There are saloons in the City of Mexico, hundreds of them, but cafés of the kind that are such oases in the evenings of France, of Germany, of Italy, have not (with the exception of the delightful one at the base of Chapultepec, which, however, is several miles out of town) yet been invented. In the matter of restaurants (again excepting the distant Chapultepec) there is no choice whatever, if one happens to be in the mood to draw a distinction between eating and dining. People talk of the food at the various hotels, but when speaking of Sylvain’s restaurant they elegantly refer to thecuisine. Sylvain’s is a small, quiet, dignified, almost somber place where everything, except occasionally the service, is as wickedly good as it is anywhere in the world, and where the cost of painting the culinary lily is somewhat less than it is in establishments of similar excellence in New York (I know of none in the United States outside of New York) and Europe.
But taking the city as it is (always a sane and sensible line of action) rather than finding fault with it for not being what one assumed it was going to be, it has its moments—moments that, as far as my experience permits me to speak with a semblance of authority, are peculiar to itself. On Sunday mornings three beautiful allées of the Alameda are lined with little chairs and roofed with gayly decorated canvas, under which the world and his wife sit, or very slowly promenade down one side and up the other in two densely crowded, music-loving streams. It is a variation of the plaza idea of the smaller places, the variation consisting in the aloofness of the classes from the masses. And by the masses in the capital is usually meant, although the distinction is a loose one, persons who still wear native costume. A cheap, ill-fitting suit of American cut is a passport to a slightly higher position in the social scale—which somewhat shoddy conception was responsible a year ago for the abolishment of the sombreros worn by cabmen. Until then, these towers of protection had imparted to cab-stands the character and distinction possessed by no other form of head covering. But now, no livery having been substituted, the drivers wear dingy felt hats, and carry battered umbrellas when obliged to sit in the sun.
The band is very large and very good—so large and good, indeed, that later in the day, at four or five o’clock, as one joins the ever-increasing throng of carriages, cabs, and automobiles on the Paseo, one is amazed to discover several others even larger and better, playing in the magnificent circular glorietas along the drive to Chapultepec. In the park at the Paseo’s farther end is still another, and whether it actually does play with more flexibility, feeling, and taste than the bands I have heard in other countries, or whether the romantic beauty of the situation—the dusky cypress grove, the steep, craggy rock,literally dripping with flowers, from which the castle smiles down at the crowd (it belongs to the smiling, not the frowning family of castles) the gleam of the lake through aged trees, the happy compromise between wildness and cultivation—weaves the spell, transmutes brass into gold, I do not know. The Paseo was begun during the French intervention, and although its trees and its statues of national celebrities are alike small for its splendid breadth (the trees, however, will grow), too much could not be said in praise of the conception itself, and the manner in which it has been carried out. It is one of the noblest of avenues and, with the Alameda at one end and the gardens of Chapultepec at the other, does much in the City of Mexico to make life worth living there.
The crowd of vehicles increases until there is a compact slow-moving mass of them creeping past the band stand, into the cypress grove, around the other side of the park and back again. Many of the carriages are victorias and landaus of the latest design, the horses drawing them are superb, the lady occupants are always elaborately dressed and sometimes notably handsome. So it is odd that most of this wealth and fashion and beauty seems to shy at servants in livery. There are equipages with“two men on the box,” complete in every detail, but in the endless jam of vehicles their number is small. That there are not more of them seems especially remiss after one has seen the few. For in English livery a young and good-looking Mexican servant exemplifies more than any other human being the thing called “style.” As darkness comes on everyone returns to town to drive in San Francisco Street until half past eight or nine. This is a most extraordinary sight—the narrow thoroughfare in the heart of the city so congested with carriages as to be more or less impassable for two hours—the occupants under the electric lights more pallid than their powder—the sidewalks packed with spectators constantly urged by the police to “move on.” It all happens at the same hour every Sunday, and no one seems to tire.
When I said there were but few “sights” in Mexican cities I made, in the case of the capital, a mental reservation. Here there are formal, official, objective points sufficient to keep the intelligent tourist busy for a week; the cathedral, the Viga canal, the shrine of Guadalupe, the Monte de Piedad—the National Palace, and the Castle of Chapultepec, if one cares to measure the red tape necessary to passing within their historic and deeplyinteresting portals. Even if one doesn’t, it would, in my opinion, be a tragedy to leave without seeing, at sunset, the view of the volcanoes from the top of the rock on which the castle is built; especially as this can be done by following, without a card of admission, the steep, winding road past the pretty grottolike entrance to the President’s elevator, until it ends at the gateway of the famous military school on the summit. One also goes, of course, to the National Museum to inspect the small but immensely valuable collection of Aztec remains (large compared to any other Aztec remains, but small, if one pauses to recall the remains in general that have remained elsewhere) and to receive the impression that the pre-Spanish inhabitants of the country, interesting as they undoubtedly were, had by no means attained that facility in the various arts which Prescott and other historians claim for them. After examining their grotesque and terrifying gods, the incoherent calendar and sacrificial stones, the pottery, the implements, and the few bits of crude, gold jewelry, one strolls into the small room in which are left, perhaps, the most tangible evidences of Maximilian’s “empire,” reflecting that Prescott’s monumental effort is one of the most entrancing works of fiction one knows. To the unarcheological, Maximilian’s state coach, almost as overwhelmingly magnificent as the gilded sledge in which Lillian Russell used to make her entrance in “The Grand Duchess,” his carriage for ordinary occasions, the saddle he was in when captured, and the colored fashion plates of his servants’ liveries, are sure to be the museum’s most interesting possessions. Not without a pardonable touch of malice, in the guise of a grave political lesson, is the fact that the severely simple, well-worn, eminently republican vehicle of Benito Juarez is displayed in the same room.
The four or five vast apartments of the Academy of San Carlos (the national picture gallery) suggests certain aspects of the Louvre, but their variously sized canvases suggest only the melancholy reflection that all over the world so many perfectly well-painted pictures are so perfectly uninteresting. One cannot but except, however, a dozen or more scattered little landscapes—absolutely faultless examples of the kind of picture (a very beautiful kind I have grown to think) that the grandparents of all good Bostonians felt it becoming their means and station to acquire fifty or sixty years ago in Rome. The Mexican Government, it no doubt will be surprising to hear, encourages painting and music bysubstantial scholarships. Talented students are sent abroad to study at government expense. One young man I happened to know was given his opportunity on the strength of an exquisite oil sketch of the patio of his parents’ house in the white glare of noon. He is in Paris now, painting pictures of naked women lying on their backs in vacant lots. Several of them, naturally, have been hung in the Salon.
But the guidebook will enumerate the sights, and the “Seeing Mexico” electric car will take one to them. Still there is one I do not believe the book mentions, and I am sure the car does not include. That is the city itself between five and six o’clock on a fair morning. It several times has been my good fortune (in disguise) to be obliged to get up at this hour for the purpose of saying good-by to people who were leaving on an early train, and in returning all the way on foot from the station to the Zócalo (as the stupendous square in front of the cathedral is called) I saw the place, I am happy to remember, in what was literally as well as figuratively a new light. Beyond a few laborers straggling to their work, and the men who were making the toilet of the Alameda with large, green bushes attached to the end of sticks, the city appeared to beblandly slumbering, and just as the face of some one we know will, while asleep, surprise us by a rare and unsuspected expression, the great, unfinished, unsympathetic capital smiled, wisely and a trifle wearily, in its dreams. It is at this hour, before the mongrel population has begun to swarm, that one should walk through the Alameda, inhale the first freshness of the wet roses and lilies, the gardenias and pansies and heliotrope in the flower market, and, undisturbed among the trees in front of the majestic cathedral, listen to “the echoed sob of history.”
THE END
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:Futhermore=> Furthermore {pg 73}Oh que bonitas=> Oh qué bonitas {pg 179}a desert=> a dessert {pg 185}she as giving=> she was giving {pg 210}exclaims her hushand=> exclaims her husband {pg 261}innocent midemeanor=> innocent misdemeanor {pg 272}of preoccuption while=> of preoccupation while {pg 281}
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
Futhermore=> Furthermore {pg 73}
Oh que bonitas=> Oh qué bonitas {pg 179}
a desert=> a dessert {pg 185}
she as giving=> she was giving {pg 210}
exclaims her hushand=> exclaims her husband {pg 261}
innocent midemeanor=> innocent misdemeanor {pg 272}
of preoccuption while=> of preoccupation while {pg 281}