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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Mexico, through the eyes of Sybille Bedford, is a country of passion and paradox: arid desert and shrieking jungle, harsh sun and deep shadow, violence and sentimentality. In her frank descriptions of the horrors of travel- trapped in a broiling stationary train, or in a bus with a dead fish against her face- she gains our trust. But it is the charmed world of Don Otavio which steals our imagination. He is, she says, 'one of the kindest men I ever met.' She stays in his crumbling ancestral mansion, living a life of provincial ease and observing with glee the intense theatricality of a Mexican neighbourhood.
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A Visit to Don Otavio
SYBILLE BEDFORD
To Esther Murphy Arthur & to Allanah Harper
Contents
A Visit to Don Otavio
PART ONE
In Search of a Journey
CHAPTER ONE
New York to Nuevo Laredo
O le pauvre amoureux des pays chimériques!
THE UPPER PART of Grand Central Station is large and splendid like the Baths of Caracalla.
‘Your rooms are on Isabel la Catolica,’ said Guillermo.
‘How kind of you,’ said I.
‘Pensión Hernandez.’
‘What is it like?’
‘The manager is very unkind. He would not let me have my clothes when I was arrested. But you will have no trouble.’
‘Whatever next,’ said I.
‘One cannot tell,’ said Guillermo. His mother was a Mexican lady; his father, so Guillermo says, had been a Scotchman. Guillermo looked like an alley cat, not sleek; survival only seemed to be his forte. ‘Friends will look after you.’
‘What friends?’
‘Friends. Very sweet and useful.’ His louche fly’s eyes swept the floor. ‘Don’t mention my name at the Pensión.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Much better so,’ said Guillermo.
After some years in the United States where a seat at a successful movie has to be booked six weeks in advance and hotel reservations are a matter of patience and cunning settled at the last minute by luck, one never expected to move freely again. You couldn’t get into the Reforma at Mexico City for love or money, they told one at the American Express. One did not wish to get into the Reforma, one explained. Well, the Ritz was just as hard. At that point one gave up. Hence Guillermo, hence the Pensión Hernandez. Guillermo was lonely and serviceable and always rushed in to do the things one wanted in a way one did not want them done.
‘Shall we have a little drink?’ he said.
We were sitting in the station bar, waiting. There was a great deal of time. The bags were in the hands of porters and suddenly, after the rush of days, there was nothing more to do. We were receiving. That is people were dropping in to see us off and to buy us and each other drinks. People we had not seen for years. Arrival and Departure are the two great pivots of American social intercourse. You arrive. You present your credentials. You are instantly surrounded by some large, unfocused hopefulness. You may be famous; you may be handsome, or witty, or rich; you may even be amiable. What counts is that you are new. In Europe where human relations like clothes are supposed to last, one’s got to be wearable. In France one has to be interesting, in Italy pleasant, in England one has to fit. Here, where intercourse between man and man is without degrees, sans lendemain, where foreign visitors are consumers’ goods, it is a matter of turnover. You are taken up, taken out, shown around, introduced, given parties for, and bang, before you can say American Resident, it’s farewell parties and steamer baskets. Your cheeks are kissed, your back is slapped, your hand is pressed; you are sent bottles and presents and flowers – you are Sailing. The great empty wheel of hospitality has come full circle.
These last days have atmosphere and intensity, there is a quantitative increase of everything, more parties, more people, drinks. And for all their slapdash bonhomie these agitations are not meaningless. The warmth, the sudden intimacies, the emotion, are not false, they are ritual. To Americans, sailing is a symbol. Of travel past and potential, of their peril and their safety, of isolation and flight. They stay and are safe; they too may go and prove themselves free. The dangerous, the coveted, the despised and admired continent of Europe lies only a few days across the sea. One’s sailing drives it home. Farewells are vicarious magic: Americans still believe in l’adieu suprême des mouchoirs.
Between arrival and departure – if one is tactless enough to stay – there is a social no-man’s-land in which one is left to make one’s friends and lead one’s life. The country is large and so is the choice. One’s life and friends are rarely among the hospitable figures of the first whirling weeks. Some vanish, and, if one runs into them, are too kind to ask, ‘You still around?’ Instead they say, ‘Call me some time.’ ‘Indeed I will,’ one says, and that is that until another year. Others recede to fixtures, the unseen faces in the middle distance one meets through the winters at the same New York parties. One calls them by their Christian names, one hands each other drinks, but there is no impact.
When at last one leaves, one undergoes a social resurrection. Invitations and steamer baskets come rolling in as though one were the Sitwells and had only stayed five weeks. A partial resurrection in my case because leaving by land is not the game, and Mexico cuts little ice: the same continent, or almost.
The bar was air-cooled. Which means that first one feels cool, then one feels cold, then one begins to shiver. Then one feels warm again and rather clammy; then the air begins to taste of steel knives, one’s ears begin to hum, it becomes hard to breathe; then one breaks into a cold sweat and then it is time to leave.
We emerged into the Hall of Mosaics. It was steaming like a Chinese laundry, the heat hit us on the head like a club. Summer in the large American cities is an evil thing. It is negative, relentless and dead. It is very hot. The heat, radiated by concrete and steel, is synthetic, involuntarily man-made, another unplanned by-product of the industrial revolution. This urban heat grows nothing; it does not warm, it only torments. It hardly seems to come from the sky. It has none of the charm and strength of the sun in a hot country. It is neither part of nature nor of life, and life is not adapted to it and nature recedes. In spirit and in fact, in architecture and habits, the Eastern Seaboard of the United States remains harshly northern, a cold country scourged by heat.
Through the day a grey lid presses upon the City of New York. At sunset there is no respite. Night is an airless shaft; in the dark the temperature still rises; heat is emanating invisible from everywhere, from underfoot, from above, from the dull furnaces of saturated stone and metal. The hottest point is reached in the very kernel of the night: each separate inhabitant lies alone, for human contact is not to be endured, on a mattress enclosed in a black hole of Calcutta till dawn goes up like a soiled curtain on the unrefreshed in littered streets and rooms.
This kind of suffering is quite pointless. It does not harden the physique, it just wears it out. Yet it goes on. Clerks dream of deep cold lakes, of a camp in the Adirondacks, a fishing shack in Maine where, the myth goes, you have to sleep under a blanket. But nobody does anything about it. Nobody knows what to do about it. There are already too many sheep in the pen.
We went underground, where the trains were champing in grey, concrete tunnels. Guillermo was still with us. Though not travelling, he carried a brown canvas bag. A porter tried to take it, Guillermo resisted. The bag clinked. He peered inside.
‘I should have brought some paper,’ he said.
I peered too. Half covered by a bath-mat, there were some tooth glasses, a quantity of hangers, loose moth-balls, a metal teapot, bulbs and a roll of blotting paper.
‘Guillermo?’
‘From your apartment,’ he said. ‘Do not worry, my dear, your landlord cannot want these.’
Guillermo runs a rabbit-warren of rooms in a condemned brownstone house in the East Thirties. This must be how he furnishes them.
The river-bound Island of Manhattan is not a junction but a cul-de-sac. Leaving New York by train is a somewhat crab-wise affair. We are bound south-west, but have to tunnel out due north. At 96th, one emerges into the upper air. The St Louis Express bowls along a kind of ramp above street level like any elevated railway. Harlem. 125th Street Station, that absurd small stop under corrugated iron near the house-tops. The upper Hundreds. Low brick houses, washing in the casements, men in undershirts sweating out the long evening in rooms. Children on the pavements below hopping in and out of chalk circles in those old old games. 205th Street. A man shaving by an open window. If one were on a boat, one would now be going down the Hudson. There would be the boat noises and the river noises. Perhaps the Queen Elizabeth would be in. One would sail past wharves and docks and warehouses and read the names of liners going to Rio and to China. One would smell the ocean and one would want the World. Then one would turn the Battery and there would be the famous sky-line, just lighting up. It would be the New York of the splendid contours, not the New York of the sordid details, and one would probably be in tears.
As it was, one felt rather smug. And private. E and I had managed to get a compartment to ourselves. They are only about a dollar more than a berth in the dormitory, but hard to come by. Off at last. I got out a pint of gin, a Thermos with ice-cubes, some Angostura and from a leather case the Woolworth glasses that had long replaced the silver-bound, cut-glass mugs with which our elders travelled about a better world, and made two large pink-gins.
‘Did someone tip the boy from Bellows?’ said E.
‘I didn’t. Did you return the book to Mr Holliday?’
‘I forgot. How awful.’
‘There is nothing we can do about it now.’ What respite, what freedom! We were in someone’s anonymous and by assumption capable hands, the Great Eastern and Missouri Railroad’s. There’d be four nights of it and almost four days. Four hours upright on a seat are a bore; eight damned long, twelve frightful. A difference in degree is a difference in kind: four days on a train are an armistice with life. And there is always food. I had packed a hamper and a cardboard box. Whenever I can I bring my own provisions; it keeps one independent and agreeably employed, it is cheaper and usually much better. I had got us some tins of tunny fish, a jar of smoked roe, a hunk of salami and a hunk of provolone; some rye bread, and some black bread in Cellophane that keeps. That first night we had fresh food. A chicken, roasted that afternoon at a friend’s house, still gently warm; a few slices of that American wonder, Virginia ham; marble-sized, dark red tomatoes from the market stands on Second Avenue; watercress, a flute of bread, a square of cream cheese, a bag of cherries and a bottle of pink wine. It was called Lancer’s Sparkling Rosé, and one ought not be put off by the name. The wine is Portuguese and delicious. A shining, limpid wine, full almost, not growing thin and mean on one in the way of many rosés. It has the further charm of being bottled in an earthenware jug, so that once cooled it stays nicely chilled for hours. I drew the cork with my French Zigzag. The neatest sound on earth.
‘Have an olive,’ I said.
With a silver clasp-knife I halved the tomatoes. A thread of oil from a phial, two crushed leaves of basil. ‘Have you seen the pepper?’
I took the wooden mill from its case. It was filled with truffle-black grains of Tellichery. I snuffed them. That pepper-mill must be the last straw. The gods could not smile on it. A friend once told me about a dachshund who used to be led about the streets of Paris on a red leash. He wore a trim red coat and in the coat was a pocket and out of the pocket peeped a handkerchief with the dachshund’s initials. It proved more than canine flesh and blood could stand. He was set upon by a dog without a collar and bitten through the neck. I often felt for that dachshund.
The journey was decided at the last moment. I was not at all prepared for Mexico. I never expected to go to Mexico. I had spent some years in the United States and was about to return to England. I had a great longing to move, to hear another language, eat new food; to be in a country with a long nasty history in the past and as little present history as possible. I longed in short to travel. Surely there was scope in the Americas, the New World that had touched the imagination of Elizabethans. Canada? One did not think of Canada. The Argentine was too new and Brazil too far. Guatemala too modern, San Salvador too limited. Honduras too British. I chose Peru.
It filled the bill and had for me the most delirious associations. Saint Rose of Lima. Peruvian architecture: rich façades, glowing and crumbling, the colour of biscuits soaked in Romanée-Conti. These must have been illustrations, but to which book? Massine in his prime, dancing the Peruvian in Gaietés Parisiennes. He came on in black ringlets and white satin breeches bearing a parrot cage in one hand and in the other a carpet-bag with the word PERU embroidered on it in beads, and everybody went mad with joy. There was also a character I identified myself with for years: ‘You may not know me under this humble disguise but I am Don Alonzo d’Alcantarra, the son of Don Pedro. One day my knock shall be heard at the gates of Lima and warn the noble youth of Peru that Don Alonzo has returned to the city of his fathers!’ I had come upon this stirring masterpiece at the age of seven and for some reason, I forget whether it was grown-up intervention or missing pages, I was not able to finish it. Meanwhile Don Alonzo ‘practised absolute immobility of his facial muscles to conceal his noble purpose from the world,’ and so did I. I took this to mean not moving anything in one’s face at all, and used to sit for what seemed a long time trying not to bat an eyelid. It was very difficult and I did not succeed.
Oh yes, Peru, decidedly Peru. I set out to tour the travel agencies with energy. They showed little, but proffered what turned out to be an extremely expensive air ticket to Lima. I could not afford it. There were no boats to Chile for the next six months. Then I sported with the idea of going to Uruguay. A friend from Montevideo who loved Italy had talked and left a sense of opera and red plush, late hours and delicious food, an impression that this city bore the burden of urbanity with something of the casual grace of Rome. The friend also talked of a freighter. The freighter did not materialise. I was not tempted by Mexico then, if anything vaguely put off by the artiness of the travel literature. At the point of total discouragement, E. M. A. – joined me in my pursuit of shopping for a country. Her ardour was tempered. E’s life is history and politics; she used to appear on Radio Forums described as Traveller and Commentator. She detests travelling, or rather she has neither aptitude nor tolerance for the mechanism of actual travel in progress.
‘Perhaps I ought to see something of my native continent,’ she said; ‘although, frankly, I never felt the slightest desire to see Latin America.’
An agency, at which I had my name down, offered train reservations to Mexico City for the end of the week. We took them.
That afternoon I went down to the Public Library on 42nd Street, and returned with the diary of Madame Calderon, Fanny Inglis, the Scotchwoman who married the first Spanish Ambassador to Mexico and spent two amazed years in that country in the 1830s. Later, Madame Calderon became governess to one of the various children of Queen Isabella. She stood up to the court of Madrid for some twenty years, followed an Infanta into exile and at the return of the Bourbons to Spain, was created, like that other royal governess, Mme. de Maintenon, a marchioness. She died in the Palace at Madrid at the age of eighty-one of a cold she had caught at a dinner party. Her Mexican diary is of the same stuff. The full title is Life in Mexico, A Residence of Two Years In That Country, by Madame Calderon de la Barca. It came out in England in 1843, was prefaced by Prescott himself, became a best-seller at once, and was praised in the Edinburgh Review. I read Life inMexico until dawn and have not thought of Peru since.
In the plains of Indiana, nature certainly has it. We have been going through the wheat fields for hours; miles upon miles of fat, yellow alien corn visibly ripening under a wide-awake sky. A spread of cruel wealth. Of human life and habitation there are few signs, no farm houses, no animals by the roadside.
What part does man play in the farming of these fields? Does he work the earth or does he operate it? Is he peasant, mechanic, or businessman? Perhaps here is the scene of his last defeat: eating tinned vegetables in a frame house, setting out in a tractor to cultivate his one-crop harvest mortgaged to the banks, he has been undone by a monstrous mating of nature with the machine.
Corrective: if the fields of Canada, the Middle West, the Argentine and the Ukraine were run like so many farms in the Home Counties, we’d all starve. Oh, double-faced truth, oh, Malthus, oh, compromise – there are too many sheep in the pen.
The beggar to Talleyrand, ‘Monseigneur, il faut que je mange.’ Talleyrand to the beggar, ‘Je n’en vois pas la nécessité.’ Ah, that is Talleyrand’s word against the beggar’s. E, who is gregarious, has gone to the club-car ostensibly in search of coffee. I am lying on the lower berth, my paraphernalia littered about me, trying to forget that we shall have to change trains at St Louis later in the afternoon. Patience cards, writing board, mineral water, brandy flask, books. Terry’s Guide to Mexico; Miss Compton-Burnett’s Elders and Betters; Howard’s End; Decline and Fall;Horizon and the Partisan Review; Hugo’s Spanish; The Unquiet Grave; two detective stories, one of them an Agatha Christie and, what rarity, unread. I know that I am comfortable, at peace and myself. I know that this is a victory or an outrage. Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it, perhaps that is enough.
Still, the fields of Indiana stretch. The past is everywhere; the fragile present already the past. Paul Pennyfeather strolls through injustice like Candide; the tragedies of Ivy Compton-Burnett throw Sophoclean light on the workings of men, women and fate; Palinurus has his hand on our feeble pulse, and Mr Forster’s connecting seems the last answer. They have all touched truth.
E has come back from the club-car, very cross. It appears that this state is dry in a particularly thorough-going manner. Not only that you cannot get a drink on the train, you cannot even order what is called a set-up, soda-water and ice being suspected of one use only. E was told to wait until we have crossed the state line. It is all very confusing. Oklahoma and Kansas are bone dry, that is everybody drinks like fishes. In Vermont you are rationed to two bottles of hard liquor a month. In Pennsylvania you cannot get a drink on Sunday; in Texas you may only drink at home, in Georgia only beer and light wines, in Ohio what and as much as you like but you have to buy it at the Post Office. Arizona and Nevada are wet but it is a criminal offence to give a drink to a Red Indian. In New York you cannot publicly consume anything on a Sunday morning but may have it sent up to an hotel bedroom. And nowhere, anywhere, in the Union can you buy, coax or order a drop on Election Day.
The Mississippi – to what child, what youth, is the word not rich in exotic longings? A river world of travel and far mornings …
Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles,
Jene me sentis plus guidé par les haleurs:
Des peaux-rouges criards les avaient pris pour cibles,
Les ayant cloués nus aux poteaux de couleurs.
* * *
Les Fleuves m’ont laissé descendre où je voulais …
And now, here, through the windows of our closed carriage, inexorably apart, we see the broad, slow stream, flowing, tranquil, between willowed banks through a country of remote and heroic beauty. Untouched, the great, sad landscape floats by the train in silence; grave, darkly green, pastoral on a majestic scale, piercing the heart with melancholy, with separateness and foreboding. A way we shall never be. Will this June day not close? Oh, the heavy, drawn-out loneliness of the American evening.
An elderly man comes shuffling down the aisle. He steadies himself at our table. ‘Have a shot, sister,’ he holds up a quart of Bourbon, ‘you look as if you need it.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, ‘I do,’ and reach for the bottle with the ubiquitous, the inevitable nightly gesture of the country.
We are now on the through train to Mexico City. It is called the Sunshine Special, and is a slowish, shabby sort of train. We no longer have a compartment, only a section of a sleeping-car, which means a lower and an upper bunk in one of those faintly comic dormitories known from the films, where men and women undress and sleep, buttoned inside curtained recesses. In daytime bed, draperies and partitions are somehow doubled back and tucked away in a cumbersome, ingenious manner, and the car takes on the aspect of a tram with tables. The arrangement is as old as the American railroads. The distances made it necessary to devise an inexpensive way for every person on the train to lay his head during the many nights. It is not bad at all. The air is cool and neutral, and although there are some forty people to a car, one is anonymously semi-private the way one would be on a large bus.
We felt like hot food that night and went to the dining-car which turned out to be an apartment decorated with machine-carved Spanish Renaissance woodwork of astonishing gloom and ugliness. Dinner, which you are supposed to order like a deaf-mute, by scribbling your unattainable wishes on a pad of paper, was a nondescript travesty of food served with the quite imaginative disregard of what goes with what that seems to be the tradition of the American table d’hôte. The one starch and vegetable of the day is supposed to be eaten as an accompaniment to any of the main dishes on the menu. So if it is cauliflower and French-fried potatoes, cauliflower and French-fried potatoes will appear on your plate whether you are having the Broiled Halibut Steak, the Corned-beef Hash, the Omelet or the Lamb Chops. I have seen – not eaten – such inspired misalliances as tinned asparagus tips and spaghetti curled around a fried mackerel. This is not a traveller’s tale.
Last night somewhere in the depths of Arkansas, the machine broke down. Something went wrong with the air-cooling. It stopped, and as there is no way of letting in the outer air, the temperature in the car quietly rose to what we were later told was 110° Fahrenheit. When I woke I thought I was in the inside of a haystack, and of course delirious. Such a scene. Faces peering from behind curtains, calling for ladders and explanations; purple faces on the verge of apoplexy, livid faces gasping for air; babies squalling, men in underclothes struggling in upper bunks, angelic Negro porters helping ladies in kimonos down the aisle.
One woman went on sleeping through it all. ‘Lady, Lady,’ a porter crooned to her, ‘you’s better wake up, Lady, or you find you’self with a lily in you’ hand.’
At last they had us all settled in an ice-cold day-coach, with our clothes and belongings piled about us. We would probably catch pneumonia, for the moment we had escaped death. Meanwhile dawn was breaking, somebody suggested a drink of Coca-Cola braced with sal volatile. This was a new one on me. It certainly does you a power of good. The worst sufferers were the mothers, the formulas had curdled in their bottles and the little ones howled. No dining-car until Texarcana. I offered to heat whatever needed heating over my spirit lamp.
‘Just look at that,’ said a mother, ‘she can boil water whenever she wants to.’
One sagging executive treated another sagging executive to a disquisition on our rolling stock. E joined them.
‘Replacements …’
‘Steel …’
‘Priorities …’
‘Commitments …’
‘ERP …’
There is time for reflection in the galleys of Spain.
Dominion over his environment was supposed to be a hallmark of man. Now, that dominion is almost wholly vicarious, derived from the past ingenuity of others. In urban and industrial communities it is never direct, physical or spontaneous. Our implements are at twelve removes and we may all live to live inside so many Thermos flasks. It may be well to remember how to use a pair of sticks and a stone.
They have promised us a new sleeping-car at San Antonio.
We are late. There is a lot of shunting going on and everybody is tired. Texas since cock-crow. It’s the size of France, the British Isles, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal combined, as one was taught. Or was it France, the British Isles and Italy? It certainly seems too vast to be true. And flat. And empty. But rich, as I was told at least six separate times today. Oil, beef, grain. E tells me that after seceding from Mexico, the Lone Star Republic sent a deputation to Queen Victoria offering Texas to the Crown. Palmerston refused.
The new car has been coupled on. The conductor has allotted the sections and we are off again. It seems, however, that we are to sit up for the Customs at Laredo. Apparently we cannot be inspected by the Immigration in our bunks. We are hours late and nobody seems to know when we shall get to the border. We are passing by a straggle of frame-houses, each house has a verandah with a crumpled man sitting in a rocking chair looking as exhausted as we feel.
Spires are piercing the shallow horizon. A Cathedral? It turns out to be oil wells.
Another dinner in the dining-car, which failed to cheer. It is midnight. Still no border. Only Texas.
The US Immigration has just been. Two men in shirt-sleeves, informal, friendly.
They began by asking US citizens where they were born. Americans need no passports for coming and going by the continental borders of the States.
‘Birmingham, Alabama, Mister.’
‘Terra Haute, Indiana.’
‘Las Vegas, Nevada.’
‘Walla Walla, Washington.’
‘Little Temperance, Iowa.’
Those whose accents were too peculiar or who were what is called foreign-born, produced birth certificates or driving licences. Nobody was deliberately made uncomfortable. The officials created no atmosphere beyond that of their employment.
They have sealed the train.
After another wait, the pointless frontier dithering where everybody’s leisure is consulted except the passengers’, we crossed the International Bridge over the Rio Grande. We are now technically in Mexico. It is two in the morning, and again nothing is happening.
We’ve been ordered into the dining-car for the Mexican Passport Control. If the American authorities did not wish to see us in bed, the Mexicans cannot bear to see us seated. We form a queue. And there one stands in tedium and fatigue punctuated by waves of anxiety. Table-clothes and cutlery have been whisked away, the dining-car has taken on the aspect of a court-martial. The atmosphere is hostile. The officials are in military uniform. There are armed guards. Two over-belted and buckled officers with their caps on, sit behind a table. At last everybody’s turn comes. The officers make a point of speaking no English. Each separate, identical tourist card – the Mexican travel permit one acquires as a matter of course with one’s ticket – is stared at. Now and then a finger comes down on the figure of somebody’s birth date. But nothing frightful happens, could happen as one has been trying to tell oneself all the time; this is supposed to be a casual border, good neighbours all, with paths smoothed for the advertised-at tourist.
Back in the sleeping-car, we are told to get off the train for the Customs inspection. Yes, with all our hand luggage. Overcoats too, and sponge bags. A gang of porters appears to drag these articles down for us. There is, we find, a special exorbitant tariff for these nocturnal services. So out we step into the sub-tropical night. Once more the heat is appalling. We are kept hanging around a squalid station for two hours while Red Indian Pygmies, male and female, dig into our bags in the manner of so many terriers burrowing down a hole.
The passengers are beginning to feel the strain. Many of them are elderly or with small children and most of them believed they were travelling for pleasure. They had been coaxed into this by the literature of the travel bureaux: a smiling Mexican in a cart-wheel hat holding up a piece of pottery; a smiling brown boy in the surf at Acapulco holding up a speared fish; a smiling woman in a rebozo holding up a rebozo. At Nuevo Laredo there is not a smile to the square league. The American railroad men across the river at Laredo despise the Greasers; the Mexicans at Nuevo Laredo loathe the Gringos. The passengers, shoved about and resentful, remember what they used to say at school about people who were coloured and smaller than themselves. The Mexicans do not understand the passengers at all – great, enormous women most of them, going about on trains without hats or escorts, so rude too, what can they be doing it for? Not vows, surely, being all heretics. No one trusts anyone a millimetre.
That Customs inspection is a malevolent rigmarole. One fails to see its practical point. The peso is considered hard currency and Mexico has no money restrictions. Cigarettes, spirits, French scent, textiles, tea and coffee are all much cheaper in Mexico than in the United States, so no one would bother to bring them in contraband. Everybody has registered their visible cameras. Indeed, it is revealed that few of these hopeful spinsters have brought much besides the print dresses, the one warm tailored suit and the raincoat prescribed by Terry’s Guide, which most sensibly admonishes one to travel light, and it seems futile to suspect them of smuggling sewing-machines, harvesters and electric wash tubs. All they are bent on, is spending their dollars on a huge loot of native arts and crafts, and bringing them home in original Mexican baskets. To subject the luggage of these benefactresses to those thorough and callous indiscretions can have no other purpose than using power and inflicting discomfort on the temporarily powerless by the temporarily powerful.
British passport officials sometimes bring to bear the pressure of their better clothes and accents on the elderly refugee fumbling in her handbag for that letter of invitation from the lady at Great Marlborough. Here, the passportees are borne down upon by the underpaid, the brutish and the ignorant. One might be in the Balkans or the East. For the individual there is more danger, more degradation, more delay, but also more hope – there is always the bribe. There is also no hope at all. Among Anglo-Saxon officials the decencies are at times replaced by loyalties; here, the decencies civic or human do not exist. There is corruption as a matter of course, cynicism without thought, ill-will as a first reaction, life and pain held cheap, and the invincible ignorance of man of man.
For E and me the tussle of the night is not over. Returning to our section, we find the beds made up and two people asleep in them. It transpires that the Mexican personnel is not going to honour the change of cars made by the Americans at San Antonio. But what are we to do? where are we to be? there are still some thirty hours to go to Mexico City. Rubbed the wrong way, the conductor shrugs. We rush out on to the platform and demand to see the stationmaster. E stamps her American foot, ‘Third-rate country … Didn’t want to come in the first place … The President of the Missouri Pacific shall hear of this. Mrs R …’ Everybody looks quite blank. The train is about to leave. Not unnaturally, we are reluctant to be left at Nuevo Laredo and allow ourselves to be pushed into a third-class Mexican day-coach. We stumble forward into a rank box. The door closes behind, and in the breaking light of dawn we find ourselves among huddled figures in a kind of tropical Newgate.
CHAPTER TWO
Mesa del Norte – Mesa Central – Valle de Mexico
Regardez, après tout, c’est une pauvre terre
IT IS HIGH MORNING. We wake to a fawn-coloured desert of sun-baked clay and stone. This is indeed a clean slate, a bare new world constructed of sparse ingredients – here and there a tall cactus like a candle, adobe huts homogeneous like mole-hills, and always one man walking, alone, along a ridge with a donkey.
We are headed South and we are climbing. Slowly, slowly the train winds upwards to the plateau of the Sierra Madre. Presently there are some signs of Mexican life, a promiscuity of children, pigs and lean dogs grubbing about the huts in the dust. How do they exist? There does not seem to be a thing growing they could possibly eat.
E and I had been released early this morning. The turn-key appeared, beckoned, led us up the train and to a couple of upper berths in a sleeping-car. Ours not to reason why. He held the ladder, we climbed into our bunks and sank into sleep. Now we find ourselves among a carful of fair boys and girls in trim shorts and crisp summer dresses. It is a private car chartered by a New Orleans school for a holiday. A cavalry officer from Monterrey and two overdressed Mexican ladies have also been pushed into their privacy. These handsome, mannerly Southerners and their chaperons are taking it like angels.
The first stop is a town called Saltillo. It is the capital of one of those lonely vast territories stretching from the US frontier roughly to the Tropic of Cancer: the States of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Baja California, Sonora and Durango, which are the limbo and ante-room to Mexico. Between them, the population is rather less than that of the city of Birmingham, which means that there is just about one person to every barren square mile. It is hot, stony, dry country, almost without rivers or rain, part desert, part mountain, part mining district. Innocent of art and architecture, yet innocent also of the amenities, these states are a kind of natural poor relations to the Western American ones across the border, and a reminder that a very large portion of the earth’s surface is, if not uninhabitable, unattractive to inhabit. Some are born there, no one goes to Sahuaripa or Santa María del Oro except to drill a shaft, lay a railway or quell a rebellion.
We all get out on to a long dusty platform covered with Indios selling things to eat – men and women squatting on the ground over minute charcoal braziers stirring some dark stew in earthenware pots, boys with structures of pancakes on their heads, children dragging clusters of mangoes and bananas. There is no noise. Everything is proffered silently if at close quarters. Wherever I turn there is a brown hand holding up a single round white cheese on a leaf.
Since 1810 and Secession from Spain, Mexico has had a dozen full-blown constitutions and a larger number of Declarations of Independence and Reform. Many of the constitutions were modelled after that of the United States. In their time, some were called liberal, some radical, some centralising. All were wonders of theoretical perfection; all followed as well as initiated a great deal of bloodshed. The Constitutional Assembly would sit in a besieged mountain town while two rebel generals advanced on it from the North; another general of yet uncertain allegiance would be advancing from the Coast; there would be a Counter-President at Vera Cruz and a revolt in Mexico City. There would be a Constitutional Party and a Reform Party, an Agrarian Party and a Liberal Party, there would be Church interests and Landowners’ interests and Creole interests, and the interests of foreign capital. Some of these interests combined, others did not. There would be an elected President whose election was illegal, a constitutionally elected President who was murdered after election, and a President by pronunciamento. One would not be recognised by the American administration, another not supported by British oil interests, a third would be fought by the French. Between actual sieges and pitched battles, liberators, reformers and upholders of the Faith rushed about the countryside with armed bands, burning crops and villages and murdering everyone in sight. Meanwhile the people got more poor and more confused, and in turn more angry, fatalistic, murderous or cowed. This millennium continued for a hundred and twenty years, from Hidalgo’s revolt against Spanish rule until Calle’s suppression of the Spring Revolution of 1929. Sometimes a general would be more victorious than usual and have a chance to look round and create order; sometimes more people would be involved in the actual killing, sometimes less. BUT THERE WAS NEVER ANY PEACE. The unhappy country only enjoyed two breathing spaces: the US-Mexican War of 1848 in which it was defeated and lost half its territory, and the forty years’ despotism of the Diaz Dictatorship.
(Once more providence spared Mexico. In the war of 1914, Germany drafted a secret note proposing an alliance against the United States, offering in return the restitution of what could hardly be called the Mexican Alsace-Lorraine, the states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Utah and Nevada. In a moment of abstraction, Dr Albrecht, a member of the German Embassy, left the dispatch case with the draft in a carriage of the Third Avenue Elevated Railway of New York City. The contents were published in the N. Y. World. Mexico remained neutral.)
All through the pleasant lazy day, the slow southward climb; and, gradually, with it, the country unfolds, ingredients multiply. There are trees now, rain-washed, and fields; young corn growing in small patches on the slopes; and a line and another line of mountains, delicate on the horizon.
This is the state with the name of a saint, San Luís Potosí. Already there are glimpses, too fragmentary, of churches and ruins. We are still sealed in our air-cooling, but on the platforms between coaches one can stand and breathe the warm live air of summer. At any moment now we shall be passing, unrecorded, the Tropic of Cancer. It is here that we enter the Tierra Templada, the mild lands, and it is here that the known Mexico begins, the Mexico of the wonderful climate, the Mexico of history and archæology, the traveller’s Mexico. Here, between the Twenty-second Parallel and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, between the Pacific and the Gulf, on the Mesa, in the two Sierras, down on the hot strips of Coast and the flats of Yucatan: everything happened – the Aztecs and the Conquest, the Silver-rush and Colonial Spain, the Inquisition and the War of Independence, the Nineteenth Century of Revolutions and Hacienda Life, of the Church Rampant and the Church at Bay; General Santa Anna, always treacherous, always defeated, rattling his wooden leg for office, and Juarez tough with Robespierrean obstinacy and virtue; the shadowy reign of Maximilian and the harsh, prosperous reign of Diaz; Civil War, Banditry, Partition of the Land, President Calles and President Cardenas, the Oilrush and the March of US Time.
Here it is then, the heartland of Mexico, the oldest country in the New World, where Montezuma lived in flowered splendour among the lily-ponds and volcanoes of Tenochtitlán; where an arbitrary, finicking and inhuman set of concepts was frozen into some of the world’s most terrifying piles of stone; where Cortez walked a year into the unknown, the blank unmeasured ranges of no return, with a bravery inconceivable in an age of doubt; where the silver was discovered that built the Armada, and the Spanish Viceroys and Judges sat stiff with gold and dignities, wifeless, among the wealth and waste and procrastination of New Spain; where the law’s delay meant four years’ wait for a letter from Madrid, where the plaster images of angels wore Aztec feathers, where bishops burnt mathematical data in public places and priests started a Boston Tea Party because they might not breed silk-worms; where highwaymen shared their spoils with cabinet ministers, where a Stendhalian Indian second-lieutenant had himself crowned Emperor at the age of twenty-four, and Creole ladies went to Mass covered in diamonds leading pet leopards; where nuns lived and died for eighty years in secret cupboards, where squires were knifed in silence at high noon, and women in crinolines sat at banquet among the flies at Vera Cruz to welcome the Austrian Archduke who had come to pit the liberalism of enlightened princes against powers he neither understood nor suspected while the messengers of treason sped already along the uncertain roads; where at the Haciendas the family sat down to dinner thirty every day but the chairs had to be brought in from the bedrooms, where the peon’s yearly wage was paid in small copper coin and the haciendado lost his crop in louis d’or in a week at Monte; where the monuments to the devouring sun are indestructible, where baroque façades are writ in sandstone, and the markets are full of tourists and beads.
Everything happened, and little was changed. There was the confusion, glitter and violence of shifting power but the birth-and deathrates remained unchecked. Indians, always other Indians, move and move about the unending hills with great loads upon their backs, sit and stare in the market-place, hour into hour, then cluster into one of their sudden pilgrimages and slowly swarm over the countryside in a massed crawl in search of a new face of the Mother of God.
Someone has come in to say that we shall be in Mexico City some time tomorrow morning and not very late after all. Everybody is getting restless. I have laid out a patience on a table kindly cleared for me by the rightful occupants. Two boys are dithering by the sides of my seat. They are terribly polite.
‘Please, M’am, what kind of cards are these?’
They are very small patience cards that used to be made in Vienna before the war, and I dare say are made there again.
‘Have you ever seen such cute cards, Jeff? Aren’t they cute? Come and look at these cute cards, Fleecy-May. Miss Carter, M’am, come and look at these cards, have you ever seen such cute cards, Miss Carter, M’am?’
‘Now Braxton, you must not disturb the lady.’
‘What kind of solitaire is this, M’am?’
‘Miss Milligan.’ It is almost my favourite patience and it hardly ever comes out. It needs much concentration.
‘My Grandpa does one just like that.’
‘Oh the Jack, M’am! The Jack of Diamonds on the Black Ten.’
‘The Jack doesn’t go on the Ten, Dope, the Jack goes on the Queen. Doesn’t the Jack go on the Queen, M’am?’
‘Braxton Bragg Jones, will you leave the lady alone,’ says Miss Carter.
‘Oh, not at all,’ I say, ‘it’s perfectly all right. Please.’
It does not come out. I could still use the privilege of waiving, but Braxton Bragg and Jefferson are beginning to get bored with Miss Milligan. I am shamed into starting something quick and simple with a spectacular lay-out.
As the train moves through the evening, the country grows more and more lovely, open and enriched. There are oxen in the fields, mulberry trees make garlands on the slopes, villages and churches stand out pink and gold in an extraordinarily limpid light as though the windows of our carriage were cut in crystal.
I start a conversation – so good for one’s Spanish – with the officer from Monterrey. Our exchange of the civilities takes this form.
‘Where do you come from?’ I am asked.
‘America.’
‘This is America.’
‘From North America.’
‘This is North America.’
‘From the United States.’
‘These are the United States, Estados Unidos Mexicanos.’
‘I see. Oh dear. Then the Señora here,’ I point to E, ‘is what? Not an American? Not a North American? What is she?’
‘Yanqui. La Señora es Yanqui.’
‘But only North Americans are called Yankees … I mean only Americans from the North of the United States … I mean only North Americans from the States … North Americans from the North … I mean only Yankees from the Northern States are called Yankees.’
‘Por favor?’
In happier days it used to be one’s custom to read about a country before one went there. One made out a library list, consulted learned friends, then buckled down through the winter evenings. This time I did nothing of the sort. Yet there is a kind of jumbled residue; I find that at one time and another, here and there, I must have read a certain amount about Mexico. The kind of books that come one’s way through the years, nothing systematic or, except for Madame Calderon, recent. Prescott’s Conquest when I was quite young, and by no means all of it. Cortez’ letters. Volumes on Maximilian and Carlota, none of them really good and all of them fascinating. Travel miscellany of the French Occupation always called something like Le Siège de Puebla: Souvenir d’une Campagne ou Cinq Ans au Mexique par un Officier de Marine en Retraite, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, Attaché à l’Etat-Major du Maréchal Bazaine. Excruciating volumes where sometimes a mad, enchanting detail of farm kitchen or highway robbery pierced through the purple lull of pre-impressionist descriptions où jallissaient les cimes majestueuses et enneigées du vénérable Popocatepetl.
The writer who first made people of my generation aware of Mexico as a contemporary reality was D. H. Lawrence in his letters, Mornings in Mexico and The Plumed Serpent.Mornings inMexico had a lyrical quality, spontaneous, warmed, like a long stroll in the sun. The Plumed Serpent was full of fear and violence, and Lawrence loudly kept the reader’s nose to the grindstone: he had to loathe the crowds in the Bull Ring, he had to be awed by the native ritual. Perhaps the reality, for better or for worse, was Lawrence’s rather than Mexico’s. There were two realities actually. The Mornings were written down in the South at Oaxaca, in the Zapotec country; The Plumed Serpent in the West at Chapala, by a lake. I never liked The Plumed Serpent. It seemed portentous without good reason. Something was being constantly expostulated and one never knew quite what, though at times one was forced into accepting it at its created face-value. And Lawrence’s mysterious Indians, those repositories of power, wisdom and evil, remained after chapters and chapters of protesting very mysterious Indians indeed.
Nor were those stacks of littérature engagée particularly enlightening. One read one book and became convinced that the Mexican Indians lived outside the grip of economic cycles in a wise man’s paradise of handicrafts; one read another and was left with the impression that they were the conscious pioneers of an awakening working-class. There were villains – the Mexican Diet, so lowering; Drink; Oil; the Church; the Persecution of the Church; President Cardenas, so like Stalin and that Man in the White House. Panacea – Partition of the Land; Irrigation; Confiscation of Foreign Holdings; the Church; the Closing of the Church; President Cardenas, so like Lenin and FDR.
The thirties were the wrong time to be much stirred by the Diaz controversy: Good Don Porfirio or the Despot? One knew that he had been a practical man in a vulgar era, a champion of order and a business promoter in a land of sloth and anarchy, who gaoled his opponents, cooked his elections and had no truck with the liberty of the press. It did seem rather mild and remote and old-fashioned; Diaz had been dead a long time and it was all very much in another country. Now I constantly hear his name on the train.
There is an air of expectancy in our coach, a feeling of the last night on board. The boys and girls are singing. The mistresses try to hush them but look awfully pleased themselves. The porter, however, is already banging up the beds. Everybody protests and it does no good. Pillow fights are in the air. I escape to the dining-car for some beer. One of the mistresses – what is called a nice type of woman – has escaped too.
‘What is it really like?’ I ask her.
‘Mexico? You will see marvels,’ she said with a look of illumination.
Prompted by some excitement, I wake and decide to get up at seven which is not my habit. I struggle into some clothes inside my buttoned tent and go to the dining-car where the windows are down at last and the air is flowing in clean and sharp, fresh with morning. And there under an intense light sky lies a shining plain succulent with sugar-cane and corn among the cacti, a bright rich tropical country miraculously laved: green, green, green, the Valley of Mexico.
CHAPTER THREE
Mexico City: First Clash
A day or so must elapse before I can satisfy my curiosity by going out, while the necessary arrangements are making concerning carriages and horses, or mules, servants etc … for there is no walking, which in Mexico is considered wholly unfashionable … nor is it difficult to forsee, even from once passing through the streets, that only the more solid-built English carriages will stand the wear and tear of a Mexican life, and the comparatively flimsy coaches which roll over the well-paved streets of New York, will not endure for any length of time.
MADAME CALDERON DE LA BARCA
