In Quest of El Dorado

by Stephen Graham

Mexico is a city of some enchantment. It is not a place that can be understood at once—like Kalamazoo or a standard American city. It holds you, puzzled. The squads of Arum lilies, the joyous fountains playing under evergreen trees, the prattling children, and the noonday tropical sun, do not entirely give the mood of the city. It is not one of innocence.

Or again, the busy American and English business men, the gay modish shops of the Avenida Madero, the foyer of "the most exclusive" American hotel, or the buzz of English talk from mining men and drummers in Sanborn's café—they also do not convey the mood of the old Aztec capital. Its air of modern business is deceptive.

The daytime activities seem to be a veil of the real city. It is in many respects very pleasant by day, more pleasant for the business people than for any one else, I think. At night the city is different. The sense of security is less, the feeling of the presence of the unknown is much greater.

The underworld of the city is terrible, and no student of life could shut his eyes to it—poverty widespread and staring; a morose, drunken male population, women who suffer more than most poor women—every one morose, melancholy; fierce threatening faces much commoner than smiling ones.

There is a thin upper crust of rich people, very thin and very swell, who own fine villas and have their cars. And their womenfolk dress and parade in the motor-car parade which at a certain hour continually blocks the way on the Avenida Madero, while their chauffeurs with their horns shriek importance to the traffic police. These people shop at the fine shops and pay three prices for American goods, foregoing their own Mexican foods and manufactured ware for expensive imports. The real Mexican population is herded into a district called by Americans the Thieves' Market, a great open place where the Aztecs used to exercise themselves. And there you may see the women lined up in scores, holding in their hands chili sandwiches, all they have to sell, and supplicating you to buy. In their faces you see something of the mood of the city.

When Cortes came he found a stately city. He found also a place of gloom and awe, a city of slavery, of human sacrifice, of fanatical unbending paganism. His brutal adventurous four hundred tasted there the greatest fear of their lives and met of course in one battle the greatest disaster that Spanish arms ever met at Indian hands. At that time the greatest feature of the city was the grand square of the Pyramid which is now called the Zocalo and has become the terminus of all the swirling street cars and of hundreds of pirate buses. There eight great causeways approached a grand open place, the center of which was the stone-faced pyramid, the altar of Huitzilopochtli, god of war. The pyramid was cemented, its base was conglomerated with jade, emerald and gold, and for that reason was picked to bits by Spanish soldiers. Not one stone remained in situ when the Christian Cathedral was started to be built. On top of the pyramid stood the gigantic sacrificial stone, now in a museum hard by, and into the cavity in the middle of the stone were flung thousands of warm hearts, still beating in death. Did not the barbarity of the Aztec rituals go far to justify the brutality of Cortes' followers?

One night, the Noche Triste of July 1, 1520, Cortes saw his own Spaniards led to ghastly sacrifice, whilst hundreds of sacred fires lit up the sides and stone stairways and platforms of this pyramid and shone luridly on the faces of the priests and the Spanish victims and the ecstatic Indians. That marked the end of Montezuma's reign. That great square is all encroached on now by shops and wretched arcades, and instead of the Pyramid a squat cathedral, trying as it were to cover an original ground plan of paganism without any architectural plan. Half the open space has gone. Groves of low electric light standards supplied by an American foundry shed unnecessary glimmer on petty garden plots—and all the grandeur has gone.

Nevertheless, somehow at night the gloom and ancient horror of the square creeps out. Aztec beggars, half Aztecs, quarter Aztecs, shades of Aztecs, make for you threateningly and yet supplicatingly. Pulque-stricken men stare at you from their doped eyesockets—The eight streets are there, ill-lit, full of darkness, noise and beggars. The drivers and the hangers-on of the pirate buses yell their destinations—Takk-uba, Rom-a, Pi-e-dad, Sa-nangel. In churches in the gloom you may see converted Indians creep from the door to the altar on their knees. Outside the churches beggars are seen kneeling in silence, their lean faces and fevered eyes set as it were upon some star. They kneel and stare, hour after hour, and it seems nothing to them who passes by or what they receive in alms. There is something of the spirit of Quahpopoca and Cauhtemoc whom the Spanish burned over slow fires, who fixed their eyes upon a point and burned and did not say a word.

What is truly remarkable is that no ten minutes passes in the night without the sound somewhere of a gun shot, a revolver shot. To the violent street crowds shooting in air is an amusement. You walk carefully and circumspectly in the streets at night. It is true, of course, that they killed my friend here, and it preys on the mind. But to me Mexico City refuses to correspond to any type of civilization. It is still the city of the Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli.