the asoleadero is covered with it. Through the house there is a slight
stir of air, and the fact that the house-boy has just swept the floor
with wet tea leaves left over from several breakfasts, makes the breeze
for the moment seem cool--which it isn’t. On such a day one is grateful
for the bareness of a room--the smooth, unadorned walls, the hard, cool
chairs. From the asoleadero comes without ceasing the harsh, hollow
sound of the wooden hoes as they turn the coffee over in the sun and
scrape against the cement. It is a hot and drowsy sound; the Mexican
equivalent of the sound made by a lawn mower in an American “front yard”
in August. It would send me to sleep, I think, if it were not
counteracted by the peculiar rustling of a clump of banana trees outside
the window. The slightest breath of air puts their torn ribbons into
motion that is a prolonged patter, indistinguishable usually from the
patter of rain. To-day it is more like the plashing of a fountain--a
fountain that, on account of the goldfish, plashes gently. Whenever we
need rain--and in the middle of the night I wake up and seem to hear
it--it turns out to be the banana trees; but when “too much water has
fallen,” as they say here, and I persuade myself that this time it is
only a fluttering in the banana trees, it is always rain. The whole
landscape is suspended in heat haze (“swooning” is the word I should
like to use, but I shan’t), from the bamboo trees nodding against the
sky on the crest of the hill behind the house, through the café tal in
front of it, down, down the long valley between extinct, woolly looking
volcanoes--thirty miles away to the sea. The sea, for some reason, never
looks from this distance like the sea; it is not flat but perpendicular.
I should have thought it a pale-blue wall across the valley’s lower end.
In an untiled corner of the piazza some chickens are taking dust baths
and talking scandal in low tones; the burro, near by, has curled up in
the shade like a dog and gone to sleep. I used to think I should never
allow chickens to take dust baths, or burros to doze on my piazza. It
seemed dreadfully squalid to permit it. Yet I have long since come to
it. What can one do? Es el costumbre del pais. So, also, is the custom
of letting a few fastidious hens lay eggs in one’s bed. But I have
always been very firm about that.
Except for the chickens and the burro, the two men on the asoleadero, a
buzzard resting on the limb of a dead tree, and one of the dogs who has
sneaked into the house to get rid of the flies, and who thinks that
because I didn’t turn him out I didn’t see him, there is apparently
nothing alive in the whole world. And their animation is but a tranquil
stupor. It does not seem as if anything could ever happen here to
disturb one. I’m sure I look as if I had been dreaming forever, but so
far to-day (it is only half past two) there have been the following
demands upon my time and attention:
At seven, one of the men tapped on my window and said he was going to
town, so I got up, wrote a note for him to post, made out the list for
the grocer--sugar, onions, flour, bread, a new bottle of olive oil, two
brooms, and a mouse trap--and gave him a hundred-peso bill to change
somewhere in the village into silver, as to-morrow is pay day. It is
inconvenient, but in the country one has to pay wages--even enormous
sums like five and ten pesos--in silver. Indians don’t understand paper
money as a rule and won’t take it; the others, too, are sometimes
suspicious of it--which is a survival, I suppose, of the time when
several different governments were trying to run Mexico at once and the
bank notes of one state were not accepted in another. At least that is
the only way I can account for their reluctance to be paid in good paper
money. A man I know got tired of sending every week to town for bags of
silver, and told the people on his place that a law had been passed (Oh,
those laws!) permitting an employer to pay only half as much as he owed
to persons who refused bills. Thereafter bills were not scorned. No
doubt I could say something of the same kind, but more than enough laws
of this sort are “passed” in darkest Mexico as it is. I shouldn’t care
to be responsible for another. In the kitchen there were no evidences of
activity on the part of Rosalia, and as I was beginning to be hungry I
knocked on her door and asked her (although I knew only too well) what
was the matter. She moaned back that she was very sick and believed she
was going to die. I didn’t tell her I hoped she would, although the
thought occurred to me. For the trouble with Doña Rosalía was that she
went to a dance last night at a little ranch next to mine, stayed until
half past four, and was carried home stinko. This I had gleaned from
Ramón (he who went to town), who had helped to carry her. With the
ladies at the party she had consumed many glasses of a comparatively
harmless although repulsive mixture of eggs, sugar, milk, and brandy,
prettily named ronpoco. With the gentlemen, however, she had laughingly
tossed off eight or ten drinks of aguardiente, not to record an
occasional glass of sherry, until at last the gentlemen were obliged
laughingly to toss her by the head and feet into a corner, where she lay
until they carried her home in the rosy dawn. I don’t know what to do
about Rosalía. She is an odious woman. If she would content herself with
one lover--somebody I know--I shouldn’t mind in the least. But she has a
different one every week--persons I’ve never laid eyes on usually--and
it makes me nervous to think that there are strange men in the house at
night. Recently I have resorted to locking the kitchen door at a
respectable hour and removing the key, which has made her furious, as I
have not been in the habit of locking any doors and as I did it without
offering an explanation. Her room, furthermore, is without a window. I
shouldn’t be surprised if she tried to poison me; they are great little
poisoners. So I had to stand for half an hour or more fanning a fire
built of green, damp wood, and getting my own breakfast--an orange, a
cup of tea, some eggs, and a roll without butter. The butter habit has
been eliminated along with many others. I could get good, pure American
butter dyed with carrot juice and preserved in boracic or salicylic
acid, by sending to the City of Mexico, but it is too much bother.
After breakfast I walked over to where they are picking. I can’t, of
course, help in the picking, but frequent, unexpected appearances on my
part are not without value. If they were sure I weren’t coming they
would, in their zeal to tear off many berries quickly (they are paid by
the amount they pick), break the branches and injure the trees. As they
have no respect for their own property I suppose it would be fatuous to
count on any respect for mine. When I got back to the house I began to
write to you, but before I had covered half a page, one Lucio appeared
on the piazza, apparently for the purpose of chatting interminably about
the weather, the coffee, the fact that some one had died and some one
else was about to be born; none of which topics had anything to do with
the real object of his visit. Three quarters of an hour went by before
he could bring himself to ask me to lend him money with which to buy two
marvelously beautiful pigs. I was kind, but I was firm. I don’t mind
lending money for most needs, but I refuse to encourage hogriculture. It
is too harrowing. When they keep pigs, no day goes by that the poor,
obese things do not escape and, helplessly rolling and stumbling down
the hill, squeal past the house with a dog attached to every ear.
Besides, they root up the young coffee trees. No, Lucio, no. Chickens,
ducks, turkeys, cows, lions, and tigers if you must, but not pigs.
Lucio--inscrutable person that he is--perfectly agrees with me. As he
says good-by one would think he had originally come not to praise pigs
but to protest against them. After his departure there are at least
fifteen minutes of absolute quiet.
Then arrive a party of four--two men and two women--respectable-looking,
well-mannered people, who stand on the piazza, saying good morning and
inquiring after my health. I have never seen them before, but I stop my
letter and go out to talk to them, wondering all the while where they
have come from and what they want--for, of course, they want something;
everybody always does. For an interminable time their object does not
emerge and in the face of such pretty, pleasant manners it is out of the
question for me bluntly to demand, “What have you come for?” In despair
I ask them if they would like to see the house, and as they stand in my
bare sala, commenting in awed undertones, I have a sudden penetrating
flash of insight into the relativeness of earthly grandeur. To me the
sala is the clean, ascetic habitation of one who has not only realized
what is and what is not essential, but who realizes that every new nail,
pane of glass, tin of paint, and cake of soap is brought sixty or
seventy miles through seas of mud and down a precipice three or four
thousand feet high on the back of a weary mule. To them, the simple
interior is a miracle of ingenious luxury. They gaze at the clumsy
fireplace, touch it, try to see daylight through the chimney and fail to
grasp its purpose, although they revere it as something superbly
unnecessary that cost untold sums. The plated candlesticks on the table
are too bewildering to remark on at all; they will refer to them on the
way home. The kitchen range at first means nothing to anyone, but when I
account for it as an American brasero the women are enthralled. One of
them confesses she thought it was a musical instrument--the kind they
have in church! There is nothing more to exhibit, nothing more to talk
about, so during a general silence one of the men asks me if I will sell
them a little corn--enough to keep them for two days--and I know they
have come to the point at last. They work on a ranch a mile or so away
and the owner, an Englishman, who lives in town, has forgotten or
neglected to supply them; they have none left for their tortillas. I am
not at all anxious to part with any of my corn, but I desire to be
obliging both to them and the Englishman, who, of course, will be told
of it the next time he rides out to his ranch. The house-boy having
disappeared in search of firewood, I have to measure the corn myself;
all of which takes time.
Next, a little boy to buy a pound of lard. (As a convenience I sell lard
at cost.) Then a little girl to say her mother is tired and would like a
drink of aguardiente. As her mother cooks for eighteen men who are
working here temporarily without their families, no doubt she deserves
one. Anyhow she gets it. Rosalía and the house-boy usually dole out
corn, lard, and aguardiente, but Rosalia is still in a trance and the
boy has not returned. Then Ezequiel, father of Candelario, stops on his
way over to the coffee tanks to tell me that Candelario is sick and he
would like me to prescribe. As Candelario is one of my godchildren I
have to show more interest in him than I feel.
“He’s always sick, Ezequiel,” I answer; “my medicines don’t seem to do
him good!” Ezequiel agrees with me that they don’t. “Except for his
stomach, which is swollen, he has been getting thinner and weaker for a
long time. Have you any idea of the cause?” Ezequiel, staring fixedly at
his toes, confesses that he has.
“What is it?”
“I am ashamed to tell you.”
“Don’t be ashamed; I shan’t speak of it, and if I know the cause I may
be able to do some good.” Ezequiel, still intent upon his toes, suddenly
looks up and blurts out:
“He’s a dirt eater.”
“Oh, well--that accounts for it. Why don’t you make him stop?” I ask, at
which Candelario’s father shrugs hopelessly.
And well he may, for dirt eating seems to be a habit or a vice or a
disease, impossible to cure. Many of them have it--grown persons as well
as children--and in the interest of science, or morbid curiosity,
perhaps, I have tried, but with little success, to get some definite
information on the subject. Nobody here who drinks to excess objects to
admitting he is a drunkard. He will refer to himself rather proudly as
“hombre perdido” (a lost man), and expect to be patted on the back. But
I have known a dirt eater to deny he was one even after a surgeon, to
save his life, had operated on him and removed large quantities of dirt.
As the habit is considered a shameful one, information at first hand is
impossible to acquire. Candelario, for instance, is only seven, but
although his father and mother know he is a dirt eater, they have never
caught him in the act. “We have watched him all day sometimes,” Ezequiel
declared, “every minute; and he would lie awake at night until we were
both asleep and then crawl out of the house to get it.” Whether there is
a particular kind of soil to which the victims are addicted or whether
any sufficiently gritty substance will do, I don’t know; neither does
Ezequiel. Among foreigners here the theory is that their stomachs have
become apathetic to the assaults of chile and demand an even more brutal
form of irritation. General emaciation and an abdominal toy balloon are
the outward and visible signs of the habit which can be broken they say
only by death. One woman on the place died of it last year, and her
seventeen-year-old son, who must have begun at an early age as his
physical development is that of a sickly child of ten, is not long for
this world. There was nothing I could do for my unfortunate little
godchild, and Ezequiel walked slowly away, looking as depressed as I
felt. For Candelario is a handsome, intelligent little boy and deserves
a better fate. But--“esterá mejor con Dios!” (He’ll be better off with
God.)
From then until luncheon there is comparative peace. That is to say,
when I am disturbed I am not disturbed for long at a time. A breathless
woman comes to “get something” for her husband who has just been bitten
in the foot by a snake. As she is scared, she omits the customary
preludes and I get rid of her within ten minutes. I have a hypodermic
injection for snake bites that comes from Belgium in little sealed
bottles and seems to be efficacious, but as the snake that bit her
husband was very small (a bravo amarillo, I think she named it), and as
he had been bitten, unsuccessfully, four years ago by another member of
the same family, I do not waste one on him. Instead, I send him several
drinks of ammonia and water which may or may not have any effect on
snake bites. To tell the truth, I don’t care. The house-boy on returning
from the mountain with a mule-load of firewood declares that the
occasion is auspicious for anointing one of the dogs who has the mange.
As the application of the salve is painful to the dog who endeavors to
bite the boy, it is necessary for me to pat the poor thing’s head and
engage him in conversation while the boy craftily dabs and smears in the
rear. When this precarious performance is taking place I notice a
turkey, a magnificent and sedate bird, who seems completely to have lost
his ordinarily fine mind. He is rushing about in a most agonized
fashion, beating his head in the dust, at times pausing and--perhaps I
imagine it--turning pale and looking as if he were about to faint.
“Manuel--what on earth is the matter with him? He has gone crazy,” I
exclaim.
“Oh, no,” Manuel placidly answers, “he fought so much with the other
turkeys and with some of the roosters as well, that I stuck a feather
through his nostrils. I thought it might _divert his attention_.” And he
smilingly waits for me to praise his thoughtful ingenuity.
It takes us fifteen minutes to catch the distracted turkey and remove
the feather. By that time I am, in every sense, too overheated to permit
myself to talk to Manuel on the subject of cruelty to animals. Some time
when I have just had a bath, put on a fresh suit of white clothes, and
am feeling altogether cool and calm and kind, I shall tell him a few
things. But to what end? If he had been willfully, deliberately cruel to
the turkey there might be some hope of converting him--of bringing about
a change of heart. But he wasn’t consciously cruel. Like most Mexicans
he is fond of animals. In fact, there is in Mexico more emotion expended
on pet animals than in any country I know. They make pets of their sheep
and their pigs, and one frequently sees a child sitting in a doorway or
by the roadside nursing a contented chicken. Yet in emotion it more
often than not begins and ends. Their lack of real kindness, of
consideration, of thought, in a word, is infuriating. Everyone on the
ranch has dogs, and at times they are petted, played with, admired, and
called by affectionate names--but they are never fed. I have seen a
family go into ecstasies for hours at a time over six new-born puppies
and then merely shrug and change the subject when it was suggested that
they ought to feed the pitifully thin little mother. The national love
of grace and beauty renders them sensitive to the beauty and grace of
animals, but to their comforts, even their necessities, they are blind
and therefore indifferent. They are all rather incapable of divided
feelings. Manuel had not the slightest feeling of compassion for the
turkey’s torture. The fact that he had prevented the bird from fighting
was all sufficient and left no room in his intelligence for any other.
Rosalía heroically manages to cook and serve my luncheon, and as she
drags herself in and out, the color of a faded lettuce leaf, with her
rebozo over one eye, I almost feel sorry for her. But I steel my heart
and make no comment either on her illness or her partial recovery. After
luncheon I again take my intermittent pen in hand and immediately throw
it down. There is a scurrying of bare feet on the piazza, and six of the
carpenter’s sons gather about the door. They are all crying and,
although it is no doubt physiologically impossible, they are all about
ten years old. The carpenter has eight sons, but one is noticeably
younger and the other is an infant in arms.
“What has happened?” I ask serenely; for I have grown to regard battle,
murder, and sudden death as conventional forms of relaxation. Six,
sobbing, simultaneous versions of the tragedy leave me ignorant.
“Now, one of you come in--you, Florenzio--and tell me about it. All the
others go around to the kitchen and tell Doña Rosalía. Now then,
Florenzio, be a man and stop crying. What is it?” I demand. Florenzio’s
narrative has moments of coherence. His father (usually the best of
fathers) went to the dance last night and came home drunk (he rarely
drinks). This morning, as he felt so badly, he tried to “cure” himself
(they always do) by drinking a little more. By ten o’clock he was all
right, and then--and then, “_he passed the cure_!” (This, I think, is
one of the most delightful phrases in the language.) After he had
“passed the cure” he suddenly went crazy, smashed all the cooking
utensils on the floor, and ended by seizing a stick of wood from the
brasero and beating his wife to a pulp. Then tearing the baby from her
breast he reeled with it into the jungle.
“All of which, my dear Florenzio,” I feel like saying, “is dramatic and
fascinating--but where do _I_ come in? I can’t undertake to pursue your
estimable father into the jungle, and I have no desire to inspect the
maternal pulp. Why have you come to _me_?” But, of course, I say nothing
of the kind. Instead, I am sympathetic and aghast and, surrounded by six
fluttering little carpenters, go over to their hut, exclaim at the
broken pottery, condole with the pulp, moan about the evils of drink,
declare that everything will come out satisfactorily in the end, and
leave them tear-blotted but not without interest in the future.
What, however, was in my thoughts throughout the visit was not the
immediate distress of this particular family, but the long distress
which, it sometimes seems to me, is the life of all of them. The house
was typical of the houses on my place--of the houses everywhere in this
part of the country, and I groaned that it should be. A small inclosure
of bamboo, fourteen feet by twelve perhaps, the steep, pointed roof
covered with rough, hand-made shingles of a soft wood that soon rots and
leaks. The bamboo, being no more than a lattice, affords but slight
protection from a slanting rain and none whatever from the wind; the
dirt floor, therefore, is damp everywhere, and near the walls muddy. At
one end is a brasero--not the neat, tiled affair for charcoal, with
holes on top and draughts in the side that one sees in towns, but a kind
of box made of logs, raised from the ground on rough legs and filled
with hard earth. A small fire of green wood smolders in the center of
this, filling the room from time to time with blinding smoke, and around
it (before the carpenter passed his cure) were three or four jars of
coarse brown pottery, and a thin round platter of unglazed earthenware
on which are baked the tortillas. Near by is a black stone with a
slight concavity on its upper surface and a primitive rolling pin of the
same substance resting upon it. On the floor in the corner are some
frayed petates--thin mats woven of palm or rushes. This is all, and this
is home. At night the family huddles together for warmth with nothing
but the petates between them and the damp ground. They sleep in their
clothes and try to cover themselves with their well-worn sarapes.
In a perpetually warm climate there is nothing deplorable about such
habitations, but from November to March the tierra templada is not
perpetually warm; it is for weeks at a time searchingly cold. The
thermometer often goes down to forty (Fahrenheit), and forty with a mad,
wet wind blowing through the house is agony to a person in cotton
pajamas, trying to seek repose in a mud puddle. During a protracted
norther the sadness of their faces, the languor of their movements--the
silent, patient wretchedness of them is indescribably depressing. A week
or so ago during a norther, when I was taking a walk between the end of
one cloud burst and the beginning of the next, I stopped to pay my
respects to a baby who had been born a few days before. The mother was
vigorously kneading corn with her stone rolling pin and the baby,
absolutely naked on a blanket, was having a chill.
“The poor little thing is very cold; it is shaking all over,” I
remarked.
“Yes, it has had chills ever since it came,” the woman answered.
“But in weather like this you ought to cover it,” I insisted.
“It doesn’t seem to wish to be covered,” was the reply. Upon which I
observed that it was a very pretty baby, and departed in tears. When one
lives among them one marvels, not like the tourist of a week, that they
are dirty, but that under the circumstances they are as clean as they
are; not that so many of them are continually sick, but that any of them
are ever well; not that they love to get drunk, but that they can bear
to remain sober.
And yet, even in cold, wet weather I am sure some of my pity is wasted.
If that baby lives and grows to manhood, a damp petate on the ground and
a thin blanket will be the only bed in its recollection; a hut of
openwork bamboo (or, at the most elaborate, of rough boards an inch
apart) its only shelter from the rain and wind. Furthermore, a human
being is never suffering as acutely as one sometimes thinks he is, if
he fails to take advantage of every available means of alleviating his
condition. Often when the faces of these people are wan with cold, I
have asked them why they do not stuff the cracks in their houses and
keep out the wind. The jungle a hundred yards away is all the year
luxuriant with great waterproof leaves, which when hung on walls or
piled on roofs are as impermeable as if they were patented and cost
money. No one is ignorant of their use, for the north side of almost
every house (it is from the north that the cold winds blow here) is
adorned with them. But why only the north side? If I knew beforehand
that I should have to spend a week in one of these huts I should, with a
machete and two or three hours of effort, make it warm and habitable.
But they, knowing that they will live and die in one, barely protect the
north side, sheath their machetes, cover their noses with their sarapes,
and shiver in silence. To the question, “Why don’t you make your house
warm and dry with leaves?” I have never been given a definite or
satisfactory answer. So sketchy and evasive have been the replies that I
am actually unable to remember what any of them were. In fact, Mexicans
have a genius for stringing words upon a flashing chain of shrugs and
smiles--of presenting you with a verbal rosary which later you find
yourself unable to tell.