Part 9

The greatest occasions are the nine posadas, all of which are exactly alike with the exception of the last, when a piñata (the grab-bag of one’s childhood days) is suspended from the ceiling and finally induced to disgorge its treasures by a blindfolded young lady, who succeeds in demolishing it with a cane. On arriving, one is graciously received by an appallingly powdered reception committee, and when all the guests have assembled, partners are chosen, a procession is formed, everyone is given a lighted candle, the incandescent lamps are extinguished and, singing verse after verse that tells of the wanderings of Joseph and Mary, the party marches around and around the upper floor of the patio. When the night is clear and there is a moon, as happened to be the case at the last posada I went to, the performance, as Madame Calderon says, is “exceedingly pretty.” Finally the procession stops in front of a closed door and sings, on the part of the Holy Family, a request for admittance. In an interesting change of key, a chorus of voices behind the door refuses to unlock. Mary and Joseph reply (always in song) that the night is cold and dark--the wind blows hard. Again they ask for shelter, and again they are refused. At this, Mary in a last verse reveals the fact that she is the Queen of Heaven--whereupon the door is instantly opened and the procession enters and disbands; not, however, before everyone has kissed a little image of the Infant Jesus reposing on a bed of leaves and flowers. After this ceremony--which no one seems to take at all seriously--the orchestra strikes up a two-step and the dance begins. Precisely this happens every evening--Sunday is an exception--for nine nights before Christmas, all over Mexico.

“Are there any girls you would like to meet?” inquired a Mexican friend of mine one evening, after Joseph and Mary had been admitted and the first dance was just beginning.

“Why, yes--introduce me to the tall girl in blue,” I answered, indicating an aristocratic young person whose gown had rue de la Paix written all over it and who, in the matter of powder, combined Mexican quantity with Parisian art.

“Oh--she’s the governor’s daughter,” my friend hesitated.

“Well, I care not who makes the daughters of a country, if I can make their acquaintance,” I attempted to say in Spanish. It ended with my dancing several times with her, and I was much interested to note what an isolated and rather somber evening she spent. She was agreeable and beautifully dressed--but she was the governor’s daughter, and the local youths for that reason were afraid of her and admired her at a distance. At an early hour she went home with her brother. He was the only person present in evening dress, and when he returned after escorting his sister home, he wore a frock coat. I have never been able to decide whether he made the change because he felt uncomfortable himself or because he wished to put the rest of us at our ease.

X

Once, in the United States I had to wait five hours for a train in a large prohibition town--a town that for many years has been a bright jewel in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s crown of glory. As I was ignorant of this fact at the time, I asked one of the intellectual-looking waitresses at the hotel where I was eating my luncheon to bring me a bottle of beer. From the manner in which she snubbed me, I supposed the fair, pure city not only did not tolerate beer, but did not tolerate even the mention of beer. After luncheon, while I was sitting on the hotel piazza, I noticed that a great many men darted into an alley just opposite, passed through a doorway and never returned. As the hour grew later their numbers increased until the door was held open by an almost continuous stream. At times the room beyond the door apparently became so crowded that the men in the alley would form a long queue and patiently await their turn to enter. Thinking it might be a show of some sort, I made inquiries of a policeman, who, much amused at my innocence, replied: “Didn’t you ever see a man take a drink before?” Hundreds of men went in at the door during the afternoon and emerged, it seemed, from a smug-looking grocery store on another street. And everybody was satisfied: the good ladies of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, who apparently can always be appeased by a bit of legislation; the inhabitants of the town, who drank as deep and as often as they pleased. I was young at the time, and although I have since discovered with much amusement and some gratification that the law which prevents a man from obtaining a drink, when he really wants one, has yet to be devised, the incident made a lasting impression on me. I often recall my afternoon in the State of Maine, the alley, the little door, the stream of men of every station in life.

In Mexico I have recalled it time and again, as I gradually learned something about the theoretical and the actual relations between the state and the Church. For there is, on the one hand, precisely the same stern attitude of the state toward religion (which in Mexico really means Roman Catholicism), and on the other the same official wink. In 1859 the great Benito Juarez proclaimed his highly desirable Reform Laws, and in so doing simply wiped from the slate the various complications that had kept the clerical party and the liberal party, from one end of the country to the other, in a state of bloody war for fifty years. At one time every public institution in Mexico was owned and managed by the Church. Every hospital, every school, every asylum was church property. Even some of the theaters were of religious origin. So great a portion of the country’s wealth was in the hands of the priests that trade of all kinds was seriously hindered. To some extent this state of affairs was alleviated even before the sweeping proclamation of Juarez in 1859, but after it the claws of the Church in Mexico seemed to be effectually extracted for all time. All the remaining monastic orders were disestablished by a stroke of the pen, and church property became national property. The cathedrals and churches are now owned by the state and lent, so to speak, to the Church for religious purposes. You can’t, according to the law, become a monk or a nun in Mexico, even if you wish to; church bells may not ring for more than one minute (I think it is one minute) at a time, and priests may not either wear, on the streets, a distinctively clerical costume or, in a religious capacity, accompany a funeral to the cemetery. (I confess that, although I believe enthusiastically in every measure, however brutal, that effectively restrains the Lord’s ambassadors from meddling in secular affairs, I have never been able to see the point of prohibiting a religious ceremony at a grave.) Once upon a time an English bishop who disembarked at Vera Cruz in the humorous costume to which his position in England entitled him, was, with a considerable flourish of trumpets, promptly arrested and compelled to change his clothes. The laws are there; they are extremely explicit, and now and then, as in the case of the English bishop, they are, for the pacification of the rabidly anticlerical, noisily enforced, but----

The President, in a word, is a person of great good sense, and I have gathered from the ultraclerical, profoundly monarchistic remarks of my friend Father O’Neil, who of course detests him, that in matters ecclesiastical he is inclined to let the letter of the law take care of itself. Father O’Neil doesn’t know that I have derived any such impression from our long and interesting talks together, and I have never told him.

“Why is it the authorities don’t arrest you?” I inquired of him one day when he had been holding forth on the indignities the Church was forever suffering at the hands of the Government. For he does not hesitate to appear on the streets in the whole paraphernalia.

“Ah, they will some day,” he hopefully replied. And it was Father O’Neil also who told me that there were to-day between thirty and forty convents running full blast in the City of Mexico alone. That they are is against the law, but, after all, the channels through which they used to work great harm have been closed, and there are a number of persons in every community of human beings who are able to satisfy their temperamental needs--to enjoy life--only by walling themselves up with others similarly disposed and wearing garments of a particular shape and fabric. Once in so often the anti-clericals explode quite in the manner of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in the United States, declare that these illicit survivals must go, that such things must not be, and compel the police to make a raid. But the police, it is said, never discover anything on these expeditions beyond some demure ladies in ordinary dress, who do not appear to understand the sudden intrusion and who declare the place to be a poor but honest boarding house. When the police retire, the ladies get their veils and habits from the cellar where they have hidden them, put them on, and proceed with the life meditative, as before. That they are never taken unawares, Father O’Neil assures me, is due to the piety of the Señora Carmen Rubio de Diaz, the President’s wife.

All of which helps one to believe that the President is a statesman and a diplomat--that he does not care if people swim, as long as they do not go too near the water. And that to be a successful president in Mexico is a task of considerable difficulty might be inferred from a trivial incident which took place some years ago. In receiving new envoys from foreign countries the President is invariably happy in the phrasing of his short speech of welcome--which, perhaps, does not seem altogether remarkable when one learns that he is always furnished with a copy of the newly arrived diplomat’s extemporaneous remarks a week before they are delivered. On one occasion a foreign minister misguidedly undertook to improve upon his discourse between the time it had been submitted and approved and the hour at which he was officially received. With the best intentions he inserted several things that the President, who is distinctly “onto his job,” would have quietly deleted had he seen them. The particular sentence that caused trouble was one in which the unsuspecting envoy invoked God to be prodigal of His blessings upon Don Porfirio’s distinguished head. The anticlerical element--it can scarcely be called a party--was immediately incensed. It has a strong prejudice against God, and of the fact that the President had, as it were, officially recognized Him, it endeavored to make a political issue. The President was much annoyed by the affair, and the diplomat horrified. It has not happened again.

Father O’Neil is an American by way (on the part of his grandparents) of Ireland; but for many years he has been a Roman Catholic priest in Mexico, and he is one of those baffling, rather fascinating Roman Catholic enigmas that I have grown accustomed to meeting in lonely, far-away places. He is forty years old; a person of education, cultivated tastes, and great charm of manner. For years he was priest of a fever-stricken parish on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec until at last he got yellow fever himself and was obliged, in order to remain alive, to seek a higher altitude. When I knew him he was filling (at a salary of three hundred dollars a year) a quaint position in an isolated spot with a queer little history.

In the seventeenth century some Spanish monks founded a monastery in a very beautiful part of the great Mexican plateau. The monastery lasted--as an institution--for just a hundred years, at the end of which time, for reasons that do not appear in the records of the place, all the monks, with the exception of one, set sail for Spain. Those who left divided the money among them; the one who remained received the buildings and the land. He, by the Pope’s dispensation, was permitted to marry, which he straightway did and begat a large family. His descendants have always owned the estate, and although the present members of the family do not live there, they still observe the wishes of the original owner by perpetually having a priest--a sort of family chaplain--in residence. When I met Father O’Neil, he was the chaplain. His entire duties consisted of saying eleven low masses a month (why eleven he did not know, except that this number had been stipulated for in the will of the late possessor) and taking care of the exquisite old vestments and gold service that dated from the place’s founding. Very few persons ever went to the masses, and he confided in me that when absolutely no one was present he did not even pretend to say them. An agreeable man, a man of ability, fond of conversation, companionship, and good living.

“What fanatical zeal he must have,” I at first thought, “in order to exile himself to a locality that, however beautiful, is absolutely deficient in everything he so greatly enjoys.” There were weeks at a stretch when he had no one to speak to but his mozo or the country folk who occasionally dropped in for the purpose of ascending the monastery’s sacred stairs on their knees. Although interested in books and an acute critic of them, he had literally none.

“On three hundred a year one’s library grows slowly,” he once remarked to me. But as I came to know him better I discovered with amazement that he was not only not a devout man--he was one of the most essentially, innately irreligious persons I have ever met. The religious temperament and point of view--especially the Christian-religious point of view--bored him indescribably, and he usually spoke to me of his activities as a priest as if they were some sort of a tedious necessity. I saw him every few days for a whole winter, and in his long, cool, bare sala, adorned only with some of the monastic relics and a portrait of the monk who had remained in Mexico and founded the family, we discussed many things--but I never could manage to maintain a satisfactory discussion on the subject of _him_. When, for instance he would, in the most casual tone imaginable, exclaim: “Oh, by the way, don’t write up any of those yarns I told you the other evening, as I got them all in the confessional,” there were several leading questions I could have asked. For the fact that he could be amusing with the secrets of the confessional jarred even on me. But I never did. Once when I inquired if something or other had not surprised him, he replied: “My dear boy, I have belonged to three exceedingly illuminating professions: journalism, the law, and the Church; I am _never_ surprised.” Why had he left the first two, in either of which one could easily imagine him successful and happy, for the third, where he was neither one nor the other? And why was he buried alive in the interior of Mexico, endeavoring to exist on three hundred dollars a year, when he loved the world and candidly admitted that he enjoyed few things as much as he enjoyed spending money? I somehow hope I shall never find out.

Late one afternoon, when he was walking part of the way home with me, he stopped to have his hand kissed by an old Indian woman who kept a small cantina by the roadside. Doña Rosario invited us to have a drink at her expense, but insisted on serving it in a small inner room, rather than in the cantina proper, where half a dozen laborers were standing at the bar.

“I wouldn’t ask the padrecito to drink with such common persons,” she explained.

“But I don’t mind, Doña Rosario,” the priest assured her with a laugh. “We’re all made of the same clay.”

“So are cream pitchers and slop-jars; but they are not used for the same purposes,” Dona Rosario prettily replied.

“Sometimes they _are_,” he murmured to me in English as he swallowed his drink, and I’ve often wondered just what he meant.

XI

What I am about to say will be of interest only to persons who for one reason or another are on the verge of a first trip to Mexico, as it will have to do chiefly with bald facts about the conditions of travel in the republic--railway trains, luggage, cabs, hotels, restaurants (there aren’t any), baths, beds, bottled water, butter--anything indeed that occurs to me as relevant to the matter of travel. I know beforehand that my attempt to make a few practical, sensible remarks on the subject will prove unsatisfactory--perhaps exasperating. After one has lived in Mexico any length of time one completely forgets the point of view of persons who have never been there. So if I happen to leave out the one thing dear reader most wishes to be informed upon, I humbly hope I may be forgiven; for if I might choose between writing about such affairs and being broken on the wheel, I should immediately inquire the nearest way to the wheel. Suggestions as to routes of travel, excursions, and “sights,” I omit deliberately, as all the Mexican railways publish attractive, illustrated folders that treat of these with much greater lucidity than I ever hope to attain.

Conventionally speaking, traveling in Mexico is uncomfortable. By this I don’t mean that a person in ordinary health is subjected to hardships, but merely that trains and hotels always lack the pleasing frills to which one is accustomed in the United States and Europe. A train is a means of transporting yourself and your belongings from one place to another and nothing else. Americans--and with reason--look upon their best trains as this and considerably more. The Mexican cars follow the American plan of a middle aisle with exits at either end, and, as in Europe, are usually of the first, second, and third class. A first-class car resembles in every respect what is known in the United States as “a coach” (as distinguished from a sleeping and a parlor car)--even to its squalor. Furthermore, as there are rarely enough of them they are almost always crowded. I have often noticed that Mexicans, generally speaking, either can afford to travel first class, or can’t afford to travel second. The second-class car is therefore sometimes comparatively empty and endurable when the other two are neither. Even after buying a first-class ticket I have more than once found it worth while to sit in a second-class car; but naturally this is not always true. Second-class cars for some reason are gradually being abolished.

In many of the larger places--the City of Mexico, Guadalajara, Puebla, Vera Cruz--you can buy tickets at the railway’s city office and then at the station check luggage at any time. It is invariably a saving of good temper, anxiety, and comfort to do so, for the ticket window at the station (surrounded by a dense crowd of the unwashed) does not open until half an hour or twenty minutes before the train leaves, and it takes longer to check luggage in Mexico than in any country in which I have traveled. The system, in its final results, is precisely that of the United States; the things are weighed, one is charged for an excess of one hundred and fifty pounds on every first-class ticket, and given in some cases a separate cardboard check for every piece, and in others a printed, filled-in receipt for all of them on a slip of paper. But why so simple a process should take so much time I have not been able to learn. Recently in Vera Cruz it required at the station of the Interoceanico railway three quarters of an hour and the combined intellectual and physical efforts of two clerks and three cargadores (working hard all the time) to furnish me with checks for six trunks and several smaller pieces. Fortunately I had gone there long before train time and was the only passenger in the station. It is but fair to admit that there was a slight hitch in the proceedings--five or six minutes--when darkness overtook us before the electric light was turned on and some one had to rush out and buy a candle in order that work could be resumed (this in one of the great seaports of the world!), but all the rest of the time was consumed in checking the trunks. For each trunk they seem to write half a page of memoranda in a book, pausing now and then to lean back and look at the ceiling as if in the throes of composing a sonnet. All things considered, it is well in Mexico to allow yourself at the railway station what would seem in other countries a foolish amount of time.

In some of the towns most visited by tourists the trains are now met by English-speaking interpreters from the various hotels, who, by taking charge of the checks and baggage, make the arrival and departure of even persons who are new to the country and speak no Spanish a simple and painless matter. When this does not happen, however, you may put yourself with perfect confidence into the hands of a licensed cargador--a licensed cargador being a porter with a numbered brass tag suspended about his neck on a string. Outside of the City of Mexico I have never known a licensed cargador who was not, in at least the practice of his profession, entirely capable and honest. He will carry your hand bags to a cab, or in places where there are no cabs, to the street car that invariably passes near the best hotels, and a short time afterwards--if you have intrusted him with your checks--arrive at the hotel with your trunks. For carrying hand bags from the train to the cab or street, twenty-five centavos is ample. The charge for taking trunks from the station to the hotel is usually fifty centavos apiece. As a measure of absolute safety, although it is hardly necessary, you may remove a cargador’s tag from his neck and keep it as a hostage until you receive your trunks. A cargador with a license is for all reasons preferable to one without. Being licensed by the city government, he has a definite status which he hesitates to imperil. By retaining his tag, or noting and remembering his number, you have an infallible means of identifying him in case your trunks should fail to arrive. But they always do arrive.

Except in the City of Mexico you are rarely tempted to get into a cab; you prefer either to walk or to make use of the street cars which will always take you anywhere worth going to. In the capital, however, although the electric-car service is excellent, cabs seem to be a necessity. They are of two classes and the cost of riding in them is fixed by law, but unless you find out beforehand from some one who is informed upon the subject exactly how much you ought to pay, the cabman will demand several times his legal fare. On fête days and Sundays, and between the hours of midnight and six in the morning, the fare is double.