CHAPTER XI.
LA VIGA CANAL.
ON the side-walk adjacent to the western entrance to the cathedral is an iron and glass Kiosk. This is Mexico’s flower market. Every morning in the year from daybreak until eight o’clock, the sidewalk and the adjoining street is one mass of fragrance and color. Every flower you know and as many as you do not know are spread in the greatest profusion possible, which fact suggests an inexhaustible supply-house somewhere. Here are roses, jassamines, pansies, violets, heliotropes, sweetpeas, gardenias, camelias, lilies, honeysuckles, forget-me-nots, verbenas, lark-spurs, poppies, morning-glories, tulips, geraniums, and orchids of untold variety and color. And there were purchasers. Priests from all the churches, milliners and café proprietors, dry-goods’ merchants, hotel keepers, the señora in her private carriage, señoritas with holy shrines and patron saints to honor, devotees whose special saint day is to be celebrated by a fiesta—everybody buys flowers, and they come by the ton as fast as other tons are sold. And they are arranged by master hands into cornucopias, crosses for the church altar, wreaths for the funeral car, decorations for the cemetery, and into any design the purchaser may indicate.
GROUP EL ABRA.
I ask where such a world of flowers can come from in such an unbroken stream. “From Las Chinampas,” the floating gardens. Floating Gardens! that sounded like the tales I had read, and here are people just from them! I anxiously ask where are they: “En Canal La Viga;” and so the search began. A street-car takes us to La Embarcadero where a hundred eager boatmen leave the wharf and come running to see us. I always thought I was popular, but here was an ovation I had not looked for. Then I learned something new. Each of my hundred friends had the best boat on La Viga, and each of my hundred friends was the best pilot from the canal to the lakes. Here was absolute perfection in ship building and nautical knowledge that would make Diogenes put up his lamp and say: “Eureka!” After each had extolled the virtues of his particular scow, or flatboat, or raft, whichever it approached nearest in appearance, we chose one.
If Canal La Viga was ever dug by man, history is silent about it. It was here when the conquerors came. It serves the same purpose as Niagara River, and brings the water of Lakes Chalco and Xochimilco down to Lake Texcoco. It has a uniform width and depth, and its banks are lined with stately avenues of trees the entire length. To the great middle-class and Indians, this is the great highway of commerce and resort for pleasure. Sundays and feast days it is a mass of moving color. In the dim past this city was the Venice of the New World, so boating is an inheritance. The boats are from ten to fifteen feet long; from four to eight wide and are generally poled along. There is an awning and comfortable seats where the passenger may enjoy the scenery protected from the sun. You make any arrangement you can as to price, and your boatman spits on his hands and pushes off, and if it is early in the morning you meet hundreds of crafts coming to market loaded down with fruits, grain and vegetables, pigs, lambs and chickens, and charcoal and baskets and everything else that the Lake country produces. The vegetables, by irrigation, surpass anything you have over met in that line; heads of lettuce larger than cabbage, and radishes as large as an ear of corn. A diminutive steam tug is met, trailing twelve or fifteen barges loaded with grain and cordwood from the upper lakes. Under a shade tree by the water, is a laundry after the fashion of the country, and a man and woman are washing clothes. The man’s part consists in sitting down and looking tired while the woman scrubs.
If it is Sunday the boats are laden with garlanded merry-makers with tinkling guitars and singing and dancing and having a “large time.” On the right is the once famous Paseo de La Viga, whose glory has long since departed to the Paseo de La Reforma. In spite of its neglect, La Viga is one of the most delightful drives in the city, especially in early morn, when canal traffic is at its best, and during Holy Week when the great middle-class take their holiday. Almost immediately after starting, we reach the old puebla of Jamaica, which, like the Paseo, has the look of having seen better times. On the opposite bank and by the Paseo, stands a melancholy bust of Guatemotzin, the last of the Aztec chieftains, whom the Mexicans delight to honor—another testimonial of ancient aristocratic grandeur. The next point of interest is the old Garita de la Viga, the custom-house building, dating back to Spanish times.