“I wouldn’t trust one of them with a cent,” declares some one else, who has in his office three Mexican clerks to whom he implicitly intrusts the handling of thousands of dollars.
“I look upon them just as I look upon niggers,” says a Southerner—who not only doesn’t, but who is gratified by the pleasant position he has achieved for himself in local, native society. And as such comments are made with neither malicious intent nor with the “feeling” that would accompany them were they final deductions from a long series of painful experiences, one marvels at the phonographic monotony with which they are endlessly reproduced. Almost always purely verbal, there is behind them neither thought nor emotion, and they are irritating in much the same way that checks are irritating when carelessly made out and signed by persons who have nothing in the bank. They are, I fancy, connected with a sense of patriotism that has grown habitual and perfunctory, and I mention them merely by way of illustrating half of my assertion to the effect that one absorbs something of Mexico both unconsciously and with deliberateness. A young Englishman of my acquaintance may well supply the other half.
It is not generally realized that the male inhabitants of Great Britain do not make a practice of wearing drawers, although such is the strange, dissembled fact. Now, while the possession of underclothes is not necessarily indicative of birth and wealth, I have always assumed, although perhaps with a certain apathy, that the possession of wealth and birth presupposed underclothes. This, in England at least, does not seem to be the case, for my young friend, whose name is ancient and whose purse is well filled, announced to me in Mexico not long ago, with the naïveté that so often astonishes one in thoroughly sophisticated persons of his race: “I’ve knocked about a good bit and I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s usually something to be said for the peculiar habits of different peoples even if you don’t know exactly what it is. Since I’ve been in this country I’ve noticed that everybody seems to wear drawers—even the peons. There must be some reason for it—connected with the climate very likely—and I’ve taken to wearing them myself. I don’t particularly care for the things,” he hastened apologetically to add, “and I dare say they’re all rot, but I’m going to give them a try. Why don’t you!”
It is natural and agreeable in Mexico to have one’s house in what we call “the retail district,” for one soon learns to appreciate the Mexican’s combined love of seclusion and publicity. A dwelling sandwiched in between the town’s most popular drug and grocery shops is ideally situated. The nature of its construction—the Moors imposed it upon Spain and Spain passed it on—insures a fortresslike privacy, while the site insures the constant movement and color, the manifold, trivial, human and animal interests without which the life of a Mexican household would be somewhat empty. Those odd moments consumed by us with magazines and the book of the week, Mexicans devote to looking out of their sala windows, with a rarely misplaced confidence in their street’s potentialities. It never strikes me as strange that I can pass so many hours in peering at sights so foreign to my race, if not any longer to my experience, but it is one of the pleasantly surprising traits of the inhabitants that their interest is just as fresh and perhaps more insatiable. To me the love affair across the way—carried on as it is with much holding of hands in the excessive broadness of Mexican daylight, by a young woman of thirty-eight behind a barred window, and a young man of forty-two on the narrow sidewalk outside—to me, this public display of an emotion, ordinarily regarded as rather private, is most exciting; but even so, I am inclined to believe that after commenting on such a courtship every afternoon and evening for three and a half years it would begin to pall. On Mexicans it never seems to. They do not precisely stare at the spectacle, as a careful unawareness under the circumstances is considered the proper line to take. But their blind spots are not situated in the tails of their eyes. However, it does not necessitate such absorbing matters as affairs of the heart to retain their attention. They never weary at certain hours of the day of peering through the bars or leaning over the balconies in contemplation of just the street’s multifarious but always leisurely movement. It is not often a noisy movement. The collective Mexican voice—the voice of a group or even a crowd is musical, and the click of donkey’s hoofs on cobblestones is a dainty, a positively prim form of commotion.
But should they wish to escape from even these sometimes distinctly soothing sounds, there is always the patio and the tranquil rooms around it. They are of all sizes, of all degrees of misery and splendor and of most shapes, these universal patios, but in the meanest of them there is an expressed yearning for color and adornment that, even when ill cared for and squalid, has been at least expressed. It takes the form, most fortunately, of flowers, with often a fountain in a circular basin of blue and white tiles. A Mexican patio, in fact, is considerably more than a courtyard. It is a flower garden surrounded by a house.
In Northern climates the most delightful hour of the day has always been that in which one comes in from the frosty dusk, lights the lamps, smashes a smoldering lump of coal into a bright, sudden blaze, draws the curtain and, in an atmosphere thick with warmth and quiet, sits down to read or write or rest. In tropical countries one often longs in vain for this hour. Its impossibility is, I think, a chief cause of homesickness, and it is long before one accepts with anything like the same sense—a sense of physical and mental well-being immune from gazes and intrusions—the Southern equivalent. The Southern equivalent is the hour in which the sun shines brightest and fiercest, when instead of seeking warmth one eludes it, half undressed, in dim, bare rooms, under awnings and behind light, thin screens.
Even when a street for the time being comparatively lacks moving figures there is for the foreigner a constant amusement in reading the signs over the doors of shops and more especially those that decorate the outer walls of pulque joints and cantinas. Their mere perusal, indeed, may throw a truer, more valuable light upon certain phases of the native humors and habits of thought than do many works less spontaneous and more profound. “Jack O’Grady, Sample Room,” or, “Otto Baumholzer, Saloon,” may or may not make an appeal. But even when it does it is not an appeal to the intellect and the imagination. In Mexico the proprietor of a saloon likes to advertise his wares, not so much with his name as with a sentiment, an allusion—a word or a phrase that poetically connotes. There are of course a great many serviceable designations of no particular relevance like the patriotic “Cinco de Mayo,” the inevitable “Estrella de Oro,” and the frequently met with and rather meaningless “Cometa de 1843.” They show respectively only a taste for the national, the brilliant, the surprising. The gift of fancy is not, after all, to everyone. Even when a foul little corner drunkery, calcimined sky-blue—with a life-sized lady reposing in a green bower, painted on its finger-marked exterior—is entitled “El Nido de Amor,” or when a pink hole in the wall that can be seen for a block and smelled for two, is named “Las Flores de Abril”—even then one does not appreciate quite to the full some of the quaint possibilities of just the ordinary Mexican mind. But a saloon called “El Destino,” another frankly advertising itself as “La Isla de Sacrificios,” still another with painted above its door “El Infiernito” (the little hell), a fourth that calls itself “Al Delirio”—there is in such names food, as one strolls about any Mexican community, for meditation. Less grim, but as suggestive and as apt, is “La Seductora.” “La Media Noche” and “Las Aves de la Noche” (the night birds) always strike a sympathetic chord, while “El Renacimiento,” “El Valor,” and “El Mensajero de los Dioses” (the messenger of the gods) gracefully hoist the whole matter into the realm of the ideal. The subtlest of them, and the one that never fails to make me laugh as I pass it, is “La Idea!” I regret now that the opportunity of entering and making the proprietor’s acquaintance has gone. A man who would name his saloon “La Idea!” ought to be worth knowing. The thing can be apperceived in so many ways and spoken in so many different tones of voice, starting, as at once suggests itself, with the intonation generally imparted to, “Why, the idea!”
One source of dissatisfaction to travelers for whom foreign travel has always meant Europe, is that there are so few “sights” in Mexican towns. By “sights” I mean the galleries of sculpture and painting, the palaces and the castles, the frescoes, the architectural fragments, the tombs, the relics, and the interminable museums crammed with a dead world’s junk, over which the conscientious may exhaust their necks and backs. European cities even as comparatively small as Stockholm and Copenhagen possess museums where, guidebook in hand, people remain for whole days examining ugly, labeled little implements fashioned in the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, and every city has among other treasures a few miles of minute, Dutch masters before which to trudge, too weary to appreciate their marvelous skill or to realize their beauty. But in Mexican towns there are none of these things, and the traveler whose days have not been mapped out for him and who is not in the habit of strolling, of sitting in churches, of shamelessly idling in parks and plazas, is likely to complain of a lack of occupation. It is difficult for him to accept the fact that the most notable sight in Mexico is simply Mexico.
It is difficult, too, for him to reconcile the general outward conditions of the towns and cities with his preconceived ideas of them, which is always annoying. Instead of giving an impression of dirt and neglect, of the repulsive indifference to appearances, and general “shiftlessness” we are so accustomed to in the small communities of States like, for instance, Arkansas and Indiana, their best quarters always, and their more modest districts very often, are perpetually swept and sprinkled, dazzling with new calcimine and, for thoroughfares so aged, incredibly neat and gay. About drainage and water works—the invisible and important—there is still much to deplore, much to hope for, although improvement is everywhere on the way. But municipal “appearances” are rigidly maintained; maintained in some instances at the cost, unfortunately, of qualities that share the secret of the country’s charm. There is at the present time, for example, a rage—a madness rather—for renovating, for “doing over” the exteriors of churches, and in the last four years some of the most impressive examples of Spanish colonial church architecture have been scraped, punctured with pointed windows, supplied with gargoyles and porticoes and then whitewashed. To remember the cathedral at Jalapa as it was, and to see it now, a jaunty horror half clad in cheap, Gothic clothes that don’t fit, brings a lump to one’s throat.
The order and security that everywhere appear to reign both by day and by night are also bewildering in a country popularly supposed to be the modern fountain-head of lawlessness and melodrama. Besides the small but businesslike policemen with large, visible revolvers who seem to be on every corner and who materialize in swarms at the slightest infringement of the code, the highways are patrolled by that picturesque body of men known as rurales, of whom there are between four and five thousand. After the fall of Santa Anna, the organized troop of ranchmen (known as “cuerados” from the leather clothes they wore) became bandits and gained for themselves the name of “plateados,” it being their dashing custom heavily to ornament their garments with silver. In the time of Comonfort they were turned from their evil ways (no doubt on the theory of its taking a thief to catch a thief) and transformed into rurales. Under President Diaz they have attained a high degree of efficiency, and while their practically limitless powers in isolated and inaccessible parts of the country are no doubt sometimes abused, their reputation for fearlessness, supplemented by a revolver, a carbine, and a saber, has a most chastening influence. One realizes something of the number of policemen at night, when they deposit their lighted lanterns in the middle of the streets and there is until dawn a ceaseless concert of their wailing whistles. You may become as drunk as you wish to in a cantina and, even with the doors open, talk as loud and as long as you are able, for cantinas were made to get drunk and talk loud in. But you must walk quite steadily when you come out—unless your wife or daughter is laughingly leading you home—or you will be arrested before you reel ten yards. Even chaperoned by your wife and unmistakably homeward bound, you will be escorted kindly, almost gently (when you show no resistance), to the police station if the city happens to need your services. The combination of quick temper and quicker drink is responsible for much violence in Mexico, but one rarely sees it. One rarely sees any form of disorder, and over vice is draped a cloak of complete invisibility. In most places women of the town are not even permitted to appear on the streets except at certain hours and in a capacity sincerely unprofessional. The facility and dispatch with which one is arrested is conducive to a constant appearance of decorum. Only in a paternal despotism is such law and order possible. One evening I myself was arrested for an exceedingly slight and innocent misdemeanor.