Part 14

When we got to the Castle it was very difficult to make anyone understand that I wasn’t a tourist, and that I had an appointment to see the President. One of them argued with me that what was the use, the President couldn’t speak English, and I couldn’t speak Spanish. I wrote my name on a piece of paper and gestured to him to “take it”--which he finally did, without further protest. We were then asked to follow upstairs, and were shown into the reception room that is entered from the roof garden. We waited and waited, and meanwhile Dick, who had heard about the President having lost an arm plied me with questions about war. Was war a thing that we had always with us, and would he go to it when he grew up? I found it extremely difficult to tell.

Finally Obregon came in, very pleasantly and smilingly, but we couldn’t talk, only a few words such as concerned Dick’s age. I said he was five, because I didn’t know what six was in Spanish. I understood he was expecting an interpreter, but no interpreter came, although we wasted three quarters of an hour, during which time he was in and out of the room, restless and expectant. The children came in, Alvaro and Alvarada, aged two and four, and when the President left the room, Dick and the boy, who had eyed each other silently, began to turn summersaults. Alvaro did it first, and then the damask sofa cushions went on to the floor, and when the President returned the children were standing on their heads, and coming down onto the parquet floor with a thud of heels. He laughed heartily. I then went out onto the freezingly cold roof terrace to see if that interpreter was coming--instead, I beheld Pani, smiling as usual. I was glad to see him ... I told him our plight and how difficult it was ... Pani however had come on business, and he and the President were closeted for some time. When he came out, we all went down stairs to the front door, piled into a car, were driven a few paces through the pouring rain across the courtyard, to another door. Here he went down a spiral stair, it was very mysterious and quaint--it led to the living apartments of the Obregons. The rooms were smaller and it certainly was more habitable. Madame Obregon met us at the foot of the stairs. She is one of those simple pretty young Mexican women, grown fat prematurely (though in this case, as an infant is due in October, there is some excuse ...) a woman devoted to her husband and her children and her home. She told me she had three children already, two, three and four years old. She asked about mine, and I told her and we discussed Dick--food and internal ailments. She talks American-English very well. We sat in a small room. It had a table in the middle and chairs all around. In the middle of the table was a silver flute-shaped vase of flowers on a Mexican flag “doyley”.... On the floor, in between the chairs, were large spittoons, quite useful for cigarette ends. Dick dropped his cake into one and roared with laughter. The little two year old girl sat down in her little baby arm chair and was given milk out of a baby’s bottle. I asked Mrs. Obregon if she wanted a boy or a girl. She wanted a girl, but her husband she said wanted another boy. He did not like girls, they had such a hard time in the world he said.

I thought of Mexican girls, and agreed--yet if the girl is born across the border of American citizenship, how different. How near and yet how far is emancipation for the Mexican girl.

I was at the castle an hour and a half altogether. The President had the use of Pani, or of his wife as interpreters if he wished. But he said nothing interesting, and asked nothing. I have an explanation for this in my own mind: In Mexico it is not easy for a woman to be taken seriously. In England, in the States and especially in Russia (where among the Intellectuals woman is on a perfect equality with men) it is natural that clever men should think it worth while to talk to a woman on subjects of mutual interest. But in Mexico woman is on such a different plane. I am told for instance that a “feminist movement” exists, but consists barely of 50 women! For the rest, they are the very carefully guarded mothers of families, and utterly submissive in spirit. I shall never forget the way Madame Pani asked me, the day I lunched there: “Are you here in our country all alone...?” Who in the world did she think I would be with...?

TUESDAY, AUGUST 9, 1921.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10, 1921.

Two days, one night and a half night getting from Mexico to Tampico. We had a “salon” and so were not too uncomfortable. Personally I rather enjoy the incident of travel and in Mexico one usually does not travel without adventure. Usually one derails. On this occasion we just stopped (with a great jerk) for a couple of hours because our engine’s piston-rod broke. It was a bleak and dusty place where maize grew and not much fun. We next stopped because an oil box was on fire, but that did not delay us greatly, finally we stopped two more hours because the train in front had derailed. We walked up the line to see what had happened, the engine was back on the rails, and a good many Indians were at work mending the track. I looked at the lines with an ignorant unprofessional eye, and then I asked questions ...: Should the wooden sleepers be rotten and splitting? Should the screws be entirely missing where two lines were riveted together? Should “pins” stick up half an inch? and then I watched the efforts of four men at the “points” trying to close the lines. They pulled at levers, and finally hammered the line into place! This Railway is owned by American shareholders, and the Mexican Government has not given it back yet, because it cannot pay the damages for the deterioration it has suffered at their hands. Meanwhile it deteriorates more every day, and I suppose each train that passes renders the track more dangerous than the last. During this interval, Dick, who found a pool in a ditch went into bathe. It was a muddy pool where cattle drink. Dick took off all his clothes and swam in it. Afterwards the sun quickly dried him and on our way back to the train we called on an Indian lady who stood at her home door. She was old. Her home was made transparently of irregular bamboo sticks, oddments of dried palmleaf and some sacking. The roof was thatched, the floor was mud. Two planks, raised each on four wooden poles with a piece of matting on the top were the beds for herself and her husband. A primitive cooker, some terra-cotta cooking utensils, and “Our Lady of Guadalupe” in one corner, were the entire contents. Whatever money they earned they spent neither on clothes nor house. Perhaps it went entirely on food. I have seen worse in Ireland. But in a country where the climate is kind (we were some considerable distance from Mexico City) a thatched roof is almost all one needs. Life under those conditions offers little, but demands less. From this place the train went rapidly down hill, winding back and forth round the mountain sides. We were in the rear coach and could see our engine going round hairpin curves, and disappearing into tunnels! The views, which were a mix up of Switzerland and Italy, excelled both. The most beautiful I’ve ever seen. Too beautiful to take in. One felt humbled and awed. At one place, as the train came round the bend of a mountain, we came in sight of a river that cascaded for about half a mile into the valley below. I exclaimed: “Why can’t one live in the beautiful spots of the Earth, instead of seeing them as one passes by?” And I decided that I would not, if I could help it, leave Mexico until I had managed somehow to return to this place to live for a month, however primitively, if it were possible to arrange it.

At all the stations where we stopped there was the ever present crowd of vendors offering excellent cold chicken, hard boiled eggs, hot fried potatoes, cakes and breads of every description, of all kinds of fruits, for almost nothing,--coffee, pulque, lemonade and beer to drink. At some of the mining stations one could buy small polished opals for a peso each (if one bargained) carved and colored walking sticks, Indian made toys and doll’s furniture. Baskets of good shape woven with colors that were a real temptation! Blind beggars played music and sang songs. At one station, a blind boy with a harp was led around by his mother (a grey-haired Indian woman of great dignity of countenance) he played and sang about 500 verses of the Peons ballad to Villa! Towards the end we all knew the chorus well enough to join in, and the train finally unable to wait any longer steamed away, leaving him still monotonously singing the ballad to Villa!

When the train stopped out in the wild country side, the track was alive with myriad butterflies of every size and color, especially brimstone ones. It looked like an allegorical picture of Spring.

We arrived in Tampico about two A.M. on the second night.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 11, 1921. _Tampico._

When I came down to breakfast in the morning, I did not recognize the quiet empty Hotel that I had entered in the small hours of the night. The hall was thronged with white suited, sombrero’d men, gun on hip. They were every type and age. There was not a single woman in the crowd. I thought I had dropped into a film play. Looking out into the sunlit streets small buildings met my gaze, an open fronted restaurant opposite, and barber shops full of men reclining in dental chairs at the mercy seemingly of someone engaged in cutting their throats. Dick asked me nervously, “What are they doing to that poor man...?” and I explained they would do it to him some day. Everything seemed open to the street. It was hot, divinely hot. Sitting still in the shade with no exertion, one had to mop one’s forehead. For the first time in my life I am comfortably warm, and Dick half clad, and protesting against the condition of his body has nevertheless recovered his color, his appetite, and his mischievous eye. In the evening we took a tram (overcrowded with a motley collection of workers) to a place half an hour away, called “Miramar.” Here Dick and Louise bathed in the surf. I felt I had been very superior (instead of lazy) for looking on, when they came out black with the oil which floats on the water. They had to take gasoline shower at the bath house to get clean! The sunset sky was very lovely, but the little wavelets that break on the beach, instead of being ripples of foam, were heavy dark and sluggish.

I have said that everything is open to the street: I include at night a quarter of the town where ladies sit outside their open lit up doorways, displaying a big bedded small room inside. These houses are almost standardised, varying only in the manner of their lights. Some preferring pink, to the cruder unshaded electric globe. From within the dancing saloons came the sound of music. Ladies fanned themselves at the door. Some had black hair and faces powdered ashen white. But the prevalent taste seemed for auburn hair, some color, and a bright pink dress. One or two in night attire were completely and transparently silhouetted in their doorways. The streets in this district being thronged, there is perfect traffic superintendence, and the tramcar has its terminus in this very midst. Everything in this respect being made easy for the tourist.

From the first moment I felt Tampico is a town for men.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 12, 1921. _Tampico._

We started off in the morning in our riding clothes for a two days’ trip across the oil fields. There is no railway, and one might almost say there are no roads to take one over the 80 kilometers to the little “boom oil town” of Zacamixtle where the oil wells are.

Happily it was dry and hot when we started off, passing first of all through the camps and tanks of the Huesteca Oil Company, which is Doheny’s. Wherever the Huasteca has oil stations the roads in that vicinity are good, and the houses of the engineers and employees are well built and nicely situated, lawned and planted, in strong contrast to the surrounding jungle, and the Indian grass huts and their squalor.

Every twenty kilometers along the way, there is a camp, most of these are built by the Foundation Company, a firm that builds railways, that lays pipelines, or restores Cathedrals. There seems to be in fact no building job in the world that the Foundation Company does not take on!

At these camps there are steam heated coils to heat the oil and thin it so that it passes more readily through the pipe line and gigantic pumps to urge it along its course. All of which was a great surprise to me, as I thought the oil flowed by gravity from the wells to the tank ships! Our road displayed at intervals rows of pipes of various sizes, mostly belonging to separate companies, and the spirit of competition was in the atmosphere even of the jungle. Here and there where a pipe had leaked, a black oil pool had oozed through to the surface. In places, such a leakage had rotted the road and made it impassable, so that one had to drive in a detour through the shrub. We went through every kind of scenery, but the woods, of which there were miles and miles, were luxuriantly tropical. I never saw such a variety of flowers, and bush. There were gnarled tall trees on the stems of which scarlet orchids had seeded themselves, and from the branches of which dry grey moss hung down in long festoons. This moss is a particular industry for the peasants, who use it to stuff their mattresses. We lunched at Camp 80, in a wooden mosquito-protected building, where the primitive, hardworking Americans gave of their hospitality. The roads having been indescribable, and the car ill sprung, the day sweltering hot, we were tired and hungry. Dick humiliated me by complaining loudly that the omelette was only “skin” and had no inside. It certainly was not the omelette of a French chef, and I was surprised that Dick knew what an omelette should be like. He is shaping into the proverbial Englishman, who cares what he eats. After lunch I gave him a lecture on manners, and on the art of accepting hospitality, threatening as I did so not to take him with me on my next trip to Russia!

At 4:30 we dined, washed and rested before pushing onto Zacamixtle. This bit of the trip in the dark was the roughest of all. The roads were worse and wet. We got stuck in a village street, the mud being above the axle, and up hill. We had to be pulled out by another car.

For miles one could see the flaring sky and one expected to come upon the wells at the crest of each hill, yet ever there seemed to be another hill between us and the lighted sky. Finally, at a bend in the road, we came upon the full glory of it. Great flares 10 or 12 feet high rising from standards, where they have burned day and night for years. This being the method of disposing of the superfluous gases, which might so easily be put to a useful purpose. But with the wild scramble to make money out of the liquid “black gold” no one has time to think of utility or waste, or even of organization. There is no fraternity in “the fields,” no sense of comradeship, no co-operation, no idea of spending anything on the bit of land that has given so much. There prevails one idea, and that of making as much gold as possible in the shortest space of time, and getting away with it.

These hillsides in the dusk with their silhouettes of drilling towers, of palm trees and grass thatched bamboo huts, added to which the sickly smell of oil, have furnished palaces to men who once had nothing and diamond crowns to women, and given them the power of kings and queens. The mud and chaos, the breathless energy and human striving, have enriched men and women beyond all dream.

But today, the world being saturated in the blood of bankrupting war, the demand for oil has enormously subsided, nor can the price be paid. The golden liquid has sunk temporarily to an eighth of its value of eight months ago. Nevertheless there is no respite in the oil fields. The oil can be stored, the oil producers can afford to wait. So new towers grow up, new holes are bored. Down into the bowels of the earth 1800 feet below sea level the great metal shaft is drilled with the full force of its 4,000 pounds weight until it bores through into the illusive river of oil that flows way down. Albeit in the harbor a few ships only await its flow to carry it to the four corners of the earth, the oil is being caught and caged, forced, heated, pumped and rushed along as before. In fact, more pipe lines and more giant tanks are being hurriedly built, so that the oil can wait in store until the markets of the world have recovered. So they hurry, hurry, bore and build and store, for the “day” of oil will come again as surely as the sun rises over the mountains. Has not Lloyd George said what he will do to the British coal miners now on strike, when he has accumulated and organized oil for fuel as a coal substitute? The world needs oil, will always need oil, will need more and more oil, oil crude and oil refined. So get it, keep it, hold it,--hurry....

But how do the pipes, the boilers, the tanks and the camps, the provisions and the materials get to the fields? What is this super-human effort to achieve the seemingly impossible? Why is there not a pause for breath, a respite from the rush, why is there no co-operation among the companies? There is so much fraternity among workers, why not among employers? A very few months and just a little of this quickly made gold would suffice to achieve a common road for the common welfare, or to build a railway, and obviate this struggle of hired humans to extricate machinery from a bog. Here for instance, is a small stretch of road, called “private.” It can close its gates to a dozen cars that have struggled and bumped and sweated through miles of morass. It is called the Aguila, because that company built it, and when it rains they close the gate to preserve the roads’ condition. What then--? Aguila’s cars can get through, but the Corona, Dutch Shell, Mexican and others can well go back and struggle through a longer hellish way. It was ten o’clock of the night when we made Zacamixtle, and a room was given to us in the staff house. A little clean bare wooden room, with a thin screen partition between us and the noisy card playing party on the other side. Two beds, for Dick, Louise and myself. I left them and went out to see the town. I went in a car, escorted and protected. The town looked like the Chinese towns I have seen in pictures. Some wooden sheds, some open stores, thatched bamboo huts and in one street there was life,--the rest was dark. We looked into saloons whence came the sound of music. In one there was a gambling table and a crowd, we passed on. The other was more full of sound and movement. We went in, took the table that was offered us, and ordered drinks. In breeches and boots I was conspicuous, the other women being half naked half-castes. The men were tall, strong, clear-featured American boys, in big sombrero’s, blue shirts open at the throat, breeches, mud and oil bespattered, and revolver in belt. They danced a perfect fox trot, to music by four men on an instrument that looked like a spinet, but sounded like a xylophone. A man came up to our table and asked me if I was from Minneapolis. I was about to explain that I came from London, and had never seen Minneapolis when my protector intervened sharply with a rebuke that made the Minneapolis man apologize and retreat. I was rather resentful at his being so summarily snubbed, for after all he had, as he said, thought he had met me in Minneapolis. Another man at the next table, drinking his beer out of the bottle, tipped it up for the last dregs, and as he did so turned round to me and when the bottle was drained said “Hullo!” He wasn’t very sober and I disregarded him. Suddenly my protector went up to him threateningly and there were words. As the evening advanced the scene became indescribable. There were Mexicans and there were Chinese in the saloon, and fragments of the conversation are unrepeatable. The two best dressed women in the room became conspicuous. The one in scarlet chiffon, who leaning against the wall had slept, heavily drugged, woke up bad tempered, and took off her white slipper to beat the man on the head who spoke to her. The one in pink chiffon sang noisily as she sat on a man’s knee. There was a white cotton stocking kept up by a mauve garter, and a hiatus of brown skin between the stocking and the chiffon dress. All the women with white shoes were mud covered and trodden on. Our chauffeur sat at our table, and attached to himself a highly painted, cynical faced broad-bosomed dancer. She joined us and her conversation with him was translated to me in an undertone. At one o’clock there being scarce any one sober in the room, and the chiffon gowns having caught their prey and left, we left too.

My impression as I look back, in spite of all the dirt and drunkenness, is of young Americans of fine material, hard working and full of grit and infinitely superior to their conditions of life. These are the men and such are their surroundings, who give their best years for the benefit of the oil shareholders.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 1921. _Zacamixtle._

We were awakened at 6:00 A.M. by the sound of men whistling as they dressed, and finally the gramaphone on the other side of the partition played “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and I got up, looked around for water to wash in. Outside on the verandah (where the men have their wash-stand!) I found it in gasoline tins. We had breakfast at the “dining room” to which we motored across an open muddy space. The breakfast, fried eggs, dried bacon, tinned butter, and canned milk was excellent, after which we started homeward, with a feeling of great appreciation for the simple hospitality of these splendid, hardworking men. They had not much to offer, and it is rare indeed that a woman intrudes upon their lives (I believe only about five have done so) but they offer ungrudgingly all they have and make one welcome. I felt badly that two people had been obliged to give up their room to me for the night, and never learnt who they were to thank them.

Passing by daylight the hills with their drilling towers that we had only seen dimly the night before made of the journey a new one.