I have only described them as individuals, and have not half turned the kaleidoscope yet.
The streets must be all vacated by eleven o’clock at night, and when the hour for closing has arrived, nothing is locked up. The thousand and one vendors have no care for their goods. A piece of canvas is spread over them and a brickbat placed on to keep the wind from interfering, and they go home.
The policeman does the rest—he never sleeps. Crime does not pay in Mexico. The laws are as swift as a bolt of Jupiter. A person is arrested this morning, tried and shot before night. They waste no sentiment on criminals and they are too expensive to feed.
Another curious custom is, the money received during the day must always be in sight. A wooden tray on top of a pile of goods holds the receipts of the entire day and not a piece is hidden. The taxation law is very rigid, and a certain per cent. of all sales is collected by the city, and the inspector must be always free tolook at your sales and figure on his per cent.
As hard as the law is on poor people, you never hear them complain. They respect the laws even though they do not like them. Just imagine an American counting up square and even with a tax collector on a day’s sale! When Bellamy gets his colony in working order and invites me to come and see the wonder of the twentieth century, that is the sight I want to see.
The wearing of pistols here is not a sign of revolution. Probably it is not loaded, and a Mexican would not shoot you for anything. If his liver was out of order to the extent of wanting your blood, he would take his knife and reduce you to sausage meat, but shoot you, never. That is not his style. A pistol is as much an article of full dress as a pair of gloves would be in America, or a tin sword is to our military organizations.
When Mexico had her monthly revolution, and when bandits used to come in and take the town, every man had to go armed in order to find himself after the cyclone; but she has comparative peace now, yet wearing pistols for a hundred years has made it quite a habit. I went on an excursion with a party of harmless looking Mexicans, and we tried to sit down on a bench, and every man and boy of them had to unload his cannon pocket before he could sit down—and the other fellow too.
At your work, the law supposes you to be unarmed, but in making a journey, though it be the length of a street, you are allowed to arm against bandits. On every first and second-class car, ten out of every dozen men will carry hugerevolvers, but you might live there for months and never hear of a person getting shot.
In this great city, everything is so quiet you are constantly enquiring if anything has happened, or is happening, or has any likelihood of happening; you cannot understand the absence of noise and bustle.
It finally dawns upon you that the native never hurries. He has mastered the ethics of rest, he never exerts himself. He does so delight to sit himself down long and often and ponder over the wear and tear of the foreigner. The state feels as he does about it, so it has placed comfortable seats everywhere, where the native can rest. Just rest. He never “Hellos” to an acquaintance across the street; if he wishes to speak, he motions with his hand. All this saves wear and tear, and by this means, the nation has saved vast stores of conservated energy to use in the next world. He has been saving energy for four hundred years and has never let any of it out.
There is no “hello” on the street, and no vehicles, and everybody is barefooted, so there is no noise. They don’t “hello” in the telephone. They talk some sweet, musical Spanish in it that is a real pleasure to listen to. Instead of thundering back “Who’s that?” he sweetly says “Quien habla?”—Who speaks?
The national watchword is, “Never do to-day what you can possibly put off till to-morrow.” An excursion agent went to a large hotel and asked what were the rates per day. “Four dollars,” said the major-domo. “But my party contains seventy people, what rates do we get for the party?” “Four dollars and a halfeach, more trouble.” The same in buying goods. The man who buys wholesale quantities has to pay for the extra trouble he causes the clerks.
“Poco tiempo,”—wait a little, is the national leveler for all difficulties and broken contracts. You order a suit of clothes to be delivered tomorrow. Tomorrow never comes—neither do the clothes, You get down your dictionary and hunt up all the cuss words you can command, and hurl them at that tailor, and expect to see him shrivel up before you. Does he? Not a shrivel! He offers you a cigarette, carefully rolls one for himself and forces wreaths of smoke through his nostrils, and turning to you says: “Poco tiempo”—what’s your hurry?Mananawill do, tomorrow, tomorrow,mananacomes, and also anotherpoco tiempo.
You engage a guide and want to go see a place you have come a thousand miles to see, and want to start this afternoon. “Well, why notmanana? YouAmericanosdo hurry through life so!” He works two days, carving a wonderful cane he sells for a quarter. His two daystiempocount for nothing. He lives in yesterday and today, but never in tomorrow. He will wait for the millennium but will never go to meet it. He will never hurry from the comforts of today into anxieties of tomorrow.Manana, the panacea for all ills, theNirvanah.
The language of gesture has a new meaning here. When a person wants you to approach him, he frantically motions you away. When you see your lady acquaintance across the street, and she motions with her fingers and thumb for you to come to her, you must read it backwardsbecause she does not mean it, she is simply recognizing you.
When ladies meet and re-enact the great American humbug of miscellaneous kissing, it is always given and received on the cheek. When two gentlemen meet, they rush into each others arms and rapidly pat each other on the back with the right hand, and finally shake hands, and if they meet each other a dozen times a day, they effusively shake.
At the railway station, the departing friend embraces, pats, shakes, and jumps aboard, If the train is delayed, he gets out again and talks until the conductor cries, “Vamanos!” then he goes through the same performance again with each of his dozen friends, and when half a dozen lugubrious groups are similarly engaged, the conductor simply waits until they have finished.
Indeed, to such an extent does this leave-taking interfere with business that signs are placed up asking the people not to delay business by their long salutations.
At Guanajuato the following sign is tacked up:—“Se suplica a los pasajeros eviten las despididas y saludos prolongadosque retarder la marcha de los carros.”
In all places the innate politeness and courtesy of the people show a study for your comfort. In walking, your Mexican friend insists that you walk on the inside next the wall, while he walks next the street. In accepting an invitation for a carriage drive, you must enter first and accept the rear seat; but if a lady invites a gentleman he is not supposed to accept the rear seat when offered. After the drive your host will alight first and assist you. In the street car, thegentlemen always offer their places to ladies, and salute all passengers when entering and leaving the ear. People have said they also shake hands with the driver, but I do not believe all I hear.
When you are introduced to a gentleman, he tells you his house and all his belongings are yours, giving you the street and number, and says: “Now you know where your house is.” If you admire his horse or his paintings or his wife, he says: “Take them, they are yours.” To be sure you are not expected to take him too literally, but it shows that the French are not the only people who claim politeness as a national trait.
If you are invited to his house for refreshments, you are to precede your host on entering, but he will precede to the door when you signify your readiness to depart.
The salutation on the street is “adios,” the equivalent of the Frenchadieu, but “buenos dias,” “buenos tardes,” and “buenos noches” are also used for good morning, etc., and are always used in the plural. Why, the deponent sayeth not. One of the adjuncts of an introduction, is for the native to offer his cigarette case; and to refuse the invitation to smoke, is to also refuse the introduction, and this little custom nearly brought trouble upon the writer’s head. His early education had been sadly neglected, and the manly art of smoking had never been taught him, so he was forced to practice deception on his kind friends to keep the peace. The deadly cigarette is rolled in the thin innershuck of the Indian corn, and holds its shape whether filled or not, so I filled my pocket with empty cases. When my new-made friend asked that Ismoke with him the pipe of peace, I replied cordially, “Sí Señor,” and took the proffered cigarette, and with the same hand felt in my pocket for a match and exchanged the loaded cigarette for a harmless one, and, presto! I am in good form and all goes merry as a marriage bell. He tells me his house, his sisters and all he has are mine for ever, and I quietly add another item to my million dollar possessions. In one summer I have acquired more wealth and real estate and beautiful maidens by actual gift, than Jay G. and Brigham Y. acquired in a lifetime.
Already I have become a bloated aristocrat, and daily receive and give away haciendas that cover nine square leagues of land.
The custom-house officials already have their eye on me, and are even now figuring on the dividends they will declare when I attempt to leave the country, but every bitter has its antidote, so I am congratulating myself on the change of dates. A few years ago I was in this country when each state collected its customs’ duties from every other state, and that sometimes meant two or three inspections daily. Now things have changed and they inspect only on the border, so I shall have fewer bribes to offer the officials from my newly-acquired millions.
This people’s generosity runs them into bankruptcy. Once a kind friend introduced himself to me, said he always did like my country and people, said he had a beautiful sister named Inez and she was mine. “Take her, señor, she is yours,” also a whole block of buildings. I thanked him profusely and began to take stock of my new possessions, whenhe said in excellent English, “Have you a loose quarter about your clothes you could lend me to buy a supper?” We had reached a part of the street where there was no light when he made his modest request, and he had his hand on a very persuasive looking knife. I had my eye on him and my hand on a good revolver, so in very choice Texas language I told him I had the drop on him.
After reflecting that he had nearly impoverished himself by enriching me with all his possessions, I took pity on him and gave him a pewter quarter that some of my dear friends had passed on me that very morning. Instinctively his native politeness came to the front, and with hat in hand hekotowed, and in the softest of Spanish he thanked me a thousand and one times, and incidentally let the quarter fall to the pavement to catch the ring of it. Proving counterfeit money here is a regular trade which they all learn.
Hereafter I shall positively refuse all gifts, because I am going to call upon the president, and when I admire the national palace he will of course say: “Take it, it is yours,” and it will appear ungrateful in me to refuse it and mean in me to accept it, because all new presidents have to start a revolution; and then he might not appreciate my motives, and sometimes they do not understand American jokes till a week after their perpetration. This is due to British influence at the embassy.
In the Capital I went once to a hotel, and before the carriage could stop, three flunkies fell over themselves grabbing for my baggage, they were so glad to see me. One got an umbrella, one a camera and one a valise, and ran up stairsto my room to welcome me, and this welcome only cost me twenty-five cents.
The proprietor wrung my hands and then wrung his own, and then spreading them out with a magnanimous gesture said: “This hotel is yours señor, and all my servants; just make yourself at home.” I blushed profusely and told him I certainly appreciated a four-story stone front on San Francisco Street, and I would remember him in my prayers.
After a week of his hospitality, when I offered to treat him to a cigar, he incidentally mentioned that I owed him sixteenrealsfor each day of my pleasant sojourn. I asked him what for. “Your room, señor.” I told him very forcibly that he told me to make myself at home. “So I did,” said he. “But I never pay board at home,” said I, but the point was lost on him. He was wearing a British hat, impervious to jokes. Next summer he will ask me what I meant.
This is the second time I have got into trouble by accepting largesse, and for the first time I understand what the old Trojans meant when they said: “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”
Hereafter, I shall positively refuse all gifts, and sell off about twenty hotels and villas and haciendas which I have accumulated beyond my needs. That much wealth actually interferes with a man’s rest and the color of his hair.
While in this state of mind and also in San Luis Potosi, I will discourse on the Bill of Fare. I know a Boston friend who would have said William of Fare, but I never could talk Bostonese, and just plain bill of fare will do me, when I am traveling. The Texas lingo just says “Hash.”
IF Cicero was right in hisDe Senectutethat old age can be enjoyed only by those who in youth preserve their vigor, then the blessings of Nirvanah are the rightful inheritance of Mexico, and she will never lose that inheritance if bustle and hurry will forfeit it.
The hotels are run to suit the guests. When you arrive, you register, and when you next enter the corridor, you see upon the large blackboard your name, room, title, residence, destination, past history and future prospects and whatever else that will be of interest to the public. Now all of that is a labor-saving machine, and saves nerve tissue and wear and tear.
When the newspaper reporter wants news, he steps into the hotel corridor, and the proprietor silently points to the blackboard and goes to sleep again. The reporter reads the bulletin board and goes off and writes a two-column “interview” upon what Mr. A. thinks of Mexico, and you are saved all unnecessary prevaricating. The system is also very helpful to the police in search of lost friends for whom they have formedstrong attachments, and for the custom house officials who have word that you passed a certain station and will bear watching. The bulletin board is a very diverting study in black and white for ordinary people, who look for the names of chance friends whom they do not expect, but who might be there. And the porters and curio vendors scan the list and patiently await your arrival on the street and tell you all about yourself. It is a regular bunco steer, but he is different from the genuine article. The g. a. will enveigle you somewhere and beat you on the sly. The Mexican artist stops in the broad sunlight, right in front of your hotel and beats you to your teeth.
He will sell you curios three hundred years old that he made last month, and has been waiting every day since for a person of just about your state of greenness and inexperience to sell to. As soon as he fleeces you, he kindly offers to find other rare bric-a-brac for you that he does not deal in, and will take you to his pal who is working other pastures. After you return to your friends and proudly show your acquisitions, some one who knows, will solemnly diagnose your head for phrenological knowledge. When he has diagnosed to his satisfaction, he will painfully tell you that your bump of Jack-assedness is abnormally developed. He will advise you to learn that little line of Shakespeare, or some other authentic writer that says: “I was a stranger and ye took me in.”
The hotel Bulletin is a great convenience. When you have found your room, you take an inventory, which will serve you in every other city. If you are in the city of Mexico, the inventory includes glass windows (elsewhere, it will be windows with iron bars) an iron bedstead built for one—which may or may not be inhabited—an iron washstand with iron enameled bowl and pitcher, chair, table, half a candle and candlestick. Kerosene is fifty cents a gallon. The scarcity of wood makes itself felt everywhere. The table, door and chair are the only things made from that precious article. Stone floors forever, which may be or may not be carpeted. The walls are decorated with printed placards giving the price per day, week, or month,sin o con comida—without or with board.
The marvel of the establishment is the door-key. A man with such a piece of iron on his person in the States would be arrested for carrying concealed weapons. It is so heavy they have made arrangements to relieve the lodger from carrying it. In the corridor is a keyrack with numbers, and a man stands all day to receive your key when you go out and to return it to you when you come back. The servant goes to him for it to clean up the room, and I have never known a lost or misplaced article under this system. The lock and key are made by hand at the blacksmith shop, and I think are sold by the pound. They are usually fastened upon huge rough doors made in the carpenter shop, and put together with three-inch wrought iron nails, with an inch or more of the point clinched on the opposite side from which they are driven. Of course there are neither fireplaces nor stoves in any hotel, but one, in the whole country.
The hotels are arranged in quadrangles, withthe four sides facing an open court, redolent with flowery fragrance and fruits and bird music. Usually a fountain plays in the center, and in fair weather the table is spread here. Every story has an open veranda which looks upon this court. In the City of Mexico, the thermometer hesitates between 65 and 75°F, so when the rainy season is not on, meals can be had in thepatiothe year around. In the morning you rise at six or ten or any other hour that suits your fancy. No bells rung, no doors shaken, no noise made—you are simply let alone, and when you come, no frowns for your delay.
You ask when is the breakfast hour. “When the señor wishes.” If you go to the table at six the servant brings hot coffee and rolls, as though the whole establishment was wound up to start at that minute. Should you sit down at half past nine, the Señora would declare by all the saints as witnesses that you are just in time and she was looking for you at that moment. You feel that you might be discommoding the establishment, so you ask for the dinner hour. The answer will be graciously given, “From twelve to three-thirty we shall be honored to serve you, and if not at those hours, when the Señor wishes.” Finally you learn that there is no dinner hour, the bell is never rung, the table is never set, but whenever you choose to eat, the servants are to serve you. An ordinary dinner lasts two hours and these meals are what the people live for. The following, for one day may be termed an average:
The stars stand for certain dishes that only Mexicans call for and their name and flavor would never be known to a foreigner. The coffee is grown in the state of Vera Cruz and is excellent, and is made strong and thick. The usual method of serving is to half-fill your cup, and add an equal quantity of milk. It is sweetened with little cubes of white sugar, or the native brown article, called pilonces.
The bread used for breakfast is a species of cooky that represents the baker’s highest art. Nothing approaching it have I found elsewhere.Prosquitos de la mantecait is called, and is made into rings, loops and bows. It is brittle, crisp and sweetened, but not so much as a doughnut. Another kind is prepared in spherical segments and crescents, and is built of numbers of exceedingly thin layers of dough with fruit between,and so frail, that when once broken it falls to pieces in crisp fragments like Prince Rupert’s Drops, the glass phenomena the teacher in Physics used to astound us with. How they can give it the tension to fly to pieces was one of the things that a layman in the cooking art does not imbibe freely. This fabric is very appropriately called pastel. The distinctive feature of the meal is, they give you only one thing at a time in the order I have numbered them, and they come in serials as unchanging as the seasons.
After a few meals you become quite expert in guessing what will come next.
If there are ten plates stacked by you, you know there will be ten courses of one dish each. You have already learned that soup, rice and eggs are the first three, and the next to the last is always beans with coffee closing, so you have only five to guess.Mirabile dictu, the national dish and universal dessert is beans, just ordinary beans, but the people don’t know enough to say ‘beans,’ they spell itfrijolesand pronounce it free-hole-ahs. You will notice that they spell better than they pronounce. As a labor of pure love and charity to my fellow countrymen of Boston, I say to them, beware! Your prestige is in danger. As a race of bean-eaters, the Mexicans have about three hundred years the start of you and they have about nine different varieties to practice on, and a different aroma of garlic to fit each one. Besides all that they eat beans. There are thirty-five tribes of Indians in Mexico, speaking one hundred and fifty languages and dialects, but they are all united onfrijoles, and they have entered the contest to beat Boston or eat up all the beans.
The national dish is a trinity, composed offrijoles,tortillasandchili. The tortilla is of common stock but aristocratic in association. You sit at the table as a foreigner, and baker’s bread will be set before you, and the Mexican at your left will be the governor of the state and the waiter brings him a stack oftortillas.
Thetortillasreduced to United States’ talk is just corn batter cakes. The architectural plan of their building is simple. The corn is put in lime water over night to soak and soften, and the next morning is put on a hot stone, and the women take another stone and pound it into meal; then they take water and make it up into cakes and half cook on a stone and stack them. No salt or grease or any thing but water is put with it. They look like circles of brown sole-leather and, when about three days old are about as tough and tasteless. This is the bread of Mexico, the staff of life. The approved method of eating it, is to spread it out, put on a spoonful offrijolesand roll it into a cylinder, then eat it as though it were a banana.
Chiliis the third member of the trinity and is everything else but chilly—it is hot. It includes every kind of green, red and yellow pepper, and is cooked with nearly every article of food, and is cooked by itself and is eaten raw, but is hot always. The natives eat so muchchilithat it acts as an antiseptic, and I was told by a man who ought to know that in the Mexican war soldiers left on the field lay dead for weeks and could not decay but dried up. That is true now, but it is notchilibut altitude that prevents dissolution. Fresh meat cannot spoil nor can vegetables rot. I can standchiliin broken doses, but when they gave me a big green pepper as large as an apple and stuffed with stuffing and dressed with dressing and swimming in an innocent looking sauce and disguised with a name I never heard of before, do you blame me if I thought I had struck a new tropical fruit and cut a respectable quarter of it off and made its acquaintance? Did I raise a howl? Ask of the winds that far around with fragments strewed the sea.
If ever I catch that girl outside of the state of Vera Cruz I shall teach her a lesson. Her name was Guadalupe, but she lacks much of being a model follower of the good saint by that name. She gave me green gourds stewed with water cress or some other green thing I never heard of and called itcalabash, and I knew no better. Then she gave me cabbage boiled with bananas and bread fruit, and said that was all the style in Vera Cruz, and finally she invented this other villainy. She thinks I am not accustomed to fine living, but I hope yet to have my revenge. If she crosses the river into Texas, I mean to get her into a railroad eating-house there and compel her to eat some of those terracotta images they sell for ham sandwiches, and when lock-jaw sets in, she will have to keep her mouth shut as long as I had to keep mine open with that loaded green pepper.
When these people get hold of any meat, they roll it up in the tortilla and call it enchilada. They cook light bread after the pattern of a naval torpedo. The loaf is about the size of a Mason’s fruit jar, pointed at both ends like a torpedo, and baked to a crust half an inch thick. Such a loaf would do you bodily injuryin the hands of your enemy. I saw so many curious things brought from the invisible work-shop. I found my way back there and told the cook I was in pursuit of knowledge and wanted to see, andveni vidi—I learned. No stove, not an iron or tin or metal vessel of any kind was visible in the land without chimneys.
A wall of earth and masonry is built up, waist high, like a blacksmith’s forge. All around this are port-holes in which the charcoal fire is made, and all over the top of the forge are holes for the cooking vessels, which are made of unglazed earthenware, and this is all. The charcoal makes no smoke, so there is no need of chimneys. Necessity is the mother and grandmother of invention, and these people have jogged along five hundred years without iron vessels, and they cook about as well as some folks I know.
The servants are models of their kind. With their sandaled feet they glide about without noise and do their work without murmur. You leave your soiled linen in their charge and find it on your bed as white as snow. They receive your gratuity with a thousand thanks and profound obeisance, stumble over their own feet to do you some unnecessary service, and as soon as off duty they offer to guide you about the city. They are rarely off duty until they have put in sixteen hours of hard work, then the blanket and stone floor make the only parenthesis between his day’s grind and tomorrow. The serving class is more servile than can be found anywhere. They take more abuse and less wages. Five dollars a month, Mexican money, is high water mark for female servants, andthat reduced to American money means forty dollars a year. When spoken to by a superior, they must always answer in a deprecating manner as: “Ever at your service;” “Yours to obey;” “At your command,” etc.
All pretentious houses and hotels are built in quadrangles, with a carriage driveway entering a huge gate to the open court. At night this is closed by a pair of tall gates or doors twelve or fifteen feet high, like those in front of our fire companies, and a servant must lie there all night to answer a summons or to admit a belated lodger. Without changing the clothes he has worn all day, he lies on the soft side of a stone pavement night after night with his zerape or a piece of straw matting under him, and a stone for a pillow. In the interior, women servants often lie on the floor in hallways, in order to be handy should a guest need light or water during the night, or to admit lodgers to upper floors after closing time, and they also sleep in the clothes they wear during the day.
Travelers on the ocean either lose or gain a day in crossing the line, depending upon which direction they are going, and in Mexico you either lose a meal or gain a surplus name for one you did not get.
The morning lunch of bread and coffee is calleddeseyuno. The breakfast proper, from twelve to three, isalmuerzo. From four to eight is the principal meal calledcomida, dinner, orcena, supper, whichever you choose to call it. I tried faithfully to keep up with them all, but I always felt that I had lost something in keeping tally on four meals and only remembered eating three. I believe there is a trick in it.
Salt meats are never seen except in American restaurants, and they sell at fifty cents a pound. Pork is always dressed by skinning the animal and not by scraping. No person needs to go to market. Everything is brought to your door by peddlers. The table is usually set in the court among the flowers, and it is a very common occurrence for peddlers to go to the head of the table with a basket of fruit and dicker bargains with the hostess during the meal. This method makes the meat supply very precarious except on Monday. After the bull-fights Sunday afternoon, all the slaughtered bulls are sold to the market.
On Monday when the proprietor asks me how I liked my steak, I always feel like giving him some American slang and saying, “It was bully.” The fruits are the very best, and as the season is perpetual, you can secure them fresh every day, such as strawberries, bananas, pine apples, mangos, figs, limes and agua cates or bread fruit. The lime is larger than the orange, but not so sweet and is used in the place of lemons. It is at the market place where you see the fruits in all their profusion, and are tempted to eat your dinner under the unusual surroundings.
Here you eat by faith, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. I hope no one will accuse me of irreverence for using these words, but they just suit me in this particular.
A suitable motto for the general market eating houses ought to be tacked over the entrance, and, with suitable apologies to Mr. Dante’s Inferno, that motto ought to read: “Who enters here leaves Soap behind.” The cookingis done while you wait, and chief among the things you eat by faith is the hot tamale—twice hot, once by pepper and once by steam. The vendor has a large tinned bucket enclosed by a blanket to hold the steam, and the whole contained in a willow basket. If your faith is sufficient, you call for a dozen tamales and the vendor fishes from its steaming, greasy depths, an article wrapped in sections of corn shucks. On dissecting the article you find about equal parts of corn meal, chili and bits of meat. And the meat! Aye, there’s the rub! If we only knew. There are tamales and tamales. All kinds and conditions of meat are said to find a last resting place in the tamale. Carlyle calls the processSartor Resartus, or the tailor made over; the great American faith article of the same vintage is plain “hash.”
Beef, pork, chicken, frogs andarmadillosare all known to the trade, and dark hints orinnuendoesto that effect, say that the fat prairie dogs and the Chilhuahua pups make prime tamales. The prairie dog is always fat. The Chilhuahua pup is only a vest-pocket edition of dog that weighs about two pounds, and the other genus or species of Mexican dog that I know has a blue skin and no hair except on the end of his tail. The ordinary tamale is anonymous, and it is well, for, like the boarding house hash, it is betterin cog.
The tunas from the prickly pear and the algæ from the canals and irrigating ditches also enter into the bill of fare. With conscious pride in my ability to grapple with the unknown, I made a foolish boast that there was nothing in the Mexican market that my stomach had bolted at,although my taste and my stomach had some pretty lively debates concerning the editorial fitness and filthiness of certain things.
But in an evil hour I boasted. I believe the good book says pride goeth before a fall. I was proud. I had bearded the Mexican lion in his den and had eaten through the lines. I had met the enemy and “they were our’n,” and I boasted of my cast-iron stomach.
My friend said: “Have you eaten anyGusanas de la Maguey? No? Well, come with me.” Now gentle reader, “If you have tears prepare to shed them now.” You have seen a tomato-worm. Well! the wordgusanameans worm, and this particulargusanais built on the order of a tomato worm, but he lives in better pasture on the maguey plant, and grows a little larger and a little fatter than your middle finger, or say the size of a cannon fire-cracker.
As we approached the market my knees got weak. I had had my pride, and was now going for my f—gusanas.
I felt that a volcanic eruption was about to take place in my immediate neighborhood, and remarked that nature was very kind to these people. My friend neither stopped nor made a shadow of turning, but marched straight to a sorcerer he knew and said, “Señora, my friend is anxious for somegusanas de la magueyat my expense.”
She slowly fished up a dozen stewed, and I fainted!(Curtain.)