Good Friday Evening.
A sickening heat was in the air all day, with a something withering and nerve-disturbing about it, though, as the thermometer goes, the temperature was not high.
I went early to the little near-by church of Corpus Christi. The singing of "Dulce lignum" made me think of the great ceremonies at St. John Lateran, and much that is no more. I returned at 2.30, when a strange-faced priest with an "inner" look and a something burning in his voice, a Spaniard by his accent, was finishing the "Three Hours." Afterward, in company with Indians and black-rebozoed women, I followed the Stations of the Cross....
Holy Saturday.
Mexico City is one vast "rattle," the most dreadful sounds everywhere to commemorate the holy, still day, and as for Judas, he is a legion in himself.
The Calle de Tacuba presented a strange sight. Stretched on wires or strings from one house to the other were bright-colored, hideous figures, representing the maldito[42] dangling in grotesque attitudes against the blue sky. On various street corners he is being burned in effigy. Firecrackers are exploding as I write, bells are ringing from every belfry. Grief is noisy in the tropics, even for the laying in the tomb of the Son of Man.
When I came out of the cathedral I stopped at the flower-market near by. It is a modern, ugly, round, iron-roofed affair, but the flowers, the bright birds in their bamboo cages, and, above all, the dazzling air, fling a charm about it. Every modern, ugly thing in Mexico seems easily transmuted. In the old days the Indians brought their flowers straight to the Plaza in canoes by the Viga Canal.
An Indian, with what I can only call a "canvas" of white flowers, on moss and wire, about two feet square, was putting in an outline of red and purple stocks. When I asked him what he was going to represent he answered, quite simply, with a look at the church, "La catedral." A very young Indian carrying a tiny white coffin on his head passed us, as I spoke to him, and he stopped his work and made the sign of the cross.
In the arcades several "Evangelistas," scribes, were surrounded by the unlettered and unwashed—and I found some tattered children, so easily made happy, looking at stands stocked with pink, syrupy drinks and cornucopias filled with ices. But mostly the attention of the crowd was concentrated on a huge magenta and blue Judas who was going up in a blaze of infamy on the corner.
A domestic tragedy awaited me when I returned home. One of the servants, while praying before the image of Nuestra Señora del Sagrario in the Church of Corpus Christi, had her pocket-book removed. In it were some coral ear-rings, a lottery ticket, and the remains of her month's wages, just received.