A diplomat's wife in Mexico

by Edith O'Shaughnessy

I must tell you about the visit to the prison of San Juan. After lunch, Dr. Ryan, Captain McDougall, Dr. Hart, Mr. Easton, and I got into the Mayflower’s boat and were taken to the landing of that most miserable of places. A strong wind was blowing from the purifying sea, which must help, from October to April, at least, to keep San Juan from being an unmitigated pest-hole. It is a huge place, composed of buildings of different periods, from the Conquerors to Diaz, with intersecting canals between great masses of masonry. To get to the commandant’s quarters we were obliged to skirt the water’s edge, where narrow slits of about three inches’ width, in walls a meter and a half thick, lead into otherwise unlighted and unaired dungeons. Human sounds came faintly from these apertures.

Entering through the portcullis, we found ourselves in the big courtyard where the official life of the prison goes on, overlooked by the apartments of the colonel and the closely guarded cells for big political prisoners. Good-conduct men, with bits of braid on one arm, solicited us to buy the finely carved fruit-stones and cocoa-nuts. To us these represented monkeys, heads, and the like; to the men that make them they represent sanity and occupation for the horrible hours—though God alone knows how they work the fine and intricate patterns in the semi-darkness of even the “best” dungeons.

Afterward we went up on the great parapets, the norte blowing fiercely—I in my black Jeanne Hallé hobble-skirt and a black tulle hat, as later we were to go to tea on the Mayflower. We walked over great, flat roofs of masonry in which were occasional square, barred holes. Peering down in the darkness, thirty feet or so, of any one of these, there would be, at first, no sound, only a horrible, indescribable stench mingling with the salt air. But as we threw boxes of cigarettes into the foul blackness there came vague, human groans and rumbling noises, and we could see, in the blackness, human hands upstretched or the gleam of an eye. If above, in that strong norther, we could scarcely stand the stench that arose, what must it have been in the depths below? About eight hundred men live in those holes.

When we got back to the central court, our hearts sick with the knowledge of misery we could do nothing to alleviate, the prison afternoon meal was being served—coffee, watery bean soup, and a piece of bread. Oh, the pale, malaria-stricken Juans and Ramons and Josés that answered to the roll-call, carrying their tin cups and dishes, as they passed the great caldrons. They filed out, blinking and stumbling, before the armed sentinels, to return in a moment to the filthy darkness! Captain McDougall, a very human sort of person, tasted of the coffee from one of their tin cups. He said it wasn’t bad, and he gave the men a friendly word and packages of cigarettes as they passed.

We bought all the little objects they had to sell, and distributed among them dozens of boxes of cigarettes. But we, with liberty, honors, opulence, and hopes, felt the foolishness of our presence, our blessing of liberty being all that any one of them would ask. The prisoners are there for every crime imaginable, but many of the faces were sorrowful and fever-stamped, rather than brutal. All were apparently forgotten of Heaven and unconsidered of man. We also visited the little, wind-swept cemetery, with its few graves. The eternal hot tides wash in and out of the short, sandy stretch that bounds it. About the only “healing” worked here is what the salt sea does to the poor bodies raked out of those prison holes. There is a stone to mark the place where some of our men were buried when they took the fortress in 1847. Dr. Ryan discovered a foot in a good American boot—evidently the remains of an individual recently eaten by a shark.

That fortress has been the home of generations of horrors, and there is no one in God’s world to break through that oozing masonry and alleviate the suffering it conceals. It was one of the cries of Madero to open up the prison, but he came, and passed, and San Juan Ulua persists. I haven’t described one-tenth of the horrors. I know there must be prisons and there must be abuses in all communities; but this pest-hole at the entrance to the great harbor where our ships lie within a stone’s-throw seems incredible.

Afterward, the contrast of tea, music, and smart, ready-to-dance young officers on the beautiful Mayflower rather inclined me to stillness. I was finding it difficult to let God take care of His world!

March 24th.

I am sitting in the motor, jotting this down in the shade of some trees by the beautiful Alameda, waiting for N. to finish at the Foreign Office. Afterward he goes to “Guerra” and I to shop.

Yesterday afternoon, on our return from Vera Cruz, N. dashed to the telephone and communicated with the Fletchers. They came to tea at four. Later Nelson went out with the admiral, and I drove to San Angel with Mrs. Fletcher and her two pretty daughters. She is most agreeable. Her appreciation of the sunset on the volcanoes, which were in their most splendid array for the occasion, was all my heart could have asked. They return to Vera Cruz to-night.