The veranda of the club-house looks toward the shining volcanoes and the blue, blue hills, their beauty indescribably enhanced, seen through the brilliant glass-like air. The house itself, in the Spanish-mission style, is very fine, and the links the most beautiful of many I have watched and waited on. There are eighteen holes, with a favorite "nineteenth" in the cantina. Some of the mounds over which the golfers play are the graves of those who fell in 1847. General Scott approached the capital from Vera Cruz by way of Puebla, and there was a big battle on what is now the golf links, then the Hacienda de la Natividad, and the near-by church and monastery of Churubusco. There is, facing the very colorful and interesting old monastery, built by the Franciscans in the seventeenth century, a colorless, uninteresting monument, put up by President Comonfort in memory of the Mexicans who lost their lives here, and there are occasional ceremonies "in memoriam" by a grateful country.
November 3d.
Yesterday I ended by staying at the club all day and having dinner there. Elim was taken home, and N. came out after chancery hours. It was a beautiful and peaceful day, and we drove back about nine o'clock, under a young moon. As we got into town, there seemed more than the usual number of little booths, dimly lighted by small hanging lanterns, the owners and their progeny sitting about.
How large families can live on the proceeds of these small stands is a mystery. Everything is dust-covered, handled and rehandled, cut into small bits and then into still smaller ones. I always marvel at the self-restraint that prevents the Indians from falling on their own goods and devouring them.
One drives over what was once an Aztec causeway, through a squalid suburb, San Antonio de Abad, to get back into town, where the day of the dead was celebrated by an unusually lively attendance at the pulque-shops. That licor divino had so incapacitated an Indian lying on the road that we nearly lost our lives in the sudden swerve the chauffeur made to avoid running over him.
There are numberless accidents to Indians, falling on the third rail of the tramways running out the Tlalpan road, though it is wired off. When you look into the awful pink and blue dens, and smell the still more awful smell of the licor divino, and see the Indians saddened and melancholy, or suddenly wild and completely irresponsible, coming out of La Encantadora, Las Emociones, or El Hombre Perdido,[19] you realize that the maguey is, indeed, bound up with the destiny of the Mexican nation.
As we passed through the Calle de Flamencos, the celebrated palace of the Conde de Santiago seemed once more splendid, rising above the squalor of the pulque-shops. It was built by a cousin of Cortés, immediately after the Conquest, in what was then a noble quarter of the town. Later, when the Conde de Santiago bought it, he surrounded it by a beautiful park, known as the Parque del Conde. Now in the great courtyard, alas! only merchandise of a tenth-rate quality is stored and old trucks encumber and disfigure it. There is a majestic stairway, seen through a wide, carved entrance still possessing its antique wooden doors of some wonderful resisting wood from the Hot Country. The roof-line is just as good as the rest, for great stone gargoyles, representing half-cannon, show themselves against the sky. There is a huge Aztec corner-stone of a single piece, representing a tiger, which tradition says was placed there by Cortés himself. It is the sort of house the government ought to buy; in this dry climate, properly preserved, it would be good for a thousand years.[20]
November 5th.
Yesterday an event unique in the troubled political history of Mexico took place. President de la Barra calmly read the report of his incumbency before the Chamber of Deputies and as calmly relinquished his high office.
About five o'clock I drove down the Avenida San Francisco, already brilliantly illuminated, though great bands of red still hung in the sky behind Chapultepec. The crowd was immense, the streets flagged, and there were squads of mounted police keeping order, and sounds of drum and clarion. Shouts of, "Viva de la Barra," "Viva el Presidente Blanco," mingled with various expressions of satisfaction, not unmixed, I imagine, with surprise, that the high power could be relinquished in so orderly a manner, and that a President could or would give accounting of his office. A hint of the millennium.