“I hate ’em all,” an American building contractor once exclaimed to me with deep sincerity. “But,” he added, “after my work is over for the day, I like to sit on a bench in the plaza and look at ’em. I sit there a couple of hours every evening. Even when the rascals ain’t doing anything in particular, you always sort of feel as if there was something doing.”
This feeling—for the accurate description of which I was truly grateful—is largely responsible in Mexico for the plaza and balcony habit that one immediately acquires and that becomes one’s chief form of diversion. In a small city of the United States or in England, even a person of unlimited leisure would have to be doddering, or an invalid or a tramp, before he would consent to sit daily for two or three hours on a bench in a public square, or lean over a balcony watching the same people pursue their ordinary vocations in the street below. The monotony of the thing, the procession’s dead level of prosperous mediocrity, would very soon prove intolerable, and he would find some one, anyone, to talk to or endeavor to forget himself in a book or a newspaper.
In Mexico, however, complete idleness is rarely a bore. “Even when the rascals ain’t doing anything in particular, you always sort of feel as if there was something doing.” One afternoon in a small Mexican town I kept tab from my balcony on what, for about eight minutes, took place in the street below. Although the town was small and the day an unusually quiet one, owing to a fiesta in the neighborhood to which many of the inhabitants had gone, there was no dearth of incident against the usual background of big-hatted cargadores waiting for employment in the middle of the street; of burros, each with four large cobblestones in a box on its back; of biblical-looking girls (an endless stream of them) bearing huge water-jars to and from a circular fountain lined with pale-blue tiles; of old men who wail at intervals that they are selling pineapple ice cream; of old women with handfuls of white and yellow and green lottery tickets; of basket sellers and sellers of flowers (the kind of adorable bouquets that haven’t been seen anywhere else since the early seventies; composed of damp moss, tinfoil, toothpicks, a lace petticoat, a wooden handle, and, yes, some flowers arranged in circles according to color); of mozos who you feel sure have been sent on an errand and told to “come right back,” but who have apparently no intention of returning for several hours; of ladies draped in black lace on their way to meditate in church; of hundreds of other leisurely moving figures that were as a bright-colored, shifting chorus to the more striking episodes.
Item one (so runs my page of hasty notes): Three rather fragile-looking young men swinging along with a grand piano on their heads. Under my window they all stop a moment to let one of them ask a passerby to stick a cigarette in his mouth and light it, which is duly done.
Item two: A flock of sheep followed by a shepherd in clean white cotton with a crimson sarape around his shoulders. He looks like Vedder’s Lazarus. The sheep have just piled into the open door of the hotel and are trying to come upstairs. In the excitement a new-born lamb has its leg hurt. The shepherd gathers it in his arms, wraps it in the sarape, thoughtfully kisses it twice on the head and proceeds.
Item three: A funeral. As there are only three streets in this place that aren’t built up and down a mountain side, there are no vehicles, and coffins, like everything else, are carried on men’s backs. This is an unusually expensive coffin, but then of course the silver handles are only hired for the occasion. They’ll be removed at the grave, as otherwise they would be dug up and stolen. I wonder why women so rarely go to funerals here? There is a string of men a block long, but no women. Some of them (probably relatives) have in their hands lighted candles tied with crape. They are nice, fat candles and don’t blow out. Everybody in the street takes his hat off as the cortége passes.
Item four: The daily pack train of mules from the Concepción sugar hacienda. There must be two hundred and fifty of them, and their hoofs clatter on the cobblestones like magnified hail. The street is jammed with them, and where the sidewalk narrows to almost nothing, people are trying to efface themselves against the wall. A wonderful exhibition of movement and color in the blazing sunlight: the warm seal-brown of the mules, the paler yellow-brown of the burlap in which are wrapped the conical sugar loaves (eight to a mule), with the arrieros in yellow straw hats, brilliant blue shirts and scarlet waist bandas bringing up the rear.
Item five: A dog fight.
Item six: Another and much worse dog fight.
Item seven: An Indian woman with apparently a whole poultry farm half concealed upon her person. She calls up to ask if I would like to buy a chicken. Why on earth should a young man on a balcony of a hotel bedroom like to buy a chicken?