could draw with closed eyes. In another hour the sun will have begun to
lose its drying powers and I shall go over to the asoleadero to watch
the men pack the half-dried coffee into bags and pile them up under
cover for the night. By that time the pickers will have begun to
straggle back through the trees--the women and children talking in
tired, quiet voices, the men silent and bent double under their loads of
berries. Where we are--with a hill between us and the western sky--dusk
will overtake us while the mountains opposite and the distant gulf are
still tinted with sunset lights of unimagined delicacy; we shall have to
measure the berries and record the amounts picked by the flame of a
torch. Then everyone will mysteriously fade away among the trees, and
before going back to the house I shall linger alone a moment to look at
the black tracery of the bamboo plumes against the yellow afterglow,
with a single star trembling through an azure lake above them--perhaps I
shall wait for the moon to come out of the gulf and disperse the silver
moon mist that already has begun to gather on the horizon. The world
will seem to be a very quiet one--not silent with the intense and
terrifying silence of desert places, but peacefully, domestically
silent. For through the brief twilight will drift detached and softened
notes of life--the pat, pat, patting of a tortilla, the disembodied
rhythm of a guitar, the baying of a hound.
At dinner Rosalía will have sufficiently recovered to relate to me, as
she comes and goes from the kitchen, all she can remember about the
dance of the night before--new scandals to gloat over, new elopements to
prophesy. What she can’t remember she will gliby invent. The mayordomo
will come in to report on the coffee, the house-boy will tell me who has
bought corn and lard, and in what amounts. (He can’t write but he has
the memory of a phonograph.) If the novel you sent me--it came
yesterday--is as good as you say it is, I shall forget for the next few
hours that Mexico was ever discovered. I used to wonder in bookstores
how anyone could have the effrontery to print another book, but now,
since they have entirely taken the place that used to be filled for me
by more or less intelligent conversation, I feel like composing a letter
of thanks for every new writer I hear of. Before going to bed I shall
walk around the piazza to see that none of the men who have been
chatting in the moonlight have set the place on fire with their
cigarettes. One night I stooped down to pick up my little black dog who
sleeps there, exclaiming as I clutched him, “Kitsy, kitsy, kitsy--who’s
uncle’s darling!” or some equally dignified remark. But it wasn’t the
little black dog at all--it was the head of an Indian who was spending
the night there, covered, except for his shock of hair, with empty
coffee sacks. To-morrow will be just like to-day.
But perhaps I should not say exactly that, for I recall the reply of the
German clerk who was asked if he did not find his occupation monotonous.
“Why, no,” he said. “To-day, for instance, I am dating everything June
3d. To-morrow, I shall write June 4th, and the day after, June 5th. You
see--in my work there is constant variety.” And so it is here.
To-morrow, no doubt, it will be wet and cool instead of dry and hot; the
dispulpador may refuse to work (it is almost time for it to get out of
order again), and I have a feeling that the bamboo trough, in which the
water runs a quarter of a mile from its source to the washing tanks, is
about due to collapse somewhere. Then, someone will have a quarrel with
his wife and come to tell me that they are going to leave. This is a
most inexplicable phase of them. When they have a quarrel their one
idea, apparently, is to pack up their few possessions and seek a change
of scene. If it were to get rid of each other I could understand it; but
they often depart together! After dark a clacuache (I don’t know how to
spell him, but that is the way he is pronounced) may sneak upon the
chickens and succeed in getting one of them. Not long ago a wild
boar--we have them here; small but fierce--trotted out of the jungle and
attacked a young girl who was sewing in front of her family residence.
She happened to be alone and the little brute would have killed her if
some dogs had not come to her rescue. Perhaps it will happen again. A
few nights ago while I was reading in the sala, I heard a light clatter
of hoofs on the tiles of the piazza. When I turned from the lamp to look
out, a deer stood peering in at me through the open door. For a quarter
of a minute I almost believed he would end by coming in and putting his
head on my lap; I sat so motionless and tried so hard to will him to.
But he reared back and the doorway was once more a frame without a
picture. The next afternoon some one on the place shot a deer and tried
to sell me a piece of it, but, although I hadn’t had meat for days, I
couldn’t bring myself to buy any. Then, too, it is about time for
somebody--somebody very young or very old--to die. Death here is more
than death; it is a social opportunity. I always go to the wakes, both
because I know my presence adds interest and éclat to the occasions and
because I enjoy them. Everybody (except me) sits on the floor--the women
draped in their rebozos as if they were in church--while the deceased,
in a corner of the room, with candles at its head and feet, and wild
flowers on the wall above it, seems somehow to take a pallid interest in
what goes on. I do not sit on the floor because the bereaved family has
borrowed a chair from Rosalía in the hope that I would come. But when I
take possession of it I, of course, do not let on that I know it belongs
to me. For an hour, perhaps, while other guests silently emerge from the
jungle and sidle quietly into the room, the conversation is in
undertones and fragmentary. The dead is referred to with affection or
respect; the most conventional conventions are, in a word, observed.
Later, however, refreshments are handed about by the surviving members
of the household; the ladies partake of sherry, the gentlemen outside
relieve the tension with aguardiente. Gradually the atmosphere of the
gathering becomes less formal; talk is more sustained and resumes the
flexibility of every day. Trinidad indulges in a prolonged reminiscence
which Rosalía caps with a brilliant and slightly indecent anecdote that
makes everyone laugh. Outside the men have another drink of aguardiente,
and seating themselves on the ground begin to play cards by the light of
a torch. Suddenly there is a dog fight. In some way the writhing,
shrieking, frantic, hairy bodies roll past the card players and into the
room among the women and children. Everyone screams, and from my chair
(I am now not sitting, but standing on it) the floor is an indescribable
chaos. After this it is impossible to reconstruct a house of sorrow. The
deceased is not exactly forgotten, but it no longer usurps the center of
the stage. No one can quite resume the mood in which he came, and from
then on the wake is in every respect like a dance except for the facts
that there is a dead person in the room and that there is no dancing. In
the small hours, some thrifty guest opens a cantina and does a good
business in aguardiente and sherry, in tortillas, tamales, bread, and
coffee. I do not often stay so late.
Now and then I have to go to the village and be godfather for some
infant born on the place, and occasionally the festivities that follow a
wedding--the dancing and drinking, card playing and fighting--vary the
monotony of my long, quiet evenings. Last year a man I know, who has a
cattle ranch a day and a half away from here, issued a general
invitation to the countryside to come to his place and be married free
of charge. He built a temporary chapel and hired a priest and for two
days the hymeneal torch flamed as it never had in that part of the world
before. So many persons took advantage of the opportunity that the
priest, who began by marrying a couple at a time, was obliged toward the
last to line them up in little squads of six and eight and ten and let
them have it, so to speak, by the wholesale. It was pathetic to see old
men and women with their children and their children’s children all
waiting in the same group to be married.
Once in a long, long while I have a visitor--a real visitor I mean; some
one who stays a week or two, sits opposite me at meals and, to all
intents and purposes, talks my own language. You can scarcely--in fact,
you cannot at all--imagine just what this means, or the light in which I
view it. It is a different light; “a light that never was” in
localities where, in the matter of companionship for an evening, there
is an embarrassment of choice--where one becomes a kind of selfish,
social epicure. You know how you go into your club sometimes at half
past six or seven, wondering vaguely with whom you will dine. There are
fifteen or twenty more or less civilized young men sitting about
drinking cocktails, over whom, as you pretend to be reading the
headlines of the evening paper, you cast an appraising eye. Most of them
are going to dine at the club and almost any one of them would suggest
your joining his group if you gave him the necessary chance. But,
unwilling to commit yourself, you let the time slip by and, unless you
see somebody in whom you are especially interested, you end by dining
with the newspaper. Or if you do bind yourself to any particular party
and table and hour, you often find yourself regretting the act even
while you commit it. You haven’t, after all, really anything in common
with the persons in whose company you are destined to spend the next
hour and a half, you reflect, and a thousand such dinners would bring
you no nearer to them.
But in a place like this how different it is! It is the difference
between looking at things through a telescope and through a microscope.
At home we have opportunity and time only to make use of the larger,
sketchier instrument; after we pass a certain age we rarely learn to
know anyone with the searching intimacy that was the point and joy and
sorrow of our earlier friendships. Here, however, not from inclination
but from force of circumstances, there is now and then a pale afterglow
of the old relations. A visitor here is necessarily an isolated
specimen, and as such he is obliged for the time being to regard me. For
a week or so we see each other at rather terribly close range and the
experience is valuable. For it sends home to roost still another
platitude, and it is only by accepting and realizing the truth of
platitudes that we grow wise and tolerant and kinder. It used to bore me
beyond the power of expression to read or to be told that “everybody has
good qualities and an interesting side, if you only know how to get at
them,” and I still would enjoy kicking the person who informs me of this
fact with the air of one who lives on the heights, yet who is not above
showing the way to others groping in the valley. But although I have not
yet arrived at the point where I like to acknowledge it, I have learned
to believe that it is true. Perhaps it was to this end that I was sent
here. Quien sabe?
VIII
Wealth, education, and travel often combine to render unimportant,
persons who, had they stayed at home in a state of comparative poverty
and ignorance, would, perhaps, have been worthy of one’s serious
consideration. For money, books, and the habit of “going a journey” tend
to draw their possessors toward the symmetrical eddy known as “society,”
and society cannot for long endure anything essentially unlike itself.
One’s lot may be cast in New York, Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Rome,
Madrid, or the City of Mexico, but in so far as one is “in society” in
any of those places one conforms, outwardly at least, to a system of
ethics, etiquette, dress, food, drink, and division of time that
obtains, with a few local differences, in all the others. My
acquaintance among Mexicans of wealth, education, and extensive
experience is not, I confess, numerous, but it is sufficient constantly
to remind me of that ever-increasing “smallness of the world” we hear so
much about, and to impress upon me how distressingly nice and similar
are persons the world over who have money, education, the habit of
society, and little else. One Mexican family I happened not long ago to
see every day for three months was an excellent example of this
pleasant, cosmopolitan blight. They somehow ought to have been as florid
and real, as indigenous to the volcanic soil, as were the hundred and
fifty others (we were at a small “health resort”) who had gathered under
the same roof from all parts of the republic. Papa _ought_ to have
joined in the noisy, frantic games in the sala after dinner and with a
complete and engaging lack of self-consciousness made a monkey of
himself, as did the other men; mamma _ought_ to have come to breakfast
in an unbelted dressing sack with her long, black, wet hair hanging down
her back against a blue or yellow bath towel attached by safety pins to
her shoulders, as did her lady compatriots. The little daughter _ought_
to have worn beruffled dresses of some inexpensive but gaudy fabric
(scarlet gingham trimmed with coarse lace, for instance), and on Sunday
a pair of rather soiled, high-buttoned shoes of white or pale-blue kid.
The son--a youth of twenty-two--_ought_ to have been an infinitely more
tropical young man than he was; more emphatic and gesticulative in
conversation, more obviously satisfied with himself, and as to his
clothes, just a trifle wrong in every important detail.
But papa, who was a lawyer of some note, had been in the diplomatic
service, and although one evening he did gravely take part in a game of
“Button! button! Who’s got the button?” he never permitted himself the
graceful and popular diversion of dredging with his teeth for ten-cent
pieces in a bowl of flour. Mamma not only did not squalidly appear at
breakfast with her hair down--she did not appear at breakfast at all.
The little girl dressed sometimes in the English fashion, sometimes in
the French, and at all times was able to chatter fluently and
idiomatically in four languages. The young man, in spite of his American
and English clothes, could not have been mistaken for an American or an
Englishman, but he might have been, at first sight, almost anything
else. They had lived abroad--in France, in Belgium, in Germany--and they
had lost their tags. They very much resembled the sort of persons one is
invited to meet at dinner almost anywhere; persons who wear the right
clothes, use the right fork, who neither come too early nor stay too
late and to whom it is second nature to talk for three hours about
nothing at all, with ease, amiability, and an appearance of interest.
Their house in the City of Mexico was like themselves. It had, so to
speak, been born Mexican and then denationalized. For although it had
been built with a patio and tiled floors on the assumption that the
climate of Mexico is hot, it had acquired half a dozen fireplaces, a
complete epidermis of Oriental rugs, pretty and comfortable furniture,
pictures that did not merely make one giggle, bric-a-brac that did not
merely make one sick, a distinct personality, an atmosphere of comfort
and all the other attributes a genuinely Mexican interior invariably
lacks. It would be amusing to blindfold somebody in New York or London,
transport him on a magic carpet to one of the señora’s dinner parties or
afternoons at home, and ask him to guess where he was.
However much at a loss he might be for an answer in this particular
instance, it would be impossible for him, on the other hand, to mistake
his whereabouts could he be suddenly wafted to the little coffee town of
Rebozo and set down in the abode of my friend, Don Juan Valera. For
although it is said that Don Juan’s estimable wife has the tidy sum of a
million dollars coming to her on the death of her father, and Don Juan
has proved himself as discreet in the coffee business as he was in the
business of matrimony, he is not a citizen of the world. A visit to Don
Juan’s is an all-day affair--exhausting, ruinous to the digestion, quite
delightful, and Mexican from beginning to end. In fact, there is about
provincial Mexican hospitality a quality for which I can think of no
more descriptive phrase than “old-fashioned.” It has a simplicity, a
completeness, an amplitude that, to one who is accustomed to the quick,
well-ordered festivities of modern civilization, seem to belong to a
remote period, the period of “old times.” We left Barranca at half past
eight in the morning--enthusiastic, vivacious, amiable, and, in
appearance, not, I am told, unprepossessing. We returned at seven in the
evening--depleted, silent, irritable, and ages older-looking than our
ages.
The train to Rebozo, where lives Don Juan, slides circuitously down the
foothills through almost a tunnel of tropical vegetation and emerges at
last in one of the great gardens of the world. One does not soon grow
indifferent to tropical foliage. Even when one has come to the
conclusion that there is after all nothing more wonderful in a gully
full of plumelike ferns, twenty and thirty feet high, than in a row of
familiar elm or maple trees, one involuntarily hangs out of the window
to marvel at the ferns. The green, damp jungle depths, partly veiled in
smoky vapor that detaches itself, sails diagonally up the hillside and
then shreds into nothingness as the hot sunlight finds its way through
the trees, recall “transformation scenes” at the theater, or
long-forgotten pictures in old geographies. It is difficult for a
Northerner simply to take their beauty for granted, as he does the
beauty of trees and shrubs at home, for there is about nature in the
tropics always a suggestion of mystery, suffocation--evil. I do not know
if it is because one is reasonably suspicious of venomous snakes,
poisonous plants, and nameless, terrifying insects, but tropical nature,
however exquisite, inspires neither confidence nor affection. The poet
who first apostrophized “Mother Nature” never put on a pair of
poison-proof gloves and endeavored to hack a path through jungle with a
machete. In the tropics, the bosom of Mother Nature does not invite her
children to repose.
Don Juan met us at the train--which deposits its passengers in the
middle of Rebozo’s principal street--and, as it was still early in the
morning and there were nine hours of sixty minutes each ahead of us,
most of which we were aware would have to be consumed in sawing
conversational wood at Don Juan’s, we called first upon the family of
Don Pedro Valasquez--another local coffee magnate. Don Pedro’s wife--in
a pink cotton wrapper, with her hair down, but heavily powdered and
asphyxiatingly perfumed--had no doubt seen us get off the train, for she
met us at the front door, kissed the two girls in our party (who, after
calling on Mexican ladies, always declare they have contracted
lead-poisoning), and, chattering like a strange but kindly bird, took us
into the sala.
There is in all truly Mexican salas a striking--a depressing--similarity
one does not notice in the drawing-rooms of other countries. It is as if
there were, somewhere in the republic, a sort of standard sala--just as
there is in a glass case at Washington a standard of weight and a
standard of measurement--which all the other salas try, now humbly, now
magnificently, to approximate. I have sat in many Mexican salas and I
have peeped from the street into many more, but it would be difficult if
not impossible for me to know whether I were in the house of Don This
rather than in the house of Don That, if none of the family were present
to give me a clew. They are all long and high and bleak. In the exact
geometric center is a table with nothing on it but its chilly marble
top. Over it hangs an electric chandelier (the unshaded incandescent
light, like a bad deed in an excellent world, casts its little beam
almost everywhere in Mexico), the size and elaborateness of which is a
tolerably accurate symptom of the owner’s wealth and position. Around
the walls is placed at intervals, as regular as the architecture will
allow, a “set” of furniture--usually of Austrian bentwood with rattan
seats and backs--the kind that looks as if it were made of gas pipe
painted black. Near the heavily barred windows, where they can be
admired by the passers-by, are other marble-topped tables laden with
trivial imported objects of china and glass and metal: bisque figurines
painted in gay colors, little ornate vases that could not hold a single
flower, fanciful inkstands, and statuettes of animals--rabbits and dogs
and owls--standing about on mats horribly evolved out of worsted and
beads. The few pictures are usually vivid in color and obvious in
sentiment.
In fact, the prominence given in Mexican houses to advertisements of
brewers and grocers--calendars portraying, for example, a red-cheeked
young person with two horticulturally improbable cherries dangling from
her faultless mouth--is indicative of the warm, bright school of art for
which the nation really cares. The floor is of tiles--sometimes
light-colored and ornamented, but more often dark-red and plain--and the
ceiling is almost invariably a false ceiling of painted canvas that
eventually sags a trifle and somewhat disturbs a stranger accustomed to
ceilings of plaster by spectrally rising and falling in the breeze. In
hot weather the bareness and hardness and cleanliness of these places,
the absence of upholstery and yielding surfaces, the fact that the
floors can be sprinkled and swabbed off with a wet mop, are most
agreeable. But whereas in some parts of Mexico one or two days of a
month may be warm and the other twenty-nine or thirty cool or even cold,
the sala, with its inevitable echo, frozen floors, and pitiless
draughts, is usually as inviting as a mortuary chapel. Don Pedro’s,
besides containing precisely what I have enumerated, had an upright
piano, a canary, and a phonograph, and if I had needed any proof of the
fact that Mexican nerves are of an entirely different quality from our
own, the hour and a half we spent there would have supplied it.
In the first place, when “entertaining company” in Mexico everybody
talks all the time, nobody listens, and the voices of the women are
more often than not loud and harsh. When they hit upon a subject with
possibilities in the way of narrative and detail, they cling to it,
develop it, expand it, and exhaust it, and then go back and do it all
over again. On this occasion the topic that naturally suggested itself
when Don Pedro appeared, limping slightly and leaning on the arm of one
of his daughters, was the accident he had met with some months before
while out riding with three of the Americans who were now calling on
him. There was the usual preliminary skirmish of politeness, and then
followed the conversational engagement. It lasted for an hour and a
quarter, and except for the fact that during its progress one of my
compatriots developed a headache and I became temporarily deaf, it was
no doubt a draw. Don Pedro told _his_ story, which began with the
pedigree and biography of the horse that had thrown him, the combination
of circumstances that had led up to his riding him instead of some other
horse, the nature of the weather on that historical morning, the
condition of the roads, the various careless happy thoughts and remarks
he had indulged in just before the fatal moment, the fatal moment
itself, the sensations and reflections of a Mexican gentleman on
returning to consciousness after a bump on the head----
But it must not be supposed that anyone except me (who had not been
present at the accident) was listening to Don Pedro or paying the
slightest attention to him. His wife, with hands outstretched and flung
in the air, with eyes now rolling, now flashing, was screaming _her_
version; just how she had spent her time between the departure of the
blithesome cavalcade and its unexpected appearance with a litter in its
midst; what she had unsuspectingly remarked to her daughter and one of
the servants when first she descried it; what they had respectively
replied; what she did next, and what she did after that and the
sensations of a Mexican lady on hearing that her husband had been thrown
from his horse and rendered unconscious----