project themselves into the spirit of every social situation, were
meeting the demands of the moment by bellowing _their_ more or less
fictitious tales, and in the narrow street beyond the long open windows,
the train we had just left (it was so near we could have leaned out and
touched it) was making wholly unsuccessful efforts to return to
Barranca. The whistle and bell of the engine shrieked and rang
incessantly, the cars separated in an agony of noise and then
slam-banged together again and again and again. Most of the time the
engine was in front of the house sending a geyser of hoarse steam
through one of the sala windows. When the six simultaneous narratives
were nearing their climaxes and the train was at its loudest, a little
girl came into the room, sat down at the piano, and began to practice
scales, a little boy appeared from the patio for the purpose of making
the phonograph play the sextette from “Lucia,” as rendered by four
trombones and two cornets, and the canary bird went abruptly and
completely mad. Most of this lasted without surcease for an hour and a
quarter. The last fifteen minutes we spent in saying good-by. The señora
kissed the two ladies before we left the sala, and again at the door.
They were more than ordinarily convinced that they had contracted
lead-poisoning. Then we strolled away to the house of Don Juan Valera,
where we were received by Don Juan’s wife and five enchanting children,
his mother who had come over from a neighboring village to cook her
son’s birthday dinner (she was ninety-three and as bald as an egg), and
an orchestra of fourteen pieces.
No doubt one could become hardened to sitting all morning at one end of
a parlor, gravely listening to the waltzes and two-steps of an orchestra
at the other, and after every selection even more gravely adjourning
with one’s host and the musicians to the dining room for a glass of
cognac. But there is about the first morning spent in this fashion a
ghastly charm. As the ladies did not take cognac, upon them devolved the
less invigorating task of preserving unbroken during our frequent
absences the thread of conversation, and I groveled before them in
admiration every time I returned and found that the children and the
weather as topics had not even begun to be exhausted. There was all the
more to say about the weather by reason of the fact that there had been
recently so little of it--rain had refused to fall for weeks and the
coffee trees, laden with buds, were unable to flower. With the crop in
imminent peril--with hundreds of thousands of dollars ready to dry up
and blow away all around us--we could still experience a kind of social
gratitude for the calamity, and toward noon I began to feel that among
the many kindly acts of our host, his having had in all, six children
instead of only one or two was perhaps the kindliest. Race suicide on
his part would have been not only race suicide but conversational
murder. The eldest boy was at a Southern school in the United States,
and (this, however, did not emerge during our visit; Don Juan perhaps
did not know of it) he had on arriving, before the school opened, much
to his amazement, been refused admittance, on account of his fine, dark
skin (grandmamma was an Indian), to one hotel after another. The
explanation of the person in charge of him to the effect that he was no
more of African extraction than were the elegant young hotel clerks
themselves, was unproductive of results.
“I don’t care what he is--he isn’t white,” was their unanimous verdict,
and he found refuge at last in an obscure boarding house. But apparently
he had lived down prejudice even in the South, for while Don Juan was
proud of the progress he had made in his studies, he was positively vain
of his success with the ladies, although still somewhat at a loss to
account for the state of affairs that rendered such admitted conquests
possible. As modestly as he could he conveyed to us that the girls were
“crazy” about Juanito, hastening to declare, as a parent should, that
for his part he did not see precisely why.
“No doubt it is because Juanito is a novelty to them,” he sought to
explain. “You know how women are; always attracted by something new. On
Sunday afternoons they take long walks with him--but all alone, _all
alone_. No mother, father, brother--no one. And afterwards they invite
him in to supper. But nothing wrong--nothing wrong” (Juanito was not
quite fifteen), he added, closing his eyes and solemnly waving his
finger in front of his face.
The dinner (it was announced at last) was a revelation in the
possibilities of Mexican cooking, and although the multitude of dishes
were not new to me their savor was. Grandmamma cooked from recipes
(“muy, muy antiguas,” they were) whose origins had been obscured by
subsequent history, and almost a century had in no way impaired her
sense of taste or her lightness of touch. Even her tortillas were
delicious, and a tortilla is a melancholy form of nourishment. The mole
(a turkey soaked in a rich, mahogany-colored sauce, composed of from
twenty to half a hundred different ingredients) was of course the
dinner’s climax--it always is--and afterwards, as the old lady did not
come to the table, we all went to the kitchen to congratulate her and
shake her hand while the maids who had been helping her looked on in
ecstasy.
“She doesn’t come to the table because she has only one tooth,” her son
explained as he gently caused her to display it, much as one exhibits
the dental deficiencies of an old and well-beloved horse, “and on top
there is no hair--none at all. You see--it’s all bare, just like
parchment. She’s a wonderful woman,” he declared, as he slid his finger
back and forth on her skull.
Then we were shown the house; even--before we realized what was about to
happen--the new bathroom, to whose undoubted conveniences Don Juan
artlessly called out attention, and after examining separately every
plant in the patio, we returned to the sala, where the darling weather
proceeded almost immediately to save not only the situation but the
coffee crop. A series of cloud-bursts kept us all at the open windows
fascinated, as for some reason one always is by the hissing of rain and
the violent activities of tin waterspouts, until their sudden cessation
enabled us to stroll out, accompanied by Don Juan and the children, to
visit the town’s famous gardens for growing violets, azaleas, camelias,
roses, and gardenias for the market. There did not seem to be many of
them, but it was only later, when Don Pedro and his wife came to the
train with their arms full, that we knew why.
In two hours the coffee had flowered, and as the train lurched back to
Barranca in the green, uncanny, storm-washed light, through acres and
acres and acres of white coffee blossoms, it was difficult not to
believe that there had been in the tropics a fall of snow.
IX
It is significant that the most entertaining as well as the most
essentially true book on Mexico that I have been able to find was
written during the years 1840 and 1841, by Madame Calderon de la Barca.
Although from this name one does not, perhaps, at once jump to the
conclusion that the writer was Scotch, the fact that she was becomes
somewhat more credible on discovering her to have been born “Ingalls.”
She was, in a word, the wife of the first minister Spain condescended to
send to Mexico after that dissatisfied country had, in the time-honored
phrase, “thrown off the yoke,” and she must have been a most intelligent
and charming young person.
Of course, I have spent far too much time in and about Boston not to
have observed that delightful books are often written by odious women,
and what persuades me that my belief in Madame Calderon’s charm is not
misplaced is the fact that she never knew she was writing a book at all.
“It consists of letters written to the members of her family, and
really not intended originally--however incredible the assertion--for
publication,” says Prescott the historian, in his short preface to the
volume. It was Prescott who urged her to print them, but even he could
not induce her actually to reveal her name. I say “actually,” as she
resorted on the title page to the quaint form of anonymity that
consisted of signing herself “Madame C--de la B--,” a proceeding always
suggestive of the manner in which the two-hundred-pound soprano of
Mozart opera holds a minute, black velvet mask a foot and a half away
from her face and instantly becomes invisible to the naked eye.
But what strikes me as significant when I open Madame Calderon’s letters
at random and read a page or two almost anywhere is that, while the book
has long since been out of print, it is essentially not out of date. For
although in sixty-six years many historical things have happened in
Mexico--revolutions, sudden and astonishing changes of government, the
complete and wonderful disestablishment of the Church, foreign invasions
both bloody and peaceful--one may still read Madame Calderon and verify
much that she says simply by glancing out of the window. Momentous
changes have without doubt taken place: there are now freedom of
religious belief and facilities for acquiring an education, where in her
time there was only a priest with hell in one hand and a yawning purse
in the other; there now are railways and an excellent post and telegraph
service, where formerly there were, so to speak, nothing but brigands.
The parents of an Englishwoman I know in Mexico, who as a young bride
and groom landed at Vera Cruz just sixty years ago, were held up and
robbed three times during their journey from the coast to Barranca. They
were in a coach with other passengers; and the first bandits they
encountered took merely their money. The second deprived them of their
watches and jewelry, but the third, enraged at finding them without
valuables of any kind, stripped everybody--including the driver--to the
skin. Stark naked, the coachload for eight hours pursued its embarrassed
way and stark naked it drove into the patio of the Barranca inn. To-day
in Mexico one may occasionally be held up on the road, just as one may
be held up in Wyoming or Vermont, but brigandage as a lucrative career
for young men of courage has been suppressed. Madame Calderon did not
seem to think it at all unlikely that the masked bandits who separated
ladies from their jewels on the way home from a ball at three in the
morning were the dashing army officers with whom the ladies had been
dancing and flirting a short time before.
Those days are passed, and yet Mexico always seems to me very much as it
was when the observant Scotchwoman wrote her long and vivid letters.
There have been “events,” and reforms, and innovations that
unquestionably have had their influence on somebody, but the great
masses appear to have been quite uninfluenced. Even the large
towns--with the exception of the City of Mexico and Guadalajara, both of
which seem in many respects to become more cosmopolitan every week--may
still be recognized from Madame Calderon’s description of them and their
inhabitants. As recently as this year (1908) it was impossible, at the
best hotel in Puebla (a capital with a population of at least a hundred
thousand), to get breakfast, if one was obliged to leave by the
half-past-six A.M. train for Jalapa.
“It is not the custom to serve breakfast so early,” said the mozo, who
was arranging my bed for the night, when I ordered soft-boiled eggs and
chocolate to be sent up at half past five for my mother and brother and
me. He was a handsome boy, shivering in a dark-brown sarape stamped all
over with white horseshoes.
“But my God, amigo mio!” I protested, “why _isn’t_ it the custom? Before
a long journey even the most spiritual of us must fortify ourselves.”
“The milkman does not come from the country until six,” he then
explained, “and the cook never lights the brasero until half past.
Without milk and fire, how can one breakfast?”
To a person of resource (I am a person of resource) such a state of
affairs is immaterial. For at half past five (with the ghastly before
dawn cheerfulness that some of us at last painfully acquire) I was
making my toilet with one hand and, on two alcohol lamps, boiling eggs
and preparing chocolate with the other--as in Mexico I had done
innumerable times before. But for the uninitiated and the
resourceless--the American traveler in Mexico is usually both--what a
situation!
A railway--an engineering marvel that in its construction again and
again achieved the impossible--has bisected the country for almost
thirty years; but I know many adult Mexicans of considerable
intelligence, in their own circumscribed, tropical way, who have lived
all their lives within sixty or seventy miles of the track without ever
having seen it. Sixty-six years ago France must have been decidedly
more French, and Italy must have been infinitely more Italian, than they
are to-day, yet Mexico apparently is but slightly less Mexican.
From Madame Calderon, and from her only, was I able to learn the exact
religious import of the nine dances (posadas, they are called), given
everywhere in Mexico just before Christmas. I knew they were given, for
I had gone to them and enjoyed myself, but just why there were nine of
them and just why they should all be held in quick succession
immediately before Christmas, was something neither my American nor my
Mexican acquaintances--in spite of their polite efforts to recollect a
pretty legend, they had forgotten--ever made altogether clear. Madame
Calderon, however, was more satisfactory, and I can do no better than
quote her: “This is the last night of what are called the Posadas,” she
writes, “a curious mixture of religion and amusement, but extremely
pretty. The meaning is this: At the time that the decree went forth from
Cæsar Augustus that ‘all the world should be taxed,’ the Virgin and
Joseph, having come out of Galilee to Judæa to be inscribed for the
taxation, found Bethlehem so full of people who had arrived from all
parts of the world that they wandered about for nine days without
finding admittance to any house or tavern, and on the ninth day took
shelter in a manger, where the Savior was born.”
“Posada” means an inn or lodging house, and the “curious” religious
preliminaries to the nine dancing parties called “posadas” are all
symbolical of the efforts of Joseph and Mary to find a resting place for
the night. The posada Madame Calderon describes took place in a private
house in the City of Mexico more than half a century ago; the last one I
went to was held less than a year ago in the casino of a small town in
the tierra templada. But except for some slight historical differences,
either one might have been the other. “We went to the Marquesa’s at
eight o’clock, and about nine the ceremony commenced,” writes Madame
Calderon. And in this sentence lurks, perhaps, the greatest difference.
For at the casino of Barranca I found no marquesas. Most of the
pure-blooded Spaniards one meets in Mexico are either priests or
grocers, and if any of them is a marqués--as is very possible--he has
long ago tactfully pretended to forget it.
The casino at Barranca in itself throws some light on Mexican character.
For a small town it is an elaborate structure--built about an impressive
patio, with two large ballrooms and a supper room upstairs and smaller
rooms below for cards and billiard tables. In England or in the United
States these ground-floor apartments would be adequately furnished,
supplied with periodicals and newspapers, regarded as a man’s club and
used as such. But in Mexico, a club, as we understand such an
institution, seems, outside of the capital, to make little appeal. The
satisfaction that Brown and Robinson extract from reading their evening
paper and sipping their whisky-and-soda under a roof whose shelter may
not be sought by Smith and Jones, is a satisfaction the Mexican in
general has yet to discover. The reading room in the casino of Barranca
contains nothing to read, the billiard tables are rarely played upon,
and the card room is not often occupied except on the night of a dance,
when a few middle-aged men whose wives and daughters are upstairs in the
ballroom endeavor to keep themselves awake over a mild game of poker.
The truth is that in Mexico the real clubs are the plaza and the most
centrally situated café. It is there that one goes to read the paper, to
smoke a cigar, to have one’s boots polished, to sit awhile on a bench
and talk to friends--to take a drink or have a game of cards or
billiards. It is there and not in the cold, dreary rooms of the casino,
that the gentlemen of Barranca may usually be found when, for the
moment, they haven’t anything in particular to do. The plaza and the
café are for every day; the casino is for occasions.
The greatest occasions are the nine posadas, all of which are exactly
alike with the exception of the last, when a piñata (the grab-bag of
one’s childhood days) is suspended from the ceiling and finally induced
to disgorge its treasures by a blindfolded young lady, who succeeds in
demolishing it with a cane. On arriving, one is graciously received by
an appallingly powdered reception committee, and when all the guests
have assembled, partners are chosen, a procession is formed, everyone is
given a lighted candle, the incandescent lamps are extinguished and,
singing verse after verse that tells of the wanderings of Joseph and
Mary, the party marches around and around the upper floor of the patio.
When the night is clear and there is a moon, as happened to be the case
at the last posada I went to, the performance, as Madame Calderon says,
is “exceedingly pretty.” Finally the procession stops in front of a
closed door and sings, on the part of the Holy Family, a request for
admittance. In an interesting change of key, a chorus of voices behind
the door refuses to unlock. Mary and Joseph reply (always in song) that
the night is cold and dark--the wind blows hard. Again they ask for
shelter, and again they are refused. At this, Mary in a last verse
reveals the fact that she is the Queen of Heaven--whereupon the door is
instantly opened and the procession enters and disbands; not, however,
before everyone has kissed a little image of the Infant Jesus reposing
on a bed of leaves and flowers. After this ceremony--which no one seems
to take at all seriously--the orchestra strikes up a two-step and the
dance begins. Precisely this happens every evening--Sunday is an
exception--for nine nights before Christmas, all over Mexico.
“Are there any girls you would like to meet?” inquired a Mexican friend
of mine one evening, after Joseph and Mary had been admitted and the
first dance was just beginning.
“Why, yes--introduce me to the tall girl in blue,” I answered,
indicating an aristocratic young person whose gown had rue de la Paix
written all over it and who, in the matter of powder, combined Mexican
quantity with Parisian art.
“Oh--she’s the governor’s daughter,” my friend hesitated.
“Well, I care not who makes the daughters of a country, if I can make
their acquaintance,” I attempted to say in Spanish. It ended with my
dancing several times with her, and I was much interested to note what
an isolated and rather somber evening she spent. She was agreeable and
beautifully dressed--but she was the governor’s daughter, and the local
youths for that reason were afraid of her and admired her at a distance.
At an early hour she went home with her brother. He was the only person
present in evening dress, and when he returned after escorting his
sister home, he wore a frock coat. I have never been able to decide
whether he made the change because he felt uncomfortable himself or
because he wished to put the rest of us at our ease.
X
Once, in the United States I had to wait five hours for a train in a
large prohibition town--a town that for many years has been a bright
jewel in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s crown of glory. As I
was ignorant of this fact at the time, I asked one of the
intellectual-looking waitresses at the hotel where I was eating my
luncheon to bring me a bottle of beer. From the manner in which she
snubbed me, I supposed the fair, pure city not only did not tolerate
beer, but did not tolerate even the mention of beer. After luncheon,
while I was sitting on the hotel piazza, I noticed that a great many men
darted into an alley just opposite, passed through a doorway and never
returned. As the hour grew later their numbers increased until the door
was held open by an almost continuous stream. At times the room beyond
the door apparently became so crowded that the men in the alley would
form a long queue and patiently await their turn to enter. Thinking it
might be a show of some sort, I made inquiries of a policeman, who,
much amused at my innocence, replied: “Didn’t you ever see a man take a
drink before?” Hundreds of men went in at the door during the afternoon
and emerged, it seemed, from a smug-looking grocery store on another
street. And everybody was satisfied: the good ladies of the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union, who apparently can always be appeased by a
bit of legislation; the inhabitants of the town, who drank as deep and
as often as they pleased. I was young at the time, and although I have
since discovered with much amusement and some gratification that the law
which prevents a man from obtaining a drink, when he really wants one,
has yet to be devised, the incident made a lasting impression on me. I
often recall my afternoon in the State of Maine, the alley, the little
door, the stream of men of every station in life.
In Mexico I have recalled it time and again, as I gradually learned
something about the theoretical and the actual relations between the
state and the Church. For there is, on the one hand, precisely the same
stern attitude of the state toward religion (which in Mexico really
means Roman Catholicism), and on the other the same official wink. In
1859 the great Benito Juarez proclaimed his highly desirable Reform
Laws, and in so doing simply wiped from the slate the various
complications that had kept the clerical party and the liberal party,
from one end of the country to the other, in a state of bloody war for
fifty years. At one time every public institution in Mexico was owned
and managed by the Church. Every hospital, every school, every asylum
was church property. Even some of the theaters were of religious origin.
So great a portion of the country’s wealth was in the hands of the
priests that trade of all kinds was seriously hindered. To some extent
this state of affairs was alleviated even before the sweeping
proclamation of Juarez in 1859, but after it the claws of the Church in
Mexico seemed to be effectually extracted for all time. All the
remaining monastic orders were disestablished by a stroke of the pen,
and church property became national property. The cathedrals and
churches are now owned by the state and lent, so to speak, to the Church
for religious purposes. You can’t, according to the law, become a monk
or a nun in Mexico, even if you wish to; church bells may not ring for
more than one minute (I think it is one minute) at a time, and priests
may not either wear, on the streets, a distinctively clerical costume
or, in a religious capacity, accompany a funeral to the cemetery. (I
confess that, although I believe enthusiastically in every measure,
however brutal, that effectively restrains the Lord’s ambassadors from
meddling in secular affairs, I have never been able to see the point of
prohibiting a religious ceremony at a grave.) Once upon a time an
English bishop who disembarked at Vera Cruz in the humorous costume to
which his position in England entitled him, was, with a considerable
flourish of trumpets, promptly arrested and compelled to change his
clothes. The laws are there; they are extremely explicit, and now and
then, as in the case of the English bishop, they are, for the
pacification of the rabidly anticlerical, noisily enforced, but----
The President, in a word, is a person of great good sense, and I have
gathered from the ultraclerical, profoundly monarchistic remarks of my
friend Father O’Neil, who of course detests him, that in matters
ecclesiastical he is inclined to let the letter of the law take care of
itself. Father O’Neil doesn’t know that I have derived any such
impression from our long and interesting talks together, and I have
never told him.