the cream poured in first, do you know anything about coffee? Did you
know that the pretty, fussy trees (they are really more like large
shrubs) won’t grow in the sun and won’t grow in the shade, but have to
be given companionship in the form of other trees that, high above them,
permit just enough and not too much sunlight to filter mildly in? And
that unless you twist off the berries in a persuasive, almost gentle
fashion, you so hurt their feelings that in the spring they may refuse
to flower? And that the branches are so brittle, they have a way of
cracking off from the weight of their own crop? And that wherever there
is coffee there is also a tough, graceful little vine about as thick as
a telegraph wire which, if left uncut, winds itself around and around a
tree, finally strangling it to death as a snake strangles a rabbit?
When I see the brown hands of the pickers fluttering like nimble birds
among the branches, and think of the eight patient processes to which
the little berries must be subjected before they can become a cup of
drinkable coffee, I often wonder how and by whom their secret was
wrested from them. Was it an accident like the original whitening of
sugar, when--so we used to be told--a chicken with clay on its feet ran
over a mound of crude, brown crystals? Or did a dejected Arabian, having
heard all his life that (like the tomato of our grandmothers’) it was a
deadly thing, attempt by drinking it to assuage forever a hopeless
passion for some bulbul of the desert, and then find himself not dead,
but waking? A careless woman drops a bottle of bluing into a vat of wood
pulp and lo! for the first time we have colored writing paper. But no
one ever inadvertently picked, dispulped, fermented, washed, dried,
hulled, roasted, ground, and boiled coffee, and unless most of these
things are done to it, it is of no possible use.
After the coffee is picked it is brought home in sacks, measured, and
run through the dispulper, a machine that removes the tough red, outer
skin. Every berry (except the pea berry--a freak) is composed of two
beans, and these are covered with a sweet, slimy substance known as the
“honey,” which has to ferment and rot before the beans may be washed.
Washing simply removes the honey and those pieces of the outer skin that
have escaped the teeth of the machine and flowed from the front end
where they weren’t wanted. Four or five changes of water are made in the
course of the operation, and toward the last, when the rotted honey has
been washed away, leaving the beans hard and clean in their coverings of
parchment, one of the men takes off his trousers, rolls up his drawers,
and knee deep in the heavy mixture of coffee and water drags his feet as
rapidly as he can around the cement washing tank until the whole mass is
in motion with a swirling eddy in the center. Into the eddy gravitate
all the impurities--the foreign substances--the dead leaves and twigs
and unwelcome hulls, and when they all seem to be there, the man deftly
scoops them up with his hands and tosses them over the side. Then, if it
be a fine hot day, the soggy mess is shoveled on the asoleadero
(literally, the sunning place), an immense sloping stone platform
covered with smooth cement, and there it is spread out to dry while men
in their bare feet constantly turn it over with wooden hoes in order
that the beans may receive the sun equally on all sides.
It sounds simple, and if one numbered among one’s employees a Joshua who
could command the sun to stand still when one wished it to, it doubtless
would be. But no matter how much coffee there may be spread out on the
asoleadero, the sun not only loses its force at a certain hour and then
inconsiderately sets, it sometimes refuses for weeks at a time to show
itself at all. During these dreary eternities the half-dried coffee is
stowed away in sacks or, when it is too wet to dispose of in this manner
without danger of molding, it is heaped up in ridges on the asoleadero
and covered. When it rains, work of all kinds in connection with the
coffee necessarily ceases. The dryers cannot dry and the pickers cannot
pick. Even when it is not actually raining the pickers won’t go out if
the trees are still wet. For the water from the shaken branches chills
and stiffens their bloodless hands and soaks through their cotton
clothes to the skin. If one’s plantation and one’s annual crop are large
enough to justify the expense, one may defy the sun by investing in what
is known as a secadero--a machine for drying coffee by artificial heat.
But I haven’t arrived at one of these two-thousand-dollar
sun-scorners--yet.
That is as far as I go with my coffee--I pick it, dispulp it, wash it,
dry it, and sell it. But while the first four of these performances
sometimes bid fair to worry me into my grave before my prime, and the
fourth at least is of vital importance, as the flavor of coffee may
certainly be marred, if not made, in the drying, they are but the
prelude to what is eventually done to it before you critically sip it
and declare it to be good or bad. Women and children pick it over by
hand, separating it into different classes; it is then run through one
machine that divests it of its parchment covering; another, with the
uncanny precision of mindless things, gropes for beans that happen to be
of exactly the same shape, wonderfully finds them, and drops them into
their respective places; while at the same time it is throwing out every
bean that either nature or the dispulping machine has in the slightest
degree mutilated. The sensitiveness and apperception of this iron and
wooden box far exceed my own. Often I am unable to see the difference
between the beans it has chosen to disgorge into one sack and the beans
it has relegated to another--to feel the justice of its irrevocable
decisions. But they are always just, and every bean it drops into the
defective sack will be found, on examination, to be defective. Then
there is still another machine for polishing the bean--rubbing off the
delicate, tissue-paper membrane that covers it inside of the parchment.
This process does not affect the flavor. In fact nothing affects the
flavor of coffee after it has once been dried; but the separation and
the polishing give it what is known to the trade as “style.” And in the
trade there is as much poppycock about coffee as there is about wine and
cigars. When you telephone to your grocer for a mixture of Mocha and
Java do you by any chance imagine that you are going to receive coffee
from Arabia and the Dutch islands? What you do receive, the coffee kings
alone know. There are, I have been told, a few sacks of real Mocha in
the United States, just as there are a few real Vandykes and Holbeins,
and if you are very lucky indeed, the Mocha in your mixture will have
been grown in Mexico.
Sometimes at the height of the picking season the day is not long
enough, the washing tanks are not large enough, and the workers are not
numerous enough to attend to both the coffee-drying on the asoleadero
and the growing pile of berries that are constantly being carried in
from the trees. When this happens the dispulping has to be done at
night, and until four or five in the morning the monotonous plaint of
the machine, grinding, grinding like the mills of some insatiable
Mexican god, comes faintly over from the tanks. Under a flaring torch
and fortified with a bottle of aguardiente the men take turns through
the long night at filling the hopper and turning the heavy wheel,
bursting now and then into wild, improvised recitatives that are
answered by whomever happens for the moment to be most illuminated by
either the aguardiente or the divine fire. They begin to improvise to
this rapid, savage burst of a few minor phrases from the time they are
children. Almost any grown man can do it, although there is a standard
of excellence in the art (I have begun to detect it when I hear it),
recognized among themselves, that only a few attain. It takes into
consideration both the singer’s gift for dramatic or lyric invention and
the quality of his voice, a loud, strained tenor with falsetto
embellishments being the most desirable. I have heard Censio, the
mayordomo’s little boy, aged three or four, singing, for an hour at a
time, sincere and simple eulogies of his father’s cows. Since I brought
him a small patrol wagon drawn by two spirited iron horses his voice,
however, is no longer lifted in commemoration of “O mis vacas! O mis
vacas! O mis vacas!” but of “O mis caballitos! O mis caballitos! O mis
caballitos!” They improvise, too, at the dances, where the music is
usually a harp and a jarana--breaking in anywhere, saying their say, and
then waiting for the reply. Women rarely take part in these
Tannhäuseresque diversions, although I remember one woman at a dance on
my own piazza who got up and proceeded to chant with a wealth of
personal and rather embarrassing detail the story of her recent
desertion by the man she loved. He had of course deserted her for some
one else, and at the end of her remarkable narrative she sang, in a
perfect debauch of emotion and self-pity: “But I am of a forgiving
nature! Come back, come back, my rose, my heart, my soul--the bed is big
enough for three!” Sometimes when there is a dance at a neighboring
ranch the harpist and his son, who plays the jarana, stop at my place on
their way home in the morning and play to me (the son also improvises)
while I am at breakfast. The harpist is always drunk, and his
instrument, after a night of hard work, out of tune. He appeared not
long ago when I had staying with me a Boston lawyer--my only visitor so
far this year.
“Isn’t it horrible to eat soft boiled eggs and toast in this
pandemonium,” I called to him across the breakfast table.
“No,” he answered, “it’s splendid--it’s just like being an Irish king.”
The harpist was drunker than usual that morning when he rode away with
his harp in front of him on the pommel of his saddle, his son trudging
along behind, and when he reached the middle of the river he fell off
his horse and was nearly drowned. Later I saw what was once a harp
hanging in midstream to a rock. A shattered harp clinging to a cruel
rock surrounded by rushing water! I’m sure it was beautifully symbolical
of something--but what?
The harpist and the mother of the boy who assists him at dances were
really married, he told me, but they haven’t lived together for years.
Since then the boy has had a succession of informal stepmothers who
never stayed very long, and just recently the harpist has really married
again. In fact, the harpist’s home life is typical of the matrimonial
situation here, which for many reasons is endlessly interesting. Among
the lower classes in Mexico “free love” is not the sociological
experiment it sometimes tries to be in more civilized communities. It is
a convention, an institution, and, in the existing condition of affairs,
a necessity. Let me explain.
The Mexicans are an excessively passionate people and their passions
develop at an early age (I employ the words in a specific sense), not
only because nature has so ordered it, but because, owing to the way in
which they live--whole families, not to mention animals, in a small,
one-roomed house--the elemental facts of life are known to them from
the time they can see with their eyes and hear with their ears. For a
Mexican child of seven or eight among the lower classes, there are no
mysteries. Boys of fifteen have had their affairs with older women; boys
of seventeen are usually strongly attracted by some one person whom they
would like to marry. And just at this interesting and important crisis
the Church furnishes the spectator with one of its disappointing and
somewhat gross exhibitions.
It seems to have been proven that for people in general certain rigid
social laws are a comfort and an aid to a higher, steadier standard of
thought and life. In communities where such usages obtain, the ordinary
person, in taking unto himself a wife, does so with a feeling of
finality. On one’s wedding day, but little thought is given, I fancy, to
the legal loopholes of escape. It strikes one as strange, as wicked
even, that a powerful Church (a Church, moreover, that regards marriage
as a sacrament) should deliberately place insuperable obstacles in the
path of persons who for the time being, at least, have every desire to
tread the straight and narrow way. This, to its shame, the Church in
Mexico does.
The only legally valid marriage ceremony in Mexico is the civil
ceremony, but to a Mexican peon the civil ceremony means nothing
whatever; he can’t grasp its significance, and there is nothing in the
prosaic, businesslike proceeding to touch his heart and stir his
imagination. The only ceremony he recognizes is one conducted by a
priest in a church. When he is married by a priest he believes himself
to be married--which for moral and spiritual purposes is just as
valuable as if he actually were. One would suppose that the Church would
recognize this and encourage unions of more or less stability by making
marriage inexpensive and easy. If it had the slightest desire to elevate
the lower classes in Mexico from their frankly bestial attitude toward
the marital relation--to inculcate ideas different and finer than those
maintained by their chickens and their pigs--it could long since easily
have done so. But quite simply it has no such desire. In the morality of
the masses it shows no interest. For performing the marriage ceremony it
charges much more than poor people can pay without going into debt. Now
and then they go into debt; more often they dispense with the ceremony.
On my ranch, for instance, very few of the “married” people are married.
Almost every grown man lives with a woman who makes his tortillas and
bears him children, and about some of these households there is an air
of permanence and content. But with the death of mutual desire there is
nothing that tends to turn the scale in favor of permanence; no sense of
obligation, no respect for a vague authority higher and better than
oneself, no adverse public opinion. Half an hour of ennui, or some one
seen for a moment from a new point of view--and all is over. The man
goes his way, the woman hers. The children, retaining their father’s
name, remain, as a rule, with the mother. And soon there is a new set of
combinations. One woman who worked here had three small
children--everyone with a different surname; the name of its father.
While here, she kept house with the mayordomo, who for no reason in
particular had wearied of the wife he had married in church. No one
thought it odd that she should have three children by different men, or
that she should live with the mayordomo, or that the mayordomo should
tire of his wife and live with her. As a matter of fact there was
nothing odd about it. No one was doing wrong, no one was “flying in the
face of public opinion.” She and the three men who had successively
deserted her, the mayordomo who found it convenient to form an alliance
with her, and his wife, who betook herself to a neighboring ranch and
annexed a boy of sixteen, were all simply living their lives in
accordance with the promptings they had never been taught to resist. It
is not unusual to hear a mother, in a moment of irritation, exclaim, as
she gives her child a slap, “Hijo de quien sabe quien!” (Child of who
knows whom!) At an early age when they first fall in love they would, I
think, almost always prefer to be married. But where get the ten pesos,
without which the Church refuses to make them man and wife? The idea of
saving and waiting is to them, of course, utterly preposterous? Why
should it not be? What tangible advantage to them would there be in
postponement? The Church, which has always been successful in developing
and maintaining prejudices, could have developed, had it wished to, the
strongest prejudice in favor of matrimony, and the permanence of the
marriage tie. But it has not done so, and now, even when peons do have
the religious ceremony performed, they do not consider it binding. After
having gone to so much expense, they are not likely to separate so soon;
but that is all. One of the men here has been married three or four
times and on every occasion he has treated himself to a religious
ceremony with quite a splendid dance afterwards. As he is a skilled
mason who commands good wages and has no bad habits (except that of
getting married every little while), he can afford it. He is a genial
sort of a creature and I think he enjoys having weddings very much as
some persons enjoy having dinner parties. Sometimes he deserts his wives
and sometimes they desert him. Of course I don’t know, but I have an
idea that to have been married to him at one time or another carries
with it considerable prestige. And yet you ask me if I am not now and
then homesick for New York!
Or did you merely ask me if I didn’t find this kind of a life
desperately lonely? Everybody at home has asked me this until I have
come to believe that the modern American’s greatest dread, greater even
than the dread of sickness or of death, is the dread of being alone. But
although I no longer have it, I am able to understand it. For I can
vividly remember the time when there were scarcely any circumstances I
could not control sufficiently to insure me constant companionship. It
was novel and pleasant occasionally to putter alone for a few hours in
one’s room, or in solitude to lose oneself in an absorbing book, with
the half-formed purpose of soon finding somebody with whom to discuss
it. But to walk alone, to dine alone, to go to the theater alone--to
think alone! To be, in a word, for any length of time, on one’s own
hands--face to face with nothing but oneself! I could not possibly
describe the restlessness, the sense of “missing something,” the acute
melancholy I have experienced on the rare occasions when in those days
the improbable happened and for an afternoon and evening I was
left--alone. Just when and how the change came I have no idea. Without
at the moment feeling them, one acquires persistent little lines that
extend from the outer corners of one’s eyes and almost meet the gray
hairs below and behind one’s temples. The capacity--the talent--for
being alone comes to some in the same way. With me it has been as
gradual as the accentuation of the streaks across my forehead, or the
somewhat premature blanching of the hair around my ears. I only know
that it has come and that I am glad of it. I can be--and I sometimes
am--alone indefinitely for weeks--for months--without feeling that life
is passing me by. I may not, on the one hand, have periods of great
gayety, but on the other there is a placid kind of satisfaction, more or
less continuous, in realizing that one’s resources are a greater
comfort than one’s limitations are a distress. At first I was rather
vain, I confess, of the facility with which I could “do without”; I used
to find myself picturing certain old friends in these surroundings and
despising their very probable anguish. One, I felt sure, would find his
solace by perpetually dwelling in imagination upon his little triumphs
of the past (there are so many kinds of little past triumphs)--in
seeking to span the unspanable gulfs behind him with innumerable
epistolary bridges. The eyes of another would be fixed on the far
horizon; he would live through the interminable days, as so many persons
live through their lives, hovering upon the brink of a vague, wonderful
something that doesn’t happen. Another would take to aguardiente, which
is worse, they say, than morphine, and thenceforward his career would
consist of trying to break himself of the habit.
But I hope I have got over being vain--indeed, I’ve got over being a lot
of things. Solitude is a great chastener when once you accept it. It
quietly eliminates all sorts of traits that were a part of you--among
others, the desire to pose, to keep your best foot forever in evidence,
to impress people as being something you would like to have them think
you are even when you aren’t. Some men I know are able to pose in
solitude; had they valets they no doubt would be heroes to them. But I
find it the hardest kind of work myself, and as I am lazy I have stopped
trying. To act without an audience is so tiresome and unprofitable that
you gradually give it up and at last forget how to act at all. For you
become more interested in making the acquaintance of yourself as you
really are; which is a meeting that, in the haunts of men, rarely takes
place. It is gratifying, for example, to discover that you prefer to be
clean rather than dirty even when there is no one but God to care which
you are; just as it is amusing to note, however, that for scrupulous
cleanliness you are not inclined to make superhuman sacrifices, although
you used to believe you were. Clothes you learn, with something of a
shock, have for you no interest whatever. You come to believe that all
your life you have spent money in unnecessary raiment to please yourself
only in so far as it is pleasant to gain the approval of others. You
learn to regard dress merely as a covering, a precaution. For its color
and its cut you care nothing.
But the greatest gift in the power of loneliness to bestow is the
realization that life does not consist either of wallowing in the past
or of peering anxiously at the future; and it is appalling to
contemplate the great number of often painful steps by which one arrives
at a truth so old, so obvious, and so frequently expressed. It is good
for one to appreciate that life is now. Whether it offers little or
much, life is now--this day--this hour--and is probably the only
experience of the kind one is to have. As the doctor said to the woman
who complained that she did not like the night air: “Madam, during
certain hours of every twenty-four, night air is the only air there is.”
Solitude performs the inestimable service of letting us discover that it
is our lives we are at every moment passing through, and not some
useless, ugly, interpolated interval between what has been and what is
to come. Life does not know such intervals. They can have no separate
identity for they are life itself, and to realize this makes what has
seemed long and without value, both precious and fleeting. The fleeting
present may not be just what we once dreamed it might be, but it has the
advantage of being present, whereas our past is dead and our future may
never be born.
So you see, I am not lonely--or I mean, when I _am_ lonely (for
everyone is lonely), I try to regard it as a purely objective
affliction, like the sting of a wasp, or the hot blister that comes when
you carelessly touch a leaf of mala mujer. For minor objective
afflictions there is always some sort of an alleviator, and for
loneliness I have found a remedy in reflecting that the sensation itself
is never as interesting or as important as the circumstances that cause
it. All of which brings me back again to this hillside clearing in the
jungle with its lovely views, its outrageous climate, its mysterious
people, its insidious fascination. Do you ever have a feeling of
skepticism as to the continued existence of places you are no longer in?
I can shut my eyes and see Boston and New York and Paris, for instance,
as they are in their characteristic ways at almost any hour of the day
or night. I know just how the people in certain quarters are conducting
themselves, where they are going next, and what they will say and do
when they arrive. But I don’t altogether believe in it. It doesn’t seem
possible, somehow, that they are going ceaselessly on and on when I am
not there to see. Something happens to places where I no longer am.
Until I go back to them I’m sure they must be white and blank like the
screen in a cinematograph performance between the end of one film and
the beginning of the next. Just at present, nowhere is particularly
existent but here.