Viva Mexico!

by Charles Macomb Flandrau

Or did you merely ask me if I didn’t find this kind of a life desperately lonely? Everybody at home has asked me this until I have come to believe that the modern American’s greatest dread, greater even than the dread of sickness or of death, is the dread of being alone. But although I no longer have it, I am able to understand it. For I can vividly remember the time when there were scarcely any circumstances I could not control sufficiently to insure me constant companionship. It was novel and pleasant occasionally to putter alone for a few hours in one’s room, or in solitude to lose oneself in an absorbing book, with the half-formed purpose of soon finding somebody with whom to discuss it. But to walk alone, to dine alone, to go to the theater alone—to think alone! To be, in a word, for any length of time, on one’s own hands—face to face with nothing but oneself! I could not possibly describe the restlessness, the sense of “missing something,” the acute melancholy I have experienced on the rare occasions when in those days the improbable happened and for an afternoon and evening I was left—alone. Just when and how the change came I have no idea. Without at the moment feeling them, one acquires persistent little lines that extend from the outer corners of one’s eyes and almost meet the gray hairs below and behind one’s temples. The capacity—the talent—for being alone comes to some in the same way. With me it has been as gradual as the accentuation of the streaks across my forehead, or the somewhat premature blanching of the hair around my ears. I only know that it has come and that I am glad of it. I can be—and I sometimes am—alone indefinitely for weeks—for months—without feeling that life is passing me by. I may not, on the one hand, have periods of great gayety, but on the other there is a placid kind of satisfaction, more or less continuous, in realizing that one’s resources are a greater comfort than one’s limitations are a distress. At first I was rather vain, I confess, of the facility with which I could “do without”; I used to find myself picturing certain old friends in these surroundings and despising their very probable anguish. One, I felt sure, would find his solace by perpetually dwelling in imagination upon his little triumphs of the past (there are so many kinds of little past triumphs)—in seeking to span the unspanable gulfs behind him with innumerable epistolary bridges. The eyes of another would be fixed on the far horizon; he would live through the interminable days, as so many persons live through their lives, hovering upon the brink of a vague, wonderful something that doesn’t happen. Another would take to aguardiente, which is worse, they say, than morphine, and thenceforward his career would consist of trying to break himself of the habit.

But I hope I have got over being vain—indeed, I’ve got over being a lot of things. Solitude is a great chastener when once you accept it. It quietly eliminates all sorts of traits that were a part of you—among others, the desire to pose, to keep your best foot forever in evidence, to impress people as being something you would like to have them think you are even when you aren’t. Some men I know are able to pose in solitude; had they valets they no doubt would be heroes to them. But I find it the hardest kind of work myself, and as I am lazy I have stopped trying. To act without an audience is so tiresome and unprofitable that you gradually give it up and at last forget how to act at all. For you become more interested in making the acquaintance of yourself as you really are; which is a meeting that, in the haunts of men, rarely takes place. It is gratifying, for example, to discover that you prefer to be clean rather than dirty even when there is no one but God to care which you are; just as it is amusing to note, however, that for scrupulous cleanliness you are not inclined to make superhuman sacrifices, although you used to believe you were. Clothes you learn, with something of a shock, have for you no interest whatever. You come to believe that all your life you have spent money in unnecessary raiment to please yourself only in so far as it is pleasant to gain the approval of others. You learn to regard dress merely as a covering, a precaution. For its color and its cut you care nothing.

But the greatest gift in the power of loneliness to bestow is the realization that life does not consist either of wallowing in the past or of peering anxiously at the future; and it is appalling to contemplate the great number of often painful steps by which one arrives at a truth so old, so obvious, and so frequently expressed. It is good for one to appreciate that life is now. Whether it offers little or much, life is now—this day—this hour—and is probably the only experience of the kind one is to have. As the doctor said to the woman who complained that she did not like the night air: “Madam, during certain hours of every twenty-four, night air is the only air there is.” Solitude performs the inestimable service of letting us discover that it is our lives we are at every moment passing through, and not some useless, ugly, interpolated interval between what has been and what is to come. Life does not know such intervals. They can have no separate identity for they are life itself, and to realize this makes what has seemed long and without value, both precious and fleeting. The fleeting present may not be just what we once dreamed it might be, but it has the advantage of being present, whereas our past is dead and our future may never be born.

So you see, I am not lonely—or I mean, when I am lonely (for everyone is lonely), I try to regard it as a purely objective affliction, like the sting of a wasp, or the hot blister that comes when you carelessly touch a leaf of mala mujer. For minor objective afflictions there is always some sort of an alleviator, and for loneliness I have found a remedy in reflecting that the sensation itself is never as interesting or as important as the circumstances that cause it. All of which brings me back again to this hillside clearing in the jungle with its lovely views, its outrageous climate, its mysterious people, its insidious fascination. Do you ever have a feeling of skepticism as to the continued existence of places you are no longer in? I can shut my eyes and see Boston and New York and Paris, for instance, as they are in their characteristic ways at almost any hour of the day or night. I know just how the people in certain quarters are conducting themselves, where they are going next, and what they will say and do when they arrive. But I don’t altogether believe in it. It doesn’t seem possible, somehow, that they are going ceaselessly on and on when I am not there to see. Something happens to places where I no longer am. Until I go back to them I’m sure they must be white and blank like the screen in a cinematograph performance between the end of one film and the beginning of the next. Just at present, nowhere is particularly existent but here.

It is a cloudless, burning day, the best kind of a day for coffee, and the asoleadero is covered with it. Through the house there is a slight stir of air, and the fact that the house-boy has just swept the floor with wet tea leaves left over from several breakfasts, makes the breeze for the moment seem cool—which it isn’t. On such a day one is grateful for the bareness of a room—the smooth, unadorned walls, the hard, cool chairs. From the asoleadero comes without ceasing the harsh, hollow sound of the wooden hoes as they turn the coffee over in the sun and scrape against the cement. It is a hot and drowsy sound; the Mexican equivalent of the sound made by a lawn mower in an American “front yard” in August. It would send me to sleep, I think, if it were not counteracted by the peculiar rustling of a clump of banana trees outside the window. The slightest breath of air puts their torn ribbons into motion that is a prolonged patter, indistinguishable usually from the patter of rain. To-day it is more like the plashing of a fountain—a fountain that, on account of the goldfish, plashes gently. Whenever we need rain—and in the middle of the night I wake up and seem to hear it—it turns out to be the banana trees; but when “too much water has fallen,” as they say here, and I persuade myself that this time it is only a fluttering in the banana trees, it is always rain. The whole landscape is suspended in heat haze (“swooning” is the word I should like to use, but I shan’t), from the bamboo trees nodding against the sky on the crest of the hill behind the house, through the café tal in front of it, down, down the long valley between extinct, woolly looking volcanoes—thirty miles away to the sea. The sea, for some reason, never looks from this distance like the sea; it is not flat but perpendicular. I should have thought it a pale-blue wall across the valley’s lower end. In an untiled corner of the piazza some chickens are taking dust baths and talking scandal in low tones; the burro, near by, has curled up in the shade like a dog and gone to sleep. I used to think I should never allow chickens to take dust baths, or burros to doze on my piazza. It seemed dreadfully squalid to permit it. Yet I have long since come to it. What can one do? Es el costumbre del pais. So, also, is the custom of letting a few fastidious hens lay eggs in one’s bed. But I have always been very firm about that.

Except for the chickens and the burro, the two men on the asoleadero, a buzzard resting on the limb of a dead tree, and one of the dogs who has sneaked into the house to get rid of the flies, and who thinks that because I didn’t turn him out I didn’t see him, there is apparently nothing alive in the whole world. And their animation is but a tranquil stupor. It does not seem as if anything could ever happen here to disturb one. I’m sure I look as if I had been dreaming forever, but so far to-day (it is only half past two) there have been the following demands upon my time and attention:

At seven, one of the men tapped on my window and said he was going to town, so I got up, wrote a note for him to post, made out the list for the grocer—sugar, onions, flour, bread, a new bottle of olive oil, two brooms, and a mouse trap—and gave him a hundred-peso bill to change somewhere in the village into silver, as to-morrow is pay day. It is inconvenient, but in the country one has to pay wages—even enormous sums like five and ten pesos—in silver. Indians don’t understand paper money as a rule and won’t take it; the others, too, are sometimes suspicious of it—which is a survival, I suppose, of the time when several different governments were trying to run Mexico at once and the bank notes of one state were not accepted in another. At least that is the only way I can account for their reluctance to be paid in good paper money. A man I know got tired of sending every week to town for bags of silver, and told the people on his place that a law had been passed (Oh, those laws!) permitting an employer to pay only half as much as he owed to persons who refused bills. Thereafter bills were not scorned. No doubt I could say something of the same kind, but more than enough laws of this sort are “passed” in darkest Mexico as it is. I shouldn’t care to be responsible for another. In the kitchen there were no evidences of activity on the part of Rosalia, and as I was beginning to be hungry I knocked on her door and asked her (although I knew only too well) what was the matter. She moaned back that she was very sick and believed she was going to die. I didn’t tell her I hoped she would, although the thought occurred to me. For the trouble with Doña Rosalía was that she went to a dance last night at a little ranch next to mine, stayed until half past four, and was carried home stinko. This I had gleaned from Ramón (he who went to town), who had helped to carry her. With the ladies at the party she had consumed many glasses of a comparatively harmless although repulsive mixture of eggs, sugar, milk, and brandy, prettily named ronpoco. With the gentlemen, however, she had laughingly tossed off eight or ten drinks of aguardiente, not to record an occasional glass of sherry, until at last the gentlemen were obliged laughingly to toss her by the head and feet into a corner, where she lay until they carried her home in the rosy dawn. I don’t know what to do about Rosalía. She is an odious woman. If she would content herself with one lover—somebody I know—I shouldn’t mind in the least. But she has a different one every week—persons I’ve never laid eyes on usually—and it makes me nervous to think that there are strange men in the house at night. Recently I have resorted to locking the kitchen door at a respectable hour and removing the key, which has made her furious, as I have not been in the habit of locking any doors and as I did it without offering an explanation. Her room, furthermore, is without a window. I shouldn’t be surprised if she tried to poison me; they are great little poisoners. So I had to stand for half an hour or more fanning a fire built of green, damp wood, and getting my own breakfast—an orange, a cup of tea, some eggs, and a roll without butter. The butter habit has been eliminated along with many others. I could get good, pure American butter dyed with carrot juice and preserved in boracic or salicylic acid, by sending to the City of Mexico, but it is too much bother.

After breakfast I walked over to where they are picking. I can’t, of course, help in the picking, but frequent, unexpected appearances on my part are not without value. If they were sure I weren’t coming they would, in their zeal to tear off many berries quickly (they are paid by the amount they pick), break the branches and injure the trees. As they have no respect for their own property I suppose it would be fatuous to count on any respect for mine. When I got back to the house I began to write to you, but before I had covered half a page, one Lucio appeared on the piazza, apparently for the purpose of chatting interminably about the weather, the coffee, the fact that some one had died and some one else was about to be born; none of which topics had anything to do with the real object of his visit. Three quarters of an hour went by before he could bring himself to ask me to lend him money with which to buy two marvelously beautiful pigs. I was kind, but I was firm. I don’t mind lending money for most needs, but I refuse to encourage hogriculture. It is too harrowing. When they keep pigs, no day goes by that the poor, obese things do not escape and, helplessly rolling and stumbling down the hill, squeal past the house with a dog attached to every ear. Besides, they root up the young coffee trees. No, Lucio, no. Chickens, ducks, turkeys, cows, lions, and tigers if you must, but not pigs. Lucio—inscrutable person that he is—perfectly agrees with me. As he says good-by one would think he had originally come not to praise pigs but to protest against them. After his departure there are at least fifteen minutes of absolute quiet.

Then arrive a party of four—two men and two women—respectable-looking, well-mannered people, who stand on the piazza, saying good morning and inquiring after my health. I have never seen them before, but I stop my letter and go out to talk to them, wondering all the while where they have come from and what they want—for, of course, they want something; everybody always does. For an interminable time their object does not emerge and in the face of such pretty, pleasant manners it is out of the question for me bluntly to demand, “What have you come for?” In despair I ask them if they would like to see the house, and as they stand in my bare sala, commenting in awed undertones, I have a sudden penetrating flash of insight into the relativeness of earthly grandeur. To me the sala is the clean, ascetic habitation of one who has not only realized what is and what is not essential, but who realizes that every new nail, pane of glass, tin of paint, and cake of soap is brought sixty or seventy miles through seas of mud and down a precipice three or four thousand feet high on the back of a weary mule. To them, the simple interior is a miracle of ingenious luxury. They gaze at the clumsy fireplace, touch it, try to see daylight through the chimney and fail to grasp its purpose, although they revere it as something superbly unnecessary that cost untold sums. The plated candlesticks on the table are too bewildering to remark on at all; they will refer to them on the way home. The kitchen range at first means nothing to anyone, but when I account for it as an American brasero the women are enthralled. One of them confesses she thought it was a musical instrument—the kind they have in church! There is nothing more to exhibit, nothing more to talk about, so during a general silence one of the men asks me if I will sell them a little corn—enough to keep them for two days—and I know they have come to the point at last. They work on a ranch a mile or so away and the owner, an Englishman, who lives in town, has forgotten or neglected to supply them; they have none left for their tortillas. I am not at all anxious to part with any of my corn, but I desire to be obliging both to them and the Englishman, who, of course, will be told of it the next time he rides out to his ranch. The house-boy having disappeared in search of firewood, I have to measure the corn myself; all of which takes time.

Next, a little boy to buy a pound of lard. (As a convenience I sell lard at cost.) Then a little girl to say her mother is tired and would like a drink of aguardiente. As her mother cooks for eighteen men who are working here temporarily without their families, no doubt she deserves one. Anyhow she gets it. Rosalía and the house-boy usually dole out corn, lard, and aguardiente, but Rosalia is still in a trance and the boy has not returned. Then Ezequiel, father of Candelario, stops on his way over to the coffee tanks to tell me that Candelario is sick and he would like me to prescribe. As Candelario is one of my godchildren I have to show more interest in him than I feel.