A Visit to Don Otavio (23 page)

The reign was still capable of gestures. To assure the succession and perpetuate the dynasty, Maximilian and Carlota, childless, adopted a small Mexican boy and had him proclaimed heir presumptive. With their strange wrong flair, they chose a grandson of that other phantom, the Emperor Augustín Iturbide. The child was invested as Crown Prince of Mexico, and painted in full regalia sitting on his new parent's lap. He looks a charming, staring, serious little boy. His mother was an American and a row was kicked up on her behalf in the US press; his aunts insisted on being created Imperial Princesses, the family claimed pensions and made all kinds of embarrassing fusses, and in the end asked to annul the adoption. The boy was sent to Europe and grew up to the expected vicissitudes.

For two years things had been sliding, then suddenly everything looked quite bad. The Juaristas were taking towns, half the provinces were risen; the families of clerico-conservatives were sailing for Europe. No fresh troops arrived from France. Answers to frantic appeals for help came late and vague. The Empress became alarmed: did they not
know?
She decided to go herself and impress upon the courts of Europe the intensity of her sense of peril. Another Te Deum was sung at Mexico Cathedral, an escort was scraped together and the Empress travelled to Vera Cruz and embarked for France, carrying with her through the slow sea days the urgent vision of the country left behind. She landed at the end of the summer of 1866, and went on at once to Paris. A suite was taken
for her at the Grand Hotel. September was flowering in the Tuileries Gardens, waters played, tall hats and hooped muslins floated below the chestnuts, the rue de Rivoli was a-click from noon till twilight with smart turn-outs. Into the elegancies of that summer world of the late sixties, the Empress of Mexico arrived like a person who has run out of a burning house to fetch a bucket of water. The Empress Eugenie called, held out a cheek to be kissed. You must save my country, cried Carlota. Napoleon was not well, could not be seen, not this week certainly; meanwhile there was Offenbach at the opera. Carlota insisted, was fobbed off with an official audience, called again at Saint-Cloud, opened doors and walked into the Emperor's
cabinet de travail.
They had an appalling scene. Later Napoleon cooled down; Eugenie went again to the Grand; but meanwhile while the worst was out – it was no longer a question of sending help, Napoleon planned to recall the present troops from Mexico. Carlota whipped on to Italy; insisted on an official celebration of the Sixteenth of September, Mexican Independence Day; presided at the banquet; hurried on to Rome.

Maximilian was waiting. For developments, for help. For news. In September, he heard that no more help would come; in October, that Carlota had suddenly and dramatically gone insane in the Vatican during an audience with Pius IX. This ghastly and improbable news paralysed him. It could have been the moment for departure. He thought of hurrying to Carlota, was advised against it; hesitated, set out, turned back, stayed. He waited for details; for a change, a turn, for orders.
THERE WERE NO MORE ORDERS
. At times he must have been assailed, even as the free traveller is assailed, by fear; by the sense of the implacable, the alien remoteness of that country. In January the French began evacuating garrison towns; on February 5th the French army marched out of Mexico City on their way to embarkation. Maximilian watched them crossing the Plaza Mayor from behind a palace window. A week later he set out for Querétaro.

The Austrian Government had a memorial chapel set up on the site where Maximilian and his two aides were shot. It is a drab little brownstone
building, more like a guard-house, standing on top of a bare, dun hill among rubble and sparse agaves. It was built in 1901 – some thirty years after the event – and now belongs to the Mexican nation, and is administered by the
Instituto Nacionál de Antropologia e Historia,
which provides a custodian, but not his shelter, who on the approach of visitors rises from under a stone to sell for the price of threepence a ticket of admission and a picture postcard of the graceless memorial. The same institution runs the collection of Maximilian miscellany, called the Political Museum, exhibited in a room at the Federal Palace of Querétaro. We wandered about the array of photographs, medals, captured banners; peered at scraps of handwriting under glass. The inkstand used by the court martial … The stools Generals Mejija and Miramón, the two aides that died, sat on during the trial … Somebody's top boots … Swords …

The custodian was following us around. ‘Accommodate yourselves. Your Excellencies are missing the coffin.

‘Please to approach again. It is the coffin of Don Masimiliano. Do not think that because it is empty, it is not the true coffin.
La Mamacita
sent another when Don Masimiliano was taken across the sea, but this is the true coffin of Don Masimiliano. General Juarez came to look at Don Masimiliano in this coffin.

‘Your Excellencies have not noted the bloodstain. Please to look inside. Is it not shaped like a hand? Your Excellencies have not noted well. Favour to use this glass. To make it larger.'

A braided coat … The facsimile of the death sentence … A daguerreotype of the Princess Salm-Salm on horse-back …

‘And he
could
have got away,' said E. ‘It was usual. When the Princess Salm-Salm came back from San Luís Potosí she was so frantic that she managed to persuade him. She, and the Belgian and Austrian Ministers, arranged it all. They bribed everybody. It cost a fortune. A Juarista general would have had to flee with them. When all was ready, they put a cloak around him, and then they realised that they would have to do something about his fair beard. No one else had a beard like that. That must have brought it home to him: he refused to move. Perhaps, it seemed all so
shabby. They argued with him. Meanwhile, the guard had changed. The new men were not bribed. It was too late.'

‘And this is the syringe Don Masimiliano was embalmed with. Please to look again: it is the embalming syringe of Don Masimiliano.

‘Do Your Excellencies understand? The
embalming syringe
. The syringe for embalming Don Masimiliano after he was dead.

‘Please, Excellency, does the other Excellency not understand? It is of much interest. It is the embalming syringe. Favour to explain.'

T
HE DOMINANT of our second stay in Mexico City is irritation. Need there be all that noise? Must the trams have horns? Why have a town that size at such an altitude at all. Surely those long American motor cars can only be a nuisance in these packed streets; surely it is not rational to carry water in small earthenware vessels on the backs of women and single animals into a city of one and a half million inhabitants? There is no cohesion; no one has consulted anyone, nothing connects: the government and the governed, the goods and the consumers, the law and the practice …

And the baize doors do not fit tight, one is nowhere without the kitchen smells – corruption, poverty, decay, slick deals, branching interests and a sheltered foreign colony.

Every town has its addicts, inveterate cockneys who away from their native pavements expire with ennui on beach and land like chimpanzees in a northern zoo. Only here there are no natives. Everybody has just arrived. Very poor people who have lost their bearings drift in thinking of city ease; find no work (there are no industries), have no return, stay, and subsist doing odd jobs, fetching and carrying, lugging in the markets, touting, stealing – turning beggars, bandits and journeymen, spending their lives and sleep in the streets. The literate come more purposefully in the wake of the local
politicos
and foreign business concerns, ready for fat pickings, pickings and the pickings of pickings. The smallest bribe is split
into seventeen unequal parts; the system is rigid and worked out down to the boy who held the blotter like a pensions list.

We had a busy ten days. We had to go to the bank (the Post Office people suppress letters containing cheques in the obstinate belief that there must be a way, which one day they'll find out, for them to cash those instruments themselves, and nothing will persuade them to give them up). We were after some other vanished post; we wanted to buy some books; E had to go to the library. None of this can be accomplished without a deal of paperwork, and paperwork is not their forte. The letters B and V, for instance, are pronounced so as to be indistinguishable in sound and, to tell them apart in spelling, people call them
B Burro
and
V Vaca
respectively. So I was always careful to say at the beginning of an interview that my name was B for Donkey, yet this never prevented anyone from looking up V for Cow as well. One Sunday morning, I spent half-heartedly snooping about the Thieves' Market. We also had to begin thinking about papers, our permits were running out and as there was no provision for extending them, one was expected to travel to the border where one would be given a new permit in the time it took to write it out at the cost of five pesos and a two-thousand-mile journey. Don Otavio's brother Luís said he would arrange it for us. We had
comida
at Don Luís house. He lived in Colonia Roma, a smart residential suburb. Outside the entrance hall sat two turkeys whom Don Luís had brought from San Pedro and was having fatted for All Saints'. We had lunch with four girls between eleven and fifteen, all dressed alike, a governess and a rather miserable younger boy; three smaller children were led in for dessert.
Doña Asunçión was still recovering from her last confinement. Don Luís told us that Don Otavio was very well and had just engaged an hotel manager, an English gentleman recommended to him by friends of ours.

‘How very odd,' said E. Then she told Don Luís how old Henry Ford used to run his factories.

Don Luís also took us for a drive on Chapultepec Heights at what he said used to be the fashionable hour. At our request we visited the gardens, the Palace and the imperial apartments. We saw the Empress Carlota's, most luxurious, bathroom which had no window or opening other than a door leading out on to the Palace grounds.

‘What happened when the Empress had a bath?' we said.

‘A soldier of the Indian Guard would come and stand inside the open door,' said Don Luís. ‘His back turned of course.'

We went to see the Cs at Coyacán with traveller's tales; and we had tea with Mrs Rawlston's daughter, Diana Waldheim, a handsome woman with some of the charm and none of the rudeness of her mother, who spoke a concoction of Virginian English, Mexican Spanish and Bavarian German, and that concoction only; and we met Mrs Rawlston's German son-in-law who indeed for Mrs Rawlston's sins looked as much, and more, like a man-sized dachshund as it is possible for a human being to look. Mrs Waldheim's children had remained in the schoolroom.

‘So you know my mother-in-law?' said Mr Waldheim, looking at us as though we were the volunteers of Balaclava. ‘Will you have some brandy?'

‘But I always say to Diana, it is not right for your mother to live in that big house all alone. The old lady ought to have electric light. She does not like me, but I will have it installed for her this year, as a Christmas surprise.'

‘Karl is very kind to my mother,' said Mrs Waldheim; ‘Mother is a little difficult sometimes.'

‘Then we will all have a happy Christmas on Lake Chapala,' said her husband.

‘I am sure we shall, my dear,' said his wife; and we began to admire Diana Waldheim.

Then we started for the West Coast, broke the journey, and spent ten magical days near Cuernavaca. For the first time since we had left San Pedro we were in the country again, and the country at Cuernavaca is beautiful. The weather in this sheltered region is mild and luminous, and there is that miracle in Mexico, fountains in the sand: water. Springs by the road, brooks on the hillside, live water everywhere – one hears the sound at night, smells it in the fields. We were staying with a German Social-Democrat and his family, refugees. On their lawn there was a small green-tiled pool, a natural thing to have at Cuernavaca, fed by some mountain source. Here I bathed every morning. Red cigar-flowers were blooming by the edge, the sky was flawless and, swimming, one could see the snows of two volcanoes. Our friends' parents, two very old people, would come out of the house with wicker chairs and the newspaper. They had just been got out of Germany, had spent years in camps. They were very generous.
‘Guten Morgen, guten Morgen,'
they cried.
‘Schoenes Bad? Wuenschen viel Vergnuegen.'

One afternoon I rattled through the valley on an empty bus. We climbed into the uplands, stopped at a village outside a sixteenth-century Dominican monastery and church, half-gutted, empty, but open to the warmth and birds. Perhaps never a great piece of architecture, but here, in the light air, above that plain, overgrown with flowers, it seemed a very moving place indeed. An Indio took me through a refectory with flaking frescoes, a chapel full of nests, into cells with a view the world might well been lost for, up to the roof where we walked on mossy stone among bell towers and hand-turned cupolas, above the slanting rays and the women hacking away in the fields. Then I returned, content, on a wooden bench, the sun in my eyes, the cool of the evening descending.

I had been rather curious about Acapulco, that Saint Moritz of the tropics where Americans fast and rich are supposed to go for big game fishing. I could not see anything being run on quite those lines here. Acapulco was once a port; and when Magellan discovered the Philippines, it became linked with the China trade, and the Viceroys were able to get their silks and porcelain directly from the East. The climate was always felt to be a
trial, and Philip III had Negroes imported to do the pearl-diving and thrash the sugar cane as the Indios turned out to be too frail. Acapulco is ruined now, quite monstrous, many said. But others – ah, it is still very lovely; and if one wants to see that coast at all, there is nowhere else in the nine hundred miles between there and Mazatlàn where one could lay one's head. Two things I was not prepared for: that the impact of the – very great – natural beauty of the South-Sea setting would be weakened by photography, impoverished by previous reels and albums of other lagoons and bays (the very opposite would have happened had one seen Tuscany or the Seine valley for the first time after the Impressionists and the Florentines); and that the man-made part of the place was a gipsy slum squeezed between the jungle and the ocean. Oh, the hotels were there, two unequal clumps of them on either side of the unpaved town. Above the mosquito belt, on a breezy cliff, stand the luxury hotels, so called because they are built of stone and provide the conveniences appropriate to the climate – air-cooling, shower-baths, electric fans – as well as such advertised attractions as nocturnal tennis courts, a sea lift and a subterranean bar. The family establishments, executed in match-board, straggle in a line along the beach. The season is very short –
enrichissez-vous
– December to mid-January really, though the hardier native petty-rich keep on coming until Holy Week, and the rest of the year the town bakes in its own mud. Indeed, it does little else in mid-season: the cliff hotels with their hairdressers and gift-shops are self-contained and their guests lead the life of liners, while the families by the water-front rarely heave themselves beyond beach and dining-room. Imagine a major resort, imagine Cannes, consisting solely of the Carlton, the Majestic and the Martinez, some acres of churned mud and fly-blown stands, and a strip of boarding houses.

We were rather early in the year for comfort, though the prices were already high, and stayed at Los Pinguinos, a place – front on the beach, back open to leaf-hut and camp fire – managed by a discouraged, young, lean and single German of a type that might have gone in with more success for a civil service career in the Silesian forestry, who kept mum about his possible political antecedents and appeared to have been
unable to maintain in these parts the reputed energy of his compatriots. He was always lying down. He did have a police dog, Flora, but she seemed to be affected by the heat as much as was her master. Our fellow guests were a Mexican family and four jolly middle-aged Saxonians from Saxony, who sat in the dining-room in their underwear, drinking whisky and eating plum-cake through the siesta hours. They were in business in Mexico City and had not been out of the country these twenty years and thus had no political past to hide, which must have been a thorn to them for if anybody ever had occasion to use Dorothy Parker's hallucinatory sentence from the book of etiquette, ‘We regret that we have come too late to accompany you upon your harp,' it was they.

The Mexican mother upset E by wearing the kind of old-fashioned stays that brought her to the verge of public apoplexy at the end of every meal. ‘Ought I not tell the poor lady to unlace herself?' she said. ‘How can I put it?'

I told her that my grandmother always boasted of having worn stays throughout the hot weather in India.

‘Very bad for her,' said E, un-detracted. She never told the Mexican lady, and we had the same conversation every day.

We discovered what one knew but had not realised, that at daytime in the tropics, unless one has to earn a living, there is nothing for one to do, and even if one braced oneself to be about there is little that can be described as doing. One could be rowed by Mulattos looking like Chinese under an awning of mats across an even bay, bathe with a straw hat in waters of topaz and pellucid green, alas warm; sit in a sweltering grove drinking the milk of freshly opened coconuts wishing that it were water and that it were cold. One could be drawn across the town by mules, and up the cliff, sit in a transparent frigidaire above the sea, order from a list of forty-six rum cocktails, watch boys dive off a ninety-foot crag for coins, listen to Riviera voices dropping names. Three Starlit Swizzles, please …
Un quinto por caridád
… Willy, Wally …

One could bathe, from our beach, only before sunrise and at brief dusk, that exquisite ten minutes when the waves stand almost black and fifty pelicans swoop plumply by one's side teaching their young to fish.

The bulk of the day one lay on one's bed, between showers, and read. The book was heavy, the paper stuck, the light through close-drawn blinds was never right. Soon one dozed. For meals, one pulled oneself up, bathed, dressed, felt bucked by the change. There was ice but it was not comestible, so the manager kept a bottle of gin on it for us, of which we drank a tumblerful diluted with a little lime-juice before lunch and dinner, enjoying a moment, but a moment only, of refreshment. Then we ate a little dull food. Every scrap of clothes began to stick – the dining-room was always 95° – the jolly Saxonians sang, the Mexican mother puffed, the manager went about the tables moaning, quite truthfully, about the bad quality of everything, the soap, the plaster, the fish. So often before the pudding, one went upstairs again. Another shower, a book …

In this limbo we stayed rather longer than we need have stayed. Until one day we performed the necessary actions, and got away.

This time we broke the journey at Taxco, a hill-town on the high road between Mexico City and the Coast. The cool was delicious though after twenty-four hours we ceased to be aware or grateful, and here we spent three days which settled our congealing views on tourist Mexico.