Viva Mexico!

by Charles Macomb Flandrau

“It doesn’t seem to wish to be covered,” was the reply. Upon which I observed that it was a very pretty baby, and departed in tears. When one lives among them one marvels, not like the tourist of a week, that they are dirty, but that under the circumstances they are as clean as they are; not that so many of them are continually sick, but that any of them are ever well; not that they love to get drunk, but that they can bear to remain sober.

And yet, even in cold, wet weather I am sure some of my pity is wasted. If that baby lives and grows to manhood, a damp petate on the ground and a thin blanket will be the only bed in its recollection; a hut of openwork bamboo (or, at the most elaborate, of rough boards an inch apart) its only shelter from the rain and wind. Furthermore, a human being is never suffering as acutely as one sometimes thinks he is, if he fails to take advantage of every available means of alleviating his condition. Often when the faces of these people are wan with cold, I have asked them why they do not stuff the cracks in their houses and keep out the wind. The jungle a hundred yards away is all the year luxuriant with great waterproof leaves, which when hung on walls or piled on roofs are as impermeable as if they were patented and cost money. No one is ignorant of their use, for the north side of almost every house (it is from the north that the cold winds blow here) is adorned with them. But why only the north side? If I knew beforehand that I should have to spend a week in one of these huts I should, with a machete and two or three hours of effort, make it warm and habitable. But they, knowing that they will live and die in one, barely protect the north side, sheath their machetes, cover their noses with their sarapes, and shiver in silence. To the question, “Why don’t you make your house warm and dry with leaves?” I have never been given a definite or satisfactory answer. So sketchy and evasive have been the replies that I am actually unable to remember what any of them were. In fact, Mexicans have a genius for stringing words upon a flashing chain of shrugs and smiles—of presenting you with a verbal rosary which later you find yourself unable to tell.

Such, so far, has been my day. The general outline of the rest of it I could draw with closed eyes. In another hour the sun will have begun to lose its drying powers and I shall go over to the asoleadero to watch the men pack the half-dried coffee into bags and pile them up under cover for the night. By that time the pickers will have begun to straggle back through the trees—the women and children talking in tired, quiet voices, the men silent and bent double under their loads of berries. Where we are—with a hill between us and the western sky—dusk will overtake us while the mountains opposite and the distant gulf are still tinted with sunset lights of unimagined delicacy; we shall have to measure the berries and record the amounts picked by the flame of a torch. Then everyone will mysteriously fade away among the trees, and before going back to the house I shall linger alone a moment to look at the black tracery of the bamboo plumes against the yellow afterglow, with a single star trembling through an azure lake above them—perhaps I shall wait for the moon to come out of the gulf and disperse the silver moon mist that already has begun to gather on the horizon. The world will seem to be a very quiet one—not silent with the intense and terrifying silence of desert places, but peacefully, domestically silent. For through the brief twilight will drift detached and softened notes of life—the pat, pat, patting of a tortilla, the disembodied rhythm of a guitar, the baying of a hound.

At dinner Rosalía will have sufficiently recovered to relate to me, as she comes and goes from the kitchen, all she can remember about the dance of the night before—new scandals to gloat over, new elopements to prophesy. What she can’t remember she will gliby invent. The mayordomo will come in to report on the coffee, the house-boy will tell me who has bought corn and lard, and in what amounts. (He can’t write but he has the memory of a phonograph.) If the novel you sent me—it came yesterday—is as good as you say it is, I shall forget for the next few hours that Mexico was ever discovered. I used to wonder in bookstores how anyone could have the effrontery to print another book, but now, since they have entirely taken the place that used to be filled for me by more or less intelligent conversation, I feel like composing a letter of thanks for every new writer I hear of. Before going to bed I shall walk around the piazza to see that none of the men who have been chatting in the moonlight have set the place on fire with their cigarettes. One night I stooped down to pick up my little black dog who sleeps there, exclaiming as I clutched him, “Kitsy, kitsy, kitsy—who’s uncle’s darling!” or some equally dignified remark. But it wasn’t the little black dog at all—it was the head of an Indian who was spending the night there, covered, except for his shock of hair, with empty coffee sacks. To-morrow will be just like to-day.

But perhaps I should not say exactly that, for I recall the reply of the German clerk who was asked if he did not find his occupation monotonous. “Why, no,” he said. “To-day, for instance, I am dating everything June 3d. To-morrow, I shall write June 4th, and the day after, June 5th. You see—in my work there is constant variety.” And so it is here. To-morrow, no doubt, it will be wet and cool instead of dry and hot; the dispulpador may refuse to work (it is almost time for it to get out of order again), and I have a feeling that the bamboo trough, in which the water runs a quarter of a mile from its source to the washing tanks, is about due to collapse somewhere. Then, someone will have a quarrel with his wife and come to tell me that they are going to leave. This is a most inexplicable phase of them. When they have a quarrel their one idea, apparently, is to pack up their few possessions and seek a change of scene. If it were to get rid of each other I could understand it; but they often depart together! After dark a clacuache (I don’t know how to spell him, but that is the way he is pronounced) may sneak upon the chickens and succeed in getting one of them. Not long ago a wild boar—we have them here; small but fierce—trotted out of the jungle and attacked a young girl who was sewing in front of her family residence. She happened to be alone and the little brute would have killed her if some dogs had not come to her rescue. Perhaps it will happen again. A few nights ago while I was reading in the sala, I heard a light clatter of hoofs on the tiles of the piazza. When I turned from the lamp to look out, a deer stood peering in at me through the open door. For a quarter of a minute I almost believed he would end by coming in and putting his head on my lap; I sat so motionless and tried so hard to will him to. But he reared back and the doorway was once more a frame without a picture. The next afternoon some one on the place shot a deer and tried to sell me a piece of it, but, although I hadn’t had meat for days, I couldn’t bring myself to buy any. Then, too, it is about time for somebody—somebody very young or very old—to die. Death here is more than death; it is a social opportunity. I always go to the wakes, both because I know my presence adds interest and éclat to the occasions and because I enjoy them. Everybody (except me) sits on the floor—the women draped in their rebozos as if they were in church—while the deceased, in a corner of the room, with candles at its head and feet, and wild flowers on the wall above it, seems somehow to take a pallid interest in what goes on. I do not sit on the floor because the bereaved family has borrowed a chair from Rosalía in the hope that I would come. But when I take possession of it I, of course, do not let on that I know it belongs to me. For an hour, perhaps, while other guests silently emerge from the jungle and sidle quietly into the room, the conversation is in undertones and fragmentary. The dead is referred to with affection or respect; the most conventional conventions are, in a word, observed. Later, however, refreshments are handed about by the surviving members of the household; the ladies partake of sherry, the gentlemen outside relieve the tension with aguardiente. Gradually the atmosphere of the gathering becomes less formal; talk is more sustained and resumes the flexibility of every day. Trinidad indulges in a prolonged reminiscence which Rosalía caps with a brilliant and slightly indecent anecdote that makes everyone laugh. Outside the men have another drink of aguardiente, and seating themselves on the ground begin to play cards by the light of a torch. Suddenly there is a dog fight. In some way the writhing, shrieking, frantic, hairy bodies roll past the card players and into the room among the women and children. Everyone screams, and from my chair (I am now not sitting, but standing on it) the floor is an indescribable chaos. After this it is impossible to reconstruct a house of sorrow. The deceased is not exactly forgotten, but it no longer usurps the center of the stage. No one can quite resume the mood in which he came, and from then on the wake is in every respect like a dance except for the facts that there is a dead person in the room and that there is no dancing. In the small hours, some thrifty guest opens a cantina and does a good business in aguardiente and sherry, in tortillas, tamales, bread, and coffee. I do not often stay so late.

Now and then I have to go to the village and be godfather for some infant born on the place, and occasionally the festivities that follow a wedding—the dancing and drinking, card playing and fighting—vary the monotony of my long, quiet evenings. Last year a man I know, who has a cattle ranch a day and a half away from here, issued a general invitation to the countryside to come to his place and be married free of charge. He built a temporary chapel and hired a priest and for two days the hymeneal torch flamed as it never had in that part of the world before. So many persons took advantage of the opportunity that the priest, who began by marrying a couple at a time, was obliged toward the last to line them up in little squads of six and eight and ten and let them have it, so to speak, by the wholesale. It was pathetic to see old men and women with their children and their children’s children all waiting in the same group to be married.

Once in a long, long while I have a visitor—a real visitor I mean; some one who stays a week or two, sits opposite me at meals and, to all intents and purposes, talks my own language. You can scarcely—in fact, you cannot at all—imagine just what this means, or the light in which I view it. It is a different light; “a light that never was” in localities where, in the matter of companionship for an evening, there is an embarrassment of choice—where one becomes a kind of selfish, social epicure. You know how you go into your club sometimes at half past six or seven, wondering vaguely with whom you will dine. There are fifteen or twenty more or less civilized young men sitting about drinking cocktails, over whom, as you pretend to be reading the headlines of the evening paper, you cast an appraising eye. Most of them are going to dine at the club and almost any one of them would suggest your joining his group if you gave him the necessary chance. But, unwilling to commit yourself, you let the time slip by and, unless you see somebody in whom you are especially interested, you end by dining with the newspaper. Or if you do bind yourself to any particular party and table and hour, you often find yourself regretting the act even while you commit it. You haven’t, after all, really anything in common with the persons in whose company you are destined to spend the next hour and a half, you reflect, and a thousand such dinners would bring you no nearer to them.

But in a place like this how different it is! It is the difference between looking at things through a telescope and through a microscope. At home we have opportunity and time only to make use of the larger, sketchier instrument; after we pass a certain age we rarely learn to know anyone with the searching intimacy that was the point and joy and sorrow of our earlier friendships. Here, however, not from inclination but from force of circumstances, there is now and then a pale afterglow of the old relations. A visitor here is necessarily an isolated specimen, and as such he is obliged for the time being to regard me. For a week or so we see each other at rather terribly close range and the experience is valuable. For it sends home to roost still another platitude, and it is only by accepting and realizing the truth of platitudes that we grow wise and tolerant and kinder. It used to bore me beyond the power of expression to read or to be told that “everybody has good qualities and an interesting side, if you only know how to get at them,” and I still would enjoy kicking the person who informs me of this fact with the air of one who lives on the heights, yet who is not above showing the way to others groping in the valley. But although I have not yet arrived at the point where I like to acknowledge it, I have learned to believe that it is true. Perhaps it was to this end that I was sent here. Quien sabe?

VIII

WEALTH, education, and travel often combine to render unimportant, persons who, had they stayed at home in a state of comparative poverty and ignorance, would, perhaps, have been worthy of one’s serious consideration. For money, books, and the habit of “going a journey” tend to draw their possessors toward the symmetrical eddy known as “society,” and society cannot for long endure anything essentially unlike itself. One’s lot may be cast in New York, Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Rome, Madrid, or the City of Mexico, but in so far as one is “in society” in any of those places one conforms, outwardly at least, to a system of ethics, etiquette, dress, food, drink, and division of time that obtains, with a few local differences, in all the others. My acquaintance among Mexicans of wealth, education, and extensive experience is not, I confess, numerous, but it is sufficient constantly to remind me of that ever-increasing “smallness of the world” we hear so much about, and to impress upon me how distressingly nice and similar are persons the world over who have money, education, the habit of society, and little else. One Mexican family I happened not long ago to see every day for three months was an excellent example of this pleasant, cosmopolitan blight. They somehow ought to have been as florid and real, as indigenous to the volcanic soil, as were the hundred and fifty others (we were at a small “health resort”) who had gathered under the same roof from all parts of the republic. Papa ought to have joined in the noisy, frantic games in the sala after dinner and with a complete and engaging lack of self-consciousness made a monkey of himself, as did the other men; mamma ought to have come to breakfast in an unbelted dressing sack with her long, black, wet hair hanging down her back against a blue or yellow bath towel attached by safety pins to her shoulders, as did her lady compatriots. The little daughter ought to have worn beruffled dresses of some inexpensive but gaudy fabric (scarlet gingham trimmed with coarse lace, for instance), and on Sunday a pair of rather soiled, high-buttoned shoes of white or pale-blue kid. The son—a youth of twenty-two—ought to have been an infinitely more tropical young man than he was; more emphatic and gesticulative in conversation, more obviously satisfied with himself, and as to his clothes, just a trifle wrong in every important detail.