VIVA MEXICO!
Books by Charles M. Flandrau
VIVA MEXICO!
_16mo. Cloth, $1.25 net_
PREJUDICES
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THE DIARY OF A FRESHMAN
_12mo. Cloth, 75 cents net_
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK
VIVA MEXICO!
By
CHARLES MACOMB FLANDRAU
Author of “Harvard Episodes,” “The
Diary of a Freshman,” etc.
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1912
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
_Published September, 1908_
Printed in the United States of America
TO
DON GUILLERMO
OF THE FINCA DE
SANTA MARGARITA
For permission to reprint the chapters of this book that originally
appeared in _The Bellman_, I beg to thank the editor.
RIGHT
C. M. F.
VIVA MEXICO!
I
Neither tourists nor persons of fashion seem to have discovered that the
trip by water from New York to Vera Cruz is both interesting and
agreeable. But perhaps to tourists and persons of fashion it wouldn’t
be. For, although the former enjoy having traveled, they rarely enjoy
traveling, and the travels of the latter would be pointless, as a rule,
if they failed to involve the constant hope of social activity and its
occasional fulfillment. By tourists I mean--and without disparagement of
at least their preference--persons who prefer to visit a country in
bands of from fifteen to five hundred rather than in a manner less
expeditionary; and persons of fashion I am able even more accurately to
define to my own satisfaction by saying they are the kind of persons to
whom the wives of American ambassadors in Europe are polite. Probably to
neither of these globe-trotting but alien classes would the voyage from
New York to Vera Cruz appeal. For the tourist it is too slow and long.
There are whole days when there is nothing for the man in charge of him
to expound through his megaphone; whole days when there is nothing to do
but contemplate a cloudless sky and a semitropical sea. Thoroughly to
delight in the protracted contemplation of such spacious blueness
overhead and of so much placid green water underneath, one must be
either very lazy or very contemplative. Tourists, of course, are
neither, and while persons of fashion are sometimes both, they are given
to contemplating the beauties of nature from points of vantage favorable
also to the contemplation of one another.
Emphatically the deck of a Ward line steamer is not one of these. A
preliminary investigation just before the ship sails rarely results in
the discovery of what a certain type of American classifies as “nice
people.” When nice people take sea voyages they usually go to Europe;
and so there is an additional anticipatory thrill on embarking for
Mexico in the certainty that there won’t be any merely nice people on
board. The ship will be crowded--so crowded, in fact, that at Havana and
Progreso (which is the port of Merida in the Mexican State of Yucatan)
the company’s agents will distractedly swoop down on you and try to
convince you that it is to your everlasting advantage to abandon a lower
berth in the stateroom long experience has enabled you to select, for an
upper berth in a room you happen to know is small, hot, and near the
steerage. If you are amiable you laugh at them, but if, as is customary,
you and the company have had a fierce disgusto before sailing and you
are therefore not amiable, you express yourself without restraint and
then run to the rail to watch the agents depart in their launch, with
gestures that more literally resemble the traditional tearing of hair,
wringing of hands, and rending of garments than any you have yet
observed.
The ships are crowded, but not with the kind of people who set sail in
search of pleasure, or the Beyreuth festival, or health, or the London
season, or clothes, or the Kiel regatta, or merely because they are
temporarily hard up and have to economize for a time by dismissing the
servants, closing all three houses, and living very simply in nine
ballrooms at Claridge’s or the Ritz. With people bound for Latin
America, Fate somehow seems more actively occupied, on more intimate,
more intrusive terms than it is with people on the way to somewhere
else. Most of them are going, one gradually discovers, not just to see
what it is like, or because they have seen and have chosen to return,
but because circumstances in their wonderful, lucid way have combined to
send them there.
My roommates--I can’t afford a whole stateroom--have usually detested
their destinations from experience or dreaded them from hearsay. One, a
silent, earnest-looking young man who was fond of playing solitaire and
reading the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, always spent his winters in the
hot countries, not because he liked them, but because his profession of
“looping the loop” on a bicycle could be continuously pursued only in
climates salubrious to the circus. Another, a grizzled old Wisconsin
timber cruiser, was being sent, much against his will, to make a report
on some Cuban forest lands.
“It is a queer, strange thing,” he confided in me when we parted in
Havana harbor, “that a man of my age and morals won’t be able even to
get drunk without the help o’ that”--and he nodded toward the ladylike
little interpreter who had come out to meet him and take charge of him
during his stay.
Still another struck me at first as a provincial and tedious New
Englander until I found out his mission. His inside coat pocket was
stuffed with photographs of his numerous children, and he had a horror
of snakes and tarantulas that he often expressed much as one of Miss
Wilkins’s heroines might express her horror of mice. Like all persons
who share the same dread and are about to make a first visit to the
tropics, he conferred on reptiles and poisonous insects a kind of civic
importance that they themselves under no circumstances assume. He had a
haunting idea that the entire toxical population of Guatemala would be
lined up at the railway station to receive him. But when it came out
that he was being sent twenty-six hundred miles for the sole purpose of
splicing a rope--a matter, he said, of a few hours at the most--I was
compelled to see him in a light not only different but almost romantic.
Somewhere in darkest Guatemala there was a rope four and a half miles
long. It broke, and my roommate, who had never been farther south than
Summer Street nor farther west than West Newton--localities between
which he had vibrated daily for many years--was, it seemed, the one
human being among all the human beings from Guatemala to Boston who was
capable of splicing it. As the rope had cost three thousand dollars it
was distinctly less expensive to import a West Newtonian than to import
another rope.
Then, too, I once between Havana and Vera Cruz had as a roommate a
“confidence man”--a broadening and therefore a valuable experience. One
is not often given the privilege of living for five days with a
confidence man on terms of confidence. He was a tall, lank, sandy-haired
creature of about forty, with a Roman nose, a splendid mustache,
unemotional, gray-green eyes, a diamond ring, and suspenders, as well as
a belt; the sort of looking person whom twenty-five years ago British
playwrights would have seized upon as “a typical American.” In a
bloodless fashion his whole existence was “a carnival of crime”--a
succession of scurvy tricks, heartless swindles, lies, frauds, and, now
and then, candid, undisguised thefts. Sometimes, as when he sold jewelry
and bric-a-brac at auction, his dealings were with the semi-intelligent
well-to-do, but more often he exerted himself among the credulous poor,
as when he unloaded brass watch cases filled with tacks on negroes at
Texas fairs. His marked playing cards and loaded dice, which he showed
and explained to me with much amiable vanity, were very ingenious, and I
found our long, cheerful discussions on the technic of his art most
helpful. His contributions to them, in fact, threw upon certain phases
of sociology a brilliant and authoritative light that I defy anyone to
get out of a book or put into it. From instinct, from habit, from love
of the work, he was an almost thoroughly consistent scoundrel, and it
was a shock to discover by the end of the voyage that the thing about
him I most objected to was his wearing suspenders as well as a belt.
There is always a brave and hopeful little band of actors on
board--usually an American stock company on the way to its financial and
artistic doom in the City of Mexico. And it is invariably named after
the beautiful young lady who has hypnotized some middle-aged Mexican
patron saint of the drama into guaranteeing everybody six weeks’ salary
and a return ticket. If it isn’t the Beryl Smith Company it is sure to
be the Company of Hazel Jones or Gladys Robinson, and Beryl (or Hazel or
Gladys) is so beautiful that she can stand unhatted and unveiled in the
midday sunlight of the Gulf--beauty knows no more merciless
test--without making you wish she wouldn’t. Furthermore, you continue to
think her hair the loveliest color you have ever seen, even after--with
an extremely elegant gesture--she tosses her chewing gum overboard and
languidly tells you how she does it.
But her tragedy, like that of her more hardworking associates, is a
great inability to hold anyone’s attention except when she is off the
stage. If actors could only arrange in some way to charge admission to
their semi-private existence, acting as a profession would be less of a
gamble. For it is an unexplained fact that, however obscure,
inconspicuous, and well-behaved they may be, actors and actresses
excite, when they are not acting, more curiosity, speculation, and
comment than any other class. Start the rumor on shipboard that a
certain quiet, unattached young woman, who wears a shabby mackintosh,
common-sense shoes and a last year’s hat, is a third-rate actress, and
the center of the deck at once becomes hers. A few days later, however,
when she turns out to be a first-rate physician or the professor of
Pre-Christian Hebrew literature at Bryn Mawr, her value as a
conversational resource drops instantly to nothing.
But if on the voyage to Mexico one’s compatriots strike, to fall back on
the cant phrase, a diverting “note,” the Cubans, the Spaniards, the
Yucatecans, and the Mexicans in general strike whole chords. To set sail
for anywhere, even Duluth, has always seemed to me considerably more
than merely a practical step toward transporting myself from one place
to another. On going aboard a ship I can’t--and would not if I
could--rid myself of the sensation that there is something improbable
and adventurous about me; that everybody, from the captain to the
sixty-year-old cockney stewardess, is about to engage in “deeds of love
and high emprise.” The sudden translation from Forty-second Street to
the deck of any steamer bound for foreign parts has a thrill in it, but
if the destination be the tropics, there is more than one. They are
incited by the presence of so many slim, sallow, gesticulating men, and
stout, powdered, gayly (and badly) dressed women, by the surprisingly
variegated inflections and minor cadences of the Spanish language, by
the first penetrating whiff of exotic tobacco smoke from the cigarette
of a coffee-colored old lady with a mustache, from the very shape and
quality of the luggage as it is hoisted over the side or carried up by
the army of negro porters; the most un-Anglo-Saxon luggage conceivable.
They travel, the Latin-Americans, with incredible amounts of it, and the
sight of it always makes me wonder whether they have ever traveled
before or ever expect to travel again. For it consists chiefly of
gigantic, smashed-in paper band-boxes, satchels precariously fashioned
out of something that tries hard to look like leather and doesn’t in the
least succeed, pale blue or pink trunks that for some occult reason are
narrower at the bottom than at the top and might be either small,
frivolous coffins or large, forbidding cradles, corpulent bales of
heaven knows what covered with matting, baskets covered with newspapers,
articles of wearing apparel covered with confusion, and fifty other
things covered with nothing at all. Once at the Wall Street wharf I saw
a young Mexican get out of a Holland House omnibus bearing in his hand a
parrot cage stuffed full of shoes. It seemed to me at the time a
delirious incident, and I remembered it. But I doubt that, after having
lived in Mexico, I should now notice or remember it at all. He was a
very charming young person whose mother had been a lady in waiting to
the Empress Carlotta, and he was on his way back from Belgium, where he
goes once a year to sink on his knee and kiss the aged Carlotta’s hand.
Oh, yes, there is always a thrill in it--this setting sail for the hot
countries. It begins on the dock, slightly increases as one steams past
the low, monotonous coast of Florida, becomes disturbing in the
exquisite little harbor of Havana, and at Progreso, where for
thirty-six hours one stares at the shallow, green gulf water, the
indolent sharks and the stretch of sand and palm trees wavering in heat,
that is Yucatan, it enslaves one like a drug of which one disapproves,
but to which one nevertheless succumbs. One afternoon at sunset, before
we had even sighted land, a little French boy accurately summed up for
us the vague and various sensations that, during the last few hours of
the hot afternoon, had stolen over us all. He had been born in Yucatan
and was returning there with his father after a first visit to France.
Suddenly in his race around the deck with some other children he stopped
short, glanced at the group of half-dozing, half-fanning women in
steamer chairs, at the listless men against the rail, at the calm,
lemon-colored sky and the floating islands of seaweed on the green
water. Then, throwing back his head, he closed his eyes, drew a long
appreciative breath and, with his eyes still closed, exclaimed
luxuriously: “Ah-h-h, on sent les pays chauds!”
II
At first you are both amazed and annoyed by what seems like not only
lack of curiosity but positive ignorance on the part of Americans who
live in Mexico. As a new arrival, I had an admirable thirst for
information which I endeavored to slake at what I supposed were
fountains of knowledge as well as of afternoon tea. The tea was
delicious and plentiful; but the knowledge simply did not exist.
“What is the population of Barranca?” you ask of an intelligent
compatriot who has lived in Barranca for ten years.
“Why, I don’t know exactly,” he replies, as if the question were an
interesting one that had never before occurred to him.
“Oh, I don’t mean exactly--but is it eight thousand, or fourteen, or
twenty-five? It’s rather difficult for a stranger to form an idea; the
towns are built so differently from ours. Although they may not be
really large, they are so compact that they look more populous and
‘citified’ than places of the same size in the United States,” you
explain.
“Yes, that’s very true, and it _is_ difficult,” he agrees.
“Do you suppose I could find out anywhere? Do they ever take the
census?” you pursue.
“The census? Why, I don’t know about that. But there’s Smith on the
bench over there having his shoes shined. He’s been in the country for
fifteen years--he’ll be able to tell you. Smith, I want to introduce a
friend of mine who is very anxious to know the population of Barranca
and whether they ever take the census.”
“The census?” muses Smith, ignoring the population entirely. “I don’t
know if they take the census, but they take your taxes with great
regularity,” he declares with a laugh. Then follows a pleasant ten
minutes with Smith, during which the reason of your introduction to him
does not recur, and after precisely the same thing has happened several
other times with several other persons, you would almost rather start a
revolution than an inquiry into the population of Barranca.
The specific instance is perhaps a trivial one, but it is typical, and,
as I said, you are for a time amazed and irritated, on asking
intelligent questions about the federal and state governments, the
judiciary, the army, education, morality, and even so obvious a matter
as the climate, to receive from American acquaintances replies that are
never accurate and rarely as much as inaccurately definite. Some of them
frankly admit that, as they never have had personal relations with the
establishments you seek to learn about (barring the climate), they have
not taken the trouble to inform themselves. Others appear to experience
a belated regret at their long indifference, promise to look the matter
up and let you know. But they never do, and it is rather discouraging.
You yearn to acquire a respectably comprehensive idea of the conditions
in which you are living, yet the only people with whom you can carry on
any but a most staccato and indispensable conversation are unable to
throw light. So, being the only one really intelligent foreigner in the
republic, you resort to the medium of art, and begin to read books.
Everyone you know has at some time or other read and enjoyed Prescott’s
“Conquest,” but it does not emerge that on the subject of Mexico they
have ever read anything else, and for a while you quietly revel in your
mental alertness and superior intelligence. You are learning all about
the country--its institutions and laws, its products and habits--while
your listless friends still sit in darkness. Then one fine morning
something happens--something of no especial importance, but something
that nevertheless serves to insert the thin edge of suspicion’s wedge
between you and your learning.
You have, for instance, read that “in virtue of the constitution adopted
February 5, 1857, arrest is prohibited, save in the case of crimes
meriting corporal punishment,” and it has seemed to you a wise and just
provision. You have also, let us say, employed two competent stone
masons to build a coffee tank, a fireplace, a pigpen, or some such
useful accessory of life in the tropics, and you become much disturbed
when, after they have worked steadily and well for three or four days,
they fail to appear. That afternoon as you stroll through the plaza
lamenting their perfidy, you are astonished at receiving two friendly,
sheepish greetings from two sheepish, friendly stone masons who are
engaged in laying municipal cobblestones, together with thirty or forty
other prisoners, under the eyes of several heavily armed policemen.
Unmistakably they are your masons, and with much bewilderment you demand
of Smith--who, no doubt, is strolling with you--just what it means.
“It merely means,” Smith explains, “that the town is repairing part of
the plaza pavement and needs competent masons. So they arrested yours.”
“But on what grounds?”
“Oh, drunkenness probably.”
“Do you suppose they were drunk? They seemed like very steady men.”
“Why, they may have been a trifle elated,” Smith laughs. “The assumption
that they were isn’t a particularly startling one in this part of the
world. But that wasn’t why they were arrested. They were arrested
because they were good masons and the city happens to need them. If they
hadn’t been drunk, some one would have been sent out to make them
so--never, unfortunately, a very arduous undertaking.”
“Oh, indeed; how simple and efficacious!” you murmur, and go home to
read some more.
Still other wise and just provisions of the same excellent document are
that no person may be obliged to work for another person without freely
consenting so to work, nor without receiving just remuneration, and that
imprisonment for debts of a purely civil nature is prohibited. But as
your Spanish gradually improves and you are able to have more sustained
talks with the natives, you learn that the entire lives of a great
number of peones working on haciendas contain two alternatives, one of
which is practical slavery and the other imprisonment for debt to his
employer.
A young man goes to work on, say, a sugar plantation for the magnificent
wages of thirty-six Mexican cents a day. In the course of time--usually
a very short time--he acquires a family. If he acquires it after certain
preliminary formalities, such as a marriage ceremony and its attendant
festivities, his employer has loaned him the forty or fifty
pesos--unpayable sum--necessary to defray the costs of the priest and
the piper, and the young man’s eternal indebtedness begins from the
beginning. If, however, there are no formalities, the financial burden
is not assumed until the birth of the first child.
Mexicans of every station adore their children, and even when, as
frequently happens among the lower classes, the parents are neither
civilly nor religiously married (in Mexico only the civil ceremony is
recognized by the law) nothing is too good or too expensive for the
offspring. They are baptized and, if the informal union of the parents
lasts long enough, they are confirmed. But in Mexico, as elsewhere, the
kingdom of heaven costs money, and this money the young man’s employer
cheerfully advances. Then in the natural march of events some one dies.
Death, of course, all the world over, has become one of our grossest
extravagances. Again the employer delightedly pays.
Now he has the young man--no longer so young--exactly where his sugar
plantation wants him. On thirty-six cents a day there is no possibility
of a laborer’s paying a debt of a hundred or more pesos and moving away,
and if he attempts to depart without paying it, a word from the
hacendado to his friend the jefe politico would suffice to land him in
jail and keep him there. It is impossible to deny that on some
haciendas, perhaps on many, this form of slavery is a happier, a more
comfortable arrangement than would be the freedom so energetically
insisted on in the constitution. Still, slavery is neither a pretty word
nor a pretty idea, and yet, in spite of the constitution, the idea
obtains in Mexico quite as it obtains in the United States.
Then again you read with satisfaction that among other forms of
freedom--“freedom of education, freedom to exercise the liberal
professions, freedom of thought,” and so on--the freedom of the press is
guaranteed; guaranteed, that is to say, with the reservation that
“private rights and the public peace shall not be violated.” The manner
in which this reservation can be construed, however, does not occur to
you until you read in _El Imparcial_ or in the _Mexican Herald_--the
best Spanish and American daily papers--an account of, let us say, a
strike of the mill operatives at Orizaba, and then, a week later, chance
to learn what actually happened.
“I see by the _Herald_ that you had a little strike at Orizaba the other
day,” you remark to the middle-aged British manager of a large Orizaba
jute mill, with whom you find yourself in the same swimming pond at the
baths of Tehuacan. “The _Herald_ said that in a clash with the troops
several strikers were killed and twenty-five were injured.”
“Did it indeed?” remarks the manager dryly, and later, when you are
sitting together in the sun after your bath, he explains that the strike
was an incipient revolution engineered by a junta in St. Louis, that the
Government sent down a regiment from the City of Mexico, that in an
impromptu sort of way six hundred strikers were immediately shot, and
that the next morning thirty-four were formally, elaborately, and
officially executed. This prompt and heroic measure, he informs you,
ended both the strike and the incipient revolution, and as you compare
what you have read in the papers with what is the truth, you can tell
yourself that it has also ended your illusions as to the freedom of the
Mexican press.
In fact you begin to realize why, when you ask American residents of the
country for information, their replies are usually so vague, so
contradictory, so uninforming. It is not, as a rule, because they know
too little, but because they know too much. Theoretical Mexico--the
Mexico of constitutions, reform laws, statutes, and books of travel--has
ceased, long since, vitally to concern them. It is Mexico as they day by
day find it that interests them and that in the least counts. And
practical, every-day Mexico is an entirely different, infinitely more
mysterious, fascinating affair.
“Does it rain here in summer as much as it does in winter?” I once asked
a Mexican lady in a saturated mountain village in the State of Vera
Cruz.
“No hay reglas fijas, señor” (there are no fixed rules), she replied,
after a thoughtful silence, with a shrug.
No hay reglas fijas! It is not perhaps a detailed description of the
great Don Porfirio’s republic, but it is a consummate epitome, and once
you have committed it to memory and “taken it to heart,” your literary
pursuits begin to languish. After traveling for three weeks in Mexico,
almost anyone can write an entertaining and oracular volume, but after
living there for several years, the oracle--unless subsidized by the
Government--has a tendency to become dumb. For, in a country where
theory and practice are so at variance, personal experience becomes the
chart by which one is accustomed to steer, and although it is a valuable
one, it may, for a hundred quaint reasons, be entirely different from
that of the man whose ranch, or mine, or coffee place adjoins one’s own.
In just this, I feel sure, lies much of the indisputable charm of
Mexico. No hay reglas fijas. Everyone’s experience is different, and
everyone, in a sense, is a pioneer groping his way--like Cortés on his
prodigious march up from the sea. One never knows, from the largest to
the smallest circumstances of life, just what to expect, and Ultimate
Truth abideth not. This is not so much because Mexicans are instinctive
and facile liars, as because the usual methods of ascertaining and
disseminating news are not employed. At home we demand facts and get
them. In Mexico one subsists on rumor and never demands anything. A
well-regulated, systematic, and precise person always detests Mexico and
can rarely bring himself to say a kind word about anything in it,
including the scenery. But if one is not inclined to exaggerate the
importance of exactitude and is perpetually interested in the casual,
the florid, and the problematic, Mexico is one long, carelessly written
but absorbing romance.
III
Superficially, Mexico is a prolonged romance. For even its brutal
realities--of which there are many--are the realities of an intensely
pictorial people among surroundings that, to Northern eyes, are never
quite commonplace. I once, for instance, saw a plucky little policeman
shoot and kill an insanely drunken shoemaker who, in the marketplace a
few minutes before, apropos of nothing except the fact that he _was_
insanely drunk, had cut the throat of a young milkman. The policeman
pursued him in his mad flight for home and, just as they passed me on a
deserted street near the outskirts of the town, returned a quick stab in
the stomach from the shoemaker’s knife (still reeking with the milkman’s
blood) by a revolver shot. They then both collapsed in a mud puddle, and
to me was appointed the rôle of arousing the neighborhood, unbuttoning
the policeman’s clothes and slipping two pillows under his pale, brave
head.
Of course it was the most squalid of incidents; precisely what happens
every little while in New York and Pittsburg and San Francisco, and
every few minutes, so we are told, in Chicago. But in Barranca, somehow,
the squalor of the affair could not successfully compete with the
dramatic interest and the stage-setting. The people who emerged from
their blue and pink and yellow and green houses at my alarm (no one in
Mexico is alarmed by the sound of firearms) the distracted widow--who,
however, postponed complete distraction until after she had carefully
gone through her dead husband’s pockets--the pompous arrival of the
chief of police, the color and costuming and arrangement of it all, were
far too like the last scenes of “Carmen” or “Cavalleria Rusticana” to
permit of one’s experiencing any but an agreeably theatrical sensation
of horror.
I strolled away after the shoemaker was removed to the police station
and the canvas-covered litter had been sent back for the gasping
policeman, asking myself by what strange alchemy drunkenness, murder,
and retribution in a mud puddle could be made so entertaining. The
brutish spectacle, I realized, ought to have shocked me, and the
remainder of my walk should have been spent in reflecting that the world
was a very wicked place. But I had not been shocked at all, and the
world just then seemed not so much wicked as unusually interesting. And
this, I flatter myself, was not on my part a moral obtuseness, but an
innate quality of the general Mexican scene. For it is always pictorial
and always dramatic; it is not only invariably a painting, but the kind
of painting that tells a story. Paintings that tell stories are declared
by critics to be “bad art.” Perhaps this is why so many travelers in
Mexico find so little to admire.
At first, I confess, almost everybody in the republic looks like a
home-made cigar. But when your eyes have become properly focused, it is
difficult to remember having thought of so cheap a comparison. Whether
your relations with the people be agreeable or otherwise, you cannot but
admit, after becoming used to the type, that there is among all classes
an extraordinary amount of beauty. In every Mexican crowd there are,
naturally, a great many ugly persons and plain persons and
average-looking persons. An omnipotent Creator for, no doubt, some
perfectly good reason that surpasseth all my little understanding,
chooses, in perpetuating the human race, to depart, as a rule, very far
from perfection and even from charm. But in Mexico, although the
departure can be as far, it is somehow not as frequent.
In its way, the mixture of Spaniard and tropical Indian--which was the
original recipe for making the contemporary Mexican--is physically a
pleasing one. It isn’t our way, but one doesn’t after a while find it
less attractive for that. The Indians, in the part of Mexico I happen to
know best, have at least the outward characteristics of a “gentle” race.
Even when they are tall, they are inevitably and--one might almost
say--incorrigibly plump. One never ceases to marvel at the superhuman
strength existing beneath the pretty and effeminate modeling of their
arms and legs and backs. Except when they grow old and wither up, which
they do, like all tropical races, while they are still young, they yet
display no angles. However great may be their muscular development from
trotting up and down perpendicular mountain trails with incredible loads
of corn, or pottery, or tiles, or firewood, or human beings on their
backs, the muscles themselves never stand out. The legs of an American
“strong man” look usually like an anatomical chart, but the legs of the
most powerful Totonac Indian--and the power of many of them is beyond
belief--would serve admirably as one of those idealized extremities on
which women’s hosiery is displayed in shop windows. In spite of their
constantly surprising exhibitions both of unpremeditated strength and
long endurance, there is in the general aspect of their physique more of
prettiness than of vigor, more grace than virility.
With these people and others like them, the Spaniards began to mingle in
the year 1519, and from the union of Spanish men and aboriginal women
sprang the Mexican of to-day. In them the physical traits of both races
are obvious. If, by alliance, the native lost some of his round, sleek
modeling, the conqueror renounced much of his gauntness and austerity.
For the modern Mexican, roughly speaking, is neither a rugged type nor
an unmanly one. He is, as a rule, a “spare,” small-waisted creature
whose muscles, when he has any, show--unlike those of the pure
Indian--in the ordinary way, but whose small feet and slender, beautiful
hands are deceptive. A cargador of my acquaintance, whose hands are like
those of a slim girl, and who, if he wore shoes, would require a narrow
five, thinks nothing of transporting on his back from the railway
station to the center of the town, a distance of more than a mile up a
steep hill, a gigantic trunk (the kind that used to be known as a
“Saratoga”), a smaller trunk, half a dozen “dress-suit cases,” a bundle
of rugs, and a steamer chair. They by no means lack strength, but it is
more often than not concealed in a body all sallow slenderness and
grace. And gracefulness in a nation is a characteristic no good American
fresh from “God’s country”--whatever that patriotic if strangely
un-Christian phrase may mean--can in his heart of hearts forgive. The
typical Mexican, although not effeminately, is delicately formed, and,
in addition to the prevailing lightness and sensitiveness of his
structure, a great factor in the general high average of his good looks
is the almost complete elimination of the matter of complexion.
With Northern races it is difficult to disassociate the thought of
beauty in either sex from a certain clear glowing quality of the
epidermis known as “a complexion.” But in Mexico this consideration--in
spite of the quarter of an inch of powder which the ladies of the upper
classes apply to their faces on a substratum of glycerin--does not
enter. You know that even under the powder all Mexican complexions
approximate a satisfactory café au lait standard, and that, if the
owners are not positively suffering from smallpox, they are all good.
They impress you, after your eyes become acclimated, as being an
extraordinarily ornamental race, and it is always amusing to notice
that, however strong may be the aversion to them of an American or
British resident, he cannot refrain now and then from an involuntary
tribute to their unconscious habit of quietly or violently “composing”
themselves at every moment of their lives into some kind of a frameable
picture.
“I hate ’em all,” an American building contractor once exclaimed to me
with deep sincerity. “But,” he added, “after my work is over for the
day, I like to sit on a bench in the plaza and look at ’em. I sit there
a couple of hours every evening. Even when the rascals ain’t doing
anything in particular, you always sort of feel as if there was
something doing.”
This feeling--for the accurate description of which I was truly
grateful--is largely responsible in Mexico for the plaza and balcony
habit that one immediately acquires and that becomes one’s chief form of
diversion. In a small city of the United States or in England, even a
person of unlimited leisure would have to be doddering, or an invalid or
a tramp, before he would consent to sit daily for two or three hours on
a bench in a public square, or lean over a balcony watching the same
people pursue their ordinary vocations in the street below. The monotony
of the thing, the procession’s dead level of prosperous mediocrity,
would very soon prove intolerable, and he would find some one, anyone,
to talk to or endeavor to forget himself in a book or a newspaper.
In Mexico, however, complete idleness is rarely a bore. “Even when the
rascals ain’t doing anything in particular, you always sort of feel as
if there was something doing.” One afternoon in a small Mexican town I
kept tab from my balcony on what, for about eight minutes, took place in
the street below. Although the town was small and the day an unusually
quiet one, owing to a fiesta in the neighborhood to which many of the
inhabitants had gone, there was no dearth of incident against the usual
background of big-hatted cargadores waiting for employment in the middle
of the street; of burros, each with four large cobblestones in a box on
its back; of biblical-looking girls (an endless stream of them) bearing
huge water-jars to and from a circular fountain lined with pale-blue
tiles; of old men who wail at intervals that they are selling pineapple
ice cream; of old women with handfuls of white and yellow and green
lottery tickets; of basket sellers and sellers of flowers (the kind of
adorable bouquets that haven’t been seen anywhere else since the early
seventies; composed of damp moss, tinfoil, toothpicks, a lace petticoat,
a wooden handle, and, yes, some flowers arranged in circles according to
color); of mozos who you feel sure have been sent on an errand and told
to “come right back,” but who have apparently no intention of returning
for several hours; of ladies draped in black lace on their way to
meditate in church; of hundreds of other leisurely moving figures that
were as a bright-colored, shifting chorus to the more striking episodes.
Item one (so runs my page of hasty notes): Three rather fragile-looking
young men swinging along with a grand piano on their heads. Under my
window they all stop a moment to let one of them ask a passerby to stick
a cigarette in his mouth and light it, which is duly done.
Item two: A flock of sheep followed by a shepherd in clean white cotton
with a crimson sarape around his shoulders. He looks like Vedder’s
Lazarus. The sheep have just piled into the open door of the hotel and
are trying to come upstairs. In the excitement a new-born lamb has its
leg hurt. The shepherd gathers it in his arms, wraps it in the sarape,
thoughtfully kisses it twice on the head and proceeds.
Item three: A funeral. As there are only three streets in this place
that aren’t built up and down a mountain side, there are no vehicles,
and coffins, like everything else, are carried on men’s backs. This is
an unusually expensive coffin, but then of course the silver handles are
only hired for the occasion. They’ll be removed at the grave, as
otherwise they would be dug up and stolen. I wonder why women so rarely
go to funerals here? There is a string of men a block long, but no
women. Some of them (probably relatives) have in their hands lighted
candles tied with crape. They are nice, fat candles and don’t blow out.
Everybody in the street takes his hat off as the cortége passes.
Item four: The daily pack train of mules from the Concepción sugar
hacienda. There must be two hundred and fifty of them, and their hoofs
clatter on the cobblestones like magnified hail. The street is jammed
with them, and where the sidewalk narrows to almost nothing, people are
trying to efface themselves against the wall. A wonderful exhibition of
movement and color in the blazing sunlight: the warm seal-brown of the
mules, the paler yellow-brown of the burlap in which are wrapped the
conical sugar loaves (eight to a mule), with the arrieros in yellow
straw hats, brilliant blue shirts and scarlet waist bandas bringing up
the rear.
Item five: A dog fight.
Item six: Another and much worse dog fight.
Item seven: An Indian woman with apparently a whole poultry farm half
concealed upon her person. She calls up to ask if I would like to buy a
chicken. Why on earth should a young man on a balcony of a hotel bedroom
like to buy a chicken?
Item eight: An acquaintance makes a megaphone of his hands and inquires
if I am very busy. I reply, “Yes, frightfully,” and we adjourn to the
plaza for the afternoon.
IV
The inability of people in general to think for themselves--the
inevitableness with which they welcome an opinion, a phrase, a
catchword, if it be sufficiently indiscriminating and easy to remember,
and the fashion in which they then solemnly echo it, are never more
displayed than when they are commenting upon a race not their own.
Sometimes this rubber-stamp sort of criticism is eulogistic in tone as
when, for instance, a few years ago it was impossible in the United
States to speak of the Japanese without calling forth from some tedious
sounding-board, who couldn’t have told a Jap from a Filipino, the
profound exclamation: “What a wonderful little people they are!” But
more often than not, ignorant criticism of a foreign country is also
adverse. For one nation cannot altogether understand another, and if it
is true that “to understand everything is to pardon everything,” it must
also be true that unforgiveness is one of the penalties of being
misunderstood.
It is the vast throng of fairly well educated “people in general” who
are forever divulging the news that “Englishmen have no sense of humor,”
that “the French are very immoral,” that “all Italians steal and none of
them wash,” that “every German eats with his knife and keeps his bedroom
windows closed at night,” that “the inhabitants of Russia are barbarians
with a veneer of civilization” (how they cherish that word “veneer”!),
and that “the Scotch are stingy.”
The formula employed in the case of Mexicans runs usually something like
this: “They’re the laziest people in the world, and although they seem
to treat you politely they are all treacherous and dishonest. Their
politeness is merely on the surface; it doesn’t come from the heart”--as
does the exquisite courtesy we are so accustomed to receive from
everybody in the United States, one is tempted to add, without, however,
doing so. For what, after all, is the use of entering into a discussion
with the sort of person who supposes that his own or anyone’s else
politeness “comes from the heart,” or has, in fact, anything to do with
the heart? Politeness, of course, is, all the world over, just the
pleasing surface quality we should expect it to be from the derivation
of the word. Even in Kansas or South Boston we do not necessarily wish
to die for the old gentleman whom we allow to pass through the doorway
first, and the act of taking off one’s hat to a lady scarcely convicts
one of a secret passion for her. But it is odd what depths are demanded
of Mexican politeness, which--except for the fact that there is much
more of it--is, like our own, an outward “polish” and nothing else.
If, however, there is anything valuable in politeness as such, the
Mexicans have over us at least one extensive advantage. For in Mexico
the habit of politeness in its most elaborate form is so universal that
the very occasional lack of it in anybody gives one the sensation of
being not only surprised but somewhat hurt. If, for instance, a
street-car conductor in taking my ticket should fail to say “Thank you,”
and neglect on receiving it to make toward me a short, quick gesture of
the hand--something between a wave and flourish--I should realize that,
as far as I was concerned, his manners had not risen to the ordinary
standard, and wonder why he had chosen to be indifferent and rather
rude. This naturally would not apply in the City of Mexico, where, as in
all great capitals, the mixture of nationalities has had a noticeable
influence upon many native characteristics. But in provincial
Mexico--wherever there was a street car--it would be true.
In riding along a country road it is likely to be considered an example
of gringo brutalidad if one does not speak to every man, woman, and
child one meets or overtakes. And completely to fulfill the requirements
of rural etiquette, the greeting must be not collective but individual;
everybody in one group murmurs something--usually “Adiós”--for the
especial benefit of everybody in the other. The first time I took part
in this--as it seemed to me then--extraordinary performance, my party of
three had met another party of equal number on a narrow path in the
mountains, and as we scraped past one another, the word adiós in tired
but distinct tones was uttered exactly eighteen times--a positive litany
of salutation that nearly caused me to roll off my mule. It is a polite
sociable custom and I like it, but under certain circumstances it can
become more exhausting than one would suppose. In approaching--on Sunday
afternoon, toward the end of a long hot ride--a certain little town
(which no doubt is to-day very much as it was when Cortés three hundred
and eighty-seven years ago mentioned it in one of his letters to Charles
V) I have met as many as three hundred persons returning from market to
their ranchitos and villages. Adiós is a beautiful word, but--well,
after one has said it and nothing else with a parched throat and an air
of sincerity for the three hundredth time, one no longer much cares.
However, if you don’t know the returning marketers it is safe to assume
that they all know a great deal about you, and for a variety of reasons
it is well, however tired one may be, to observe the convention.
With the pure-blooded Indians along the Gulf coast there is, when they
happen to know you, an elaborateness about your meetings and partings on
the road that amounts to a kind of ritual. The sparkling conversation
that follows is an ordinary example and an accurate translation of what
is said. During its progress, hands are grasped and shaken several
times--the number being in direct ratio to the number of drinks your
friend has had during the day.
“Good day, Don Carlitos. How are you?”
“Good day, Vicente” (or Guadalupe or Ipifigenio). “Very well, thank you.
How are you?”
“Thanks to God, there is no change! How are Don Guillermo and your
mamma?”
“Many thanks, they are as always.” (A pause.) “The roads are bad.”
“Yes, senõr, very bad. Is there much coffee?”
“Enough.”
“I am coming to pick next week.” (He really isn’t and he knows I know he
isn’t--but the remark delicately suggests that there is no ill feeling.)
“Come when you wish to. Well, until we meet again.”
“Until we meet again--if God wishes it. May you go with God!”
“Many thanks, Vicente” (or Ipifigenio or Guadalupe). “Remain with God!”
“Thank you, senõr--if God wishes it.”
“Adiós.”
“Adiós.”
Toward women we are everywhere accustomed to a display of more or less
politeness, but in Mexico, under the ordinary circumstances of life, men
of all classes are polite to one another. Acquaintances take off their
hats both when they meet and part, and I have heard a half-naked laborer
bent double under a sack of coffee-berries murmur, “With your
permission,” as he passed in front of a bricklayer who was repairing a
wall. Even the children--who are not renowned in other lands for
observing any particular code of etiquette among themselves--treat one
another, as a rule, with an astonishing consideration. Once in the
plaza at Tehuacan I found myself behind three little boys of about six
or seven who were sedately strolling around and around while the band
played, quite in the manner of their elders. One of them had a cent, and
after asking the other two how they would most enjoy having it invested,
he bought from a dulcero one of those small, fragile creations of egg
and sugar known, I believe, as a “kiss.” This he at once undertook to
divide, with the result that when the guests had each received a pinch
of the ethereal structure, there was nothing left for the host but two
or three of his own sticky little fingers. He looked a trifle surprised
for a moment, and I thought it would be only natural and right for him
to demand a taste of the others. But instead of that he merely licked
his fingers in silence and then resumed the promenade where it had been
left off. However, the general seraphicness of Mexican children is a
chapter in itself.
“Is that your horse?” you ask of a stranger with whom you have entered
into conversation on the road.
“No, señor--it is yours,” he is likely to reply with a slight bow. And
perhaps it is by reason of formulæ like this that the great public
characterizes Mexican politeness as “all on the surface--not from the
heart.” The stranger’s answer, naturally, is just a pretty phrase. But
all politeness is largely verbal and the only difference between the
politeness of Mexico and the politeness of other countries consists of
the fact that, first, the Spanish language is immensely rich in pretty
phrases, and, secondly, that literally everyone makes use of them.