VI
We waited for the interview. The chances were that nothing we had written would ever be published. If it were, Carranza would never know it. And there was more of Mexico City to be seen.
If it bore a superficial resemblance to Paris, its population remained distinctly Mexican.
In the early morning, upon the Avenida Francisco I. Madero, the Mexican Fifth Avenue, the boulevardiers were mostly Indians in blankets, and shop girls hurrying to work with black shawls over their heads. Gradually they gave way to people in European dress, yet here and there in the crowd there passed an hacendado just in from his country estate and still wearing riding boots and sombrero and a huge revolver pendant from a heavy leather belt encircling his ample girth. Then came the shoppers—stout, overpowdered matrons with a flock of señoritas in tow—all in Parisian garb, but unmistakably Mexican. They came in handsome private cars, alighting with the assistance of uniformed attendants, and disappearing into the fashionable modistes’ establishments with the grand aristocratic air of the newly rich—for most of the city’s real aristocracy had fled the country during the long series of revolutions, and these were largely the wives and daughters of the successful generals.
At noon, the streets became almost deserted, for here as everywhere the siesta was a ritual, but later the crowd reappeared, and now for a brief hour the Avenida did bear some true resemblance to Paris. The womenfolk came out in their new finery, and rolled up and down in their handsome cars to display themselves. The men, having finished the day’s work, loitered along the sidewalk, chatting merrily, twiddling their canes, puffing at their cigarettes, and keeping an attentive eye on passing femininity. But at twilight, the womenfolk disappeared, and the chill of evening brought an end to the atmosphere of gayety. The men still loitered, but the attentive eye was fixed now upon the shop girls that hurried homeward.
“Why hasten, chiquita?” they called after each mantilla-muffled figure. “Come with me instead.”
Sometimes the male voices were serious. Usually they were casual, as though merely performing the rite—considered a sacred duty by the men of all Latin America—of insulting the unchaperoned woman. The girls were accustomed to it, and paid no attention either to the words or to the nudges and pinches that followed. Now and then there passed a street-walker—an institution seldom seen in the smaller Mexican cities, where vice is more carefully segregated—and she invited with a concentrated flash of eyes, but she did not speak, as might her counterpart in Paris. Over the crowded streets there hung an air of gravity—of Mexican gravity—the gravity of the high plateau.
Darkness came. The men pulled up their coat collars, pulled in their necks, and discussed the advisability of a cocktail. Lights appeared in thick clusters of glowing bulbs, as in the French capital, but they shed a radiance that inspired no gayety. The taxis still roared and rattled, and shot zigzag through the streets like so many skating-bugs on a millpond; the trolleys passed at thirty-foot intervals incessantly clanging their gongs; the policemen at each corner turned their “Alto-Adelante” or “Go-Stop” signs first one way, then another, blowing their shrill whistles first with one toot, then two toots, and sending the traffic scurrying first in one direction, then another; above the Avenida there rose the grand discord of a busy metropolis; yet Mexico City became merely noisy rather than lively. Acquaintances embraced acquaintances demonstratively, yet with an air of conventionality. The loitering throngs before the blazing doorways of theaters or cinemas were subdued and solemn. The street-walkers invited with unsmiling eyes. The boulevardiers withdrew, group by group, for their cocktails, not to pleasant sidewalk cafés like those of Paris, but to formal Spanish bar-rooms. By ten o’clock the sidewalks were almost as empty as those of Hermosillo. Only the flying taxis remained, dashing about with screeching claxons as though crying vainly, “This is Paris.”
It looked like Paris, and from a distance it sounded like Paris, but the Parisian insouciance was missing. This was still Mexico—the Mexico of the high plateau.