good old custom of taking a bath every Saturday night whether he needs
it or not), as we ride through a Yucatecan village in which most of the
Indian inhabitants scrub from head to foot and put on clean clothes
every day.
“I wouldn’t trust one of them with a cent,” declares some one else, who
has in his office three Mexican clerks to whom he implicitly intrusts
the handling of thousands of dollars.
“I look upon them just as I look upon niggers,” says a Southerner--who
not only doesn’t, but who is gratified by the pleasant position he has
achieved for himself in local, native society. And as such comments are
made with neither malicious intent nor with the “feeling” that would
accompany them were they final deductions from a long series of painful
experiences, one marvels at the phonographic monotony with which they
are endlessly reproduced. Almost always purely verbal, there is behind
them neither thought nor emotion, and they are irritating in much the
same way that checks are irritating when carelessly made out and signed
by persons who have nothing in the bank. They are, I fancy, connected
with a sense of patriotism that has grown habitual and perfunctory, and
I mention them merely by way of illustrating half of my assertion to the
effect that one absorbs something of Mexico both unconsciously and with
deliberateness. A young Englishman of my acquaintance may well supply
the other half.
It is not generally realized that the male inhabitants of Great Britain
do not make a practice of wearing drawers, although such is the strange,
dissembled fact. Now, while the possession of underclothes is not
necessarily indicative of birth and wealth, I have always assumed,
although perhaps with a certain apathy, that the possession of wealth
and birth presupposed underclothes. This, in England at least, does not
seem to be the case, for my young friend, whose name is ancient and
whose purse is well filled, announced to me in Mexico not long ago, with
the naïveté that so often astonishes one in thoroughly sophisticated
persons of his race: “I’ve knocked about a good bit and I’ve come to the
conclusion that there’s usually something to be said for the peculiar
habits of different peoples even if you don’t know exactly what it is.
Since I’ve been in this country I’ve noticed that everybody seems to
wear drawers--even the peons. There must be some reason for
it--connected with the climate very likely--and I’ve taken to wearing
them myself. I don’t particularly care for the things,” he hastened
apologetically to add, “and I dare say they’re all rot, but I’m going to
give them a try. Why don’t you!”
It is natural and agreeable in Mexico to have one’s house in what we
call “the retail district,” for one soon learns to appreciate the
Mexican’s combined love of seclusion and publicity. A dwelling
sandwiched in between the town’s most popular drug and grocery shops is
ideally situated. The nature of its construction--the Moors imposed it
upon Spain and Spain passed it on--insures a fortresslike privacy, while
the site insures the constant movement and color, the manifold, trivial,
human and animal interests without which the life of a Mexican household
would be somewhat empty. Those odd moments consumed by us with magazines
and the book of the week, Mexicans devote to looking out of their sala
windows, with a rarely misplaced confidence in their street’s
potentialities. It never strikes me as strange that _I_ can pass so
many hours in peering at sights so foreign to my race, if not any longer
to my experience, but it is one of the pleasantly surprising traits of
the inhabitants that _their_ interest is just as fresh and perhaps more
insatiable. To me the love affair across the way--carried on as it is
with much holding of hands in the excessive broadness of Mexican
daylight, by a young woman of thirty-eight behind a barred window, and a
young man of forty-two on the narrow sidewalk outside--to me, this
public display of an emotion, ordinarily regarded as rather private, is
most exciting; but even so, I am inclined to believe that after
commenting on such a courtship every afternoon and evening for three and
a half years it would begin to pall. On Mexicans it never seems to. They
do not precisely stare at the spectacle, as a careful unawareness under
the circumstances is considered the proper line to take. But their blind
spots are not situated in the tails of their eyes. However, it does not
necessitate such absorbing matters as affairs of the heart to retain
their attention. They never weary at certain hours of the day of peering
through the bars or leaning over the balconies in contemplation of just
the street’s multifarious but always leisurely movement. It is not often
a noisy movement. The collective Mexican voice--the voice of a group or
even a crowd is musical, and the click of donkey’s hoofs on cobblestones
is a dainty, a positively prim form of commotion.
But should they wish to escape from even these sometimes distinctly
soothing sounds, there is always the patio and the tranquil rooms around
it. They are of all sizes, of all degrees of misery and splendor and of
most shapes, these universal patios, but in the meanest of them there is
an expressed yearning for color and adornment that, even when ill cared
for and squalid, has been at least expressed. It takes the form, most
fortunately, of flowers, with often a fountain in a circular basin of
blue and white tiles. A Mexican patio, in fact, is considerably more
than a courtyard. It is a flower garden surrounded by a house.
In Northern climates the most delightful hour of the day has always been
that in which one comes in from the frosty dusk, lights the lamps,
smashes a smoldering lump of coal into a bright, sudden blaze, draws the
curtain and, in an atmosphere thick with warmth and quiet, sits down to
read or write or rest. In tropical countries one often longs in vain for
this hour. Its impossibility is, I think, a chief cause of homesickness,
and it is long before one accepts with anything like the same sense--a
sense of physical and mental well-being immune from gazes and
intrusions--the Southern equivalent. The Southern equivalent is the hour
in which the sun shines brightest and fiercest, when instead of seeking
warmth one eludes it, half undressed, in dim, bare rooms, under awnings
and behind light, thin screens.
Even when a street for the time being comparatively lacks moving figures
there is for the foreigner a constant amusement in reading the signs
over the doors of shops and more especially those that decorate the
outer walls of pulque joints and cantinas. Their mere perusal, indeed,
may throw a truer, more valuable light upon certain phases of the native
humors and habits of thought than do many works less spontaneous and
more profound. “Jack O’Grady, Sample Room,” or, “Otto Baumholzer,
Saloon,” may or may not make an appeal. But even when it does it is not
an appeal to the intellect and the imagination. In Mexico the proprietor
of a saloon likes to advertise his wares, not so much with his name as
with a sentiment, an allusion--a word or a phrase that poetically
connotes. There are of course a great many serviceable designations of
no particular relevance like the patriotic “Cinco de Mayo,” the
inevitable “Estrella de Oro,” and the frequently met with and rather
meaningless “Cometa de 1843.” They show respectively only a taste for
the national, the brilliant, the surprising. The gift of fancy is not,
after all, to everyone. Even when a foul little corner drunkery,
calcimined sky-blue--with a life-sized lady reposing in a green bower,
painted on its finger-marked exterior--is entitled “El Nido de Amor,” or
when a pink hole in the wall that can be seen for a block and smelled
for two, is named “Las Flores de Abril”--even then one does not
appreciate quite to the full some of the quaint possibilities of just
the ordinary Mexican mind. But a saloon called “El Destino,” another
frankly advertising itself as “La Isla de Sacrificios,” still another
with painted above its door “El Infiernito” (the little hell), a fourth
that calls itself “Al Delirio”--there is in such names food, as one
strolls about any Mexican community, for meditation. Less grim, but as
suggestive and as apt, is “La Seductora.” “La Media Noche” and “Las Aves
de la Noche” (the night birds) always strike a sympathetic chord, while
“El Renacimiento,” “El Valor,” and “El Mensajero de los Dioses” (the
messenger of the gods) gracefully hoist the whole matter into the realm
of the ideal. The subtlest of them, and the one that never fails to
make me laugh as I pass it, is “La Idea!” I regret now that the
opportunity of entering and making the proprietor’s acquaintance has
gone. A man who would name his saloon “La Idea!” ought to be worth
knowing. The thing can be apperceived in so many ways and spoken in so
many different tones of voice, starting, as at once suggests itself,
with the intonation generally imparted to, “Why, the idea!”
One source of dissatisfaction to travelers for whom foreign travel has
always meant Europe, is that there are so few “sights” in Mexican towns.
By “sights” I mean the galleries of sculpture and painting, the palaces
and the castles, the frescoes, the architectural fragments, the tombs,
the relics, and the interminable museums crammed with a dead world’s
junk, over which the conscientious may exhaust their necks and backs.
European cities even as comparatively small as Stockholm and Copenhagen
possess museums where, guidebook in hand, people remain for whole days
examining ugly, labeled little implements fashioned in the stone age,
the bronze age, the iron age, and every city has among other treasures a
few miles of minute, Dutch masters before which to trudge, too weary to
appreciate their marvelous skill or to realize their beauty. But in
Mexican towns there are none of these things, and the traveler whose
days have not been mapped out for him and who is not in the habit of
strolling, of sitting in churches, of shamelessly idling in parks and
plazas, is likely to complain of a lack of occupation. It is difficult
for him to accept the fact that the most notable sight in Mexico is
simply Mexico.
It is difficult, too, for him to reconcile the general outward
conditions of the towns and cities with his preconceived ideas of them,
which is always annoying. Instead of giving an impression of dirt and
neglect, of the repulsive indifference to appearances, and general
“shiftlessness” we are so accustomed to in the small communities of
States like, for instance, Arkansas and Indiana, their best quarters
always, and their more modest districts very often, are perpetually
swept and sprinkled, dazzling with new calcimine and, for thoroughfares
so aged, incredibly neat and gay. About drainage and water works--the
invisible and important--there is still much to deplore, much to hope
for, although improvement is everywhere on the way. But municipal
“appearances” are rigidly maintained; maintained in some instances at
the cost, unfortunately, of qualities that share the secret of the
country’s charm. There is at the present time, for example, a rage--a
madness rather--for renovating, for “doing over” the exteriors of
churches, and in the last four years some of the most impressive
examples of Spanish colonial church architecture have been scraped,
punctured with pointed windows, supplied with gargoyles and porticoes
and then whitewashed. To remember the cathedral at Jalapa as it was, and
to see it now, a jaunty horror half clad in cheap, Gothic clothes that
don’t fit, brings a lump to one’s throat.
The order and security that everywhere appear to reign both by day and
by night are also bewildering in a country popularly supposed to be the
modern fountain-head of lawlessness and melodrama. Besides the small but
businesslike policemen with large, visible revolvers who seem to be on
every corner and who materialize in swarms at the slightest infringement
of the code, the highways are patrolled by that picturesque body of men
known as rurales, of whom there are between four and five thousand.
After the fall of Santa Anna, the organized troop of ranchmen (known as
“cuerados” from the leather clothes they wore) became bandits and gained
for themselves the name of “plateados,” it being their dashing custom
heavily to ornament their garments with silver. In the time of Comonfort
they were turned from their evil ways (no doubt on the theory of its
taking a thief to catch a thief) and transformed into rurales. Under
President Diaz they have attained a high degree of efficiency, and while
their practically limitless powers in isolated and inaccessible parts of
the country are no doubt sometimes abused, their reputation for
fearlessness, supplemented by a revolver, a carbine, and a saber, has a
most chastening influence. One realizes something of the number of
policemen at night, when they deposit their lighted lanterns in the
middle of the streets and there is until dawn a ceaseless concert of
their wailing whistles. You may become as drunk as you wish to in a
cantina and, even with the doors open, talk as loud and as long as you
are able, for cantinas were made to get drunk and talk loud in. But you
must walk quite steadily when you come out--unless your wife or daughter
is laughingly leading you home--or you will be arrested before you reel
ten yards. Even chaperoned by your wife and unmistakably homeward bound,
you will be escorted kindly, almost gently (when you show no
resistance), to the police station if the city happens to need your
services. The combination of quick temper and quicker drink is
responsible for much violence in Mexico, but one rarely sees it. One
rarely sees any form of disorder, and over vice is draped a cloak of
complete invisibility. In most places women of the town are not even
permitted to appear on the streets except at certain hours and in a
capacity sincerely unprofessional. The facility and dispatch with which
one is arrested is conducive to a constant appearance of decorum. Only
in a paternal despotism is such law and order possible. One evening I
myself was arrested for an exceedingly slight and innocent misdemeanor.
“But why do you arrest me? Why don’t you arrest everybody else? I’m not
the only one,” I protested to the policeman with a lightness I was
beginning not to feel.
“You are a foreigner and a gentleman and you ought to set an example to
the ignorant lower classes,” he replied without a smile. It was some
time before I could induce him to let me go.
The frequency of the policemen is equaled (or exceeded, one sometimes
feels) only by the frequency of the churches. And, as if there were not
already thousands more than the souls of any people could possibly need,
new ones are always being built. I was told not long ago of a wealthy
man who, on recently acquiring a vast area of land which he contemplated
turning into a sugar hacienda, began the construction of his “plant”
with a thirty-thousand-dollar church. Their number and the manner in
which they monopolize all the most conspicuous sites, as well as render
conspicuous most of the others, now and then enables even a Roman
Catholic to regard the Laws of Reform with a slightly less bilious eye.
The countryside is dotted with them--the towns and cities crowded by
them. It seems at times as if the streets were but so many convenient
lanes through which to approach them--the shops and houses merely so
many modest dependencies. Pictorially considered, they imbue the
dreariest, most impersonal of landscapes, especially just after sunset,
with a mild and lovely atmosphere of human pathos that one might journey
far without seeing again. But even in Mexico the pictorial sense is
subject to periods of suspended animation during which one’s attitude
toward the churches, or perhaps I should say the Church, is curiously
ill-defined. It is discomposing, on the one hand, to learn of a powerful
bishop whose “wife” and large family of sons and daughters are
complacently taken for granted by his entire diocese--to be warned by a
devout Catholic never under any circumstances to allow one’s American
maid servants to converse with a priest or to enter his house on any
pretext whatever--to appreciate the extreme poverty of the people and
to realize that the entire gigantic corporation is kept running chiefly
by the hard-earned mites with which they hope to save their souls. In
the church of San Miguel (not a particularly large church) at Orizaba, I
once had the curiosity to count the various devices by which the
faithful are hypnotized into leaving their money behind them, and as I
made notes of the little alms boxes in front of all the chapels, at the
doors, and scattered along the nave, many of them with a placard
explaining the use to which the funds were supposed to be put, I could
not but admire the unerring instinct with which the emotions of the race
had been gauged. The system, assisted as it is by a fantastically
dressed lay figure at every placarded box, has for the population of
Orizaba (an excessively religious town) much the same fascination that
is exercised upon me by a penny arcade. There were boxes for “The
Monthly Mass of Jesus,” “For the Marble Cross,” “For the Sick,” “For the
Sick of S. Vincent and S. Paul,” “For Mary Conceived without Sin,” “For
Our Father Jesus Carrying the Cross,” “For Saint Michael,” “For the
Blessed Souls,” “For the Blessed Virgin,” “For Our Lady of Carmen,” and
then, as if the ground had not been tolerably well covered, there were
two boxes, “For the Work of this Parish.” But these were literally less
than half the total number. In addition to the twelve whose uses were
revealed, there were _eighteen others_ whose uses were not, or thirty in
all.
On the other hand, I cannot linger in Mexican churches day after day, as
I have done, watching the Indians glide in, remove the leather bands
from their foreheads, let their chitas slip gently to the pavement, and
then, with straight backs and crossed hands, kneel in reverent ecstasy
before their favorite images, without rejoicing that a profound human
want can be so filled to overflowing. And I cannot but doubt that it
could by any other way we know be filled at all. Three men in Indian
white, who are returning from market to their homes in some distant
village, stop to kneel for fully half an hour without moving before the
chapel of St. Michael. St. Michael happens to be an almost life-sized
female doll with pink silk socks, the stiff skirts of a ballet-dancer
(actually), a pink satin bolero jacket, an imitation diamond necklace, a
blond wig with long curls, and a tin helmet. The two women who accompany
them pray before the figure of Mary Conceived without Sin--whose costume
I prefer not to invite the accusation of sacrilege by recording. The
men are straight-backed, motionless, enthralled. One of the women
suddenly extends her arms with an all-embracing gesture, and rigidly
holds them there--her hands palm upward, as if she expected to receive
the stigmata. What are they all thinking about? But what earthly
difference does it make--if there be a difference so heavenly? No doubt
they are thinking of nothing; thought is not essential to bliss. Then
they get up, and after dropping money in the little slot machines of
Michael, and Mary Conceived without Sin, they proceed on their way,
leaving me glad that for fully half an hour some one in the world has
been happy. For beyond the possibility of a doubt they have been happy,
and have deepened my conviction that the desire to undermine their faith
in Michael and in Mary Conceived without Sin is at best misguided, and
at worst, wicked. “Idolatry and superstition!” one hears groaned from
end to end of Mexico. But why not? They appear to be very comforting,
exalting things. It happens that personally I could derive no spiritual
refreshment from remaining on my knees for half an hour in front of
these dreadful dolls. But there is a statue or two in the Louvre, and
several pictures in Florence, to whom--had I been brought up to believe
them capable of performing miracles--I should find it most agreeable and
beneficial to say my prayers.
So one’s attitude toward the Church in Mexico becomes at the last
curiously ill-defined. The Church is corrupt, grasping, resentful; but
it unquestionably gives millions of people something without which they
would be far more unhappy than they are--something that no other church
could give them.
There are city parks and squares in other countries, but in none do they
play the same intimate and important part in the national domestic life
that they do in Mexico. To one accustomed to associate the “breathing
spaces” with red-nosed tramps and collarless, unemployed men dejectedly
reading wilted newspapers on shabby benches, it would be impossible to
give an idea of what the plaza means to the people of Mexico--of how it
is used by them. It strikes me always as a kind of open-air
drawing-room, not only, as are our own public squares, free to all, but,
unlike them, frequented by all. It is not easy to imagine one’s
acquaintances in the United States putting on their best clothes for the
purpose of strolling around and around the public square of even one of
the smaller cities, to the efforts of a brass band, however good; but
in Mexico one’s acquaintances take an indescribable amount of innocent
pleasure in doing just this on three evenings a week and on Sunday
afternoons as well. And with a simplicity--a democracy--that is a
strange contradiction in a people who have inherited so much
punctilio--such pride of position, they do it together with all the
servants and laborers in town. In the smaller places the men at these
concerts promenade in one direction, while the women, and the women
accompanied by men, revolve in the other; a convenient arrangement that
permits the men to apperceive the charms of the women, and the women to
apperceive the charms of the men without effort or boldness on the part
of either. And everyone is socially so at ease! There is among the rich
and well dressed not the slightest trace of that “certain condescension”
observable, I feel sure, when the duke and the duchess graciously pair
off with the housekeeper and the butler, and among the lower
classes--the maid and men servants, the stone-masons and carpenters, the
cargadores, the clerks, the small shopkeepers--there is neither the
aggressive sense of an equality that does not exist nor a suggestion of
servility. The sons of, say, the governor of the state, and their
companions, will stroll away the evening between two groups of sandaled
Indians with blankets on their shoulders--his daughters in the midst of
a phalanx of laundresses and cooks; the proximity being carried off with
an engaging naturalness, an apparent unawareness of difference on the
part of everyone that is the perfection of good manners. When such
contacts happen with us it is invariably an experiment, never a matter
of course. Our upper classes self-consciously regard themselves as doing
something rather quaint--experiencing a new sensation, while the lower
classes eye them with mixed emotions I have never been able
satisfactorily to analyze.