A Visit to Don Otavio (3 page)

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.

I
T 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 in
Mexico
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.