Part 4
The streets were completely deserted last night as we drove home from the very excellent dinner at Hye's, at which the German and Belgian ministers, the French chargé, the Spanish minister and his pretty daughter, the Romeros, _et al._, assisted. One sees no Mexicans of any political shade abroad these days, and the change of government has been effected mildly rather than otherwise, if one looks back over Mexican history. A few hundreds killed and wounded, a very few thousands of dollars damage done to property in town, and the great and long and glorious Diaz régime is a thing of the past. Mexico is to tread untrodden paths.
Robles Dominguez, who is Madero's representative here, has been dashing about the streets on a big black horse accompanied by his followers, all wearing the national colors on their hats, promising in the name of Madero everything on earth to the people gathered at the various points where he speaks. In many places the tramcars leading to the different suburbs were taken possession of by the mob, who rode free, to carry the good news "from Ghent to Aix." The cars everywhere were simply plastered with them.
Señor de la Barra was sworn in as President of the republic in the afternoon. No anti-American riots, which were at one time feared, though the ambassador and his staff had the pleasant experience of being hissed as they went to the Cámara for the ceremony. From the little balcony of the drawing-room I could see De la Barra quite plainly as he came down the Paseo, bowing on all sides, grave, but amiable and dignified, in the presidential coach, and across his breast the green-and-white-and-red sash of his high office.
Glittering, blue-uniformed outriders with polished silver helmets preceded him, and the crowd was rending the air with "_Viva De la Barra!_" I saw De la Barra with my physical eye, but I was thinking of the great old Indian, the maker and molder of Mexico, who was wont to go down the broad avenue in that same coach to the sound of vivas, and wondering would they see his like again. I am sending you a post-card photograph of Maximilian in uniform, and Carlota in a blue dress with many pearls, which is not really so beside the point. Diaz helped to close that epoch. We now witness the closing of the Diaz epoch.[3]
_May 27th._
Though the mob turned into the tamest thing possible in mobs, and the revolution into the tamest thing possible in revolutions, I keep thinking how both did their work and how never again will Diaz drive up the beautiful Paseo, receiving the plaudits of the people. The town is busy preparing for the reception of Madero and for the elections. General Reyes is still feared by the new party. Madero said to one of our newspaper correspondents the other day that the only unfavorable thing in the Cabinet was the admission of General Reyes as Minister of War, and that the members of the Cabinet and governors of states would be selected later by himself and De la Barra. It looks as if in the apportioning out of the plums the first seeds of discord will be sown in the new political garden.
Yesterday we went motoring with Mr. S. and Dearing over the great, beautiful hills to the west. Something like Italy and yet not at all like it in the feeling of light and color. For the first time I looked down on the city from a great height, seemingly on a level with the hills that hold the cup-like valley, and I saw again in all their beauty the two shining volcanoes flanked by the matchless hills. There was an immense exhilaration in the fitting of the mind to such a remote and gorgeous horizon, and suddenly I found it did not matter if it were peopled or not; it seemed quite complete, even humanly. There was a wonderful lightness about the air. Little puffs that one could not call wind came and brushed our faces with a brilliant yet feathery feeling. The Ajusco hills with their suggestions of brigands (I have not been thinking much of brigands since the tales of Raisuli and Perducaris and Miss Annie Stone) gave a "human" touch to the whole.
In going out of the city we passed through Tacubaya, a very attractive suburb with handsome houses hidden in great gardens, and an old palace of some archbishop; but the most interesting thing about it was the Indian market, spread out on the steep, cobblestoned highway. There was just enough room for the motor to pass between the mats on which were spread their wares. Great piles of pottery, bright rolls of cotton, were laid on squares of cloth, or little mats made of rushes, and there were infinitesimal groupings of eatables of various kinds, little piles of five nuts, or three oranges, or little heaps of melon-seed, or beans.
Indians, picturesque beyond description, were bending, selling, buying, just as they have done since prehistoric days. It was the brightest bit of color I have ever seen, with the thread of Indian life that it was strung on. The Indians compose themselves into beautiful pictures everywhere, and further on the road was full of pottery-makers, bent beneath their huge loads, basket-makers, sandal-makers, women and children equally laden, going with their quick Aztec trot to their journey's end.
All was quiet in the little villages through which we passed. I wonder if they know something has happened to their Mexico?
_May 29th._
In the revolutionary lull we have all been vaccinated, and I have been looking into the drinking-water question quite exhaustively.
I felt rather discouraged when the doctor suggested boiling even the mineral water, _Tehuacan_, from a place near Orizaba. In general the microbe question keeps foreigners busy, and more alarmed if they have children than the sound of artillery. One has to learn to live here. The food leaves much to be desired, and if we were delicate or gourmets, there would be a great deal of difficulty ahead.
Friday Mr. and Mrs. Wilson and the Embassy staff come for dinner, the first time I will have had any one except those dropping in informally. I don't know how it will turn out. There is a nice American range in the kitchen, but the cook, it seems, prefers the classic _brasero_, and a turkey wing to fan the coals. It is not as primitive as it sounds, however, for the _brasero_ is a tiled affair and has holes on the top for saucepans. They say the American stove would make even the saints too hot. How they produce the nice roasts or bake with the thing is a mystery to me.
However, the whole cooking business is beyond me, though I have put an embargo on _riñones_ (kidneys). Every time there is a halt in remarks about the menu, Teresa suggests _riñones_, which I despise with my whole soul. I am not enthused by organs, anyway, as food. I would put an embargo on _cabrito_ (kid), but stewed it's objectively one of the best dishes she prepares, and I would eat it under another name. A certain _sopa de frijoles_ would be nice anywhere, and with slices of lemon and hard-boiled egg in it is really delicious, and recalls vaguely the thick mock-turtle soup of my native land. There is a "near" apricot, called _chabacano_, ripe at this season, but it's only "near," and there are quantities of small, fragrant strawberries.
At Hye de Glunek's I ate, for the first time, the very fine mango, in its perfection. The eating recalls stories of the original fountain-pen and the bath-tub, but the fruit is delicious, even the first time you eat it, with a slightly turpentiny, very clean taste, and cascades of juice. There is a way of sticking a single-pronged fork into one end, while you peel it with a knife, and then proceeding, which makes its consumption possible in public.
To-day we lunched with the British chargé in his temporary quarters, as the new Legation, which is going to be a delightful dwelling, built with some regard for latitude and longitude and altitude, is not yet ready for occupation. Hohler came to Mexico from Constantinople, and wherever he goes collects works of art. In his apartment were all sorts of quite beautiful, Oriental bric-à-brac and hangings, which, somehow, did not seem as Oriental here as they would in other places. Simon, the newly arrived French _Inspecteur des Finances_ of the Banco National, with a brilliant Balkan record behind him, was also there with his wife. They are "enjoying" the Hôtel de Genève, while awaiting the arrival of their Lares and Penates, stalled somewhere between Vera Cruz and Mexico City, and Madam S.'s maid is already down with typhoid fever.
Yesterday, when N. boarded the tram, a smartly dressed, handsome Frenchwoman had just got on with neither Mexican money nor vocabulary. He came to her assistance, and they felt quite like long-separated friends on discovering "who was who" at the luncheon. In the center of the table was a lovely silver bowl of old Mexican artisanship, filled with unfamiliar, theatrical-looking fruits. I compromised on a _granadita_, which is like a pomegranate in color and taste, but small and oblong in shape. Of course the "old hands" were trying to enlighten the new-comers, but it was rather the blind leading the blind. Nobody can tell what the gigantic political changes will lead to, or what this new wine of fraternity and equality, fermenting in the oldest of bottles, will do to their heads. A gentle joke as we got up from the table, about the pictures in last week's _Semana Ilustrada_ (showing insurrectos burning bridges), to the effect that the national sport might soon prove to be _la promenade_, if artless, was more to the point.
There is a good deal of talk here about something called the "Plan de San Luis Potosí," apparently the building stones of a new Mexico. It's the manifesto Madero made at that town in the early stages of his revolution, a rather personal and arbitrary political document, in which he declares himself the mouthpiece of the nation's will, and pronounces the last election of Don Porfirio illegal. It was, as far as I can see--which is not, of course, very far--like all his other "elections." Madero finished by saying that the republic being without a legitimate government, he assumes the provisional presidency. It's so simple it may succeed, and the Diaz government left a comfortable sum in the treasury to begin operations with, some sixty-five millions.
_May 31st._
The "official" family dinner went off all right, so I am having the ambassador and Mrs. Wilson, Von Hintze, Hye, the Austrian chargé, and De Vaux to dinner on Sunday--eight in all. This is the limit, not of the table and the dining-room, but possibly of the handmaidens. Leclerq, who is departing for Brussels and the Foreign Office, has given me the use, till I have made other arrangements, of his table-silver. I do, indeed, sigh for the silver and linen in Vienna.
Madame de la Barra receives the _Corps Diplomatique_ on Saturday afternoon. It will be her inaugural reception as first lady in the land, and, indeed, the first complete tableau of the _chers collègues_ that I will have seen since our arrival. I suppose I will get a glimpse, at least, of some of the up-to-now invisible Mexican statesmen.
Life goes on here quietly, as far as I am personally concerned, but underneath it all there is the unmistakable beat and throb of changing governments, the passing of the old order, the beginning of the new, with all its potentialities. It is a many-colored background. I am sending an illustrated paper of the shooting done by the mob in my street, _La Semana Ilustrada_, which is printed at the other end of Calle Humboldt, as is also _La Prensa_, a newspaper belonging to Francisco Bulnes, the cleverest of the publicists here, and a star among the intellectuals. I am between the making of history and its annals.
The _Courrier du Mexique_ and the _Mexican Herald_ I read daily. The _Courrier du Mexique et de l'Europe_ (_Ancien Trait d'Union_) was founded in 1849, and has survived many vicissitudes and many governments. Its files would make strange reading, with their succession of political hails and farewells--or rather farewells and hails.
Gabrielle is doing very well, though she is suffering from _Heimweh_ for Vienna. The Austrian chargé sends me accumulations of the _Neue Freie Presse_ to sweeten what she calls "diese Mexico." The Indian maids are almost too good to be true. There's a dusting and a sweeping going on that would satisfy a better housewife than myself.
I am quite in love with my street--it has so much for the eye, so much to intrigue the imagination. As I told you, just opposite is the Finance Ministry. Endless motors belonging to the old and new régime and the intermediate, the _Trait d'Union_ régime, fraternize in front of it. Diagonally across is the home of Diaz's son, Porfirio, who seems to have neither the talents nor the ambitions of his father. The house is a very Mexican-looking affair, though not after the good old models. It is a reddish pink, with superfluous cupolas and bay windows, all lined with pale blue. Great vines of the magenta-colored Bougainvillea, "the glory of Mexico," hanging everywhere, further enliven it. The tiny triangular garden also has various obstreperous and violent-colored botanical specimens.
A little farther down the street, however, is the real gem, for there I perceived, in passing, storied Spanish-American life being enacted. It's a low one-storied house with heavily grated windows, only a couple of feet up from the street. Behind that grating I actually saw a pink-robed señorita sitting, with a flower in her hair and a letter, which I knew must have been a love letter, in her hand, all just as it ought to be, as far as local color is concerned.
The other night, hearing the sound of music, I stepped out on the balcony. Behold! there were the outlines of some kind of Romeo playing the mandolin, in front of that window. It's so complete, so ridiculously like what it ought to be, you will think I have added something, but you don't have to add anything here; it's always all there. That end of the street is where the offices of _La Prensa_ and of _La Semana Ilustrada_ are, and the little newsboys (_papeleros_) bring things quite up to date when they dash past crying out new editions.
The other end of the street, which is short, gives on the Plaza de la Reforma, where the new, handsome Foreign Office is, and the beautiful equestrian statue of Charles the Fourth of Spain, which Humboldt said could only be compared to that of Marcus Aurelius on the Campidoglio. There are two or three handsome houses belonging to Mexicans between me and the Plaza. The Suinagás', whose daughter is married to a French diplomat, and the Saldivars', next the Finance Ministry, are other houses in the good old style of several generations ago. In former days the streets were familiarly spoken of as _calles de Dios_ (streets of God); pious, picturesque, but probably not resembling those of our eternal abiding-place!
[3] I had three glimpses of the "King in Exile." First in Rome, the Easter Sunday of 1913, after the Madero tragedy. As I went across the Piazza Barberini I saw flying from the middle window of the _piano nobile_ of the Hotel Bristol, the Mexican colors, floating there by what strange chance, the eagle holding in its claws the antique serpent against the green, white, and red. As I went up the stairway there were numberless and unmistakable Mexicans on the landings, and several priests were waiting in the antechamber.
Doña Carmen came in almost immediately with the "grand air" I had heard about, handsome and composed, a veritable queen in exile. She was dressed with extreme elegance and simplicity, in a perfectly plain, dark-blue gown; around her throat was a pearl necklace. After the greetings she seated me on the gaudy, gold-and-blue sofa, and took her place beside me. Once or twice her eyes filled as we spoke of Mexico, but mostly there was a remote look in them.
When Don Porfirio entered the room I knew him for a leader of men. _Anno Domini_ had weakened his will, perhaps, but had not bowed his proud figure nor dulled the piercing look in his eye, which I remember as hazel with a very large, light iris, the pupil dark and fiery. We could not but speak of the Madero tragedy, Don Porfirio talking in Spanish, I in French. I found myself slightly trembling. He repeated several times, "I foresaw it all--my method was the only one," and once he added, "How shall one judge men other than by results?" I saw in his eye that same remoteness which I think an observer would have found in mine also; for instead of the gaudy hotel room I saw Chapultepec high up, swung in a strange transparency and Don Porfirio's destiny blocked out against it.
In Paris, that same summer of 1913, at the Hotel Astoria, I witnessed another _étape_ of the painful, unfit Odyssey from hotel to hotel. The antechamber was filled with their luggage, plastered with endless hotel tabs. Don Porfirio's mien was not quite so majestic, his heart was more broken, his hope less, his years seemed heavier, and they were uncertain where next to turn their steps, to San Sebastian or to some "cure" in Switzerland.
On my way back to Mexico on the _Espagne_, September, 1913, I was sitting idly watching the Spanish shores off Santander. There were some Syrians on board suspected of _quién sabe_ what disease, and we were not allowed to go ashore to visit the old town. About four o'clock a small launch was seen approaching. In it were Don Porfirio and Doña Carmen and Don Porfirio's daughter, Doña Amada (Madame de la Torre), whom they were bringing to the ship, which was crowded with returning Mexicans, anticipating the pacification of the country by Huerta. At the news that the "grand old man" was in the launch there was a rush for the railing. Don Porfirio could not come on board on account of the quarantine. It was a tragic moment when he took his daughter in his arms, and many eyes filled with tears as she tore herself from him and came hurriedly up the gangway. Farewells were waved as the launch turned toward the land. Don Porfirio, upright, majestic, motionless, had his eyes fixed on the ship with its prow toward Mexico. Who would, if he could, have searched his heart or said of what he was thinking, the old, the illustrious, the once powerful, in "the fell clutch of circumstance"?
As long as I live his figure will be to me the sign and symbol of nostalgia, as he stood in the small launch, his head bared under the brilliant sky, the bright spot of his red necktie accenting the whiteness of his hair, watching with longing eyes the ship turned toward the land which had given him birth, and which he in return had made great and honorable among nations.
IV
First reception at Chapultepec Castle--First bull-fight--A typical Mexican earthquake--Madero's triumphal march through Mexico City--Three days of adoration
_June 4th._
Yesterday we went to the De la Barras' first reception, a tea neither formal nor informal, at beautiful Chapultepec, lifted high up on the historic hill overlooking the city and the beauteous valley, in its gorgeous setting of mountains and volcanoes.
There is a pretty grotto-like modern entrance at the foot of the hill which takes visitors to the elevator, a shaft pierced in the rock, and from the darkness one steps suddenly on to the enchantment of the terraces with their matchless view. There is a winding road which takes longer, ending at the great iron gateway of the military school, and one must cross the broad terrace, where the cadets are walking about or drilling.
Madame de la Barra, herself a widow, the sister of the President's first wife, has only been married a few months, and is smiling, fair, and un-Mexican-looking, of Swiss descent. She was daintily dressed in some sort of beige chiffon with pearls about her neck, and had easy, pleasant manners.
There was no chance for conversation. The whole Diaz set, with very few exceptions, has vanished, not into thin air, but into retirement or Europe, and society will have to be reorganized from new elements. These new elements did not seem at first view to be very malleable. A circle of iron, in the shape of ladies--old, middle-aged, and young--kept formed about Madame de la B., and I was wedged in, for quite a while, between a granddaughter of Juarez wearing, among other things, a huge and, it appears, historic emerald pendant, and a young, inquiring-looking woman. I mean inquiring for these climes, where external phenomena only remotely give rise to speculation. She was in a décolleté mauve passementerie-trimmed gown, with a train--what we would call an evening dress. The experienced foreign diplomats mostly kept outside the circle.
Mr. de la B. was moving about the beautiful flower-planted terraces, smiling, suave, _homme du monde_, as well as President of Mexico, but the skein from which he is to knit the national destinies is somewhat tangled. He and Mr. Wilson were colleagues in Brussels. Now the turn of the wheel has made him President, and Mr. Wilson ambassador.
Some of the well-seasoned foreigners were predicting immediate difficulties in the disbanding of the revolutionary forces, which seem to be composed of those who don't want to be disbanded, those who want to be disbanded immediately, and those who want to be ban_dits_.
I must say I found it all very interesting--a little gem of a picture of life in Mexico. As a sudden darkness rose up from the valley, rather than fell from the sky, one of the volcanoes gone suddenly blue, the other still aflame, the gathering melted away.
_June 6th._
Yesterday, Pentecost Sunday, I went to Mass in the cathedral where Maximilian and Carlota were crowned, and Iturbide and his consort. It is a large, ornate structure, though the lowish roof, earthquake height, I suppose, takes away from the effect of the interior. Three huge altars and a choir also combine to spoil the perspective, but it is imposing and the outside is a lovely grayish pink. It is built on the site of the great Aztec temple, over countless images and remains of the _teocali_ (temple), which the conquerors demolished as soon as they got their breath, after the taking of the city.
I found it full of a multicolored crowd. The Indians were most in evidence, but there were all sorts and conditions of people. Despite what is said to the contrary, the Church has an enormous influence on life here--on institutions, habits, and customs. The convents, monasteries, and seminaries were suppressed in 1859, and no one since has been allowed to leave money or property to the Church by will, but here as elsewhere there is no way to prevent the Church from getting rich. With a constantly renewing collection of individuals having no personal wants, concerned largely with the promises of another life, the aggregate of their activities through the ages will always be enormous in the way of mathematical progression; and I don't see in a free world why they haven't as much right to spend their money and energies that way as in the usual spending for personal and mundane aims.