As you cross the plaza towards the market, it is difficult to picture what the old city must have been like when roads were not roads and the plaza, now a wonderfully kept square of grass, flowers and stone, was a mangy patch of leprous grass dotted with trees, to which were tied mules which had brought in produce from the country.
But the alterations in Merida are surface alterations. The only wonder is that the city is as healthy as it is, for there is no attempt at any general sewerage system, no main drains, and every householder is a law unto himself on this vital question. Each hot season there are outbreaks, sometimes very serious, of yellow fever. But the city is a healthy city; there is no doubt about that. There is a general avoidance of well-water for drinking purposes, and as a substitute the most elaborate arrangements are made for storing every drop of rain-water during the wet season. This is done by every house of any size having enormous cemented tanks under their patios, the water-pipes from the roofs connecting with them. Thus the two huge quadrangles of our hotel were nothing but gigantic reservoirs tiled over. The rainy season practically never fails Yucatan; and, though not as regular in its advent as the Indian monsoon, keeps up year by year its average of supply. Surface refuse is dealt with summarily by the most picturesque set of road-sweepers imaginable. Neatly uniformed in white drill or brown holland, they wear pith helmets adorned with metal badges bearing their number, and look like soldiers. In front of them they push by means of a long handle a tin shovel, some four feet long, which runs on neat little wheels. These men are everywhere, and take very good care that garbage is nowhere. The water-carts, too, are worth a mention: gigantic wooden hogsheads painted in yellow stripes. These generally work at night, and take up their supply from huge water-taps which jut out from the walls of buildings, and upon which the men tie brown holland piping in the most primitive fashion to fill their carts.
The evenings at Merida are the gayest times, for then all folks, rich and poor, come out to spend the cool hours in the plaza. There is very little twilight ever in the tropics, and as soon as the sun is down and it is dusk enough, the wealthy Yucatecans have a queer habit of sitting in rocking-chairs outside their houses. A whole group of ladies will thus take the air in front of the huge doorways of the biggest houses, surrounded by two or three cavaliers. Later on the carriages are ordered, and sleepy-eyed beauties drive round and round the plaza in the dark, apparently enjoying this rather queer form of carriage exercise. In the centre of the plaza itself the town band assembles, and this is a signal for a nightly promenade of the humbler Meridians. Nothing can be more picturesque or typical. The seats are filled for the most part with the older people; fat old men, linen-suited and besandalled, armed generally with an incongruous ill-rolled umbrella, smoke and doze; beside them solid-looking Yucatecan matrons with gold chains round their necks from which hang gold coins and a metal or ivory crucifix; at their feet a baby or two, dressed in the shortest of shifts, play about.
But young Merida walks. Yet here again there is something which attracts the English eye, for there is a complete separation of the sexes. The girls walk together in twos, threes and fours one way, and the young dandies, in their spotless white-linen bell-bottomed trousers, belted with ornamental belts, over which are hung blue and white striped cloths reaching to their knees like butchers' aprons put on sideways, gaudily coloured silk-cotton vests and over these white-linen coats, walk the other. All the youths have a pretty habit of going hand in hand, or with arms round each other's necks. They are there to see the girls, and in the hope that the girls will see them. But the curious thing is that you never see them look at one another. The groups of chatting youths and maidens pass and repass one another round and round under the trees, in and out of the paths, and watch as hard as you like you will never see an ogling glance or catch a hint of that coarse chaff which is inseparable from such a congregating of lower-class youth of both sexes in a city like London. It really is quite extraordinary, the naïveté of it all, the determined way in which the eternal sex problem seems tabooed here. We sat for hours watching the orderly crowds, and never once did we see a girl stop in her walk to speak to a man or any youth attempt to speak or to walk with a maid. It was decorum in excelsis. It reminded one of the famous description of Boston as the place "where respectability stalks unchecked."
But respectability is usually perilously near being a synonym for mawkish dullness. Here it was not so. You had absolute decorum; there was no suspicion of noisy horseplay or hooliganism; there was not the slightest need for a policeman (as a matter of fact none appeared during the whole evening) to keep order; and yet the crowd was as perfect a specimen of the brightest popular life any city could show. They had all come out to enjoy themselves, and they enjoyed themselves like children, with a simple unaffected gaiety which was very infectious. With all their faults the Yucatecans have the saving grace of good temper, not from a geniality of disposition so much as from a physical apathy which makes them reluctant to the effort which losing one's temper involves. And this merry, laughing crowd in the plaza, the simple unadorned beauty of the dark-eyed lassies, the knots of handsome youths arms-linked, the plump babies contentedly playing in between the legs of the strollers, the old people dozing in the shady seats, and the mellow light from a huge electric standard dappling with a moonlike radiance the exquisitely cleanly pathways, made such a picture of pleasant contentment as was quite Utopian. In the darkened roadways the wealthier beauties of Merida drove round and round the plaza like bats circling round a lamp. But though there were many of them whose lascivious beauty would have made most men forswear their most cherished convictions, our hearts were in the plaza with the chattering, happy crowd, and we were quite sorry when the band, which, with an extraordinary display of energy, had played four tunes in two hours, struck work and the folks dispersed.
[CHAPTER V]
A YUCATECAN BREAKFAST, AND OTHER "SIGHTS"
Unless one is endowed with the appetite of the proverbial ploughboy there is surely nothing which puts you off your food more than having too much on your plate. One's sympathies go out to the irritable old gentleman at the London club who, having ordered a plate of beef and getting beef and a plate, snapped out angrily to the waiter, "Do you think I haven't eaten for a month?" The next worse thing to having too much on your plate is to have too much on the table. Every traveller knows the bewildering effect of those breakfasts served on the Paris and Mediterranean Railway, when seven dishes are placed before you, with fifteen minutes in which to eat their contents. But though there is no time-limit for feeding in Yucatan, you have got to get accustomed to the whole meal, in all its courses, being placed before you at once.
We had brought with us to Merida several letters of introduction, and on the Monday we presented one of these to a Yucatecan millionaire whom we ran to earth in his office (he was mayor of the city) transacting official business. After our preliminary greetings he said, "We Yucatecans never ask anybody to our houses, but I should like you to see the interior of a Yucatecan home. Therefore, will you breakfast with me to-morrow at 11.30?" In fulfilment of this engagement we turned up the next day in his patio at the appointed hour. The house is one of the finest in Merida, and is so typical of the people as to be worth a short description. Entering through the patio, bright with flowering shrubs, with orange trees loaded with the golden fruit, with palms and evergreens, you ascend a short flight of stone steps into a long central tiled hall forming a kind of glorified verandah on two sides of the courtyard. On the tiles are thrown a few cheap coloured mats. Ranged in two rows facing each other are eight or ten American bentwood rocking-chairs. On the walls hang a few oleographs. Here we were received by our host in a linen suit, and his Señora, a celebrated Meridian beauty, daintily dressed in a pink muslin frock, the mother, as we afterwards discovered, of seven children, though she herself looked little more than out of her teens. One or two other guests, male relatives, all in cool linens, having arrived, our hosts lead the way to the further end of the hall, out of which opens the dining-room. Not at all such a dining-room as we English associate with the sacred occupation of feeding. It is really nothing but another tiled annexe to the hall with huge doorway, but without doors (there are no real doors between the rooms in Yucatecan houses), at which the chickens and turkeys from the back yard are congregating to see the fun, hopping, cackling, out of the way of the half dozens of Indian women servants who are pattering in with bare feet from the kitchen of which you catch a glimpse down a vista of tiled yard.