A Visit to Don Otavio (26 page)

The shipping office had found a boat. A freighter. Three thousand tons. Well, perhaps two. A very fine freighter. A Captain
and
stewards. Cabins? Yes, cabins. And shower-baths. Food? Oh yes, much food. In fact it was a French boat, Portuguese.
From
Vera Cruz. Straight to Yucatán? Well not
quite. Where to then? Such a good boat did not waste itself on Yucatán.
Where
did it go to? To Bordeaux. Bordeaux? Bordeaux-the-Other-Side-of-the-Sea.

It was a thought. The boat would leave in a month. It took five weeks, no seven. It was very inexpensive. We talked it over. Was it really necessary for me to return by way of New York? Did we really want to go to Uxmal? The great thing about this boat was that it would make no fuss about taking two small donkeys. For some time now I had been wanting to buy two Mexican baby donkeys, one grey one black, for fifteen shillings a piece. Where else in the world could one acquire two such enchanting, silk-muzzled creatures for that sum? In later life they tend to become sullen and coarse-grained, with me they would spend years of ease. I wanted to settle down, they would compel me to find a suitable rural home at once. Their influence on my choice would be good: a quiet place, some distance from a market … I worked it out. First I would leave them with a friend who had a cottage in Normandy – I might give one to her, I might take a third – Madame Guerinier, the farmwoman who had such a way with dogs could look after them. She had never seen a donkey. E, I would put on an aeroplane that would get her to her native country before she could say San Estebán Tlaquepaque …

‘And how do you propose to get those animals from Bordeaux to Normandy?’ said E.

The shipping clerks were finding their stride. Every day more details, all splendid, were coming to light about the desirable cargo-boat.

‘Are you sure it exists?’ said E. ‘Is there such a thing as a freighter from Vera Cruz to Bordeaux?’

I reminded her of a friend of ours who had actually travelled on something of that nature.

‘Ah, but Nancy commands freighters; they rise for her from the seas like Prospero’s island. And nearly drown her, too.’

Meanwhile the general, tired of his gloomy tales of shipwreck and sabotage, invented a liner to Yucatán. Weekly service, female stewardesses, a band. Cabins to be had by favours of a brother officer who was at our service at Vera Cruz.

Three days later, we received two telegrams respectively offering us cabins on a boat to Bordeaux and a boat to Progreso.

‘I suppose we ought to give them an answer some time,’ said E.

‘It says by return.’

‘Yes, yes. One knows what that means. Some time. Now don’t you have any of your interesting churches to look at this morning?’

Then came a letter from Don Otavio reminding us that it was a fortnight to Christmas and of our promise to spend that Feast and the winter at San Pedro, and suggesting, in five somewhat involved pages, that as I had often expressed the wish to drive a car in this country and a cousin of Doña Concepción’s in Mexico was too far gone in a pregnancy to travel in hers, and her husband felt that she should not travel unaccompanied by him on the trains, and their chauffeur had said that nothing would make him go on such a journey without his master, and Doña Concepción’s cousin and her husband
would
like to have the car at Guadalajara where they were going to spend some time, would we, could we, might we, not take amiss but consider this very irregular idea of travelling ourselves in this car from Mexico to Guadalajara? The car was not entirely uncomfortable and Doña Concepción’s cousin would provide of course a
mozo
and a maid.

There were two postscripts. One said,

The other,

‘Don Otavio is a very sensible man,’ said E. ‘Oh, good morning, General. How does one get out of Puebla?’

But the General was not ready for this yet. ‘Good morning, Madams,’
he said in grave rebuke. ‘I kiss your feet. How have you spent the night?’

‘Very well, thank you. And you?’

‘At
your
service,’ said the General.

O
NCE MORE we rose before sunrise. Once more we stumbled through pitch black streets behind a trotting
cargador
. Puebla is a town only from nine o’clock onwards.

‘Can you send up some tea to numbers 9 and 11 at half past four tomorrow morning?’

‘Not at that hour, Señora.’

‘Well, will you just have us called.’

‘Not at that hour.’

‘Can we get a cab?’

‘No, Señora.’

‘What does one do about one’s bags?’

‘A carrier will take them.’

‘How does one get one at that hour?’

‘One gets him now, Señora. We will fetch him. He will sleep outside the hotel, and tomorrow morning you must call him from your window.’

So first we woke ourselves, and then we woke the carrier. Puebla is in
Terra Fría
and it was bitter cold.

‘The wind from Vera Cruz,’ said E. ‘It must have got it wrong about our departure.’

At the bus place, there was no bus, but an enterprising person had
started a fire and was selling ladlefuls of boiling coffee for five centavos a dipping. Presently we had our shoes cleaned. It was a weird business as one could not see whoever it was that was rubbing away at one’s feet by the curb. Then someone else turned up with a tray of hard-boiled eggs. The beggars on so raw a night were late, though by and by they arrived disclosing their identity by tugging at one’s garments. Then the bus was there: all lit up inside like something at a fair. For some reason it was locked, and remained so for some time.

The cold was preposterous. I had no coat. My winter clothes were at San Pedro or Anthony had taken them back to the States, but it did not matter as it was the kind of knifing wind that would have got through anything. I remember feeling neither discomfort nor impatience, everything seemed quite unreal and I had a presentiment that this would be my last journey of this kind.

Later on we saw the sun leap into the sky over the Valley of Puebla with the sudden ferocious spring that goes for sunrise in this country, and translate us from a heavy-shadowed Daumier world of walls and figures to a landscape of pure lines: frail hills, a river, paper shapes of blue-and-snow volcanoes moving in the perspective of our passage with the firm light order of the progress of a Scarlatti sonata.

All that drive we were chased by four volcanoes, like so many shifting
moons, coming up as the road wound through the valley; singly, in pairs, all four, at one’s right, one’s left, receding, racing; suddenly still before one, near and large.

We stopped at 10,000 feet, in icy shade, on an eminence named Rìo Frìo. There, the daydream of Acapulco, a cold caterer’s buffet was spread for our refreshment. I scanned the expanse of aspic. ‘There wouldn’t be any soup?’ I asked the attendant.

‘No, Señora.’

‘Anything hot at all?’

‘No Señora.’

‘Is
everything
iced?’

‘Everything iced. It lends itself.’

Once more we spent a week in Mexico City – mornings walking in a broiling sun in the crumbling quarters behind the Zocolà, afternoons reading in the frigid Jesuit church that had been turned into the National Library by the Revolutions. The statues of Saint Ignacio and Saint Felipe de Jesús had been tumbled from their niches, and plaster busts of Spinoza, Cuvier and Descartes installed in their place. Book-shelves replaced altars. As the well-to-do classes do not patronise free institutions, and the others cannot read, this shrine of learning was delightfully peaceful. I nearly froze. We went to see the patent lawyer Don Luís was arranging with for our papers, both at his brand-new office and at the Ritz; we took our luncheons in a packed little restaurant full of dons, recommended by the Cs, near the ex-headquarters of the Inquisition and the present School of Jurisprudence. Again I tried to get a look of the inside of the Cathedral, again I lost heart trying to press through a devout mob. There is a passage in Madame de la Barca that reads like something one might find quoted in This England and which contains mere sober truth stated with nineteenth-century unselfconsciousness.

‘The floor is so dirty that one kneels with a feeling of horror, and an inward determination to effect as speedy a change of garments afterwards
as possible. Besides many of my Indian neighbours were engaged in an occupation which I must leave to your imagination … I was not sorry to find myself once more in the pure air after mass; and have since been told that, except on peculiar occasions, few ladies perform their devotions in the Cathedral.’

And yet walking in these parts charmed again; I was caught by the excitement of the first time, the street cries, the look of the well-worn
palaçios
. What grand modesty to have built all those elaborate façades in local
tezontle
, a stone so soft that the most rigorous classical mouldings, the most protuberant of baroque reliefs become blurred before the century is out, what desinvolture! It makes the solid preservation of the Palazzo Strozzi look so vulgar.

We went out again to the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon. After Oaxaca, these formidable temples have an almost romantic aspect. What were those Aztecs really like? At the time of the splendours of Tenochtitlán they were already a conqueror nation, ensconced in the fairest and most prosperous portion of the world they knew, with the harshness and softnesses peculiar to established empire. We know their uncompromising sculpture; we know what they ate; we know that they were fond of gardening, smoked amber mixed with their tobacco, that they were waiting – perhaps with no great impatience – for the white Messiah from across the sea. The letters and diaries of the Conquistadores (to whom ironically we owe the description of the lyrical beauty of the city they destroyed) make us sup of the horrors of the Aztec religion and stress Aztec prowess in matters of philosophy and science, the data of which they, the Spaniards, were at such pains to burn and generally obliterate. Yet Gibbon said that the native civilisations of the Americas were ‘strangely magnified’ by the Conquistadores. ‘There were universities in Mexico, but they were limited to droning over the scholastic philosophy in its dotage.’

Of Montezuma we know one rather wistful remark. Cortez, who somewhat leaned on the Aztec tradition of the White Messiah, had a theological conversation with the King in which he must have tried to
establish the common origin of their discrepant creeds. Montezuma replied mildly that they were not natives of the land but had come to it a long time ago and therefore were well prepared to believe that they had erred somewhat from the true faith during the long time they had left their native land.

We rang up Mrs Rawlston’s daughter, Mrs Waldheim that was, but learned that she and the children had already left for Lake Chapala. Mr Waldheim was on the telephone and told us that he was flying out on the 24th with a case of egg-nog and a side of wild boar.

‘She will like that, the old lady? Do you think? Yes? She can cook
das
Wildschwein
on the new electric stove I am giving her. Is it not a beautiful Christmas thought?’

I said it was.

‘My mother-in-law will appreciate it? Perhaps she will let Willi and Hansi go to the German school again? Well, we shall see you there. You must come and have some egg-nog. Merry Christmas.’

Then one fine morning at a civilised hour we set out ourselves. The car, what advertisements call one of the better makes of American automobile, was not at all uncomfortable. We had managed to eliminate the maid; about the
mozo
everybody had been adamant. He sat, a large hat strapped on to his chin, a handkerchief tied over his mouth, bolt upright in the back, impervious to human intercourse. First we tried to talk to him, then he made us nervous, later we forgot about him. The day was flawless, the road clear. It was the third month of the dry season, and the colours of the earth and fields had changed to sand and fawn and terracotta; the hills, bare of the lush Rousseau growths of August, revealed the contours of Italian paintings. Sometimes a black pig, glossy like a seal, would walk deliberately across our path. Towns appeared, spread across the plains, as Lawrence put it, as though they had been brought and unfolded from a napkin. We enjoyed ourselves.

At Toluca we stopped among the bustle of a midday market to give the
mozo
a chance to buy something.

‘¿Tamales?
Hot
tamales?
Wouldn’t you like some?

‘Quesadillas,
look. They are frying
quesadillas.

‘And there are
empanadas
just out of the oven?

‘Do you want some
enchiladas? gorditas? garbanzas? chimole?
Or do you want some
guacamole?
Do you want a nice
requeson?
Do you want some maize-cakes? fish-cakes? cheese-cakes? meat-cakes? honey-cakes? curd-cakes?’

He shook his head.

‘Oh my God,’ said E, ‘what
does
he eat?’

We had been given instructions as to the
mozo
’s maintenance. He was to sleep on or by the car but not
in
the car. He was to get his own food for which he was to be given a peso a day. A number of pesos had been pressed upon us, one to be doled out every morning or the
mozo
would spend the entire amount at once on
tequila
and bottled orangeade. An excess of these were apt to give the
mozo
a melancholy, and when he had a melancholy he was unreliable.

The
mozo
, on the other hand, had the money for our oil and petrol. It had been considered unheard of that we might pay for these ourselves, and not seemly that there should be accounts, except for the simple arithmetic of the
mozo’s
pesos, between us and the cousins of Doña Concepción. The
mozo
would spend his own money as he wished, but would never touch his master’s or a sum so far beyond his computations. Thus, we had been entrusted with the money for the
mozo
’s food, and the
mozo
with the money for our petrol.

All had a difficult time of it. The
mozo
would not eat, and we could find no petrol. Such pumps as there are, at Toluca, at San José Purúa, were closed.

‘No hay.’

‘But why?’

‘No hay.’

We were carrying a reserve. I put the thought out of my mind.

We had meant to lunch at San José, a Lourdes-and-Spa for the rheumatic, but found the place taken over by the newly-shod. A jukebox was playing tangoes from a ghastly new hostelry. So instead we ate a
picnic in a mulberry grove in the valley of Zitacuaro. As soon as we had turned our backs the
mozo
untied the handkerchief from over his mouth, produced
tortillas
and red pepper, and ate.

In the afternoon we did some serious climbing. Then we descended into a region of small lakes. It was not inhabited.

E looked up from her book. ‘You know, I think there hasn’t been a single car on this road all day. Perhaps there just is no gas.’

There came after all a village. I stopped to make some sleeveless inquiries and while I stopped the
mozo
flicked an eyelid. A woman came forward from a stand with a bottle of orangeade. Another economic gesture and the
mozo
was provided with a measure of
tequila
and a pinch of salt. Again he united his handker-chief. First he licked the salt, then he gulped the
tequila
, then slowly but in one pull he drank down the orangeade. Then he held out his peso note, keeping his palm flat until he had got the copper change.

The next place was large and the inhabitants had heard of
gasolina
. It was to be had in a near remoteness. The
mozo
made an auction-room gesture and repeated his performance. There was still some change.

‘Better not stop again,’ said E.

‘Much better.’

‘Are we all right for gas?’

‘I suppose so.’

We were. And so once more at nightfall we arrived at Morelia. It was a warm, dry December evening and my thoughts were mainly on petrol.

Some inter-politico squeeze was going on and half the motored population of the Republic was stuck at Morelia on their way to Christmas celebrations in the Central West. There was a three day old queue, two miles of Buick behind bus behind Buick stretching from the bean fields to the garage plaza. I took E and bags to the hotel, drove back, put the car at the end of the queue and, beginning to understand his uses, left the
mozo
. I returned on foot.

Morelia was of course full up to the last square cot. Families were sleeping on pallets in hotel corridors. The only people who were
comfortable were ourselves – Don Luís having booked for us in advance at a small place we had not noticed half a year ago, where we were well looked after and rather under-charged – and a troupe of actors from California who were some weeks gone with a film and had taken over a floor of the Hotel Virrey de Mendoza.