Viva Mexico!

by Charles Macomb Flandrau

But there was the same vagueness as to when the ceremony would begin that there had been about the date of the previous visit. Some, remembering perhaps that most gringos have an inscrutable prejudice in favor of the definite, courteously named an hour—any hour; two, five, half past six. Others recalled that evening was the time, while a few assured me the bishop had come and gone the day before. Nobody, however, seemed to care, and I asked myself as Felipe and Geronimo and I sat on a crumbling parapet and watched the bright colored crowd: “Why should I care? What difference does it make whether I sit here in the shade or in the shade at the ranch?”

But at last there began to be a slow activity—a going in and a coming out at the door of the priest’s house. I watched people go in empty-handed and come out with a slip of paper in one hand and a long yellow candle in the other. The slip of paper left me cold, but the tapering yellow candle mystically called. In Jalapa I had often stood for an hour staring at the moderate revolutions of the great hoop on which the pendent wicks grow fatter and fatter as the velero patiently bathes them in boiling tallow, and I had yearned to possess one. Yet, heretofore, I had denied myself; the desire, it seemed to me, was like that craving for heirlooms and ancestors on the part of persons to whom such innocent sensualities have been cruelly denied. To-day, however, long virtue was to have a short, vicarious reward, for Geronimo’s little soul was at the moment entirely in my hands, and it was but proper that his way to heaven should be lighted by a blessed candle. So when I came out of the priest’s house I, too, had one (“Bang! went saxpence”) as well as the “certificate of confirmation” (“Bang!” went another), on which was written my godchild’s name, and the names of his parents and my name. It took hours for everyone to be supplied, but they were as nothing compared to the hours we waited in the church for the bishop. Except in front of the altar, the nave had been fenced off by a continuous line of benches facing inward, and on these the children stood with their sponsors behind them. Like most Mexican children, their behavior was admirable. They rarely cry, they rarely quarrel, and their capacity for amusing themselves with nothing is without limit. Had I the ordering of this strange, unhappy world, I think all children would be born Mexican and remain so until they were fifteen.

That they in a measure outgrow their youthful serenity, however, seemed to be proved by exhausted relatives all about me who, after the first hour of waiting, began to roll their eyes when they met mine and dispatch a succession of Sister Annes to peer through the windows of the priest’s sala. “Está dormiendo” (he is sleeping), in a hoarse whisper, was repeated so often that—my breakfast had been a cup of chocolate and a cigarette—the hinges in my knees began to work both ways, and just outside the church door I recklessly bought and ate something (it cauterized me as it went down) wrapped in a tortilla. When I returned, the bishop, with three priests behind him, was standing at the top of the altar steps. He was wearing his miter and the tips of his fingers lightly touched one another, as a bishop’s fingers should, on the apex of his stomach. It was a thrilling moment.

Then, combining, in a quite wonderful fashion, extreme rapidity with an air of ecclesiastical calm, he made his confirmatory way down one side of the nave, across the end, and up the other, preceded by one priest and followed by two. The first gathered up the certificates (no laying on of hands unless one has paid one’s twenty-five centavos) and read the name of the child next in line to the bishop, who murmured the appropriate formula, made a tiny sign of the cross on a tiny forehead with the end of a large, dirty thumb, and moved on. The second, with a bit of absorbent cotton dipped in oil, swabbed the spot on which the cross had been signed, while the third, taking advantage of the general rapture, gently relieved everyone of his blessed candle (it had never been lighted) and carried it away to be sold again.

But by the time the first priest reached my family party he had grown tired and careless. Instead of collecting the certificates singly, he began to take them in twos and threes with the result that they became mixed, and Geronimo was confirmed, not as Geronimo, but as “Saturnina,” which happened to be the name of the little snubnosed Totonac girl standing next to him. When I realized what had happened, I protested. Whereupon his grace and I proceeded to have “words.” With exceeding bitterness he then reperformed the rite, and if the eyes of the first priest could have killed, I should have withered on my slender stalk. The priest with the cotton also sought to annihilate me with an undertoned remark to the effect that my conduct was a “barbaridad,” but the third was not only sinpatico—he was farther away from the bishop. As, with much tenderness, he disengaged Geronimo’s reluctant fingers from the candle, he severely looked at me and winked.

Then we wandered down to the shabby little plaza, where I bought Geronimo some toys and Felipe wanted to buy me a drink. But as Felipe was still looking prematurely old as the result of something suspiciously like delirium tremens a few weeks before, I sanctimoniously declined and bade them good-by.

There is no twilight in those tropics, and before the mayordomo and I reached home, darkness gathered in the deep valley, crept behind us up the mountainside, and all at once, as they say in Spanish, “it nighted.” It was impossible to see the trail or even the sky, and we lurched on and on as through an interminable world of black velvet. Most of the way I kept my eyes shut—crouching down on the pommel to escape overhanging vines and the terrible outstretched fingers of mala mujer. Twice we lost our hats, and once my mule stuck deep and fast in the mud until we jumped into it ourselves and pulled him out. On this road after dark it is usually difficult to think of anything except that in a little while one’s neck will be broken; but that evening, with my eyelids squeezed together and my feet prudently hanging free of the stirrups, I kept recalling Felipe’s clumsy, charming devotion to his ethereal little son and the satisfaction he had unconsciously displayed when Geronimo toddled out of the church—confirmed.

Although Felipe gets frightfully drunk, neglects his wife for other women, and regards a machete as the most convincing form of argument, he has excellent qualities; but I shouldn’t think of him as religious exactly. And yet—and yet—Felipe and his wife are really married (it seems rather snobbish of them, but it’s a fact), and from the knowledge that his children have been baptized by the priest and confirmed by the bishop, he gets some sort of an agreeable sensation.

VI

WHY people are what they are is always an interesting subject on which to exert one’s talents, however slight, for observation and inference. On an isolated Mexican farm one spends many odd moments in considering and attempting to explain the traits of the people who condescend to work for one. For most of the problems of one’s daily life there arise from those traits, and by them, all are complicated. The amicable relations between employer and employed everywhere is one that necessitates on the former’s part considerable tact to preserve, but in Mexico both the nation’s history and the people’s temperament combine to render the situation one of unusual delicacy.