“Adiós.”
Toward women we are everywhere accustomed to a display of more or less politeness, but in Mexico, under the ordinary circumstances of life, men of all classes are polite to one another. Acquaintances take off their hats both when they meet and part, and I have heard a half-naked laborer bent double under a sack of coffee-berries murmur, “With your permission,” as he passed in front of a bricklayer who was repairing a wall. Even the children—who are not renowned in other lands for observing any particular code of etiquette among themselves—treat one another, as a rule, with an astonishing consideration. Once in the plaza at Tehuacan I found myself behind three little boys of about six or seven who were sedately strolling around and around while the band played, quite in the manner of their elders. One of them had a cent, and after asking the other two how they would most enjoy having it invested, he bought from a dulcero one of those small, fragile creations of egg and sugar known, I believe, as a “kiss.” This he at once undertook to divide, with the result that when the guests had each received a pinch of the ethereal structure, there was nothing left for the host but two or three of his own sticky little fingers. He looked a trifle surprised for a moment, and I thought it would be only natural and right for him to demand a taste of the others. But instead of that he merely licked his fingers in silence and then resumed the promenade where it had been left off. However, the general seraphicness of Mexican children is a chapter in itself.
“Is that your horse?” you ask of a stranger with whom you have entered into conversation on the road.
“No, señor—it is yours,” he is likely to reply with a slight bow. And perhaps it is by reason of formulæ like this that the great public characterizes Mexican politeness as “all on the surface—not from the heart.” The stranger’s answer, naturally, is just a pretty phrase. But all politeness is largely verbal and the only difference between the politeness of Mexico and the politeness of other countries consists of the fact that, first, the Spanish language is immensely rich in pretty phrases, and, secondly, that literally everyone makes use of them.
One of the most amusing manifestations of the state of mind known as “patriotism” is the fact that every nation is thoroughly convinced of the dishonesty of every other. From end to end of Europe the United States is, and for a long time has been, a synonym of political and financial corruption. We are popularly supposed to be a nation of sharks who have all grown fabulously rich by the simple, effective method of eating one another—and everybody else—up. This is not perhaps the topic the French ambassador picks out to expound at White House dinners, nor does it form the burden of the Duke of Abruzzi’s remarks on the occasion of planting a tree at Washington’s tomb. It is merely a conviction of the great majority of their fellow countrymen at home. On the other hand, very few persons with a drop of Anglo-Saxon blood in them can bring themselves to admit—much less to feel—that the “Latin” races have any but a shallow and versatile conception of honesty and truth. It is a provision of nature that one’s own people should have a monopoly of all the virtues. Uncle John, who was given short change for a napoleon by a waiter at the Jardin de Paris, is more than sustained in his original opinion of the French. And Aunt Lizzie, who paid a dollar and a half for a trunk strap at the leading harness shop of Pekin, Illinois, and then had it stolen at the Laredo customhouse, will all her life believe that the chief occupation of everyone in Mexico, from President Diaz down, is the theft of trunk straps. This sounds like trifling—but it is the way in which one country’s opinion of another is really formed.
A discussion of the comparative honesty of nations must always be a futile undertaking, as a considerable number of persons in every country are dishonest. I know for a fact that when Aunt Lizzie alighted at Laredo to have her trunk examined, she saw the strap “with her own eyes,” and that somewhere between the border and her final destination it miraculously disappeared. On the other hand, I always leave everything I own scattered about my room in Mexican hotels, because I am lazy, and various articles that I should regret to lose I have sometimes forgotten to pack, because I am careless. But nothing has ever been stolen from me in Mexico, and when I have requested the innkeeper by letter or telegram, “Please to send me the two diamond tiaras together with the emerald stomacher I inadvertently left in the second drawer of the washstand,” they have invariably come to me by return express—neither of which experiences (Aunt Lizzie’s and mine) proves anything whatever about anybody.
The question of “laziness” would be easy to dispose of if one could simply say that just as there are honest and dishonest Mexicans, there are indolent and energetic Mexicans. But somehow one can’t. Many of them are extremely industrious, many of them work, when they do work, as hard and as long as it is possible for human beings to bear fatigue—and yet, of what we know as “energy,” I have seen little or nothing. For whatever may be the word’s precise definition, it expresses to most of us an adequate power operating under the lash of a perpetual desire to get something done. In Mexico there are many kinds of adequate power, but apparently the desire to get anything done does not exist. The inhabitants, from peon to professional man, conduct their affairs as if everybody were going “to live,” as Marcus Aurelius says, “ten thousand years!”
Among the lower classes, even leaving out of consideration the influence of a tropical and semitropical climate, it is not difficult to account for this lack of energy. No people whose diet consists chiefly of tortillas, chile, black coffee, and cigarettes are ever going to be lashed by the desire to accomplish. This is the diet of babies as soon as they are weaned. I have heard proud mothers at country dances compare notes, while their men were playing monte around a kerosene torch stuck in the ground.
“My little boy”—aged three—“won’t look at a tortilla unless it is covered with chile,” one of them explains.
“Does he cry for coffee?” inquires another. “My baby”—aged two and a half—“screams and cries unless we give her coffee three and four times a day.” It is not surprising that a population perpetually in the throes of intestinal disorder should be somewhat lacking in energy.