A diplomat's wife in Mexico - Edith O'Shaughnessy

This morning, after Mass at nine o’clock, I started with Seeger, Hay, the Tozzers, and Elim for Texcoco. It was marvelous, speeding through the soft, yet brilliant, air, each turn of the wheel bringing us to historic spots. Texcoco was the “Athens” of Mexico in Aztec days, and the whole length of this now so-dusty road was done in canoes and barques. There is a great column near Chapingo which points the spot Cortés started from in his brigantine, in his last desperate and successful attempt at the conquest of the City of Mexico. It was from the ridge of hills beyond that the conquerors first looked down on the marvels of Tenochtitlan, set among its shining lakes and its myriad gardens.

We found it was market-day at Texcoco, and Indian life was beating its full around the old plaza with its Aztec sun-dial, palms, and eucalyptus. Here the Indians set up their innumerable booths with their potteries, baskets, blankets, fruits, and vegetables. We were most amused watching a crowd gathered about a steaming caldron. In it a pig, his outline still quite intact, was converting himself into soup as fast as fire and water could assist him. Cortés, in one of the famous letters, gives as detailed an account of an Indian market as if he were a modern traveling agent sending back data to the firm. In the near-by old church his venturesome heart lay for long years. Now only unlettered Indians crowd in and out of the place. There is a huge adjacent seminary of the Spanish period, unused since the “Laws of Reform.” The most visible results of the “Laws of Reform” seem to be, as far as I have discovered, huge, dusty waste spaces, where schools had once been. All over Mexico there are such.

Texcoco doesn’t offer many inducements to modern picnickers, so we motored back a short distance and stopped at the hacienda of Chapingo, formerly belonging to Gonsalez, President of Mexico before Diaz’s second administration. He was allowed to leave the country. As Dooley remarks, “There is no such word as ‘ix-Prisidint’ in Mexico. They are known as ‘the late-lamented,’ or ‘the fugitive from justice’; and the only tr’uble the country has with those who remain is to keep the grass cut.”

Beautiful avenues of eucalyptus adorn the entrance to the gaudy clap-clappy house, and the dozens of peon dwellings surrounding it. The administrador allowed us to have our luncheon in the grounds, and we sat around the dry, flower-grown basin of an old fountain. Hay recited; we picked bunches of violets without moving an inch, and watched cheerful lizards darting in and out. Coming home, great spiral pillars of dust reached up, with a regular rotary motion, to the sky over the lake, the results of the drainage works of the lake and valley of Texcoco.

As we passed the Peñon and got into the straight home road, some one remarked, “Nothing doing in the Zapatista line this time.” A moment afterward, however, volleys were heard in the direction of Xochimilco, and puffs of smoke could be seen. Then about forty rurales galloped up. The sergeant, a fresh-complexioned, dull-witted fellow, stopped us and asked if we knew from where the firing came. We apparently knew more than he, little as it was. He continued, in a helpless way: “Those are Mauser shots, pero no hay tren, no hay telefono. Como vamos a hacer?” (“but we have no train, we have no telephone. What are we to do?”) When we asked him the name of the village (pueblo) where it was going on, he shrugged his shoulders and answered, “Quién sabe?” Finally we left the rurales to their own devices and came upon a group of women running for their lives and virtue. They all learn to get out of the way of the soldiers, as they are obliged to hear dreadful groserías, if nothing worse. A pink- or blue-skirted figure being chased in the maguey-fields is no uncommon sight.

We came back to the Embassy and had tea, learning that a huge fire we had seen burning on the side of a not-distant hill, and which we thought might be from a charcoal-burners’ camp, was a village the Zapatistas had pillaged and set on fire at two o’clock, while we were peacefully picnicking in “violet-crowned” Chapingo.

The Tozzers and Clarence Hay leave for Oaxaca and Mitla, to-morrow night, for a week’s trip. I would have loved to go, but “No traveling” is our motto. We must keep out of possible troubles. Later Kanya de Kanya, the new Austro-Hungarian minister, came to call. He has been ten years in the Foreign Office in Vienna, and is glad to be out of the turmoil of Near-East politics. For him Mexico is relatively quiet. There are only about five or six hundred of his nationals in the whole country, as there has been little or nothing here for them since the Maximilian tragedy. Kanya is a Hungarian. He will be a pleasant colleague, and I certainly hope the Magyar will show itself. He is said to be very musical.

In the evening Seeger came back for dinner; also Burnside, who is up from Vera Cruz for a day or so. We had a “political” evening. Going back over things, it does seem as if the United States, in conniving at the elimination of Diaz, three years ago, had begun the deadly work of disintegration here.

But all the time I kept before my mind’s eye the enchanting background of blue hills and lakes shining in the slanting sun, millions of wild ducks flying across the Lake of Chalco, and, above it, the smoldering village, the reverberations of the Mauser rifles below!