VIII
A week drifted past, and Sunday arrived.
On that, of all days, Mexico City was most typically Mexican.
The aristocrats paraded themselves in the parks; the middle-classes went picnicking; the peons went to church.
We strolled out along the Avenida Madero, past the National Opera House—said to be the handsomest building of its kind on the continent, but still with an unfinished dome because one administration had started it, and others had neglected to provide funds for its completion. Beyond it lay the Alameda, the Mexican Central Park. It was a European park, quite unlike the palm-grown plazas of the smaller cities, but there was the usual Mexican band concert, and the people were renting camp-chairs along the shady walks to enjoy the national pastime of seeing and being seen.
Beyond the Alameda, commenced a wide boulevard, the Paseo de la Reforma, typically Parisian in its wealth of monuments, and lined with handsome embassies and residences, leading out to Chapultepec, a larger and even more charming park, with wide expanses of lawn and woodland and lake and meadow surrounding the National Palace, a squatty fortress-like structure pleasing in its effect of strength and beauty, perched upon high cliffs and glimpsed through the tree-tops as though it hung suspended in the sky. The policemen here were clad in Mexico’s charro costume—the costume of the old grandees—with short buff jacket, skin-tight blue trousers lined with rows of silver buttons, flowing red tie, huge velvet sombrero, and a big gleaming sword. An orchestra in similar costume held forth beneath an awning near the lake, playing sweetly upon a marvelous combination of guitars, mandolins, marimbas, harps, cellos, oboes, and what not. Automobiles rolled past along the winding driveway, each filled with a bevy of señoritas. Horsemen rode grandly past, dressed also in charro costume, and mounted upon the finest steeds in Mexico. Pedestrians idled beside the lake, watching the procession, and listening to the orchestra, with that rare enjoyment of really good music that characterizes peon and aristocrat alike. Here, as in the small-town plaza, the Mexicans were finding a pleasure in their park such as no American ever finds in the parks of the United States. Here, as everywhere in Mexico, a public garden was not merely a place for the perambulation of baby carriages by nursemaids, but an institution of which even society took full advantage.
Having seen the aristocrats in action, we caught a trolley out to the floating gardens of Xochimilco to observe the middle-class picknickers. It was a profanely modern trolley, with a “No Spitting” sign, and rimmed with lurid posters from which “Wrigley” and “Colgate” peeped out from a conglomeration of Spanish, and it carried us through streets whose buildings were defaced either by countless advertisements or countless warnings not to post advertisements. But presently it left the city behind, and raced out through maize-fields and maguey fields, and dropped us at a quaint little town, complete even to cathedral-fronted plaza.
Tiny children, their arms laden with flowers, surrounded us, sticking bouquets into our buttonholes and pockets, and pleading for “a little centavito.” They were irresistible. Dressed exactly like their elders in long skirts and mantillas, and with the mature air characteristic of Mexican children, they seemed like little dwarfed adults. Their voices were caressing, and they would retreat whenever we tried to return their bouquets without purchasing.
“Ah, no, señor! Buy them from me! A little centavito, no more!”
Looking rather like floating gardens ourselves, we drifted toward the canals. These were the remnants of the great network of waterways that the Spanish conquistadores saw when first they entered the Valley of Mexico. In those days, before Modern Progress decreed that the Valley should be drained, Mexico City was a Venice, upon whose lakes there floated rafts of interlaced twigs, covered with rich soil, and blossoming with flowers. Xochimilco was the last survival of the Aztec floral paradise, and it proved distinctly disappointing.
IN THE GARDENS OF XOCHIMILCO, RELICS OF AN AZTEC PARADISE, ONLY THE CABBAGES WERE IN BLOOM
A barefoot boatman met us, holding up a piece of paper upon which was written in English, “Do you want one bot? I have a fin bot.”
He led us to a dugout canoe, with an awning supported by vine-laced framework, and paddled us out through a canal where native women were washing clothes or cleaning chickens, under a bridge emblazoned with “Drink Moctezuma Beer,” and along a waterway lined with decaying rafts covered with a luxuriant growth of carnations, cane, eucalyptus, and cabbages, of which only the last-named seemed to be in bloom. Parties of picknickers drifted past us in larger boats, each with a table in the center, at which every one was busily eating. Along the way were restaurants and refreshment rooms, each with an orchestra of one fiddle, one guitar, and one bass-drum, which started to play at our approach and quit as soon as we passed, the bass-drummer invariably outspeeding and outdrowning his collaborators. The final exhibit, at the far end of the canal, was the city waterworks.
We came back to the churches to see the peons.
At the central Zocalo, or main plaza, a rather dusty square with a few bedraggled palm trees, where once had stood an Aztec pyramid, there now stands the famous Cathedral of Mexico. Mexicans will inform one that it is the largest and handsomest cathedral in the hemisphere, although it is much smaller than the Peruvian Cathedral, and one of the least handsome churches in Mexico itself. There are really two edifices, joined together like the Siamese twins; each with a façade of elaborately carved gray sandstone against a background of cracked red basalt, pierced by many little windows in which repose mildewed green bells.
This, essentially, is the church of the common people. Society attends a more exclusive church on the Avenida Madero, where the women (always devout) go inside to mass, and the men (usually agnostic) remain at the gate to ogle them as they make their exit. There one finds the dim light, the subdued air, and the solemnity of churches in other lands. There is none of it in the Cathedral.
Everything in the huge edifice was bright and gaudy and noisy. Many windows flooded it with light. Glittering gilt ornamentation was everywhere. The priests wore green and yellow robes. The choir sang enthusiastically and loudly, without evidence of training, as though each would outsing his fellows both in volume and speed. Services were proceeding simultaneously in both halves of the institution, and each seemed trying frantically to drown out the other.
Yet this, offensive even to one of mediocre taste, impressed the peons for whom it was intended. They knelt at the door and lighted their candles. Then they crept forward upon their knees—ragged little brown devils, unwashed, unshaven, and unlaundered—many of them still a trifle pulque-sodden from a fiesta of the night before. This noise and display thrilled them as no solemn service could thrill them. As they crept forward, with arms extended, expressions of rapt ecstasy almost ennobled their villainous faces. Their sins were forgiven! To-morrow, with that odd mixture of idealism and materialism so characteristic of their race, they would start sinning again with a clean conscience.
These ragged little devils were the pawns of a long series of revolutions. To-day, while the successful generals rode grandly through Chapultepec, the peons who had won their battles and gained nothing turned to the Cathedral for solace. One might not believe in their religion, but one was forced to admit that they found comfort. And certainly they needed it.