No doubt one could become hardened to sitting all morning at one end of a parlor, gravely listening to the waltzes and two-steps of an orchestra at the other, and after every selection even more gravely adjourning with one’s host and the musicians to the dining room for a glass of cognac. But there is about the first morning spent in this fashion a ghastly charm. As the ladies did not take cognac, upon them devolved the less invigorating task of preserving unbroken during our frequent absences the thread of conversation, and I groveled before them in admiration every time I returned and found that the children and the weather as topics had not even begun to be exhausted. There was all the more to say about the weather by reason of the fact that there had been recently so little of it—rain had refused to fall for weeks and the coffee trees, laden with buds, were unable to flower. With the crop in imminent peril—with hundreds of thousands of dollars ready to dry up and blow away all around us—we could still experience a kind of social gratitude for the calamity, and toward noon I began to feel that among the many kindly acts of our host, his having had in all, six children instead of only one or two was perhaps the kindliest. Race suicide on his part would have been not only race suicide but conversational murder. The eldest boy was at a Southern school in the United States, and (this, however, did not emerge during our visit; Don Juan perhaps did not know of it) he had on arriving, before the school opened, much to his amazement, been refused admittance, on account of his fine, dark skin (grandmamma was an Indian), to one hotel after another. The explanation of the person in charge of him to the effect that he was no more of African extraction than were the elegant young hotel clerks themselves, was unproductive of results.
“I don’t care what he is—he isn’t white,” was their unanimous verdict, and he found refuge at last in an obscure boarding house. But apparently he had lived down prejudice even in the South, for while Don Juan was proud of the progress he had made in his studies, he was positively vain of his success with the ladies, although still somewhat at a loss to account for the state of affairs that rendered such admitted conquests possible. As modestly as he could he conveyed to us that the girls were “crazy” about Juanito, hastening to declare, as a parent should, that for his part he did not see precisely why.
“No doubt it is because Juanito is a novelty to them,” he sought to explain. “You know how women are; always attracted by something new. On Sunday afternoons they take long walks with him—but all alone, all alone. No mother, father, brother—no one. And afterwards they invite him in to supper. But nothing wrong—nothing wrong” (Juanito was not quite fifteen), he added, closing his eyes and solemnly waving his finger in front of his face.
The dinner (it was announced at last) was a revelation in the possibilities of Mexican cooking, and although the multitude of dishes were not new to me their savor was. Grandmamma cooked from recipes (“muy, muy antiguas,” they were) whose origins had been obscured by subsequent history, and almost a century had in no way impaired her sense of taste or her lightness of touch. Even her tortillas were delicious, and a tortilla is a melancholy form of nourishment. The mole (a turkey soaked in a rich, mahogany-colored sauce, composed of from twenty to half a hundred different ingredients) was of course the dinner’s climax—it always is—and afterwards, as the old lady did not come to the table, we all went to the kitchen to congratulate her and shake her hand while the maids who had been helping her looked on in ecstasy.
“She doesn’t come to the table because she has only one tooth,” her son explained as he gently caused her to display it, much as one exhibits the dental deficiencies of an old and well-beloved horse, “and on top there is no hair—none at all. You see—it’s all bare, just like parchment. She’s a wonderful woman,” he declared, as he slid his finger back and forth on her skull.
Then we were shown the house; even—before we realized what was about to happen—the new bathroom, to whose undoubted conveniences Don Juan artlessly called out attention, and after examining separately every plant in the patio, we returned to the sala, where the darling weather proceeded almost immediately to save not only the situation but the coffee crop. A series of cloud-bursts kept us all at the open windows fascinated, as for some reason one always is by the hissing of rain and the violent activities of tin waterspouts, until their sudden cessation enabled us to stroll out, accompanied by Don Juan and the children, to visit the town’s famous gardens for growing violets, azaleas, camelias, roses, and gardenias for the market. There did not seem to be many of them, but it was only later, when Don Pedro and his wife came to the train with their arms full, that we knew why.
In two hours the coffee had flowered, and as the train lurched back to Barranca in the green, uncanny, storm-washed light, through acres and acres and acres of white coffee blossoms, it was difficult not to believe that there had been in the tropics a fall of snow.
IX
IT is significant that the most entertaining as well as the most essentially true book on Mexico that I have been able to find was written during the years 1840 and 1841, by Madame Calderon de la Barca. Although from this name one does not, perhaps, at once jump to the conclusion that the writer was Scotch, the fact that she was becomes somewhat more credible on discovering her to have been born “Ingalls.” She was, in a word, the wife of the first minister Spain condescended to send to Mexico after that dissatisfied country had, in the time-honored phrase, “thrown off the yoke,” and she must have been a most intelligent and charming young person.
Of course, I have spent far too much time in and about Boston not to have observed that delightful books are often written by odious women, and what persuades me that my belief in Madame Calderon’s charm is not misplaced is the fact that she never knew she was writing a book at all. “It consists of letters written to the members of her family, and really not intended originally—however incredible the assertion—for publication,” says Prescott the historian, in his short preface to the volume. It was Prescott who urged her to print them, but even he could not induce her actually to reveal her name. I say “actually,” as she resorted on the title page to the quaint form of anonymity that consisted of signing herself “Madame C—de la B—,” a proceeding always suggestive of the manner in which the two-hundred-pound soprano of Mozart opera holds a minute, black velvet mask a foot and a half away from her face and instantly becomes invisible to the naked eye.