A Gringo in Mañana-Land

by Harry L. Foster

He finally discovered a stout, middle-aged lady who professed some slight knowledge of terpsichore, and marched with her thrice about the room, as is the fashion in Latin America. Then he seized her manfully, and sped away in a two-step. The lady, taken seemingly by surprise, did not move, and the little General came to a sliding stop. Still determined, he recovered his balance, and sped away in the other direction, with the same result. There was then a discussion as to whether this were a waltz or not. That question being settled by the musicians, who said it was a polka, both parties danced in the same direction, until they had made a couple of flying rounds, when they stopped, and the General offered his partner to me. It was somewhat reminiscent of putting out the ash-barrels on Monday morning, but the lady was willing, and for the next three hours Eustace and I and the General took turns whirling her over the adobe floor.

“A little excitement like that,” said the General, as we finally took our departure, “breaks the monotony of life.”

IV

As I came to know the Mexicans better, I discovered that such an evening, although it impressed a Gringo as a trifle boresome, was quite an event in middle-class Mexican existence.

The Latin-American had an amazing knack of not being bored. This, too, was a product of his mental habit of living wholly in the present. He never suffered from the Anglo-Saxon sense of a waste of time; he was never afflicted with reflections about countless other ways of spending his evening.

He could sit every night in the same plaza, looking at the same faces. He could meet the same friends day after day, and be just as pleased to see them, and ask them the same questions about their many relatives, and part with the same elaborate courtesies. He could listen hour after hour with the same enjoyment to the same pieces of music that the village band had played for the past ten years. And he could talk with the same neighbors about exactly the same things again and again, and never lose his enthusiasm either as speaker or listener.

After supper, at the hotels along the way, proprietor and guests would bring their chairs to the sidewalk, where they could see the passers-by, and would remain there for hours, chatting with tremendous zest about nothing at all. Inconsequential remarks, which Americans of equal intelligence might consider unworthy either of utterance or audience, would be offered for popular consideration with emphatic statement, and received almost with applause. I recall the declaration of a young señorita to the effect that she considered a bath very refreshing. This bit of wisdom, which elsewhere in the world might have been accepted as trite and obvious, brought every member of the circle into enthusiastic agreement. It was quite as though she had advanced a startling new theory, which had long been hovering vaguely in the minds of the others, but which they now heard propounded for the first time. It stimulated cries of “Yes, indeed!” or “You have spoken most truly!” and the discussion lasted for half an hour.

With Mexican kindliness, they always included me in the conversation, although I spoke their language abominably. Had a foreigner murdered English as I murdered Spanish, I should not have had the patience to listen to him. Yet they listened avidly, knitting their brows sometimes in their effort to guess the meaning. If they smiled, their smiles were kindly. They were pleased that the foreigner should try to learn their language. If they disliked Americans in general, they were quickly ready to like any individual American who would meet them half-way. And the moment he showed a willingness to adopt their own elaborate courtesy, they described him as muy simpatico—an expression that means infinitely more than our nearest equivalent of “very sympathetic”—and hailed him as “paisano”—“fellow-countryman.” And they would promise him anything.

V

If at first impression, the elaborate Spanish politeness seems boresome, it gradually seeps its way into the soul of the average visitor so insidiously that within two weeks he finds himself resenting the rudeness of Americans more recently arrived than himself.