when he had been holding forth on the indignities the Church was forever
suffering at the hands of the Government. For he does not hesitate to
appear on the streets in the whole paraphernalia.
“Ah, they will some day,” he hopefully replied. And it was Father O’Neil
also who told me that there were to-day between thirty and forty
convents running full blast in the City of Mexico alone. That they are
is against the law, but, after all, the channels through which they used
to work great harm have been closed, and there are a number of persons
in every community of human beings who are able to satisfy their
temperamental needs--to enjoy life--only by walling themselves up with
others similarly disposed and wearing garments of a particular shape and
fabric. Once in so often the anti-clericals explode quite in the manner
of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in the United States, declare
that these illicit survivals must go, that such things must not be, and
compel the police to make a raid. But the police, it is said, never
discover anything on these expeditions beyond some demure ladies in
ordinary dress, who do not appear to understand the sudden intrusion and
who declare the place to be a poor but honest boarding house. When the
police retire, the ladies get their veils and habits from the cellar
where they have hidden them, put them on, and proceed with the life
meditative, as before. That they are never taken unawares, Father
O’Neil assures me, is due to the piety of the Señora Carmen Rubio de
Diaz, the President’s wife.
All of which helps one to believe that the President is a statesman and
a diplomat--that he does not care if people swim, as long as they do not
go too near the water. And that to be a successful president in Mexico
is a task of considerable difficulty might be inferred from a trivial
incident which took place some years ago. In receiving new envoys from
foreign countries the President is invariably happy in the phrasing of
his short speech of welcome--which, perhaps, does not seem altogether
remarkable when one learns that he is always furnished with a copy of
the newly arrived diplomat’s extemporaneous remarks a week before they
are delivered. On one occasion a foreign minister misguidedly undertook
to improve upon his discourse between the time it had been submitted and
approved and the hour at which he was officially received. With the best
intentions he inserted several things that the President, who is
distinctly “onto his job,” would have quietly deleted had he seen them.
The particular sentence that caused trouble was one in which the
unsuspecting envoy invoked God to be prodigal of His blessings upon Don
Porfirio’s distinguished head. The anticlerical element--it can scarcely
be called a party--was immediately incensed. It has a strong prejudice
against God, and of the fact that the President had, as it were,
officially recognized Him, it endeavored to make a political issue. The
President was much annoyed by the affair, and the diplomat horrified. It
has not happened again.
Father O’Neil is an American by way (on the part of his grandparents) of
Ireland; but for many years he has been a Roman Catholic priest in
Mexico, and he is one of those baffling, rather fascinating Roman
Catholic enigmas that I have grown accustomed to meeting in lonely,
far-away places. He is forty years old; a person of education,
cultivated tastes, and great charm of manner. For years he was priest of
a fever-stricken parish on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec until at last he
got yellow fever himself and was obliged, in order to remain alive, to
seek a higher altitude. When I knew him he was filling (at a salary of
three hundred dollars a year) a quaint position in an isolated spot with
a queer little history.
In the seventeenth century some Spanish monks founded a monastery in a
very beautiful part of the great Mexican plateau. The monastery
lasted--as an institution--for just a hundred years, at the end of which
time, for reasons that do not appear in the records of the place, all
the monks, with the exception of one, set sail for Spain. Those who left
divided the money among them; the one who remained received the
buildings and the land. He, by the Pope’s dispensation, was permitted to
marry, which he straightway did and begat a large family. His
descendants have always owned the estate, and although the present
members of the family do not live there, they still observe the wishes
of the original owner by perpetually having a priest--a sort of family
chaplain--in residence. When I met Father O’Neil, he was the chaplain.
His entire duties consisted of saying eleven low masses a month (why
eleven he did not know, except that this number had been stipulated for
in the will of the late possessor) and taking care of the exquisite old
vestments and gold service that dated from the place’s founding. Very
few persons ever went to the masses, and he confided in me that when
absolutely no one was present he did not even pretend to say them. An
agreeable man, a man of ability, fond of conversation, companionship,
and good living.
“What fanatical zeal he must have,” I at first thought, “in order to
exile himself to a locality that, however beautiful, is absolutely
deficient in everything he so greatly enjoys.” There were weeks at a
stretch when he had no one to speak to but his mozo or the country folk
who occasionally dropped in for the purpose of ascending the monastery’s
sacred stairs on their knees. Although interested in books and an acute
critic of them, he had literally none.
“On three hundred a year one’s library grows slowly,” he once remarked
to me. But as I came to know him better I discovered with amazement that
he was not only not a devout man--he was one of the most essentially,
innately irreligious persons I have ever met. The religious temperament
and point of view--especially the Christian-religious point of
view--bored him indescribably, and he usually spoke to me of his
activities as a priest as if they were some sort of a tedious necessity.
I saw him every few days for a whole winter, and in his long, cool, bare
sala, adorned only with some of the monastic relics and a portrait of
the monk who had remained in Mexico and founded the family, we discussed
many things--but I never could manage to maintain a satisfactory
discussion on the subject of _him_. When, for instance he would, in the
most casual tone imaginable, exclaim: “Oh, by the way, don’t write up
any of those yarns I told you the other evening, as I got them all in
the confessional,” there were several leading questions I could have
asked. For the fact that he could be amusing with the secrets of the
confessional jarred even on me. But I never did. Once when I inquired if
something or other had not surprised him, he replied: “My dear boy, I
have belonged to three exceedingly illuminating professions: journalism,
the law, and the Church; I am _never_ surprised.” Why had he left the
first two, in either of which one could easily imagine him successful
and happy, for the third, where he was neither one nor the other? And
why was he buried alive in the interior of Mexico, endeavoring to exist
on three hundred dollars a year, when he loved the world and candidly
admitted that he enjoyed few things as much as he enjoyed spending
money? I somehow hope I shall never find out.
Late one afternoon, when he was walking part of the way home with me, he
stopped to have his hand kissed by an old Indian woman who kept a small
cantina by the roadside. Doña Rosario invited us to have a drink at her
expense, but insisted on serving it in a small inner room, rather than
in the cantina proper, where half a dozen laborers were standing at the
bar.
“I wouldn’t ask the padrecito to drink with such common persons,” she
explained.
“But I don’t mind, Doña Rosario,” the priest assured her with a laugh.
“We’re all made of the same clay.”
“So are cream pitchers and slop-jars; but they are not used for the same
purposes,” Dona Rosario prettily replied.
“Sometimes they _are_,” he murmured to me in English as he swallowed his
drink, and I’ve often wondered just what he meant.
XI
What I am about to say will be of interest only to persons who for one
reason or another are on the verge of a first trip to Mexico, as it will
have to do chiefly with bald facts about the conditions of travel in the
republic--railway trains, luggage, cabs, hotels, restaurants (there
aren’t any), baths, beds, bottled water, butter--anything indeed that
occurs to me as relevant to the matter of travel. I know beforehand that
my attempt to make a few practical, sensible remarks on the subject will
prove unsatisfactory--perhaps exasperating. After one has lived in
Mexico any length of time one completely forgets the point of view of
persons who have never been there. So if I happen to leave out the one
thing dear reader most wishes to be informed upon, I humbly hope I may
be forgiven; for if I might choose between writing about such affairs
and being broken on the wheel, I should immediately inquire the nearest
way to the wheel. Suggestions as to routes of travel, excursions, and
“sights,” I omit deliberately, as all the Mexican railways publish
attractive, illustrated folders that treat of these with much greater
lucidity than I ever hope to attain.
Conventionally speaking, traveling in Mexico is uncomfortable. By this I
don’t mean that a person in ordinary health is subjected to hardships,
but merely that trains and hotels always lack the pleasing frills to
which one is accustomed in the United States and Europe. A train is a
means of transporting yourself and your belongings from one place to
another and nothing else. Americans--and with reason--look upon their
best trains as this and considerably more. The Mexican cars follow the
American plan of a middle aisle with exits at either end, and, as in
Europe, are usually of the first, second, and third class. A first-class
car resembles in every respect what is known in the United States as “a
coach” (as distinguished from a sleeping and a parlor car)--even to its
squalor. Furthermore, as there are rarely enough of them they are almost
always crowded. I have often noticed that Mexicans, generally speaking,
either can afford to travel first class, or can’t afford to travel
second. The second-class car is therefore sometimes comparatively empty
and endurable when the other two are neither. Even after buying a
first-class ticket I have more than once found it worth while to sit in
a second-class car; but naturally this is not always true. Second-class
cars for some reason are gradually being abolished.
In many of the larger places--the City of Mexico, Guadalajara, Puebla,
Vera Cruz--you can buy tickets at the railway’s city office and then at
the station check luggage at any time. It is invariably a saving of good
temper, anxiety, and comfort to do so, for the ticket window at the
station (surrounded by a dense crowd of the unwashed) does not open
until half an hour or twenty minutes before the train leaves, and it
takes longer to check luggage in Mexico than in any country in which I
have traveled. The system, in its final results, is precisely that of
the United States; the things are weighed, one is charged for an excess
of one hundred and fifty pounds on every first-class ticket, and given
in some cases a separate cardboard check for every piece, and in others
a printed, filled-in receipt for all of them on a slip of paper. But why
so simple a process should take so much time I have not been able to
learn. Recently in Vera Cruz it required at the station of the
Interoceanico railway three quarters of an hour and the combined
intellectual and physical efforts of two clerks and three cargadores
(working hard all the time) to furnish me with checks for six trunks and
several smaller pieces. Fortunately I had gone there long before train
time and was the only passenger in the station. It is but fair to admit
that there was a slight hitch in the proceedings--five or six
minutes--when darkness overtook us before the electric light was turned
on and some one had to rush out and buy a candle in order that work
could be resumed (this in one of the great seaports of the world!), but
all the rest of the time was consumed in checking the trunks. For each
trunk they seem to write half a page of memoranda in a book, pausing now
and then to lean back and look at the ceiling as if in the throes of
composing a sonnet. All things considered, it is well in Mexico to allow
yourself at the railway station what would seem in other countries a
foolish amount of time.
In some of the towns most visited by tourists the trains are now met by
English-speaking interpreters from the various hotels, who, by taking
charge of the checks and baggage, make the arrival and departure of even
persons who are new to the country and speak no Spanish a simple and
painless matter. When this does not happen, however, you may put
yourself with perfect confidence into the hands of a licensed
cargador--a licensed cargador being a porter with a numbered brass tag
suspended about his neck on a string. Outside of the City of Mexico I
have never known a licensed cargador who was not, in at least the
practice of his profession, entirely capable and honest. He will carry
your hand bags to a cab, or in places where there are no cabs, to the
street car that invariably passes near the best hotels, and a short time
afterwards--if you have intrusted him with your checks--arrive at the
hotel with your trunks. For carrying hand bags from the train to the cab
or street, twenty-five centavos is ample. The charge for taking trunks
from the station to the hotel is usually fifty centavos apiece. As a
measure of absolute safety, although it is hardly necessary, you may
remove a cargador’s tag from his neck and keep it as a hostage until you
receive your trunks. A cargador with a license is for all reasons
preferable to one without. Being licensed by the city government, he has
a definite status which he hesitates to imperil. By retaining his tag,
or noting and remembering his number, you have an infallible means of
identifying him in case your trunks should fail to arrive. But they
always do arrive.
Except in the City of Mexico you are rarely tempted to get into a cab;
you prefer either to walk or to make use of the street cars which will
always take you anywhere worth going to. In the capital, however,
although the electric-car service is excellent, cabs seem to be a
necessity. They are of two classes and the cost of riding in them is
fixed by law, but unless you find out beforehand from some one who is
informed upon the subject exactly how much you ought to pay, the cabman
will demand several times his legal fare. On fête days and Sundays, and
between the hours of midnight and six in the morning, the fare is
double.
If your train leaves at an early hour in the morning, you cannot get
breakfast at the hotels; coffee and rolls, or pan dulce--a slightly
sweetened cross between bread and cake--is usually served somewhere in
the station. There are no dining cars; the train instead stops at decent
intervals at stations provided with clean and adequate Chinese
restaurants. Even when the train is very late there is no need of being
hungry; at almost every station women and girls walk up and down the
platform selling fruit, pulque, and tortillas covered with strange,
smeary condiments that taste much better than they look. One of these
decorated tortillas and a glass of pulque may not exactly satisfy the
appetite, but they effectually kill it. Pulque--a thin fluid resembling
water that has been poured into a receptacle in which a little milk had
been carelessly left--tastes like a kind of degenerate buttermilk, and
in the middle of a hot journey is delicious and refreshing. It is
derived from the sap of the maguey plant and is often spoken of as “the
national drink.” This somehow strikes me as a misnomer. Pulque is
certainly peculiar to Mexico and on the highlands it is drunk in
enormous quantities. But in the tierra caliente and the tierra templada
where maguey does not grow, what pulque there is has to be brought from
a distance and is neither good nor very popular. In the lowlands fiery
derivatives of the sugar cane are much more prevalent. Although I have
had irrefutable ocular evidence to the effect that pulque, when drunk in
sufficient quantities, is extremely intoxicating, it is difficult after
only a glass or two to believe so. But I have drunk it only in the
country, where it is fresh and comparatively pure. In towns it is
invariably doctored and injurious.
If you are not too warm and too tired and too cross, a Mexican railway
journey is infinitely more amusing than trips by rail elsewhere. In the
first place smoking, except in sleeping cars, is nowhere prohibited, and
smoking would tend to promote sociability even if Mexicans on trains
were not always eager to talk at any hour of the day or night. In a
crowded car the volume of conversation is at times appalling. It is not
perhaps deeply interesting, but it is always amiable, vivacious, and
incessant, and if you show the slightest desire to participate you are
never made to feel unwelcome.
The Anglo-Saxon shibboleth of travel is, I should say, neatness and
reserve. We do not keep on adding to our carefully calculated luggage
after we have once settled ourselves in a train, and we are not inclined
to forsake our book or our magazine for a casual acquaintance unless we
have some reason to believe the exchange will be profitable. Mexicans,
on the other hand, are in an engaging fashion the most slovenly and
expansive little travelers imaginable. For laden though they be with all
manner of flimsy baggage, they impulsively buy everything that is thrust
at them--if it takes up enough room and is sufficiently useless--and
talk to everyone in sight.
The train, for instance, stops at a lonely station in a vast dun-colored
plain, planted everywhere in straight, never-ending lines of maguey. At
the foot of the bare mountains in the distance, and seen through a faint
haze of dust, is the high white inclosure around the buildings of an
hacienda with the tiled dome and towers of its private church
glittering in the sunlight. Two antique, high-hung carriages with dusty
leather curtains, each drawn by a pair of mules, are at one side of the
station, and standing near by a neat mozo, with a smart straw sombrero
(a Mexican hat, more than other hats takes on something of the nature of
its owner), and a narrowly folded red sarape reposing--Heaven knows how;
I can’t carry one that way--on his left shoulder, is holding three
saddle horses. The antique carriages--they look as if they dated from
the time of Maximilian, and probably do--have brought the hacendado, his
imposing wife, two babies, three older children, a nurse for each baby,
and two dressy, hatless young ladies, from the house to the train. One
of the horses was ridden by a mozo who is to accompany the family on its
travels (he, however, goes second class), the second brought the mozo
who is to lead back the horse of the first, while the third--a finer
animal who objects to trains and whose head has been left tightly
checked for the benefit of the passengers--carried a slender young man,
presumably the son, who has come to see the others off. Mamma is not yet
middle-aged, but her figure--her waist line--is but a reminiscence; has
passed in fact into Mexican history. She wears a heavy brown woolen
skirt (the thermometer stands at about 92°), a rebozo twisted around
her arms and across her back as if she were a lady Laocoon, and a shirt
waist of white cashmere covered with large crimson polka dots; the kind
of material that makes one feel as if a very methodical person had had
the nose-bleed. Papa has on skin-tight trousers of shepherd’s plaid, a
“boiled” shirt with a turned-over collar (clean--but they wilted on the
drive), a plain black jacket that extends only a few inches below his
belt, a flowing silk necktie of the peculiarly beautiful shade of
scarlet one usually sees in the neckties of rurales, a small but
businesslike revolver in a holster at his hip, and a shaggy, gray beaver
sombrero embroidered around the brim in gold and silver flowers,
weighing about two pounds and costing at least seventy-five or a hundred
pesos. The older children--little girls--and the two dressy, hatless
young ladies are in what might be called the Franco-Mexican style of
traveling costume; thin summer dresses of bright pink and yellow and
blue and white materials made with many little tucks and frills and
ruffles, and adorned with narrow bands of coarse white lace applied in a
rather irrelevant fashion with here and there a knot of soiled white
satin ribbon. Besides a goodly number of venerable valises they have
brought with them the usual collection of cardboard hat boxes and
tenates (a kind of flexible basket without handles, made of matting).
Some of their effects are informally wrapped in bath towels of pleasing
hues. It takes much time, a whirlwind of talk and all the remaining
space in the car, to stow away everybody and everything; then as the
train moves from the station there is a shrill chorus of good-bys and a
prolonged wiggling of fingers through the windows at the son on the
platform.
As it is only two o’clock in the afternoon, they undoubtedly were
fortified by an elaborate midday meal about an hour and a half before,
but at the next station oranges are offered for sale, so papa through
the window buys a dozen oranges and everybody, maids and all--except the
youngest baby--eats one. A few stations farther on we pass through a
kind of an oasis where flowers are grown for the market. Short sections
of the trunk of a banana tree, hollowed out, stopped at both ends and
filled with gardenias, are held up to the window. Everyone exclaims, “Oh
qué bonitas!” and as they have more things now than they can take care
of, mamma buys one of them and, after a short mental struggle, the elder
of the dressy young ladies buys another.
“How fragrant they are!” you murmur as the sweet, opaque scent of the
gardenias begins to join forces with the tobacco smoke and the
lingering smell of the eleven oranges. Papa, delighted, at once picks
out one of the largest flowers and hands it to you across the aisle.
Your thanks are profuse and there is a moment of intensely interested
silence while you smell it and put it in your button-hole. Then you ask
mamma what they are called in Spanish, and after she tells
you--repeating the name emphatically four or five times--she asks you if
they grow in your country. You reply yes, but that they are
expensive--costing in midwinter sometimes as much as a dollar gold
apiece. This announcement creates a tremendous sensation on the part of
everyone, as mamma didn’t pay a fifth of that sum for all of them. One
of the dressy young ladies says she is going to count hers to see how
much they would come to in the United States in midwinter; and now the
bark of conversation having been successfully launched, you sail
pleasantly along in it until the next station, where one of the three
little girls interrupts with the exclamation that on the platform she
sees some papayas. A papaya being a bulky, heavy fruit of irregular
shape and the size of a large squash, papa naturally leans out of the
window and acquires two--buying the second one, he explains, in case he
should be disappointed in the flavor of the first. But before the
opening of the papaya you excuse yourself and go into another car, for
without a plate and a knife and a spoon, a papaya, like a mango, can be
successfully managed only while naked in a bath tub. After it is all
over, however, you return for more talk, and for days afterwards, if
your destination happens to be the same, you and papa wriggle fingers at
each other from passing cabs, and you and mamma and the two dressy young
ladies (who still haven’t hats) bow as old friends. But about hotels----