Land without chimneys; or, the byways of Mexico

by Alfred Oscar Coffin

A Mexican’s home is indeed his castle, to which he enters through stone walls and iron gates. You are not wanted there and are never invited. I knew an American professor who taught five years in Mexico, and had seen the inside of only three homes, and then he went on business, and saw none of the female members. Such is the custom and seclusiveness of the people.

Tlalpan reminds me of a citizen of New York who went into a fin du siecle saloon to get a drink, and when he paid his reckoning it was one dollar. He naturally protested against the exorbitance, and the clerk called his attention to his surroundings. “My dear sir, look about you; this is no dive, these paintings cost a hundred thousand dollars.” The victim paid the dollar, and thought long and deeply. The next day he returned by way of a harness shop, and got a pair of blind bridles that draymen use on their horses, and thus equipped he entered that aristocratic saloon and walked up to the counter. “Gimme a drink straight without any scenery today.” That is old Tlalpam. Every street has its blind bridles up and no scenery, but it is not peculiar to Tlalpam. I have never seen a Mexican’s home with a front yard. At the edge of the sidewalk up goes his stone house or his stone wall, pierced with an opening and closed by a heavy iron gate fastened always on the inside. Members of the family have to give the password or its equivalent before it is ever opened, and tramps are unknown. Life would have no pleasures for a tramp who could not open the back-gate and creep up to the kitchen and frighten a woman to death by a flash of his living picture.

In Tlalpam you walk a block between high walls to the cross street, and do the same to the next and the next, and you can imagine how delightful it is, “Straight without scenery.” You must not forget that none of the streets have shade trees. So after I had admired all the beautiful stone walls and stone pavements, a wicket was suddenly opened to pass someone in, and I got a flashing glance of languid señoras and señoritas taking their siesta in hammocks swung between lime trees redolent with fragrance and—some one shut the gate. If that sleepy old town thought that I had come all the way there to look at the stone walls, little did it know me. I pounded on that gate till the startled inhabitants thought I was trying to break into jail, but I got in, and found myself in one of the most beautiful and fascinating places I had yet seen. The spraying fountains and flowers and song birds, and the Moorish setting of the surroundings, took me back to the wonderful stories of the Alhambra. Meanwhile that astonished household was all agape at the unheard of intrusion, but great is the power of flattery. I frankly told them that I had been sent all the way from the United States by a committee of one, to hunt out the most beautiful places in Mexico and secure their photographs at all hazard to display and strike dead with envy the people who live in the stuffy cities of America. That on that very morning I had left the City of Mexico for the express purpose of getting a picture of the finest place and the most beautiful ladies in Tlalpam, and with that end in view I was here.——“Enough Señor, enough! Take us; we are all yours, the house, the fountains, the trees, the girls—they are all yours, take them.”

Here was eloquence and victory combined and I did not know what to do with all the victory. I had solemnly promised not to accept any more costly presents from these good people, but this bunch of girls seemed to be different from hotels and other real estate, so I resolved to make the old gentleman a present of his house and lot, and keep the girls: so I very gladly embraced—er—the opportunity of posing them for their pictures. Why these good people should hide so much loveliness and beauty behind impassable stone walls is beyond my ken.

How old is Tlalpam? I don’t know, but it began at a time when the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. Upon the walls, the crop of glass planted in the cement did not seem to flourish very much. It was a very glassy looking glass and seemed to need irrigating, but time is long with these people, and if it does not pan out a crop in the next fifty years, they will wait patiently for manana, that scape-goat of all incompleted enterprises—to-morrow. I don’t know whatever gave these people an idea that they could grow glass anyway, unless it was the Spanish moss. This moss is a parasite that grows upon all kinds of trees, but in old Tlalpam it grows upon the wires stretched across the street to hold the street lamps, and it is aristocratic moss that grows with its head up instead of trailing, and I call that making headway against adverse conditions. The weeds and cacti upon the wall seemed to make their way better than the broken glass, and when I last saw them, they were green and were getting up in the world.

“But it is a long lane,” etc., as the proverb says, so at last the supply of aristocracy gave out at the rise of the hill, and we reached the realm of the great unwashed, who had neither walls nor rags to hide their nakedness. The happy children were clothed with innocence which needed no other protection than the blue sky and the Republic of Mexico.

Higher and higher we go up the hill. The avenue we started in led into the main street, this street finally led into a path, and the path terminated in a cow trail and this trail merged into a squirrel path which ran up a tree; so, like the King of France, “We marched up the hill, and then marched down again.” But before starting down we stopped to rest at the tree where the squirrel trail disappeared, and looked over the valley, and could realize the emotions of Cortez when he stood at the same place and viewed a similar scene. Across the silver lake lay the City of Mexico, twenty kilometers away, with its thousands of spires and pulse-throbs that supplied the veins and arteries and capillaries to the fortunes and hopes of its tens of thousands of dependencies. No wonder Cortez said it was the fairest city man ever looked upon. The one thing a stranger never quite masters here is the rarified atmosphere which destroys all ideas of distance and nullifies all laws of optics. You have traveled the road and know it is twenty kilometers, but the city is brought so like a mirage that you seem almost able to hear the clock strike. We leave our squirrel path and find ourselves in the city of the dead, a beautiful place shaded with eucalyptus trees and furnished with restful seats.

Soon there enters a figure heavily veiled and places a wreath of amaranth upon a new-made grave, marked with a wooden cross, and R. I. P. We leave her to her sorrow and follow a limpid stream from the mountain back to the city below. Beyond is the parched chaparral and the thorny cactus now laden with its harvest of purple tunas, surely the manna of the desert for these discouraged-looking peons. Beside the stream were green trees of limes and oranges and English walnuts and agua caties and an air of restfulness.

We follow the stream into the little plaza with its spraying fountain and fragrant Datura suaveolens, which grows into quite a bush. The pleasant seats invite us to sit and listen to the notes of the noisy purple grackle and the discordant tropical jay as they take their morning bath. Rip Van Winkle is still asleep and Mrs. Xantippe R. V. W. has not yet come from the market, and so for fear of disturbing the serenity of that Elysian Field, we tip-toe back to the station where the car is waiting, and that sleepy old town does not know to this day that a band of camera fiends invaded its sacred precincts, even unto its highest citadel and returned without the loss of a single man. Happy Old Tlalpam. R.I.P.

Back across the ancient bed of the lake we fly, and where once was Montezuma’s fleet are herds of sleek cattle, knee-deep in rich alfalfa, awaiting their turn to contribute to the material welfare of the mammoth city. We reach a junction, Churubusco! Immediately we think of that history class of twenty years ago, when we had to “stay in” after school because those battles would not fight themselves in the right places; when Chancellorsville and Crown Point and Saratoga and Churubusco could not agree as to time, place and manner. Here was a chance to settle one point, even if the teacher had long since died of worry, and we anxiously get out and look.