CHAPTER XXIV AT MONTEZUMA'S CAPITAL
Here the event happened which saddened the year: my friend was killed. Wilfrid Ewart, to whose genius and person I was devoted, and who in turn was very fond of us, was shot on Old Year's Night, a lamentable taking off over which one can never cease to grieve.
Arrived at Mexico City my wife and I sped along the Avenue Juarez to the Hotel Cosmos where we spent a night. Next day we repaired to the quieter and more comfortable Iturbide, a fine old structure built around stone courts and a garden of palm trees and flowering shrubs, with a fountain playing. I think we were fortunate, for while we paid only a moderate price we yet had a large airy room with writing desk and table and a pleasant outlook on the unfurling green of the banana palms. By no possibility could we have been shot from the street whilst standing at the window.
We wondered much whether Wilfrid Ewart were in the city. Although I knew he had only ten days wherein his ticket would be valid I knew the temptation was to stay longer. There is one perfectly safe and conventional hotel in Mexico City, and that is "The Regis," run in the American style and patronized chiefly by Americans and English. Its agents circulate on the Pullman cars of the trains and make sure of the English-speaking passengers. A hotel omnibus meets all trains and takes off guests for the hotel. We felt sure, therefore, that Ewart would have stayed there. So on our first morning we went thither and asked for him. He was not there. We consulted the register. He had not been there. Next day I called on Mr. Norman King, the British Consul General, but the consulate had not heard of him. Dr. E. J. Dillon and his wife had, however, arrived in the city and were staying at the "Princess," but Ewart was not registered at the "Princess." We wondered where he could have stayed. As a matter of fact a Spaniard on the train had given him the address of a hotel several streets distant from the center—the Hotel Isabel on the Street of the Republic of San Salvador, a hotel chiefly patronized by Germans and Spanish.
On Friday, the 29th of December, we went to the shrine of "Our Lady of Guadeloupe" and saw that famous image worshiped more by the Indians than by any other. We watched the Aztecs of to-day, candle in one hand, sombrero in the other, walk on their knees up the aisle to the altar, and looked on those grandiose ecclesiastical pictures which adorn the gilded church telling the story of the revelation of the Virgin and the Pope's remark, "Such things are not done for all nations." We recalled to mind December 12, the festival of the Guadeloupe Virgin and the resonance of it at Santa Fe among the Mexicans there; the firing of guns promiscuously in the streets, the lighting of festive fires. It had much astonished Wilfrid Ewart then.
Next day, the thirtieth, at noontide we met our friend by chance on the streets of the city. It was on the corner of San Juan de Latran and the street of the 16th September. We were in the act of choosing at which new restaurant we would partake of luncheon when suddenly we saw Ewart's tall figure on the edge of the curb; he was gazing in his short-sighted way up into the sky and did not see us till I cried out.
Then we moved joyfully together to a restaurant and had lunch.
"Well, Wilfrid Ewart, you are a wicked fellow!" I said to him reproachfully.
He ruffled a little.
"Well, I don't know," said he. "Isn't it the chance of a lifetime? I've been looking for a place like this all my life."
He seemed utterly charmed with Mexico City and spoke with a sort of rapture of Chapultepec Park. We agreed to go together on the morrow to San Angel to have lunch together on the last day of the year at the fine inn there. It was a place nine or ten miles from the center of the city, literally buried in flowers and palms, and he seriously thought of taking a room at the inn and staying there for three months.
One thing troubled him: that iron box of regimental papers and his portmanteau had gone to New Orleans; he carried only his knapsack and staff, like a pilgrim bound for a distant shrine. He could sacrifice his unused ticket, but how get these pieces of baggage forwarded to Mexico. We went after luncheon to talk to the railway agent about it, but the office was closed for the New Year holidays.
I then accompanied him to his hotel and saw the English-speaking German who kept it, "surprisingly civil," said Ewart; "trying to ingratiate himself with me," I thought. I went up to his room and admired the fine view of the mountains obtained from his window, but I did not care for the feeling of it—not a place to write in. I meditated getting him to change over to the Iturbide.
Next day, the thirty-first of December, we sat on a street car and went out together to San Angel. We had lunch in view of the great mountains Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl but their summits remained wreathed in cloud. A fine, warm air blew steadily thence, ruffling the blossoms of the garden, disturbing the eyes. Our luncheon was spread in an arbor. We were waited on by a French waiter. It was hardly a democratic resort. There were other arbors and tables set in a shady patio where rich Mexicans who had driven up in their cars dissected elegantly cooked sole and turkey, and ate strawberries and cream, washed down with imported wines. The straw-hatted, blanket-wrapped Mexicans, the descendants of the Aztecs, the women with gold ornaments on their necks and ears and flowing raven hair were hidden from view here. One might very well have been on the Riviera—except for those gigantic volcanoes and a certain dryness of the table-mountain air which spoke not of the sea.
Ewart had already been to the inn several times. He had been ill at ease in American civilization, and told us so. He thirsted for the elegance of Paris and the easy-going ways of London. "One thing the Americans have not yet learned to prize, and that is leisureliness," said he. His own marked, leisured utterance was strangely in contrast with the rapid speech and style of Americans.
Yet he was going back to America in the spring. He felt the fascination of modern America as much as any one. He was surprised that America had not yet annexed Mexico. Ideal considerations did not weigh in his mind. The only argument in favor of Mexico was that Mexico was unlike the United States and it might be worth while conserving her as something different.
Of them and of many things we discoursed during a long afternoon spent mostly on the roof of the San Angel Inn. And in the dusk of evening we took a returning tram to Mexico. As we passed the bull ring at Chapultepec the outcoming crowds swarmed on to the streets, and ere we reached the city the newsboys with the evening papers came clamorously on to the cars crying, "Glorious afternoon with the bulls! Great triumph of Rodolfo Gaon! Great triumph of Lalanda!" Gaon is an Indian bullfighter and the idol of Mexico for a time. Ewart had seen him kill four bulls in his garments of gold and silver, and was hideously impressed. But he was greatly tickled by the newscry "Glorious afternoon with the bulls!" and kept repeating it.
That evening we went together to the Teatro Lirico to see a revue called 1922. We sat in the midst of a wild crowd and looked on at something of which we did not understand very much, allusions of all kinds of happenings in the Republic of Mexico during 1922, danced out by girls and clowns in colored silks. There were acts representing the two years' peace of the Obregon régime, Liberty, the Graves of the Martyrs of the Revolution, and through it all there stalked a hooligan, drunk in every scene and creating a scandal in every part. In the graveyard of the heroes he makes love to the widow grieving over her dead husband and is only interrupted when the grave opens and the dead man inside roars a terrible reproval—the thrill of the evening. The whole ended on a sort of parade of the Republic and a rivalry of flags over which in a grand burst of the National Anthem triumphed the Red, White and Green of the Mexican nation.
By the time we came out of the theater it had become a wild night in Mexico City. Every one who had a car had brought it out. All the "camions" were filled with joy riders, every klaxon and horn was yelling, the sidewalks were packed with thronging crowds carrying colored paper flags and other baubles. Most of the men had pistols, some had guns. Promiscuous firing rattled and banged in side streets and about house tops. The cafés were full. Orchestras were playing. Men everywhere were under the influence of pulque and other cactus alcohols. I think we felt rather tired. Certainly we were ready for supper and we sought a table where we might sit down to eat and finish the night.
It was at the Cosmos that we sat down to supper—for the last time. There we lingered and would no doubt have seen the Old Year out, the New Year in, but an unkind Fate prompted otherwise. At half-past eleven or thereabout we sallied forth once more into the wild streets. I had a mind to go to the great central square, the Zocalo, where once stood the Great Pyramid, but we did not agree to go. Instead we gave one another last greetings and departed to our several hotels.
"A happy New Year!" Ewart cried, swaying his arm affectionately in a last handshake.
"A happy New Year!" said I. "And may you soon get that iron box" I added, involuntarily thinking of what was most on our minds.
So we parted. Even the Iturbide was in a strange condition, most of the servants being in that menacing drunken state which comes after drinking much pulque. But that was small matter. At midnight there outbroke a quintupled clamor over all the city. Hundreds of thousands of revolvers and guns must have been discharged and discharged repeatedly. The sound was of a great general engagement in war. I stood at the window and looked at the dark sky which, however, told nothing of the myriads of bullets flying into it. I was astonished. But little did I guess that Wilfrid Ewart doing the same at his window overlooking that wild street of the "Republic of San Salvador" was in these moments being killed—by a revolver bullet from below.
Yet so it was, and I will not say more here, except that we buried him in the British Cemetery beside the Tlacopan Causeway along which Cortes and the remains of his defeated army slowly retreated on the Noche Triste of July 1, 1520. A few English people stood beside a new-dug grave with tearful eyes and choking hearts. So we laid him to rest far away from his home. There were white roses buried with him. There are lilies growing near him.
I should not perhaps have narrated this happening here but that Wilfrid Ewart has become part of Mexico as Francis Drake became part of Nombre de Dios and the Spanish Main. It was Mexico that took him, sacrificing yet another victim on its Aztec altars. On the day after we buried Ewart another Englishman was killed, George W. Steabben, an English merchant. He was walking along a street with his family when suddenly a shooting affray took place between two parties of Mexicans in cars. Shots went in many directions, several people were wounded, and Steabben was killed. The quarreling parties were mostly officers and deputies—really above the law. Members of the Mexican Parliament enjoy immunity from arrest but nevertheless they are frequently implicated in crimes and outrages.
The social condition of Mexico has evidently greatly changed since Diaz' days. Porfirio Diaz ruled as a Dictator for a quarter of a century and enforced peace upon the country. He was the type of great man that Carlyle sought in history, the hero once found to be obeyed. The obedience to Diaz was very gratifying to foreigners in Mexico. His fame was extraordinary in his day. But now none so poor as to do him reverence. His name is not heard. Streets are not named after him nor monuments raised to him. His name represents bondage and oppression to the masses.
The ten years of civil war and revolution which followed the Diaz régime were no doubt strongly colored by the personal ambitions of aspirants to the Presidency. But the violence of them came from a popular upheaval, a rising out of the depths. What has happened in Mexico is not un-akin to what has happened in Russia.
The Mexican revolution began before the success of the Bolsheviks but it obtained a powerful inspiration from Russia. Mexican politicians came to Europe to study Bolshevism and in one or two States, notably those of Vera Cruz and Yucatan, it can be said that a dictatorship of the proletariat has been achieved. Bourgeois society and the enormous capitalistic concerns of Mexico are menaced by proletarianism.
The force of the law has been greatly weakened by this revolutionary triumph. Every Mexican feels that he is a law to himself and that he must be ready to protect himself should he be set upon. Hence the prevalence of firearms in the possession of citizens—and the many assaults, murders, accidents.
I suppose in no other capital in the world, not even in Russia, could a funeral cortège of a dead Communist be followed by banners inscribed "Viva Anarchia—Long live Anarchy!" Nor could a tram-strike such as we had this January and in an armed battle in the streets and nobody be punished.
There is much that is remarkable about Mexico City. It is an Indian capital, a Spanish capital, and an American capital in one. All three clash, producing a city of strange unrest. The Americans want only business, the Spanish believe they want culture, the Indians want only freedom. Spanish and Indians together make up the Mexican people, which on the whole is mentally deficient. They are loquacious and lose themselves talking. When they take to arms they do so without mathematics. Impregnable as Mexico seems, any civilised nation could defeat her in war—because, to use a colloquialism "she is not all there." That is why, in my opinion, in the first place Cortes with his handful of warriors was able to destroy the Aztec Empire. The Aztecs had a fourth part lacking in their mental equipment. Montezuma, magnificent as he was, was clearly, from a European point of view, something of a half-wit. That half-wittedness the Spaniards married gayly into and have not been able to throw it off. The conqueror has become the conquered.
Mexico is a city of some enchantment. It is not a place that can be understood at once—like Kalamazoo or a standard American city. It holds you, puzzled. The squads of Arum lilies, the joyous fountains playing under evergreen trees, the prattling children, and the noonday tropical sun, do not entirely give the mood of the city. It is not one of innocence.
Or again, the busy American and English business men, the gay modish shops of the Avenida Madero, the foyer of "the most exclusive" American hotel, or the buzz of English talk from mining men and drummers in Sanborn's café—they also do not convey the mood of the old Aztec capital. Its air of modern business is deceptive.
The daytime activities seem to be a veil of the real city. It is in many respects very pleasant by day, more pleasant for the business people than for any one else, I think. At night the city is different. The sense of security is less, the feeling of the presence of the unknown is much greater.
The underworld of the city is terrible, and no student of life could shut his eyes to it—poverty widespread and staring; a morose, drunken male population, women who suffer more than most poor women—every one morose, melancholy; fierce threatening faces much commoner than smiling ones.
There is a thin upper crust of rich people, very thin and very swell, who own fine villas and have their cars. And their womenfolk dress and parade in the motor-car parade which at a certain hour continually blocks the way on the Avenida Madero, while their chauffeurs with their horns shriek importance to the traffic police. These people shop at the fine shops and pay three prices for American goods, foregoing their own Mexican foods and manufactured ware for expensive imports. The real Mexican population is herded into a district called by Americans the Thieves' Market, a great open place where the Aztecs used to exercise themselves. And there you may see the women lined up in scores, holding in their hands chili sandwiches, all they have to sell, and supplicating you to buy. In their faces you see something of the mood of the city.
When Cortes came he found a stately city. He found also a place of gloom and awe, a city of slavery, of human sacrifice, of fanatical unbending paganism. His brutal adventurous four hundred tasted there the greatest fear of their lives and met of course in one battle the greatest disaster that Spanish arms ever met at Indian hands. At that time the greatest feature of the city was the grand square of the Pyramid which is now called the Zocalo and has become the terminus of all the swirling street cars and of hundreds of pirate buses. There eight great causeways approached a grand open place, the center of which was the stone-faced pyramid, the altar of Huitzilopochtli, god of war. The pyramid was cemented, its base was conglomerated with jade, emerald and gold, and for that reason was picked to bits by Spanish soldiers. Not one stone remained in situ when the Christian Cathedral was started to be built. On top of the pyramid stood the gigantic sacrificial stone, now in a museum hard by, and into the cavity in the middle of the stone were flung thousands of warm hearts, still beating in death. Did not the barbarity of the Aztec rituals go far to justify the brutality of Cortes' followers?
One night, the Noche Triste of July 1, 1520, Cortes saw his own Spaniards led to ghastly sacrifice, whilst hundreds of sacred fires lit up the sides and stone stairways and platforms of this pyramid and shone luridly on the faces of the priests and the Spanish victims and the ecstatic Indians. That marked the end of Montezuma's reign. That great square is all encroached on now by shops and wretched arcades, and instead of the Pyramid a squat cathedral, trying as it were to cover an original ground plan of paganism without any architectural plan. Half the open space has gone. Groves of low electric light standards supplied by an American foundry shed unnecessary glimmer on petty garden plots—and all the grandeur has gone.
Nevertheless, somehow at night the gloom and ancient horror of the square creeps out. Aztec beggars, half Aztecs, quarter Aztecs, shades of Aztecs, make for you threateningly and yet supplicatingly. Pulque-stricken men stare at you from their doped eyesockets—The eight streets are there, ill-lit, full of darkness, noise and beggars. The drivers and the hangers-on of the pirate buses yell their destinations—Takk-uba, Rom-a, Pi-e-dad, Sa-nangel. In churches in the gloom you may see converted Indians creep from the door to the altar on their knees. Outside the churches beggars are seen kneeling in silence, their lean faces and fevered eyes set as it were upon some star. They kneel and stare, hour after hour, and it seems nothing to them who passes by or what they receive in alms. There is something of the spirit of Quahpopoca and Cauhtemoc whom the Spanish burned over slow fires, who fixed their eyes upon a point and burned and did not say a word.
What is truly remarkable is that no ten minutes passes in the night without the sound somewhere of a gun shot, a revolver shot. To the violent street crowds shooting in air is an amusement. You walk carefully and circumspectly in the streets at night. It is true, of course, that they killed my friend here, and it preys on the mind. But to me Mexico City refuses to correspond to any type of civilization. It is still the city of the Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli.