I am scribbling this in the lovely old patio of San Joaquin, out beyond the hacienda of Morales, sitting on a comfortably slanted grave—slab, on which I can just distinguish a bishop's miter and a faint tracing of the date—17 something and requiescat in pace. Delicate mosses, bits of cactus, and a tiny, vine-like, yellow flower make it a thing of beauty.
Madame Lefaivre and Elsie S. are sketching; all is peaceful, sun-flooded, with much singing of birds, and the trees are dropping solid bits of gold through their dark branches. There is a fine old five-belled belfry that pierces the perfect sky; the top bell and one of the next lower pair are missing (in what vagary of Mexican history they disappeared I know not).
This was once a Carmelite monastery, and still has a wonderful garden and a celebrated peach and pear and chabacano orchard. The wall inclosing the orchard is so high that scarcely anything green grows tall enough to show above it, though the mirador has a few vines twisting about it. The wall, however, is beautiful in itself—pink, crumbling, sun-baked, with moss and flowers and bits of cactus clinging to it, and a fruity odor was wafted over to us as we passed on the broken, ditch-like road with the motor at an angle of forty-five degrees.
There is a large space, planted with live-oaks, outside the patio of the church with its lovely, broadly scalloped pink wall. Once through the carved door, one is as if in a bath of sun and beauty. Before another time-worn, carved door leading into the church stand two straight, black, immemorial cypresses. The inside wall of the patio has, here and there, an old carved coat of arms cemented into it, and colored growing things abound. The live-oaks outside bend above the scalloping of the walls, on which are ancient numbers above flat-carved symbols for the "Way of the Cross."
Elsie chose a corner inside, and Madame Lefaivre is sketching outside, so I got the guardian, who is also the administrator of the orchard and hacienda, to unlock the church. Several gilded Churrigueresque altars still remain—intricately designed, time-softened, lovely, and on the altar steps were some charming old candlesticks, five or six feet high, in the same lovely style of gilding and twisting. How they have remained there during a century of suburban vicissitudes I know not. Various saints in ecstasy, San Joaquin in special, were portrayed, almost life-size, their garments floating, falling, blowing about, with the special unquiet but lovely Churrigueresque touch. Winged, open-mouthed cherubim and seraphim hold up the vaulting with its wealth of lovely, conventional motifs; throughout Mexico, in churches where everything else is gone, one finds the out-of-reach vaultings intact.
There is a school of a sort, held in what was once the seminary behind the church; and some barefooted, bareheaded, and otherwise scantily clad wrestlers with the "three R's" came out from one end of the church and passed through, followed by their teacher, a shabby, bored-looking young Mestizo of doubtful cleanliness and dubious competency.
Calle Humboldt, Later.
I left you in the patio of San Joaquin. When I went to see how the artists were progressing, I found them both looking miserable and discouraged. No "fine frenzy" to the roll of their eyes, though they were "glancing from heaven to earth." The beauty here isn't one to record on canvas, rather on memory and soul, which, having remarked to them as gently as I could, they began to clean their palettes.
We took a last, regretful look at all the pinky loveliness, the tiled dome, the silent belfry, the slender heads of the two straight, coal-black cypresses, and the inexpressibly lovely wall, wrapped ourselves about with the shining air, and bumped homewards. "Quick, thy tablets, memory."
July 20th.