Part 2

In fact you begin to realize why, when you ask American residents of the country for information, their replies are usually so vague, so contradictory, so uninforming. It is not, as a rule, because they know too little, but because they know too much. Theoretical Mexico--the Mexico of constitutions, reform laws, statutes, and books of travel--has ceased, long since, vitally to concern them. It is Mexico as they day by day find it that interests them and that in the least counts. And practical, every-day Mexico is an entirely different, infinitely more mysterious, fascinating affair.

“Does it rain here in summer as much as it does in winter?” I once asked a Mexican lady in a saturated mountain village in the State of Vera Cruz.

“No hay reglas fijas, señor” (there are no fixed rules), she replied, after a thoughtful silence, with a shrug.

No hay reglas fijas! It is not perhaps a detailed description of the great Don Porfirio’s republic, but it is a consummate epitome, and once you have committed it to memory and “taken it to heart,” your literary pursuits begin to languish. After traveling for three weeks in Mexico, almost anyone can write an entertaining and oracular volume, but after living there for several years, the oracle--unless subsidized by the Government--has a tendency to become dumb. For, in a country where theory and practice are so at variance, personal experience becomes the chart by which one is accustomed to steer, and although it is a valuable one, it may, for a hundred quaint reasons, be entirely different from that of the man whose ranch, or mine, or coffee place adjoins one’s own.

In just this, I feel sure, lies much of the indisputable charm of Mexico. No hay reglas fijas. Everyone’s experience is different, and everyone, in a sense, is a pioneer groping his way--like Cortés on his prodigious march up from the sea. One never knows, from the largest to the smallest circumstances of life, just what to expect, and Ultimate Truth abideth not. This is not so much because Mexicans are instinctive and facile liars, as because the usual methods of ascertaining and disseminating news are not employed. At home we demand facts and get them. In Mexico one subsists on rumor and never demands anything. A well-regulated, systematic, and precise person always detests Mexico and can rarely bring himself to say a kind word about anything in it, including the scenery. But if one is not inclined to exaggerate the importance of exactitude and is perpetually interested in the casual, the florid, and the problematic, Mexico is one long, carelessly written but absorbing romance.

III

Superficially, Mexico is a prolonged romance. For even its brutal realities--of which there are many--are the realities of an intensely pictorial people among surroundings that, to Northern eyes, are never quite commonplace. I once, for instance, saw a plucky little policeman shoot and kill an insanely drunken shoemaker who, in the marketplace a few minutes before, apropos of nothing except the fact that he _was_ insanely drunk, had cut the throat of a young milkman. The policeman pursued him in his mad flight for home and, just as they passed me on a deserted street near the outskirts of the town, returned a quick stab in the stomach from the shoemaker’s knife (still reeking with the milkman’s blood) by a revolver shot. They then both collapsed in a mud puddle, and to me was appointed the rôle of arousing the neighborhood, unbuttoning the policeman’s clothes and slipping two pillows under his pale, brave head.

Of course it was the most squalid of incidents; precisely what happens every little while in New York and Pittsburg and San Francisco, and every few minutes, so we are told, in Chicago. But in Barranca, somehow, the squalor of the affair could not successfully compete with the dramatic interest and the stage-setting. The people who emerged from their blue and pink and yellow and green houses at my alarm (no one in Mexico is alarmed by the sound of firearms) the distracted widow--who, however, postponed complete distraction until after she had carefully gone through her dead husband’s pockets--the pompous arrival of the chief of police, the color and costuming and arrangement of it all, were far too like the last scenes of “Carmen” or “Cavalleria Rusticana” to permit of one’s experiencing any but an agreeably theatrical sensation of horror.

I strolled away after the shoemaker was removed to the police station and the canvas-covered litter had been sent back for the gasping policeman, asking myself by what strange alchemy drunkenness, murder, and retribution in a mud puddle could be made so entertaining. The brutish spectacle, I realized, ought to have shocked me, and the remainder of my walk should have been spent in reflecting that the world was a very wicked place. But I had not been shocked at all, and the world just then seemed not so much wicked as unusually interesting. And this, I flatter myself, was not on my part a moral obtuseness, but an innate quality of the general Mexican scene. For it is always pictorial and always dramatic; it is not only invariably a painting, but the kind of painting that tells a story. Paintings that tell stories are declared by critics to be “bad art.” Perhaps this is why so many travelers in Mexico find so little to admire.

At first, I confess, almost everybody in the republic looks like a home-made cigar. But when your eyes have become properly focused, it is difficult to remember having thought of so cheap a comparison. Whether your relations with the people be agreeable or otherwise, you cannot but admit, after becoming used to the type, that there is among all classes an extraordinary amount of beauty. In every Mexican crowd there are, naturally, a great many ugly persons and plain persons and average-looking persons. An omnipotent Creator for, no doubt, some perfectly good reason that surpasseth all my little understanding, chooses, in perpetuating the human race, to depart, as a rule, very far from perfection and even from charm. But in Mexico, although the departure can be as far, it is somehow not as frequent.

In its way, the mixture of Spaniard and tropical Indian--which was the original recipe for making the contemporary Mexican--is physically a pleasing one. It isn’t our way, but one doesn’t after a while find it less attractive for that. The Indians, in the part of Mexico I happen to know best, have at least the outward characteristics of a “gentle” race. Even when they are tall, they are inevitably and--one might almost say--incorrigibly plump. One never ceases to marvel at the superhuman strength existing beneath the pretty and effeminate modeling of their arms and legs and backs. Except when they grow old and wither up, which they do, like all tropical races, while they are still young, they yet display no angles. However great may be their muscular development from trotting up and down perpendicular mountain trails with incredible loads of corn, or pottery, or tiles, or firewood, or human beings on their backs, the muscles themselves never stand out. The legs of an American “strong man” look usually like an anatomical chart, but the legs of the most powerful Totonac Indian--and the power of many of them is beyond belief--would serve admirably as one of those idealized extremities on which women’s hosiery is displayed in shop windows. In spite of their constantly surprising exhibitions both of unpremeditated strength and long endurance, there is in the general aspect of their physique more of prettiness than of vigor, more grace than virility.

With these people and others like them, the Spaniards began to mingle in the year 1519, and from the union of Spanish men and aboriginal women sprang the Mexican of to-day. In them the physical traits of both races are obvious. If, by alliance, the native lost some of his round, sleek modeling, the conqueror renounced much of his gauntness and austerity. For the modern Mexican, roughly speaking, is neither a rugged type nor an unmanly one. He is, as a rule, a “spare,” small-waisted creature whose muscles, when he has any, show--unlike those of the pure Indian--in the ordinary way, but whose small feet and slender, beautiful hands are deceptive. A cargador of my acquaintance, whose hands are like those of a slim girl, and who, if he wore shoes, would require a narrow five, thinks nothing of transporting on his back from the railway station to the center of the town, a distance of more than a mile up a steep hill, a gigantic trunk (the kind that used to be known as a “Saratoga”), a smaller trunk, half a dozen “dress-suit cases,” a bundle of rugs, and a steamer chair. They by no means lack strength, but it is more often than not concealed in a body all sallow slenderness and grace. And gracefulness in a nation is a characteristic no good American fresh from “God’s country”--whatever that patriotic if strangely un-Christian phrase may mean--can in his heart of hearts forgive. The typical Mexican, although not effeminately, is delicately formed, and, in addition to the prevailing lightness and sensitiveness of his structure, a great factor in the general high average of his good looks is the almost complete elimination of the matter of complexion.

With Northern races it is difficult to disassociate the thought of beauty in either sex from a certain clear glowing quality of the epidermis known as “a complexion.” But in Mexico this consideration--in spite of the quarter of an inch of powder which the ladies of the upper classes apply to their faces on a substratum of glycerin--does not enter. You know that even under the powder all Mexican complexions approximate a satisfactory café au lait standard, and that, if the owners are not positively suffering from smallpox, they are all good. They impress you, after your eyes become acclimated, as being an extraordinarily ornamental race, and it is always amusing to notice that, however strong may be the aversion to them of an American or British resident, he cannot refrain now and then from an involuntary tribute to their unconscious habit of quietly or violently “composing” themselves at every moment of their lives into some kind of a frameable picture.

“I hate ’em all,” an American building contractor once exclaimed to me with deep sincerity. “But,” he added, “after my work is over for the day, I like to sit on a bench in the plaza and look at ’em. I sit there a couple of hours every evening. Even when the rascals ain’t doing anything in particular, you always sort of feel as if there was something doing.”

This feeling--for the accurate description of which I was truly grateful--is largely responsible in Mexico for the plaza and balcony habit that one immediately acquires and that becomes one’s chief form of diversion. In a small city of the United States or in England, even a person of unlimited leisure would have to be doddering, or an invalid or a tramp, before he would consent to sit daily for two or three hours on a bench in a public square, or lean over a balcony watching the same people pursue their ordinary vocations in the street below. The monotony of the thing, the procession’s dead level of prosperous mediocrity, would very soon prove intolerable, and he would find some one, anyone, to talk to or endeavor to forget himself in a book or a newspaper.

In Mexico, however, complete idleness is rarely a bore. “Even when the rascals ain’t doing anything in particular, you always sort of feel as if there was something doing.” One afternoon in a small Mexican town I kept tab from my balcony on what, for about eight minutes, took place in the street below. Although the town was small and the day an unusually quiet one, owing to a fiesta in the neighborhood to which many of the inhabitants had gone, there was no dearth of incident against the usual background of big-hatted cargadores waiting for employment in the middle of the street; of burros, each with four large cobblestones in a box on its back; of biblical-looking girls (an endless stream of them) bearing huge water-jars to and from a circular fountain lined with pale-blue tiles; of old men who wail at intervals that they are selling pineapple ice cream; of old women with handfuls of white and yellow and green lottery tickets; of basket sellers and sellers of flowers (the kind of adorable bouquets that haven’t been seen anywhere else since the early seventies; composed of damp moss, tinfoil, toothpicks, a lace petticoat, a wooden handle, and, yes, some flowers arranged in circles according to color); of mozos who you feel sure have been sent on an errand and told to “come right back,” but who have apparently no intention of returning for several hours; of ladies draped in black lace on their way to meditate in church; of hundreds of other leisurely moving figures that were as a bright-colored, shifting chorus to the more striking episodes.

Item one (so runs my page of hasty notes): Three rather fragile-looking young men swinging along with a grand piano on their heads. Under my window they all stop a moment to let one of them ask a passerby to stick a cigarette in his mouth and light it, which is duly done.

Item two: A flock of sheep followed by a shepherd in clean white cotton with a crimson sarape around his shoulders. He looks like Vedder’s Lazarus. The sheep have just piled into the open door of the hotel and are trying to come upstairs. In the excitement a new-born lamb has its leg hurt. The shepherd gathers it in his arms, wraps it in the sarape, thoughtfully kisses it twice on the head and proceeds.

Item three: A funeral. As there are only three streets in this place that aren’t built up and down a mountain side, there are no vehicles, and coffins, like everything else, are carried on men’s backs. This is an unusually expensive coffin, but then of course the silver handles are only hired for the occasion. They’ll be removed at the grave, as otherwise they would be dug up and stolen. I wonder why women so rarely go to funerals here? There is a string of men a block long, but no women. Some of them (probably relatives) have in their hands lighted candles tied with crape. They are nice, fat candles and don’t blow out. Everybody in the street takes his hat off as the cortége passes.

Item four: The daily pack train of mules from the Concepción sugar hacienda. There must be two hundred and fifty of them, and their hoofs clatter on the cobblestones like magnified hail. The street is jammed with them, and where the sidewalk narrows to almost nothing, people are trying to efface themselves against the wall. A wonderful exhibition of movement and color in the blazing sunlight: the warm seal-brown of the mules, the paler yellow-brown of the burlap in which are wrapped the conical sugar loaves (eight to a mule), with the arrieros in yellow straw hats, brilliant blue shirts and scarlet waist bandas bringing up the rear.

Item five: A dog fight.

Item six: Another and much worse dog fight.

Item seven: An Indian woman with apparently a whole poultry farm half concealed upon her person. She calls up to ask if I would like to buy a chicken. Why on earth should a young man on a balcony of a hotel bedroom like to buy a chicken?

Item eight: An acquaintance makes a megaphone of his hands and inquires if I am very busy. I reply, “Yes, frightfully,” and we adjourn to the plaza for the afternoon.

IV

The inability of people in general to think for themselves--the inevitableness with which they welcome an opinion, a phrase, a catchword, if it be sufficiently indiscriminating and easy to remember, and the fashion in which they then solemnly echo it, are never more displayed than when they are commenting upon a race not their own. Sometimes this rubber-stamp sort of criticism is eulogistic in tone as when, for instance, a few years ago it was impossible in the United States to speak of the Japanese without calling forth from some tedious sounding-board, who couldn’t have told a Jap from a Filipino, the profound exclamation: “What a wonderful little people they are!” But more often than not, ignorant criticism of a foreign country is also adverse. For one nation cannot altogether understand another, and if it is true that “to understand everything is to pardon everything,” it must also be true that unforgiveness is one of the penalties of being misunderstood.

It is the vast throng of fairly well educated “people in general” who are forever divulging the news that “Englishmen have no sense of humor,” that “the French are very immoral,” that “all Italians steal and none of them wash,” that “every German eats with his knife and keeps his bedroom windows closed at night,” that “the inhabitants of Russia are barbarians with a veneer of civilization” (how they cherish that word “veneer”!), and that “the Scotch are stingy.”

The formula employed in the case of Mexicans runs usually something like this: “They’re the laziest people in the world, and although they seem to treat you politely they are all treacherous and dishonest. Their politeness is merely on the surface; it doesn’t come from the heart”--as does the exquisite courtesy we are so accustomed to receive from everybody in the United States, one is tempted to add, without, however, doing so. For what, after all, is the use of entering into a discussion with the sort of person who supposes that his own or anyone’s else politeness “comes from the heart,” or has, in fact, anything to do with the heart? Politeness, of course, is, all the world over, just the pleasing surface quality we should expect it to be from the derivation of the word. Even in Kansas or South Boston we do not necessarily wish to die for the old gentleman whom we allow to pass through the doorway first, and the act of taking off one’s hat to a lady scarcely convicts one of a secret passion for her. But it is odd what depths are demanded of Mexican politeness, which--except for the fact that there is much more of it--is, like our own, an outward “polish” and nothing else.

If, however, there is anything valuable in politeness as such, the Mexicans have over us at least one extensive advantage. For in Mexico the habit of politeness in its most elaborate form is so universal that the very occasional lack of it in anybody gives one the sensation of being not only surprised but somewhat hurt. If, for instance, a street-car conductor in taking my ticket should fail to say “Thank you,” and neglect on receiving it to make toward me a short, quick gesture of the hand--something between a wave and flourish--I should realize that, as far as I was concerned, his manners had not risen to the ordinary standard, and wonder why he had chosen to be indifferent and rather rude. This naturally would not apply in the City of Mexico, where, as in all great capitals, the mixture of nationalities has had a noticeable influence upon many native characteristics. But in provincial Mexico--wherever there was a street car--it would be true.

In riding along a country road it is likely to be considered an example of gringo brutalidad if one does not speak to every man, woman, and child one meets or overtakes. And completely to fulfill the requirements of rural etiquette, the greeting must be not collective but individual; everybody in one group murmurs something--usually “Adiós”--for the especial benefit of everybody in the other. The first time I took part in this--as it seemed to me then--extraordinary performance, my party of three had met another party of equal number on a narrow path in the mountains, and as we scraped past one another, the word adiós in tired but distinct tones was uttered exactly eighteen times--a positive litany of salutation that nearly caused me to roll off my mule. It is a polite sociable custom and I like it, but under certain circumstances it can become more exhausting than one would suppose. In approaching--on Sunday afternoon, toward the end of a long hot ride--a certain little town (which no doubt is to-day very much as it was when Cortés three hundred and eighty-seven years ago mentioned it in one of his letters to Charles V) I have met as many as three hundred persons returning from market to their ranchitos and villages. Adiós is a beautiful word, but--well, after one has said it and nothing else with a parched throat and an air of sincerity for the three hundredth time, one no longer much cares. However, if you don’t know the returning marketers it is safe to assume that they all know a great deal about you, and for a variety of reasons it is well, however tired one may be, to observe the convention.

With the pure-blooded Indians along the Gulf coast there is, when they happen to know you, an elaborateness about your meetings and partings on the road that amounts to a kind of ritual. The sparkling conversation that follows is an ordinary example and an accurate translation of what is said. During its progress, hands are grasped and shaken several times--the number being in direct ratio to the number of drinks your friend has had during the day.

“Good day, Don Carlitos. How are you?”

“Good day, Vicente” (or Guadalupe or Ipifigenio). “Very well, thank you. How are you?”

“Thanks to God, there is no change! How are Don Guillermo and your mamma?”

“Many thanks, they are as always.” (A pause.) “The roads are bad.”

“Yes, senõr, very bad. Is there much coffee?”

“Enough.”

“I am coming to pick next week.” (He really isn’t and he knows I know he isn’t--but the remark delicately suggests that there is no ill feeling.)

“Come when you wish to. Well, until we meet again.”

“Until we meet again--if God wishes it. May you go with God!”

“Many thanks, Vicente” (or Ipifigenio or Guadalupe). “Remain with God!”

“Thank you, senõr--if God wishes it.”

“Adiós.”

“Adiós.”

Toward women we are everywhere accustomed to a display of more or less politeness, but in Mexico, under the ordinary circumstances of life, men of all classes are polite to one another. Acquaintances take off their hats both when they meet and part, and I have heard a half-naked laborer bent double under a sack of coffee-berries murmur, “With your permission,” as he passed in front of a bricklayer who was repairing a wall. Even the children--who are not renowned in other lands for observing any particular code of etiquette among themselves--treat one another, as a rule, with an astonishing consideration. Once in the plaza at Tehuacan I found myself behind three little boys of about six or seven who were sedately strolling around and around while the band played, quite in the manner of their elders. One of them had a cent, and after asking the other two how they would most enjoy having it invested, he bought from a dulcero one of those small, fragile creations of egg and sugar known, I believe, as a “kiss.” This he at once undertook to divide, with the result that when the guests had each received a pinch of the ethereal structure, there was nothing left for the host but two or three of his own sticky little fingers. He looked a trifle surprised for a moment, and I thought it would be only natural and right for him to demand a taste of the others. But instead of that he merely licked his fingers in silence and then resumed the promenade where it had been left off. However, the general seraphicness of Mexican children is a chapter in itself.

“Is that your horse?” you ask of a stranger with whom you have entered into conversation on the road.