Part 8
Don Juan met us at the train--which deposits its passengers in the middle of Rebozo’s principal street--and, as it was still early in the morning and there were nine hours of sixty minutes each ahead of us, most of which we were aware would have to be consumed in sawing conversational wood at Don Juan’s, we called first upon the family of Don Pedro Valasquez--another local coffee magnate. Don Pedro’s wife--in a pink cotton wrapper, with her hair down, but heavily powdered and asphyxiatingly perfumed--had no doubt seen us get off the train, for she met us at the front door, kissed the two girls in our party (who, after calling on Mexican ladies, always declare they have contracted lead-poisoning), and, chattering like a strange but kindly bird, took us into the sala.
There is in all truly Mexican salas a striking--a depressing--similarity one does not notice in the drawing-rooms of other countries. It is as if there were, somewhere in the republic, a sort of standard sala--just as there is in a glass case at Washington a standard of weight and a standard of measurement--which all the other salas try, now humbly, now magnificently, to approximate. I have sat in many Mexican salas and I have peeped from the street into many more, but it would be difficult if not impossible for me to know whether I were in the house of Don This rather than in the house of Don That, if none of the family were present to give me a clew. They are all long and high and bleak. In the exact geometric center is a table with nothing on it but its chilly marble top. Over it hangs an electric chandelier (the unshaded incandescent light, like a bad deed in an excellent world, casts its little beam almost everywhere in Mexico), the size and elaborateness of which is a tolerably accurate symptom of the owner’s wealth and position. Around the walls is placed at intervals, as regular as the architecture will allow, a “set” of furniture--usually of Austrian bentwood with rattan seats and backs--the kind that looks as if it were made of gas pipe painted black. Near the heavily barred windows, where they can be admired by the passers-by, are other marble-topped tables laden with trivial imported objects of china and glass and metal: bisque figurines painted in gay colors, little ornate vases that could not hold a single flower, fanciful inkstands, and statuettes of animals--rabbits and dogs and owls--standing about on mats horribly evolved out of worsted and beads. The few pictures are usually vivid in color and obvious in sentiment.
In fact, the prominence given in Mexican houses to advertisements of brewers and grocers--calendars portraying, for example, a red-cheeked young person with two horticulturally improbable cherries dangling from her faultless mouth--is indicative of the warm, bright school of art for which the nation really cares. The floor is of tiles--sometimes light-colored and ornamented, but more often dark-red and plain--and the ceiling is almost invariably a false ceiling of painted canvas that eventually sags a trifle and somewhat disturbs a stranger accustomed to ceilings of plaster by spectrally rising and falling in the breeze. In hot weather the bareness and hardness and cleanliness of these places, the absence of upholstery and yielding surfaces, the fact that the floors can be sprinkled and swabbed off with a wet mop, are most agreeable. But whereas in some parts of Mexico one or two days of a month may be warm and the other twenty-nine or thirty cool or even cold, the sala, with its inevitable echo, frozen floors, and pitiless draughts, is usually as inviting as a mortuary chapel. Don Pedro’s, besides containing precisely what I have enumerated, had an upright piano, a canary, and a phonograph, and if I had needed any proof of the fact that Mexican nerves are of an entirely different quality from our own, the hour and a half we spent there would have supplied it.
In the first place, when “entertaining company” in Mexico everybody talks all the time, nobody listens, and the voices of the women are more often than not loud and harsh. When they hit upon a subject with possibilities in the way of narrative and detail, they cling to it, develop it, expand it, and exhaust it, and then go back and do it all over again. On this occasion the topic that naturally suggested itself when Don Pedro appeared, limping slightly and leaning on the arm of one of his daughters, was the accident he had met with some months before while out riding with three of the Americans who were now calling on him. There was the usual preliminary skirmish of politeness, and then followed the conversational engagement. It lasted for an hour and a quarter, and except for the fact that during its progress one of my compatriots developed a headache and I became temporarily deaf, it was no doubt a draw. Don Pedro told _his_ story, which began with the pedigree and biography of the horse that had thrown him, the combination of circumstances that had led up to his riding him instead of some other horse, the nature of the weather on that historical morning, the condition of the roads, the various careless happy thoughts and remarks he had indulged in just before the fatal moment, the fatal moment itself, the sensations and reflections of a Mexican gentleman on returning to consciousness after a bump on the head----
But it must not be supposed that anyone except me (who had not been present at the accident) was listening to Don Pedro or paying the slightest attention to him. His wife, with hands outstretched and flung in the air, with eyes now rolling, now flashing, was screaming _her_ version; just how she had spent her time between the departure of the blithesome cavalcade and its unexpected appearance with a litter in its midst; what she had unsuspectingly remarked to her daughter and one of the servants when first she descried it; what they had respectively replied; what she did next, and what she did after that and the sensations of a Mexican lady on hearing that her husband had been thrown from his horse and rendered unconscious----
My three American friends, who live in Mexico and have learned how to project themselves into the spirit of every social situation, were meeting the demands of the moment by bellowing _their_ more or less fictitious tales, and in the narrow street beyond the long open windows, the train we had just left (it was so near we could have leaned out and touched it) was making wholly unsuccessful efforts to return to Barranca. The whistle and bell of the engine shrieked and rang incessantly, the cars separated in an agony of noise and then slam-banged together again and again and again. Most of the time the engine was in front of the house sending a geyser of hoarse steam through one of the sala windows. When the six simultaneous narratives were nearing their climaxes and the train was at its loudest, a little girl came into the room, sat down at the piano, and began to practice scales, a little boy appeared from the patio for the purpose of making the phonograph play the sextette from “Lucia,” as rendered by four trombones and two cornets, and the canary bird went abruptly and completely mad. Most of this lasted without surcease for an hour and a quarter. The last fifteen minutes we spent in saying good-by. The señora kissed the two ladies before we left the sala, and again at the door. They were more than ordinarily convinced that they had contracted lead-poisoning. Then we strolled away to the house of Don Juan Valera, where we were received by Don Juan’s wife and five enchanting children, his mother who had come over from a neighboring village to cook her son’s birthday dinner (she was ninety-three and as bald as an egg), and an orchestra of fourteen pieces.
No doubt one could become hardened to sitting all morning at one end of a parlor, gravely listening to the waltzes and two-steps of an orchestra at the other, and after every selection even more gravely adjourning with one’s host and the musicians to the dining room for a glass of cognac. But there is about the first morning spent in this fashion a ghastly charm. As the ladies did not take cognac, upon them devolved the less invigorating task of preserving unbroken during our frequent absences the thread of conversation, and I groveled before them in admiration every time I returned and found that the children and the weather as topics had not even begun to be exhausted. There was all the more to say about the weather by reason of the fact that there had been recently so little of it--rain had refused to fall for weeks and the coffee trees, laden with buds, were unable to flower. With the crop in imminent peril--with hundreds of thousands of dollars ready to dry up and blow away all around us--we could still experience a kind of social gratitude for the calamity, and toward noon I began to feel that among the many kindly acts of our host, his having had in all, six children instead of only one or two was perhaps the kindliest. Race suicide on his part would have been not only race suicide but conversational murder. The eldest boy was at a Southern school in the United States, and (this, however, did not emerge during our visit; Don Juan perhaps did not know of it) he had on arriving, before the school opened, much to his amazement, been refused admittance, on account of his fine, dark skin (grandmamma was an Indian), to one hotel after another. The explanation of the person in charge of him to the effect that he was no more of African extraction than were the elegant young hotel clerks themselves, was unproductive of results.
“I don’t care what he is--he isn’t white,” was their unanimous verdict, and he found refuge at last in an obscure boarding house. But apparently he had lived down prejudice even in the South, for while Don Juan was proud of the progress he had made in his studies, he was positively vain of his success with the ladies, although still somewhat at a loss to account for the state of affairs that rendered such admitted conquests possible. As modestly as he could he conveyed to us that the girls were “crazy” about Juanito, hastening to declare, as a parent should, that for his part he did not see precisely why.
“No doubt it is because Juanito is a novelty to them,” he sought to explain. “You know how women are; always attracted by something new. On Sunday afternoons they take long walks with him--but all alone, _all alone_. No mother, father, brother--no one. And afterwards they invite him in to supper. But nothing wrong--nothing wrong” (Juanito was not quite fifteen), he added, closing his eyes and solemnly waving his finger in front of his face.
The dinner (it was announced at last) was a revelation in the possibilities of Mexican cooking, and although the multitude of dishes were not new to me their savor was. Grandmamma cooked from recipes (“muy, muy antiguas,” they were) whose origins had been obscured by subsequent history, and almost a century had in no way impaired her sense of taste or her lightness of touch. Even her tortillas were delicious, and a tortilla is a melancholy form of nourishment. The mole (a turkey soaked in a rich, mahogany-colored sauce, composed of from twenty to half a hundred different ingredients) was of course the dinner’s climax--it always is--and afterwards, as the old lady did not come to the table, we all went to the kitchen to congratulate her and shake her hand while the maids who had been helping her looked on in ecstasy.
“She doesn’t come to the table because she has only one tooth,” her son explained as he gently caused her to display it, much as one exhibits the dental deficiencies of an old and well-beloved horse, “and on top there is no hair--none at all. You see--it’s all bare, just like parchment. She’s a wonderful woman,” he declared, as he slid his finger back and forth on her skull.
Then we were shown the house; even--before we realized what was about to happen--the new bathroom, to whose undoubted conveniences Don Juan artlessly called out attention, and after examining separately every plant in the patio, we returned to the sala, where the darling weather proceeded almost immediately to save not only the situation but the coffee crop. A series of cloud-bursts kept us all at the open windows fascinated, as for some reason one always is by the hissing of rain and the violent activities of tin waterspouts, until their sudden cessation enabled us to stroll out, accompanied by Don Juan and the children, to visit the town’s famous gardens for growing violets, azaleas, camelias, roses, and gardenias for the market. There did not seem to be many of them, but it was only later, when Don Pedro and his wife came to the train with their arms full, that we knew why.
In two hours the coffee had flowered, and as the train lurched back to Barranca in the green, uncanny, storm-washed light, through acres and acres and acres of white coffee blossoms, it was difficult not to believe that there had been in the tropics a fall of snow.
IX
It is significant that the most entertaining as well as the most essentially true book on Mexico that I have been able to find was written during the years 1840 and 1841, by Madame Calderon de la Barca. Although from this name one does not, perhaps, at once jump to the conclusion that the writer was Scotch, the fact that she was becomes somewhat more credible on discovering her to have been born “Ingalls.” She was, in a word, the wife of the first minister Spain condescended to send to Mexico after that dissatisfied country had, in the time-honored phrase, “thrown off the yoke,” and she must have been a most intelligent and charming young person.
Of course, I have spent far too much time in and about Boston not to have observed that delightful books are often written by odious women, and what persuades me that my belief in Madame Calderon’s charm is not misplaced is the fact that she never knew she was writing a book at all. “It consists of letters written to the members of her family, and really not intended originally--however incredible the assertion--for publication,” says Prescott the historian, in his short preface to the volume. It was Prescott who urged her to print them, but even he could not induce her actually to reveal her name. I say “actually,” as she resorted on the title page to the quaint form of anonymity that consisted of signing herself “Madame C--de la B--,” a proceeding always suggestive of the manner in which the two-hundred-pound soprano of Mozart opera holds a minute, black velvet mask a foot and a half away from her face and instantly becomes invisible to the naked eye.
But what strikes me as significant when I open Madame Calderon’s letters at random and read a page or two almost anywhere is that, while the book has long since been out of print, it is essentially not out of date. For although in sixty-six years many historical things have happened in Mexico--revolutions, sudden and astonishing changes of government, the complete and wonderful disestablishment of the Church, foreign invasions both bloody and peaceful--one may still read Madame Calderon and verify much that she says simply by glancing out of the window. Momentous changes have without doubt taken place: there are now freedom of religious belief and facilities for acquiring an education, where in her time there was only a priest with hell in one hand and a yawning purse in the other; there now are railways and an excellent post and telegraph service, where formerly there were, so to speak, nothing but brigands. The parents of an Englishwoman I know in Mexico, who as a young bride and groom landed at Vera Cruz just sixty years ago, were held up and robbed three times during their journey from the coast to Barranca. They were in a coach with other passengers; and the first bandits they encountered took merely their money. The second deprived them of their watches and jewelry, but the third, enraged at finding them without valuables of any kind, stripped everybody--including the driver--to the skin. Stark naked, the coachload for eight hours pursued its embarrassed way and stark naked it drove into the patio of the Barranca inn. To-day in Mexico one may occasionally be held up on the road, just as one may be held up in Wyoming or Vermont, but brigandage as a lucrative career for young men of courage has been suppressed. Madame Calderon did not seem to think it at all unlikely that the masked bandits who separated ladies from their jewels on the way home from a ball at three in the morning were the dashing army officers with whom the ladies had been dancing and flirting a short time before.
Those days are passed, and yet Mexico always seems to me very much as it was when the observant Scotchwoman wrote her long and vivid letters. There have been “events,” and reforms, and innovations that unquestionably have had their influence on somebody, but the great masses appear to have been quite uninfluenced. Even the large towns--with the exception of the City of Mexico and Guadalajara, both of which seem in many respects to become more cosmopolitan every week--may still be recognized from Madame Calderon’s description of them and their inhabitants. As recently as this year (1908) it was impossible, at the best hotel in Puebla (a capital with a population of at least a hundred thousand), to get breakfast, if one was obliged to leave by the half-past-six A.M. train for Jalapa.
“It is not the custom to serve breakfast so early,” said the mozo, who was arranging my bed for the night, when I ordered soft-boiled eggs and chocolate to be sent up at half past five for my mother and brother and me. He was a handsome boy, shivering in a dark-brown sarape stamped all over with white horseshoes.
“But my God, amigo mio!” I protested, “why _isn’t_ it the custom? Before a long journey even the most spiritual of us must fortify ourselves.”
“The milkman does not come from the country until six,” he then explained, “and the cook never lights the brasero until half past. Without milk and fire, how can one breakfast?”
To a person of resource (I am a person of resource) such a state of affairs is immaterial. For at half past five (with the ghastly before dawn cheerfulness that some of us at last painfully acquire) I was making my toilet with one hand and, on two alcohol lamps, boiling eggs and preparing chocolate with the other--as in Mexico I had done innumerable times before. But for the uninitiated and the resourceless--the American traveler in Mexico is usually both--what a situation!
A railway--an engineering marvel that in its construction again and again achieved the impossible--has bisected the country for almost thirty years; but I know many adult Mexicans of considerable intelligence, in their own circumscribed, tropical way, who have lived all their lives within sixty or seventy miles of the track without ever having seen it. Sixty-six years ago France must have been decidedly more French, and Italy must have been infinitely more Italian, than they are to-day, yet Mexico apparently is but slightly less Mexican.
From Madame Calderon, and from her only, was I able to learn the exact religious import of the nine dances (posadas, they are called), given everywhere in Mexico just before Christmas. I knew they were given, for I had gone to them and enjoyed myself, but just why there were nine of them and just why they should all be held in quick succession immediately before Christmas, was something neither my American nor my Mexican acquaintances--in spite of their polite efforts to recollect a pretty legend, they had forgotten--ever made altogether clear. Madame Calderon, however, was more satisfactory, and I can do no better than quote her: “This is the last night of what are called the Posadas,” she writes, “a curious mixture of religion and amusement, but extremely pretty. The meaning is this: At the time that the decree went forth from Cæsar Augustus that ‘all the world should be taxed,’ the Virgin and Joseph, having come out of Galilee to Judæa to be inscribed for the taxation, found Bethlehem so full of people who had arrived from all parts of the world that they wandered about for nine days without finding admittance to any house or tavern, and on the ninth day took shelter in a manger, where the Savior was born.”
“Posada” means an inn or lodging house, and the “curious” religious preliminaries to the nine dancing parties called “posadas” are all symbolical of the efforts of Joseph and Mary to find a resting place for the night. The posada Madame Calderon describes took place in a private house in the City of Mexico more than half a century ago; the last one I went to was held less than a year ago in the casino of a small town in the tierra templada. But except for some slight historical differences, either one might have been the other. “We went to the Marquesa’s at eight o’clock, and about nine the ceremony commenced,” writes Madame Calderon. And in this sentence lurks, perhaps, the greatest difference. For at the casino of Barranca I found no marquesas. Most of the pure-blooded Spaniards one meets in Mexico are either priests or grocers, and if any of them is a marqués--as is very possible--he has long ago tactfully pretended to forget it.
The casino at Barranca in itself throws some light on Mexican character. For a small town it is an elaborate structure--built about an impressive patio, with two large ballrooms and a supper room upstairs and smaller rooms below for cards and billiard tables. In England or in the United States these ground-floor apartments would be adequately furnished, supplied with periodicals and newspapers, regarded as a man’s club and used as such. But in Mexico, a club, as we understand such an institution, seems, outside of the capital, to make little appeal. The satisfaction that Brown and Robinson extract from reading their evening paper and sipping their whisky-and-soda under a roof whose shelter may not be sought by Smith and Jones, is a satisfaction the Mexican in general has yet to discover. The reading room in the casino of Barranca contains nothing to read, the billiard tables are rarely played upon, and the card room is not often occupied except on the night of a dance, when a few middle-aged men whose wives and daughters are upstairs in the ballroom endeavor to keep themselves awake over a mild game of poker. The truth is that in Mexico the real clubs are the plaza and the most centrally situated café. It is there that one goes to read the paper, to smoke a cigar, to have one’s boots polished, to sit awhile on a bench and talk to friends--to take a drink or have a game of cards or billiards. It is there and not in the cold, dreary rooms of the casino, that the gentlemen of Barranca may usually be found when, for the moment, they haven’t anything in particular to do. The plaza and the café are for every day; the casino is for occasions.