Part 12

Malbran, whom he had referred to as “our conservative friend!” had become interested, and towards the end he ceased to be interpreter and joined in the discussion.

I thought of all the people in all the rooms who were patiently and impatiently waiting to see their Minister of Finance, who was engaged in Socialist arguments with this strange party! At the end, I said I felt I had drunk deep of clear pure water! and he said chivalrously that it had been a great pleasure to him to have opportunity of once in awhile “letting himself go....”

He repeated his promise about fetching me Thursday, to see.... He did not precisely define _what_.

We got down into the street, and found the car, and drove away with a strange sense of excitement and stimulation, at least I did, and as for Malbran, who had been rather silent on our way there, he was now quite expansive. We talked animatedly all the way back to the Geneva Hotel, where he dropped me. We discussed the psychology of de la Huerta, I said I would hate to be disillusioned, but that my instinct told me the man had all the passion and the sincerity of the Russians I had known in Moscow. We agreed that if de la Huerta had been imprisoned for years by a Czarist regime, he would be as fanatical and as ready to give his life for the cause, as volcanic and ruthless as any of the Russian Revolutionaries. Of the few people I have met so far in Mexico, de la Huerta is by far the most interesting.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 1921. _Mexico City._

When I returned from riding at midday, it was to find Pani’s car waiting for me, and the information that four times people had called to take me to the “Haripeyo” that was taking place at the bull ring since 11 o’clock. I hurriedly changed my clothes, cursing fate, that I had not been told of this in time. Arrived there I was welcomed by Pani, and Malbran. There were quite a lot of people, but I didn’t know who they were. I regretted not having had the chance of asking my friends. In the ring there were about a dozen men on horseback, and one of them I recognized as my friend Guadalupe. He looked extremely picturesque in his leather clothes and huge brimmed white hat embroidered in gold. The game seemed to be to chase a wild horse and lassoo it. Dick was wildly excited. He shouted: “That’s good!” at the top of his voice when the pony was violently thrown to the ground. It may have been a wild horse, but a tame horse fed on oats is wilder. This animal looked unkempt, moth-eaten, and dazed, I suppose from fright. It must be a rotten game for the horse, to be tripped up when he’s galloping full speed. They would lassoo his front legs together and then his back legs so that the animal lay on the ground helpless, then a man would straddle it, and the horse would rise to his feet with the man on his back. They did the same with a bull, having previously pursued it, caught it by the tail, given the tail a twist round the man’s leg, which just threw the galloping bull with a thud to the ground. Almost the best feat was performed by a rider who pursued the wild horse, caught it by the mane and jumped from his own horse on the back of the wild one, as they galloped side by side. They are wonderful riders these Mexicans. They can sit anything and cannot be shaken off! But I would like to see them on a powerful big horse with an English saddle.

Dick and I spent the afternoon in the garden of the American Embassy. There is a little round clear blue-tiled pond full of goldfish, and Dick paddled and played and was completely happy. I asked Mr. Summerlin for news, as I get nothing to read but the MEXICAN POST. But he was full of mystery and told me nothing about anything. When people get a suspicion that one may be writing, they became terribly secretive. I remember a time when I used to hear state secrets, and people used to talk about things in front of me as if I were perfectly idiotic and negligible.

Today I asked Mr. Summerlin: “Is recognition any nearer...?” He shrugged his shoulders in true diplomatic fashion--it told me nothing. That he was very busy and finally called away on urgent matters, was all I learnt. We might be on the eve of war for all I know! The people one meets are supremely indifferent to everything. The newspapers record certain rebellions in various parts, no one even reads them. Even the Tampico Oil ‘hold up’ is now a thing of the past, the papers hardly mention it at all, nor the oil wells that are on fire; it is as if the Mexican nation was so blasé with excitements that nothing any longer can stir their interest.

THURSDAY, JULY 28, 1921. _Mexico City._

Punctually at 3 o’clock, and true to his word, de la Huerta fetched me in his car. Mr. Malbran was of the party, and as also Mr. Rubio, the good-looking young man who interprets for him. To my great joy he told the chauffeur to drive to El Disirto. It is one of the places I want to see. If the expedition was meant to show me the poverty of Mexico, one did not have to go far, the outskirts of the town are as sordid, dirty, and miserable as can be. But out in the open road, (and a beautiful road it was) we met almost a procession of Indians, one behind the other, walking into the town with their loads. These loads consist chiefly of terra-cotta pots and cooking utensils, piled up, in and around a wooden case, the whole weight of which is carried by a strap round the forehead. Thus, barefooted and bent double, heads straining forward against the weight, muscles of their necks swollen, lips sometimes blue, and bulging eyes focussed on the ground immediately in front, the Indian man, woman and boy will walk twelve kilometres. De la Huerta, pointing to some Indians on burros, said: “Those are the privileged classes.”

“How are you going to better the conditions of these people?” I asked....

“Caramba!” he exclaimed with a gesture of perplexity, and this needed no interpretation.

“What is your motive in showing me ‘La misere’ of Mexico...?”

He said: “Your bourgeois friends have shown you what they had to show,” and he referred laughingly to yesterday’s Haripeyo and the description in the newspapers of the smart people present. “Each of us shows you his own side...”. He went on to tell me that in olden days, the poverty and distress was hidden from visitors as much as possible, but that times had changed, and to-day everything was open for anyone who wished to investigate. “It is good that foreigners should see what we made our Revolution for.” I was a little bit perplexed, and remarked: “But how has it helped, if the people are still in this condition?”

He explained that things were slowly progressing, that the development was from the coast towards the centre, he said proudly, that the State of Sonora, of which he is Governor (elected by a tremendous majority) has no such conditions, and he expressed the desire that I might see his State--“But these people” and he waved towards the patient procession, remarking as he did so upon the expression of suffering in their faces--“these people are better off even than they were. In the days of Porfirio Diaz they worked as they are worked today, but they worked for an employer. They were whipped to work. They were slaves. They had even to marry according to their employers’ selection. Today they are doing the work for themselves, they do it of free choice, and whatever small gain they make, it is theirs.”

I quoted what a friend had told me, that the Indians would rather sell bananas in the gutter, than own a bit of land and have to cultivate it. De la Huerta’s face took a savage expression: “Try and take away a piece of land from the Indian who owns it and see what happens ...” he said.

Under the thirty years peaceful reign of Porfirio Diaz, a handful of people prospered, a propertied class and a rich leisured class sprang up, “But the working people were as you see them here on the road. Are you surprised they rose in revolt?”

I told him that Russia seemed to be concentrating all her propaganda on the next generation, and that the obsession of the moment was education. De la Huerta said in reply, that after he became Governor of Sonora, he increased the schools from eighty to four hundred and twenty-seven in one year. The man is evidently full of ideas and ideals, but he has not a free hand. He referred to the criticism of the world, and said it was necessary to show what effort and what aims there were. I told him that what was far more convincing than seeing conditions was meeting people. Of himself, for instance, I had heard great criticism, from a certain class. But it was only necessary to meet him to see that he was a sincere idealist, and not in the least as the world described him. De la Huerta turned to the mobile-faced Malbran, and said: “There! Let your diplomatic mind take in all this....” I said laughingly, that I thought the Argentine Minister would make a very excellent Ambassador to Russia, when his time was up in Mexico, but the others said his initiation had only just begun, and he would not be ready for quite a while!

El Desirto is round a corner, at the top of a mountain. The mountain is covered with trees, and profuse vegetation. Our car climbed and zig-zagged and encircled. On our left was a precipice. On our right a steep straight bank. We were within half a mile of Desirto, when it suddenly began to pour rain, thunder and lightning and hail, as it only can in the mountains. De la Huerta ordered that the car should turn round and go back. He said it would be dangerous to attempt the remainder of that half mile in the rain. I was terribly disappointed at not getting there and thought him unnecessarily fussy, and alarmist, but ... trust these people to know their own country! In less than five minutes, what had been a perfectly smooth, good, dusty road, suddenly became greasy and sticky, so that our car skidded crabwise down the hill. Seeing a precipice on one side, and a car not under control was alarming in the extreme. Behind us came a Ford, and it also slid drunkenly down the road, and I felt that no brakes would be able to stop it bumping us. Mercifully for us it went sideways into the ditch, and mercifully for them it was not the precipice side! We stopped and put chains on round our wheels,--it took time. De la Huerta was perfectly calm and philosophical but apologetic, he said this addition from above was _not_ part of his programme!

Even with chains our car too went into the ditch, and as by this time the rain had slackened, I was delighted to get out and walk, but the road was so slippery that even arm in arm, the Minister and I could hardly stand up. I picked a variety of wild flowers, and watched de la Huerta surrounded by clamoring Indians who wanted pesos for having helped the car out of the ditch--it was rather an attractive scene, and he really does love his Indians! I say “his” Indians, because he has Indian blood in his veins, but he told me also that his grandfather was a Spaniard from Granada and his mother was the daughter of a Polish Jew, born in France. It is a glorious mix-up.

I asked him if it would be possible for me to stop and see Villa on my way to California, and if so would he give me a letter of introduction. De la Huerta laughed, he said it would be quite possible and that with a letter from him I would be quite safe.... (Safe--from what?) I told him I mean to leave in about ten days. “Yes,” he said, “if the Mexican government allows you to go!” I told him about the Mexican Consul in New York hesitating to visé my passport, because Mexico did not want any Bolsheviks, and I said how surprised I had felt at Mexico suddenly becoming so respectable.

“Do you consider a conservative attitude respectable?” he asked, adding: “I call respectability having a sincere and independent opinion, and having the courage to acknowledge it....” Then with a sudden impulse he plucked at a scarlet flower in my hand, one that I had gathered among the rocks, and half audibly, more to himself than to me, he said: “That represents the life blood of these toiling people....”

Later, when we neared home, he remarked: “Ah! if we could only work at ease, without the shadow of that spectre in the North....”

We agreed that no country could independently work out its salvation, except Russia, who was not overshadowed. We had got back to Mexico City, and I was nearing my ‘home’ when suddenly he asked: “What is your impression of Trotzky...? I told him I had compromised myself on two continents shouting his praises!

“And Lenin...?”

I told him. Then came this astonishing final question:

“Is Trotzky a good man?”

“From what point of view good?”

“Morally....”

I could not embark at this last moment upon a discussion of what are morals through an interpreter. I thought. I hesitated. I wondered, as I never had wondered before, about Trotzky, and then I admitted that so far as I knew, Trotzky was a moral man!

FRIDAY, JULY 29, 1921. _Mexico City._

This evening José Vasconselos came to see me and we talked for nearly two hours. He is head of the Department of Education. I am told he is one of the most brilliant and most promising men of Mexico. I felt that a talk with him would do much to help me to understand what the present Government is aiming at, and what effort is being made for the future of Mexico. I tackled him at once very frankly about his education system. I said to him: “The bourgeois tell me that you have caused to be printed 20,000 copies of Shakespeare and Homer for illiterate Indians, who can neither read nor write.”

This criticism was no news to him, he proceeded to explain to me that these classics were for the town libraries, and there were 10,000 towns. “What would you put in the libraries?” he asked--“What would you have the people read as soon as they can read?” He said that he was basing his system on the Carnegie System, and that during one of the former Revolutions when he was an exile, he lived at San Antonio, Texas. There he went into the Public Library and borrowed an edition of Plato. Every book that is loaned is inscribed with the name and date of the person to whom it is loaned. “In one year, that volume of Plato had been loaned to thirty people, and that was San Antonio, a community of cowboys.”

He explained to me his great difficulty in getting enough books for the 10,000 libraries. He said that if he wrote to Madrid for 10,000 volumes of Don Quixote, they could only supply him with 500. So he must get them printed himself. He promised me a complete set of the standard library works. This had nothing to do with the elementary books distributed to the schools. He said he would like me to see, in some of the little towns how keen the Indian parents are on education for their children.

“When the next generation are educated--then will evolve the real Socialist State!” he said.

He referred to the reign of Porfirio Diaz as having accomplished nothing for the education of the masses. His ideas about social reform are Spartacist, he quoted Liebknecht and said that he favored the plan of limited fortunes, rather than communism, as the one seemed to him to kill initiative, and he did not like the idea of being a slave to the State. The only class he really despised was the bourgeois, “people who eat three meals a day, how can their brains work--?” People who assume an attitude of culture, but who never open a book, certainly not a classic. How dared they attempt to criticize! “The only thing in their favor in this country is that at least they don’t have any part in the affairs of the government!”

Vasconselos is a queer personality, mixture of Spanish and Mexican, yet he said he cared nothing for the civilization of the Occident, he understood better the Orient, and followed in the train of Tagore, whom he talked of with great admiration. I asked him whether on the whole he was satisfied with the way things were shaping for Mexico, and he said he was certainly satisfied. That in his opinion revolutions were a thing of the past, there were a stirring and an awakening all through the land.

We discussed literature, art, social reforms, education of children, Russian evolution, the compromises of Lenin, the activities of Trotzky, the prejudices, the ignorances, the indifferences of the bourgeois, the national spirit of Mexico, the planet we live in and the ineptitude of humans to adapt themselves to it. He said he felt it was almost a crime to put children into the world: “If they are stupid, indifferent and incapable of thought they are little better than the brutes, if they are intellectuals and have any ideas and ideals at all, then they suffer unendurably--No, this world, even with its mountains and its lakes and its vegetation, it is no place for humans...!”

SATURDAY, JULY 30, 1921. _Puebla._

We left Mexico City by the 5 P.M. train for Puebla. The train was full and the first class compartment resembled a dirty tramcar. (I qualify the tram car, because there are tramcars that are clean, but this was not.) A wedding party came to see off a honeymoon couple. They were a quiet and completely self-absorbed pair. I watched them rather unmercifully. It took us five hours to get to Puebla. Long before that time, the bride-groom, so smartly attired in frock coat, varnished button boots, and cloth cap, wearied of his collar and deposited it like a crown on his bride’s knees. He seemed happier so, and looked much more himself with a handkerchief round his neck. Towards the end of the journey, he seemed very impatient. Behind Dick and me sat a large cigar smoking man, who in a foreign accent asked if we were English. He was from Manchester, and had lived in Mexico 26 years! He told us what hotel to go at Puebla, (we had reserved no rooms). He insisted on buying lemonade and chicken for us at the wayside station. Finally he took possession of our luggage and said he would himself take us to our hotel in his car.

He was met on the platform by his son, and in his car sat his wife and his daughter. I tried to back out discreetly and take a taxi, but they were all very insistent, and kind. Finally, one hotel being full, he found us rooms in the second. I asked him his name. He was the British Vice Consul.

JULY 31, 1921.

Dick, who was sleeping with me, had an attack of croup so that I was awake most of the night. At dawn I was awakened by bugles of a regiment riding into town, besides the clanging of church bells, and the crowing of cocks! Shortly after that we got up.

Dick insisted on looking up some of his “ship friends” who live in the town. We found them, and left him in their back garden playing in their water tank. It was a great chance to see some of the churches, and drive round the town, and do the things that bore Dick.

The town is overburdened with churches, but their exteriors are so decorative that one is glad they exist. The domes are tiled, either with blue and white or yellow. They glisten in the sun like enamel. I went into one called “Of the Company” and happened upon a service with a cardinal. At least, I suppose he was a cardinal. He was dressed in the color of that name. This crimson melodramatic figure seemed to me emblematical of the inquisitorial Church of Spain. Sitting all over the floor were Indian women with their babies, and when the organ subsided, there was a real baby chorus.

The church entrances are the congregating places (as in Italy) of the most wretched beggars. I could not help wondering why a man with no legs submits to living his remaining life on a plank with four wheels; why old age with its skin wizened like a walnut can bear the degradation of extreme filth, and of asking charity on bended knee; and why a blind individual can roll sightless grey orbs and fix them on me while so doing. Why don’t they end life? Why is it endurable? But almost worse in my estimation, was the woman who passed me by, bent double by an enormous load on her back, and dragged down by a baby tied in a bundle to her breast. Must she bear both those burdens?

At midday, there was supposed to be a “battle of flowers.” I have seen the real thing on the Riviera, where the national temperament is joyous. But can people here have a real spontaneous out-burst, when the big sad-eyed Indian stands at the street corner, gaping and incapable of throwing off the melancholy of generations? A few dressed-up cars appeared, but there was no profuse flower throwing. Perhaps, like me, the Pueblans were economizing. Anyway, it was so dull and half-hearted that we took a train to San Francisco.

This is a church and garden on the outskirts of the city. Soon we rambled on, up and up, to a hill summit, from which one viewed the city in the plain, and Popocatapetl with its snow peak, emerging through a bank of cloud. It was beautiful on our hilltop, wild, deserted, peaceful, and the persistent Church bells came to us distantly. We had been told by Dick’s “ship friends,” that it was not possible to go outside the town without a man, and so we had Dick. He found a dew pond, and was perfectly happy.

Puebla is an old town built by the Spaniards. It is more Mexican than Mexico City. There are more sombrero’d people and more flocks of laden burros, and more houses with little “patios,” than in Mexico. The shops are more attractive because they contain Mexican things, instead of, as in Mexico City, inferior foreign goods, in a desire to be cosmopolitan. There are more old tiled houses in Puebla. Fewer people speak English. No one in the hotel understands anything. This evening Louise tried to explain to a group of five that we wanted mineral water. They did not understand until she made a noise of a bottle exploding.

MONDAY, AUGUST 1, 1921. _Puebla._

We caught a 10 o’clock train to Cholula. It was terribly crowded, but we managed to get a front seat in the second car.

Halfway along the line, the front car ran off the track. It took at least an hour and a half hard work on the part of a crowd of Indians, to get it back again. They all looked so clean in their white linen pajama suits (they look like this) tied round the waist with a faded and fringed blue or red sash, and the absurdly big sombrero hat, and bare feet. One wonders how a working man can wear white, it seems so impractical, and yet these men looked cleaner than Dick when he is in white, at the end of a day! How can they dig as they do, with naked feet on the iron spade?

We sat down on the grass in a broiling sun and watched their efforts to reinstate the car. Presently, on his private trolley, arrived the “traffic superintendent,” a young stalwart American, who threw off his coat, displaying a khaki shirt and a large revolver in his belt. There was no mistaking him for anything but an American. He was the rather brutal, square-jaw’ed type. He contained in his face everything that the Latin and the Indian lacked: force, determination, power to command. Moreover, he was broad-shouldered and a head taller than anyone else. When he lifted a crowbar and attempted to do any work himself, the Indians fell back and watched him openmouthed! I said things to myself about the Anglo-Saxon race.