Soft, shining-bodied children were sleeping in the most fortuitous of positions, uncovered, in the chill night air. I could but think of blue-eyed, white-skinned children in warm nurseries. They lay beside grotesque naguales—figures with hideous human faces on woolly four-footed bodies, whose raison d'être is to frighten. The population inclines to the grotesque, anyway, on the slightest provocation, and side by side with the naguales are other hideous clown-like figures—piñatas—which are the high-lights of certain time-hallowed post-Christmas festivities. They are of all sizes and prices—from little paper dolls hanging from bamboo rods that will decorate adobe huts to the more expensive figures, bulky about the waist, whose tinsel and tissue-paper garments conceal a great earthenware jar filled with toys and candies.
The cohetes are sounding as I write—a sort of fire-cracker—announcing the advent of the Child to this Indian world.
As for the Posadas, we are evidently not to be initiated into their mysteries. The Mexican families of note continue to sport their oaks since the coming in of the Madero administration, and the Diplomatic Corps this year is left out in the cold on these intimate occasions, which are family parties held during nine days before Christmas, symbolic of the efforts of Mary and Joseph to find a resting-place in crowded Bethlehem.
December 24th.
We see the list of diplomatic shifts; among them are a few real Christmas presents. Dearing, who returned a short time ago, is made assistant chief of the Latin-American division of the State Department. He has made and will continue to make une bonne carrière. Schuyler, whom I have not seen since he passed through Copenhagen en route for Petersburg, takes his place here. Cresson goes to London, which will please him; the Blisses get Paris, quite the handsomest of all the presents. Weitzel, who was here when we arrived, goes to Nicaragua, and so on through a long list. I felt, when I saw the changes, a sort of hankering for the Aryan flesh-pots, a sudden feeling of my unrelatedness to Latin America. I was, so to speak, for the moment "fed up" on the tropics with a thick sauce of world pain. Any light-colored diplomat will know just what I mean, and I dare say the dark ones feel it in higher latitudes.
Diplomacy, as offered by the United States Government, is a most unsettling thing, anyway. The basic uncertainties of the carrière, to begin with, and then, if you are in a place you like, the feeling that at any time the trump may sound, and if you don't like it, hoping to be changed. However, it all goes up like smoke along with other human things.
XV
The first Christmas in Mexico City—Hearts sad and gay—Piñatas—Statue to Christopher Columbus.
Christmas Day, 1911.
My first thought was of my precious mother, l'absence est le plus grand des maux. I went to midnight mass at the French church with Madame Lefaivre. The Adeste Fideles was beautifully sung, and I thought of the millions of throats, all over the glad, sad earth, singing the peace-bringing air.