Then we wandered down to the shabby little plaza, where I bought Geronimo some toys and Felipe wanted to buy me a drink. But as Felipewas still looking prematurely old as the result of something suspiciously like delirium tremens a few weeks before, I sanctimoniously declined and bade them good-by.
There is no twilight in those tropics, and before the mayordomo and I reached home, darkness gathered in the deep valley, crept behind us up the mountainside, and all at once, as they say in Spanish, “it nighted.” It was impossible to see the trail or even the sky, and we lurched on and on as through an interminable world of black velvet. Most of the way I kept my eyes shut—crouching down on the pommel to escape overhanging vines and the terrible outstretched fingers of mala mujer. Twice we lost our hats, and once my mule stuck deep and fast in the mud until we jumped into it ourselves and pulled him out. On this road after dark it is usually difficult to think of anything except that in a little while one’s neck will be broken; but that evening, with my eyelids squeezed together and my feet prudently hanging free of the stirrups, I kept recalling Felipe’s clumsy, charming devotion to his ethereal little son and the satisfaction he had unconsciously displayed when Geronimo toddled out of the church—confirmed.
Although Felipe gets frightfully drunk, neglectshis wife for other women, and regards a machete as the most convincing form of argument, he has excellent qualities; but I shouldn’t think of him as religious exactly. And yet—and yet—Felipe and his wife are really married (it seems rather snobbish of them, but it’s a fact), and from the knowledge that his children have been baptized by the priest and confirmed by the bishop, he gets some sort of an agreeable sensation.
WHY people are what they are is always an interesting subject on which to exert one’s talents, however slight, for observation and inference. On an isolated Mexican farm one spends many odd moments in considering and attempting to explain the traits of the people who condescend to work for one. For most of the problems of one’s daily life there arise from those traits, and by them, all are complicated. The amicable relations between employer and employed everywhere is one that necessitates on the former’s part considerable tact to preserve, but in Mexico both the nation’s history and the people’s temperament combine to render the situation one of unusual delicacy.
In 1519 Spain and the Roman Catholic Church affixed themselves to Mexico’s throat and were with extreme difficulty detached from it only after three hundred years. During most of that time, in addition to the fact that the Church got possession actually of something more than a third of the country’s entire property, “real, personal, andmixed,” the metaphorical expression, “he could not call his soul his own,” was true of the inhabitants in its baldest, its most literal sense. To call one’s soul one’s own in Mexico between the years 1527 and 1820 was to be tried in secret by the Holy Office of the Inquisition and then turned over to the secular authorities—a formality that deceived no one—to be either publicly strangled and then burned, or burned without even the preliminary solace of strangulation. “The principal crimes of which the Holy Office took cognizance,” we read, “were heresy, sorcery, withcraft, polygamy, seduction, imposture, and personation”—a tolerably elastic category. Without the slightest difficulty it could be stretched to cover anyone “not in sympathy with the work,” and during the period in which the Holy Office was exercised it covered many.
It is true the royal order by which the Inquisition was formally established in Mexico exempted Indians from its jurisdiction, but when the clause was observed—which it was not in the case of Indians who displayed a capacity for thought—it was almost the only form of oppression from which, under the bigoted and avaricious rule of Spain, they were exempt. Until the advent of the conquerors this part of the new world had been, for no oneknows how long, a slaughterhouse of the gods. Spain and the Church continued a carnage of their own in the name of God.
The limited scope of these impressions permits of scarcely a reference to Mexico’s history. I can only assert that almost every phase of it is imbedded in layer upon layer of the rottenest type of ecclesiastical politics and that the great mass of the people to-day reflects—in a fashion curiously modified at unexpected moments by the national awakening—its generations of mental and physical subjection. For whatever, from time to time, has happened to be the form of government, the people have never enjoyed any large measure of freedom. Even now, with an acute, patriotic, and enlightened president at the head of the nation, Mexico—and quite inevitably—is not a republic, but a military Diazpotism.
In the name of gods and of God, of kings, dictators, popes, generals, emperors, and presidents, the people of Mexico have been treated, one would be inclined to say, like so many head of irresponsible cattle, if cattle, as a rule, were not treated more solicitously. And this general tendency of the governor toward the governed has accentuated certain traits easy enough to isolate and describe, if they were notcomplicated by the facts that: First, the Mexican of to-day naturally has many characteristics in common with the Spaniard who begat him and whom he still hates; second, that the nation is becoming more and more conscious of itself as a nation, and, third, that in a multitude of petty ways a kind of mediæval tyranny is still often exercised by the very persons who, as officials of a theoretically excellent republic, ought to stand for all that is liberal and just.
Now, if the attitude of a Mexican peon were always consistently that of the oppressed and patient creature who looks upon his patrón as omnipotent and omniscient, or if it were always that of the highfalutin Spaniard whom at times he so much resembles—or, if it were always that of Young Mexico, conscious of at least his theoretical independence and in theory “as good as anybody,” there would be little difficulty in getting along with him; one would know at any given moment how to treat him. But as a matter of fact it is a rather intricate combination of all three, and one can rarely predict which he will choose to exhibit. Add to this an incredible depth of superstition that is both innate and very carefully encouraged by the Church, and it is not difficult to see why an employer in certain parts of Mexico is compelled totreat his laborers much as one has to treat nervous and unreasonable children.
Although they are hired and receive wages on various terms of agreement, the normal relation between the proprietor of, say, a café finca of moderate size and the people who work for him, suggests in many respects the relation that existed before the Civil War between our Southerners of the better type and their slaves. Some of the people have small farms of their own in the neigborhood, but when they go to work for any length of time they usually close their houses and live on the ranch of their employer in one-roomed huts built by the patrón at a cost—if they are made of bamboo—of from six to ten dollars an edifice. Closing their houses for the coffee-picking season consists of gathering up four or five primitive pottery cooking utensils, several babies, a pair of thin and faded sarapes, calling to the dogs and strolling out of the door. Under ordinary amicable circumstances they are disposed to look up to the patrón, to be flattered by his notice of them—to regard him, in fact, as of different and finer clay than themselves. And when this lowly and dependent mood is upon them there is not only nothing the señor cannot, in their opinion, accomplish if he desires to—there are nodemands upon his time, his money, his implements, and his sympathies that they hesitate to make. The proprietor of a far-away ranch acquires a certain proficiency in the performance of almost every kindly office, from obstetrics to closing the eyes of the dead.
One Agapito, whose baby died on our place, informed us—after we had sufficiently condoled and he had cheerfully assured us that the baby was “better off with God”—that it would give him and his wife great pleasure to pay us the compliment of having the wake in our sala! There, of course, was a delicate situation at once. Agapito yearned for the prestige that would be his if we permitted him to suspend his dead baby—dressed in mosquito netting and orange blossoms—against the sala wall and leave it there to the edification of the countryside for a day and a night. To refuse was, without doubt, to offend him; but to consent was to establish a somewhat ghastly precedent impossible in subsequent cases of affliction to ignore. As my brother declared, when we withdrew to discuss the matter, one had to choose between hurting Agapito’s feelings and turning the sala into a perpetual morgue. Agapito was in several respects an efficient and valuable person. He could even persuade the machine for dispulpingcoffee-berries to work smoothly when—as they express it—“it does not wish to.” But, nevertheless, with much regret we decided to hurt Agapito’s feelings. Like children they do not shrink from making naïvely preposterous demands upon one, and like children their sense of obligation is almost entirely lacking. They are given to bringing one presents of oranges and bananas, or inedible blood puddings and cakes when they kill a pig or have a party, but they are rarely incited to display appreciation of kindness—even when it would be easy for them to do so—in a way that counts.
One afternoon, during the busiest season of the year on a coffee ranch, all the coffee-pickers—men, women, and children—with the exception of one family, suddenly struck. When asked what the trouble was, the spokesman in a florid and pompous address declared that they were “all brothers and must pick together or not at all.” It came out during the interview that the father of the family who had not struck had received permission for himself, his wife, and six small children to pick in a block of coffee by themselves, and to this the others had been induced to object. Why they objected they could not say, because they did not know. It was explained to them that the man had wishedhis family to work apart for the sole and sensible reason that, first, he and his wife could take better care of the children when they were not scattered among the crowd, and, secondly, that as the trees of the particular block he had asked to be allowed to pick in were younger and smaller than the others, the children had less difficulty in reaching the branches. He not only derived no financial advantage from the change, he was voluntarily making some sacrifice by going to pick where the coffee, owing to the youth of the trees, was less abundant.
“Don’t you see that this is the truth and all there is to it?” the strikers were asked.
“Yes.”
“And now that it has been explained, won’t you go back to work?”
“No.”
“But why not?”
“Because.”
“Because what?”
“Because we must all pick together.”
A strike for higher wages or shorter hours or more and better food is usual and always comprehensible anywhere, but one has to go to Mexico, I imagine, to experience a strike that involves neithera question of material advantage nor of abstract principle. It was recalled to them that the fact of their being “all brothers” did not operate against their eloping with one another’s wives and slashing one another with machetes in the mazy dance whenever they felt so inclined—a reflection that produced much merriment, especially among the ladies. But upon the point at issue it had no effect whatever, and irritating as it was to be forced into submitting to this sort of thing, before work could be resumed the family of eight had to be sent for and told to pick with the others. All these people were indebted to their employer for loans, for medicines—for assistance of various kinds too numerous to mention or to remember, and, in their way, they liked him and liked the ranch. I can account for such inconsiderate imbecility only by supposing that after generations of oppression the desire among an ignorant and emotional people to assert their independence in small matters becomes irresistible from time to time, even when they cannot discover that their rights have been in any way infringed upon.
However, their rightsareconstantly infringed upon in the most obvious and brazen manner, and knowledge of this undoubtedly contributes to theiruncomfortable habit of vibrating between an attitude of doglike trust and one of the most exaggerated suspicion. Last year, for example, a stone bridge was being built in a small town some six or eight miles away from our ranch. As the heavy summer rains were but a few months off, it was desirable that the bridge should be completed. Labor, however, was exceedingly scarce, and for a long time the work made no visible progress. At first the authorities resorted to the usual plan of making arrests for drunkenness and obliging the victims to haul stones and mortar, but as this immediately resulted in the exercise of unusual self-restraint on the part of the populace, the jefe político evolved the quaint conceit of detaining every able-bodied man who appeared in town without trousers! The Indians in that part of the country, and many of the people who are not pure Indian, wear, instead of the skin-tight Mexican trousers, a pair of long, loose white cotton drawers resembling in cut and fit the lower part of a suit of pajamas. They are not only a perfectly respectable garment, they are vastly more practical and comfortable than the pantalones, inasmuch as they can be rolled above the knee and, in a land of mud and streams, kept clean and dry. But until the jefehad acquired a force sufficient to complete the bridge, he arrested everybody who wore them. A law had been passed, he said, declaring them to be indecent. Just when the law had been passed and by whom he did not trouble to explain. Among the small rancheros of the neighborhood who did not own a pair of trousers, the edict caused not only inconvenience but now and then positive hardship. Many of them who had not heard of it and innocently attended church or market were sent to bridge-building for indefinite periods when they ought to have been at home harvesting their corn. Their crops were either spoiled or stolen. The Indians on our place did not dare venture into town for supplies until we bought a pair of trousers for lending purposes. “Trinidad (or Lucio, or Jesús) is going to town and begs that you will do him the favor of lending him the pants,” was an almost daily request for weeks.[1]
[1]Since I wrote the above, the following item of news appeared in theMexican Heraldof February 11, 1908:Forced to Wear TrousersMountaineers Around GuanajuatoPrefer to Pay Fines.Special Dispatch to theHerald.Guanajuato, February 10th.—The local treasury will soon be full to overflowing from the numerous fines collected from sons of the mountains who daily endeavor to enter this ancient town clad in cotton drawers. The law is strict in this particular, and the police in the suburbs have strict orders to see that no peon enters the town without a pair of factory-made trousers.[It would be interesting to know who, in Guanajuato, owns the largest interest in the local trousers factory.]
[1]Since I wrote the above, the following item of news appeared in theMexican Heraldof February 11, 1908:
Forced to Wear TrousersMountaineers Around GuanajuatoPrefer to Pay Fines.
Special Dispatch to theHerald.
Guanajuato, February 10th.—The local treasury will soon be full to overflowing from the numerous fines collected from sons of the mountains who daily endeavor to enter this ancient town clad in cotton drawers. The law is strict in this particular, and the police in the suburbs have strict orders to see that no peon enters the town without a pair of factory-made trousers.
[It would be interesting to know who, in Guanajuato, owns the largest interest in the local trousers factory.]
I remember one jefe político to whom it occurred that he might start a butcher shop and ruin the business of the only other butcher shop in town, which was kept by a man he happened to dislike. When he had completed his arrangements for the sale of meat, he caused a rumor to circulate among the lower classes to the effect that life would be a gladder, sweeter thing for all concerned if the meat he was now prepared to dispense should find a market both ready and sustained. To the American and English rancheros of the neighborhod he had letters written by various friends of his who happened to know them; courteous not to say punctilious letters that, however, contained somewhere between the lines an ominous rumble. “I thought it might interest you to learn that H—, the jefe, has opened a butcher shop and would consider it an honor if you were to favor him with your patronage, instead of bestowing it upon his competitor,” the letters ran in part. Though somewhat more rhetorical, it all sounded to the unattuned ear as innocent as any of the numerous advertisements one receives by post in the course of a week at home. But it wasn’t. In a “republic,” where the governors of the various states must be without question the political friends of the president, and the jefes are usually, with no more question, the political friends of the governors, the suggestion that a jefe would not object to one’s purchasing beefsteaks from him is not lightly to be ignored. The local jefe can, in a hundred subtle ways, make one’s residence in Mexico extremely difficult and disagreeable. Every foreigner who received one of the inspired epistles changed his butcher the next day. Another jefe of my acquaintance—a rather charming man—decided to pave a certain country road chiefly because it went through some land owned by his brother. As most of the able-bodied convicts of that district were engaged in paving a much more important highway and he could not very well draw upon their forces, he magnificently sent out a messenger who floundered through the mud from ranch to ranch, announcing to the countryside that henceforth every man would have to labor, without compensation, one day in eight upon the road. Now, to most of the people who received the message, this particular road wasof no importance; they rarely used it and they owned no land through which it ran. And yet—whether from the habit of submitting to tyranny, or from guilty consciences, I don’t know—many responded with their time and their toil. When asked, as we frequently were, for advice on the subject, we refrained from giving any.
The habit of suspicion and the impulse to make, for no very definite reason, little displays of personal independence would tax one’s patience and amiability to the utmost if one did not keep on hand a reserve fund of these qualities with which to fortify oneself against frequent exhibitions of Mexican honor. In referring to this somewhat rococo subject, it is perhaps but fair for me to admit that even so comparatively simple a matter as the Anglo-Saxon sense of honor presents certain difficulties to my understanding. Explain and expound as many intelligent gentlemen have to me, for instance, I have never been able to grasp why it is so much more dishonorable to evade one’s gambling debts than it is to evade one’s laundress. Therefore I do not feel competent to throw a great light upon the kind of honor that obtains in Mexico. I can only observe that, like politeness, smallpox, and fine weather, it is very prevalent, and record an exampleor two of the many that arise in my memory, by way of illustrating one of the obstacles in the employer’s path.
A few winters ago we hired a youth to bring our letters and fresh meat every day from the town to the ranch. He performed this monotonous service with commendable regularity, and with a regularity not so commendable always cut off at least a quarter of the meat after leaving the butcher shop and gave it to his mother who lived in town. Furthermore, when the workmen on the place intrusted him with letters to post on his return, he posted them if they were stamped, but scattered them in fragments if they were not, and pocketed the money. We knew he did both these things because we found and identified some of the epistolary fragments, and his mother had the monumental brass to complain to the butcher when the meat was tough! But even so, he was a convenience—none of the laborers could be regularly spared at the time—and we made no moan. One day, however, it was impossible to ignore the matter; he arrived with a bit of beefsteak about as large as a mutton chop and had the effrontery, as we thought, to deliver it without a word of explanation. So, as the imposition had been going on for at least six weeks,he was as kindly as possible, most unfortunately, accused. Then followed an exhibition of outraged innocence such as I have never before seen. He turned a kind of Nile green; he clenched his fist and beat upon his chest. He made an impassioned address in which he declared that, although his family was poor and needed the twenty-five centavos a day we paid him, he could not continue to work for anyone who had sought to cast a reflection upon his spotless honor; and he ended by bursting into tears and sobbing for ten minutes with his head on a bag of coffee.
The tragic, humorous, and altogether grotesque part of the affair was that on this particular day for the first time, no doubt, since we had employed him, hehadn’tstolen the meat! We learned from the butcher a few hours afterwards that there had been scarcely any beefsteak in the shop when the boy had called, but that he had sent a few ounces, thinking it was better than nothing at all. We lost our messenger; his mother would not allow him to work for persons who doubted his honesty.
A friend of mine had in his employ an old man—an ex-bullfighter—who took care of the horses and accompanied the various members of the family when they went for a ride. He was given to gambling, and on one occasion when he had lost all his money but could not bring himself to leave the game, he gambled away a saddle and bridle of his employer. Shortly afterwards my friend recognized them in the window of a harness shop and bought them back, without, however, mentioning the fact to old Preciliano, who, when casually asked where they were, replied quite as casually that at the public stable where the horses were kept they had become mixed with some other equipment and taken away by mistake. He explained that he knew the distant ranchero who had inadvertently done this and that steps had been taken to have them returned. For several weeks my friend amused himself by asking for—and getting—minute details of the saddle’s whereabouts and the probable date of its arrival, and then one day he abruptly accused Preciliano of having lost it in a game of cards.
This was followed by almost exactly a repetition of the performance we had been given by the meat-and-letter boy. Preciliano was not only astonished that the señor could for a moment imagine such a thing, he was hurt—wounded—cruelly smitten in his old age by the hand he had never seen raised except in kindness. All was lost save honor. That, thank God, he could still retain—but not there; notunder that roof. He could not remain covered with shame in the shadow of so hideous a suspicion. Honor demanded that he should “separate” himself at once—honor demanded all sorts of things in this vein until my friend, who said he was positively beginning to believe Preciliano very much as Preciliano believed himself, suddenly stooped down and pulled the saddle and bridle from under the table. Collapse. Tears. Forgiveness. Tableau.
Preciliano subsequently left this family—gave up an agreeable and lucrative position—because the wife of the employer thoughtfully suggested that, on account of his advancing years, it would be wiser of him not to exercise a certain imperfectly broken horse. He was “covered with shame” and sorrowfully bade them farewell.
HERE is a letter from a coffee plantation:
When I got back in October, they received me with formalities—gave me a kind of Roman triumph. If it hadn’t been so pathetic I should have laughed; if it hadn’t been so funny I should have cried. For I had been fourteen hours on a slow-climbing mule, and you know—or rather you don’t know—how the last interminable two hours of that kind of riding unstrings one. Being Mexican, everything about the Roman triumph went wrong and fell perfectly flat. In the first place they expected me a day earlier, and when I didn’t arrive they decided—Heaven knows why—that I wouldn’t come the next day, but the day after. In the meanwhile I appeared late in the afternoon of the day between. They had built in front of the piazza a wobbly arch of great glossy leaves and red flowers, and from post to post had hung chains of red, white, and green tissue paper. But the arch, of course, had blown down in the night and most of the paper garlands had beenrained on and were hanging limply to the posts. All this, they assured me, would have been repaired had I arrived a day later, and I marveled at my self-control as I enthusiastically admired the beauty of a welcoming arch lying prostrate in the mud.
It had been the pleasant intention of everyone to assemble and welcome me home, and when at the entrance to the ranch the Indian who lives there gave a prolonged, falsetto cry (un grito)—the signal agreed on—and I rode up the slope to the clanging of the bell we ring to call in the pickers, and the detonations of those terrible Mexican rockets that give no light but rend the sky apart, I had a feeling as of a concourse awaiting me. The concourse, however, had given me up until the next day, and when I got off my mule I found that the entire festivities were being conducted by Manuel the house-boy, Rosalía the cook, and Trinidad the mayordomo. Trinidad shot off all six cartridges in his revolver and then shook hands with me. Rosalía was attached to the bell rope—Manuel was manipulating the rockets. At that moment I knew exactly how the hero feels when the peasantry (no doubt such plays are now extinct) exclaims: “The young squire comes of age to-day. Hurray, hurray, hurray! There will be great doings up at thehall. Hurray, hurray, hurray!” It was all so well meant that when I went into my bedroom I could not bring myself to scold at what I found there. On the clean, brown cedar walls they had pasted pictures—advertisements of sewing machines and breakfast foods and automobiles, cut from the back pages of magazines and slapped on anywhere. They see but few pictures, and ours, although rather meaningless to them, are fascinating. A picture is a picture, and my walls were covered with them; but I pretended to be greatly pleased. Since then I have been quietly soaking them off at the tactful rate of about two a week.
Trinidad, the new mayordomo, seems to have done well in my absence. He planted thirty-five thousand new coffee trees with an intelligence positively human. Casimiro, his predecessor, and I parted last year—not in anger, only in sorrow. Casimiro had been a highwayman—a bandit. His police record, they say, makes creepy reading on dark and windy nights. That, however, I never took in consideration. It was only when he began to gamble and to make good his losses by selling me my own corn and pocketing the money that we bade each other good-by. There was no scene. When I told him such things could not go on, hegravely agreed with me that they couldn’t, and without resentment departed the next morning. They are strange people. When they do lose control of themselves they go to any lengths; there is likely to be a scene more than worth the price of admission. Somebody usually gets killed. But nothing short of this would seem to be, as a rule, worth while, and on the surface their manner is one of indifference—detachment. Trinidad, who took Casimiro’s place, rose, so to speak, from the ranks. He was an arriero for seven years and then drifted here as a day laborer. But he understands coffee, and the experiment of suddenly placing him over all the others has so far been a success.
What a watchful eye the authorities keep on them even in far-away places like this! The instant Trinidad ceased to be a common laborer on whatever he could earn a day by picking coffee, hauling firewood, cleaning the trees, and received a salary of thirty-five pesos a month, his taxes were raised. They all pay a monthly tax (the “contribución” it is called) of a few centavos, although what most of them, owning absolutely nothing, are taxed for, it would be hard to say, unless it be for breathing the air of heaven—for being alive at all. He triedto keep secret the fact of his advancement, but it became known of course, and his tax, to his great disgust, was raised fifteen or twenty cents.
Last week we had our first picking of the year and, weather permitting (which it won’t be), we shall pick with more or less continuity for the next four months. Coffee is different from other crops (“not like other girls”) and often inclines me to believe it has acquired some of its characteristics from prolonged and intimate contact with the hands that pick it. For quite in the Mexican manner it cannot bring itself to do anything so definite and thorough as to ripen—like wheat or corn or potatoes—all at once. A few berries turn red on every tree and have to be removed before they fall off. By the time this has been done from one end of the place to the other, more have ripened and reddened and the pickers begin again. “Poco á poco—not to-day shall we be ready for you, but to-morrow, or perhaps next week. To do anything so final—in fact, to be ready on any specific date is not the custom of the country,” the trees seem to say. However, it is just as well. Nature apparently knew what she was doing. To pick the berries properly requires skill and time, and if they all ripened at once one could not take care of them.
Beyond the fact that you “don’t take sugar, thank you,” and like to have the cream poured in first, do you know anything about coffee? Did you know that the pretty, fussy trees (they are really more like large shrubs) won’t grow in the sun and won’t grow in the shade, but have to be given companionship in the form of other trees that, high above them, permit just enough and not too much sunlight to filter mildly in? And that unless you twist off the berries in a persuasive, almost gentle fashion, you so hurt their feelings that in the spring they may refuse to flower? And that the branches are so brittle, they have a way of cracking off from the weight of their own crop? And that wherever there is coffee there is also a tough, graceful little vine about as thick as a telegraph wire which, if left uncut, winds itself around and around a tree, finally strangling it to death as a snake strangles a rabbit?
When I see the brown hands of the pickers fluttering like nimble birds among the branches, and think of the eight patient processes to which the little berries must be subjected before they can become a cup of drinkable coffee, I often wonder how and by whom their secret was wrested from them. Was it an accident like the original whitening ofsugar, when—so we used to be told—a chicken with clay on its feet ran over a mound of crude, brown crystals? Or did a dejected Arabian, having heard all his life that (like the tomato of our grandmothers’) it was a deadly thing, attempt by drinking it to assuage forever a hopeless passion for some bulbul of the desert, and then find himself not dead, but waking? A careless woman drops a bottle of bluing into a vat of wood pulp and lo! for the first time we have colored writing paper. But no one ever inadvertently picked, dispulped, fermented, washed, dried, hulled, roasted, ground, and boiled coffee, and unless most of these things are done to it, it is of no possible use.
After the coffee is picked it is brought home in sacks, measured, and run through the dispulper, a machine that removes the tough red, outer skin. Every berry (except the pea berry—a freak) is composed of two beans, and these are covered with a sweet, slimy substance known as the “honey,” which has to ferment and rot before the beans may be washed. Washing simply removes the honey and those pieces of the outer skin that have escaped the teeth of the machine and flowed from the front end where they weren’t wanted. Four or five changes of water are made in the course of theoperation, and toward the last, when the rotted honey has been washed away, leaving the beans hard and clean in their coverings of parchment, one of the men takes off his trousers, rolls up his drawers, and knee deep in the heavy mixture of coffee and water drags his feet as rapidly as he can around the cement washing tank until the whole mass is in motion with a swirling eddy in the center. Into the eddy gravitate all the impurities—the foreign substances—the dead leaves and twigs and unwelcome hulls, and when they all seem to be there, the man deftly scoops them up with his hands and tosses them over the side. Then, if it be a fine hot day, the soggy mess is shoveled on the asoleadero (literally, the sunning place), an immense sloping stone platform covered with smooth cement, and there it is spread out to dry while men in their bare feet constantly turn it over with wooden hoes in order that the beans may receive the sun equally on all sides.
It sounds simple, and if one numbered among one’s employees a Joshua who could command the sun to stand still when one wished it to, it doubtless would be. But no matter how much coffee there may be spread out on the asoleadero, the sun not only loses its force at a certain hour and theninconsiderately sets, it sometimes refuses for weeks at a time to show itself at all. During these dreary eternities the half-dried coffee is stowed away in sacks or, when it is too wet to dispose of in this manner without danger of molding, it is heaped up in ridges on the asoleadero and covered. When it rains, work of all kinds in connection with the coffee necessarily ceases. The dryers cannot dry and the pickers cannot pick. Even when it is not actually raining the pickers won’t go out if the trees are still wet. For the water from the shaken branches chills and stiffens their bloodless hands and soaks through their cotton clothes to the skin. If one’s plantation and one’s annual crop are large enough to justify the expense, one may defy the sun by investing in what is known as a secadero—a machine for drying coffee by artificial heat. But I haven’t arrived at one of these two-thousand-dollar sun-scorners—yet.
That is as far as I go with my coffee—I pick it, dispulp it, wash it, dry it, and sell it. But while the first four of these performances sometimes bid fair to worry me into my grave before my prime, and the fourth at least is of vital importance, as the flavor of coffee may certainly be marred, if not made, in the drying, they are but the preludeto what is eventually done to it before you critically sip it and declare it to be good or bad. Women and children pick it over by hand, separating it into different classes; it is then run through one machine that divests it of its parchment covering; another, with the uncanny precision of mindless things, gropes for beans that happen to be of exactly the same shape, wonderfully finds them, and drops them into their respective places; while at the same time it is throwing out every bean that either nature or the dispulping machine has in the slightest degree mutilated. The sensitiveness and apperception of this iron and wooden box far exceed my own. Often I am unable to see the difference between the beans it has chosen to disgorge into one sack and the beans it has relegated to another—to feel the justice of its irrevocable decisions. But they are always just, and every bean it drops into the defective sack will be found, on examination, to be defective. Then there is still another machine for polishing the bean—rubbing off the delicate, tissue-paper membrane that covers it inside of the parchment. This process does not affect the flavor. In fact nothing affects the flavor of coffee after it has once been dried; but the separation and the polishing give it what is known to the trade as“style.” And in the trade there is as much poppycock about coffee as there is about wine and cigars. When you telephone to your grocer for a mixture of Mocha and Java do you by any chance imagine that you are going to receive coffee from Arabia and the Dutch islands? What you do receive, the coffee kings alone know. There are, I have been told, a few sacks of real Mocha in the United States, just as there are a few real Vandykes and Holbeins, and if you are very lucky indeed, the Mocha in your mixture will have been grown in Mexico.
Sometimes at the height of the picking season the day is not long enough, the washing tanks are not large enough, and the workers are not numerous enough to attend to both the coffee-drying on the asoleadero and the growing pile of berries that are constantly being carried in from the trees. When this happens the dispulping has to be done at night, and until four or five in the morning the monotonous plaint of the machine, grinding, grinding like the mills of some insatiable Mexican god, comes faintly over from the tanks. Under a flaring torch and fortified with a bottle of aguardiente the men take turns through the long night at filling the hopper and turning the heavy wheel, burstingnow and then into wild, improvised recitatives that are answered by whomever happens for the moment to be most illuminated by either the aguardiente or the divine fire. They begin to improvise to this rapid, savage burst of a few minor phrases from the time they are children. Almost any grown man can do it, although there is a standard of excellence in the art (I have begun to detect it when I hear it), recognized among themselves, that only a few attain. It takes into consideration both the singer’s gift for dramatic or lyric invention and the quality of his voice, a loud, strained tenor with falsetto embellishments being the most desirable. I have heard Censio, the mayordomo’s little boy, aged three or four, singing, for an hour at a time, sincere and simple eulogies of his father’s cows. Since I brought him a small patrol wagon drawn by two spirited iron horses his voice, however, is no longer lifted in commemoration of “O mis vacas! O mis vacas! O mis vacas!” but of “O mis caballitos! O mis caballitos! O mis caballitos!” They improvise, too, at the dances, where the music is usually a harp and a jarana—breaking in anywhere, saying their say, and then waiting for the reply. Women rarely take part in these Tannhäuseresque diversions, although I remember one woman at adance on my own piazza who got up and proceeded to chant with a wealth of personal and rather embarrassing detail the story of her recent desertion by the man she loved. He had of course deserted her for some one else, and at the end of her remarkable narrative she sang, in a perfect debauch of emotion and self-pity: “But I am of a forgiving nature! Come back, come back, my rose, my heart, my soul—the bed is big enough for three!” Sometimes when there is a dance at a neighboring ranch the harpist and his son, who plays the jarana, stop at my place on their way home in the morning and play to me (the son also improvises) while I am at breakfast. The harpist is always drunk, and his instrument, after a night of hard work, out of tune. He appeared not long ago when I had staying with me a Boston lawyer—my only visitor so far this year.
“Isn’t it horrible to eat soft boiled eggs and toast in this pandemonium,” I called to him across the breakfast table.
“No,” he answered, “it’s splendid—it’s just like being an Irish king.” The harpist was drunker than usual that morning when he rode away with his harp in front of him on the pommel of his saddle, his son trudging along behind, and when hereached the middle of the river he fell off his horse and was nearly drowned. Later I saw what was once a harp hanging in midstream to a rock. A shattered harp clinging to a cruel rock surrounded by rushing water! I’m sure it was beautifully symbolical of something—but what?
The harpist and the mother of the boy who assists him at dances were really married, he told me, but they haven’t lived together for years. Since then the boy has had a succession of informal stepmothers who never stayed very long, and just recently the harpist has really married again. In fact, the harpist’s home life is typical of the matrimonial situation here, which for many reasons is endlessly interesting. Among the lower classes in Mexico “free love” is not the sociological experiment it sometimes tries to be in more civilized communities. It is a convention, an institution, and, in the existing condition of affairs, a necessity. Let me explain.
The Mexicans are an excessively passionate people and their passions develop at an early age (I employ the words in a specific sense), not only because nature has so ordered it, but because, owing to the way in which they live—whole families, not to mention animals, in a small, one-roomedhouse—the elemental facts of life are known to them from the time they can see with their eyes and hear with their ears. For a Mexican child of seven or eight among the lower classes, there are no mysteries. Boys of fifteen have had their affairs with older women; boys of seventeen are usually strongly attracted by some one person whom they would like to marry. And just at this interesting and important crisis the Church furnishes the spectator with one of its disappointing and somewhat gross exhibitions.
It seems to have been proven that for people in general certain rigid social laws are a comfort and an aid to a higher, steadier standard of thought and life. In communities where such usages obtain, the ordinary person, in taking unto himself a wife, does so with a feeling of finality. On one’s wedding day, but little thought is given, I fancy, to the legal loopholes of escape. It strikes one as strange, as wicked even, that a powerful Church (a Church, moreover, that regards marriage as a sacrament) should deliberately place insuperable obstacles in the path of persons who for the time being, at least, have every desire to tread the straight and narrow way. This, to its shame, the Church in Mexico does.
The only legally valid marriage ceremony in Mexico is the civil ceremony, but to a Mexican peon the civil ceremony means nothing whatever; he can’t grasp its significance, and there is nothing in the prosaic, businesslike proceeding to touch his heart and stir his imagination. The only ceremony he recognizes is one conducted by a priest in a church. When he is married by a priest he believes himself to be married—which for moral and spiritual purposes is just as valuable as if he actually were. One would suppose that the Church would recognize this and encourage unions of more or less stability by making marriage inexpensive and easy. If it had the slightest desire to elevate the lower classes in Mexico from their frankly bestial attitude toward the marital relation—to inculcate ideas different and finer than those maintained by their chickens and their pigs—it could long since easily have done so. But quite simply it has no such desire. In the morality of the masses it shows no interest. For performing the marriage ceremony it charges much more than poor people can pay without going into debt. Now and then they go into debt; more often they dispense with the ceremony. On my ranch, for instance, very few of the “married” people are married. Almost every grown man liveswith a woman who makes his tortillas and bears him children, and about some of these households there is an air of permanence and content. But with the death of mutual desire there is nothing that tends to turn the scale in favor of permanence; no sense of obligation, no respect for a vague authority higher and better than oneself, no adverse public opinion. Half an hour of ennui, or some one seen for a moment from a new point of view—and all is over. The man goes his way, the woman hers. The children, retaining their father’s name, remain, as a rule, with the mother. And soon there is a new set of combinations. One woman who worked here had three small children—everyone with a different surname; the name of its father. While here, she kept house with the mayordomo, who for no reason in particular had wearied of the wife he had married in church. No one thought it odd that she should have three children by different men, or that she should live with the mayordomo, or that the mayordomo should tire of his wife and live with her. As a matter of fact there was nothing odd about it. No one was doing wrong, no one was “flying in the face of public opinion.” She and the three men who had successively deserted her, the mayordomo who found it convenient to forman alliance with her, and his wife, who betook herself to a neighboring ranch and annexed a boy of sixteen, were all simply living their lives in accordance with the promptings they had never been taught to resist. It is not unusual to hear a mother, in a moment of irritation, exclaim, as she gives her child a slap, “Hijo de quien sabe quien!” (Child of who knows whom!) At an early age when they first fall in love they would, I think, almost always prefer to be married. But where get the ten pesos, without which the Church refuses to make them man and wife? The idea of saving and waiting is to them, of course, utterly preposterous? Why should it not be? What tangible advantage to them would there be in postponement? The Church, which has always been successful in developing and maintaining prejudices, could have developed, had it wished to, the strongest prejudice in favor of matrimony, and the permanence of the marriage tie. But it has not done so, and now, even when peons do have the religious ceremony performed, they do not consider it binding. After having gone to so much expense, they are not likely to separate so soon; but that is all. One of the men here has been married three or four times and on every occasion he has treated himself to a religious ceremony with quite a splendid dance afterwards. As he is a skilled mason who commands good wages and has no bad habits (except that of getting married every little while), he can afford it. He is a genial sort of a creature and I think he enjoys having weddings very much as some persons enjoy having dinner parties. Sometimes he deserts his wives and sometimes they desert him. Of course I don’t know, but I have an idea that to have been married to him at one time or another carries with it considerable prestige. And yet you ask me if I am not now and then homesick for New York!
Or did you merely ask me if I didn’t find this kind of a life desperately lonely? Everybody at home has asked me this until I have come to believe that the modern American’s greatest dread, greater even than the dread of sickness or of death, is the dread of being alone. But although I no longer have it, I am able to understand it. For I can vividly remember the time when there were scarcely any circumstances I could not control sufficiently to insure me constant companionship. It was novel and pleasant occasionally to putter alone for a few hours in one’s room, or in solitude to lose oneself in an absorbing book, with the half-formed purpose of soon finding somebody with whom to discuss it. But to walk alone, to dine alone, to go to the theater alone—to think alone! To be, in a word, for any length of time, on one’s own hands—face to face with nothing but oneself! I could not possibly describe the restlessness, the sense of “missing something,” the acute melancholy I have experienced on the rare occasions when in those days the improbable happened and for an afternoon and evening I was left—alone. Just when and how the change came I have no idea. Without at the moment feeling them, one acquires persistent little lines that extend from the outer corners of one’s eyes and almost meet the gray hairs below and behind one’s temples. The capacity—the talent—for being alone comes to some in the same way. With me it has been as gradual as the accentuation of the streaks across my forehead, or the somewhat premature blanching of the hair around my ears. I only know that it has come and that I am glad of it. I can be—and I sometimes am—alone indefinitely for weeks—for months—without feeling that life is passing me by. I may not, on the one hand, have periods of great gayety, but on the other there is a placid kind of satisfaction, more or less continuous, in realizingthat one’s resources are a greater comfort than one’s limitations are a distress. At first I was rather vain, I confess, of the facility with which I could “do without”; I used to find myself picturing certain old friends in these surroundings and despising their very probable anguish. One, I felt sure, would find his solace by perpetually dwelling in imagination upon his little triumphs of the past (there are so many kinds of little past triumphs)—in seeking to span the unspanable gulfs behind him with innumerable epistolary bridges. The eyes of another would be fixed on the far horizon; he would live through the interminable days, as so many persons live through their lives, hovering upon the brink of a vague, wonderful something that doesn’t happen. Another would take to aguardiente, which is worse, they say, than morphine, and thenceforward his career would consist of trying to break himself of the habit.
But I hope I have got over being vain—indeed, I’ve got over being a lot of things. Solitude is a great chastener when once you accept it. It quietly eliminates all sorts of traits that were a part of you—among others, the desire to pose, to keep your best foot forever in evidence, to impress people as being something you would like to have them thinkyou are even when you aren’t. Some men I know are able to pose in solitude; had they valets they no doubt would be heroes to them. But I find it the hardest kind of work myself, and as I am lazy I have stopped trying. To act without an audience is so tiresome and unprofitable that you gradually give it up and at last forget how to act at all. For you become more interested in making the acquaintance of yourself as you really are; which is a meeting that, in the haunts of men, rarely takes place. It is gratifying, for example, to discover that you prefer to be clean rather than dirty even when there is no one but God to care which you are; just as it is amusing to note, however, that for scrupulous cleanliness you are not inclined to make superhuman sacrifices, although you used to believe you were. Clothes you learn, with something of a shock, have for you no interest whatever. You come to believe that all your life you have spent money in unnecessary raiment to please yourself only in so far as it is pleasant to gain the approval of others. You learn to regard dress merely as a covering, a precaution. For its color and its cut you care nothing.
But the greatest gift in the power of loneliness to bestow is the realization that life does not consist either of wallowing in the past or of peering anxiously at the future; and it is appalling to contemplate the great number of often painful steps by which one arrives at a truth so old, so obvious, and so frequently expressed. It is good for one to appreciate that life is now. Whether it offers little or much, life is now—this day—this hour—and is probably the only experience of the kind one is to have. As the doctor said to the woman who complained that she did not like the night air: “Madam, during certain hours of every twenty-four, night air is the only air there is.” Solitude performs the inestimable service of letting us discover that it is our lives we are at every moment passing through, and not some useless, ugly, interpolated interval between what has been and what is to come. Life does not know such intervals. They can have no separate identity for they are life itself, and to realize this makes what has seemed long and without value, both precious and fleeting. The fleeting present may not be just what we once dreamed it might be, but it has the advantage of being present, whereas our past is dead and our future may never be born.
So you see, I am not lonely—or I mean, whenIamlonely (for everyone is lonely), I try to regard it as a purely objective affliction, like the sting of a wasp, or the hot blister that comes when you carelessly touch a leaf of mala mujer. For minor objective afflictions there is always some sort of an alleviator, and for loneliness I have found a remedy in reflecting that the sensation itself is never as interesting or as important as the circumstances that cause it. All of which brings me back again to this hillside clearing in the jungle with its lovely views, its outrageous climate, its mysterious people, its insidious fascination. Do you ever have a feeling of skepticism as to the continued existence of places you are no longer in? I can shut my eyes and see Boston and New York and Paris, for instance, as they are in their characteristic ways at almost any hour of the day or night. I know just how the people in certain quarters are conducting themselves, where they are going next, and what they will say and do when they arrive. But I don’t altogether believe in it. It doesn’t seem possible, somehow, that they are going ceaselessly on and on when I am not there to see. Something happens to places where I no longer am. Until I go back to them I’m sure they must be white and blank like the screen in a cinematograph performance between the end of one film and the beginning of the next.Just at present, nowhere is particularly existent but here.
It is a cloudless, burning day, the best kind of a day for coffee, and the asoleadero is covered with it. Through the house there is a slight stir of air, and the fact that the house-boy has just swept the floor with wet tea leaves left over from several breakfasts, makes the breeze for the moment seem cool—which it isn’t. On such a day one is grateful for the bareness of a room—the smooth, unadorned walls, the hard, cool chairs. From the asoleadero comes without ceasing the harsh, hollow sound of the wooden hoes as they turn the coffee over in the sun and scrape against the cement. It is a hot and drowsy sound; the Mexican equivalent of the sound made by a lawn mower in an American “front yard” in August. It would send me to sleep, I think, if it were not counteracted by the peculiar rustling of a clump of banana trees outside the window. The slightest breath of air puts their torn ribbons into motion that is a prolonged patter, indistinguishable usually from the patter of rain. To-day it is more like the plashing of a fountain—a fountain that, on account of the goldfish, plashes gently. Whenever we need rain—and in the middle of the night I wake up and seemto hear it—it turns out to be the banana trees; but when “too much water has fallen,” as they say here, and I persuade myself that this time it is only a fluttering in the banana trees, it is always rain. The whole landscape is suspended in heat haze (“swooning” is the word I should like to use, but I shan’t), from the bamboo trees nodding against the sky on the crest of the hill behind the house, through the café tal in front of it, down, down the long valley between extinct, woolly looking volcanoes—thirty miles away to the sea. The sea, for some reason, never looks from this distance like the sea; it is not flat but perpendicular. I should have thought it a pale-blue wall across the valley’s lower end. In an untiled corner of the piazza some chickens are taking dust baths and talking scandal in low tones; the burro, near by, has curled up in the shade like a dog and gone to sleep. I used to think I should never allow chickens to take dust baths, or burros to doze on my piazza. It seemed dreadfully squalid to permit it. Yet I have long since come to it. What can one do? Es el costumbre del pais. So, also, is the custom of letting a few fastidious hens lay eggs in one’s bed. But I have always been very firm about that.
Except for the chickens and the burro, the two men on the asoleadero, a buzzard resting on the limb of a dead tree, and one of the dogs who has sneaked into the house to get rid of the flies, and who thinks that because I didn’t turn him out I didn’t see him, there is apparently nothing alive in the whole world. And their animation is but a tranquil stupor. It does not seem as if anything could ever happen here to disturb one. I’m sure I look as if I had been dreaming forever, but so far to-day (it is only half past two) there have been the following demands upon my time and attention:
At seven, one of the men tapped on my window and said he was going to town, so I got up, wrote a note for him to post, made out the list for the grocer—sugar, onions, flour, bread, a new bottle of olive oil, two brooms, and a mouse trap—and gave him a hundred-peso bill to change somewhere in the village into silver, as to-morrow is pay day. It is inconvenient, but in the country one has to pay wages—even enormous sums like five and ten pesos—in silver. Indians don’t understand paper money as a rule and won’t take it; the others, too, are sometimes suspicious of it—which is a survival, I suppose, of the time when several different governments were trying to run Mexico at once and the bank notes of one state were not accepted in another. At least that is the only way I can account for their reluctance to be paid in good paper money. A man I know got tired of sending every week to town for bags of silver, and told the people on his place that a law had been passed (Oh, those laws!) permitting an employer to pay only half as much as he owed to persons who refused bills. Thereafter bills were not scorned. No doubt I could say something of the same kind, but more than enough laws of this sort are “passed” in darkest Mexico as it is. I shouldn’t care to be responsible for another. In the kitchen there were no evidences of activity on the part of Rosalia, and as I was beginning to be hungry I knocked on her door and asked her (although I knew only too well) what was the matter. She moaned back that she was very sick and believed she was going to die. I didn’t tell her I hoped she would, although the thought occurred to me. For the trouble with Doña Rosalía was that she went to a dance last night at a little ranch next to mine, stayed until half past four, and was carried home stinko. This I had gleaned from Ramón (he who went to town), who had helped to carry her. With the ladies atthe party she had consumed many glasses of a comparatively harmless although repulsive mixture of eggs, sugar, milk, and brandy, prettily named ronpoco. With the gentlemen, however, she had laughingly tossed off eight or ten drinks of aguardiente, not to record an occasional glass of sherry, until at last the gentlemen were obliged laughingly to toss her by the head and feet into a corner, where she lay until they carried her home in the rosy dawn. I don’t know what to do about Rosalía. She is an odious woman. If she would content herself with one lover—somebody I know—I shouldn’t mind in the least. But she has a different one every week—persons I’ve never laid eyes on usually—and it makes me nervous to think that there are strange men in the house at night. Recently I have resorted to locking the kitchen door at a respectable hour and removing the key, which has made her furious, as I have not been in the habit of locking any doors and as I did it without offering an explanation. Her room, furthermore, is without a window. I shouldn’t be surprised if she tried to poison me; they are great little poisoners. So I had to stand for half an hour or more fanning a fire built of green, damp wood, and getting my own breakfast—an orange, a cup of tea, some eggs,and a roll without butter. The butter habit has been eliminated along with many others. I could get good, pure American butter dyed with carrot juice and preserved in boracic or salicylic acid, by sending to the City of Mexico, but it is too much bother.
After breakfast I walked over to where they are picking. I can’t, of course, help in the picking, but frequent, unexpected appearances on my part are not without value. If they were sure I weren’t coming they would, in their zeal to tear off many berries quickly (they are paid by the amount they pick), break the branches and injure the trees. As they have no respect for their own property I suppose it would be fatuous to count on any respect for mine. When I got back to the house I began to write to you, but before I had covered half a page, one Lucio appeared on the piazza, apparently for the purpose of chatting interminably about the weather, the coffee, the fact that some one had died and some one else was about to be born; none of which topics had anything to do with the real object of his visit. Three quarters of an hour went by before he could bring himself to ask me to lend him money with which to buy two marvelously beautiful pigs. I was kind, but I was firm. Idon’t mind lending money for most needs, but I refuse to encourage hogriculture. It is too harrowing. When they keep pigs, no day goes by that the poor, obese things do not escape and, helplessly rolling and stumbling down the hill, squeal past the house with a dog attached to every ear. Besides, they root up the young coffee trees. No, Lucio, no. Chickens, ducks, turkeys, cows, lions, and tigers if you must, but not pigs. Lucio—inscrutable person that he is—perfectly agrees with me. As he says good-by one would think he had originally come not to praise pigs but to protest against them. After his departure there are at least fifteen minutes of absolute quiet.
Then arrive a party of four—two men and two women—respectable-looking, well-mannered people, who stand on the piazza, saying good morning and inquiring after my health. I have never seen them before, but I stop my letter and go out to talk to them, wondering all the while where they have come from and what they want—for, of course, they want something; everybody always does. For an interminable time their object does not emerge and in the face of such pretty, pleasant manners it is out of the question for me bluntly to demand, “What have you come for?” In despair I askthem if they would like to see the house, and as they stand in my bare sala, commenting in awed undertones, I have a sudden penetrating flash of insight into the relativeness of earthly grandeur. To me the sala is the clean, ascetic habitation of one who has not only realized what is and what is not essential, but who realizes that every new nail, pane of glass, tin of paint, and cake of soap is brought sixty or seventy miles through seas of mud and down a precipice three or four thousand feet high on the back of a weary mule. To them, the simple interior is a miracle of ingenious luxury. They gaze at the clumsy fireplace, touch it, try to see daylight through the chimney and fail to grasp its purpose, although they revere it as something superbly unnecessary that cost untold sums. The plated candlesticks on the table are too bewildering to remark on at all; they will refer to them on the way home. The kitchen range at first means nothing to anyone, but when I account for it as an American brasero the women are enthralled. One of them confesses she thought it was a musical instrument—the kind they have in church! There is nothing more to exhibit, nothing more to talk about, so during a general silence one of the men asks me if I will sell them a little corn—enough tokeep them for two days—and I know they have come to the point at last. They work on a ranch a mile or so away and the owner, an Englishman, who lives in town, has forgotten or neglected to supply them; they have none left for their tortillas. I am not at all anxious to part with any of my corn, but I desire to be obliging both to them and the Englishman, who, of course, will be told of it the next time he rides out to his ranch. The house-boy having disappeared in search of firewood, I have to measure the corn myself; all of which takes time.
Next, a little boy to buy a pound of lard. (As a convenience I sell lard at cost.) Then a little girl to say her mother is tired and would like a drink of aguardiente. As her mother cooks for eighteen men who are working here temporarily without their families, no doubt she deserves one. Anyhow she gets it. Rosalía and the house-boy usually dole out corn, lard, and aguardiente, but Rosalia is still in a trance and the boy has not returned. Then Ezequiel, father of Candelario, stops on his way over to the coffee tanks to tell me that Candelario is sick and he would like me to prescribe. As Candelario is one of my godchildren I have to show more interest in him than I feel.
“He’s always sick, Ezequiel,” I answer; “my medicines don’t seem to do him good!” Ezequiel agrees with me that they don’t. “Except for his stomach, which is swollen, he has been getting thinner and weaker for a long time. Have you any idea of the cause?” Ezequiel, staring fixedly at his toes, confesses that he has.
“What is it?”
“I am ashamed to tell you.”
“Don’t be ashamed; I shan’t speak of it, and if I know the cause I may be able to do some good.” Ezequiel, still intent upon his toes, suddenly looks up and blurts out:
“He’s a dirt eater.”
“Oh, well—that accounts for it. Why don’t you make him stop?” I ask, at which Candelario’s father shrugs hopelessly.
And well he may, for dirt eating seems to be a habit or a vice or a disease, impossible to cure. Many of them have it—grown persons as well as children—and in the interest of science, or morbid curiosity, perhaps, I have tried, but with little success, to get some definite information on the subject. Nobody here who drinks to excess objects to admitting he is a drunkard. He will refer to himself rather proudly as “hombre perdido” (a lostman), and expect to be patted on the back. But I have known a dirt eater to deny he was one even after a surgeon, to save his life, had operated on him and removed large quantities of dirt. As the habit is considered a shameful one, information at first hand is impossible to acquire. Candelario, for instance, is only seven, but although his father and mother know he is a dirt eater, they have never caught him in the act. “We have watched him all day sometimes,” Ezequiel declared, “every minute; and he would lie awake at night until we were both asleep and then crawl out of the house to get it.” Whether there is a particular kind of soil to which the victims are addicted or whether any sufficiently gritty substance will do, I don’t know; neither does Ezequiel. Among foreigners here the theory is that their stomachs have become apathetic to the assaults of chile and demand an even more brutal form of irritation. General emaciation and an abdominal toy balloon are the outward and visible signs of the habit which can be broken they say only by death. One woman on the place died of it last year, and her seventeen-year-old son, who must have begun at an early age as his physical development is that of a sickly child of ten, is not long for this world. There was nothing Icould do for my unfortunate little godchild, and Ezequiel walked slowly away, looking as depressed as I felt. For Candelario is a handsome, intelligent little boy and deserves a better fate. But—“esterá mejor con Dios!” (He’ll be better off with God.)
From then until luncheon there is comparative peace. That is to say, when I am disturbed I am not disturbed for long at a time. A breathless woman comes to “get something” for her husband who has just been bitten in the foot by a snake. As she is scared, she omits the customary preludes and I get rid of her within ten minutes. I have a hypodermic injection for snake bites that comes from Belgium in little sealed bottles and seems to be efficacious, but as the snake that bit her husband was very small (a bravo amarillo, I think she named it), and as he had been bitten, unsuccessfully, four years ago by another member of the same family, I do not waste one on him. Instead, I send him several drinks of ammonia and water which may or may not have any effect on snake bites. To tell the truth, I don’t care. The house-boy on returning from the mountain with a mule-load of firewood declares that the occasion is auspicious for anointing one of the dogs who has the mange. Asthe application of the salve is painful to the dog who endeavors to bite the boy, it is necessary for me to pat the poor thing’s head and engage him in conversation while the boy craftily dabs and smears in the rear. When this precarious performance is taking place I notice a turkey, a magnificent and sedate bird, who seems completely to have lost his ordinarily fine mind. He is rushing about in a most agonized fashion, beating his head in the dust, at times pausing and—perhaps I imagine it—turning pale and looking as if he were about to faint.
“Manuel—what on earth is the matter with him? He has gone crazy,” I exclaim.
“Oh, no,” Manuel placidly answers, “he fought so much with the other turkeys and with some of the roosters as well, that I stuck a feather through his nostrils. I thought it mightdivert his attention.” And he smilingly waits for me to praise his thoughtful ingenuity.
It takes us fifteen minutes to catch the distracted turkey and remove the feather. By that time I am, in every sense, too overheated to permit myself to talk to Manuel on the subject of cruelty to animals. Some time when I have just had a bath, put on a fresh suit of white clothes, and am feeling altogether cool and calm and kind, I shall tell hima few things. But to what end? If he had been willfully, deliberately cruel to the turkey there might be some hope of converting him—of bringing about a change of heart. But he wasn’t consciously cruel. Like most Mexicans he is fond of animals. In fact, there is in Mexico more emotion expended on pet animals than in any country I know. They make pets of their sheep and their pigs, and one frequently sees a child sitting in a doorway or by the roadside nursing a contented chicken. Yet in emotion it more often than not begins and ends. Their lack of real kindness, of consideration, of thought, in a word, is infuriating. Everyone on the ranch has dogs, and at times they are petted, played with, admired, and called by affectionate names—but they are never fed. I have seen a family go into ecstasies for hours at a time over six new-born puppies and then merely shrug and change the subject when it was suggested that they ought to feed the pitifully thin little mother. The national love of grace and beauty renders them sensitive to the beauty and grace of animals, but to their comforts, even their necessities, they are blind and therefore indifferent. They are all rather incapable of divided feelings. Manuel had not the slightest feeling of compassion for the turkey’s torture.The fact that he had prevented the bird from fighting was all sufficient and left no room in his intelligence for any other.
Rosalía heroically manages to cook and serve my luncheon, and as she drags herself in and out, the color of a faded lettuce leaf, with her rebozo over one eye, I almost feel sorry for her. But I steel my heart and make no comment either on her illness or her partial recovery. After luncheon I again take my intermittent pen in hand and immediately throw it down. There is a scurrying of bare feet on the piazza, and six of the carpenter’s sons gather about the door. They are all crying and, although it is no doubt physiologically impossible, they are all about ten years old. The carpenter has eight sons, but one is noticeably younger and the other is an infant in arms.