A Visit to Don Otavio (7 page)

But here too, the other note is sounded. There is a picture of a small boy led by a governess through a most peculiar garden of sugar cane and coffee bush, followed by a curly lap dog and an Indian boy carrying his doll, a neatly dressed and bonneted baby skeleton.

There are three active volcanoes in the valley, all within easy lava-throw of the City. Popocatepetl, Iztaccihúatl, Xinantecatl – monsters in name and size, fragile in appearance; Japanese contoured shapes of pastel blue and porcelain snow, and three thin formal curls of smoke afloat in a limpid sky. There is also an unobtrusive mound, a tiny volcano now quiescent, Peñon, which according to the geologists will one day destroy the City.

In the spaces of the Plaza Mayor, walking over the grave of a pyramid, one is assailed by infinity, seized at the throat by an awful sense of the past stretching and stretching backwards through tunnels of time … Can this be Here, can one be in it? One is in a legend, one is walking in Troy.

W
E WERE ASKED to tea by some academic friends of friends, Spanish refugees, Mexican residents for some ten years. Their house was at Coyacán, the suburb in which Trotsky lived and was murdered. We set out with little idea of how to get there. Asking one's way is an uncertain business as pleasantness seems to be the guiding principle of one's informants, not truth. Everything is made to appear wonderfully near. Thus, the hotel porter suppressed the second tram, and the women at the terminal a mile of walk on an unpaved road full of mudholes and happy grubbing pigs, and we arrived very late at the Cs.

The unprepossessing road ended in an alley by a small door in a high unbroken wall. A manservant in a striped coat and no shoes, opened from within and we stepped into the colonnaded garden of a Carmelite convent choked with bougainvillaea and large, lush, rambling roses. Seven or eight people were waiting for their tea and chocolate in a long domed room lined with books, french windows open to the garden. We were punctiliously introduced, shook hands and apologised for being late.

‘You found? You came by taxi, yes?'

E explained that I had prevented her from doing so.

The company seemed favourably impressed. ‘And you walked after tramway? That is good. The tourists are so helpless.'

‘Be charitable,' I said, ‘call us travellers.'

‘But you have not come to live?'

‘I think I can bear it for six weeks,' said E.

‘About a year,' said I.

We exchanged a look.

‘And where do you go?' said our host.

‘You must go to the Colonial towns,' said his wife.

‘Don't miss Puebla,' said their daughter.

‘They can go to Puebla on their way to Oaxaca.'

‘I should like to get out into the country,' said I, ‘and stay somewhere for a few months; get my bearings, learn Spanish properly and then start travelling. Somewhere near water if possible.'

‘You can't go to the seaside before December,' said our host. ‘Too hot.'

‘They could go to the lakes.'

‘They're far.'

‘They could get there.'

‘I've been told of Lake Pazcuaro,' said I.

‘Very lonely.'

We had settled meanwhile to a solid tea around a polished table. ‘You see,' said Señora C. with melancholy as I declined a second helping of the third cake, ‘this is our last meal. One cannot eat at night in this altitude; not after some time that is. We had to give up dinner.'

And I realised that these people were in exile.

‘The children don't feel it so much. My husband and I just have a snack before we go to bed, an omelet, a little beef-steak, a cup of chocolate.'

We remarked on the loveliness of the house.

‘Yes,' said Señor C. ‘My wife seldom leaves it. She does not like Mexico City.'

It was a European tea party. Czechs and Germans besides our Spanish hosts, a Frenchman. Middle-aged, mildly learned people, mellowed in disillusionment, who had given their political youth to
anti-fascism. There were no Anglo-Saxons, and there were no Mexicans. The conversation was general, the topic for our benefit Mexico.

‘You have no car, no? The roads, when there are roads, are good. It's sometimes hard to get petrol.'

‘Here?'

‘Oh, that oil business was much exaggerated. There never was that much to begin with. Then there were seepages and now there's sea water in the wells. Nor has nationalisation worked out, whatever one may have hoped. Nor kicking out the foreign engineers. And that's not the whole of it. Of course there is plenty of oil for home consumption and to spare, only distribution happens to be one of the biggest rackets in the country. It's quite an elaborate graft, and sometimes there is a row and then there just is no petrol for weeks.

‘Glad to hear you don't want to go by air. Oh, it's safe enough. The pilots are good; better than the planes. When President Truman came in '47, a Mexican pilot took over to fly him over the Sierra Madre. But it is a stupid way of travelling. Don't take a train if you can help it. Whenever there's a road, go by bus. They're slow. But you'll stop at places you'd never get to see otherwise. One thing about this country, don't be in a hurry, don't
think
about time, take things as they come when they come, and
always go first class
.'

‘Do the buses have classes?'

‘No. There are first-class buses and second-class buses.'

‘What's the difference?'

‘All the difference. More people, less seats, more stops, larger animals. You just don't go second-class bus.'

‘Are there any third-class buses?'

‘There
are
.' They looked at each other. ‘You won't come across them.'

‘… Hotels: as a rule always go to the second best hotel in the provinces. It'll be Mexican run, and you'll get better value, better manners, more to eat. Don't go to the new places, half the time they forget to put in something like the doors. Don't
ever
expect to read in bed. You will find a bulb in mid-ceiling and the switch by the door.

‘Never come straight to a point. Mexican Indians are formalists.
Americans offend them by being businesslike or friendly, both are considered
una barbaridad.
Always be
polite
.

‘… Water: don't touch what comes out of a tap. You needn't always buy bottled water. You can trust the carafes they put in the bedrooms. The water is electrically sterilised, or at least boiled.'

‘Do they take the trouble? It would be so easy to cheat.'

‘They won't. Crime is a profession here. You either set up as a bandit or you are an honest man. Cheating is outside their habits and characters.'

‘Except in Mexico City,' said Señora C.

‘Except in Mexico City,' said her husband.

‘… Food: you said you liked chile? One does need a touch of good hot pepper sometimes. Eat anything you please. There's too much fuss among foreigners about that. As a matter of fact, you'd be hard put to find fresher food anywhere. Nothing stored, nothing frozen, or lugged across half a continent in freight cars. Everything produced in small quantities near the consumer. Vegetables picked and eggs laid just in time for dinner. Alas, meat is killed in time for dinner too. I shouldn't eat uncooked lettuce though, unless I knew where it came from; certainly not in Mexico City where the market gardens are watered from the city sewer. It's different in the Provinces. Everything is.'

They all sighed, and again I was aware of the note of revulsion whenever the City is mentioned.

‘It is an evil place,' said Señora C.

‘The people's diet is sound enough.
Frijoles
and
tortillas
. Black beans, hand-ground maize cakes; and chile pepper. That's what the Aztecs ate and that's what they are eating now. It never changed. It's not the most energy-building diet, but it's complete. Down to all the vitamins. We only found out in the laboratories what they've known by instinct for three thousand years. You see, the Aztecs had no cattle, which meant no milk. The rich ate turkey, eggs and game, and fresh vegetables, but no one had any butter, or butcher's meat, or even pork. All that, with the horses and goats and pack animals, came with the blessings of the Conquest. The Indios haven't really taken to the new food. They say butter turns parrots mute, and they won't eat bread. As it takes four hours to grind the maize
for one person's daily
tortillas
, you can imagine what this means in a household. We need two servants to run this place, and two servants to keep them and themselves in
tortillas
, and a fifth to tend the baking braziers. She has no teeth, so the others feed her on mashed beans and chile which are luxury food, but save us,
pobres académicos
, a sixth servant.'

I was fascinated and quite shameless.

‘If you
really
want to know, we pay our manservant a peso a day. The cook gets a bit more as she comes from Monterrey, which is supposed to have a faint Yankee chic. The
tortilla
menials are paid in coppers. Oh yes, it's all cheap enough by Western standards. In Mexico everything is cheap and everybody is underpaid.

‘Take the electric light. You don't pay for the current you consume, you pay for the number of sockets you have in the house. Of course the system is quite mad. It comes to as much for a ballroom chandelier blazing away all night with hundreds of watts as for the bulb on your attic steps. So far so bad. Now comes the collector, who is so ill-paid that he couldn't exist without bribes, literally not exist. You have just taken a house, he goes into your living-room and counts the sockets – ceiling light, standing lamp, side lamps,
unos, dos, tres, cuatros
… “Nonsense,” he says, “you must put in one point and connect all your lights with extension wires.” It saves you four-fifths of the bill, and you split the saving. This is where your troubles begin. The one point is overstressed, your lights fuse, you keep tripping over wires. Then a controller appears and threatens to denounce you for what he quite correctly calls fraud. You bribe him as expected, and at the end of the year you are fined by the company anyhow. If you refuse this arrangement to begin with – we all did – you never get any current at all. Your application's simply not honoured. It gets lost.

‘… Health: better get yourselves re-vaccinated against smallpox. Yes, there is a lot of typhoid and dysentry. In fact, one-fifth of the people die of some kind of intestinal infection. The rest die of malaria, bronchitis, whooping-cough and the measles. They all die young and fast. There is no heart disease, they don't live old enough. Oh, they've got a sort of wiry
strength – you've seen them with those pianos on their backs – but they get tired quickly, no staying power, they just slip out of life. There's not much of a dividing line. They don't prepare against death any more than they prepare against the next dry season. Although they do have a high opinion of Paradise.

‘Doctors are not bad on the whole. Good surgeons. The trouble is that they won't set up practice outside the larger towns. The Government tried to make them. Passed a law that a man couldn't take his degree unless he signed up to work seven years in an Indian village. But you know what
laws
are here. Too many of them as it is. Even old Don Porfirio used to complain about them.'

‘Diaz?' said I.

‘The old devil could be quite sensible at times. Don't look shocked. It takes ten years in Mexico to make a Catalonian Anarchist put in a good word for Diaz.

‘The Indios don't go to doctors much anyway. It's not that they prefer the witches, they're afraid of snubbing them. Nursing's poor too, with so many of the nuns still gone. When the Sisters were allowed back a few years ago, the people knelt in the streets and kissed their skirts. Lay skirts, of course. Nuns and priests still may not wear their habits in public.'

‘What do you really think of the expulsion of the clergy?' said E.

There was a weary pause. ‘You might say that we are not exactly proclerical. The Mexican Church used to be quite fantastically corrupt. But the Reform Laws – a hundred years of them, soon made so much bitterness and misery … Such violence, such brutality, such excesses on all sides. They put half the country and half the world against Juarez, they helped to make that Hapsburg foolery possible; they kept the Revolutions going for an extra decade. After six or seven years of war and eighty years of persecutions, one doesn't think so much about the original rights and wrongs. One accepts the Concordat. Such as it is.

‘Some of the priests are hogs, others are good men. One used to talk about the Church keeping people in ignorance. Well, they
are
ignorant. I'm not so sure now that our brand of universal education wouldn't merely add another kind of ignorance. Mexico has the most up-to-date
humanitarian legislation imaginable, but even when it doesn't stay on paper, it seems to have no impact on any known Indio's life. Perhaps only the priests could be a power against bestiality … This is not a Western country. They are not the heirs of the French Revolution. Here, one lives to learn the futility of the principle of equality.'

We stay for supper, and presently the Cs' daughter offers to drive us back. From that graceful house we tumble into a pitch black lane and feel our way to the Model A Ford waiting at the end. It is mild; the road leads through an avenue of tamarinds, frogs are croaking in the streets of Coyacán, but the night is without beauty.