It seems to me, however, that he who looks forward to a change in the affairs of the world, rather than he who looks on them as changeless, is less likely to be mistaken; and great rulers have always sensed evolutions.
April 4th,
Holy Thursday, evening.
The whole of Mexico seemed afield to-day, with a hint of Sunday best as they made the rounds of various churches for the visits to the Repository—the gente decente, as well as those sin hechos y derechos.[41]
I went through the shining Alameda, where again Indian life was beating its full around the little booths—preparing for the Resurrection morn. There is something simple and affecting about the way they regulate their commerce by these festivals of the year, this peaceful, almost rhythmic flooding in and out of the city. Now the booths are full of toy wagons, with screaming, harsh-sounding wheels, rattles of every description—in fact, any harsh combination of sounds which represents the breaking of the bones of Judas.
The Indian must have gods—and it is better to have him worshiping the image of one God, the God of gods, and His attributes, than sacrificing to Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, and their like, in blood and terror, or wandering in the colorless and empty places of unbelief.
At San Juan de Dios I came upon a family group so charming and so artless that I could scarcely take my eyes from them. The mother, a straight-haired Indian woman, with the usual small, loose upper garment and the straight piece of cloth wrapped about her hips, had the sweetest little baby peeping out from the rebozo which bound it across her back. An old oil-can, filled with what I know not what, was by her side. The father carried a platter of dusty pink sweets, and a tribe of soft, bright-eyed, smiling children accompanied them. The next youngest to the baby was on the father's shoulder, who laid his hat before him with his platter, on the altar steps. His eyes were uplifted. All were silent and immobile, even the baby looking intently at the altar of the Repository, banked with flowers, ablaze with candle-light, and decorated with a few cages wherein were some small, bright-plumaged birds.
The church is part of an old chapel erected in the sixteenth century to Nuestra Señora de los Desamparados (Our Lady of the Forsaken Ones); but somehow that group fulfilling its destiny did not seem forsaken, but a part of the mysterious human fabric of which I myself was just as mysterious a bit. Before the beautiful recessed portal in the rich baroque façade, whose adjacent wall is ornamented in a Mauresque design, a remnant of the earliest colonial period, was a varied assortment of beggars—also not disinherited, it seemed to me—but called to partake of the sorrows of the Madre de Dios whom they so loudly invoked as I passed in.
The feature of the church is the statue of St. Anthony of Padua, which once was among the group of santos in the façade, but had been cast down during the anti-church riots of 1857. For many years it lay covered with mud and dust in a ditch by the Alameda. Now it is a mass of votive offerings—milagros they are called—in the shape of hearts, limbs, etc., whatever organ had been damaged by the casualties of earthly existence. I espied an ingenious presentment of a liver in copper hanging in its proper anatomical place on the person of the santo. The Indians have the strange habit of making their offerings to this shrine in groupings of thirteen—thirteen candles, bouquets containing thirteen flowers etc.—commemorative of the death of San Antonio on the 13th of June (1531).
I can't see how the Indian is benefited by the suppression of religious ceremonies. Gods he must have. And when one comes out into the Alameda, the sun shining on the belfries and domes of the many churches surrounding it, filtering through the lovely foliage of the park about which the Indian tides sweep, fixed as the laws that govern other tides, one feels the bounteousness of the natural world, and a desire to render thanks to something.
The long, narrow, flower-planted atrium of San Diego, from the early part of the sixteenth century, flanks the charming old house where the presses of the Mexican Herald turn out world news on the site of the Aztec market-place, or tinquiz. But though the outer seeming of life is changed, I could but think me of the changelessness of the human heart.