“But why do you arrest me? Why don’t you arrest everybody else? I’m not the only one,” I protested to the policeman with a lightness I was beginning not to feel.
“You are a foreigner and a gentleman and you ought to set an example to the ignorant lower classes,” he replied without a smile. It was some time before I could induce him to let me go.
The frequency of the policemen is equaled (or exceeded, one sometimes feels) only by the frequency of the churches. And, as if there were not already thousands more than the souls of any people could possibly need, new ones are always being built. I was told not long ago of a wealthy man who, on recently acquiring a vast area of land which he contemplated turning into a sugar hacienda, began the construction of his “plant” with a thirty-thousand-dollar church. Their number and the manner in which they monopolize all the most conspicuous sites, as well as render conspicuous most of the others, now and then enables even a Roman Catholic to regard the Laws of Reform with a slightly less bilious eye. The countryside is dotted with them—the towns and cities crowded by them. It seems at times as if the streets were but so many convenient lanes through which to approach them—the shops and houses merely so many modest dependencies. Pictorially considered, they imbue the dreariest, most impersonal of landscapes, especially just after sunset, with a mild and lovely atmosphere of human pathos that one might journey far without seeing again. But even in Mexico the pictorial sense is subject to periods of suspended animation during which one’s attitude toward the churches, or perhaps I should say the Church, is curiously ill-defined. It is discomposing, on the one hand, to learn of a powerful bishop whose “wife” and large family of sons and daughters are complacently taken for granted by his entire diocese—to be warned by a devout Catholic never under any circumstances to allow one’s American maid servants to converse with a priest or to enter his house on any pretext whatever—to appreciate the extreme poverty of the people and to realize that the entire gigantic corporation is kept running chiefly by the hard-earned mites with which they hope to save their souls. In the church of San Miguel (not a particularly large church) at Orizaba, I once had the curiosity to count the various devices by which the faithful are hypnotized into leaving their money behind them, and as I made notes of the little alms boxes in front of all the chapels, at the doors, and scattered along the nave, many of them with a placard explaining the use to which the funds were supposed to be put, I could not but admire the unerring instinct with which the emotions of the race had been gauged. The system, assisted as it is by a fantastically dressed lay figure at every placarded box, has for the population of Orizaba (an excessively religious town) much the same fascination that is exercised upon me by a penny arcade. There were boxes for “The Monthly Mass of Jesus,” “For the Marble Cross,” “For the Sick,” “For the Sick of S. Vincent and S. Paul,” “For Mary Conceived without Sin,” “For Our Father Jesus Carrying the Cross,” “For Saint Michael,” “For the Blessed Souls,” “For the Blessed Virgin,” “For Our Lady of Carmen,” and then, as if the ground had not been tolerably well covered, there were two boxes, “For the Work of this Parish.” But these were literally less than half the total number. In addition to the twelve whose uses were revealed, there were eighteen others whose uses were not, or thirty in all.
On the other hand, I cannot linger in Mexican churches day after day, as I have done, watching the Indians glide in, remove the leather bands from their foreheads, let their chitas slip gently to the pavement, and then, with straight backs and crossed hands, kneel in reverent ecstasy before their favorite images, without rejoicing that a profound human want can be so filled to overflowing. And I cannot but doubt that it could by any other way we know be filled at all. Three men in Indian white, who are returning from market to their homes in some distant village, stop to kneel for fully half an hour without moving before the chapel of St. Michael. St. Michael happens to be an almost life-sized female doll with pink silk socks, the stiff skirts of a ballet-dancer (actually), a pink satin bolero jacket, an imitation diamond necklace, a blond wig with long curls, and a tin helmet. The two women who accompany them pray before the figure of Mary Conceived without Sin—whose costume I prefer not to invite the accusation of sacrilege by recording. The men are straight-backed, motionless, enthralled. One of the women suddenly extends her arms with an all-embracing gesture, and rigidly holds them there—her hands palm upward, as if she expected to receive the stigmata. What are they all thinking about? But what earthly difference does it make—if there be a difference so heavenly? No doubt they are thinking of nothing; thought is not essential to bliss. Then they get up, and after dropping money in the little slot machines of Michael, and Mary Conceived without Sin, they proceed on their way, leaving me glad that for fully half an hour some one in the world has been happy. For beyond the possibility of a doubt they have been happy, and have deepened my conviction that the desire to undermine their faith in Michael and in Mary Conceived without Sin is at best misguided, and at worst, wicked. “Idolatry and superstition!” one hears groaned from end to end of Mexico. But why not? They appear to be very comforting, exalting things. It happens that personally I could derive no spiritual refreshment from remaining on my knees for half an hour in front of these dreadful dolls. But there is a statue or two in the Louvre, and several pictures in Florence, to whom—had I been brought up to believe them capable of performing miracles—I should find it most agreeable and beneficial to say my prayers.
So one’s attitude toward the Church in Mexico becomes at the last curiously ill-defined. The Church is corrupt, grasping, resentful; but it unquestionably gives millions of people something without which they would be far more unhappy than they are—something that no other church could give them.
There are city parks and squares in other countries, but in none do they play the same intimate and important part in the national domestic life that they do in Mexico. To one accustomed to associate the “breathing spaces” with red-nosed tramps and collarless, unemployed men dejectedly reading wilted newspapers on shabby benches, it would be impossible to give an idea of what the plaza means to the people of Mexico—of how it is used by them. It strikes me always as a kind of open-air drawing-room, not only, as are our own public squares, free to all, but, unlike them, frequented by all. It is not easy to imagine one’s acquaintances in the United States putting on their best clothes for the purpose of strolling around and around the public square of even one of the smaller cities, to the efforts of a brass band, however good; but in Mexico one’s acquaintances take an indescribable amount of innocent pleasure in doing just this on three evenings a week and on Sunday afternoons as well. And with a simplicity—a democracy—that is a strange contradiction in a people who have inherited so much punctilio—such pride of position, they do it together with all the servants and laborers in town. In the smaller places the men at these concerts promenade in one direction, while the women, and the women accompanied by men, revolve in the other; a convenient arrangement that permits the men to apperceive the charms of the women, and the women to apperceive the charms of the men without effort or boldness on the part of either. And everyone is socially so at ease! There is among the rich and well dressed not the slightest trace of that “certain condescension” observable, I feel sure, when the duke and the duchess graciously pair off with the housekeeper and the butler, and among the lower classes—the maid and men servants, the stone-masons and carpenters, the cargadores, the clerks, the small shopkeepers—there is neither the aggressive sense of an equality that does not exist nor a suggestion of servility. The sons of, say, the governor of the state, and their companions, will stroll away the evening between two groups of sandaled Indians with blankets on their shoulders—his daughters in the midst of a phalanx of laundresses and cooks; the proximity being carried off with an engaging naturalness, an apparent unawareness of difference on the part of everyone that is the perfection of good manners. When such contacts happen with us it is invariably an experiment, never a matter of course. Our upper classes self-consciously regard themselves as doing something rather quaint—experiencing a new sensation, while the lower classes eye them with mixed emotions I have never been able satisfactorily to analyze.
But the serenatas are the least of it. The plaza is in constant use from morning until late at night. Ladies stop there on their way home from church, “dar una vuelta” (to take a turn), as they call it, and to see and be seen; gentlemen frequently interrupt the labors of the day by going there to meditate over a cigar; schoolboys find in it a shady, secluded bench and use it as a study; nurse maids use it as a nursery; children use its broad, outside walks as a playground; tired workmen use it as a place of rest. By eleven o’clock at night the whole town will, at various hours, have passed through it, strolled in it, played, sat, rested, talked, or thought in it. It is the place to go when in doubt as to what to do with oneself—the place to investigate, when in doubt as to where to find some one. The plaza is a kind of social clearing house—a resource—a solution. I know of nothing quite like it, and nothing as fertile in the possibilities of innocent diversion. Except during a downpour of rain, the plaza never disappoints.
I have grown rather tired of reading in magazines that “the City of Mexico resembles a bit of Paris”; but I have grown much more tired of the people who have also read it and repeat it as if they had evolved the comparison unaided—particularly as the City of Mexico doesn’t in the least resemble a bit of Paris. It resembles absolutely nothing in the world except itself. To criticise it as having most of the objectionable features and few of the attractions of a great city would be unfair; but first telling myself that I am unfair, I always think of it in those terms. In truth it is a great and wonderful city, and it grows more wonderful every day; also, I am inclined to believe, more disagreeable. Unfortunately I did not see it until after I had spent six months in Mexico—in Vera Cruz, in Jalapa, in Orizaba, in Puebla, in the depths of the country—and when it finally burst upon me in all its shallow brilliancy, I felt that I was no longer in Mexico, but without the compensation of seeming to be somewhere else. I certainly did not seem to be in Paris. The fact of going to a place for no reason other than to see what it is like, always stands between me and a proper appreciation of it. It does, I think, with everyone, although it is not generally realized and admitted. A certain amount of preoccupation while visiting a city is essential to receiving just impressions of it. The formation of judgments should be gradual and unconscious—should resemble the processes of digestion. I have been in the capital of the republic half a dozen times, but I have never, so to speak, digested it; I have merely looked without losing consciousness of the fact that I was looking, which is conducive to seeing too much on the one hand, and on the other, too little.
After the jungle and the smaller places, the city impressed me, on arriving at night, as wonderfully brilliant. There were asphalted streets, vistas of illuminated shop windows, enormous electric cars, the inviting glow of theater entrances, a frantic darting of cabs and automobiles, and swarms of people in a strangely un-Mexican hurry. The noises and the lights were the noises and the lights of a metropolis. Even daylight did not, for the first morning and afternoon, have any appreciable effect upon the general sense of size and effulgence. But somewhere within forty-eight hours the place, to a mere observer, began to contract—its glitter became increasingly difficult to discern. It was not a disappointment exactly, but neither was it “just like a bit of Paris.” It remained extremely interesting—geographically, historically, architecturally—but it was oddly lacking in the one quality everybody is led to believe it has in a superlative degree. Without doubt I shall be thought trifling to mention it at all. In fact I don’t believe I can mention it, as I don’t precisely know what it is, and the only way in which I can hope to make myself even partly clear will sound not only trifling but foolish. I mean—the City of Mexico lacks the indefinable quality that makes one either desirous of putting on one’s best clothes, or regretful that one has not better clothes to put on. To dear reader this may mean something or it may not. For me it instantly recreates an atmosphere, recalls certain streets at certain hours in New York, in Paris, in London—in a few of the less down-at-the-heel, Congoesque localities of Washington. One may or may not possess the garments in question. One might not take the trouble to put them on if one did. But the feeling, I am sure, is known to everyone; the feeling that in some places there is a pleasantly exacting standard in the amenities of appearance which one must either approximate, or remain an outsider. In the City of Mexico one is nowhere subject to such aspirations or misgivings, in spite of the “palatial residences,” the superb horses, the weekly display of beauty and fashion. For the place has upon one—it has at least upon me—the effect of something new and indeterminate and mongrel, which for a city founded in 1522 is a decidedly curious effect to exert.
It arises without doubt from the prosperity and growth of the place—the manner in which it is tearing down and building up and reaching out—gradually transforming whole streets of old Spanish and Mexican houses into buildings that are modern and heterogeneous. In its center, some five or six adjacent streets appear to have been almost wholly so converted, the final proof of it being that in front of the occasional elaborately carved old doorway or armorial-bearing façade and castellated top, one instinctively pauses as in the presence of a curiosity. Imbedded as they are in unusually unattractive quarters of purely native origin, these half a dozen business streets suggest a small city in the heart of a large town. They might, one feels, be somewhere in Europe, although the multitude of American signs, of American products, and American residents, by which one is on all sides confronted, makes it impossible to decide where. There is a surprising transformation, too, on the left of the Paseo, along the line of the electric cars on the way to the castle of Chapultepec. (A lady in the throes of displaying an interest in Mexico exclaimed to me the other day: “There have been so many earthquakes in Mexico of late that I suppose Chapultepec is very active!”) The bare, flat territory is growing an enormous crop of detached dwellings that seek to superimpose Mexican characteristics upon an American suburban-villa foundation, with results not always felicitous. Outwardly, at least, much of the city is being de-Mexicanized, and whereas the traveler, to whom it has been a gate of entrance, has eyes and adjectives only for its age, its singularity, its picturesqueness (all of which are indisputably there), the traveler who sees it last—for whom it is an exit—is more inclined merely to be discomposed by its uncompleted modernity.