Part 15

The country, as we drove along, was scorching, dry, light-colored, with only an occasional tree and the irrepressible mesquite growing everywhere out of the sandy soil. We passed dreadful, screaming, wooden carts, with their solid wooden wheels, drawn by thin oxen, trying to nibble the withered grass; and there were herds of skeleton-like cattle dotted over the thorny cactus-covered fields.

There is a great hill, Istlaltepec, which separates San Gerónimo (fortunately, I should say) from lively Juchitan; and on the side of it away from San Gerónimo are prehistoric tracings and remains, studied, at various times, by various savants. It's a country with sandy, flat stretches and blue hills bounding them, and the river of Juchitan flowing to the near Pacific. The village of Istlaltepec was a blaze of color, white-washed or pink- or blue-washed dwellings, fig- and palm-trees, and over all the brilliant, blinding light.

At Juchitan we stopped a moment at a hotel, but it was so dilapidated and shot with bullet marks, and so desolate and mournful-looking inside, that we went to a small, native place of refreshment, kept by a one-time servant of Aunt L.'s. She was old, but welcoming. Her daughter, a fine, tall woman of thirty or thereabouts, was coming down the street, with one of the great, painted gourds on her head filled with a variety of highly colored things, and with the walk of a queen, a majestic, gentle, swaying movement.

They spread a spotless cloth, in a dim, sandy, red-tiled room with a glimpse of a palm in the old _patio_ behind, that would have been a back yard, and a hideous one, if it had been "at home." The old woman told her ailments, and the daughter, aided by the granddaughter, served us a _sopa de frijoles_ (bean soup), a perfect omelet, with a hard-crusted, pleasant-tasting bread, but no butter, and black coffee.

Goat's milk was offered; the goat was in the _patio_--but "goat _me_ no goats."

The inhabitants of the street gathered around as we got into the carriage, among them an Indian woman with a coal-black baby--a _salto atras_, a "jump back," as they are cheerfully called, when the baby is blacker than the mother. We proceeded to hunt the _jefe_ again, but when we got to the _jefatura_ we were informed that he was still taking his siesta, so in spite of the sun we decided to look about the apparently deserted town.

We stopped at another inn, where there were more signs of recent "regeneration"--blood-stained walls, mirrors broken, a billiard-table partly chopped up, and a piano of the "cottage" variety with its strings pulled out. The _propietario_ showed us around sadly, but with a note of pride. His house was, for the moment, the "show-place" of the town. He pointed out a large, carefully preserved blood-spot on the floor, and kept repeating _muy triste_--but all the same there was a light in his eye.

The barracks, with a large detachment of Federal troops, and the near-by church have great pieces chipped off by guns, and are embroidered by pepperings of rifle-fire.

Don Porfirio nearly lost his life on his way to Don Alejandro de Gyvès' (Aunt L.'s French friend, when she first came down here; he was consul, you remember, and they were the _civilisés_ of the place). The Juchitecos tried to kill Diaz and his priest-friend, Fray Mauricio, near his house, and it was the village leader of that epoch who put his brother Felix to death. They seem to be consistent and persistent fighters, these Juchitecos, given over to libations, always fighting with somebody, but best enjoying it in their own bailiwick.

The damages caused by the ambitions of the late Che Gómez were amply testified to. A French merchant, Señor Rome, whom Aunt L. saw about some business, had had his home in the environs sacked, and his bride had escaped with difficulty into the hills, her beloved trousseau and household linen, brought from Paris, of course, being destroyed or stolen.

_January 12th, 9 a.m._

We were up with the dawn, expecting to start for Tehuantepec and Salina Cruz at six o'clock, taking the train that I had arrived on at 5.30. But this is one of the mornings when it won't get here till after nine o'clock.

A hot, fierce, sandy gale is blowing, and every door and window in the house is rattling. We are just going to have a second breakfast, before starting out. The Chinese cook does very well, but when he was talking with his assistant this morning under my window, it sounded like the chopping of hash, literally, a conversation of short sounds and shorter stops.

Some fresh cocoanuts were brought in, and we have each had a glassful of the milky beverage. I can imagine how delicious it would be, come upon suddenly in the desert; but sitting at a table with a servant to pour it out, I was a little disappointed. I innocently came down in a hat for the journey, but it was impossible to keep it on, even sitting on the veranda. These winds, it appears, blow whenever they feel like it, from October till May.

Now we are waiting, Aunt L. in white, with a long blue chiffon veil, and I in blue, with a white veil. I fancy we would present a picturesque sight to the proper eyes.

_January 13th, 7.30 a.m._

At last, yesterday, the train came, and, clutching at our veils, we were blown into it, and after another unexplained delay started off in an American-built car like our ordinary ones. Its name was "Quincy"! In the old days, Aunt L. went everywhere on horseback. We passed various little wind-swept villages. Jordan was the name of one of them, seeming, in the sandy, New-Testament-looking spot, just the right name. Two beautiful Tehuantepec women got into the train there, kindly sitting near us. I was fascinated by their clothes, and much more interested in them than they were in us.

The unfamiliar cadence of the Zapoteca gave them a complete touch of foreignness. One of them wore a beautiful, strange, complicated head-dress of stiff pleated and ruffled lace, which, I later discovered, does not at all interfere with the carrying on their heads of the large, shallow, brightly painted gourds. Her skirts were long and deeply flounced, but looped up at the waist, just a tucking in of the lower hem of the flounce, with the rest of the stuff flowing away in a most lovely line. The other woman had on a beautiful necklace of irregular-shaped gold coins, and with her flashing teeth and dark eyes, and a brilliant, low-cut, full jacket, with a yellow handkerchief twisted turbanwise around her head, made a picture I could not take my eyes from. I felt as colorless as a shadow, and I told Aunt L. she looked like a blue-and-gray Copenhagen vase strayed into a Moorish room.

Just before getting into Tehuantepec we came upon a beautiful grove of cocoanut-palms, high and graceful, above the rest of the vegetation, and the little nestling huts and houses. All about are jungles containing strange creeping things, and strange fevers and kindred creeping ills.

As the train passed slowly down the principal street, it seemed to me I looked out on a race of queens, tall, stately, with their lovely costumes. The men seemed undersized and sort of "incidental" in the landscape, but those beautiful women walking up and down their sandy streets were a revelation. Aunt L. says they possess not only the beauty, but the brains of the race. Former generations of Tehuantepec men, fitter mates for these queens than the specimens I saw, were mostly killed off in the various wars of "independence," and I understand the population is kept up by fortuitous but willing males from other places.

Everything was color; gorgeous splashes of yellow and black, and red and orange and blue against the shifting, sandy streets. A picturesque, creamy _Palacio Municipal_ faces the plaza, and there were many churches--mostly showing earthquake vicissitudes. An old fortress, once the headquarters of Diaz, gives a last suggestive note to the whole.

Glorious memories of Don Porfirio hang all over this part of the world, where he is adored and mourned. I must say Madero's face looked positively childish in the _jefatura_ at Juchitan, as it confronted the stern, clever visage of the great Indian. Even the cheap, highly colored lithograph could not do away with his look of distinction and power. He was, in his young days, military governor of Tehuantepec, and at one time _jefe político_. A French savant and traveler, l'Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, remembering him then, said he was the most perfect type he had ever seen, and what he imagined the kingly hero Cuauhtemoc to have been.

When we got out of the train at Salina Cruz, a whirl-wind caught us and blew us down the platform. I saw very little of the town on the way to the British Consulate, where we were to lunch, as I was bent double by the wind and blinded by the sand.

Mr. Buchanan and his wife were waiting to receive us. Mr. B.'s kind but shrewd blue eyes, altruistic brow, and welcoming hand-clasp show him at first sight to be what Aunt L. says he is, "pure gold." She has found him through years the best of friends and wisest of advisers. The consulate is on one of the sandy ridges that the town seems largely composed of, and Mrs. Buchanan has arranged it with taste and comfort after our ideas, with books and flowers and easy-chairs. But one look from the high bow window and you know at once where you are, with irrepressible cacti and palm-trees peeking in at you.

I tried sitting on the sheltered side of the veranda for a few minutes while waiting for lunch, that my eyes might "receive" the Pacific, but I was glad to go in-doors again. Mr. B. says the wind blows that way six or seven months in the year. Yesterday was one of its "best."

Our consul, Mr. Haskell, and his wife came in later to tea. Their house is on another sand-ridge. After a last pleasant chat about our affairs, their affairs, and Mexican affairs we departed for our train in a great darkness that the stars made no impression on, the wind still tearing down the sandy streets. I was sorry not to visit the breakwaters--_rompeolas_, they call them--but would probably have been blown overboard.

From the veranda I could see ships that had come from Morning Lands, riding at anchor, and later the sun went down in quiet majesty over the great, flat waters of the Pacific. I was so near the Atlantic that I thought of Humboldt's expression of "tearing the Isthmus apart, as the pillars of Hercules had been torn in some great act of nature," and Revillagigedo's[29] dream of a canal joining the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Mr. Buchanan said the first authentic mention of the Isthmus was in a conversation between Montezuma and Cortés, as to the source of the quantities of gold the Spaniards saw. Cortés, who was of an inquiring turn of mind at any mention of the shining stuff, sent Pizarro, and then Diego de Ordaz (he who tried to ascend Popocatepetl, and got a volcano added to his crest), to investigate, coming here himself after the rebuilding of Mexico City, _en route_ to Honduras. He received a grant of the whole territory round about--"Las Marquesadas," as they are still called, after his title, _Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca_ (Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca).

This morning there is still a great rattling of the windows and the doors, but not a sign of gnat or mosquito. I must arise and further investigate isthmian life. The _huacamaia_ in the fig-tree has been making himself heard since dawn. I knew that if I did not tell you of Tehuantepec and Salina Cruz now, you would never hear, and I think what those names have meant to you during the years. It's all a memory of drifting sands, women as straight as their own palm-trees, slim, naked boys, fierce wind, and, in the harbor, the great port works, built by foreign energy and capital.

_January 14th._

Going up, up, with a ringing in my ears out of the "blazing tropics" into the Tierra Templada. I am traveling with a parrot in a cage, and a nondescript little animal called, I think, a _tajon_, in a box with slats! After a very cursory survey last night, it seemed to belong to the 'coon family. I (who wish all animals well, but not too near) dimly apprehend the Mérida family on the "Ward Line" traveling with their parrot, when I consider that I was put onto the Pullman last night in a thick, inky, tropical darkness, with a parrot in a cage, and a _tajon_ in a box with slats. The amiable colored porter is looking after them in the baggage-car, and the back veranda with the oleanders, beyond the dining-room, is their ultimate destination. I say nothing of the parting; Aunt L. has promised to come soon.

The glorious Pico de Orizaba has just shown its lovely white head between two dissolving blue ridges. Last night I reread _Le Journal d'Amiel_, which, with _Monsieur Le Coq_, I picked up as I was leaving the house. As up-to-date in the jungle as anything would be.

[29] Fifty-second viceroy.

XVII

Gathering clouds--"Tajada" the common disease of republics--Reception at Chapultepec--Madero in optimistic mood--His views of Mexico's liabilities to America

_January 17th._

I have not written since my word in the train. Too busy taking up daily threads, and there have been various dinings and lunchings out. On my return I found yours saying that another yellow-stamped instalment of the _Arabian Nights Entertainment_ had come in on your breakfast-tray. Just put Mexicans instead of Persians, or whatever they were, intrigues for power in a Latin-American republic, instead of the intricacies of Haroun-al-Raschid and his _califat_, change your longitude, and you are "Orientée" as exactly as the pyramids!

_January 19th._ (My brother's birthday).

To-night I am thinking of Elliott,[30] and, as so often, _before_ his days of physical and spiritual anguish, of the beautiful brow with its lines of thought, and the straight limbs as he moved freely among the other sons of men. But however dear in his activities, where pride was a factor, he is infinitely dearer to me now, stretched, broken, while others divide his garments. I ask myself to-night at this seventh turning of the years of pain, what I have not asked him. Has he drunk the chalice, or is he still putting it away?

His mind is naturally occupied with intellectual equations. He as naturally rejects the mystical; there is nothing "vicarious" to him. Life is only what rationally and definitely is to be discovered by each one, no possible doing of another's work. I remember quoting to him once, _à propos_ of destinies and the end of the ends: "_Ego sum alpha et omega, principium et finis_," and he answered, "Each one is his own alpha and omega."

I know little, after all, of his spiritual life. His intellectual life I can read like any fine book, the technicalities of a trained mind superior to mine, inspiringly surmised, but not understood. He is not _anima naturaliter christiana_, but all the same, he must hang in his body on the cross of Christ crucified, and his only hope is in acceptance of it, along the lines of redemption, cut off as he is from the exercise of his splendid natural gifts. Results for him mean the hunting out of definite, secret combinations, in definite, scientific areas, and his mind is speculative only in an intellectual sense.

I shall, perhaps, never know how far the "Crucified" has convinced him, but to-night, in thinking of him, _sitio_ comes again and again to me. He has been so thirsty for the employment of his gifts, whose value he knows, in a clear, common-sense way, as he also knows what has not been given him, and the suppression of that gift of industry seems sometimes to me the most painful nail that holds him. Don't let what I have written make you unhappy. Mother-wounds bleed and burn so easily.

In this quiet, beauteous night, with the _patio_ holding a thick, silver moonlight spilling over the square, dark roof, this gorgeous Indian world in strange unrest about me, and I myself far enough away to see, I can speak. Show him this some time when he is healed. What an adoring sister thought cannot hurt. I unite myself with the millions who have had their loved ones hanging on the cross, who have heard their _sitio_. But as the emotions of each are measured by their personal experience, this, my brother's thirst, moves me more deeply than even that of sacramental martyrs, who gave willingly, where he gives resistingly. "And everywhere I see a cross where sons of men give up their lives." ...

_January 20th._

Things are bubbling up, boiling, geyser-like, and the public in a fair way to get scalded. Yesterday a bill was passed through Congress suspending the constitutional guarantees in various of the near-by states, Morelos, Tlaxcala, Puebla, Vera Cruz, and others.

It would seem that all of Mr. Madero's chickens are coming home to roost, and demands for the cutting up of the Mexican cake sound from all sides. But what was easy for Madero to promise in the first passion for the regeneration of "his" people is proving not only impractical, but impossible. What's the use, anyway, of giving waterless lands to Indians without farming implements, whose only way of irrigating would be prayers for moisture to pre- or post-Cortésian gods? Let those who have been divested of their illusions by hard facts govern the state, _I_ say.

Outside of a few political agitators, who cares for politics here except as a means of livelihood? What each one is a-fevered for is the disease commonly attacking republics. Above the Rio Grande they call it graft. _Tajada_ it is called here, but the name doesn't matter. Republics are notoriously susceptible, and here it grows with a lushness comparable only to the jungle. Now when the reins of government are in many regions given over to those completely unversed in statecraft or even in the rudiments of "mine and thine"--a lower-class contingent, naturally destructive, unimaginative, and completely ignorant--what can one expect?

_January 23d._

Aldebert de Chambrun[31] called yesterday afternoon and came back for dinner. He is just down from Washington, being _à cheval_ between the two posts. It brought back old childhood days. Now he is in the full tide of a brilliant career, and scintillating with the celebrated De C. wit. They all have it--delightful, _fin_, glancing from subject to subject, illuminating and refreshing, giving a "lift" to any conversation they partake of, sometimes unsparing, but oftener kind. It's completely unlike the Spanish-American satire, which I am now beginning to understand, and which has its own value, though it is mostly cruel and demolishing, and seems to suffer with difficulty the neighbor's good fortune.

_January 26th._

Yesterday was the first reception at Chapultepec since several weeks. We drove up during a chill dropping of the sun, to find quite a grouping of foreign and domestic powers. The _Corps Diplomatique_ was almost complete, De Chambrun going with the Lefaivres. I talked with Calero, and Vasquez Tagle, Minister of Justice, a scholar of note, they tell me, deeply versed in law and of the highest probity. Though he had a serious face, there was a twinkle in his eyes.

N. walked up and down the terrace with the President for a long time. He said he had a very interesting conversation, accidentally turning on the claims of Americans who had been killed or wounded during the revolution, in El Paso and Douglas. N., thinking it well to improve the shining hour, pointed out to the President the special character of these claims; that during a revolution by which he had established himself as President of Mexico his soldiers, in taking positions held by President Diaz's troops, had killed and wounded, on American soil, several peaceful American citizens. This constituted a claim that could not be denied by any international tribunal, to say nothing of the violation of American territory. N., finding Madero in optimistic mood (not that this is unusual), advised him strongly to settle these claims, which were not large, and were leading to much criticism of his government, when things might go so pleasantly. He even quoted to him, "_Qui cito dat bis dat_."

Madero replied: "All that will be settled in due time," but he did not seem to feel that it was as important as N. thought it was, saying, "They should have got out of harm's way." He also said the amounts claimed were exorbitant (that "madonna of the wash-tub" wanted one hundred thousand dollars) and he did not see how, without bringing the matters before a court of arbitration, he could come to a decision as to proper compensation. N. said that, as the question of Mexico's liability was certain, he need not be afraid to admit the validity of the claims in principle--to get a good railroad lawyer in Texas to find out for him how much such injuries would be paid for by a railroad company in event of such injuries occurring on a United States line, and then quadruple the amount. This seemed to make an impression on him, but in the shifting sands of Mexican liabilities will probably lead nowhere.

I found myself standing by ---- on the terrace, after we had taken leave of Madame Madero, and as I said good-by, I added, "Perhaps some day we will be paying our respects to _you_ here."

Even in the sudden dusk that had fallen I saw flash across his face in answer, as if written in words, the look that men of ambitious temperament, gifted with will and intelligence necessary to achievement, have had in all ages when the object of desire is mentioned. I imagine he has little hope and no illusions about the present situation. I am struck all the time by the exceeding cleverness of the clever men here. What, then, _is_ the matter?

In the evening a very pleasant dinner at the French Legation, illuminated by several European stars, or rather comets, as they quickly disappear from these heavens.

The Duc de R. took me out. He is small, with clever, unhappy eyes and the world-manner, with a hint of introversion, most interesting. I found, when I came to talk with him, that he was possessed of immense knowledge, rendered living and _actuel_ by his personality, and his mentality is of that crystal type equally lucid in the discussion of facts or ideas.

He has just returned from a trip through Oaxaca, where he has large mining and railway interests, and is _en route_ for Paris, _via_ New York. He walked home with us afterward, telling us about that southern country, which he knows as only one knows a country gone through on horseback, and, of course, he was turning the international flashlight on it all.

Mr. de Gheest sat on my other side. He has come on a brief business visit with his handsome very _jeunesse dorée_ son, Henri.[32] I had never met them before, but his charming wife and I have listened to Wagner cycles together in Munich. They were married strangely enough, in Mexico, and lived here for a while afterward.

M. de G. is trained and brilliant in discussion of international affairs, witty, _risqué_, and unsparing. They come for lunch to-morrow. I must say I was what one would call extremely well placed at table!

_January 27th._

Most amusing lunch here to-day, the Gallic sparks flying in all directions! The De Gheests, De Chambrun, the Lefaivres, Allart--and our Anglo-Saxon selves as listeners.

De G. was very amusing about some business rendezvous with Mexican banking associates. One important meeting fell through because the banker's little granddaughter was having a birthday. The second came to grief because another luminary's wife's aunt's sister-in-law, or some sort of remote relation, had died, and, of course, it's a rather far journey from Paris to Mexico to find oneself tripping over family occurrences....