“patriotism” is the fact that every nation is thoroughly convinced of
the dishonesty of every other. From end to end of Europe the United
States is, and for a long time has been, a synonym of political and
financial corruption. We are popularly supposed to be a nation of sharks
who have all grown fabulously rich by the simple, effective method of
eating one another--and everybody else--up. This is not perhaps the
topic the French ambassador picks out to expound at White House dinners,
nor does it form the burden of the Duke of Abruzzi’s remarks on the
occasion of planting a tree at Washington’s tomb. It is merely a
conviction of the great majority of their fellow countrymen at home. On
the other hand, very few persons with a drop of Anglo-Saxon blood in
them can bring themselves to admit--much less to feel--that the “Latin”
races have any but a shallow and versatile conception of honesty and
truth. It is a provision of nature that one’s own people should have a
monopoly of all the virtues. Uncle John, who was given short change for
a napoleon by a waiter at the Jardin de Paris, is more than sustained in
his original opinion of the French. And Aunt Lizzie, who paid a dollar
and a half for a trunk strap at the leading harness shop of Pekin,
Illinois, and then had it stolen at the Laredo customhouse, will all her
life believe that the chief occupation of everyone in Mexico, from
President Diaz down, is the theft of trunk straps. This sounds like
trifling--but it is the way in which one country’s opinion of another is
really formed.
A discussion of the comparative honesty of nations must always be a
futile undertaking, as a considerable number of persons in every country
are dishonest. I know for a fact that when Aunt Lizzie alighted at
Laredo to have her trunk examined, she saw the strap “with her own
eyes,” and that somewhere between the border and her final destination
it miraculously disappeared. On the other hand, I always leave
everything I own scattered about my room in Mexican hotels, because I
am lazy, and various articles that I should regret to lose I have
sometimes forgotten to pack, because I am careless. But nothing has ever
been stolen from me in Mexico, and when I have requested the innkeeper
by letter or telegram, “Please to send me the two diamond tiaras
together with the emerald stomacher I inadvertently left in the second
drawer of the washstand,” they have invariably come to me by return
express--neither of which experiences (Aunt Lizzie’s and mine) proves
anything whatever about anybody.
The question of “laziness” would be easy to dispose of if one could
simply say that just as there are honest and dishonest Mexicans, there
are indolent and energetic Mexicans. But somehow one can’t. Many of them
are extremely industrious, many of them work, when they do work, as hard
and as long as it is possible for human beings to bear fatigue--and yet,
of what we know as “energy,” I have seen little or nothing. For whatever
may be the word’s precise definition, it expresses to most of us an
adequate power operating under the lash of a perpetual desire to get
something done. In Mexico there are many kinds of adequate power, but
apparently the desire to get anything done does not exist. The
inhabitants, from peon to professional man, conduct their affairs as if
everybody were going “to live,” as Marcus Aurelius says, “ten thousand
years!”
Among the lower classes, even leaving out of consideration the influence
of a tropical and semitropical climate, it is not difficult to account
for this lack of energy. No people whose diet consists chiefly of
tortillas, chile, black coffee, and cigarettes are ever going to be
lashed by the desire to accomplish. This is the diet of babies as soon
as they are weaned. I have heard proud mothers at country dances compare
notes, while their men were playing monte around a kerosene torch stuck
in the ground.
“My little boy”--aged three--“won’t _look_ at a tortilla unless it is
covered with chile,” one of them explains.
“Does he cry for coffee?” inquires another. “My baby”--aged two and a
half--“screams and cries unless we give her coffee three and four times
a day.” It is not surprising that a population perpetually in the throes
of intestinal disorder should be somewhat lacking in energy.
Furthermore, they are a religious, or rather a superstitious people,
given to observing as many of the innumerable feasts on the calendar as
is compatible with making both ends approach--one hesitates to say
meet. The entire working force of an isolated ranch will abruptly cease
from its labors on hearing from some meddlesome passerby that in more
populous localities the day is being celebrated. That it is, may or may
not be a fact, and if a supply of liquor cannot be procured there is no
very definite way of enjoying unpremeditated idleness. But a fiesta is a
fiesta, and everyone stands about all day unwilling to work, unable to
play--the prey of ennui and capricious tempers.
Possibly it is mere hair splitting to draw a distinction between
laziness and lack of energy, but although climate and heredity will
abide and continue to restrain the lower classes from undue continuity
of effort, even as they still do the wealthy and educated, it is not
fantastic to believe that education and a more nourishing, less
emotional diet (both are on the way) will stimulate in the Mexican
people some of the latent qualities that will absolve them from the
popular reproach of laziness.
V
One December morning, while I was aimlessly strolling in the white, dry
sunlight of Puebla, I wandered into the cathedral. The semireligious,
semiculinary festival known as Christmas had come and gone for me in
Jalapa, but as soon as I went into the church and walked beyond the
choir, the awkward situation of which in Spanish cathedrals shows on the
part of catholics an unusual indifference to general impressiveness, it
was apparent--gorgeously, overwhelmingly apparent--that here Christmas
still lingered. This cathedral is always gorgeous and always somewhat
overpowering, for, unlike any other I can recall, that which, perhaps,
was the original scheme of decoration looks as if it had been completed
a few moments before one’s arrival. We have learned to expect in these
places worn surfaces, tarnished gilt, a sense of invisible dust and
tones instead of colors. So few of them look as they were intended to
look that, just as we prefer Greek statues unpainted, we prefer the
decorations of cathedrals to be in the nature of exquisite effacement.
In the great church of Puebla, however, little is exquisite and
certainly nothing is effaced. On entering, one is at first only
surprised that an edifice so respectably old can be so jauntily new. But
when, during mass, one passes slightly before the choir, and is
confronted by the first possible view of any amplitude, it is something
more than rhetoric to say that for a moment the cathedral of Puebla is
overpowering.
The use of gold leaf in decoration is like money. A little is pleasant,
merely too much is vulgar; but a positively staggering amount of it
seems to justify itself. My own income is not vulgar; neither is Mr.
Rockefeller’s. The ordinary white and gold drawing-room done by the
local upholsterer is atrociously vulgar, but the cathedral of Puebla is
not. Gold--polished, glittering, shameless gold--blazes down and up and
across at one; from the stone rosettes in the vaulting overhead, from
the grilles in front of the chapels, from the railings between which the
priests walk to altar and choir, from the onyx pulpit and the barricade
of gigantic candlesticks in front of the altar, from the altar
itself--one of those carefully insane eighteenth-century affairs, in
which a frankly pagan tiempolito and great lumps of Christian symbolism
have become gloriously muddled for all time. Gold flashes in the long
straight sun shafts overhead, twinkles in the candle flames, glitters
from the censers and the chains of the censers. The back of the priest
at the altar is incrusted with gold, and to-day--for Christmas
lingers--all the pillars from capital to base are swathed in the finest
of crimson velvet, fringed with gold. It isn’t vulgar, it isn’t even
gaudy. It has surpassed all that and has entered into the realm of the
bewildering--the flabbergastric.
As I sank upon one of the sparsely occupied benches “para los señores,”
there was exhaled from the organ, somewhere behind and above me, a dozen
or more bars of Chopin. During the many sartorial interims of the mass
the organ coquetted frequently with Chopin as well as with Saint-Saëns,
Massenet, and Gounod in some of his less popular but as successfully
cloying moments--and never anywhere have I seen so much incense. As a
rule, unless one sits well forward in churches, the incense only
tantalizes. Swing and jerk as the little boys may, it persists in
clinging to the altar and the priests, in being sucked into the draught
of the candle flames and then floating up to the sunlight of the dome.
It rarely reaches the populace until it has become cool and thin. At
Puebla they may be more prodigal of it, or they may use a different
kind. It at any rate belches out at one in fat, satiating clouds of
pearl-gray and sea-blue, and what with Chopin and all the little gasping
flames, the rich, deliberate, incrusted group about the altar, the
forest of crimson pillars and the surfeit of gold, I experienced one of
those agreeable, harmless, ecclesiastical debauches that in Mexico,
where the apparatus of worship does not often rise above the tawdry, and
the music is almost always execrable, are perforce rare.
Toward the end of it, the central and most splendid figure among those
at the altar turned to execute some symbolic gesture and I recognized
his grace, the Bishop. More than half incrusted with gold and, for the
rest, swathed in white lace over purple, he was far more splendid than
when, two years before, he had confirmed my godchild Geronimo, son of
Felipe, in the weatherworn church at Mizantla. But he was none the less
the same poisonous-looking old body with whom on that occasion I had had
“words.” I recognized, among other things, his fat, overhanging
underlip. By its own weight it fell outward from his lower teeth, turned
half about and disclosed a rubbery inside that, with its blue veins
against a background of congested red, had reminded me, I remember, of a
piece of German fancy-work. Undoubtedly it was his grace on a visit to a
neighboring see and officiating through the courtesy of a brother bishop
in the great cathedral.
Strange, I thought, that such a looking old person should be associated
in my mind with so pretty an incident and so springlike a day. For the
sight of him took me back, as the saying is, to a hot, radiant February
morning when the sun blazed down upon the ranch for the first time in
two weeks and I had ridden into the village to have Geronimo, a charming
child of six, confirmed. There was the inevitable Mexican delay in
starting, while horses and mules fled around the pasture refusing to be
caught, while the cook made out “la lista”--three cents worth of this
and six cents worth of that--while mislaid tenates were found, provided
with string handles and hung over pommels. But we staggered off at
last--Felipe leading on foot with a sky-blue bundle under one arm (it
was a clean pair of trousers) and his loose white drawers rolled up to
his thighs. I wondered why, on this great occasion, he did not wear the
neckerchief of mauve silk we had given him at Christmas until a moment
later I discovered it in two pieces around the necks of his wife and
Geronimo. His wife followed him on a horse, and Geronimo, astride at her
back, clutched at her waist with one hand and with the other attempted
most of the way in to prevent his cartwheel of a hat from bumping
against his mother’s shoulder blades in front and falling off behind.
Then a San Juan Indian in fluttering white, bearing on his back Felipe’s
sick baby in a basket, pattered along over the mudholes with the aid of
a staff. Trinidad, the mayordomo, followed next on his horse, and I came
last on a mule, from where I could see the others vanishing one by one
into the shady jungle, scrambling below me down wet, rocky hillsides and
stringing through the hot pastures full of damp, sweet vapors and hidden
birds that paused and listened to their own languid voices.
The river was high and swift after the rain, and for those who counted
on another’s legs to get them across, there was the interminable three
or four minutes when one takes a reef in one’s own, unconditionally
surrenders to the steed, tries not to look down at the water, and with a
pinched smile at the opposite shore reflects that: “If the beast keeps
three or even two of his little hoofs on the stones at the same time
until we reach the sand bar--how trivial! But if he doesn’t he will go
swirling downstream like an empty barrel, my head will smash against the
first boulder, and it will all be very sad.”
The bishop’s advent had, if not quite the importance of a fiesta, at
least the enlivening qualities of a fiestita. There was so much movement
and talk and color in the drowsy town, and so many drunken Indians shook
hands with me and patted me on the back, that if it had not been
Thursday, I should have known it was Sunday. The bishop had not been to
Mizantla for some said five and others eight years. But in either period
it seems that unconfirmed children pile up amazingly. Grouped about the
weed-grown open space on the church’s shady side there were almost four
hundred of them, not including parents and godparents, and this was the
second of the three days’ opportunity.
But there was the same vagueness as to when the ceremony would begin
that there had been about the date of the previous visit. Some,
remembering perhaps that most gringos have an inscrutable prejudice in
favor of the definite, courteously named an hour--any hour; two, five,
half past six. Others recalled that evening was the time, while a few
assured me the bishop had come and gone the day before. Nobody, however,
seemed to care, and I asked myself as Felipe and Geronimo and I sat on a
crumbling parapet and watched the bright colored crowd: “Why should I
care? What difference does it make whether I sit here in the shade or in
the shade at the ranch?”
But at last there began to be a slow activity--a going in and a coming
out at the door of the priest’s house. I watched people go in
empty-handed and come out with a slip of paper in one hand and a long
yellow candle in the other. The slip of paper left me cold, but the
tapering yellow candle mystically called. In Jalapa I had often stood
for an hour staring at the moderate revolutions of the great hoop on
which the pendent wicks grow fatter and fatter as the velero patiently
bathes them in boiling tallow, and I had yearned to possess one. Yet,
heretofore, I had denied myself; the desire, it seemed to me, was like
that craving for heirlooms and ancestors on the part of persons to whom
such innocent sensualities have been cruelly denied. To-day, however,
long virtue was to have a short, vicarious reward, for Geronimo’s little
soul was at the moment entirely in my hands, and it was but proper that
his way to heaven should be lighted by a blessed candle. So when I came
out of the priest’s house I, too, had one (“Bang! went saxpence”) as
well as the “certificate of confirmation” (“Bang!” went another), on
which was written my godchild’s name, and the names of his parents and
my name. It took hours for everyone to be supplied, but they were as
nothing compared to the hours we waited in the church for the bishop.
Except in front of the altar, the nave had been fenced off by a
continuous line of benches facing inward, and on these the children
stood with their sponsors behind them. Like most Mexican children, their
behavior was admirable. They rarely cry, they rarely quarrel, and their
capacity for amusing themselves with nothing is without limit. Had I the
ordering of this strange, unhappy world, I think all children would be
born Mexican and remain so until they were fifteen.
That they in a measure outgrow their youthful serenity, however, seemed
to be proved by exhausted relatives all about me who, after the first
hour of waiting, began to roll their eyes when they met mine and
dispatch a succession of Sister Annes to peer through the windows of the
priest’s sala. “Está dormiendo” (he is sleeping), in a hoarse whisper,
was repeated so often that--my breakfast had been a cup of chocolate and
a cigarette--the hinges in my knees began to work both ways, and just
outside the church door I recklessly bought and ate something (it
cauterized me as it went down) wrapped in a tortilla. When I returned,
the bishop, with three priests behind him, was standing at the top of
the altar steps. He was wearing his miter and the tips of his fingers
lightly touched one another, as a bishop’s fingers should, on the apex
of his stomach. It was a thrilling moment.
Then, combining, in a quite wonderful fashion, extreme rapidity with an
air of ecclesiastical calm, he made his confirmatory way down one side
of the nave, across the end, and up the other, preceded by one priest
and followed by two. The first gathered up the certificates (no laying
on of hands unless one has paid one’s twenty-five centavos) and read the
name of the child next in line to the bishop, who murmured the
appropriate formula, made a tiny sign of the cross on a tiny forehead
with the end of a large, dirty thumb, and moved on. The second, with a
bit of absorbent cotton dipped in oil, swabbed the spot on which the
cross had been signed, while the third, taking advantage of the general
rapture, gently relieved everyone of his blessed candle (it had never
been lighted) and carried it away to be sold again.
But by the time the first priest reached my family party he had grown
tired and careless. Instead of collecting the certificates singly, he
began to take them in twos and threes with the result that they became
mixed, and Geronimo was confirmed, not as Geronimo, but as “Saturnina,”
which happened to be the name of the little snubnosed Totonac girl
standing next to him. When I realized what had happened, I protested.
Whereupon his grace and I proceeded to have “words.” With exceeding
bitterness he then reperformed the rite, and if the eyes of the first
priest could have killed, I should have withered on my slender stalk.
The priest with the cotton also sought to annihilate me with an
undertoned remark to the effect that my conduct was a “barbaridad,” but
the third was not only sinpatico--he was farther away from the bishop.
As, with much tenderness, he disengaged Geronimo’s reluctant fingers
from the candle, he severely looked at me and winked.
Then we wandered down to the shabby little plaza, where I bought
Geronimo some toys and Felipe wanted to buy me a drink. But as Felipe
was still looking prematurely old as the result of something
suspiciously like delirium tremens a few weeks before, I sanctimoniously
declined and bade them good-by.
There is no twilight in those tropics, and before the mayordomo and I
reached home, darkness gathered in the deep valley, crept behind us up
the mountainside, and all at once, as they say in Spanish, “it nighted.”
It was impossible to see the trail or even the sky, and we lurched on
and on as through an interminable world of black velvet. Most of the way
I kept my eyes shut--crouching down on the pommel to escape overhanging
vines and the terrible outstretched fingers of mala mujer. Twice we lost
our hats, and once my mule stuck deep and fast in the mud until we
jumped into it ourselves and pulled him out. On this road after dark it
is usually difficult to think of anything except that in a little while
one’s neck will be broken; but that evening, with my eyelids squeezed
together and my feet prudently hanging free of the stirrups, I kept
recalling Felipe’s clumsy, charming devotion to his ethereal little son
and the satisfaction he had unconsciously displayed when Geronimo
toddled out of the church--confirmed.
Although Felipe gets frightfully drunk, neglects his wife for other
women, and regards a machete as the most convincing form of argument, he
has excellent qualities; but I shouldn’t think of him as religious
exactly. And yet--and yet--Felipe and his wife are really married (it
seems rather snobbish of them, but it’s a fact), and from the knowledge
that his children have been baptized by the priest and confirmed by the
bishop, he gets some sort of an agreeable sensation.
VI
Why people are what they are is always an interesting subject on which
to exert one’s talents, however slight, for observation and inference.
On an isolated Mexican farm one spends many odd moments in considering
and attempting to explain the traits of the people who condescend to
work for one. For most of the problems of one’s daily life there arise
from those traits, and by them, all are complicated. The amicable
relations between employer and employed everywhere is one that
necessitates on the former’s part considerable tact to preserve, but in
Mexico both the nation’s history and the people’s temperament combine to
render the situation one of unusual delicacy.
In 1519 Spain and the Roman Catholic Church affixed themselves to
Mexico’s throat and were with extreme difficulty detached from it only
after three hundred years. During most of that time, in addition to the
fact that the Church got possession actually of something more than a
third of the country’s entire property, “real, personal, and mixed,”
the metaphorical expression, “he could not call his soul his own,” was
true of the inhabitants in its baldest, its most literal sense. To call
one’s soul one’s own in Mexico between the years 1527 and 1820 was to be
tried in secret by the Holy Office of the Inquisition and then turned
over to the secular authorities--a formality that deceived no one--to be
either publicly strangled and then burned, or burned without even the
preliminary solace of strangulation. “The principal crimes of which the
Holy Office took cognizance,” we read, “were heresy, sorcery, withcraft,
polygamy, seduction, imposture, and personation”--a tolerably elastic
category. Without the slightest difficulty it could be stretched to
cover anyone “not in sympathy with the work,” and during the period in
which the Holy Office was exercised it covered many.
It is true the royal order by which the Inquisition was formally
established in Mexico exempted Indians from its jurisdiction, but when
the clause was observed--which it was not in the case of Indians who
displayed a capacity for thought--it was almost the only form of
oppression from which, under the bigoted and avaricious rule of Spain,
they were exempt. Until the advent of the conquerors this part of the
new world had been, for no one knows how long, a slaughterhouse of the
gods. Spain and the Church continued a carnage of their own in the name
of God.
The limited scope of these impressions permits of scarcely a reference
to Mexico’s history. I can only assert that almost every phase of it is
imbedded in layer upon layer of the rottenest type of ecclesiastical
politics and that the great mass of the people to-day reflects--in a
fashion curiously modified at unexpected moments by the national
awakening--its generations of mental and physical subjection. For
whatever, from time to time, has happened to be the form of government,
the people have never enjoyed any large measure of freedom. Even now,
with an acute, patriotic, and enlightened president at the head of the
nation, Mexico--and quite inevitably--is not a republic, but a military
Diazpotism.
In the name of gods and of God, of kings, dictators, popes, generals,
emperors, and presidents, the people of Mexico have been treated, one
would be inclined to say, like so many head of irresponsible cattle, if
cattle, as a rule, were not treated more solicitously. And this general
tendency of the governor toward the governed has accentuated certain
traits easy enough to isolate and describe, if they were not
complicated by the facts that: First, the Mexican of to-day naturally
has many characteristics in common with the Spaniard who begat him and
whom he still hates; second, that the nation is becoming more and more
conscious of itself as a nation, and, third, that in a multitude of
petty ways a kind of mediæval tyranny is still often exercised by the
very persons who, as officials of a theoretically excellent republic,
ought to stand for all that is liberal and just.