The greatest occasions are the nine posadas, all of which are exactly alike with the exception of the last, when a piñata (the grab-bag of one’s childhood days) is suspended from the ceiling and finally induced to disgorge its treasures by a blindfolded young lady, who succeeds in demolishing it with a cane. On arriving, one is graciously received by an appallingly powdered reception committee, and when all the guests have assembled, partners are chosen, a procession is formed, everyone is given a lighted candle, the incandescent lamps are extinguished and, singing verse after verse that tells of the wanderings of Joseph and Mary, the party marches around and around the upper floor of the patio. When the night is clear and there is a moon, as happened to be the case at the last posada I went to, the performance, as Madame Calderon says, is “exceedingly pretty.” Finally the procession stops in front of a closed door and sings, on the part of the Holy Family, a request for admittance. In an interesting change of key, a chorus of voices behind the door refuses to unlock. Mary and Joseph reply (always in song) that the night is cold and dark—the wind blows hard. Again they ask for shelter, and again they are refused. At this, Mary in a last verse reveals the fact that she is the Queen of Heaven—whereupon the door is instantly opened and the procession enters and disbands; not, however, before everyone has kissed a little image of the Infant Jesus reposing on a bed of leaves and flowers. After this ceremony—which no one seems to take at all seriously—the orchestra strikes up a two-step and the dance begins. Precisely this happens every evening—Sunday is an exception—for nine nights before Christmas, all over Mexico.
“Are there any girls you would like to meet?” inquired a Mexican friend of mine one evening, after Joseph and Mary had been admitted and the first dance was just beginning.
“Why, yes—introduce me to the tall girl in blue,” I answered, indicating an aristocratic young person whose gown had rue de la Paix written all over it and who, in the matter of powder, combined Mexican quantity with Parisian art.
“Oh—she’s the governor’s daughter,” my friend hesitated.
“Well, I care not who makes the daughters of a country, if I can make their acquaintance,” I attempted to say in Spanish. It ended with my dancing several times with her, and I was much interested to note what an isolated and rather somber evening she spent. She was agreeable and beautifully dressed—but she was the governor’s daughter, and the local youths for that reason were afraid of her and admired her at a distance. At an early hour she went home with her brother. He was the only person present in evening dress, and when he returned after escorting his sister home, he wore a frock coat. I have never been able to decide whether he made the change because he felt uncomfortable himself or because he wished to put the rest of us at our ease.
X
ONCE, in the United States I had to wait five hours for a train in a large prohibition town—a town that for many years has been a bright jewel in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s crown of glory. As I was ignorant of this fact at the time, I asked one of the intellectual-looking waitresses at the hotel where I was eating my luncheon to bring me a bottle of beer. From the manner in which she snubbed me, I supposed the fair, pure city not only did not tolerate beer, but did not tolerate even the mention of beer. After luncheon, while I was sitting on the hotel piazza, I noticed that a great many men darted into an alley just opposite, passed through a doorway and never returned. As the hour grew later their numbers increased until the door was held open by an almost continuous stream. At times the room beyond the door apparently became so crowded that the men in the alley would form a long queue and patiently await their turn to enter. Thinking it might be a show of some sort, I made inquiries of a policeman, who, much amused at my innocence, replied: “Didn’t you ever see a man take a drink before?” Hundreds of men went in at the door during the afternoon and emerged, it seemed, from a smug-looking grocery store on another street. And everybody was satisfied: the good ladies of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, who apparently can always be appeased by a bit of legislation; the inhabitants of the town, who drank as deep and as often as they pleased. I was young at the time, and although I have since discovered with much amusement and some gratification that the law which prevents a man from obtaining a drink, when he really wants one, has yet to be devised, the incident made a lasting impression on me. I often recall my afternoon in the State of Maine, the alley, the little door, the stream of men of every station in life.
In Mexico I have recalled it time and again, as I gradually learned something about the theoretical and the actual relations between the state and the Church. For there is, on the one hand, precisely the same stern attitude of the state toward religion (which in Mexico really means Roman Catholicism), and on the other the same official wink. In 1859 the great Benito Juarez proclaimed his highly desirable Reform Laws, and in so doing simply wiped from the slate the various complications that had kept the clerical party and the liberal party, from one end of the country to the other, in a state of bloody war for fifty years. At one time every public institution in Mexico was owned and managed by the Church. Every hospital, every school, every asylum was church property. Even some of the theaters were of religious origin. So great a portion of the country’s wealth was in the hands of the priests that trade of all kinds was seriously hindered. To some extent this state of affairs was alleviated even before the sweeping proclamation of Juarez in 1859, but after it the claws of the Church in Mexico seemed to be effectually extracted for all time. All the remaining monastic orders were disestablished by a stroke of the pen, and church property became national property. The cathedrals and churches are now owned by the state and lent, so to speak, to the Church for religious purposes. You can’t, according to the law, become a monk or a nun in Mexico, even if you wish to; church bells may not ring for more than one minute (I think it is one minute) at a time, and priests may not either wear, on the streets, a distinctively clerical costume or, in a religious capacity, accompany a funeral to the cemetery. (I confess that, although I believe enthusiastically in every measure, however brutal, that effectively restrains the Lord’s ambassadors from meddling in secular affairs, I have never been able to see the point of prohibiting a religious ceremony at a grave.) Once upon a time an English bishop who disembarked at Vera Cruz in the humorous costume to which his position in England entitled him, was, with a considerable flourish of trumpets, promptly arrested and compelled to change his clothes. The laws are there; they are extremely explicit, and now and then, as in the case of the English bishop, they are, for the pacification of the rabidly anticlerical, noisily enforced, but——
The President, in a word, is a person of great good sense, and I have gathered from the ultraclerical, profoundly monarchistic remarks of my friend Father O’Neil, who of course detests him, that in matters ecclesiastical he is inclined to let the letter of the law take care of itself. Father O’Neil doesn’t know that I have derived any such impression from our long and interesting talks together, and I have never told him.
“Why is it the authorities don’t arrest you?” I inquired of him one day when he had been holding forth on the indignities the Church was forever suffering at the hands of the Government. For he does not hesitate to appear on the streets in the whole paraphernalia.