We strolled out along the Avenida Madero, past the National Opera House—said to be the handsomest building of its kind on the continent, but still with an unfinished dome because one administration had started it, and others had neglected to provide funds for its completion. Beyond it lay the Alameda, the Mexican Central Park. It was a European park, quite unlike the palm-grown plazas of the smaller cities, but there was the usual Mexican band concert, and the people were renting camp-chairs along the shady walks to enjoy the national pastime of seeing and being seen.
Beyond the Alameda, commenced a wide boulevard, the Paseo de la Reforma, typically Parisian in its wealth of monuments, and lined with handsome embassies and residences, leading out to Chapultepec, a larger and even more charming park, with wide expanses of lawn and woodland and lake and meadow surrounding the National Palace, a squatty fortress-like structure pleasing in its effect of strength and beauty, perched upon high cliffs and glimpsed through the tree-tops as though it hung suspended in the sky. The policemen here were clad in Mexico’s charro costume—the costume of the old grandees—with short buff jacket, skin-tight blue trousers lined with rows of silver buttons, flowing red tie, huge velvet sombrero, and a big gleaming sword. An orchestra in similar costume held forth beneath an awning near the lake, playing sweetly upon a marvelous combination of guitars, mandolins, marimbas, harps, cellos, oboes, and what not. Automobiles rolled past along the winding driveway, each filled with a bevy of señoritas. Horsemen rode grandly past, dressed also in charro costume, and mounted upon the finest steeds in Mexico. Pedestrians idled beside the lake, watching the procession, and listening to the orchestra, with that rare enjoyment of really good music that characterizes peon and aristocrat alike. Here, as in the small-town plaza, the Mexicans were finding a pleasure in their park such as no American ever finds in the parks of the United States. Here, as everywhere in Mexico, a public garden was not merely a place for the perambulation of baby carriages by nursemaids, but an institution of which even society took full advantage.
Having seen the aristocrats in action, we caught a trolley out to the floating gardens of Xochimilco to observe the middle-class picknickers. It was a profanely modern trolley, with a “No Spitting” sign, and rimmed with lurid posters from which “Wrigley” and “Colgate” peeped out from a conglomeration of Spanish, and it carried us through streets whose buildings were defaced either by countless advertisements or countless warnings not to post advertisements. But presently it left the city behind, and raced out through maize-fields and maguey fields, and dropped us at a quaint little town, complete even to cathedral-fronted plaza.
Tiny children, their arms laden with flowers, surrounded us, sticking bouquets into our buttonholes and pockets, and pleading for “a little centavito.” They were irresistible. Dressed exactly like their elders in long skirts and mantillas, and with the mature air characteristic of Mexican children, they seemed like little dwarfed adults. Their voices were caressing, and they would retreat whenever we tried to return their bouquets without purchasing.
“Ah, no, señor! Buy them from me! A little centavito, no more!”
Looking rather like floating gardens ourselves, we drifted toward the canals. These were the remnants of the great network of waterways that the Spanish conquistadores saw when first they entered the Valley of Mexico. In those days, before Modern Progress decreed that the Valley should be drained, Mexico City was a Venice, upon whose lakes there floated rafts of interlaced twigs, covered with rich soil, and blossoming with flowers. Xochimilco was the last survival of the Aztec floral paradise, and it proved distinctly disappointing.
IN THE GARDENS OF XOCHIMILCO, RELICS OF AN AZTEC PARADISE, ONLY THE CABBAGES WERE IN BLOOM
A barefoot boatman met us, holding up a piece of paper upon which was written in English, “Do you want one bot? I have a fin bot.”
He led us to a dugout canoe, with an awning supported by vine-laced framework, and paddled us out through a canal where native women were washing clothes or cleaning chickens, under a bridge emblazoned with “Drink Moctezuma Beer,” and along a waterway lined with decaying rafts covered with a luxuriant growth of carnations, cane, eucalyptus, and cabbages, of which only the last-named seemed to be in bloom. Parties of picknickers drifted past us in larger boats, each with a table in the center, at which every one was busily eating. Along the way were restaurants and refreshment rooms, each with an orchestra of one fiddle, one guitar, and one bass-drum, which started to play at our approach and quit as soon as we passed, the bass-drummer invariably outspeeding and outdrowning his collaborators. The final exhibit, at the far end of the canal, was the city waterworks.