A Visit to Don Otavio (6 page)

W
E HAVE BEEN to the Pensión Hernandez.

We were walking along Isabel la Catolica, a smart street in the business quarter, when we had to do the equivalent of taking cover, we flattened ourselves against a wall to avoid being crushed by a train of mules carrying boulders; the mules were flattening themselves against us to avoid being barged into by a motor hearse that was avoiding a tram. The tram, tramlike, pursued its way; we fell backwards through a door into a patio. Above our heads, like the finger of providence, was a plate saying
Hernandez: Casa de Huéspedes.

One is sometimes less intrigued by the future than by what the past might have held. ‘Let us go in,’ I said; ‘there may be letters.’

The pensión was on the third floor. An old Indian, barefoot and very clean, conveyed without uttering a single word that he was entirely at a loss as to who we were and what we had come for. He edged us into a sombre parlour. In the exact centre of this apartment stood a large, brand-new sewing-machine. It was covered, like a concert grand, with a tapestried runner representing several phases of the life of Geneviva of Brabant in port-wine colours. On the runner was a vase with a neatly rounded bouquet made of artificial flowers and barbed wire. The remainder of the parlour was stocked like a cross between the votive chapel at Lourdes and a cupboard of Queen Victoria’s presents. Everything was spotless. We spent a long time looking at water stoops,
statues of the Virgin clothed in doll’s dresses, bronze stags and leaning towers, and absolutely nothing happened. Then we opened the door. The Indian had gone. We began to walk downstairs. Something compelled us to look up. An exquisite apparition wrapped in a foulard dressing-gown, looking as though it had been kept pinned in the glass case for rather a number of years, was leaning over the banisters.

We started. It spoke.

‘You are the friends of Guillermo’s,’ it stated in Central European English.

We edged two steps down.

A second apparition from a butterfly collection appeared behind the first. ‘I was shaving.’

‘I adore New York,’ said the first.

‘I thought it was bailiffs,’ said the second.

‘Guillermo wrote to look you up,’ said the first.

We put a foot on the landing.

‘Do you know Bubi von der Witzleben?’ said the second.

‘They should go to Taxco,’ said the first.

We had turned the landing. There was the door. We bolted.

The mules had passed. There was only an old man milking a goat into an empty tin of Campbell’s Cream of Tomato, and a taxi. We took the taxi.

Concert at the Teatro Nacionál. Virtuosi from the USA. The National Orchestra. Brief Bach. Brahms. A contemporary suite, not brief at all, thumping with fiesta motives, failing to do for Mexico what Ravel does for Spain. The public is cosmopolitan provincial, like an afternoon audience at the Casino in Nice. At midnight, more stanzas of the national anthem are played than is usual elsewhere at such occasions. Then we disperse from the stuffy foyer into a remote and silent night, bitter as a night in the desert. On the pavement hundreds of Indios are curled in sleep.

The city has many open squares in which markets are continuously held and the general buying and selling proceeds … There are barber-shops where you may have your hair washed and cut. There are other
shops where you may obtain food and drink. There are street porters such as there are in Spain to carry packages. There is a great quantity of wood, charcoal braziers made of clay, mats of all sorts, some for beds and others more finely woven for seats, still others for furnishing halls and private apartments. All kinds of vegetables may be found there, in particular onions, leeks, garlic, cresses, water-cress, borage, sorrel, artichokes, and golden thistles. There are many different sorts of fruit, including cherries and plums. They sell honey obtained from bees … All kinds of cotton threads in various colours may be bought in skeins … A great deal of chinaware is sold, including earthenware jars of all sizes for holding liquids, pitchers, pots, tiles and an infinite variety of earthenware all made of very special clay and almost all decorated and painted in some way. Maize is sold both as grain and in the form of bread … Pasties are made from game and fish pies may be seen on sale and there are large quantities of fresh and salt fish both in their natural states and cooked ready for eating. Eggs from fowls, geese, and all others may be had, and likewise omelets ready made.

The last paragraph was written in 1520. It is part of a letter by Cortez to the Emperor Charles V on the Aztec capital as he found it on his first entry as a guest of Montezuma’s. The description still serves.

When I join E, I find her at a table with a stranger and some bacardies.

‘S, S,’ she cried across the room, ‘this kind lady from Ponkah City wishes to know whether she should visit the Pyramid of the Moon?’

We end up all three eating the rather rustic luncheon – rice and pork, chickpeas and goat, and such portions – the Ritz serves for seven pesos in a tight, gilded back parlour.

Ribera’s frescoes in Cortez’ Palace are hard, flat and huge. The figures are flat, static and huge; the colours flat and drab. They are as narrative as the illustrations to the rhyme sheet, but without innocence. They have a dead serious over-emphasis that results not in power but in boredom. The subject is a pageant of Mexican history culminating in the Apotheosis of the Revolution, a kind of Dialectical Last Judgment, one of the many
remarkable features of which is the five times life-size figure of the wife of Carlos Marx standing almost haloed among the elect with the
tool-bearing
worker and the sheaf-laden peasant, while the Señora Doña María-Carmen Romero Rubio Diaz hovers on the other side in murky shadow with bankers and the members of the upper clergy.

‘Can you make me a pair of these sandals?’

‘No, Señora.’

‘I mean, can you make me a pair of these sandals?’

‘No, Señora.’

‘But you do make sandals?’

‘Yes, Señora.’

‘Then why can’t you make me a pair?’

‘I made sandals yesterday.’

‘That’s no reason.’

‘It is, Señora. I have got all I need.’

‘All you need? You’re not going to retire on yesterday’s sandals?’

‘Who knows, Señora? I have all I need now.’

The note of fear again.

The rains were late today and I was caught by them and darkness, alone and far from the shop-lit streets of the centre. One was aware of the presence of silent people sitting in doorways. Nothing happened, but I was seized by such a sense of desolation that several times I broke into a run. Once I thought that I had lost my way. I made the hotel and E in the state of a person reaching shelter from a panic. It was half past eight in the evening.

Homage to DHL.

‘We have had a letter from Anthony,’ said E ‘It is his vacation. He’s going to join us.’

‘How nice.’

‘He’s coming out to Mexico City by air.’

‘We must wait for him.’

‘Of course, we must.’

‘Of course.’

It appears that we have been called upon by Rosenkranz and Guildenstern.

‘Do make some sense out of the porter,’ said E.

The porter said there were two gentlemen and these were their names.

We find their cards in our rooms upstairs.

‘Golly,’ said I. ‘Pensión Hernandez.’

‘The long louche arm of Guillermo,’ said E.

‘What do they want?’

‘We shall see,’ said E.

Already a week in Mexico City. One entire day we were gated by the housekeeper. Not exactly polling day, but some kind of recount of a previous election we gathered, perhaps incorrectly, from the papers.

‘Yes, yes, an
eleccioncita
, a tiny election. It is of no matter,’ said the housekeeper.

But why should we not go out? Was it not safe?

‘Yes, safe. Very safe. Safe as safe. Only a little shooting. Quite safe.
But
it is better to stay in.’

On the day the massive front door of the hotel stayed barred and bolted. The hotel has no restaurant, nevertheless from dawn to dusk our detention was enlivened by a succession of trays – sandwich trays and cold meat trays, fruit and cake trays, tea trays, trays with covered dishes and chafing dishes, trays piled with tiered triple boilers balancing casseroles, until one could no longer tell snack from meal. We were never charged for these treats. We did not hear any shooting. Next morning the housekeeper told us that there had been a few dead, one hundred? two hundred? just a small election.

Other days pass in a rhythm of going out and exhausted return to the cool, flower-scented peace of the patio. Outside everything is just a bit too
near, too loud, too much. One is always pressed upon, there is always something to dodge – the beggars, the insane traffic, the sun, pineapples cascading off a stall.

The Baedeker round is quickly done.

Palace and Cathedral are vast Spanish Colonial edifices conceived in ambition and the high if interested purposes of the Counter-Reformation, and built with rather more than the usual deal of delay through low funds, change of policy and volcanic tremor. The Paséo de la Reforma, Maximilian and Carlota’s Champs-Elysées, casts a dank Victorian pall, dispiritedly
dépaysé
with its unbending line of tropical trees mercilessly clipped à la française. The Gallery has its Rubens (a religious subject), its Murillo, ‘what,’ I am quoting
Terry
, ‘is believed by many to be a genuine Titian,’ cracked and darkened portraits of Spanish gentlemen with heads like Spanish Gentlemen painted by El Greco, many battle-pieces and room upon roomful of Schools. The Museum has the Aztec Calendar Stone, an assortment of sacrificial stones of all sizes and a large collection of imp-faced deities, but Pre-Columbian sculpture can be seen bigger and better in Oaxaca and at the British Museum.

Yes, the show-pieces on the itinerary are numbered and on the whole disappointing. But how much there is to see. Everywhere. No need, no point, to plan and rush, only to stand, to stroll and stare; to connect. Not great beauty, not the perfect proportions, the slow-grown, well-grown balance (you will never be further from Greece), not the long-tended masterpiece of thought and form, the tight French gem, but the haphazard, the absurd, the over-blown, the savage, the gruesome. The fantastic detail and the frightening vista; the exotically elegant; the vast, the far, the legendarily ancient.

Everywhere. In the thoroughfare where the baby mule is born; by the fountain in the cool courtyard of the Spanish merchant’s house where the Churrigueresque façade is gently weather-worn like a half-wiped slate; in the Street of the False Door of Saint-Andrew where two lovely, epicene young workmen are weaving a custom-made cage of soft twigs for a waiting parrot; in the lobby of the Ritz where of a Sunday morning
Creole business-men sit, heavily powdered, missals on their laps, discussing fat deals.

The Church of the Assumption of María Santísima, the Cathedral of Mexico City, the Archiepiscopal See of the Distrito Federál, the Holy Metropolitan Church of Mexico, the Patriarchal Basilica of the Americas,
l’Iglesia Mayor
, the First Christian Church on American Soil, is dense from sunrise to nightfall with a religious rabble, the vagrant
camp-followers
of holy shrines, prostrate, agape, chanting, swaying, scraping on their knees, hugging images with oriental intensity – mindless, far-gone, possessed, separate and at one, unarrestable, frightening to the pitch of panic.

The City is full of bookshops, large recent establishments stocked with cheap, well-turned-out paper editions of
David Copperfield, Le Père Goriot, The Mill on the Floss, Point Counter Point.
The showcases are stuffed with the translated editions of Stephan Zweig, Emily Brontë and Professor Sigmund Freud. Who buys them? One quarter of the people cannot read. Another quarter can only read laboriously. Every grown-up, who can, is supposed by law to teach his letters to one illiterate grown-up a year. The question is often what letters. The current language is Spanish, but there are still two million Mexicans who speak only one of sixty different pre-Columbian tribal dialects. In the State of Sonora, they do not even use Arabic or Roman numerals, but a system they invented on their own.

I bought a Manual of Conversation. In the section headed
Useful Words and Phrases,
I find on page one:

‘Are you interested in death, Count?’

‘Yes, very much, your Excellency.’

One of the happiest places in this town is a room of early
nineteenth-century
Creole genre paintings in the Chapultepec Museum. These graceful pictures of hummingbird, butterfly and country life (unusual subjects of inspiration in Latin America) are quite unlike anything one
has ever seen, luxuriant but domestic, naïve and worldly, fresh, faintly absurd, wholly delicious. Young women in striped silk on a verandah mocked by a lemur, a muslin dress shimmering through magnolia trees, fruit like flowers and flowers like birds, give intimations of a better world. One can hear the leaf fans rustling through the afternoon, soft sucking of bare feet on patio tiles, ice clinking in punch glasses …