A Visit to Don Otavio (8 page)

W
HO BUILT THE CITY? What is the history of this jumble of main street and chunks intact from an almost legendary past, this rather tremendous place, so squalid, so splendid, that bears the megalomaniac imprint of three civilisations?

Many hundred years ago, the Valley of Mexico, an oval seven thousand feet above the seas, walled and sheltered by porphyry and immense volcanic rock, was a valley of great lakes and flowering tropical forests. Here on fifty islands and the shore of Lake Taxcuoco rose the city. Waterways fronted by low-roofed palaces of pink stone, plazas at anchor, floating gardens: Tenochtitlán, waterbound, canal-crossed, bridge-linked, ablaze with flowers … And amid the soft magic, a huge temple, a pyramid, squat, vast, solid, dedicated to some deity of war, piled without help of pack animal or metal tool, stone to stone forever.

For three centuries, back entrances were lapped by water; canoes glided to market upon canals pompous with lilies, shaded by roof-grown trees, and the royal barges sailed the lake between the mainland and the Summer Palace.

Then the Spaniards came and changed everything. They couldn’t have been more thorough. After four years the city is destroyed and rebuilt, the lakes drained, the waterways filled in, the canals dry, the forests decimated. The countryside begins to look like the bare hills of Castille. Naturally the climate changes too, and the soil. The new terra firma turns
into swamp. There are floods, landslides … Nine thousand Spaniards die of the fevers. Native deaths are not recorded. Only that martian temple, the pyramid, escaped. Too solid for the old world’s most accomplished efforts at destruction, it resisted demolition for some years; then by its own weight, sank out of sight into the boggy ground. There it lies, intact below the main square, waiting for archaeologist or messiah. The Spanish built a cathedral on top of it and dedicated it to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, some four hundred years before the recent promulgation of that dogma. Opposite, on the site of Montezuma’s town house (razed), they began a renaissance mansion, first Cortez’ residence, then in turn Gubernatorial, Viceregal, National, Imperial and Presidential Palace.

The fabulous past is over. From now on the history of the city is that of any sixteenth-century outpost. Ecclesiastical and administrative magnificence, throne-room and
audiencia
, space and façade, the prestige building exacted by empire and counter-reformation. Good sound Roman masonry, as contemporarily practised at Segovia and Tarragona, but applied to
tezontle
the local soft volcanic stone, and to adobe the native clay. Colonial products of a good period: renaissance, plateresque, baroque, churrigueresque …

The City grows, the population increases – more people living, cooking, dying at close quarters. There are no drains. As the names of the Viceroys grow longer, the administrative machine becomes creaky; from Garcia Guerra to Diego Osorio de Escobar y Llamas, to Antonio Sebastian de Toledo Molina y Salazar, to Diego Lopez Pacheco Cabrera y Bobadilla Duque de Escalona y Marques de Villena. By 1750, Spain is in full decline and Mexico a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants.

These are the years of the rat, the open sewers, of garbage rotting in the unpaved streets, of the cut-purse and the cut-throat, of cholera and fire unchecked. Madrid is considered the filthiest town in Europe; Mexico City is the death-trap of the New World. There were five major inundations since the Conquest, each followed by an epidemic. The cellars are never dry. Once the city was under water for six years and abandoned to the lower orders. At the end of the eighteenth century there is some attempt at
reform. Charles III in Spain, Viceroy Conde de Revillagigedo over here. A number of things are done: Revillagigedo regulates the water supply, founds a police force and hangs a number of bandits. But it is late in the day of the Spanish Empire. Charles III dies, Charles IV abdicates, Ferdinand VI. (he who called thinking
una funesta mania
) is deposed by Napoleon. Thirty years after Revillagigedo, New Spain is gone. Viva Mexico.

During the next half-century much happens, but there is no natural growth. The War for Independence; Secession; the Kingdom of Annuac; the First Empire; the First Republic; Civil War; war with the United States; another republic; the Reform War; semi-war with England and Spain, war with France; military occupation; the Second Empire; civil war; another republic … sieges, triumphal entries, two coronations and the last
auto-da-fé
in the Plaza Mayor – the city stays suspended like a young man’s education during a long war. Thus, the fruits of the industrial revolution and the appurtenances of nineteenth-century urban existence reach it late and piecemeal as exotic gifts in the baggage of travellers and occupiers. Like other hostess presents, they are chiefly for the convenience of the guest. Madame Calderon de la Barca brings a portable bath tub, the Empress Carlota one of different design; gentlemen from Bavaria start a brewery; the Americans bide the time for their own century and General Taylor arrives to sign the Peace of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which ceded two-thirds of Mexican territory to the United States, bringing nothing.

In the eighties this trickle of the amenities becomes a flow: plumbing, trams, French fashions, residential suburbs, a race-course, gaslight –
le confort moderne
is arriving thick and fast. But it is unconnected. In 1876 General Porfirio Diaz had entered the city, was proclaimed Provisional President and made himself dictator for forty years. He managed – at a price – to establish internal peace, resume somewhat dilapidated foreign relations, and set out to attract foreign capital. It is the heyday of the satrap, the politico, the Gauleiter, of the pampered investor and the quick foreign fortune; of summary executions – unreported – in a faraway province, discreet exile, the very large bribe, the shop front. Every man has his price, and no man his value. The rate of interest rises to forty per
cent and is only surpassed by the death-rate. Railways are built over swamp and precipice; opera houses, villas and spas, and roads to spas. For the first time since the murder of Montezuma, the public aspect of the city is clean, safe and comfortable. For whom? Mexico has a bad name for political instability. Without confidence no credit, without credit no expansion. The smug Edwardian cover pulled over a semi-barbarous country by a business-minded ex-soldier is a window-dressing, not for home consumption.
There are no home consumers
. Indians, fed on
home-ground
corn, clothed by home-spun cotton, housed by palm leaf and bamboo, worked on plantations for food and hut, worked in mines for less than subsistence, make no consumer class. As in the good old days of the Conquest, the products of Mexico are wrested from field and mine by more or less forced labour and shipped across the seas.

At Diaz’ fall in 1910, Mexico City has three hundred thousand inhabitants and all the attributes of that period’s capitals from railway terminal to gasworks. Then there are another twenty-five years of revolution and civil war, and another ritardando:
Maderistas,
Rurales
,
Encomenderos,
Peninsulares, Iconoclastes
and
Christo Reyes;
Villa, Huerta, Obregon, Calles and Cardenas. Then settled government once more, and economic wooing, this time of the USA. The latest lap is taken in a leap: cinema theatres, motor buses, petrol stations; juke boxes, Coca-Cola machines, one million people and tall gimcrack houses full of tiny rooms. But there is still that Indian sitting on the kerb selling a string of onions and one cabbage, still that fortuitous air as though the city were not a town but a sample bag, a travesty of modern urbanism, a cautionary tale perhaps: the caricature that gives the show away.

A
T THE END of our second week I am beset by discouragement. It is the weariness peculiar to travellers. A slight shift in focus, and the proposed enchantment is seen as our planned and burdened crawl about the earth. Moving appears both futile and difficult, the apparatus of travel petty. I feel crushed by the fret and tedium of preparations, the vanity of wanting to see new places and the doubts of ever getting anywhere at all.

E, who has left arrangements to me, pretends to be unaware that none are forthcoming. She is holding her breath like a child unnoticed in the wrong room. She does not mind much where she is at the moment – one must exist somewhere – only the past can be patterned into reality; but she dreads the unknown and the setting out for it.

East. South. West. North-west. The tropics, the ruins, the lakes? Which? The roads into Mexico are long and do not converge; once embarked, one must advance or retract.

Then E, on the principle that a move in time saves nine, proposed a day’s outing to Cuernavaca.

‘I would like to see the Emperor Maximilian’s Summer Palace,’ she said; ‘the one his valet called
das Lust-Schloss
. And remember we ought to wait for Anthony.’  

Cuernavaca is a great week-end place some seventy miles from the City, down in the
Tierra Templada.
I do not like to go anywhere for the day – it is always too long and too short, involves hanging about and a wilted return at an unsuitable hour – but I am willing to take E’s sample journey. She further disclosed that the nice young man who had lost all her mail recommended the conducted tour organised by his Travel Agency. You just paid thirty pesos per head and that included luncheon, transport (in
individual limousines) and a guide. I dislike this kind of travelling more than any private struggle, but in my present mood I might have acquiesced had I not found out that the Agency left the worst part of the struggle to ourselves. Those individual limousines were public conveyances plying hourly between Mexico and Cuernavaca, available to any citizen capable of getting himself to the distant outskirt from which such services are apt to start. At these purlieus, the Agency expected one to appear unguided at nine. They would not pick us up. All day, through a megaphone, they would tell us where to look, but the step that costs we were to take on our own. No.

We took a taxi at half past ten, bought our tickets, found two seats in a waiting car and a few minutes after eleven were out of town screeching up a mountain road. As we were threading in and out of hairpin turns and corkscrew curves, the succulent greenery of the Valley of Mexico changed to spindly pines; peaks rose, precipices yawned before our front wheels, snow appeared in the near distance and the view became as spectacular as it is natural to such roads.

E put down her book. ‘Quite remarkable,’ she said.

‘One likes to be warned,’ I said, ‘I understood Cuernavaca was a place people ran down to for lunch. Where is it going to end?’

I was flung against my other neighbour, a man with an attaché case, dressed in wintry brown. I addressed him, ‘Is Cuernavaca not below Mexico City?’

‘It is low.’

‘Then what is this?’ Another summit had sprung up above a curve.

‘At your orders, the Three Marias.’

‘What are the Three Marias?’

‘These.’

Later, I learned from
Terry
that they were the three peaks by the La Cima Pass which is indeed one of the highest passes in the Republic; and still later from experience, that before running down to anywhere in this country one must first run up some six or seven thousand feet. The descents are more alarming than the climbs. We hurtled towards Cuernavaca down unparapeted slopes with the speed and angle, if not
the precision, of a scenic railway – cacti flashed past like telegraph poles, the sun was brilliant, the air like laughing gas, below an enchanting valley, and the lack of brakes became part of a general allegro accelerando.

The town is not as lovely as the countryside; but it is small and the country is all about it. The plaza looks improvised. There are some booths about to be put up or pulled down; perhaps they are always there. As a resort the place seems unconvincing; for a Cathedral town, unsettled. We look into San Francisco, walk down the long, sober nave and, through a side-door, come out under the crumbling arcades of a formal, long-neglected garden laid out by a public-spirited
eighteenth-century
French speculator. We go into the Municipal Palace and see Ribera’s frescoes in the loggia. We buy some postcards and at half past two, sit down to lunch under the awning of a restaurant in the square. In all these places we encounter what would have been our conducted tour.

We have some gin – Gordon’s under license – and fresh lime juice. The food when it comes is pleasant and monotonous, and there is perhaps not quite as much of it as there would be in a less-frequented place. The tour gets the same – I watch – minus a dish of fried black beans I asked for. We talk over our coffee in the shade. It is warmer than in Mexico City though the sun is much less violent, and I become aware that I am feeling extremely well.

By four o’clock the tour left. ‘We may as well tote up,’ I said. ‘We’ve done what they’ve done, and we’ve got our return tickets.’

‘Do we count the taxi?’

‘No. We would have had to pay for that anyhow. Same as tips and drinks. I make it exactly twenty-seven pesos between us. Less than half.’

‘Money in our pockets,’ said E. ‘We must celebrate our victory over this great travel institution.’

‘We ought to start for Maximilian’s summer place.’

‘It was only a shooting lodge,’ said E. ‘There will be nothing to see.’

‘You said you wanted to go,’ said I.

‘My dear, these things had always best be done in the imagination.’

‘It isn’t far.’

‘You must go. You love a walk. I shall be very comfortable here with
my reflections. And may I ask you to be so very kind as to order me another cup of coffee in your excellent Spanish?’

The road is a country road. The maize stands tall and green. Everywhere there are springs, and the sound of clear running water is magical. Indians pass and call
Adiós
,

I walk on, empty of thought, content.

The Emperor’s Lodge is an unconcerned shell in a field. So this is where, in that official incognito so dear to royalty, he dawdled during the lulls in the tragedy. He loved Cuernavaca. Someone passes on a donkey, and I ask to make sure.

‘Si, si, es la casa de Masimiliano.’

It is Maximilian’s house. Now? Yesterday? Eighty years ago? It is improbable anyhow.

‘And have you also come from the other side of the sea,
del otro lado del mar,
to look for Maximilian?’

Perhaps I saw it there. On the other side of the sea, Manet’s fragment of the execution of the Emperor Maximilian. In grey, softness and damp, among Ophelia in the reeds and La Grande Jatte, soldiers in sombre blue stood at the extreme edge of a canvas, rifles held at right angles, butts pressing into shoulders, rigid, waiting. One need not know what was happening or to whom; one was frozen. I never looked at that painting without a shiver.
Al otro lado del mar.
Here, there is nothing to connect with that grim story. Summer landscapes tell no tales.

In the Plaza, the sun is almost down. I find E refreshed and full of Maximilian and Carlota. We talk. E’s memory is prodigious. There is little she does not remember about their sensational and complicated history. Why is it so fascinating? Surely the ingredients are too romantic to be borne – the spider of the Tuileries, creole glamour, the doom of the House of Habsburg; young princes, sudden rise, fabulous parts and an
exotic crown; early death, execution, madness. It is not respectable, and no first-rate writer has touched it with a barge-pole. Historically treated, it bogs down in a maze of long-winded, short-sighted, political intrigue of undisentangleable intricacy. The threads lead everywhere. They concerned everyone. There was not an event in the 1850s and ’60s that did not help to shape the Mexican Empire; not a power, a faction, a person in a privileged position, an interest vested or on the make, that did not have a finger and a stake in that particular pie. Ambitious mothers, a soured brother, a prudent father-in-law and indifferent cousins; Austrian policy in Italy, French policy in Austria, the vacancy of the throne of Greece, Bonaparte insecurity and Coburg consolidation, the Mexican debt in England and the Mexican debt in Spain, the fear of Bismarck in many quarters and the American Civil War. Pio Nono, Napoleon III, the Emperor Francis-Joseph. The Archduchess Sophie of Austria, the Empress Eugénie, Louis-Philippe’s widow Queen Marie-Amélie who shrieked on her death-bed,
‘les pauvres enfants, ils seront assassinés!’
Lincoln, Don Pedro of Brazil, white Mexicans in Paris; French militarism and French radicalism; King Leopold of the Belgians, Victor Hugo and the shades of l’Aiglon.

Few of these persons were dunces. A number of them were astute, at least three were brilliant. The men knew their statecraft and their world. All calculated; some meant well. Not one of them knew the first thing about Mexico.

On the face of it, the facts must have looked something like this. It is around 1860. Mexico had been in chaos for fifty years. Juarez was President, but could only maintain himself by the help of arms, some of them US arms. Nevertheless, he went on with nationalist and anticlerical reforms. Church lands were confiscated and he repudiated foreign debts. France, England and Spain decided on a punitive expedition to recover some of the money owed them. The Spanish
double-crossed
the French by arriving first and landing before anybody else. The English did not land at all. A squadron lay off Vera Cruz, and a little later withdrew. So, after some time, did the Spanish. The French stayed on and, after an exceedingly hard campaign of almost two years, took
Puebla. This, on the one hand, meant about as much or as little as the taking of Kiev.
‘Un million d’hommes? Sire, chez nous c’est l’affaire d’une nuit d’hiver.’
In Mexico too, losses count low, and there is always another range of mountains. Fighting went on for three more years and could have gone on forever if the French had not at last withdrawn their troops. On the other hand, Puebla meant the open road to the capital, which in fact was entered a few days later. At that moment it looked like a triumph for France; the way seemed clear for larger ambitions. Mexico was then still believed to be immensely rich. The United States were too locked in civil war to implement the Monroe Doctrine; there was nothing repulsive in overseas expansion to nineteenth-century Europe. Louis XV lost Canada, Napoleon I sold Louisiana, Louis-Napoleon and Eugénie were tempted to conquer Mexico. The idea of a Catholic dynasty and a stable government in Mexico – and incidentally at the Southern borders of the United States – backed by a continental power, appealed as advantageous and creditable to a number of persons and institutions. In the then not unlikely event of the South winning the Civil War, the success of such an enterprise would have ensured perpetual semi-colonial status to the Americas.
*
In any case Lombard Street would recover its bonds, the Apostolic Church an unfaithful daughter and, it was hoped, her lands. The Mexican émigrés in Paris were excited by what could not even be called a restoration. The atmosphere of fatuous unreality waxed high. The Empress Eugénie told the American Ambassador,
‘je vous assure que si le Mexique n’était pas si loin et mon fils encore un enfant, je souhaiterais qu’il se mette à la tête de l’armée française, pour écrire avec l’épée une des plus belles pages de l’histoire de ce siècle!’
The pages of history written by the sword: what extreme of false values, what insolence, what hot air.
Meanwhile not a word of the French conscripts who were dying of fever at Vera Cruz and of wounds in the Sierra Madre; not a thought of the possible wishes of the people of Mexico, which as a matter of fact would have been difficult to ascertain.

The next step was to find an available Catholic Prince who would not tread on too many susceptibilities. A Spanish Bourbon would have been too much like attempting to set up the House of Hanover at Washington; an Orleans was not acceptable to the Bonapartes, a Wittelsbach had just cut a small figure in Greece. The Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg was the favourite from the start. After Solferino, Napoleon III had a great deal to make up to Austria. Maximilian’s wife, Charlotte, was the daughter of King Leopold I of the Belgians; her elevation to a throne fell in with Coburg family expansion, and Leopold could be counted on to write to Queen Victoria. There was also that old rumour that Maximilian was not the son of his legitimate father, the Archduke Francis-Charles, but a bastard of the Duke of Reichstadt’s and thus a grandson of Napoleon I. The story was by no means proved, but the kind of thing that appealed to the Empress Eugénie. So Napoleon III offered the crown of Mexico, a crown that was neither his to offer nor had ever existed except as a viceregal jewel in the crown of Spain, to the Archduke Maximilian guaranteeing French military and financial support to see Maximilian to his throne.

The press promptly spoke of the Crown of Montezuma. The French public, so often accused of shrewdness in money matters, subscribed its savings to the enterprise. Gutierrez de Estrada, one of the Mexican intermediaries, referred to the hour of destiny, ‘God, the Virgin and all the Saints,’ he wrote to Maximilian, ‘bear witness that this hour is unique in the history of the world.’

Maximilian, the more amiable brother of the Emperor Francis-Joseph, had been somewhat pushed from pillar to post. One gathers that he was liberal in a sheltered way, high-minded, serious and romantic. He was fond of botanising; he sketched from nature; he had been to Brazil and loved the tropics. His manners were gentle, and he was liked by his entourage. He was handsome, not very stable, and probably quite weak.
His sense of rank was not keen; he had little judgment and often fell in with traitors and charlatans. He was religious without bigotry; he read; he studied; and he never realised that he lived in what was also the age of Darwin and dialectical materialism. He believed in good government and the duties of a monarch; he abhorred despots but was incapable of finding anything anomalous in a perpetual parental relationship between prince and subject. In different circumstances he might have made an excellent officer in the Salvation Army. He had little sense of personal importance, was quite without vindictiveness, and had great personal courage. He pondered much about improvement and he believed that he was meant to do good.