Puebla.--The Miracle of the Angels.--A City of Priests.--Marianna
in Bronze.--The Vega of Puebla.--First View of the Pyramid of
Cholula.--Modern Additions to it.--The View from its
Top.--Quetzalcoatl.--Cholula and Tlascala.--Cholula without the
Poetry.--Indian Relics.
_Pueblo de los Angelos_--the "Village of the Angels"--derives its
name from a miracle that occurred during the building of its celebrated
Cathedral. While its walls were going up, angels are said to have come
down from heaven nightly, and laid on the walls the same amount of
stone and mortar that the masons laid the day previous. It is, of
course, a sacred city. Its people, particularly the women, are the most
devout in all Mexico; and, of course, the most profligate, as we shall
show presently. It is a city of priests, and monks, and nuns, and
friars, of every order, white and gray, black and greasy. As in all
Spanish-American towns, the fronts of the houses are plastered and
painted in fresco; but the fresco painting has gone too long without
renewing, and the town looks now, as it did two years ago, gray,
streaked, and inhospitable. The unwashed houses are filled with
unwashed people; and the streets swarm with filthy beggars, and monks
asking for alms in the name of the most blessed Virgin. The streets,
thanks to the male and female chain-gangs, are kept quite clean. But
all else is dirty. If the angels, when they finished their work on the
Cathedral, had left a whitewash brush behind them, they would have done
the city a real service. The houses, inside and out, and occupants too,
and the reputation of its men from olden time, all need whitewashing.
CHARACTER OF THE POBLANAS.
Perhaps I could not present a more deplorable picture of the moral
condition of the ladies of Puebla, who are celebrated for being so very
devout, "but not very virtuous," than by copying the following from
Madame Calderon de la Barca's "Life in Mexico:"
"Yesterday (Sunday), a great day here for visiting after mass is over.
We had a concourse of Spaniards, all of whom seemed anxious to know
whether or not I intended to wear a Poblana dress at the fancy ball,
and seemed wonderfully interested about it. Two young ladies or women
of Puebla, introduced by Senor ----, came to proffer their services in
giving me all the necessary particulars, and dressed the hair of
Josefa, a little Mexican girl, to show me how it should be arranged;
mentioned several things still wanting, and told me that every one was
much pleased at the idea of my going in a Poblana dress. I was rather
surprised that _every one_ should trouble themselves about it. About
twelve o'clock the President, in full uniform, attended by his
aids-de-camp, paid me a visit, and sat about half an hour, very amiable
as usual. Shortly after came more visits, and just as we had supposed
they were all concluded, and we were going to dinner, we were told that
the Secretary of State, the Ministers of War and of the Interior, and
others, were in the drawing-room. And what do you think was the purport
of their visit? To adjure me by all that was most alarming, to discard
the idea of making my appearance in a Poblana dress! They assured us
that Poblanas generally were _femmes de rien_, that they wore no
stockings, and that the wife of the Spanish Minister should by no means
assume, even for one evening, such a costume. I brought in my dresses,
showed their length and their propriety, but in vain; and, in fact, as
to their being in the right, there could be no doubt, and nothing but a
kind motive could have induced them to take this trouble; so I yielded
with a good grace, and thanked the cabinet council for their timely
warning, though fearing that, in this land of procrastination, it would
be difficult to procure another dress for the fancy ball.
[Illustration: ECCLESIASTICAL COSTUMES.]
"They had scarcely gone, when Senor ---- brought a message from several
of the principal ladies here, whom we do not even know, and who had
requested that, as a stranger, I should be informed of the reasons
which rendered the Poblana dress objectionable in this country,
especially on any public occasion like this ball. I was really thankful
for my escape.
"Just as I was dressing for dinner, a note was brought, marked
_reservada_ (private), the contents of which appeared to me more odd
than pleasant. I have since heard, however, that the writer, Don Jose
Arnaiz, is an old man, and a sort of privileged character, who
interferes in every thing, whether it concerns him or not. I translate
it for your benefit:
"The dress of a Poblana is that of a woman of no character. The lady of
the Spanish minister is a _lady_ in every sense of the word. However
much she may have compromised herself, she ought neither to go as a
Poblana, nor in any other character but her own. So says to the Senor
de C----n, Jose Arnaiz, who esteems him as much as possible."
If priests were angels, the town would be rightly named, for it is a
city of priests and _religious_ men who have consecrated their lives
to begging, and count it a merit with God to live on charity. Convents
of male and female _religious_ abound, and, as the books tell us,
$40,000,000, in the form of mortgages upon the fairest lands of the
Vega of Puebla, is consecrated to their support, under the supervision
of the bishop. That smoking mountain, that outlet to infernal fires, is
so lose at hand as to suggest the idea that this whole mass of impurity
and moral rottenness may have been vomited up from the bottomless pit,
or that the fallen angels, in their way thitherward, tarried here to
found a sacred city, see its Cathedral finished, and then led the way
down the inclined plane to that brimstone convent where friars "most do
congregate."
MARIANNA IN BRONZE.
In this city of dirty houses and dirty faces there is, nevertheless,
some public spirit. Since I was last here a bronze equestrian statue
has been set up in the Grand Plaza. It is a bronze woman, sitting
quietly and easily upon a furious bronze horse. The horse is in a
terrible state of excitement, but the woman is not alarmed in the
least; for she seems to be well aware that it is only make-believe
passion, badly executed in bronze. Who could this woman be but
Malinche, or Marianna, the Indian mistress of Cortez--a fit patroness
of the women of Puebla. She was the first convert that Cortez ever made
to Christianity; and her sort of Christianity is not unusual in Mexico.
That beautiful cone that rises so majestically out of the plain between
Puebla and Tlascala bears the name of Malinche; but as this name was
applied to her paramour as well as to herself, an additional
testimonial, in the form of a bronze statue, was deemed requisite; for
she is considered here as almost a saint, and would be altogether such
if she had not been the mother of children, and ended her career by
getting married. That act of getting married--not her former
life--rendered her unfit for a saint; for how could an honest housewife
be a saint? She might have been the best of mothers and the best of
wives, and have performed scrupulously the duties that God had assigned
to her upon earth; but she was lacking in romance, in those aerial
materials from which saints are made. Saints are made in damp, cold
prison-cells, where, in the midst of self-inflicted misery, they see
visions, dream dreams, and perform cures upon crowds as deluded as
themselves.
It was a delightful afternoon when I mounted my horse for a ride to
Cholula. The wind of the day before had driven away every vapor from
this exceedingly transparent atmosphere, excepting only the cloud that
was resting upon Popocatapetl, a little below its snow-covered summit.
It was such weather as we have at "harvest home," and it was truly a
"harvest home" throughout the whole Vega. Men were working in gangs in
the different fields, gathering stalks, or husking corn, or cutting
grain, or plowing with a dozen plows in company, or harrowing, or
putting in seed. It was harvest-time and seed-time together. The full
green blade and the ripened grain stood in adjoining fields in this
region of perpetual sunshine. As I rode along between carefully
cultivated estates, I did not fail to catch the enthusiasm which groups
of cheerful field-laborers always inspire in one whose happiest
recollections run back to the labors of the farm. Such are the
varieties this country affords: three days ago I was enjoying the most
delicate tropical fruits, which I plucked fresh from the trees;
yesterday I was traversing a salt desert covered with clouds of
drifting sand; and I was now among grain-farms of a cold climate.
PYRAMID OF CHOLULA.
Right before me, as I rode along, was a mass of trees, of ever-green
foliage, presenting indistinctly the outline of a pyramid, which ran up
to the height of about two hundred feet, and was crowned by an old
stone church, and surmounted by a tall steeple. It was the most
attractive object in the plain; it had such a look of uncultivated
nature in the midst of grain-fields. It would have lost half its
attractiveness had it been the stiff and clumsy thing which the
pictures represent it to be. I had admired it in pictures from my
childhood for what it was not; but I now admired it for what it really
was--the finest Indian mound on this continent; where the Indians
buried the bravest of their braves, with bows and arrows, and a
drinking cup, that they might not be unprovided for when they should
arrive at the hunting-grounds of the Great Spirit. A little digging, a
few years ago,[11] has furnished the evidence on which I base this
assertion. This digging has destroyed the old monkish fiction to
reinstate the truly Indian idea of the dead, and of the necessity of
mounds for their burial.
By going round to the north side, I obtained a fine view of the modern
improvements which have been constructed upon this Indian mound. I rode
up a paved carriage-way into the church-yard that now occupies the top,
and giving my horse to a squalid Indian imp who came out of the vestry,
I went in and took a survey of the tawdry images through which God is
now worshiped by the baptized descendants of the builders of this
mound. My curiosity was soon gratified, and I returned to my place in
the saddle.
[Illustration: PYRAMID OF CHOLULA.]
I followed the wall around the church-yard, stopping from point to
point to look upon the vast map spread around on every side. Orizaba,
which I first saw when 150 miles out at sea as a mammoth sugar-loaf
sitting upon a cloud, had at Jalapa, and at "the eye of waters,"
different forms, while here it appeared to be joined with the Perote,
forming the limit of the horizon toward the east. On the west were
Popocatapetl, Iztaccihuatl, and Malinche; while smaller mountains and
hills seemed to complete the line of circumvallation, which gave to the
elevated plain of Puebla the aspect of the bed of an exhausted lake,
and to the isolated hills, rising here and there upon its surface, the
appearance of having been islands when the waters covered the face of
the land.
The cloud was still resting upon Popocatapetl; but its crest, far above
the clouds, was in that region where, in the tropics, ice and snow lie
undisturbed forever. The marks which it bore of having once been the
smoke-pipe of one of Nature's furnaces, furnished us with the
translation of its name--"The mountain with a smoking mouth." But that
lake of fire has long since ceased to burn, and when the mountain had
last emitted smoke was unknown to the oldest inhabitant. And that other
mountain, Iztaccihuatl, or the "White Woman," lying so quietly and
snug, in her covering of perpetual snow, at the side of the volcano,
called up in the minds of the Indians the strange conceit of man and
wife. There were forests on the mountain sides and trees along the
rivers covered with green, but all else looked dry and parched. Seldom,
indeed, has the eye of man ever rested on a finer farming country than
the great plain of Puebla, and seldom are lands seen better cultivated.
CHOLULA.
Cholula was of old sacred to Quetzalcoatl, the "God of the Air," who,
during his abode upon earth, taught mankind the use of metals, the
practice of agriculture, and the arts of government. Translating myth
into history, we may call him the great Aztec reformer. He is
represented as a man of fair complexion with curling hair and flowing
beard, very different from the type of the Aztecs. On his way from
Mexico to the coast he remained for a while at Cholula, where a mound
and temple was raised to his honor.
This tradition made Cholula the Mecca of the Indian world; and with the
merchants who came to attend the annual fair held at the base of the
mound came also hosts of pilgrims, to offer sacrifice to the memory of
that god who introduced flowers into the native worship, and
discouraged cruelties and human sacrifices.
At Cholula I was so fortunate as to procure one of the images of
Quetzalcoatl, cut in stone, with curled hair and Caucasian features. I
afterward verified the same by comparison with the great image found at
Mexico, not without strong suspicions that both were counterfeits; for
in this country even the most sacred records are open to suspicion.
Popular tradition and the most approved authors will have it, that some
stray white man had found his way among the Mexicans, and taught them
empirically the calculations and divisions of time, and a very few of
the arts of civilized life unknown to our Indians, and they venerated
him as a god. But the probabilities are that the whole story is a myth,
and for once the Inquisition was right in suppressing speculation in
relation to him, whether he was Saint Thomas or not.
At the base of this pyramid, three hundred years ago, flourished the
rich and opulent city of Cholula, which, according to Cortez,[12]
contained 40,000 houses. He says that he counted from this spot 400
mosques,[13] and 400 towers of other mosques--that the "exterior of this
city is more beautiful than any in Spain." That is, as he and all other
historians of the Conquest agree in representing it, it was at the same
time not only the Mecca and the commercial centre, but the centre of
learning and refinement of Mexico. Here Indian philosophers met upon a
common footing with Indian merchants. Its government, too, was
republican; and upon these very plains, three hundred years ago and
more, flourished two powerful republics, Tlascala and Cholula. The
first was the Lacedaemon, the second the Athens of the Indian world, and
when united they had successfully resisted the armies of Montezuma and
his Aztecs. But Aztec intrigue was too powerful for the American
Athens, and the polished city of Cholula having been subdued by the
same arts by which Philip of Macedon had won the sovereignty of
Athens--a combination of intrigue and of arms--Tlascala was left alone
to resist the whole force of the Aztec empire, now aided by the
faithless Cholulans. Yet Tlascala was undismayed by the new combination
brought to bear against her, and did not readily listen to the proposed
alliance of Cortez. It was only after three terrible battles with
Cortez, that Tlascala learned to appreciate the value of his
alliance--an alliance which has conferred upon her perpetual freedom
and a distinct political organization to the present time.
This is the poetry of the thing. Let us give it a little matter-of-fact
examination.
The spot on which I stand, instead of being what it has often been
represented to be, is but a shapeless mass of earth 205 feet high,
occupying a village square of 1310 feet. It is sufficiently wasted by
time to give full scope to the imagination to fill out or restore it to
almost any form. One hundred years ago, some rich citizen constructed
steps up its side, and protected the sides of his steps from falling
earth by walls of adobe, or mud-brick; and on the west side some adobe
buttresses have been placed to keep the loose earth out of the village
street. This is all of man's labor that is visible, except the work of
the Indians in shaving away the hill which constitutes this pyramid. As
for the great city of Cholula, it never had an existence; for if there
had been, only three hundred years ago, such a city here, composed of
40,000 houses, with 400 towers, besides the 400 mosques, then some
vestige or fragment of a fallen wall or a ruined tower would still be
visible. But I searched in vain for the slightest evidence of former
magnificence, and was driven to the unwelcome conclusion that the whole
city was fabricated out of some miserable Indian village, inferior,
perhaps, to the present town of one-story, whitewashed mud huts.
My contemplations were broken in upon by a swarm of squalid women and
children from the church vestry, importuning me to buy relics in clay,
which might answer the double purpose of images of saints or of heathen
gods, according to the taste of the purchaser. But when they found me
impracticable, they brought out their greatest curiosity--a flint
arrow-head, such as used to be plowed up in scores near the place where
I was born. Thoroughly disgusted with the sight of this Acropolis, with
this ancient Athens of mud, I turned my horse's head toward Puebla; and
as I rode on, I met scores of these modern Athenians trotting homeward,
bare-headed and bare-footed, carrying "papooses" on their backs, while
their faces, forms, and hair, and ragged dress, were the very
counterpart of the Indians of North America.
The Indians of Puebla have long enjoyed the distinguished honor of
being the governing men, while the white inhabitants were ineligible to
a seat in the city councils. This city was formerly an Indian village,
bearing the indigestible name of Cuetlaxcapen, or "Snake in the Water;"
but, in 1530, the Vice-King Mendoza established here a Spanish colony,
but left the original government unchanged; so that, down to the
independence, the city administration was conducted by an Indian
alcalde, assisted by a council of four Indians. Notwithstanding the
anomalous form of its government, Puebla has ever been a great
manufacturing town, and at this day consumes a quantity of cotton equal
to some of our large manufacturing cities.
[11] The living witnesses of the result of this excavation are
still at Cholula, and the fact is mentioned in several American
works; my inference from the fact is the only novelty in the
matter.
[12] Cortez's "Letters," Folsom's translation, p. 71.
[13] This word mosques Cortez constantly makes use of, apparently
to keep before the people of Spain the idea that he Was
conducting a holy war.