Vagabond Life in Mexico

by Gabriel Ferry

The Jamaïca and Mount Parnassus.

Mexico is the most beautiful city ever built by the Spaniards in the New World; and even in Europe it would take a high place for splendor and magnificence. If you wish to behold the magnificent and varied panorama which Mexico presents, you have only to mount at sunset one of the towers of the Cathedral. On whatever side you turn your eye, you see before you the serrated peaks of the Cordilleras, forming a gigantic azure belt of about sixty leagues in circumference. To the south, the two volcanoes which overtop the other peaks of the sierra raise their majestic summits, covered with eternal snow, which, in the evening sun, put on a pale purple hue flecked with delicate ruby. The one, Popocatapetl (smoking mountain), is a perfect cone, dazzling in the blue vault of heaven; the other, Iztaczihuatl (the white woman), has the appearance of a nymph reclining, who lifts her icy shoulders to receive the last beams of the dying sun. At the foot of the two volcanoes gleam two lakes, like mirrors, which reflect the clouds in their waters, and where the wild swan plays its merry gambols. To the west rises an immense pile of building, the palace of Chapultepec, once the abode of the old viceroys of New Spain. Round the mountain on which it is built stretches, in a long, waving belt of verdure, a forest of cedars more than a thousand years old. A fountain bubbles forth at the top of the mountain; its brawling waters leap down into the valley, where they are received into an aqueduct, and thus conducted into a large and populous city, to supply the wants of its inhabitants. Villages, steeples, and cupolas rise on all sides from the bottom of the valley. Dusty roads cross and recross one another like gold stripes on a green ground, or like runnels of water interbranching through the country. A tree, peculiar to Peru, the weeping willow of the sandy plains, bends its long, interlaced branches, loaded with odoriferous leaves and red berries, in the evening breeze, and a solitary palm-tree rises here and there above clumps of olives with their pale-green foliage.

But these are only the grand outlines of the picture. Turn your eye upon the city, or, rather, look at your feet. In the midst of the chess-board formed by the terraces of houses, and from among the flowers with which these are adorned, you will see rising, as from an immense bouquet, spires, churches with domes of yellow and blue tiling, houses with walls stained with various colors, and balconies hung with a kind of striped cotton, which give them a trim and jaunty appearance. On one of the four sides of the Plaza Mayor (great square) the Cathedral towers majestically aloft. This magnificent edifice overtops the turrets of the president's palace, a building devoid of all pretensions to architectural beauty, and now falling to decay. It is an immense pile, inclosing within its four walls the public offices of the government, a prison, two barracks, a botanic garden, and the legislative chambers. This palace occupies a whole side of the square. The Ayuntamiento (Municipality) and the Postal de las flores, an immense market, form the third side. The Parian, a market similar to the preceding, completes the fourth. Thus the legislative and executive power, the board of works, commerce—all the departments of the Mexican government, in short, are in one building, and seem as if grouped together under the shadow of the church. The people are there also; for the streets of St. Domingo, of St. Francisco, of Tacuba, of Monnaie, of Monterilla, all arteries of the great city, pour into the Plaza Mayor a flood of human beings, which is always changing, and ever in motion, and you have only to mix in this crowd for a few moments to get acquainted with Mexican life in all its diversified phases of vice and virtue, of splendor and misery.

When the hour of the Angelus approaches especially, horsemen, foot-passengers, and carriages are packed together in disorderly confusion, and gold, silk, and rags, mingled here and there, give to the crowd a grotesque and startling appearance. The Indians are returning to their villages, the populace to the suburbs. The ranchero makes his horse prance and curvet in the midst of the passengers, who are in no hurry to get out of his way; the aquador (water-carrier), whose day's work is over, crosses the square, bending under the weight of his chochocol of porous earthenware; the officer is bending his steps to the coffee-houses or gambling-tables, where he intends to spend the evening; the non-commissioned officer clears the way for himself with a vine-tree-staff, which he carries in his hand as a badge of his rank. The red petticoat of the townswoman is in glaring contrast with the saya and black mantilla of the fashionable lady, who holds her fan over her face to shade it from the departing rays of the sun. Monks of all colors flit through the crowd in every direction. Here the padre, with his huge hat à la Basile, elbows the Franciscan in his blue gown, silken cord, girdle, and large white felt hat; there goes the Dominican in his lugubrious costume of black and white, reminding one of Torquemada, the founder of the Inquisition; farther on, the brown drugget of the Capuchin contrasts with the white flowing robes of the Brother of Mercy. Incidents of different kinds occur continually in this motley crowd, and serve to keep one's attention alive. Sometimes, as the drum in the barracks are beating a salute, the folding doors of a sagrario[1] suddenly fly open, and there issues forth a carriage splendidly gilt, the slow toll of the bell is heard along with the harsh rattle of the drum, and the whole crowd uncover, and kneel with bent head to the holy sacrament which they are carrying to a dying man. Woe betide the foreigner, though bold and resolute, who, ignorant of the profound respect which the Mexican pays to his religious rites, fails to bow the knee to the host as it passes! Sometimes a military detachment of six officers, escorted by three soldiers and preceded by a dozen musicians, is seen marching into the square in all the majesty of military pomp; it is to proclaim a bando (law or edict) of the highest authority, for which all this display of military music and brocaded uniforms is deemed necessary. Such at this time of the evening is the general appearance of the Plaza Mayor, that square where the people of Mexico, the sovereign people (as their flatterers call them), flutter in rags, ceaselessly engaged in quest of a new master who can put down the master of the night before, quite indifferent as to political principles, mistaking disorder for liberty, and never suspecting that the continual assaults of anarchy may bring down one day the worm-eaten structure of their rotten republic, although it has not been in existence more than twenty-five years.

Every evening, however, at the first peals of the Angelus, all noise ceases, as if by enchantment, in the Plaza Mayor. The crowd becomes hushed and silent. When the last toll of the bell dies away, the din recommences. The crowd disperses in every direction, carriages rattle off, horsemen gallop away, foot-passengers hurry hither and thither, but not always nimbly enough to escape the sword or lasso of the bold thieves who murder or rob their hapless victims, and whose audacity is such that, even in open day, and with crowds looking on, they have been known to commit their crimes.[2] At nightfall the square is deserted; a few promenaders scurry along in the moonlight; others remain seated, or swing lazily upon the iron chains, which, separated by granite pillars, run round the sagrario. The day is past, the scenes of the night begin, and the léperos become for a few hours masters of the city.

The lépero is a type, and that the strangest, of Mexican society. The attentive observer, who has seen Mexico stirring with the joyous excitement that precedes the Oracion, and then abandoned to the ill-omening silence which the night brings on, can alone tell what is singular and formidable in the character of this Mexican lazzarone. At once brave and cowardly, calm and violent, fanatic and incredulous, with just such a belief in God as to have a wholesome terror for the devil, a continual gambler, quarrelsome by nature, with a sobriety only equaled by the intemperance to which he sometimes delivers himself, the lépero can accommodate himself to every turn of fortune, as his humor or idleness inclines him. Porter, stone-mason, teamster, street-pavior, hawker, the lépero is every thing at different times. A thief sometimes by inclination, he practices his favorite calling every where, in the churches, at processions, and in theatres; his life is only one struggle with justice, which is not herself safe from his larcenies. Lavish when he finds himself master of a little money, he is not the less resigned or courageous when he has none. Has he gained in the morning a sufficiency for the expenses of the day? he drops work immediately. Often his precarious resources fail him entirely. Tranquil then, and submissive, and careless about thieves, he wraps himself in his torn cloak, and lies down at the corner of the pavement or in a door-way. There, rattling his jarana (a little mandolin), and looking with stoical serenity at the pulqueria (public-house), where he has no credit, he listens distractedly to the hissing of some savory stew which they are preparing for some more favored being, tightens the belt round his stomach, and, after breakfasting off a sunbeam, he sups off a cigar, and sleeps quietly without thinking of the morrow.

I will confess my weakness: among this motley crowd, idle and brawling as it was, my attention was more engaged with the miserable tatterdemalions than with the well-dressed foot-passengers, as the former seemed to afford a truer index of Mexican society than the latter. I never met, for instance, a lépero, in all the picturesqueness of his tattered costume, without having a strong desire to become better acquainted with this Bohemian-like class, who reminded me frequently of the more uncommon heroes of Picaresque romance. It appeared to me a curious study to compare this filthy and ragged denizen of the great towns with the savage adventurers I had met in the woods and savannas. When I first came to live in Mexico, I sought, and succeeded in getting acquainted, through the kindness of a Franciscan monk, a friend of mine, with a thorough-bred lépero, called Perico the Zaragate.[3] Unhappily, our acquaintance had hardly commenced, when, for very good reasons, I was resolved to break it, for I only got the scantiest information from him about his class, and the number of piastres I was forced to pay him was so considerable as to induce me to reflect strongly upon the absurdity of taking such expensive lessons. I was resolved, then, to bring my studies with him to a conclusion, when, one morning, Fray Serapio, the worthy monk who had made me acquainted with Perico, entered my apartment.

"I came to ask you," said the Franciscan, "to go with me to a bull-fight at the Necatitlan Square; there will also be a Jamaïca and a Monte Parnaso, which will be an additional inducement."

"What is a Jamaïca and a Monte Parnaso?"

"You will know that immediately. Let us set out; it is nearly eleven, and we shall be scarcely there in time to get a good place."