But if on the voyage to Mexico one’s compatriots strike, to fall back on the cant phrase, a diverting “note,” the Cubans, the Spaniards, the Yucatecans, and the Mexicans in general strike whole chords. To set sail for anywhere, even Duluth, has always seemed to me considerably more than merely a practical step toward transporting myself from one place to another. On going aboard a ship I can’t—and would not if I could—rid myself of the sensation that there is something improbable and adventurous about me; that everybody, from the captain to the sixty-year-old cockney stewardess, is about to engage in “deeds of love and high emprise.” The sudden translation from Forty-second Street to the deck of any steamer bound for foreign parts has a thrill in it, but if the destination be the tropics, there is more than one. They are incited by the presence of so many slim, sallow, gesticulating men, and stout, powdered, gayly (and badly) dressed women, by the surprisingly variegated inflections and minor cadences of the Spanish language, by the first penetrating whiff of exotic tobacco smoke from the cigarette of a coffee-colored old lady with a mustache, from the very shape and quality of the luggage as it is hoisted over the side or carried up by the army of negro porters; the most un-Anglo-Saxon luggage conceivable. They travel, the Latin-Americans, with incredible amounts of it, and the sight of it always makes me wonder whether they have ever traveled before or ever expect to travel again. For it consists chiefly of gigantic, smashed-in paper band-boxes, satchels precariously fashioned out of something that tries hard to look like leather and doesn’t in the least succeed, pale blue or pink trunks that for some occult reason are narrower at the bottom than at the top and might be either small, frivolous coffins or large, forbidding cradles, corpulent bales of heaven knows what covered with matting, baskets covered with newspapers, articles of wearing apparel covered with confusion, and fifty other things covered with nothing at all. Once at the Wall Street wharf I saw a young Mexican get out of a Holland House omnibus bearing in his hand a parrot cage stuffed full of shoes. It seemed to me at the time a delirious incident, and I remembered it. But I doubt that, after having lived in Mexico, I should now notice or remember it at all. He was a very charming young person whose mother had been a lady in waiting to the Empress Carlotta, and he was on his way back from Belgium, where he goes once a year to sink on his knee and kiss the aged Carlotta’s hand.
Oh, yes, there is always a thrill in it—this setting sail for the hot countries. It begins on the dock, slightly increases as one steams past the low, monotonous coast of Florida, becomes disturbing in the exquisite little harbor of Havana, and at Progreso, where for thirty-six hours one stares at the shallow, green gulf water, the indolent sharks and the stretch of sand and palm trees wavering in heat, that is Yucatan, it enslaves one like a drug of which one disapproves, but to which one nevertheless succumbs. One afternoon at sunset, before we had even sighted land, a little French boy accurately summed up for us the vague and various sensations that, during the last few hours of the hot afternoon, had stolen over us all. He had been born in Yucatan and was returning there with his father after a first visit to France. Suddenly in his race around the deck with some other children he stopped short, glanced at the group of half-dozing, half-fanning women in steamer chairs, at the listless men against the rail, at the calm, lemon-colored sky and the floating islands of seaweed on the green water. Then, throwing back his head, he closed his eyes, drew a long appreciative breath and, with his eyes still closed, exclaimed luxuriously: “Ah-h-h, on sent les pays chauds!”
II
AT first you are both amazed and annoyed by what seems like not only lack of curiosity but positive ignorance on the part of Americans who live in Mexico. As a new arrival, I had an admirable thirst for information which I endeavored to slake at what I supposed were fountains of knowledge as well as of afternoon tea. The tea was delicious and plentiful; but the knowledge simply did not exist.
“What is the population of Barranca?” you ask of an intelligent compatriot who has lived in Barranca for ten years.
“Why, I don’t know exactly,” he replies, as if the question were an interesting one that had never before occurred to him.
“Oh, I don’t mean exactly—but is it eight thousand, or fourteen, or twenty-five? It’s rather difficult for a stranger to form an idea; the towns are built so differently from ours. Although they may not be really large, they are so compact that they look more populous and ‘citified’ than places of the same size in the United States,” you explain.
“Yes, that’s very true, and it is difficult,” he agrees.
“Do you suppose I could find out anywhere? Do they ever take the census?” you pursue.
“The census? Why, I don’t know about that. But there’s Smith on the bench over there having his shoes shined. He’s been in the country for fifteen years—he’ll be able to tell you. Smith, I want to introduce a friend of mine who is very anxious to know the population of Barranca and whether they ever take the census.”