V
If at first impression, the elaborate Spanish politeness seems boresome, it gradually seeps its way into the soul of the average visitor so insidiously that within two weeks he finds himself resenting the rudeness of Americans more recently arrived than himself.
I met one on the train that took me out of Guaymas.
He was trying to tell the conductor that this passenger coach would have been condemned long ago in the good old U.S.A. Since the official did not understand English, even when shouted, the newcomer was growing a trifle peeved. He turned disgustedly to Eustace and myself:
“Damn these spigs, anyway! How do they expect anybody to come down here and do business with them when they can’t talk like other people?”
He seemed out of place in Mexico. He belonged essentially to the smoking compartment of an American Pullman, where his counterpart can invariably be found with thumbs beneath suspender straps, telling the world about the big deals which his type seems always to have “just pulled off between trains in Detroit.”
In Mexico, he admitted failure. He was selling soap—“the best grade of pure white bath soap on the market.” But buyers were too ignorant to converse with him in his language, and they showed a ridiculous inclination to purchase the brilliant scarlet soaps turned out by a German firm that catered to the native love of bright color.
“If I’d known what they were like,” he said, speaking loudly, “I’d have laid in a side-line of perfume and bug powder.”
We suggested that some of the passengers might understand English.
“What the hell do I care? Let ’em hear it. It’ll do ’em good. Let the dirty greasers know what we Americans think of ’em! Say, I’m glad I met you fellows. I’ve been lonesome for somebody from God’s country.”
He attached himself to us, and stuck like a leech. At Culiacán, where we stopped over for a day, he made the discovery that “whiskey” was the same in Spanish as in English. After imbibing freely in a little saloon kept by an elderly lady whose manners were those of royalty, he propped his feet on the table and expectorated with impressive accuracy at a picture of the Madonna that hung on the wall.
We dragged him out, and led him toward the hotel.
“What do I care about her?” he growled. “Damned spig! Let ’er call a policeman. I’ll lick ten Mexican policemen!”
At the hotel, after we had persuaded him not to hit the General, he favored our friend with another discourse on the relative prowess of Americans and “Greasers.”
“Any time we get good and ready, we’ll come down here and take this rotten republic and make a decent place out of it! We’ll clean up your spig army in two weeks! All you guys can do is knife people in the back! When you have a war, you point your rifles around the corner of a building and pull the trigger without lookin’ where you shoot! Any good Yank can lick ten of you—ten of you—with one arm tied behind his back!”
The General’s face darkened. I watched him, rather hoping that the slender little Mexican would proceed to mop up the floor with the valiant soap-salesman. Beneath his politeness, I knew, there was a sensitive, proud nature quick to resent an insult. Yet so ingrained were his traditions of courtesy that—even while a tigerish gleam in his eyes betrayed his wrath—he merely smiled.
“The señor,” he said, “is feeling very lively to-night.”