morning until late at night. Ladies stop there on their way home from
church, “dar una vuelta” (to take a turn), as they call it, and to see
and be seen; gentlemen frequently interrupt the labors of the day by
going there to meditate over a cigar; schoolboys find in it a shady,
secluded bench and use it as a study; nurse maids use it as a nursery;
children use its broad, outside walks as a playground; tired workmen use
it as a place of rest. By eleven o’clock at night the whole town will,
at various hours, have passed through it, strolled in it, played, sat,
rested, talked, or thought in it. It is the place to go when in doubt
as to what to do with oneself--the place to investigate, when in doubt
as to where to find some one. The plaza is a kind of social clearing
house--a resource--a solution. I know of nothing quite like it, and
nothing as fertile in the possibilities of innocent diversion. Except
during a downpour of rain, the plaza never disappoints.
I have grown rather tired of reading in magazines that “the City of
Mexico resembles a bit of Paris”; but I have grown much more tired of
the people who have also read it and repeat it as if they had evolved
the comparison unaided--particularly as the City of Mexico doesn’t in
the least resemble a bit of Paris. It resembles absolutely nothing in
the world except itself. To criticise it as having most of the
objectionable features and few of the attractions of a great city would
be unfair; but first telling myself that I _am_ unfair, I always think
of it in those terms. In truth it is a great and wonderful city, and it
grows more wonderful every day; also, I am inclined to believe, more
disagreeable. Unfortunately I did not see it until after I had spent six
months in Mexico--in Vera Cruz, in Jalapa, in Orizaba, in Puebla, in the
depths of the country--and when it finally burst upon me in all its
shallow brilliancy, I felt that I was no longer in Mexico, but without
the compensation of seeming to be somewhere else. I certainly did not
seem to be in Paris. The fact of going to a place for no reason other
than to see what it is like, always stands between me and a proper
appreciation of it. It does, I think, with everyone, although it is not
generally realized and admitted. A certain amount of preoccupation while
visiting a city is essential to receiving just impressions of it. The
formation of judgments should be gradual and unconscious--should
resemble the processes of digestion. I have been in the capital of the
republic half a dozen times, but I have never, so to speak, digested it;
I have merely looked without losing consciousness of the fact that I was
looking, which is conducive to seeing too much on the one hand, and on
the other, too little.
After the jungle and the smaller places, the city impressed me, on
arriving at night, as wonderfully brilliant. There were asphalted
streets, vistas of illuminated shop windows, enormous electric cars, the
inviting glow of theater entrances, a frantic darting of cabs and
automobiles, and swarms of people in a strangely un-Mexican hurry. The
noises and the lights were the noises and the lights of a metropolis.
Even daylight did not, for the first morning and afternoon, have any
appreciable effect upon the general sense of size and effulgence. But
somewhere within forty-eight hours the place, to a mere observer, began
to contract--its glitter became increasingly difficult to discern. It
was not a disappointment exactly, but neither was it “just like a bit of
Paris.” It remained extremely interesting--geographically, historically,
architecturally--but it was oddly lacking in the one quality everybody
is led to believe it has in a superlative degree. Without doubt I shall
be thought trifling to mention it at all. In fact I don’t believe I
_can_ mention it, as I don’t precisely know what it is, and the only way
in which I can hope to make myself even partly clear will sound not only
trifling but foolish. I mean--the City of Mexico lacks the indefinable
quality that makes one either desirous of putting on one’s best clothes,
or regretful that one has not better clothes to put on. To dear reader
this may mean something or it may not. For me it instantly recreates an
atmosphere, recalls certain streets at certain hours in New York, in
Paris, in London--in a few of the less down-at-the-heel, Congoesque
localities of Washington. One may or may not possess the garments in
question. One might not take the trouble to put them on if one did. But
the feeling, I am sure, is known to everyone; the feeling that in some
places there is a pleasantly exacting standard in the amenities of
appearance which one must either approximate, or remain an outsider. In
the City of Mexico one is nowhere subject to such aspirations or
misgivings, in spite of the “palatial residences,” the superb horses,
the weekly display of beauty and fashion. For the place has upon one--it
has at least upon me--the effect of something new and indeterminate and
mongrel, which for a city founded in 1522 is a decidedly curious effect
to exert.
It arises without doubt from the prosperity and growth of the place--the
manner in which it is tearing down and building up and reaching
out--gradually transforming whole streets of old Spanish and Mexican
houses into buildings that are modern and heterogeneous. In its center,
some five or six adjacent streets appear to have been almost wholly so
converted, the final proof of it being that in front of the occasional
elaborately carved old doorway or armorial-bearing façade and
castellated top, one instinctively pauses as in the presence of a
curiosity. Imbedded as they are in unusually unattractive quarters of
purely native origin, these half a dozen business streets suggest a
small city in the heart of a large town. They might, one feels, be
somewhere in Europe, although the multitude of American signs, of
American products, and American residents, by which one is on all sides
confronted, makes it impossible to decide where. There is a surprising
transformation, too, on the left of the Paseo, along the line of the
electric cars on the way to the castle of Chapultepec. (A lady in the
throes of displaying an interest in Mexico exclaimed to me the other
day: “There have been so many earthquakes in Mexico of late that I
suppose Chapultepec is _very_ active!”) The bare, flat territory is
growing an enormous crop of detached dwellings that seek to superimpose
Mexican characteristics upon an American suburban-villa foundation, with
results not always felicitous. Outwardly, at least, much of the city is
being de-Mexicanized, and whereas the traveler, to whom it has been a
gate of entrance, has eyes and adjectives only for its age, its
singularity, its picturesqueness (all of which are indisputably there),
the traveler who sees it last--for whom it is an exit--is more inclined
merely to be discomposed by its uncompleted modernity.
For, not unreasonably, he expects to find there some of the frills of
civilization; luxurious hotels, “smart” restaurants, an embarrassing
choice of cafés and theaters. Such frills as there are, however, succeed
for the most part in being only pretentious and ineffective, like those
a woman tries to make at home after taking notes in front of a
milliner’s window. The leading hotels are all bad--not in the sense of
being uncomfortable, for they are comfortable enough, but in the sense
of purporting to be something they are not. The four I have stayed in
reminded me of a placard I once saw while endeavoring to find something
edible at a railway “eating house” in one of our Western States. “Low
Aim, not Failure is a Crime,” the thing declared with an almost audible
snigger. Surrounded by the second-and third-rate magnificence of the
capital’s best hotels, one longs for the clean, native simplicity of the
provinces. The theaters--that is to say, what one hears and sees in
them--are quite as primitive and tedious as they are elsewhere. A
translated French play now and then proves a temptation, but as it is
customary in Mexican theaters for the prompter to read everybody’s part,
whether he needs assistance or not, in a voice as loud and often louder
than those of the actors, the pleasure of illusion is out of the
question. In fact, it is such a matter of course for the prompter to
yell through a whole play at the top of his lungs (often reading the
lines _after_ the actors instead of ahead of them), that when, as
happens once in a long while, his services are dispensed with, the fact
is proudly advertised! I have several times gleaned from the advance
notices of traveling companies that on such and such a night Señorita
So-and-So would take the leading part in the laughable comedy entitled
“‘Thingumbob,’ sin auxilio de apuntador!” (without the aid of the
prompter.) Nothing in connection with the theater in Mexico has seemed
to me more entertaining than this, unless, perhaps, it is that at the
Teatro Limón in Jalapa, “The management respectfully requests gentlemen
not to bring their firearms to the performances.” Whether or not this
plaintive plea is on the principle of the old “Don’t shoot the organist;
he is doing his best,” I have never been able to learn.
There are saloons in the City of Mexico, hundreds of them, but cafés of
the kind that are such oases in the evenings of France, of Germany, of
Italy, have not (with the exception of the delightful one at the base of
Chapultepec, which, however, is several miles out of town) yet been
invented. In the matter of restaurants (again excepting the distant
Chapultepec) there is no choice whatever, if one happens to be in the
mood to draw a distinction between eating and dining. People talk of the
food at the various hotels, but when speaking of Sylvain’s restaurant
they elegantly refer to the _cuisine_. Sylvain’s is a small, quiet,
dignified, almost somber place where everything, except occasionally the
service, is as wickedly good as it is anywhere in the world, and where
the cost of painting the culinary lily is somewhat less than it is in
establishments of similar excellence in New York (I know of none in the
United States outside of New York) and Europe.
But taking the city as it is (always a sane and sensible line of action)
rather than finding fault with it for not being what one assumed it was
going to be, it has its moments--moments that, as far as my experience
permits me to speak with a semblance of authority, are peculiar to
itself. On Sunday mornings three beautiful allées of the Alameda are
lined with little chairs and roofed with gayly decorated canvas, under
which the world and his wife sit, or very slowly promenade down one side
and up the other in two densely crowded, music-loving streams. It is a
variation of the plaza idea of the smaller places, the variation
consisting in the aloofness of the classes from the masses. And by the
masses in the capital is usually meant, although the distinction is a
loose one, persons who still wear native costume. A cheap, ill-fitting
suit of American cut is a passport to a slightly higher position in the
social scale--which somewhat shoddy conception was responsible a year
ago for the abolishment of the sombreros worn by cabmen. Until then,
these towers of protection had imparted to cab-stands the character and
distinction possessed by no other form of head covering. But now, no
livery having been substituted, the drivers wear dingy felt hats, and
carry battered umbrellas when obliged to sit in the sun.
The band is very large and very good--so large and good, indeed, that
later in the day, at four or five o’clock, as one joins the
ever-increasing throng of carriages, cabs, and automobiles on the Paseo,
one is amazed to discover several others even larger and better, playing
in the magnificent circular glorietas along the drive to Chapultepec. In
the park at the Paseo’s farther end is still another, and whether it
actually does play with more flexibility, feeling, and taste than the
bands I have heard in other countries, or whether the romantic beauty of
the situation--the dusky cypress grove, the steep, craggy rock,
literally dripping with flowers, from which the castle smiles down at
the crowd (it belongs to the smiling, not the frowning family of
castles) the gleam of the lake through aged trees, the happy compromise
between wildness and cultivation--weaves the spell, transmutes brass
into gold, I do not know. The Paseo was begun during the French
intervention, and although its trees and its statues of national
celebrities are alike small for its splendid breadth (the trees,
however, will grow), too much could not be said in praise of the
conception itself, and the manner in which it has been carried out. It
is one of the noblest of avenues and, with the Alameda at one end and
the gardens of Chapultepec at the other, does much in the City of Mexico
to make life worth living there.
The crowd of vehicles increases until there is a compact slow-moving
mass of them creeping past the band stand, into the cypress grove,
around the other side of the park and back again. Many of the carriages
are victorias and landaus of the latest design, the horses drawing them
are superb, the lady occupants are always elaborately dressed and
sometimes notably handsome. So it is odd that most of this wealth and
fashion and beauty seems to shy at servants in livery. There are
equipages with “two men on the box,” complete in every detail, but in
the endless jam of vehicles their number is small. That there are not
more of them seems especially remiss after one has seen the few. For in
English livery a young and good-looking Mexican servant exemplifies more
than any other human being the thing called “style.” As darkness comes
on everyone returns to town to drive in San Francisco Street until half
past eight or nine. This is a most extraordinary sight--the narrow
thoroughfare in the heart of the city so congested with carriages as to
be more or less impassable for two hours--the occupants under the
electric lights more pallid than their powder--the sidewalks packed with
spectators constantly urged by the police to “move on.” It all happens
at the same hour every Sunday, and no one seems to tire.
When I said there were but few “sights” in Mexican cities I made, in the
case of the capital, a mental reservation. Here there are formal,
official, objective points sufficient to keep the intelligent tourist
busy for a week; the cathedral, the Viga canal, the shrine of Guadalupe,
the Monte de Piedad--the National Palace, and the Castle of Chapultepec,
if one cares to measure the red tape necessary to passing within their
historic and deeply interesting portals. Even if one doesn’t, it would,
in my opinion, be a tragedy to leave without seeing, at sunset, the view
of the volcanoes from the top of the rock on which the castle is built;
especially as this can be done by following, without a card of
admission, the steep, winding road past the pretty grottolike entrance
to the President’s elevator, until it ends at the gateway of the famous
military school on the summit. One also goes, of course, to the National
Museum to inspect the small but immensely valuable collection of Aztec
remains (large compared to any other Aztec remains, but small, if one
pauses to recall the remains in general that have remained elsewhere)
and to receive the impression that the pre-Spanish inhabitants of the
country, interesting as they undoubtedly were, had by no means attained
that facility in the various arts which Prescott and other historians
claim for them. After examining their grotesque and terrifying gods, the
incoherent calendar and sacrificial stones, the pottery, the implements,
and the few bits of crude, gold jewelry, one strolls into the small room
in which are left, perhaps, the most tangible evidences of Maximilian’s
“empire,” reflecting that Prescott’s monumental effort is one of the
most entrancing works of fiction one knows. To the unarcheological,
Maximilian’s state coach, almost as overwhelmingly magnificent as the
gilded sledge in which Lillian Russell used to make her entrance in “The
Grand Duchess,” his carriage for ordinary occasions, the saddle he was
in when captured, and the colored fashion plates of his servants’
liveries, are sure to be the museum’s most interesting possessions. Not
without a pardonable touch of malice, in the guise of a grave political
lesson, is the fact that the severely simple, well-worn, eminently
republican vehicle of Benito Juarez is displayed in the same room.
The four or five vast apartments of the Academy of San Carlos (the
national picture gallery) suggests certain aspects of the Louvre, but
their variously sized canvases suggest only the melancholy reflection
that all over the world so many perfectly well-painted pictures are so
perfectly uninteresting. One cannot but except, however, a dozen or more
scattered little landscapes--absolutely faultless examples of the kind
of picture (a very beautiful kind I have grown to think) that the
grandparents of all good Bostonians felt it becoming their means and
station to acquire fifty or sixty years ago in Rome. The Mexican
Government, it no doubt will be surprising to hear, encourages painting
and music by substantial scholarships. Talented students are sent
abroad to study at government expense. One young man I happened to know
was given his opportunity on the strength of an exquisite oil sketch of
the patio of his parents’ house in the white glare of noon. He is in
Paris now, painting pictures of naked women lying on their backs in
vacant lots. Several of them, naturally, have been hung in the Salon.
But the guidebook will enumerate the sights, and the “Seeing Mexico”
electric car will take one to them. Still there is one I do not believe
the book mentions, and I am sure the car does not include. That is the
city itself between five and six o’clock on a fair morning. It several
times has been my good fortune (in disguise) to be obliged to get up at
this hour for the purpose of saying good-by to people who were leaving
on an early train, and in returning all the way on foot from the station
to the Zócalo (as the stupendous square in front of the cathedral is
called) I saw the place, I am happy to remember, in what was literally
as well as figuratively a new light. Beyond a few laborers straggling to
their work, and the men who were making the toilet of the Alameda with
large, green bushes attached to the end of sticks, the city appeared to
be blandly slumbering, and just as the face of some one we know will,
while asleep, surprise us by a rare and unsuspected expression, the
great, unfinished, unsympathetic capital smiled, wisely and a trifle
wearily, in its dreams. It is at this hour, before the mongrel
population has begun to swarm, that one should walk through the Alameda,
inhale the first freshness of the wet roses and lilies, the gardenias
and pansies and heliotrope in the flower market, and, undisturbed among
the trees in front of the majestic cathedral, listen to “the echoed sob
of history.”
THE END
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
Futhermore=> Furthermore {pg 73}
Oh que bonitas=> Oh qué bonitas {pg 179}
a desert=> a dessert {pg 185}
she as giving=> she was giving {pg 210}
exclaims her hushand=> exclaims her husband {pg 261}
innocent midemeanor=> innocent misdemeanor {pg 272}
of preoccuption while=> of preoccupation while {pg 281}