After the coffee is picked it is brought home in sacks, measured, and run through the dispulper, a machine that removes the tough red, outer skin. Every berry (except the pea berry—a freak) is composed of two beans, and these are covered with a sweet, slimy substance known as the “honey,” which has to ferment and rot before the beans may be washed. Washing simply removes the honey and those pieces of the outer skin that have escaped the teeth of the machine and flowed from the front end where they weren’t wanted. Four or five changes of water are made in the course of the operation, and toward the last, when the rotted honey has been washed away, leaving the beans hard and clean in their coverings of parchment, one of the men takes off his trousers, rolls up his drawers, and knee deep in the heavy mixture of coffee and water drags his feet as rapidly as he can around the cement washing tank until the whole mass is in motion with a swirling eddy in the center. Into the eddy gravitate all the impurities—the foreign substances—the dead leaves and twigs and unwelcome hulls, and when they all seem to be there, the man deftly scoops them up with his hands and tosses them over the side. Then, if it be a fine hot day, the soggy mess is shoveled on the asoleadero (literally, the sunning place), an immense sloping stone platform covered with smooth cement, and there it is spread out to dry while men in their bare feet constantly turn it over with wooden hoes in order that the beans may receive the sun equally on all sides.
It sounds simple, and if one numbered among one’s employees a Joshua who could command the sun to stand still when one wished it to, it doubtless would be. But no matter how much coffee there may be spread out on the asoleadero, the sun not only loses its force at a certain hour and then inconsiderately sets, it sometimes refuses for weeks at a time to show itself at all. During these dreary eternities the half-dried coffee is stowed away in sacks or, when it is too wet to dispose of in this manner without danger of molding, it is heaped up in ridges on the asoleadero and covered. When it rains, work of all kinds in connection with the coffee necessarily ceases. The dryers cannot dry and the pickers cannot pick. Even when it is not actually raining the pickers won’t go out if the trees are still wet. For the water from the shaken branches chills and stiffens their bloodless hands and soaks through their cotton clothes to the skin. If one’s plantation and one’s annual crop are large enough to justify the expense, one may defy the sun by investing in what is known as a secadero—a machine for drying coffee by artificial heat. But I haven’t arrived at one of these two-thousand-dollar sun-scorners—yet.
That is as far as I go with my coffee—I pick it, dispulp it, wash it, dry it, and sell it. But while the first four of these performances sometimes bid fair to worry me into my grave before my prime, and the fourth at least is of vital importance, as the flavor of coffee may certainly be marred, if not made, in the drying, they are but the prelude to what is eventually done to it before you critically sip it and declare it to be good or bad. Women and children pick it over by hand, separating it into different classes; it is then run through one machine that divests it of its parchment covering; another, with the uncanny precision of mindless things, gropes for beans that happen to be of exactly the same shape, wonderfully finds them, and drops them into their respective places; while at the same time it is throwing out every bean that either nature or the dispulping machine has in the slightest degree mutilated. The sensitiveness and apperception of this iron and wooden box far exceed my own. Often I am unable to see the difference between the beans it has chosen to disgorge into one sack and the beans it has relegated to another—to feel the justice of its irrevocable decisions. But they are always just, and every bean it drops into the defective sack will be found, on examination, to be defective. Then there is still another machine for polishing the bean—rubbing off the delicate, tissue-paper membrane that covers it inside of the parchment. This process does not affect the flavor. In fact nothing affects the flavor of coffee after it has once been dried; but the separation and the polishing give it what is known to the trade as “style.” And in the trade there is as much poppycock about coffee as there is about wine and cigars. When you telephone to your grocer for a mixture of Mocha and Java do you by any chance imagine that you are going to receive coffee from Arabia and the Dutch islands? What you do receive, the coffee kings alone know. There are, I have been told, a few sacks of real Mocha in the United States, just as there are a few real Vandykes and Holbeins, and if you are very lucky indeed, the Mocha in your mixture will have been grown in Mexico.
Sometimes at the height of the picking season the day is not long enough, the washing tanks are not large enough, and the workers are not numerous enough to attend to both the coffee-drying on the asoleadero and the growing pile of berries that are constantly being carried in from the trees. When this happens the dispulping has to be done at night, and until four or five in the morning the monotonous plaint of the machine, grinding, grinding like the mills of some insatiable Mexican god, comes faintly over from the tanks. Under a flaring torch and fortified with a bottle of aguardiente the men take turns through the long night at filling the hopper and turning the heavy wheel, bursting now and then into wild, improvised recitatives that are answered by whomever happens for the moment to be most illuminated by either the aguardiente or the divine fire. They begin to improvise to this rapid, savage burst of a few minor phrases from the time they are children. Almost any grown man can do it, although there is a standard of excellence in the art (I have begun to detect it when I hear it), recognized among themselves, that only a few attain. It takes into consideration both the singer’s gift for dramatic or lyric invention and the quality of his voice, a loud, strained tenor with falsetto embellishments being the most desirable. I have heard Censio, the mayordomo’s little boy, aged three or four, singing, for an hour at a time, sincere and simple eulogies of his father’s cows. Since I brought him a small patrol wagon drawn by two spirited iron horses his voice, however, is no longer lifted in commemoration of “O mis vacas! O mis vacas! O mis vacas!” but of “O mis caballitos! O mis caballitos! O mis caballitos!” They improvise, too, at the dances, where the music is usually a harp and a jarana—breaking in anywhere, saying their say, and then waiting for the reply. Women rarely take part in these Tannhäuseresque diversions, although I remember one woman at a dance on my own piazza who got up and proceeded to chant with a wealth of personal and rather embarrassing detail the story of her recent desertion by the man she loved. He had of course deserted her for some one else, and at the end of her remarkable narrative she sang, in a perfect debauch of emotion and self-pity: “But I am of a forgiving nature! Come back, come back, my rose, my heart, my soul—the bed is big enough for three!” Sometimes when there is a dance at a neighboring ranch the harpist and his son, who plays the jarana, stop at my place on their way home in the morning and play to me (the son also improvises) while I am at breakfast. The harpist is always drunk, and his instrument, after a night of hard work, out of tune. He appeared not long ago when I had staying with me a Boston lawyer—my only visitor so far this year.
“Isn’t it horrible to eat soft boiled eggs and toast in this pandemonium,” I called to him across the breakfast table.
“No,” he answered, “it’s splendid—it’s just like being an Irish king.” The harpist was drunker than usual that morning when he rode away with his harp in front of him on the pommel of his saddle, his son trudging along behind, and when he reached the middle of the river he fell off his horse and was nearly drowned. Later I saw what was once a harp hanging in midstream to a rock. A shattered harp clinging to a cruel rock surrounded by rushing water! I’m sure it was beautifully symbolical of something—but what?
The harpist and the mother of the boy who assists him at dances were really married, he told me, but they haven’t lived together for years. Since then the boy has had a succession of informal stepmothers who never stayed very long, and just recently the harpist has really married again. In fact, the harpist’s home life is typical of the matrimonial situation here, which for many reasons is endlessly interesting. Among the lower classes in Mexico “free love” is not the sociological experiment it sometimes tries to be in more civilized communities. It is a convention, an institution, and, in the existing condition of affairs, a necessity. Let me explain.
The Mexicans are an excessively passionate people and their passions develop at an early age (I employ the words in a specific sense), not only because nature has so ordered it, but because, owing to the way in which they live—whole families, not to mention animals, in a small, one-roomed house—the elemental facts of life are known to them from the time they can see with their eyes and hear with their ears. For a Mexican child of seven or eight among the lower classes, there are no mysteries. Boys of fifteen have had their affairs with older women; boys of seventeen are usually strongly attracted by some one person whom they would like to marry. And just at this interesting and important crisis the Church furnishes the spectator with one of its disappointing and somewhat gross exhibitions.
It seems to have been proven that for people in general certain rigid social laws are a comfort and an aid to a higher, steadier standard of thought and life. In communities where such usages obtain, the ordinary person, in taking unto himself a wife, does so with a feeling of finality. On one’s wedding day, but little thought is given, I fancy, to the legal loopholes of escape. It strikes one as strange, as wicked even, that a powerful Church (a Church, moreover, that regards marriage as a sacrament) should deliberately place insuperable obstacles in the path of persons who for the time being, at least, have every desire to tread the straight and narrow way. This, to its shame, the Church in Mexico does.
The only legally valid marriage ceremony in Mexico is the civil ceremony, but to a Mexican peon the civil ceremony means nothing whatever; he can’t grasp its significance, and there is nothing in the prosaic, businesslike proceeding to touch his heart and stir his imagination. The only ceremony he recognizes is one conducted by a priest in a church. When he is married by a priest he believes himself to be married—which for moral and spiritual purposes is just as valuable as if he actually were. One would suppose that the Church would recognize this and encourage unions of more or less stability by making marriage inexpensive and easy. If it had the slightest desire to elevate the lower classes in Mexico from their frankly bestial attitude toward the marital relation—to inculcate ideas different and finer than those maintained by their chickens and their pigs—it could long since easily have done so. But quite simply it has no such desire. In the morality of the masses it shows no interest. For performing the marriage ceremony it charges much more than poor people can pay without going into debt. Now and then they go into debt; more often they dispense with the ceremony. On my ranch, for instance, very few of the “married” people are married. Almost every grown man lives with a woman who makes his tortillas and bears him children, and about some of these households there is an air of permanence and content. But with the death of mutual desire there is nothing that tends to turn the scale in favor of permanence; no sense of obligation, no respect for a vague authority higher and better than oneself, no adverse public opinion. Half an hour of ennui, or some one seen for a moment from a new point of view—and all is over. The man goes his way, the woman hers. The children, retaining their father’s name, remain, as a rule, with the mother. And soon there is a new set of combinations. One woman who worked here had three small children—everyone with a different surname; the name of its father. While here, she kept house with the mayordomo, who for no reason in particular had wearied of the wife he had married in church. No one thought it odd that she should have three children by different men, or that she should live with the mayordomo, or that the mayordomo should tire of his wife and live with her. As a matter of fact there was nothing odd about it. No one was doing wrong, no one was “flying in the face of public opinion.” She and the three men who had successively deserted her, the mayordomo who found it convenient to form an alliance with her, and his wife, who betook herself to a neighboring ranch and annexed a boy of sixteen, were all simply living their lives in accordance with the promptings they had never been taught to resist. It is not unusual to hear a mother, in a moment of irritation, exclaim, as she gives her child a slap, “Hijo de quien sabe quien!” (Child of who knows whom!) At an early age when they first fall in love they would, I think, almost always prefer to be married. But where get the ten pesos, without which the Church refuses to make them man and wife? The idea of saving and waiting is to them, of course, utterly preposterous? Why should it not be? What tangible advantage to them would there be in postponement? The Church, which has always been successful in developing and maintaining prejudices, could have developed, had it wished to, the strongest prejudice in favor of matrimony, and the permanence of the marriage tie. But it has not done so, and now, even when peons do have the religious ceremony performed, they do not consider it binding. After having gone to so much expense, they are not likely to separate so soon; but that is all. One of the men here has been married three or four times and on every occasion he has treated himself to a religious ceremony with quite a splendid dance afterwards. As he is a skilled mason who commands good wages and has no bad habits (except that of getting married every little while), he can afford it. He is a genial sort of a creature and I think he enjoys having weddings very much as some persons enjoy having dinner parties. Sometimes he deserts his wives and sometimes they desert him. Of course I don’t know, but I have an idea that to have been married to him at one time or another carries with it considerable prestige. And yet you ask me if I am not now and then homesick for New York!