Today they had for diversion (besides the jazz band, which did bring the sexes together for short intervals) the Indian girl who has won the beauty prize, and 10,000 pesos with it. She was in her pretty Indian dress and certainly looked very attractive, though more Roumanian than Indian. Everyone was making a fuss of her, and she was being photographed by flashlight with Madame Pani, and the highest of the land. This little peasant girl was perfectly smiling and composed, not a bit shy or awkward. Her naked feet reposed on the velvet cushions on the parquet floor, and she seemed to gain a great distinction from her surroundings. Behind her she has generations of noble Indian race. Her dignity and calm had the effect of making the other women appear rather banal. She looked as though a young Cortes should fling his fame and fortune at her feet!
Friday, August 5, 1921. Mexico City.
I went to see Pani in his office at what they call “Relationes.” I wanted to say good-bye to him and ask his help in getting over the frontier. His office building inside looked like a converted Palace. I had to go through a large gilt room that contained beautiful tables with a life sized bust on each, presumably of former Presidents (so they do have their busts done sometimes!)
I asked him if the place were a Palace, and he said that it was not, but merely his office. I suppose the busts, the gilt and the good furniture, etc., are the proofs of Pani’s culture. I like Pani, he is not interesting, but is shrewd, and kind, and has a sense of humor. He smiles always, even on official occasions. Other Ministers smile when his name is mentioned. This because he likes old Masters, and Bourgeoisie, and is not a general, and is an opportunist; at least he might be considered so because he was in the Carranza Ministry, and has now attached himself to the Obregon, which is a rare occurrence in this country. Howbeit, Pani fits his post very well, he is a suave diplomat, and can talk a few languages. I confided to him that I am not going off to Los Angeles on Monday, having just been offered a trip to the Tampico oil fields. He agreed it was well worth doing. De la Huerta offered to facilitate my visit to Villa, but I have not time to do both so I have chosen oil.
Pani was charming to me, said that whatever I wanted of Mexico he would have done for me, and he hoped to see me in New York when “things are settled.”
When I got back to the Hotel, a man walked into the patio, with a bunch of flowers. It was a bunch that could hardly get in at the door, and the flowers were of every color and variety. There were exclamations of admiration from the people sitting around, as from me also, and then I was told it was for me, the sender was Don Adolfo de la Huerta. It was so big and so beautiful, I laid it on a table in the middle of my sitting room, and felt that I was at my own funeral, but at least enjoying it. A Mexican bunch is a wonderful thing, a great work of art. The flowers are wired and tied. Some on long sticks according to the design—It produces a wonderful effect, but they cannot be kept alive unless the whole construction is picked to pieces, and then oftentimes it is discovered the stems are too short to put in water. My flowers were roses, dahlias, choisias, magnolia, tuberose and violets, the two latter rescued and put in water. Then I sat down and wrote to de la Huerta, and told him exactly what I thought of him, straight from my heart.
Saturday, August 6, 1921. Mexico City.
I was lent a car, which called at the Hotel at 6:00 A.M. We did not start till seven, and it was cold, ever so cold, but the road was beautiful. I repeated the expedition to El Desirto and having started early got there before the rains. El Desirto is the ruin of a Carmelite Convent. It is a huge rambling place “in the desert” quite isolated on the mountainside amid the woods. It is very beautiful, but I thought dismal and damp. A Mexican man and boy, armed us with candles, led us down through underground passages and cells that were very extensive and dripping from the vaulted roofs ... Dick loved it, but I was glad to be back in the sunlight. It must be a curious sensation to be a nun or a monk, to live secluded from the world, in peace and calm, and to have no further anxiety (unless it be about one’s soul—) and to be content with the daily round, the menial work. I suppose it requires great belief and no imagination. We came back down the mountain, stopping to pick wild flowers, and at a village we found a house that gave us hot milk, for which we were thankful. Then we pursued our way along a road whence came the endless procession of men, women and boys, carrying their abnormal loads into town for sale. It led us through a valley some miles further in among the hills, and we paused on a hillside in the sun, to eat our combined breakfast and lunch. From our selected spot we viewed about a mile of road, and it made a curious impression upon one (as de la Huerta would have wished). This never ceasing steady stream of human beasts of burden! It suggested the evacuation of a town by refugees, carrying all they could take away.
Dick, gathering bunches of wild penstimon was joined by two little Indian girls. One could not have been more than three years old. She wore a single garment of coarse linen. It reached nearly to her little barefeet, was sleeveless and cut in a big square decolleté. She had the loveliest little face, huge eyes and regular features ... and as she crushed a big bunch of long stemmed penstimon in her arms, as if it might have been a baby, she made a picture that one longed to preserve. But a sadness overwhelmed me at the thought that these little young things on the flowery hillside were surveying their destiny, as it passed along the road below them. They had been born into a world where early in life, they would be bent double, by the burden back and front, of merchandise and baby, and there would seem to be no escape. “Why do they submit?” was the question that kept rising in my heart. Why does man, woman or child submit; and then I imagined myself in their place, and I got the answer: If my father had always done it, and my mother whilst she bore me, and my father’s father and mother, and my mother’s, and my brother already accompanied them, and the neighbors went too, and they talked pantingly as they started off together, or rested at the wayside places, then I who was young enough to be left behind, (and not so young as to be a burden that must be carried with them), I would know that my life would not always be one of watching, or of gathering flowers. When everyone is doing it, and it is in your tradition and in your environment, there is a submission to conditions that no one would dream of breaking.
We went for a walk along a stream, out of view of the saddening road, and our path was a mosaic of flowers, and the shrubs and trees grew in such a way that it might have been a carefully planted and tended English rock garden.