The Project Gutenberg eBook ofViva Mexico!This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Viva Mexico!Author: Charles Macomb FlandrauRelease date: December 30, 2023 [eBook #72552]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: NYC: E. Appleton and Company, 1912Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIVA MEXICO! ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Viva Mexico!Author: Charles Macomb FlandrauRelease date: December 30, 2023 [eBook #72552]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: NYC: E. Appleton and Company, 1912Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
Title: Viva Mexico!
Author: Charles Macomb Flandrau
Author: Charles Macomb Flandrau
Release date: December 30, 2023 [eBook #72552]
Language: English
Original publication: NYC: E. Appleton and Company, 1912
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIVA MEXICO! ***
CHAPTER I,II,III,IV,V,VI,VII,VIII,IX,X,XI,XII,XIII,XIV,XV.
Books by Charles M. FlandrauVIVA MEXICO!16mo. Cloth, $1.25 netPREJUDICES16mo. Cloth, $1.25 netTHE DIARY OF A FRESHMAN12mo. Cloth, 75 cents netD. APPLETON AND COMPANYNEW YORK
Books by Charles M. FlandrauVIVA MEXICO!16mo. Cloth, $1.25 netPREJUDICES16mo. Cloth, $1.25 netTHE DIARY OF A FRESHMAN12mo. Cloth, 75 cents netD. APPLETON AND COMPANYNEW YORK
ByCHARLES MACOMB FLANDRAUAuthor of “Harvard Episodes,” “TheDiary of a Freshman,” etc.NEW YORK AND LONDOND. APPLETON AND COMPANY1912Copyright, 1908, byD. APPLETON AND COMPANYPublished September, 1908Printed in the United States of AmericaTODON GUILLERMOOF THE FINCA DESANTA MARGARITAFor permission to reprint the chapters of this book that originally appeared inThe Bellman, I beg to thank the editor.
C. M. F.
VIVA MEXICO!
NEITHER tourists nor persons of fashion seem to have discovered that the trip by water from New York to Vera Cruz is both interesting and agreeable. But perhaps to tourists and persons of fashion it wouldn’t be. For, although the former enjoy having traveled, they rarely enjoy traveling, and the travels of the latter would be pointless, as a rule, if they failed to involve the constant hope of social activity and its occasional fulfillment. By tourists I mean—and without disparagement of at least their preference—persons who prefer to visit a country in bands of from fifteen to five hundred rather than in a manner less expeditionary; and persons of fashion I am able even more accurately to define to my own satisfaction by saying they are the kind of persons to whom the wives of American ambassadors in Europe are polite. Probably to neither of these globe-trotting but alien classes would the voyage fromNew York to Vera Cruz appeal. For the tourist it is too slow and long. There are whole days when there is nothing for the man in charge of him to expound through his megaphone; whole days when there is nothing to do but contemplate a cloudless sky and a semitropical sea. Thoroughly to delight in the protracted contemplation of such spacious blueness overhead and of so much placid green water underneath, one must be either very lazy or very contemplative. Tourists, of course, are neither, and while persons of fashion are sometimes both, they are given to contemplating the beauties of nature from points of vantage favorable also to the contemplation of one another.
Emphatically the deck of a Ward line steamer is not one of these. A preliminary investigation just before the ship sails rarely results in the discovery of what a certain type of American classifies as “nice people.” When nice people take sea voyages they usually go to Europe; and so there is an additional anticipatory thrill on embarking for Mexico in the certainty that there won’t be any merely nice people on board. The ship will be crowded—so crowded, in fact, that at Havana and Progreso (which is the port of Merida in the Mexican State of Yucatan) the company’s agents will distractedlyswoop down on you and try to convince you that it is to your everlasting advantage to abandon a lower berth in the stateroom long experience has enabled you to select, for an upper berth in a room you happen to know is small, hot, and near the steerage. If you are amiable you laugh at them, but if, as is customary, you and the company have had a fierce disgusto before sailing and you are therefore not amiable, you express yourself without restraint and then run to the rail to watch the agents depart in their launch, with gestures that more literally resemble the traditional tearing of hair, wringing of hands, and rending of garments than any you have yet observed.
The ships are crowded, but not with the kind of people who set sail in search of pleasure, or the Beyreuth festival, or health, or the London season, or clothes, or the Kiel regatta, or merely because they are temporarily hard up and have to economize for a time by dismissing the servants, closing all three houses, and living very simply in nine ballrooms at Claridge’s or the Ritz. With people bound for Latin America, Fate somehow seems more actively occupied, on more intimate, more intrusive terms than it is with people on the way to somewhere else. Most of them are going, one gradually discovers, not just to see what it is like, or because they have seen and have chosen to return, but because circumstances in their wonderful, lucid way have combined to send them there.
My roommates—I can’t afford a whole stateroom—have usually detested their destinations from experience or dreaded them from hearsay. One, a silent, earnest-looking young man who was fond of playing solitaire and reading the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, always spent his winters in the hot countries, not because he liked them, but because his profession of “looping the loop” on a bicycle could be continuously pursued only in climates salubrious to the circus. Another, a grizzled old Wisconsin timber cruiser, was being sent, much against his will, to make a report on some Cuban forest lands.
“It is a queer, strange thing,” he confided in me when we parted in Havana harbor, “that a man of my age and morals won’t be able even to get drunk without the help o’ that”—and he nodded toward the ladylike little interpreter who had come out to meet him and take charge of him during his stay.
Still another struck me at first as a provincial and tedious New Englander until I found out hismission. His inside coat pocket was stuffed with photographs of his numerous children, and he had a horror of snakes and tarantulas that he often expressed much as one of Miss Wilkins’s heroines might express her horror of mice. Like all persons who share the same dread and are about to make a first visit to the tropics, he conferred on reptiles and poisonous insects a kind of civic importance that they themselves under no circumstances assume. He had a haunting idea that the entire toxical population of Guatemala would be lined up at the railway station to receive him. But when it came out that he was being sent twenty-six hundred miles for the sole purpose of splicing a rope—a matter, he said, of a few hours at the most—I was compelled to see him in a light not only different but almost romantic. Somewhere in darkest Guatemala there was a rope four and a half miles long. It broke, and my roommate, who had never been farther south than Summer Street nor farther west than West Newton—localities between which he had vibrated daily for many years—was, it seemed, the one human being among all the human beings from Guatemala to Boston who was capable of splicing it. As the rope had cost three thousand dollars it was distinctly less expensiveto import a West Newtonian than to import another rope.
Then, too, I once between Havana and Vera Cruz had as a roommate a “confidence man”—a broadening and therefore a valuable experience. One is not often given the privilege of living for five days with a confidence man on terms of confidence. He was a tall, lank, sandy-haired creature of about forty, with a Roman nose, a splendid mustache, unemotional, gray-green eyes, a diamond ring, and suspenders, as well as a belt; the sort of looking person whom twenty-five years ago British playwrights would have seized upon as “a typical American.” In a bloodless fashion his whole existence was “a carnival of crime”—a succession of scurvy tricks, heartless swindles, lies, frauds, and, now and then, candid, undisguised thefts. Sometimes, as when he sold jewelry and bric-a-brac at auction, his dealings were with the semi-intelligent well-to-do, but more often he exerted himself among the credulous poor, as when he unloaded brass watch cases filled with tacks on negroes at Texas fairs. His marked playing cards and loaded dice, which he showed and explained to me with much amiable vanity, were very ingenious, and I found our long, cheerful discussions on the technic ofhis art most helpful. His contributions to them, in fact, threw upon certain phases of sociology a brilliant and authoritative light that I defy anyone to get out of a book or put into it. From instinct, from habit, from love of the work, he was an almost thoroughly consistent scoundrel, and it was a shock to discover by the end of the voyage that the thing about him I most objected to was his wearing suspenders as well as a belt.
There is always a brave and hopeful little band of actors on board—usually an American stock company on the way to its financial and artistic doom in the City of Mexico. And it is invariably named after the beautiful young lady who has hypnotized some middle-aged Mexican patron saint of the drama into guaranteeing everybody six weeks’ salary and a return ticket. If it isn’t the Beryl Smith Company it is sure to be the Company of Hazel Jones or Gladys Robinson, and Beryl (or Hazel or Gladys) is so beautiful that she can stand unhatted and unveiled in the midday sunlight of the Gulf—beauty knows no more merciless test—without making you wish she wouldn’t. Furthermore, you continue to think her hair the loveliest color you have ever seen, even after—with an extremely elegant gesture—she tosses her chewinggum overboard and languidly tells you how she does it.
But her tragedy, like that of her more hardworking associates, is a great inability to hold anyone’s attention except when she is off the stage. If actors could only arrange in some way to charge admission to their semi-private existence, acting as a profession would be less of a gamble. For it is an unexplained fact that, however obscure, inconspicuous, and well-behaved they may be, actors and actresses excite, when they are not acting, more curiosity, speculation, and comment than any other class. Start the rumor on shipboard that a certain quiet, unattached young woman, who wears a shabby mackintosh, common-sense shoes and a last year’s hat, is a third-rate actress, and the center of the deck at once becomes hers. A few days later, however, when she turns out to be a first-rate physician or the professor of Pre-Christian Hebrew literature at Bryn Mawr, her value as a conversational resource drops instantly to nothing.
But if on the voyage to Mexico one’s compatriots strike, to fall back on the cant phrase, a diverting “note,” the Cubans, the Spaniards, the Yucatecans, and the Mexicans in general strike whole chords. To set sail for anywhere, even Duluth, has alwaysseemed to me considerably more than merely a practical step toward transporting myself from one place to another. On going aboard a ship I can’t—and would not if I could—rid myself of the sensation that there is something improbable and adventurous about me; that everybody, from the captain to the sixty-year-old cockney stewardess, is about to engage in “deeds of love and high emprise.” The sudden translation from Forty-second Street to the deck of any steamer bound for foreign parts has a thrill in it, but if the destination be the tropics, there is more than one. They are incited by the presence of so many slim, sallow, gesticulating men, and stout, powdered, gayly (and badly) dressed women, by the surprisingly variegated inflections and minor cadences of the Spanish language, by the first penetrating whiff of exotic tobacco smoke from the cigarette of a coffee-colored old lady with a mustache, from the very shape and quality of the luggage as it is hoisted over the side or carried up by the army of negro porters; the most un-Anglo-Saxon luggage conceivable. They travel, the Latin-Americans, with incredible amounts of it, and the sight of it always makes me wonder whether they have ever traveled before or ever expect to travel again. For it consists chiefly of gigantic, smashed-in paper band-boxes, satchels precariously fashioned out of something that tries hard to look like leather and doesn’t in the least succeed, pale blue or pink trunks that for some occult reason are narrower at the bottom than at the top and might be either small, frivolous coffins or large, forbidding cradles, corpulent bales of heaven knows what covered with matting, baskets covered with newspapers, articles of wearing apparel covered with confusion, and fifty other things covered with nothing at all. Once at the Wall Street wharf I saw a young Mexican get out of a Holland House omnibus bearing in his hand a parrot cage stuffed full of shoes. It seemed to me at the time a delirious incident, and I remembered it. But I doubt that, after having lived in Mexico, I should now notice or remember it at all. He was a very charming young person whose mother had been a lady in waiting to the Empress Carlotta, and he was on his way back from Belgium, where he goes once a year to sink on his knee and kiss the aged Carlotta’s hand.
Oh, yes, there is always a thrill in it—this setting sail for the hot countries. It begins on the dock, slightly increases as one steams past the low, monotonous coast of Florida, becomes disturbing in the exquisite little harbor of Havana, and at Progreso,where for thirty-six hours one stares at the shallow, green gulf water, the indolent sharks and the stretch of sand and palm trees wavering in heat, that is Yucatan, it enslaves one like a drug of which one disapproves, but to which one nevertheless succumbs. One afternoon at sunset, before we had even sighted land, a little French boy accurately summed up for us the vague and various sensations that, during the last few hours of the hot afternoon, had stolen over us all. He had been born in Yucatan and was returning there with his father after a first visit to France. Suddenly in his race around the deck with some other children he stopped short, glanced at the group of half-dozing, half-fanning women in steamer chairs, at the listless men against the rail, at the calm, lemon-colored sky and the floating islands of seaweed on the green water. Then, throwing back his head, he closed his eyes, drew a long appreciative breath and, with his eyes still closed, exclaimed luxuriously: “Ah-h-h, on sent les pays chauds!”
AT first you are both amazed and annoyed by what seems like not only lack of curiosity but positive ignorance on the part of Americans who live in Mexico. As a new arrival, I had an admirable thirst for information which I endeavored to slake at what I supposed were fountains of knowledge as well as of afternoon tea. The tea was delicious and plentiful; but the knowledge simply did not exist.
“What is the population of Barranca?” you ask of an intelligent compatriot who has lived in Barranca for ten years.
“Why, I don’t know exactly,” he replies, as if the question were an interesting one that had never before occurred to him.
“Oh, I don’t mean exactly—but is it eight thousand, or fourteen, or twenty-five? It’s rather difficult for a stranger to form an idea; the towns are built so differently from ours. Although they may not be really large, they are so compact that they look more populous and ‘citified’ than placesof the same size in the United States,” you explain.
“Yes, that’s very true, and itisdifficult,” he agrees.
“Do you suppose I could find out anywhere? Do they ever take the census?” you pursue.
“The census? Why, I don’t know about that. But there’s Smith on the bench over there having his shoes shined. He’s been in the country for fifteen years—he’ll be able to tell you. Smith, I want to introduce a friend of mine who is very anxious to know the population of Barranca and whether they ever take the census.”
“The census?” muses Smith, ignoring the population entirely. “I don’t know if they take the census, but they take your taxes with great regularity,” he declares with a laugh. Then follows a pleasant ten minutes with Smith, during which the reason of your introduction to him does not recur, and after precisely the same thing has happened several other times with several other persons, you would almost rather start a revolution than an inquiry into the population of Barranca.
The specific instance is perhaps a trivial one, but it is typical, and, as I said, you are for a time amazed and irritated, on asking intelligent questions about the federal and state governments, the judiciary, the army, education, morality, and even so obvious a matter as the climate, to receive from American acquaintances replies that are never accurate and rarely as much as inaccurately definite. Some of them frankly admit that, as they never have had personal relations with the establishments you seek to learn about (barring the climate), they have not taken the trouble to inform themselves. Others appear to experience a belated regret at their long indifference, promise to look the matter up and let you know. But they never do, and it is rather discouraging. You yearn to acquire a respectably comprehensive idea of the conditions in which you are living, yet the only people with whom you can carry on any but a most staccato and indispensable conversation are unable to throw light. So, being the only one really intelligent foreigner in the republic, you resort to the medium of art, and begin to read books.
Everyone you know has at some time or other read and enjoyed Prescott’s “Conquest,” but it does not emerge that on the subject of Mexico they have ever read anything else, and for a while you quietly revel in your mental alertness and superior intelligence. You are learning all about the country—its institutions and laws, its products and habits—while your listless friends still sit in darkness. Then one fine morning something happens—something of no especial importance, but something that nevertheless serves to insert the thin edge of suspicion’s wedge between you and your learning.
You have, for instance, read that “in virtue of the constitution adopted February 5, 1857, arrest is prohibited, save in the case of crimes meriting corporal punishment,” and it has seemed to you a wise and just provision. You have also, let us say, employed two competent stone masons to build a coffee tank, a fireplace, a pigpen, or some such useful accessory of life in the tropics, and you become much disturbed when, after they have worked steadily and well for three or four days, they fail to appear. That afternoon as you stroll through the plaza lamenting their perfidy, you are astonished at receiving two friendly, sheepish greetings from two sheepish, friendly stone masons who are engaged in laying municipal cobblestones, together with thirty or forty other prisoners, under the eyes of several heavily armed policemen. Unmistakably they are your masons, and with much bewilderment you demand of Smith—who, no doubt, is strolling with you—just what it means.
“It merely means,” Smith explains, “that the town is repairing part of the plaza pavement and needs competent masons. So they arrested yours.”
“But on what grounds?”
“Oh, drunkenness probably.”
“Do you suppose they were drunk? They seemed like very steady men.”
“Why, they may have been a trifle elated,” Smith laughs. “The assumption that they were isn’t a particularly startling one in this part of the world. But that wasn’t why they were arrested. They were arrested because they were good masons and the city happens to need them. If they hadn’t been drunk, some one would have been sent out to make them so—never, unfortunately, a very arduous undertaking.”
“Oh, indeed; how simple and efficacious!” you murmur, and go home to read some more.
Still other wise and just provisions of the same excellent document are that no person may be obliged to work for another person without freely consenting so to work, nor without receiving just remuneration, and that imprisonment for debts of a purely civil nature is prohibited. But as your Spanish gradually improves and you are able to have more sustained talks with the natives, youlearn that the entire lives of a great number of peones working on haciendas contain two alternatives, one of which is practical slavery and the other imprisonment for debt to his employer.
A young man goes to work on, say, a sugar plantation for the magnificent wages of thirty-six Mexican cents a day. In the course of time—usually a very short time—he acquires a family. If he acquires it after certain preliminary formalities, such as a marriage ceremony and its attendant festivities, his employer has loaned him the forty or fifty pesos—unpayable sum—necessary to defray the costs of the priest and the piper, and the young man’s eternal indebtedness begins from the beginning. If, however, there are no formalities, the financial burden is not assumed until the birth of the first child.
Mexicans of every station adore their children, and even when, as frequently happens among the lower classes, the parents are neither civilly nor religiously married (in Mexico only the civil ceremony is recognized by the law) nothing is too good or too expensive for the offspring. They are baptized and, if the informal union of the parents lasts long enough, they are confirmed. But in Mexico, as elsewhere, the kingdom of heaven costs money,and this money the young man’s employer cheerfully advances. Then in the natural march of events some one dies. Death, of course, all the world over, has become one of our grossest extravagances. Again the employer delightedly pays.
Now he has the young man—no longer so young—exactly where his sugar plantation wants him. On thirty-six cents a day there is no possibility of a laborer’s paying a debt of a hundred or more pesos and moving away, and if he attempts to depart without paying it, a word from the hacendado to his friend the jefe politico would suffice to land him in jail and keep him there. It is impossible to deny that on some haciendas, perhaps on many, this form of slavery is a happier, a more comfortable arrangement than would be the freedom so energetically insisted on in the constitution. Still, slavery is neither a pretty word nor a pretty idea, and yet, in spite of the constitution, the idea obtains in Mexico quite as it obtains in the United States.
Then again you read with satisfaction that among other forms of freedom—“freedom of education, freedom to exercise the liberal professions, freedom of thought,” and so on—the freedom of the press is guaranteed; guaranteed, that is to say, with the reservation that “private rights and the publicpeace shall not be violated.” The manner in which this reservation can be construed, however, does not occur to you until you read inEl Imparcialor in theMexican Herald—the best Spanish and American daily papers—an account of, let us say, a strike of the mill operatives at Orizaba, and then, a week later, chance to learn what actually happened.
“I see by theHeraldthat you had a little strike at Orizaba the other day,” you remark to the middle-aged British manager of a large Orizaba jute mill, with whom you find yourself in the same swimming pond at the baths of Tehuacan. “TheHeraldsaid that in a clash with the troops several strikers were killed and twenty-five were injured.”
“Did it indeed?” remarks the manager dryly, and later, when you are sitting together in the sun after your bath, he explains that the strike was an incipient revolution engineered by a junta in St. Louis, that the Government sent down a regiment from the City of Mexico, that in an impromptu sort of way six hundred strikers were immediately shot, and that the next morning thirty-four were formally, elaborately, and officially executed. This prompt and heroic measure, he informs you, ended both the strike and the incipientrevolution, and as you compare what you have read in the papers with what is the truth, you can tell yourself that it has also ended your illusions as to the freedom of the Mexican press.
In fact you begin to realize why, when you ask American residents of the country for information, their replies are usually so vague, so contradictory, so uninforming. It is not, as a rule, because they know too little, but because they know too much. Theoretical Mexico—the Mexico of constitutions, reform laws, statutes, and books of travel—has ceased, long since, vitally to concern them. It is Mexico as they day by day find it that interests them and that in the least counts. And practical, every-day Mexico is an entirely different, infinitely more mysterious, fascinating affair.
“Does it rain here in summer as much as it does in winter?” I once asked a Mexican lady in a saturated mountain village in the State of Vera Cruz.
“No hay reglas fijas, señor” (there are no fixed rules), she replied, after a thoughtful silence, with a shrug.
No hay reglas fijas! It is not perhaps a detailed description of the great Don Porfirio’s republic, but it is a consummate epitome, and once you havecommitted it to memory and “taken it to heart,” your literary pursuits begin to languish. After traveling for three weeks in Mexico, almost anyone can write an entertaining and oracular volume, but after living there for several years, the oracle—unless subsidized by the Government—has a tendency to become dumb. For, in a country where theory and practice are so at variance, personal experience becomes the chart by which one is accustomed to steer, and although it is a valuable one, it may, for a hundred quaint reasons, be entirely different from that of the man whose ranch, or mine, or coffee place adjoins one’s own.
In just this, I feel sure, lies much of the indisputable charm of Mexico. No hay reglas fijas. Everyone’s experience is different, and everyone, in a sense, is a pioneer groping his way—like Cortés on his prodigious march up from the sea. One never knows, from the largest to the smallest circumstances of life, just what to expect, and Ultimate Truth abideth not. This is not so much because Mexicans are instinctive and facile liars, as because the usual methods of ascertaining and disseminating news are not employed. At home we demand facts and get them. In Mexico one subsists on rumor and never demands anything. Awell-regulated, systematic, and precise person always detests Mexico and can rarely bring himself to say a kind word about anything in it, including the scenery. But if one is not inclined to exaggerate the importance of exactitude and is perpetually interested in the casual, the florid, and the problematic, Mexico is one long, carelessly written but absorbing romance.
SUPERFICIALLY, Mexico is a prolonged romance. For even its brutal realities—of which there are many—are the realities of an intensely pictorial people among surroundings that, to Northern eyes, are never quite commonplace. I once, for instance, saw a plucky little policeman shoot and kill an insanely drunken shoemaker who, in the marketplace a few minutes before, apropos of nothing except the fact that hewasinsanely drunk, had cut the throat of a young milkman. The policeman pursued him in his mad flight for home and, just as they passed me on a deserted street near the outskirts of the town, returned a quick stab in the stomach from the shoemaker’s knife (still reeking with the milkman’s blood) by a revolver shot. They then both collapsed in a mud puddle, and to me was appointed the rôle of arousing the neighborhood, unbuttoning the policeman’s clothes and slipping two pillows under his pale, brave head.
Of course it was the most squalid of incidents;precisely what happens every little while in New York and Pittsburg and San Francisco, and every few minutes, so we are told, in Chicago. But in Barranca, somehow, the squalor of the affair could not successfully compete with the dramatic interest and the stage-setting. The people who emerged from their blue and pink and yellow and green houses at my alarm (no one in Mexico is alarmed by the sound of firearms) the distracted widow—who, however, postponed complete distraction until after she had carefully gone through her dead husband’s pockets—the pompous arrival of the chief of police, the color and costuming and arrangement of it all, were far too like the last scenes of “Carmen” or “Cavalleria Rusticana” to permit of one’s experiencing any but an agreeably theatrical sensation of horror.
I strolled away after the shoemaker was removed to the police station and the canvas-covered litter had been sent back for the gasping policeman, asking myself by what strange alchemy drunkenness, murder, and retribution in a mud puddle could be made so entertaining. The brutish spectacle, I realized, ought to have shocked me, and the remainder of my walk should have been spent in reflecting that the world was a very wicked place.But I had not been shocked at all, and the world just then seemed not so much wicked as unusually interesting. And this, I flatter myself, was not on my part a moral obtuseness, but an innate quality of the general Mexican scene. For it is always pictorial and always dramatic; it is not only invariably a painting, but the kind of painting that tells a story. Paintings that tell stories are declared by critics to be “bad art.” Perhaps this is why so many travelers in Mexico find so little to admire.
At first, I confess, almost everybody in the republic looks like a home-made cigar. But when your eyes have become properly focused, it is difficult to remember having thought of so cheap a comparison. Whether your relations with the people be agreeable or otherwise, you cannot but admit, after becoming used to the type, that there is among all classes an extraordinary amount of beauty. In every Mexican crowd there are, naturally, a great many ugly persons and plain persons and average-looking persons. An omnipotent Creator for, no doubt, some perfectly good reason that surpasseth all my little understanding, chooses, in perpetuating the human race, to depart, as a rule, very far from perfection and even from charm. But in Mexico,although the departure can be as far, it is somehow not as frequent.
In its way, the mixture of Spaniard and tropical Indian—which was the original recipe for making the contemporary Mexican—is physically a pleasing one. It isn’t our way, but one doesn’t after a while find it less attractive for that. The Indians, in the part of Mexico I happen to know best, have at least the outward characteristics of a “gentle” race. Even when they are tall, they are inevitably and—one might almost say—incorrigibly plump. One never ceases to marvel at the superhuman strength existing beneath the pretty and effeminate modeling of their arms and legs and backs. Except when they grow old and wither up, which they do, like all tropical races, while they are still young, they yet display no angles. However great may be their muscular development from trotting up and down perpendicular mountain trails with incredible loads of corn, or pottery, or tiles, or firewood, or human beings on their backs, the muscles themselves never stand out. The legs of an American “strong man” look usually like an anatomical chart, but the legs of the most powerful Totonac Indian—and the power of many of them is beyond belief—would serve admirably as one of those idealized extremities on which women’s hosiery is displayed in shop windows. In spite of their constantly surprising exhibitions both of unpremeditated strength and long endurance, there is in the general aspect of their physique more of prettiness than of vigor, more grace than virility.
With these people and others like them, the Spaniards began to mingle in the year 1519, and from the union of Spanish men and aboriginal women sprang the Mexican of to-day. In them the physical traits of both races are obvious. If, by alliance, the native lost some of his round, sleek modeling, the conqueror renounced much of his gauntness and austerity. For the modern Mexican, roughly speaking, is neither a rugged type nor an unmanly one. He is, as a rule, a “spare,” small-waisted creature whose muscles, when he has any, show—unlike those of the pure Indian—in the ordinary way, but whose small feet and slender, beautiful hands are deceptive. A cargador of my acquaintance, whose hands are like those of a slim girl, and who, if he wore shoes, would require a narrow five, thinks nothing of transporting on his back from the railway station to the center of the town, a distance of more than a mile up a steep hill, a gigantic trunk (the kind that used to beknown as a “Saratoga”), a smaller trunk, half a dozen “dress-suit cases,” a bundle of rugs, and a steamer chair. They by no means lack strength, but it is more often than not concealed in a body all sallow slenderness and grace. And gracefulness in a nation is a characteristic no good American fresh from “God’s country”—whatever that patriotic if strangely un-Christian phrase may mean—can in his heart of hearts forgive. The typical Mexican, although not effeminately, is delicately formed, and, in addition to the prevailing lightness and sensitiveness of his structure, a great factor in the general high average of his good looks is the almost complete elimination of the matter of complexion.
With Northern races it is difficult to disassociate the thought of beauty in either sex from a certain clear glowing quality of the epidermis known as “a complexion.” But in Mexico this consideration—in spite of the quarter of an inch of powder which the ladies of the upper classes apply to their faces on a substratum of glycerin—does not enter. You know that even under the powder all Mexican complexions approximate a satisfactory café au lait standard, and that, if the owners are not positively suffering from smallpox, they are all good. Theyimpress you, after your eyes become acclimated, as being an extraordinarily ornamental race, and it is always amusing to notice that, however strong may be the aversion to them of an American or British resident, he cannot refrain now and then from an involuntary tribute to their unconscious habit of quietly or violently “composing” themselves at every moment of their lives into some kind of a frameable picture.
“I hate ’em all,” an American building contractor once exclaimed to me with deep sincerity. “But,” he added, “after my work is over for the day, I like to sit on a bench in the plaza and look at ’em. I sit there a couple of hours every evening. Even when the rascals ain’t doing anything in particular, you always sort of feel as if there was something doing.”
This feeling—for the accurate description of which I was truly grateful—is largely responsible in Mexico for the plaza and balcony habit that one immediately acquires and that becomes one’s chief form of diversion. In a small city of the United States or in England, even a person of unlimited leisure would have to be doddering, or an invalid or a tramp, before he would consent to sit daily for two or three hours on a bench in apublic square, or lean over a balcony watching the same people pursue their ordinary vocations in the street below. The monotony of the thing, the procession’s dead level of prosperous mediocrity, would very soon prove intolerable, and he would find some one, anyone, to talk to or endeavor to forget himself in a book or a newspaper.
In Mexico, however, complete idleness is rarely a bore. “Even when the rascals ain’t doing anything in particular, you always sort of feel as if there was something doing.” One afternoon in a small Mexican town I kept tab from my balcony on what, for about eight minutes, took place in the street below. Although the town was small and the day an unusually quiet one, owing to a fiesta in the neighborhood to which many of the inhabitants had gone, there was no dearth of incident against the usual background of big-hatted cargadores waiting for employment in the middle of the street; of burros, each with four large cobblestones in a box on its back; of biblical-looking girls (an endless stream of them) bearing huge water-jars to and from a circular fountain lined with pale-blue tiles; of old men who wail at intervals that they are selling pineapple ice cream; of old women with handfuls of white and yellow andgreen lottery tickets; of basket sellers and sellers of flowers (the kind of adorable bouquets that haven’t been seen anywhere else since the early seventies; composed of damp moss, tinfoil, toothpicks, a lace petticoat, a wooden handle, and, yes, some flowers arranged in circles according to color); of mozos who you feel sure have been sent on an errand and told to “come right back,” but who have apparently no intention of returning for several hours; of ladies draped in black lace on their way to meditate in church; of hundreds of other leisurely moving figures that were as a bright-colored, shifting chorus to the more striking episodes.
Item one (so runs my page of hasty notes): Three rather fragile-looking young men swinging along with a grand piano on their heads. Under my window they all stop a moment to let one of them ask a passerby to stick a cigarette in his mouth and light it, which is duly done.
Item two: A flock of sheep followed by a shepherd in clean white cotton with a crimson sarape around his shoulders. He looks like Vedder’s Lazarus. The sheep have just piled into the open door of the hotel and are trying to come upstairs. In the excitement a new-born lamb has its leg hurt. The shepherd gathers it in his arms,wraps it in the sarape, thoughtfully kisses it twice on the head and proceeds.
Item three: A funeral. As there are only three streets in this place that aren’t built up and down a mountain side, there are no vehicles, and coffins, like everything else, are carried on men’s backs. This is an unusually expensive coffin, but then of course the silver handles are only hired for the occasion. They’ll be removed at the grave, as otherwise they would be dug up and stolen. I wonder why women so rarely go to funerals here? There is a string of men a block long, but no women. Some of them (probably relatives) have in their hands lighted candles tied with crape. They are nice, fat candles and don’t blow out. Everybody in the street takes his hat off as the cortége passes.
Item four: The daily pack train of mules from the Concepción sugar hacienda. There must be two hundred and fifty of them, and their hoofs clatter on the cobblestones like magnified hail. The street is jammed with them, and where the sidewalk narrows to almost nothing, people are trying to efface themselves against the wall. A wonderful exhibition of movement and color in the blazing sunlight: the warm seal-brown of the mules, the paler yellow-brown of the burlap in which are wrapped theconical sugar loaves (eight to a mule), with the arrieros in yellow straw hats, brilliant blue shirts and scarlet waist bandas bringing up the rear.
Item five: A dog fight.
Item six: Another and much worse dog fight.
Item seven: An Indian woman with apparently a whole poultry farm half concealed upon her person. She calls up to ask if I would like to buy a chicken. Why on earth should a young man on a balcony of a hotel bedroom like to buy a chicken?
Item eight: An acquaintance makes a megaphone of his hands and inquires if I am very busy. I reply, “Yes, frightfully,” and we adjourn to the plaza for the afternoon.
THE inability of people in general to think for themselves—the inevitableness with which they welcome an opinion, a phrase, a catchword, if it be sufficiently indiscriminating and easy to remember, and the fashion in which they then solemnly echo it, are never more displayed than when they are commenting upon a race not their own. Sometimes this rubber-stamp sort of criticism is eulogistic in tone as when, for instance, a few years ago it was impossible in the United States to speak of the Japanese without calling forth from some tedious sounding-board, who couldn’t have told a Jap from a Filipino, the profound exclamation: “What a wonderful little people they are!” But more often than not, ignorant criticism of a foreign country is also adverse. For one nation cannot altogether understand another, and if it is true that “to understand everything is to pardon everything,” it must also be true that unforgiveness is one of the penalties of being misunderstood.
It is the vast throng of fairly well educated“people in general” who are forever divulging the news that “Englishmen have no sense of humor,” that “the French are very immoral,” that “all Italians steal and none of them wash,” that “every German eats with his knife and keeps his bedroom windows closed at night,” that “the inhabitants of Russia are barbarians with a veneer of civilization” (how they cherish that word “veneer”!), and that “the Scotch are stingy.”
The formula employed in the case of Mexicans runs usually something like this: “They’re the laziest people in the world, and although they seem to treat you politely they are all treacherous and dishonest. Their politeness is merely on the surface; it doesn’t come from the heart”—as does the exquisite courtesy we are so accustomed to receive from everybody in the United States, one is tempted to add, without, however, doing so. For what, after all, is the use of entering into a discussion with the sort of person who supposes that his own or anyone’s else politeness “comes from the heart,” or has, in fact, anything to do with the heart? Politeness, of course, is, all the world over, just the pleasing surface quality we should expect it to be from the derivation of the word. Even in Kansas or South Boston we do not necessarily wish to diefor the old gentleman whom we allow to pass through the doorway first, and the act of taking off one’s hat to a lady scarcely convicts one of a secret passion for her. But it is odd what depths are demanded of Mexican politeness, which—except for the fact that there is much more of it—is, like our own, an outward “polish” and nothing else.
If, however, there is anything valuable in politeness as such, the Mexicans have over us at least one extensive advantage. For in Mexico the habit of politeness in its most elaborate form is so universal that the very occasional lack of it in anybody gives one the sensation of being not only surprised but somewhat hurt. If, for instance, a street-car conductor in taking my ticket should fail to say “Thank you,” and neglect on receiving it to make toward me a short, quick gesture of the hand—something between a wave and flourish—I should realize that, as far as I was concerned, his manners had not risen to the ordinary standard, and wonder why he had chosen to be indifferent and rather rude. This naturally would not apply in the City of Mexico, where, as in all great capitals, the mixture of nationalities has had a noticeable influence upon many native characteristics.But in provincial Mexico—wherever there was a street car—it would be true.
In riding along a country road it is likely to be considered an example of gringo brutalidad if one does not speak to every man, woman, and child one meets or overtakes. And completely to fulfill the requirements of rural etiquette, the greeting must be not collective but individual; everybody in one group murmurs something—usually “Adiós”—for the especial benefit of everybody in the other. The first time I took part in this—as it seemed to me then—extraordinary performance, my party of three had met another party of equal number on a narrow path in the mountains, and as we scraped past one another, the word adiós in tired but distinct tones was uttered exactly eighteen times—a positive litany of salutation that nearly caused me to roll off my mule. It is a polite sociable custom and I like it, but under certain circumstances it can become more exhausting than one would suppose. In approaching—on Sunday afternoon, toward the end of a long hot ride—a certain little town (which no doubt is to-day very much as it was when Cortés three hundred and eighty-seven years ago mentioned it in one of his letters to Charles V) I have met as many as three hundred persons returning from market to their ranchitos and villages. Adiós is a beautiful word, but—well, after one has said it and nothing else with a parched throat and an air of sincerity for the three hundredth time, one no longer much cares. However, if you don’t know the returning marketers it is safe to assume that they all know a great deal about you, and for a variety of reasons it is well, however tired one may be, to observe the convention.
With the pure-blooded Indians along the Gulf coast there is, when they happen to know you, an elaborateness about your meetings and partings on the road that amounts to a kind of ritual. The sparkling conversation that follows is an ordinary example and an accurate translation of what is said. During its progress, hands are grasped and shaken several times—the number being in direct ratio to the number of drinks your friend has had during the day.
“Good day, Don Carlitos. How are you?”
“Good day, Vicente” (or Guadalupe or Ipifigenio). “Very well, thank you. How are you?”
“Thanks to God, there is no change! How are Don Guillermo and your mamma?”
“Many thanks, they are as always.” (A pause.) “The roads are bad.”
“Yes, senõr, very bad. Is there much coffee?”
“Enough.”
“I am coming to pick next week.” (He really isn’t and he knows I know he isn’t—but the remark delicately suggests that there is no ill feeling.)
“Come when you wish to. Well, until we meet again.”
“Until we meet again—if God wishes it. May you go with God!”
“Many thanks, Vicente” (or Ipifigenio or Guadalupe). “Remain with God!”
“Thank you, senõr—if God wishes it.”
“Adiós.”
“Adiós.”
Toward women we are everywhere accustomed to a display of more or less politeness, but in Mexico, under the ordinary circumstances of life, men of all classes are polite to one another. Acquaintances take off their hats both when they meet and part, and I have heard a half-naked laborer bent double under a sack of coffee-berries murmur, “With your permission,” as he passed in front of a bricklayer who was repairing a wall. Even the children—who are not renowned in other lands for observing any particular code of etiquette among themselves—treat one another, as a rule, with anastonishing consideration. Once in the plaza at Tehuacan I found myself behind three little boys of about six or seven who were sedately strolling around and around while the band played, quite in the manner of their elders. One of them had a cent, and after asking the other two how they would most enjoy having it invested, he bought from a dulcero one of those small, fragile creations of egg and sugar known, I believe, as a “kiss.” This he at once undertook to divide, with the result that when the guests had each received a pinch of the ethereal structure, there was nothing left for the host but two or three of his own sticky little fingers. He looked a trifle surprised for a moment, and I thought it would be only natural and right for him to demand a taste of the others. But instead of that he merely licked his fingers in silence and then resumed the promenade where it had been left off. However, the general seraphicness of Mexican children is a chapter in itself.
“Is that your horse?” you ask of a stranger with whom you have entered into conversation on the road.
“No, señor—it is yours,” he is likely to reply with a slight bow. And perhaps it is by reason of formulæ like this that the great public characterizesMexican politeness as “all on the surface—not from the heart.” The stranger’s answer, naturally, is just a pretty phrase. But all politeness is largely verbal and the only difference between the politeness of Mexico and the politeness of other countries consists of the fact that, first, the Spanish language is immensely rich in pretty phrases, and, secondly, that literally everyone makes use of them.
One of the most amusing manifestations of the state of mind known as “patriotism” is the fact that every nation is thoroughly convinced of the dishonesty of every other. From end to end of Europe the United States is, and for a long time has been, a synonym of political and financial corruption. We are popularly supposed to be a nation of sharks who have all grown fabulously rich by the simple, effective method of eating one another—and everybody else—up. This is not perhaps the topic the French ambassador picks out to expound at White House dinners, nor does it form the burden of the Duke of Abruzzi’s remarks on the occasion of planting a tree at Washington’s tomb. It is merely a conviction of the great majority of their fellow countrymen at home. On the other hand, very few persons with a drop of Anglo-Saxon blood in them can bring themselves to admit—much less to feel—that the “Latin” races have any but a shallow and versatile conception of honesty and truth. It is a provision of nature that one’s own people should have a monopoly of all the virtues. Uncle John, who was given short change for a napoleon by a waiter at the Jardin de Paris, is more than sustained in his original opinion of the French. And Aunt Lizzie, who paid a dollar and a half for a trunk strap at the leading harness shop of Pekin, Illinois, and then had it stolen at the Laredo customhouse, will all her life believe that the chief occupation of everyone in Mexico, from President Diaz down, is the theft of trunk straps. This sounds like trifling—but it is the way in which one country’s opinion of another is really formed.
A discussion of the comparative honesty of nations must always be a futile undertaking, as a considerable number of persons in every country are dishonest. I know for a fact that when Aunt Lizzie alighted at Laredo to have her trunk examined, she saw the strap “with her own eyes,” and that somewhere between the border and her final destination it miraculously disappeared. On the other hand, I always leave everything I own scattered about my room in Mexican hotels, because I am lazy, and various articles that I should regret to lose I have sometimes forgotten to pack, because I am careless. But nothing has ever been stolen from me in Mexico, and when I have requested the innkeeper by letter or telegram, “Please to send me the two diamond tiaras together with the emerald stomacher I inadvertently left in the second drawer of the washstand,” they have invariably come to me by return express—neither of which experiences (Aunt Lizzie’s and mine) proves anything whatever about anybody.
The question of “laziness” would be easy to dispose of if one could simply say that just as there are honest and dishonest Mexicans, there are indolent and energetic Mexicans. But somehow one can’t. Many of them are extremely industrious, many of them work, when they do work, as hard and as long as it is possible for human beings to bear fatigue—and yet, of what we know as “energy,” I have seen little or nothing. For whatever may be the word’s precise definition, it expresses to most of us an adequate power operating under the lash of a perpetual desire to get something done. In Mexico there are many kinds of adequate power, but apparently the desire to get anything done does not exist. The inhabitants, from peon to professional man, conduct their affairs as if everybody were going “to live,” as Marcus Aurelius says, “ten thousand years!”
Among the lower classes, even leaving out of consideration the influence of a tropical and semitropical climate, it is not difficult to account for this lack of energy. No people whose diet consists chiefly of tortillas, chile, black coffee, and cigarettes are ever going to be lashed by the desire to accomplish. This is the diet of babies as soon as they are weaned. I have heard proud mothers at country dances compare notes, while their men were playing monte around a kerosene torch stuck in the ground.
“My little boy”—aged three—“won’tlookat a tortilla unless it is covered with chile,” one of them explains.
“Does he cry for coffee?” inquires another. “My baby”—aged two and a half—“screams and cries unless we give her coffee three and four times a day.” It is not surprising that a population perpetually in the throes of intestinal disorder should be somewhat lacking in energy.
Furthermore, they are a religious, or rather a superstitious people, given to observing as many of the innumerable feasts on the calendar as iscompatible with making both ends approach—one hesitates to say meet. The entire working force of an isolated ranch will abruptly cease from its labors on hearing from some meddlesome passerby that in more populous localities the day is being celebrated. That it is, may or may not be a fact, and if a supply of liquor cannot be procured there is no very definite way of enjoying unpremeditated idleness. But a fiesta is a fiesta, and everyone stands about all day unwilling to work, unable to play—the prey of ennui and capricious tempers.
Possibly it is mere hair splitting to draw a distinction between laziness and lack of energy, but although climate and heredity will abide and continue to restrain the lower classes from undue continuity of effort, even as they still do the wealthy and educated, it is not fantastic to believe that education and a more nourishing, less emotional diet (both are on the way) will stimulate in the Mexican people some of the latent qualities that will absolve them from the popular reproach of laziness.
ONE December morning, while I was aimlessly strolling in the white, dry sunlight of Puebla, I wandered into the cathedral. The semireligious, semiculinary festival known as Christmas had come and gone for me in Jalapa, but as soon as I went into the church and walked beyond the choir, the awkward situation of which in Spanish cathedrals shows on the part of catholics an unusual indifference to general impressiveness, it was apparent—gorgeously, overwhelmingly apparent—that here Christmas still lingered. This cathedral is always gorgeous and always somewhat overpowering, for, unlike any other I can recall, that which, perhaps, was the original scheme of decoration looks as if it had been completed a few moments before one’s arrival. We have learned to expect in these places worn surfaces, tarnished gilt, a sense of invisible dust and tones instead of colors. So few of them look as they were intended to look that, just as we prefer Greek statues unpainted, we prefer the decorations of cathedrals to be in thenature of exquisite effacement. In the great church of Puebla, however, little is exquisite and certainly nothing is effaced. On entering, one is at first only surprised that an edifice so respectably old can be so jauntily new. But when, during mass, one passes slightly before the choir, and is confronted by the first possible view of any amplitude, it is something more than rhetoric to say that for a moment the cathedral of Puebla is overpowering.
The use of gold leaf in decoration is like money. A little is pleasant, merely too much is vulgar; but a positively staggering amount of it seems to justify itself. My own income is not vulgar; neither is Mr. Rockefeller’s. The ordinary white and gold drawing-room done by the local upholsterer is atrociously vulgar, but the cathedral of Puebla is not. Gold—polished, glittering, shameless gold—blazes down and up and across at one; from the stone rosettes in the vaulting overhead, from the grilles in front of the chapels, from the railings between which the priests walk to altar and choir, from the onyx pulpit and the barricade of gigantic candlesticks in front of the altar, from the altar itself—one of those carefully insane eighteenth-century affairs, in which a frankly pagan tiempolito and great lumps of Christian symbolism have becomegloriously muddled for all time. Gold flashes in the long straight sun shafts overhead, twinkles in the candle flames, glitters from the censers and the chains of the censers. The back of the priest at the altar is incrusted with gold, and to-day—for Christmas lingers—all the pillars from capital to base are swathed in the finest of crimson velvet, fringed with gold. It isn’t vulgar, it isn’t even gaudy. It has surpassed all that and has entered into the realm of the bewildering—the flabbergastric.
As I sank upon one of the sparsely occupied benches “para los señores,” there was exhaled from the organ, somewhere behind and above me, a dozen or more bars of Chopin. During the many sartorial interims of the mass the organ coquetted frequently with Chopin as well as with Saint-Saëns, Massenet, and Gounod in some of his less popular but as successfully cloying moments—and never anywhere have I seen so much incense. As a rule, unless one sits well forward in churches, the incense only tantalizes. Swing and jerk as the little boys may, it persists in clinging to the altar and the priests, in being sucked into the draught of the candle flames and then floating up to the sunlight of the dome. It rarely reaches the populace untilit has become cool and thin. At Puebla they may be more prodigal of it, or they may use a different kind. It at any rate belches out at one in fat, satiating clouds of pearl-gray and sea-blue, and what with Chopin and all the little gasping flames, the rich, deliberate, incrusted group about the altar, the forest of crimson pillars and the surfeit of gold, I experienced one of those agreeable, harmless, ecclesiastical debauches that in Mexico, where the apparatus of worship does not often rise above the tawdry, and the music is almost always execrable, are perforce rare.
Toward the end of it, the central and most splendid figure among those at the altar turned to execute some symbolic gesture and I recognized his grace, the Bishop. More than half incrusted with gold and, for the rest, swathed in white lace over purple, he was far more splendid than when, two years before, he had confirmed my godchild Geronimo, son of Felipe, in the weatherworn church at Mizantla. But he was none the less the same poisonous-looking old body with whom on that occasion I had had “words.” I recognized, among other things, his fat, overhanging underlip. By its own weight it fell outward from his lower teeth, turned half about and disclosed a rubbery inside that, with its blue veins against a background of congested red, had reminded me, I remember, of a piece of German fancy-work. Undoubtedly it was his grace on a visit to a neighboring see and officiating through the courtesy of a brother bishop in the great cathedral.
Strange, I thought, that such a looking old person should be associated in my mind with so pretty an incident and so springlike a day. For the sight of him took me back, as the saying is, to a hot, radiant February morning when the sun blazed down upon the ranch for the first time in two weeks and I had ridden into the village to have Geronimo, a charming child of six, confirmed. There was the inevitable Mexican delay in starting, while horses and mules fled around the pasture refusing to be caught, while the cook made out “la lista”—three cents worth of this and six cents worth of that—while mislaid tenates were found, provided with string handles and hung over pommels. But we staggered off at last—Felipe leading on foot with a sky-blue bundle under one arm (it was a clean pair of trousers) and his loose white drawers rolled up to his thighs. I wondered why, on this great occasion, he did not wear the neckerchief of mauve silk we had given him at Christmasuntil a moment later I discovered it in two pieces around the necks of his wife and Geronimo. His wife followed him on a horse, and Geronimo, astride at her back, clutched at her waist with one hand and with the other attempted most of the way in to prevent his cartwheel of a hat from bumping against his mother’s shoulder blades in front and falling off behind. Then a San Juan Indian in fluttering white, bearing on his back Felipe’s sick baby in a basket, pattered along over the mudholes with the aid of a staff. Trinidad, the mayordomo, followed next on his horse, and I came last on a mule, from where I could see the others vanishing one by one into the shady jungle, scrambling below me down wet, rocky hillsides and stringing through the hot pastures full of damp, sweet vapors and hidden birds that paused and listened to their own languid voices.
The river was high and swift after the rain, and for those who counted on another’s legs to get them across, there was the interminable three or four minutes when one takes a reef in one’s own, unconditionally surrenders to the steed, tries not to look down at the water, and with a pinched smile at the opposite shore reflects that: “If the beast keeps three or even two of his little hoofs on thestones at the same time until we reach the sand bar—how trivial! But if he doesn’t he will go swirling downstream like an empty barrel, my head will smash against the first boulder, and it will all be very sad.”
The bishop’s advent had, if not quite the importance of a fiesta, at least the enlivening qualities of a fiestita. There was so much movement and talk and color in the drowsy town, and so many drunken Indians shook hands with me and patted me on the back, that if it had not been Thursday, I should have known it was Sunday. The bishop had not been to Mizantla for some said five and others eight years. But in either period it seems that unconfirmed children pile up amazingly. Grouped about the weed-grown open space on the church’s shady side there were almost four hundred of them, not including parents and godparents, and this was the second of the three days’ opportunity.
But there was the same vagueness as to when the ceremony would begin that there had been about the date of the previous visit. Some, remembering perhaps that most gringos have an inscrutable prejudice in favor of the definite, courteously named an hour—any hour; two, five, half past six. Othersrecalled that evening was the time, while a few assured me the bishop had come and gone the day before. Nobody, however, seemed to care, and I asked myself as Felipe and Geronimo and I sat on a crumbling parapet and watched the bright colored crowd: “Why should I care? What difference does it make whether I sit here in the shade or in the shade at the ranch?”
But at last there began to be a slow activity—a going in and a coming out at the door of the priest’s house. I watched people go in empty-handed and come out with a slip of paper in one hand and a long yellow candle in the other. The slip of paper left me cold, but the tapering yellow candle mystically called. In Jalapa I had often stood for an hour staring at the moderate revolutions of the great hoop on which the pendent wicks grow fatter and fatter as the velero patiently bathes them in boiling tallow, and I had yearned to possess one. Yet, heretofore, I had denied myself; the desire, it seemed to me, was like that craving for heirlooms and ancestors on the part of persons to whom such innocent sensualities have been cruelly denied. To-day, however, long virtue was to have a short, vicarious reward, for Geronimo’s little soul was at the moment entirely in my hands, and itwas but proper that his way to heaven should be lighted by a blessed candle. So when I came out of the priest’s house I, too, had one (“Bang! went saxpence”) as well as the “certificate of confirmation” (“Bang!” went another), on which was written my godchild’s name, and the names of his parents and my name. It took hours for everyone to be supplied, but they were as nothing compared to the hours we waited in the church for the bishop. Except in front of the altar, the nave had been fenced off by a continuous line of benches facing inward, and on these the children stood with their sponsors behind them. Like most Mexican children, their behavior was admirable. They rarely cry, they rarely quarrel, and their capacity for amusing themselves with nothing is without limit. Had I the ordering of this strange, unhappy world, I think all children would be born Mexican and remain so until they were fifteen.
That they in a measure outgrow their youthful serenity, however, seemed to be proved by exhausted relatives all about me who, after the first hour of waiting, began to roll their eyes when they met mine and dispatch a succession of Sister Annes to peer through the windows of the priest’s sala. “Está dormiendo” (he is sleeping), in a hoarsewhisper, was repeated so often that—my breakfast had been a cup of chocolate and a cigarette—the hinges in my knees began to work both ways, and just outside the church door I recklessly bought and ate something (it cauterized me as it went down) wrapped in a tortilla. When I returned, the bishop, with three priests behind him, was standing at the top of the altar steps. He was wearing his miter and the tips of his fingers lightly touched one another, as a bishop’s fingers should, on the apex of his stomach. It was a thrilling moment.
Then, combining, in a quite wonderful fashion, extreme rapidity with an air of ecclesiastical calm, he made his confirmatory way down one side of the nave, across the end, and up the other, preceded by one priest and followed by two. The first gathered up the certificates (no laying on of hands unless one has paid one’s twenty-five centavos) and read the name of the child next in line to the bishop, who murmured the appropriate formula, made a tiny sign of the cross on a tiny forehead with the end of a large, dirty thumb, and moved on. The second, with a bit of absorbent cotton dipped in oil, swabbed the spot on which the cross had been signed, while the third, taking advantage of thegeneral rapture, gently relieved everyone of his blessed candle (it had never been lighted) and carried it away to be sold again.
But by the time the first priest reached my family party he had grown tired and careless. Instead of collecting the certificates singly, he began to take them in twos and threes with the result that they became mixed, and Geronimo was confirmed, not as Geronimo, but as “Saturnina,” which happened to be the name of the little snubnosed Totonac girl standing next to him. When I realized what had happened, I protested. Whereupon his grace and I proceeded to have “words.” With exceeding bitterness he then reperformed the rite, and if the eyes of the first priest could have killed, I should have withered on my slender stalk. The priest with the cotton also sought to annihilate me with an undertoned remark to the effect that my conduct was a “barbaridad,” but the third was not only sinpatico—he was farther away from the bishop. As, with much tenderness, he disengaged Geronimo’s reluctant fingers from the candle, he severely looked at me and winked.