CITY OF MEXICO.
[Illustration: VIEW OF PART OF THE VALLEY OF MEXICO.]
Some thirty years ago, Don Agustín Yturbide, the first and last Emperor
of Mexico, found that he wanted a palace wherein to house his
newly-fledged dignity; and began to build one accordingly, in the high
street of Mexico, close to the great convent of San Francisco. It could
not have been nearly finished when its founder was shot: and it became
the _Hotel d’Yturbide_. We are now settled in it, in very comfortable
quarters. There is a restaurant down below, where the son of the late
Yturbide dines daily, and everybody points him out to us, and moralises
over him.
Mr. Christy’s drawer-roll of letters of introduction has produced an
immediate crop of pleasant acquaintances, whose hospitality is
boundless. We are not idle, far from it; and a long day’s work is
generally followed by a social dinner, and an evening spent in noting
down the results of our investigations.
Prescott’s _Conquest of Mexico_ has been more read in England than most
historical works; and the Mexico of Montezuma has a well-defined idea
attached to it. The amphitheatre of dark hills surrounding the level
plain, the two snowy mountain-peaks, the five lakes covering nearly
half the valley, the city rising out of the midst of the waters, miles
from the shore, with which it was connected by its four causeways, the
straight streets of low flat-roofed houses, the numbers of canals
crowded with canoes of Indians going to and from the market, the
floating gardens moved from place to place, on which vegetables and
flowers were cultivated, the great pyramid up which the Spanish army
saw their captured companions led in solemn procession, and sacrificed
on the top—all these are details in the mental picture.
Much of this has changed since the Spaniards first saw it. Cortes tried
all ordinary means to overcome the desperate obstinacy with which the
Aztecs defended their capital. The Spaniards conquered wherever they
went; but, as they moved forward, the Mexicans closed in again behind,
and from every house-top showers of darts, arrows, and stones were
poured down upon them. Cortes resolved upon the utter demolition of the
city. He was grieved to destroy it, he said, for it was the most
beautiful thing in the whole world; but there was no alternative. He
moved slowly towards the great teocalli, his fifty thousand Tlascalan
allies following him, throwing down every house, and filling the canals
with the ruins. When the conquest was finished, but one district of the
city was left standing, and in it were crowded a quarter of the
population, miserable famished wretches, who had surrendered when their
king was taken. All that was left besides was a patch of swampy ground
strewed with fragments of walls, a few pyramids too large for present
destruction, and such great heaps of dead bodies that it was impossible
to get from place to place without walking over them.
Cortes had resolved that a new city should be built, but it was not so
easy to decide where it was to be. The Aztecs, it seemed, had not
originally established themselves on the spot where Mexico was built.
When they came down from the north country, and across the hills into
the valley of Mexico, they were but an insignificant tribe, and as yet
mere savages. They settled down in one place after another, and were
always driven out by the persecutions of the neighbouring tribes. At
last they took possession of a little group of swampy islands in the
lake of Tezcuco; and then at last, safe from their enemies, they
increased and multiplied, and became a great and powerful nation.
The first beginnings of Mexico, a cluster of huts built on wooden
piles, must have borne some likeness to those curious settlements of
early tribes in the shallow part of the lakes of Switzerland and the
British Isles, of which numerous remains are still to be found. As the
nation increased in numbers, Tenochtitlán, as the inhabitants called
their city (they called themselves _Tenochques_), came to be a great
city of houses built on piles, with canals running through the straight
streets, along which the natives poled their flat-bottomed canoes. The
name which the Spaniards gave to the city, the “Venice of the New
World,” was appropriate, not only to its situation in the midst of the
water, with canals for thoroughfares, but also to the history of the
causes which led to its being built in such a situation.
The habit of building houses upon piles, which was first forced upon
the people by the position they had chosen, was afterwards followed as
a matter of taste, just as it is in Holland. Even after the Aztecs
became masters of the surrounding country, they built towns round the
lake, partly on the shore, and partly on piles in the water. The
Spanish chroniclers mention Iztapalapán, and many other towns, as built
in this way. Like the Swiss tribes, the early inhabitants of Mexico
depended much upon their fishing, for which their position gave them
great facilities.
If you look at the arms of the Mexican Republic, on a passport or a
silver dollar, you will see a representation of a rock surrounded by
water. On the rock grows a cactus, and on the cactus sits an eagle with
a serpent in his beak. The story is that the wandering tribe preserved
a tradition of an oracle which said that when they should find an
eagle, holding a serpent, and perched on a cactus growing out of a
rock, then they should cease their wanderings. On an island in the lake
of Tezcuco, they found eagle, serpent, cactus, and rock, as described,
and they settled there in due course. What fragment of truth is hidden
in this myth it is hard to say. Tenochtitlán means “The Stone-cactus
place;” and the Aztec picture-writings express its name by a hieroglyph
of a prickly pear growing on a rock. Putting this history out of the
question, the Aztecs had excellent reasons for choosing this peculiar
site for their city; but these reasons were not equally valid in the
case of the new invaders. For them the surrounding salt-water was not
needed as a protection, and was merely a nuisance. Every year, when the
lake rose, the place was flooded, with enormous damage to the property
of the inhabitants; and sometimes an inundation of greater depth than
usual threatened as complete a destruction as Cortes and the Tlascalans
had made. At the best of times, the site was a salt-swamp, an ugly
place to build upon. And, lastly, all the fresh water must be brought
from the hills by aqueducts, which an enemy would cut off without
difficulty, as the Spaniards themselves had done during the siege. Now
Cortes was certainly not ignorant of all this, and he knew of many
places on the rising ground close by, where he could found his new city
under more favourable circumstances. He deliberated four or five months
on the matter, and at last decided in favour of the old site, giving as
his reason that “the city of Tenochtitlán had become celebrated, its
position was wonderful, and in all times it had been considered as the
capital and mistress of all these provinces.”
The invaders were old hands at slave-driving, and so hard did they
drive the conquered Mexicans, that in four years there had arisen a
fine Spanish city, with massive stone houses of several storeys, having
the indispensable inner courts, flat roofs, and grated windows,—every
man’s house literally his castle, when once the great iron
entrance-gates were closed. The Indians had, of course, been converted
en masse, and churches were being built in all directions. The great
pyramid where Huitzilopochtli, the God of war, was worshipped, had been
razed to the ground, and its great sculptured blocks of basalt were
sunk in the earth as a foundation for a cathedral. The old lines of the
streets, running toward the four points of the compass, were kept to;
and to this it is that the present Mexico is indebted for much of its
beauty. Most of the smaller canals were filled up, and the
thoroughfares widened for carriages, things of course unknown to the
Mexicans, who had no beasts of burden. In the suburbs the natives
settled themselves after their own fashion, baking adobes, large mud
bricks, in the sun, and building with them one-storey houses with flat
roofs, much as they do at the present day. And thus a new Mexico,
nearly the same as that we are now exploring, came to be planted in the
midst of the waters. Three centuries have elapsed since; the city has
grown larger, churches, convents, and public buildings have increased,
but the architectural character of the place has scarcely altered. It
is the situation that has changed. The lake of Tezcuco is four miles
off, though the causeways which once connected the city with the dry
land still exist, and have even been enlarged. They look like
railway-embankments crossing the low ground, and serve as dykes when
there is a flood, a casualty which still often happens.
This change is interesting to the student of physical geography; and
Humboldt’s account of the causes which have brought it about is full
and explicit. When Mexico had been built a few years, the frightful
inundations which threatened its very existence at length awoke the
Spaniards to a sense of the mistake that had been made in placing
themselves but a few feet above the lowest level of the valley, in such
a way that, from whatever point the flood might come, they were sure to
get the benefit of it. The Spanish authorities at home, with their
usual sagacity, sent over peremptory orders that the city should be
abandoned, and a new capital built at Tacubaya—a proposal something
like intimating to the inhabitants of Naples that their position, at
the foot of Mount Vesuvius, was most dangerous, and that they must
leave it and settle somewhere else. In those days the valley was a
complete basin, with no outlet—at least not one worth mentioning; and
the heavy tropical rains and the melted snow from the mountains, poured
vast quantities of water into it. Had the valley been at the level of
the sea, it would simply have become a great lake, surrounded by hills;
but at three thousand feet higher, the atmosphere is rarefied, and
evaporation goes on with such rapidity as to keep the accumulation of
water in check. So the affair had adjusted itself in this wise, that
the land and the five lakes should divide the valley about equally
between them. It became necessary to alter this state of things, and a
passage was cut at a place where the hills were but little above the
level of the highest lake. The history of this passage, the famous
“Desague de Huehuetoca,” is instructive enough, but it has been written
so threadbare that I cannot touch it. Suffice it to say, that by this
means a constant outlet was made for the lake of Zumpango, the highest
of the five, and for the Rio de Guatitlán, a stream which formerly ran
into it.
So much for one cause of the change in the present appearance of the
city. Then the Spaniards were great cutters down of forests. They
rather liked to make their new country bear a resemblance to the arid
plains of Castile, where, when you arrive in Madrid, people ask you
whether you noticed _the tree_ on the road; and moreover, as they
wanted wood, they cut it, without troubling themselves to plant for the
benefit of future generations. Now, when the trees were cut down, the
small plants which grew in their shade died too, and left the bare
earth to serve as a kind of natural evaporating apparatus. And, between
these two causes, it has come to pass that the extent of the lakes has
been so much reduced, and that Mexico stands on the dry land—if,
indeed, that may be called dry land, where you cannot dig a foot
without coming to water.
During the Tertiary period the whole valley of Mexico was one great
lake. Whether the proportion of water to land had adjusted itself
before the country was inhabited, or whether during historical times
the lakes were still gradually diminishing by the excess of evaporation
over the quantity of water supplied by rain and snow, is an open
question. At any rate the two causes I have mentioned will account for
the changes which have taken place since the conquest.
Taking it as a whole, Mexico is a grand city, and, as Cortes truly
said, its situation is marvellous. But as for the buildings, I should
be sorry to inflict upon any one who may read these sketches, a
detailed description of any one of them. It is a thousand pities that,
just at the time when the Italians and Spaniards were most zealous in
church-building, so very questionable an architectural taste should
have been prevalent.
The churches and convents in Mexico belong to that kind of renaissance
style that began to flourish in southern Europe in the sixteenth
century, and has held its ground there ever since. High façades abound,
with pilasters crowned by elaborate Corinthian capitals, forming a
curious contrast with the mean little buildings crouched behind the
tall front. In the doors of the churches outside, and the chapels
within, one is constantly coming upon that peculiar construction which
consists of what would be an arch, resting on two pillars, were not the
keystone wanting. Columns with shafts elaborately sculptured, and
twisted marble pillars of the bed-post pattern, are to be seen by
hundreds, very expensive in material and workmanship, but unfortunately
very ugly; while the numbers of puffy cherubs, inside and out, remind
the Englishman of the monuments of St. Paul’s.
As to the interior decoration of the churches, the richer ones are
crowded with incongruous ornaments to a wonderful degree. Gold, silver,
costly marbles, jewels, stucco, paint, tinsel, and frippery are all
mixed up together in the wildest manner. We found the inside of the
churches to be generally the worst part of them. The Cathedral, for
instance, is really a very grand building when seen from a little
distance, with its two high towers and its cupola behind. I was greatly
edified by finding it described in the last book of Mexican travels I
have read, as built in the purest Doric style.
The Minería, or School of Mines, is a fine building, something after
the manner of Somerset House on a small scale. As for the famous Plaza
Mayor, the great square, it is a very great square indeed, large enough
to review an army in, and large enough to damage by its size the effect
of the cathedral, and to dwarf the other buildings that surround it
into mere insignificance. However, one thing is certain, that we have
not come all this way to see Spanish architecture and great squares,
but must look for something more characteristic.
I have said we arrived in Mexico on the eve of Palm Sunday, and next
morning we proceeded to consult with one of our newly-made
acquaintances as to our prospects for the ensuing Holy Week. This
gentleman, a man who took a practical view of things, mentioned a
circumstance which led him to expect that the affair would go off with
éclat. The Mexicans, both the nearly white Mestizos and the Indians of
pure race, delight in pulque. The brown people are grave and silent in
their sober state, but pulque stirs up their sluggish blood, and they
get into a condition of positive enjoyment. But very soon after this
comes a state of furious intoxication, and a general scuffle is a
common termination to a drinking-bout. Fortunately, the Indians are not
a bloodthirsty people; and, though every man carries a knife or
machete, or—if he can get nothing better—a bit of hoop-iron tempered,
sharpened, and fixed into a handle, yet nothing more serious than cuffs
and scratches generally ensues. Even if severe wounds are given, the
Indian has many chances in his favor, for his organization is somewhat
different from that of white men, and he recovers easily from wounds
that would kill any European outright.
The lower orders of the half-breed population are also given to
pulque-drinking, but with far more serious consequences. Unlike the
pure Indians, they are a hot-blooded and excitable race, and
drunkenness with them is utter madness while it lasts. Knives are drawn
at the very beginning of a squabble, and scarcely an evening passes
without one or two bodies of men killed in these drunken mêlées being
carried to the Police Cuartel in the great square. On Sundays and
holidays the number increases; but on this Palm Sunday there were
fourteen, not killed in one great battle, but brought in by ones and
twos, from different parts of the city. It was this little piece of
statistics that induced our friend to conclude that the citizens of
Mexico had made up their minds to enjoy themselves thoroughly, and that
Holy Week would be a grand affair. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of
the Semana Santa have only this to distinguish them from ordinary days,
that the churches are crowded with men and women waiting their turn at
the confessional; and that in the afternoons the old promenade of Las
Vigas, down in the Indian quarter by the canal of Chalco, is patronized
by fashionable Mexico, which, except on some four or five special days,
frequents the new Alameda. The sight of these confessionals, so
constantly filled, prompts one to ask—why just before Easter? Just
after would be more appropriate; for as we find the Glasgow people much
worse on Sundays than on week-days, so the Mexican population, not very
virtuous at the best of times, are specially and particularly wicked
when the great Church-festivals come round. The name of Shrove Tuesday
survives in our Calendar, to remind us of the time when we also used to
go to be shriven before Easter.
On Thursday at noon mass is over, the bells cease to ring, the organs
in the churches are silent, and all carriages disappear from the
streets, except the dusty Diligence which, like French law, “est
athée,” and cares nothing for fasts or festivals. Now we come to
understand the wonderful wooden machine like a water-wheel, which was
put up yesterday on one tower of the Cathedral. We had asked people in
the great square, just below, what it was, but could get no answer
except that it was _la Matraca_, the rattle, for to-morrow. And now we
found that, the church bells being incapacitated, this rattle does duty
instead, striking the hours, and occasionally going off into furious
fits of clattering, without apparent reason, for ten minutes at a time,
till the two men who worked it, who were either convicts or soldiers in
fatigue-dress, were tired out. It was not this one rattle only that was
disturbing the public peace that day and the next. Everybody was
walking about with a rattle, and working it like mad, and all over the
city there was a noise like the sound of the back-scratchers at
Greenwich Fair, or of an American forest when the woodpeckers are busy.
These little rattles stand for Judas’s bones, and all good Catholics
express in this odd way their desire to break them. They do the same
thing in Italy, but it is not so prominent a part of the celebration as
in Mexico, where old and young, rich and poor, all do their part in it.
As soon as we found out what it all meant, we bought matracas for
ourselves, and joined the rest of the world in their noisy occupation.
The breaking of his bones is but a preliminary measure. In the square a
fair is being held, in the booths of which the great articles of trade
now are Judas’s bones, of many patterns, at all prices, and Judas
himself in pasteboard, who is to be carried about and insulted till
Saturday morning, and then, hanging up by a string, is to burst asunder
by means of a packet of powder and a slow match in his inside, and
finally to perish in a bonfire.
The first sight of these pasteboard Judases convinced us of one thing,
that we had unexpectedly come upon the old custom, of which our
processions and burning of Guy Fawkes in England are merely an
adaptation. After giving up the old custom as a Popish rite, what a
bright idea to revive it in this new shape, and to give the boys
something to carry about, bang, blow up, and make a final bonfire of,
and all in the Protestant interest! There was another thing to be
noticed about the Judases. The makers had evidently tried to vary them
as much as they could; and, by that very means, had shown how
impossible it was to them to strike out anything new. There were two
types; one was the Neapolitan _Polichinello_, whom we have naturalised
as _Punch_; and the other the God _Pan_, with his horns, and hoofs, and
tail, whom the whole Christian world has recognised as the devil, for
these many ages. Well, some took one type and some the other; and a few
tried to combine the two, of course spoiling both. But, beyond this,
their power of invention could not go. They were always trying to
conceal the old idea, and could do no more than to distort it. We could
see through their flimsy pretensions to originality much as a
schoolmaster recognises the extracts from the encyclopaedia in his
boys’ essays.
As with this Judas trade, so it is with other more important arts and
sciences in this country. The old types descend, almost unchanged, from
generation to generation. Everything that is really Mexican is either
Aztec or Spanish. Among the Spanish types we may separate the Moorish.
Our knowledge of Mexico is not sufficient to enable us to analyse the
Aztec civilization, so we must be content with these three classes. I
will not go further into the question here, for occasions will
continually occur to show how—for three centuries at least—the
inhabitants of Mexico, both white and brown, have taken their ideas at
second-hand, always copying but never developing anything.
All this time my companion and I have been walking about the streets;
in evening-dress, as the etiquette of the place demands, on these three
days, from the “better classes.” The Mexican ladies may be
advantageously studied just now in their church-going black silk dress
and mantilla, one of the most graceful costumes in the world. It is not
often that one has the chance of seeing them out of doors, except
hurrying to and from Mass in the morning, or in carriages on the
Alameda; but on these festival days one meets them by hundreds. They do
not contrast favorably with the ladies of Cadiz and Seville. The
mixture of Aztec blood seems to have detracted from the beauty of the
Spanish race; the dryness of the atmosphere spoils their complexions;
and the monstrous quantity of capsicums that are consumed at every meal
cannot possibly leave the Mexican digestion in its proper state.
We dined that day with Don José de A., who, though Spanish-American by
birth, was English by education and feeling, and had known my
companion’s family well. Our dinner was half English, half Mexican; and
the favourite dishes of the country were there, to aid in our
initiation into Mexican manners and customs. The cooks at the inns,
mindful of our foreign origin, had dealt out the red pepper with a
sparing hand; but to-day the dish of “mole” was the genuine article,
and the first mouthful set as coughing and gasping for breath, while
the tears streamed down our faces, and Don Pepe and Don Pancho gravely
continued their dinner, assuring us that we should get quite to like it
in time. _Pepe_ and _Pancho_, by the way, are short for José and
Francisco. Dinner over, it was time to visit the churches, to which
people crowd by thousands, this evening and to-morrow, to see the
monuments, as they are called. Pancho departed, being on duty as escort
to his sisters; and we having, by Pepe’s advice, left our watches and
valuables in his room, and put our handkerchiefs in our breast-pockets,
started with him. Mr. Christy, always on the look-out for a new seed or
plant, had taken possession of the seeds of two _mameis_, which are
fleshy fruits—as big as cocoa-nuts—each containing a hard smooth seed
as large as a hen’s egg. These not being of great value, he put one in
each tail-pocket of his coat. When we got out, we found the streets
full of people, hurrying from one church to another, anxious to get as
many as possible visited in the evening. We went first to the monastery
of San Francisco, close to our hotel, the largest, and perhaps the
richest convent in the country. Entering through a great gate, we find
ourselves in a large courtyard, full of people, who are visiting—one
after another—the four churches which the establishment contains, going
in at one door and out at the other. At the door of the largest church,
stands a tall monk, soliciting customers for the rosaries of
olive-wood, crosses, and medals from Jerusalem, which are displayed on
a stall close by—shouting in a stentorian voice, every two or three
minutes, “He who gives alms to Holy Church, shall receive plenary
indulgence, and deliver one soul from purgatory.” We bought some, but
there did not seem to be many other purchasers. Indeed, we found, when
we had been longer in the country, that a few pence would buy all sorts
of church indulgences, from the permission to eat meat on fast-days up
to plenary absolution in the hour of death; and the trade, once so
flourishing here, is almost used up. The churches were hung with black,
and lighted up; and in each was a “monument,” a kind of bower of green
branches decorated with flowers, mirror’s, and gold and silver
church-plate, and supposed to stand for the Garden of Gethsemane.
Inside was reclining a wax figure of our Saviour, gaudily dressed in
silk and velvet; and there were also representations of the Last
Supper, with wax-work figures as large as life. To visit and criticise
these “monuments” was the object of the sort of pilgrimage people were
making from church to church, and they seemed thoroughly to enjoy it.
It was not a superfluous precaution that we had taken, in leaving our
valuables in a place of safety, for, on our exit from the first church,
we found that Pepe had lost his handkerchief and a cigar-case, which he
had stowed away in an inner pocket, and Mr. Christy had been relieved
of one of his mamei seeds by some “lepero” who probably took it for a
snuff-box. His feelings must have been like those of the English
pickpocket in Paris, when he robbed the Frenchman of the article he had
pocketed with so much care, and found it was a lump of sugar. And so
relieved of further care for our worldly goods, we went through with
the work of seeing monuments, till we were tired and disgusted with the
whole affair, and at last went home to bed.
Next day, appropriate sermons in the churches, processions in the
afternoon, in which wax figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary were
carried by men got up in fancy dresses as soldiers and centurions, and
so called penitents, walking covered with black shrouds and veils, with
small round holes to look through, or in the yellow dress and
extinguisher cap, both with flames and devils painted on them. These
are exactly the costumes worn in old times, the first by the familiars
of the Inquisition, and the second by the criminals it condemned; and
the sight of them set us thinking of the processions they used to
figure in, when the Holy Office was flourishing at Santo Domingo, a
little way down the street where we are standing.
In the evening the Crucifixion is represented in wax in the churches,
and the visiting goes on as the night before; and the next morning is
the Sábado de Gloria, the Saturday which ends Lent. We go to the
Jesuits’ church in the morning to hear the last sermon. Since Thursday
at noon, as the organs have been silenced, harps and violins have taken
their places. The sermon is long and prosy, and we rejoice that it is
the last. Then the service of the day goes on until they come to the
“Gloria in excelsis.” The organ peals out again, the black
curtain—which has hidden the high altar—parts in the middle, and
displays a perfect blaze of gold and jewels: all the bells in the city
begin to ring: the carriages, which have been waiting ready harnessed
in court yards, pour out into the streets: the lumbering hackney
coaches go racing to the great square, striving to get the first fare
for luck: the Judases, which have been hanging all the morning out of
windows and across streets, are set light to as the first bell begins
to ring, and fizzing and popping burst all to pieces, and then are
thrown into a heap in the street, where a bonfire is made of them, and
the children join hands and dance round it. So Holy Week ends.
[Illustration: THE PORTER AND THE BAKER IN MEXICO. (From Models
made by Native Artists)]
The arrangement of the day in Mexico is this. Early in the morning your
servant knocks at your door, and brings in a little cup of coffee or
chocolate and a small roll, which _desayuno_—literally breakfast—you
discuss while dressing. Going down into the courtyard, you find your
horse waiting for you, and off you go for an hour or two’s ride, and
back to a dejeuner-à-la-fourchette somewhere between ten and one
o’clock. Then you have seven or eight hours before dinner, so that a
good deal of work may be got into a day so divided. Things are managed
very differently in country places, but this is the fashion in the
capital among the higher class, that is, of course, the class of people
who put on dress-coats in the evening.
When we had been a day or two in Mexico, we took our first ride to
Tacubaya and Chapultepec. Mexican saddles and bridles were a novelty to
us, but when we come to describe our Mexican and his appurtenances it
will be time enough to speak of them.
The barricades in the streets constructed during the last revolution of
two or three weeks back had not yet been removed, but an opening at one
side allowed men and horses to get past. Carriages had to go round, an
easy matter in a city built as this is in squares like a chess-board.
The barricades mount two guns each, and as the streets are quite
straight they can sweep them in both directions, to the whole length of
their range. As in Turin, you can look backward and forward along the
straight streets from every part of the city, and see mountains at each
end. The suburbs of the city are quite as repulsive as our first
glimpse of them led us to expect; and, as far as one could judge by the
appearance of the half-caste inhabitants, it is not good to go there
alone after dark. Here is the end of the aqueduct of Chapultepec, the
Salto del Agua; and—crowded round it—a thoroughly characteristic group
of women and water-carriers, filling their great earthen jars with
water, which they carry about from house to house. The women are simply
and cheaply dressed, and though not generally pretty, are very graceful
in their movements. Their dress consists of a white cotton under-dress,
a coloured cotton skirt, generally blue, brown, or grey, with some
small pattern upon it, but never brilliant in colour, and a rebozo,
which is a small sober-coloured cotton shawl, long and narrow. This
rebozo passes over the back of the head, where it is somehow fixed to a
back hair-comb, and the two ends hang down over the shoulders in front;
or, more often, one end is thrown over the opposite shoulder, so that
the young lady’s face is set in it, like a picture in a frame. Add to
this a springy step, the peculiarly unconstrained movement in walking
which comes of living in the open air and wearing a loose dress, a
pleasant pale face, small features, bright eyes, small hands and feet,
little slippers and no stockings, and you have as good a picture of a
Mexican half-caste girl as I can give. A book of Mexican engravings,
however, will give a much better idea of her. Then we went past the
great prison, the Acordada, and out at the gate (we had purposely gone
out of our way to see more of the city), and so into the great
promenade, the Paseo or Alameda. The latter is the Spanish name for
this necessary appendage to every town. It comes from _álamo_, which
means a poplar. Imagine a long wide level road, a mile or so long,
generally so chosen as to have a fine view, with footpaths on each
side, lines of poplar trees, a fountain at each end and a statue in the
middle, and this description will stand pretty nearly for almost every
promenade of the kind I have seen in Spain or Spanish America.
[Illustration: Water-carrier and a Mexican Woman, at the Fountain]
Tacubaya is a pleasant place on the side of the first hills that begin
to rise towards the mountain-wall of the valley. Here rich Mexicans
have country-houses in large gardens, which are interesting from the
immense variety of plants which grow there, though badly kept up, and
systematically stripped by the gardeners of the fruit as it gets
ripe—for their own benefit, of course. From Tacubaya we go to
Chapultepec (Grasshopper Mountain), which is a volcanic hill of
porphyry rising from the plain. On the top is the palace on which the
viceroy Galvez expended great sums of money some seventy years ago,
making it into a building which would serve either as a palace or as a
fortress in cases of emergency. Though the Americans charged up the
hill and carried it easily in ’47, it would be a very strong place in
proper hands. It is a military school now. On the hill is the famous
grove of cypresses—ahuehuetes[5]—as they are called, grand trees with
their branches hung with fringes of the long grey Spanish moss—barba
Española—Spanish beard. I do not know what painters think of the effect
of this moss, trailing in long festoons from the branches of the trees,
but to me it is beautiful; and I shall never forget where I first saw
it, on a bayou of the Mississippi, winding through the depths of a
great forest in the swamps of Louisiana.[6] In this grove of
Chapultepec, there were sculptured on the side of the hill, in the
solid porphyry, likenesses of the two Montezumas, colossal in size. For
some reason or other, I forget now what, one of the last Spanish
viceroys thought it desirable to destroy them, and tried to blow them
up with gunpowder. He only partially succeeded, for the two great
bas-reliefs were still very distinguishable as we rode past, though
noseless and considerably knocked about.
[5] Ahuehuete, pronounced _a-hwe-hwete_. Thus, Anahuac is pronounced
_Ana-hwac;_ and Chihuahua, _Chi-hwa-hwa_.
[6] In the Swiss Alps, between 4,000 and 5,000 feet above the sea,
there is a similar plant to be seen fringing the branches of the
pine-trees; but it only grows to the length of a few inches, and will
hardly bear comparison to the long trailing festoons of the Spanish
moss, often fifteen or twenty feet in length.
We went home to breakfast with our friends, and looked at the
title-deeds of their house in crabbed Spanish of the sixteenth century,
and the great Chinese treasure-chest, still used as the strong-box of
the firm, with an immense lock, and a key like the key of Dover castle.
Fine old Chinese jars, and other curiosities, are often to be found in
Mexico; and they date from the time when the great galleon from Manila,
which was called “el nao”—the ship—to distinguish it from all other
ships, came once a year to Acapulco.
After breakfast, business hours begin; so we took ourselves off to
visit the canal of Chalco, and the famous floating gardens—as they are
called. On our way we had a chance of studying the conveyances our
ancestors used to ride in, and availed ourselves of it. In books on
Spanish America, written at the beginning of this century, there are
wonderful descriptions of the gilt coaches, with six or eight mules, in
which the great folks used to drive in state on the promenades. They
are exactly the carriages that it was the height of a lady’s ambition
to ride in, in the days of Sir Charles Grandison, and Mr. Tom Jones.
Here, in Mexico, they were still to be found, after they had
disappeared from the rest of the habitable globe; and even now, though
the private carriages are all of a more modern type, there are still
left a few of these amazing vehicles, now degraded to the cab-stand;
and we got into one that was embellished with sculptured Cupids—their
faces as much mutilated as the two Montezumas—and with the remains of
the painting and gilding, which once covered the whole affair, just
visible in corners, like the colouring of the ceilings of the Alhambra.
We had to climb up three high steps, and haul ourselves into the body
of the coach, which hung on strong leather straps; springs belong to a
later period. By the time we had got to the Paseo de las Vigas we were
glad enough to get out, wondering at the sacrifice of comfort to
dignity those highly respectable grandees must have made, and not
surprised at the fate of some inquisitive travellers who have done as
we did, and have been obliged to stop by the qualms of sea-sickness. At
the bridge we chartered a canoe to Santa Anita. This Santa Anita is a
little Indian village on the canal of Chalco, and to-day there is to be
a festival there. For this, however, we shall be too early, as we have
to be back in time to see Mexico turn out for a promenade on the Paseo
de las Vigas, and then to go out to dinner. So we must just take the
opportunity of looking at the Indian population as they go up and down
the canal in canoes, and see their gardens and their houses. However,
as the Indian notion of a festival consists in going to mass in the
morning, and getting drunk and fighting in the afternoon, we are
perhaps as well out of it. We took our passage to Santa Anita and back
in a canoe—a mere flat-bottomed box with sloping sides, made of boards
put together with wooden pegs. There was a mat at the stern for us to
squat upon, and an awning over our heads. An old Indian and his son
were the crew; and they had long poles, which they set against the
banks or the bottom of the shallow canal, and so pushed us along.
Besides these two, an old woman with two little girls got in, as we
were starting—without asking our leave, by the way—and sat down at the
other end of the canoe. Of course, the old woman began to busy herself
with the two little girls, in the usual occupation of old women here,
during their idle moments; and though she left off at our earnest
request, she evidently thought us very crotchety people for objecting.
The scene on the canal was a curious one. There were numbers of boats
going up and down; and the Indians, as soon as they caught sight of an
acquaintance, began to shout out a long string of complimentary
phrases, sometimes in Spanish and sometimes in Mexican: “How is your
worship this morning?” “I trust that I have the happiness of seeing
your worship in good health.” “If there is anything I can have the
honour of doing for your worship, pray dispose of me,” and so forth;
till they are out of hearing. All this is accompanied by a taking-off
of hats, and a series of low bows and complimentary grimaces. As far as
we could ascertain, it is all mere matter of ceremony. It may be an
exaggeration of the formal, complimentary talk of the Spaniards, but
its origin probably dates further back.
The Indians here no longer appeared the same dull, melancholy men whom
we had seen in the richer quarter of the town. There they were under a
strong feeling of constraint, for their language is not understood by
the whites and mestizos; and they, for their part, know but little
Spanish; and besides, there is very little sympathy between the two
classes. One thing will shew this clearly enough. By a distinct line of
demarcation, the Indians are separated from the rest of the population,
who are at least partly white. These latter call themselves “gente de
razón”—people of reason,—to distinguish themselves from the Indians,
who are people without reason. In common parlance the distinction is
made thus: the whites and mixed breed are “gente”—_people_,—the brown
men being merely “Indios”—Indians—and not people at all.
Here, in their own quarter, and among their own people, they seem
talkative enough. We can only tell what they are chattering about when
they happen to speak Spanish, either for our benefit, or to show off
their proficiency in that tongue. People who can speak the Aztec
language say that their way of forming compound words gives constant
occasion for puns and quibbles, and that the talk of the Indians is
full of such small jokes. In this respect they differ exceedingly from
the Spaniards, whose jests are generally about _things_, and seldom
about their _names_, as one sees by their almost always bearing
translation into other languages.
Most of the canoes were tastefully decorated with flowers, for the
Aztecs have not lost their old taste for ornamenting themselves, and
everything about them, with garlands and nosegays. The fruits and
vegetables they were carrying to market were very English in their
appearance. Mexico is supplied with all kinds of tropical fruits, which
come from a distance; but the district we are now in only produces
plants which might grow in our own country—barley, potatoes, cabbages,
parsnips, apples, pears, plums, peaches, and so forth, but scarcely
anything tropical in its character. One thing surprises us, that the
Indians, in a climate where the mornings and evenings are often very
chilly, should dress so scantily. The men have a general appearance of
having outgrown their clothes; for the sleeves of the kind of
cotton-shirt they wear only reach to their elbows, and their trousers,
of the same material, only fall to their knees. To these two garments
add a sort of blanket, thrown over the shoulders, a pair of sandals,
and a palm-leaf hat, and the man is dressed. His skin is brown, his
limbs muscular—especially his legs—his lips thick, his nose Jewish, his
hair coarse, black, and hanging straight down. The woman’s dress is as
simple as the man’s. She has on a kind of cotton sack, very short in
the sleeves, and very open at the shoulders, and some sort of a skirt
or petticoat besides. Sometimes she has a folded cotton cloth on her
head, like a Roman contadina; but, generally, nothing covers her thick
black hair, which hangs down behind in long twisted tails.
In old times, when Mexico was in the middle of a great lake, and the
inhabitants were not strong enough to hold land on the shores, they
were driven to strange shifts to get food. Among other expedients, they
took to making little floating islands, which consisted of rafts of
reeds and brushwood, on which they heaped mud from the shores of the
lakes. On the banks of the lake of Tezcuco the mud was, at first, too
full of salt and soda to be good for cultivation; but by pouring the
water of the lake upon it, and letting it soak through, they dissolved
out most of the salts, and the island was fit for cultivation, and bore
splendid crops of vegetables.[7] These islands were called _chinampas_,
and they were often large enough for the proprietor to build a hut in
the middle, and live in it with his family. In later times, when the
Mexicans came to be no longer afraid of their neighbours, the chinampas
were not of much use; and when the water was drained off, and the city
stood on dry land, one would have supposed that such a troublesome and
costly arrangement would have been abandoned. The Mexican, however, is
hard to move from the customs of his ancestors; and we have Humboldt’s
word for it, that in his time there were some of these artificial
islands still in the lake of Chalco, which the owners towed about with
a rope, or pushed with a long pole. They are all gone now, at any rate,
though the name of _chinampa_ is still applied to the gardens along the
canal. These gardens very much resemble the floating islands in their
construction of mud, heaped on a foundation of reeds and branches; and
though they are not the real thing, and do not float, they are
interesting, as the present representatives of the famous Mexican
floating gardens. They are narrow strips of land, with a frontage of
four or five yards to the canal, and a depth of one hundred, or a
hundred and fifty yards. Between the strips are open ditches; and one
principal occupation of the proprietor seems to be bringing up mud from
the bottom of the ditch with a wooden shovel, and throwing it on the
garden, in places where it has sunk. The reason of the narrowness of
the strips is that he may be able to throw mud all over them from the
ditches on either side.
[7] Chalco was and is a freshwater lake, and here they had not even
this to do.
While we are busy observing all these matters, and questioning our
boatmen about them, we reach Santa Anita. Here there are swampy lanes
and more swampy gardens, a little village of Indian houses, three or
four pulque-shops, and a church. Outside the pulque-shops are
fresco-paintings, representing Aztec warriors carousing, and draining
great bowls of pulque. These were no specimens of Aztec art, however,
but seemed to be copied (by some white or half-caste sign-painter,
probably) from the French coloured engravings which represent the
events of the Conquest. These extraordinary works of art are to be seen
everywhere in this country, where, of all places in the world, one
would have thought that people would have noticed that the artist had
not the faintest idea of what an Aztec was like, but supposed that his
limbs and face and hair were like an European’s. Here, with the real
Aztec standing underneath, the difference was striking enough. One
ought not to be too critical about these things, however, when one
remembers the pictures of shepherds and shepherdesses that adorn our
English farmhouses. We drank pulque at the sign of _The Cacique_, and
liked it, for we had now quite got over our aversion to its putrid
taste and smell. I wonder that our new faculty of pulque-drinking did
not make us able to relish the suspicious eggs that abound in Mexican
inns, but it had no such effect, unfortunately.
Our canoe took us back to the Promenade of Las Vigas, which is a long
drive, planted with rows of trees, and extends along the last mile or
two of the canal. Indeed, its name comes from the beam (Viga) which
swings across the canal at the place where the canoes pay toll. This
was the great promenade, once upon a time; but the new Alameda has
taken away all the promenaders to a more fashionable quarter, except on
certain festival days, three or four times in the year, when it is the
correct thing for society to make a display of itself—on horseback or
in carriages—in this neglected Indian quarter. We had happened upon one
of these festival days; so, as we crawled along the side-path, tired
and dusty, we had a good opportunity of seeing the Mexican beau monde.
The display of really good carriages was extraordinary; but it must be
recollected that many families here are content to live miserably
enough at home, if they can manage to appear in good style at the
theatre and on the promenade. This is one reason why so many of the
Mexicans who are so friendly with you out of doors, and in the cafés,
are so very shy of letting you see the inside of their houses. They
say, and very likely it is true, that among the richer classes, it is
customary to put a stipulation in the marriage-contracts, that the
husband shall keep a carriage and pair, and a box at the theatre, for
his wife’s benefit. The horsemen turned out in great style, and the
foreigners were fully represented among them. It was noticeable that
while these latter generally adopted the high-peaked saddle, and the
jacket, and broad-brimmed felt hat of the country, and looked as though
the new arrangements quite suited them, the native dandies, on the
other hand, were prone to dressing in European fashion, and sitting
upon English saddles—in which they looked neither secure nor
comfortable.
We walked home past the old Bull-ring, now replaced by a new one near
the new promenade, and found, to our surprise, that in this quarter of
the town many of the streets were under water. We knew that the level
of the lake of Tezcuco had been raised by a series of three very wet
seasons, but had no idea that things had got so far as this. Of course
the ground-floors had to be abandoned, and the people had made a raised
pathway of planks along the street, and adopted various contrivances
for getting dryshod up to their first floors; and in some places canoes
were floating in the street. The city looked like this some two hundred
years ago, when Martinez the engineer tried an unfortunate experiment
with his draining tunnel at Huehuetoca, and flooded the whole city for
five years. It was by the interference, they tell us, of the patroness
of the Indians, our Lady of Guadalupe, who was brought from her own
temple on purpose, that the city was delivered from the impending
destruction. A number of earthquakes took place, which caused the
ground to split in large fissures, down which the superfluous water
disappeared. For none of her many miracles has the Virgin of Guadalupe
got so much credit as for this. To be sure, it is not generally
mentioned in orthodox histories of the affair, that she was brought to
the capital a year or two before the earthquakes happened.
Talking of earthquakes, it is to be remembered that we are in a
district where they are of continual occurrence. If one looks carefully
at a line of houses in a street, it is curious to see how some walls
slope inwards, and some outwards, and some are cracked from top to
bottom. There is hardly a church-tower in Mexico that is not visibly
out of the perpendicular. Any one who has noticed how the walls of the
Cathedral of Pisa have been thrown out of the perpendicular by the
settling down of the foundations, will have an idea of the general
appearance of the larger buildings of Mexico. On different occasions
the destruction caused by earthquakes has been very great. By the way,
the liability of Mexico to these shocks, explains the peculiarity of
the building of the houses. A modern English town with
two-or-three-storied houses, with their thin brick walls, would be laid
in ruins by a shock which would hardly affect Mexico. Here, the houses
of several storeys have stone walls of such thickness that they resist
by sheer strength; and the one-storey mud houses, in the suburbs, are
too low to suffer much by being shaken about. A few days before we
arrived here, our friends Pepe and Pancho were playing at billiards in
the Lonja,[8] the Merchants’ Exchange; and Pepe described to us the
feeling of utter astonishment with which he saw his ball, after
striking the other, go suddenly off at an absurd angle into a pocket.
The shock of an earthquake had tilted the table up on one side. While
we were in Mexico there was a slight shock, which set the chandeliers
swinging, but we did not even notice it. In April, a solemn procession
goes from the Cathedral, on a day marked in the Calendar as the
“Patrocinio de Señor San Jose”, to implore the “Santissimo Patriarca”
to protect the city from earthquakes (temblores). In connection with
this subject there is an opinion, so generally received in Mexico that
it is worth notice. Everybody there, even the most educated people,
will tell you that there is an earthquake-season, which occurs in
January or February; and that the shocks are far more frequent than at
any other time of the year. My impression is that this is all nonsense;
but I should like to test it with a list of the shocks that have been
felt, if such a thing were to be had. It does not follow that, because
the Mexicans have such frequent opportunities of trying the question,
they should therefore have done so. In fact, experience as to popular
beliefs in similar matters rather points the other way. I recollect
that in the earthquake districts of southern Italy, when shocks were of
almost daily occurrence, people believed that they were more frequent
in the middle four hours of the night, from ten to two, than at other
times. Of course, this proved on examination to be quite without
foundation. To take one more case in point. How many of our
almanack-books, even the better class of them, contain prophecies of
wet and fine weather, deduced from the moon’s quarters! How long will
it be before we get rid of this queer old astrological superstition?
[8] The “Lonja” is a feature in the commercial towns of Spanish
America. It is not only the Merchants’ Exchange, but their club,
billiard-room, and smoking-room; in fact, their “lounge,” and I fancy
the two words are connected with one another.
We made a few rough observations of the thermometer and barometer
during our stay in Mexico. The barometer stands at about 22½ inches,
and our thermometer gave the boiling point of water at 199 degrees. We
could never get eggs well boiled in the high lands, and attributed
this, whether rightly or not I cannot say, to the low temperature of
boiling water.
[Illustration: Group of Ecclesiastics, Mexico.]