But what strikes me as significant when I open Madame Calderon’s letters at random and read a page or two almost anywhere is that, while the book has long since been out of print, it is essentially not out of date. For although in sixty-six years many historical things have happened in Mexico—revolutions, sudden and astonishing changes of government, the complete and wonderful disestablishment of the Church, foreign invasions both bloody and peaceful—one may still read Madame Calderon and verify much that she says simply by glancing out of the window. Momentous changes have without doubt taken place: there are now freedom of religious belief and facilities for acquiring an education, where in her time there was only a priest with hell in one hand and a yawning purse in the other; there now are railways and an excellent post and telegraph service, where formerly there were, so to speak, nothing but brigands. The parents of an Englishwoman I know in Mexico, who as a young bride and groom landed at Vera Cruz just sixty years ago, were held up and robbed three times during their journey from the coast to Barranca. They were in a coach with other passengers; and the first bandits they encountered took merely their money. The second deprived them of their watches and jewelry, but the third, enraged at finding them without valuables of any kind, stripped everybody—including the driver—to the skin. Stark naked, the coachload for eight hours pursued its embarrassed way and stark naked it drove into the patio of the Barranca inn. To-day in Mexico one may occasionally be held up on the road, just as one may be held up in Wyoming or Vermont, but brigandage as a lucrative career for young men of courage has been suppressed. Madame Calderon did not seem to think it at all unlikely that the masked bandits who separated ladies from their jewels on the way home from a ball at three in the morning were the dashing army officers with whom the ladies had been dancing and flirting a short time before.
Those days are passed, and yet Mexico always seems to me very much as it was when the observant Scotchwoman wrote her long and vivid letters. There have been “events,” and reforms, and innovations that unquestionably have had their influence on somebody, but the great masses appear to have been quite uninfluenced. Even the large towns—with the exception of the City of Mexico and Guadalajara, both of which seem in many respects to become more cosmopolitan every week—may still be recognized from Madame Calderon’s description of them and their inhabitants. As recently as this year (1908) it was impossible, at the best hotel in Puebla (a capital with a population of at least a hundred thousand), to get breakfast, if one was obliged to leave by the half-past-six A.M. train for Jalapa.
“It is not the custom to serve breakfast so early,” said the mozo, who was arranging my bed for the night, when I ordered soft-boiled eggs and chocolate to be sent up at half past five for my mother and brother and me. He was a handsome boy, shivering in a dark-brown sarape stamped all over with white horseshoes.
“But my God, amigo mio!” I protested, “why isn’t it the custom? Before a long journey even the most spiritual of us must fortify ourselves.”
“The milkman does not come from the country until six,” he then explained, “and the cook never lights the brasero until half past. Without milk and fire, how can one breakfast?”
To a person of resource (I am a person of resource) such a state of affairs is immaterial. For at half past five (with the ghastly before dawn cheerfulness that some of us at last painfully acquire) I was making my toilet with one hand and, on two alcohol lamps, boiling eggs and preparing chocolate with the other—as in Mexico I had done innumerable times before. But for the uninitiated and the resourceless—the American traveler in Mexico is usually both—what a situation!
A railway—an engineering marvel that in its construction again and again achieved the impossible—has bisected the country for almost thirty years; but I know many adult Mexicans of considerable intelligence, in their own circumscribed, tropical way, who have lived all their lives within sixty or seventy miles of the track without ever having seen it. Sixty-six years ago France must have been decidedly more French, and Italy must have been infinitely more Italian, than they are to-day, yet Mexico apparently is but slightly less Mexican.
From Madame Calderon, and from her only, was I able to learn the exact religious import of the nine dances (posadas, they are called), given everywhere in Mexico just before Christmas. I knew they were given, for I had gone to them and enjoyed myself, but just why there were nine of them and just why they should all be held in quick succession immediately before Christmas, was something neither my American nor my Mexican acquaintances—in spite of their polite efforts to recollect a pretty legend, they had forgotten—ever made altogether clear. Madame Calderon, however, was more satisfactory, and I can do no better than quote her: “This is the last night of what are called the Posadas,” she writes, “a curious mixture of religion and amusement, but extremely pretty. The meaning is this: At the time that the decree went forth from Cæsar Augustus that ‘all the world should be taxed,’ the Virgin and Joseph, having come out of Galilee to Judæa to be inscribed for the taxation, found Bethlehem so full of people who had arrived from all parts of the world that they wandered about for nine days without finding admittance to any house or tavern, and on the ninth day took shelter in a manger, where the Savior was born.”
“Posada” means an inn or lodging house, and the “curious” religious preliminaries to the nine dancing parties called “posadas” are all symbolical of the efforts of Joseph and Mary to find a resting place for the night. The posada Madame Calderon describes took place in a private house in the City of Mexico more than half a century ago; the last one I went to was held less than a year ago in the casino of a small town in the tierra templada. But except for some slight historical differences, either one might have been the other. “We went to the Marquesa’s at eight o’clock, and about nine the ceremony commenced,” writes Madame Calderon. And in this sentence lurks, perhaps, the greatest difference. For at the casino of Barranca I found no marquesas. Most of the pure-blooded Spaniards one meets in Mexico are either priests or grocers, and if any of them is a marqués—as is very possible—he has long ago tactfully pretended to forget it.
The casino at Barranca in itself throws some light on Mexican character. For a small town it is an elaborate structure—built about an impressive patio, with two large ballrooms and a supper room upstairs and smaller rooms below for cards and billiard tables. In England or in the United States these ground-floor apartments would be adequately furnished, supplied with periodicals and newspapers, regarded as a man’s club and used as such. But in Mexico, a club, as we understand such an institution, seems, outside of the capital, to make little appeal. The satisfaction that Brown and Robinson extract from reading their evening paper and sipping their whisky-and-soda under a roof whose shelter may not be sought by Smith and Jones, is a satisfaction the Mexican in general has yet to discover. The reading room in the casino of Barranca contains nothing to read, the billiard tables are rarely played upon, and the card room is not often occupied except on the night of a dance, when a few middle-aged men whose wives and daughters are upstairs in the ballroom endeavor to keep themselves awake over a mild game of poker. The truth is that in Mexico the real clubs are the plaza and the most centrally situated café. It is there that one goes to read the paper, to smoke a cigar, to have one’s boots polished, to sit awhile on a bench and talk to friends—to take a drink or have a game of cards or billiards. It is there and not in the cold, dreary rooms of the casino, that the gentlemen of Barranca may usually be found when, for the moment, they haven’t anything in particular to do. The plaza and the café are for every day; the casino is for occasions.