Chapter XV

Travelers sometimes complain that “Mexican towns are exactly alike; if you see one you’ve seen them all,” and while I cannot agree with the bromidically couched observation I can understand why it is made. They are not alike, but they are so startlingly different from Northern towns that one is at first more impressed by this fundamental difference, in which they all naturally have a family resemblance, than by the less striking but delightful ways in which they often differ from one another. Without exception, they are, as art critics used to say of certain pictures, “painted in a high key,” and where the nature of the site permits, their rectangularity is positively Philadelphian. In their center is a public square with a garden, rather formal in intention but as a rule old enough and luxuriant enough to have lost its original stiffness. Here there are paths and benches, trees, fountains, flowers, and a flimsy looking iron and tin band stand one learns at last to like. At one side is the most important church; the other three are bounded by shops and arcades. This is the plaza. Every town has one, many of them have several. But there is always one that more than the others is a kind of pulsating, civic heart, and it is interesting to note how in their dimensions they observe the scale of their environment. Big towns have big plazas, small towns have small plazas, villages have tiny plazas. In addition to the plaza there is often, in a quieter, more distant quarter of the community, a park--a tangled, shady, bird-inhabited spot, with high and aged trees, massive seats of stone or cement, and a tranquillity that exerts a noticeably benign influence on all who go to walk or sit there. Whether the houses and buildings are built of stone or mortar or, as is customary in the smaller places of the plateau, of sun-dried mud bricks, their effect is the same, for they are all given a coat of smooth stucco and then calcimined white, or a pale shade of pink, blue, yellow, buff, or green. Rarely are they of more than two stories; most of them have balconies on the upper floor, all have long, heavily barred windows on the lower, and if it were not for their gayety of color, the perpetual fascination of their flower-filled patios of which the passer-by gets tantalizing glimpses through open doorways, and the intellectual interest of the signs on the shops--their uniform height and the square simplicity of their design might be monotonous. As it is, a Mexican street, even when empty, is never monotonous.

Besides the plaza and the park, there is the market place--sometimes merely an open square in which the venders, under rectangular homemade parasols, spread their wares upon the ground, but more often an inclosure equipped with long counters and protected from sun and rain by a roof. Except in the City of Mexico, Guadalajara, and Merida, one is not conscious of “residence quarters.” The “best families” (a term almost as meaningless and as frequently employed in Mexico as in the United States) live where they please, and they please to live as deeply as possible in the thick of things. The largest and most elaborate houses are often scattered between shops and saloons along the busiest streets, and when one becomes intimate with the country and its inhabitants it seems natural and agreeable that they should be. For one cannot live in Mexico without consciously or unconsciously regarding the superficialities of life from something very like the local point of view. There is about it an infectious and inevitable quality, and I have often been both amused and depressed by the manner in which foreigners who accept the best of everything in Mexico--who grow strong, and revel in one of its several climates, who make a good living there, who enjoy its beauty and adopt many of its customs--stupidly deny its attraction for them, repudiate their sympathy with it. It is customary, almost a convention, to do so, and one is appalled by the tenacity of convention’s grasp upon the ordinary mind--by the impregnable dullness of the normal intellect. I know, for example, Americans who have lived happily in Mexico for many years. They have, among Mexicans, friends whom they both respect and admire. Almost all their interests in life are focused somewhere in the country, and when they are away from it they look forward with gladness to the time of their return. Yet, apparent as all this is to one who associates with them, they seem incapable of translating experience into consciousness and conversation. You see them leading contented and successful lives, at peace with their adopted land and almost everything in it; but when they undertake to discuss their environment, to formulate their opinions, their remarks are rarely valuable and never appreciative. Instead of simply trying to give one something of the Mexico they have day by day, month by month, and year by year met and succumbed to, they appear to take a pride in parading the old geography, guidebook and tourist dicta that in their cases, one sees at a glance, are not justified by facts.

“All Mexican servants are thieves and liars,” is the characteristic pronouncement of an American woman whose household for sixteen years has been admirably and economically run by the same devoted and honest cook.

“What a filthy lot they are!” exclaims her husband (who observes the good old custom of taking a bath every Saturday night whether he needs it or not), as we ride through a Yucatecan village in which most of the Indian inhabitants scrub from head to foot and put on clean clothes every day.

“I wouldn’t trust one of them with a cent,” declares some one else, who has in his office three Mexican clerks to whom he implicitly intrusts the handling of thousands of dollars.

“I look upon them just as I look upon niggers,” says a Southerner--who not only doesn’t, but who is gratified by the pleasant position he has achieved for himself in local, native society. And as such comments are made with neither malicious intent nor with the “feeling” that would accompany them were they final deductions from a long series of painful experiences, one marvels at the phonographic monotony with which they are endlessly reproduced. Almost always purely verbal, there is behind them neither thought nor emotion, and they are irritating in much the same way that checks are irritating when carelessly made out and signed by persons who have nothing in the bank. They are, I fancy, connected with a sense of patriotism that has grown habitual and perfunctory, and I mention them merely by way of illustrating half of my assertion to the effect that one absorbs something of Mexico both unconsciously and with deliberateness. A young Englishman of my acquaintance may well supply the other half.

It is not generally realized that the male inhabitants of Great Britain do not make a practice of wearing drawers, although such is the strange, dissembled fact. Now, while the possession of underclothes is not necessarily indicative of birth and wealth, I have always assumed, although perhaps with a certain apathy, that the possession of wealth and birth presupposed underclothes. This, in England at least, does not seem to be the case, for my young friend, whose name is ancient and whose purse is well filled, announced to me in Mexico not long ago, with the naïveté that so often astonishes one in thoroughly sophisticated persons of his race: “I’ve knocked about a good bit and I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s usually something to be said for the peculiar habits of different peoples even if you don’t know exactly what it is. Since I’ve been in this country I’ve noticed that everybody seems to wear drawers--even the peons. There must be some reason for it--connected with the climate very likely--and I’ve taken to wearing them myself. I don’t particularly care for the things,” he hastened apologetically to add, “and I dare say they’re all rot, but I’m going to give them a try. Why don’t you!”

It is natural and agreeable in Mexico to have one’s house in what we call “the retail district,” for one soon learns to appreciate the Mexican’s combined love of seclusion and publicity. A dwelling sandwiched in between the town’s most popular drug and grocery shops is ideally situated. The nature of its construction--the Moors imposed it upon Spain and Spain passed it on--insures a fortresslike privacy, while the site insures the constant movement and color, the manifold, trivial, human and animal interests without which the life of a Mexican household would be somewhat empty. Those odd moments consumed by us with magazines and the book of the week, Mexicans devote to looking out of their sala windows, with a rarely misplaced confidence in their street’s potentialities. It never strikes me as strange that _I_ can pass so many hours in peering at sights so foreign to my race, if not any longer to my experience, but it is one of the pleasantly surprising traits of the inhabitants that _their_ interest is just as fresh and perhaps more insatiable. To me the love affair across the way--carried on as it is with much holding of hands in the excessive broadness of Mexican daylight, by a young woman of thirty-eight behind a barred window, and a young man of forty-two on the narrow sidewalk outside--to me, this public display of an emotion, ordinarily regarded as rather private, is most exciting; but even so, I am inclined to believe that after commenting on such a courtship every afternoon and evening for three and a half years it would begin to pall. On Mexicans it never seems to. They do not precisely stare at the spectacle, as a careful unawareness under the circumstances is considered the proper line to take. But their blind spots are not situated in the tails of their eyes. However, it does not necessitate such absorbing matters as affairs of the heart to retain their attention. They never weary at certain hours of the day of peering through the bars or leaning over the balconies in contemplation of just the street’s multifarious but always leisurely movement. It is not often a noisy movement. The collective Mexican voice--the voice of a group or even a crowd is musical, and the click of donkey’s hoofs on cobblestones is a dainty, a positively prim form of commotion.

But should they wish to escape from even these sometimes distinctly soothing sounds, there is always the patio and the tranquil rooms around it. They are of all sizes, of all degrees of misery and splendor and of most shapes, these universal patios, but in the meanest of them there is an expressed yearning for color and adornment that, even when ill cared for and squalid, has been at least expressed. It takes the form, most fortunately, of flowers, with often a fountain in a circular basin of blue and white tiles. A Mexican patio, in fact, is considerably more than a courtyard. It is a flower garden surrounded by a house.

In Northern climates the most delightful hour of the day has always been that in which one comes in from the frosty dusk, lights the lamps, smashes a smoldering lump of coal into a bright, sudden blaze, draws the curtain and, in an atmosphere thick with warmth and quiet, sits down to read or write or rest. In tropical countries one often longs in vain for this hour. Its impossibility is, I think, a chief cause of homesickness, and it is long before one accepts with anything like the same sense--a sense of physical and mental well-being immune from gazes and intrusions--the Southern equivalent. The Southern equivalent is the hour in which the sun shines brightest and fiercest, when instead of seeking warmth one eludes it, half undressed, in dim, bare rooms, under awnings and behind light, thin screens.

Even when a street for the time being comparatively lacks moving figures there is for the foreigner a constant amusement in reading the signs over the doors of shops and more especially those that decorate the outer walls of pulque joints and cantinas. Their mere perusal, indeed, may throw a truer, more valuable light upon certain phases of the native humors and habits of thought than do many works less spontaneous and more profound. “Jack O’Grady, Sample Room,” or, “Otto Baumholzer, Saloon,” may or may not make an appeal. But even when it does it is not an appeal to the intellect and the imagination. In Mexico the proprietor of a saloon likes to advertise his wares, not so much with his name as with a sentiment, an allusion--a word or a phrase that poetically connotes. There are of course a great many serviceable designations of no particular relevance like the patriotic “Cinco de Mayo,” the inevitable “Estrella de Oro,” and the frequently met with and rather meaningless “Cometa de 1843.” They show respectively only a taste for the national, the brilliant, the surprising. The gift of fancy is not, after all, to everyone. Even when a foul little corner drunkery, calcimined sky-blue--with a life-sized lady reposing in a green bower, painted on its finger-marked exterior--is entitled “El Nido de Amor,” or when a pink hole in the wall that can be seen for a block and smelled for two, is named “Las Flores de Abril”--even then one does not appreciate quite to the full some of the quaint possibilities of just the ordinary Mexican mind. But a saloon called “El Destino,” another frankly advertising itself as “La Isla de Sacrificios,” still another with painted above its door “El Infiernito” (the little hell), a fourth that calls itself “Al Delirio”--there is in such names food, as one strolls about any Mexican community, for meditation. Less grim, but as suggestive and as apt, is “La Seductora.” “La Media Noche” and “Las Aves de la Noche” (the night birds) always strike a sympathetic chord, while “El Renacimiento,” “El Valor,” and “El Mensajero de los Dioses” (the messenger of the gods) gracefully hoist the whole matter into the realm of the ideal. The subtlest of them, and the one that never fails to make me laugh as I pass it, is “La Idea!” I regret now that the opportunity of entering and making the proprietor’s acquaintance has gone. A man who would name his saloon “La Idea!” ought to be worth knowing. The thing can be apperceived in so many ways and spoken in so many different tones of voice, starting, as at once suggests itself, with the intonation generally imparted to, “Why, the idea!”

One source of dissatisfaction to travelers for whom foreign travel has always meant Europe, is that there are so few “sights” in Mexican towns. By “sights” I mean the galleries of sculpture and painting, the palaces and the castles, the frescoes, the architectural fragments, the tombs, the relics, and the interminable museums crammed with a dead world’s junk, over which the conscientious may exhaust their necks and backs. European cities even as comparatively small as Stockholm and Copenhagen possess museums where, guidebook in hand, people remain for whole days examining ugly, labeled little implements fashioned in the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, and every city has among other treasures a few miles of minute, Dutch masters before which to trudge, too weary to appreciate their marvelous skill or to realize their beauty. But in Mexican towns there are none of these things, and the traveler whose days have not been mapped out for him and who is not in the habit of strolling, of sitting in churches, of shamelessly idling in parks and plazas, is likely to complain of a lack of occupation. It is difficult for him to accept the fact that the most notable sight in Mexico is simply Mexico.

It is difficult, too, for him to reconcile the general outward conditions of the towns and cities with his preconceived ideas of them, which is always annoying. Instead of giving an impression of dirt and neglect, of the repulsive indifference to appearances, and general “shiftlessness” we are so accustomed to in the small communities of States like, for instance, Arkansas and Indiana, their best quarters always, and their more modest districts very often, are perpetually swept and sprinkled, dazzling with new calcimine and, for thoroughfares so aged, incredibly neat and gay. About drainage and water works--the invisible and important--there is still much to deplore, much to hope for, although improvement is everywhere on the way. But municipal “appearances” are rigidly maintained; maintained in some instances at the cost, unfortunately, of qualities that share the secret of the country’s charm. There is at the present time, for example, a rage--a madness rather--for renovating, for “doing over” the exteriors of churches, and in the last four years some of the most impressive examples of Spanish colonial church architecture have been scraped, punctured with pointed windows, supplied with gargoyles and porticoes and then whitewashed. To remember the cathedral at Jalapa as it was, and to see it now, a jaunty horror half clad in cheap, Gothic clothes that don’t fit, brings a lump to one’s throat.

The order and security that everywhere appear to reign both by day and by night are also bewildering in a country popularly supposed to be the modern fountain-head of lawlessness and melodrama. Besides the small but businesslike policemen with large, visible revolvers who seem to be on every corner and who materialize in swarms at the slightest infringement of the code, the highways are patrolled by that picturesque body of men known as rurales, of whom there are between four and five thousand. After the fall of Santa Anna, the organized troop of ranchmen (known as “cuerados” from the leather clothes they wore) became bandits and gained for themselves the name of “plateados,” it being their dashing custom heavily to ornament their garments with silver. In the time of Comonfort they were turned from their evil ways (no doubt on the theory of its taking a thief to catch a thief) and transformed into rurales. Under President Diaz they have attained a high degree of efficiency, and while their practically limitless powers in isolated and inaccessible parts of the country are no doubt sometimes abused, their reputation for fearlessness, supplemented by a revolver, a carbine, and a saber, has a most chastening influence. One realizes something of the number of policemen at night, when they deposit their lighted lanterns in the middle of the streets and there is until dawn a ceaseless concert of their wailing whistles. You may become as drunk as you wish to in a cantina and, even with the doors open, talk as loud and as long as you are able, for cantinas were made to get drunk and talk loud in. But you must walk quite steadily when you come out--unless your wife or daughter is laughingly leading you home--or you will be arrested before you reel ten yards. Even chaperoned by your wife and unmistakably homeward bound, you will be escorted kindly, almost gently (when you show no resistance), to the police station if the city happens to need your services. The combination of quick temper and quicker drink is responsible for much violence in Mexico, but one rarely sees it. One rarely sees any form of disorder, and over vice is draped a cloak of complete invisibility. In most places women of the town are not even permitted to appear on the streets except at certain hours and in a capacity sincerely unprofessional. The facility and dispatch with which one is arrested is conducive to a constant appearance of decorum. Only in a paternal despotism is such law and order possible. One evening I myself was arrested for an exceedingly slight and innocent misdemeanor.

“But why do you arrest me? Why don’t you arrest everybody else? I’m not the only one,” I protested to the policeman with a lightness I was beginning not to feel.

“You are a foreigner and a gentleman and you ought to set an example to the ignorant lower classes,” he replied without a smile. It was some time before I could induce him to let me go.

The frequency of the policemen is equaled (or exceeded, one sometimes feels) only by the frequency of the churches. And, as if there were not already thousands more than the souls of any people could possibly need, new ones are always being built. I was told not long ago of a wealthy man who, on recently acquiring a vast area of land which he contemplated turning into a sugar hacienda, began the construction of his “plant” with a thirty-thousand-dollar church. Their number and the manner in which they monopolize all the most conspicuous sites, as well as render conspicuous most of the others, now and then enables even a Roman Catholic to regard the Laws of Reform with a slightly less bilious eye. The countryside is dotted with them--the towns and cities crowded by them. It seems at times as if the streets were but so many convenient lanes through which to approach them--the shops and houses merely so many modest dependencies. Pictorially considered, they imbue the dreariest, most impersonal of landscapes, especially just after sunset, with a mild and lovely atmosphere of human pathos that one might journey far without seeing again. But even in Mexico the pictorial sense is subject to periods of suspended animation during which one’s attitude toward the churches, or perhaps I should say the Church, is curiously ill-defined. It is discomposing, on the one hand, to learn of a powerful bishop whose “wife” and large family of sons and daughters are complacently taken for granted by his entire diocese--to be warned by a devout Catholic never under any circumstances to allow one’s American maid servants to converse with a priest or to enter his house on any pretext whatever--to appreciate the extreme poverty of the people and to realize that the entire gigantic corporation is kept running chiefly by the hard-earned mites with which they hope to save their souls. In the church of San Miguel (not a particularly large church) at Orizaba, I once had the curiosity to count the various devices by which the faithful are hypnotized into leaving their money behind them, and as I made notes of the little alms boxes in front of all the chapels, at the doors, and scattered along the nave, many of them with a placard explaining the use to which the funds were supposed to be put, I could not but admire the unerring instinct with which the emotions of the race had been gauged. The system, assisted as it is by a fantastically dressed lay figure at every placarded box, has for the population of Orizaba (an excessively religious town) much the same fascination that is exercised upon me by a penny arcade. There were boxes for “The Monthly Mass of Jesus,” “For the Marble Cross,” “For the Sick,” “For the Sick of S. Vincent and S. Paul,” “For Mary Conceived without Sin,” “For Our Father Jesus Carrying the Cross,” “For Saint Michael,” “For the Blessed Souls,” “For the Blessed Virgin,” “For Our Lady of Carmen,” and then, as if the ground had not been tolerably well covered, there were two boxes, “For the Work of this Parish.” But these were literally less than half the total number. In addition to the twelve whose uses were revealed, there were _eighteen others_ whose uses were not, or thirty in all.

On the other hand, I cannot linger in Mexican churches day after day, as I have done, watching the Indians glide in, remove the leather bands from their foreheads, let their chitas slip gently to the pavement, and then, with straight backs and crossed hands, kneel in reverent ecstasy before their favorite images, without rejoicing that a profound human want can be so filled to overflowing. And I cannot but doubt that it could by any other way we know be filled at all. Three men in Indian white, who are returning from market to their homes in some distant village, stop to kneel for fully half an hour without moving before the chapel of St. Michael. St. Michael happens to be an almost life-sized female doll with pink silk socks, the stiff skirts of a ballet-dancer (actually), a pink satin bolero jacket, an imitation diamond necklace, a blond wig with long curls, and a tin helmet. The two women who accompany them pray before the figure of Mary Conceived without Sin--whose costume I prefer not to invite the accusation of sacrilege by recording. The men are straight-backed, motionless, enthralled. One of the women suddenly extends her arms with an all-embracing gesture, and rigidly holds them there--her hands palm upward, as if she expected to receive the stigmata. What are they all thinking about? But what earthly difference does it make--if there be a difference so heavenly? No doubt they are thinking of nothing; thought is not essential to bliss. Then they get up, and after dropping money in the little slot machines of Michael, and Mary Conceived without Sin, they proceed on their way, leaving me glad that for fully half an hour some one in the world has been happy. For beyond the possibility of a doubt they have been happy, and have deepened my conviction that the desire to undermine their faith in Michael and in Mary Conceived without Sin is at best misguided, and at worst, wicked. “Idolatry and superstition!” one hears groaned from end to end of Mexico. But why not? They appear to be very comforting, exalting things. It happens that personally I could derive no spiritual refreshment from remaining on my knees for half an hour in front of these dreadful dolls. But there is a statue or two in the Louvre, and several pictures in Florence, to whom--had I been brought up to believe them capable of performing miracles--I should find it most agreeable and beneficial to say my prayers.

So one’s attitude toward the Church in Mexico becomes at the last curiously ill-defined. The Church is corrupt, grasping, resentful; but it unquestionably gives millions of people something without which they would be far more unhappy than they are--something that no other church could give them.

There are city parks and squares in other countries, but in none do they play the same intimate and important part in the national domestic life that they do in Mexico. To one accustomed to associate the “breathing spaces” with red-nosed tramps and collarless, unemployed men dejectedly reading wilted newspapers on shabby benches, it would be impossible to give an idea of what the plaza means to the people of Mexico--of how it is used by them. It strikes me always as a kind of open-air drawing-room, not only, as are our own public squares, free to all, but, unlike them, frequented by all. It is not easy to imagine one’s acquaintances in the United States putting on their best clothes for the purpose of strolling around and around the public square of even one of the smaller cities, to the efforts of a brass band, however good; but in Mexico one’s acquaintances take an indescribable amount of innocent pleasure in doing just this on three evenings a week and on Sunday afternoons as well. And with a simplicity--a democracy--that is a strange contradiction in a people who have inherited so much punctilio--such pride of position, they do it together with all the servants and laborers in town. In the smaller places the men at these concerts promenade in one direction, while the women, and the women accompanied by men, revolve in the other; a convenient arrangement that permits the men to apperceive the charms of the women, and the women to apperceive the charms of the men without effort or boldness on the part of either. And everyone is socially so at ease! There is among the rich and well dressed not the slightest trace of that “certain condescension” observable, I feel sure, when the duke and the duchess graciously pair off with the housekeeper and the butler, and among the lower classes--the maid and men servants, the stone-masons and carpenters, the cargadores, the clerks, the small shopkeepers--there is neither the aggressive sense of an equality that does not exist nor a suggestion of servility. The sons of, say, the governor of the state, and their companions, will stroll away the evening between two groups of sandaled Indians with blankets on their shoulders--his daughters in the midst of a phalanx of laundresses and cooks; the proximity being carried off with an engaging naturalness, an apparent unawareness of difference on the part of everyone that is the perfection of good manners. When such contacts happen with us it is invariably an experiment, never a matter of course. Our upper classes self-consciously regard themselves as doing something rather quaint--experiencing a new sensation, while the lower classes eye them with mixed emotions I have never been able satisfactorily to analyze.

But the serenatas are the least of it. The plaza is in constant use from morning until late at night. Ladies stop there on their way home from church, “dar una vuelta” (to take a turn), as they call it, and to see and be seen; gentlemen frequently interrupt the labors of the day by going there to meditate over a cigar; schoolboys find in it a shady, secluded bench and use it as a study; nurse maids use it as a nursery; children use its broad, outside walks as a playground; tired workmen use it as a place of rest. By eleven o’clock at night the whole town will, at various hours, have passed through it, strolled in it, played, sat, rested, talked, or thought in it. It is the place to go when in doubt as to what to do with oneself--the place to investigate, when in doubt as to where to find some one. The plaza is a kind of social clearing house--a resource--a solution. I know of nothing quite like it, and nothing as fertile in the possibilities of innocent diversion. Except during a downpour of rain, the plaza never disappoints.

I have grown rather tired of reading in magazines that “the City of Mexico resembles a bit of Paris”; but I have grown much more tired of the people who have also read it and repeat it as if they had evolved the comparison unaided--particularly as the City of Mexico doesn’t in the least resemble a bit of Paris. It resembles absolutely nothing in the world except itself. To criticise it as having most of the objectionable features and few of the attractions of a great city would be unfair; but first telling myself that I _am_ unfair, I always think of it in those terms. In truth it is a great and wonderful city, and it grows more wonderful every day; also, I am inclined to believe, more disagreeable. Unfortunately I did not see it until after I had spent six months in Mexico--in Vera Cruz, in Jalapa, in Orizaba, in Puebla, in the depths of the country--and when it finally burst upon me in all its shallow brilliancy, I felt that I was no longer in Mexico, but without the compensation of seeming to be somewhere else. I certainly did not seem to be in Paris. The fact of going to a place for no reason other than to see what it is like, always stands between me and a proper appreciation of it. It does, I think, with everyone, although it is not generally realized and admitted. A certain amount of preoccupation while visiting a city is essential to receiving just impressions of it. The formation of judgments should be gradual and unconscious--should resemble the processes of digestion. I have been in the capital of the republic half a dozen times, but I have never, so to speak, digested it; I have merely looked without losing consciousness of the fact that I was looking, which is conducive to seeing too much on the one hand, and on the other, too little.

After the jungle and the smaller places, the city impressed me, on arriving at night, as wonderfully brilliant. There were asphalted streets, vistas of illuminated shop windows, enormous electric cars, the inviting glow of theater entrances, a frantic darting of cabs and automobiles, and swarms of people in a strangely un-Mexican hurry. The noises and the lights were the noises and the lights of a metropolis. Even daylight did not, for the first morning and afternoon, have any appreciable effect upon the general sense of size and effulgence. But somewhere within forty-eight hours the place, to a mere observer, began to contract--its glitter became increasingly difficult to discern. It was not a disappointment exactly, but neither was it “just like a bit of Paris.” It remained extremely interesting--geographically, historically, architecturally--but it was oddly lacking in the one quality everybody is led to believe it has in a superlative degree. Without doubt I shall be thought trifling to mention it at all. In fact I don’t believe I _can_ mention it, as I don’t precisely know what it is, and the only way in which I can hope to make myself even partly clear will sound not only trifling but foolish. I mean--the City of Mexico lacks the indefinable quality that makes one either desirous of putting on one’s best clothes, or regretful that one has not better clothes to put on. To dear reader this may mean something or it may not. For me it instantly recreates an atmosphere, recalls certain streets at certain hours in New York, in Paris, in London--in a few of the less down-at-the-heel, Congoesque localities of Washington. One may or may not possess the garments in question. One might not take the trouble to put them on if one did. But the feeling, I am sure, is known to everyone; the feeling that in some places there is a pleasantly exacting standard in the amenities of appearance which one must either approximate, or remain an outsider. In the City of Mexico one is nowhere subject to such aspirations or misgivings, in spite of the “palatial residences,” the superb horses, the weekly display of beauty and fashion. For the place has upon one--it has at least upon me--the effect of something new and indeterminate and mongrel, which for a city founded in 1522 is a decidedly curious effect to exert.

It arises without doubt from the prosperity and growth of the place--the manner in which it is tearing down and building up and reaching out--gradually transforming whole streets of old Spanish and Mexican houses into buildings that are modern and heterogeneous. In its center, some five or six adjacent streets appear to have been almost wholly so converted, the final proof of it being that in front of the occasional elaborately carved old doorway or armorial-bearing façade and castellated top, one instinctively pauses as in the presence of a curiosity. Imbedded as they are in unusually unattractive quarters of purely native origin, these half a dozen business streets suggest a small city in the heart of a large town. They might, one feels, be somewhere in Europe, although the multitude of American signs, of American products, and American residents, by which one is on all sides confronted, makes it impossible to decide where. There is a surprising transformation, too, on the left of the Paseo, along the line of the electric cars on the way to the castle of Chapultepec. (A lady in the throes of displaying an interest in Mexico exclaimed to me the other day: “There have been so many earthquakes in Mexico of late that I suppose Chapultepec is _very_ active!”) The bare, flat territory is growing an enormous crop of detached dwellings that seek to superimpose Mexican characteristics upon an American suburban-villa foundation, with results not always felicitous. Outwardly, at least, much of the city is being de-Mexicanized, and whereas the traveler, to whom it has been a gate of entrance, has eyes and adjectives only for its age, its singularity, its picturesqueness (all of which are indisputably there), the traveler who sees it last--for whom it is an exit--is more inclined merely to be discomposed by its uncompleted modernity.

For, not unreasonably, he expects to find there some of the frills of civilization; luxurious hotels, “smart” restaurants, an embarrassing choice of cafés and theaters. Such frills as there are, however, succeed for the most part in being only pretentious and ineffective, like those a woman tries to make at home after taking notes in front of a milliner’s window. The leading hotels are all bad--not in the sense of being uncomfortable, for they are comfortable enough, but in the sense of purporting to be something they are not. The four I have stayed in reminded me of a placard I once saw while endeavoring to find something edible at a railway “eating house” in one of our Western States. “Low Aim, not Failure is a Crime,” the thing declared with an almost audible snigger. Surrounded by the second-and third-rate magnificence of the capital’s best hotels, one longs for the clean, native simplicity of the provinces. The theaters--that is to say, what one hears and sees in them--are quite as primitive and tedious as they are elsewhere. A translated French play now and then proves a temptation, but as it is customary in Mexican theaters for the prompter to read everybody’s part, whether he needs assistance or not, in a voice as loud and often louder than those of the actors, the pleasure of illusion is out of the question. In fact, it is such a matter of course for the prompter to yell through a whole play at the top of his lungs (often reading the lines _after_ the actors instead of ahead of them), that when, as happens once in a long while, his services are dispensed with, the fact is proudly advertised! I have several times gleaned from the advance notices of traveling companies that on such and such a night Señorita So-and-So would take the leading part in the laughable comedy entitled “‘Thingumbob,’ sin auxilio de apuntador!” (without the aid of the prompter.) Nothing in connection with the theater in Mexico has seemed to me more entertaining than this, unless, perhaps, it is that at the Teatro Limón in Jalapa, “The management respectfully requests gentlemen not to bring their firearms to the performances.” Whether or not this plaintive plea is on the principle of the old “Don’t shoot the organist; he is doing his best,” I have never been able to learn.

There are saloons in the City of Mexico, hundreds of them, but cafés of the kind that are such oases in the evenings of France, of Germany, of Italy, have not (with the exception of the delightful one at the base of Chapultepec, which, however, is several miles out of town) yet been invented. In the matter of restaurants (again excepting the distant Chapultepec) there is no choice whatever, if one happens to be in the mood to draw a distinction between eating and dining. People talk of the food at the various hotels, but when speaking of Sylvain’s restaurant they elegantly refer to the _cuisine_. Sylvain’s is a small, quiet, dignified, almost somber place where everything, except occasionally the service, is as wickedly good as it is anywhere in the world, and where the cost of painting the culinary lily is somewhat less than it is in establishments of similar excellence in New York (I know of none in the United States outside of New York) and Europe.

But taking the city as it is (always a sane and sensible line of action) rather than finding fault with it for not being what one assumed it was going to be, it has its moments--moments that, as far as my experience permits me to speak with a semblance of authority, are peculiar to itself. On Sunday mornings three beautiful allées of the Alameda are lined with little chairs and roofed with gayly decorated canvas, under which the world and his wife sit, or very slowly promenade down one side and up the other in two densely crowded, music-loving streams. It is a variation of the plaza idea of the smaller places, the variation consisting in the aloofness of the classes from the masses. And by the masses in the capital is usually meant, although the distinction is a loose one, persons who still wear native costume. A cheap, ill-fitting suit of American cut is a passport to a slightly higher position in the social scale--which somewhat shoddy conception was responsible a year ago for the abolishment of the sombreros worn by cabmen. Until then, these towers of protection had imparted to cab-stands the character and distinction possessed by no other form of head covering. But now, no livery having been substituted, the drivers wear dingy felt hats, and carry battered umbrellas when obliged to sit in the sun.

The band is very large and very good--so large and good, indeed, that later in the day, at four or five o’clock, as one joins the ever-increasing throng of carriages, cabs, and automobiles on the Paseo, one is amazed to discover several others even larger and better, playing in the magnificent circular glorietas along the drive to Chapultepec. In the park at the Paseo’s farther end is still another, and whether it actually does play with more flexibility, feeling, and taste than the bands I have heard in other countries, or whether the romantic beauty of the situation--the dusky cypress grove, the steep, craggy rock, literally dripping with flowers, from which the castle smiles down at the crowd (it belongs to the smiling, not the frowning family of castles) the gleam of the lake through aged trees, the happy compromise between wildness and cultivation--weaves the spell, transmutes brass into gold, I do not know. The Paseo was begun during the French intervention, and although its trees and its statues of national celebrities are alike small for its splendid breadth (the trees, however, will grow), too much could not be said in praise of the conception itself, and the manner in which it has been carried out. It is one of the noblest of avenues and, with the Alameda at one end and the gardens of Chapultepec at the other, does much in the City of Mexico to make life worth living there.

The crowd of vehicles increases until there is a compact slow-moving mass of them creeping past the band stand, into the cypress grove, around the other side of the park and back again. Many of the carriages are victorias and landaus of the latest design, the horses drawing them are superb, the lady occupants are always elaborately dressed and sometimes notably handsome. So it is odd that most of this wealth and fashion and beauty seems to shy at servants in livery. There are equipages with “two men on the box,” complete in every detail, but in the endless jam of vehicles their number is small. That there are not more of them seems especially remiss after one has seen the few. For in English livery a young and good-looking Mexican servant exemplifies more than any other human being the thing called “style.” As darkness comes on everyone returns to town to drive in San Francisco Street until half past eight or nine. This is a most extraordinary sight--the narrow thoroughfare in the heart of the city so congested with carriages as to be more or less impassable for two hours--the occupants under the electric lights more pallid than their powder--the sidewalks packed with spectators constantly urged by the police to “move on.” It all happens at the same hour every Sunday, and no one seems to tire.

When I said there were but few “sights” in Mexican cities I made, in the case of the capital, a mental reservation. Here there are formal, official, objective points sufficient to keep the intelligent tourist busy for a week; the cathedral, the Viga canal, the shrine of Guadalupe, the Monte de Piedad--the National Palace, and the Castle of Chapultepec, if one cares to measure the red tape necessary to passing within their historic and deeply interesting portals. Even if one doesn’t, it would, in my opinion, be a tragedy to leave without seeing, at sunset, the view of the volcanoes from the top of the rock on which the castle is built; especially as this can be done by following, without a card of admission, the steep, winding road past the pretty grottolike entrance to the President’s elevator, until it ends at the gateway of the famous military school on the summit. One also goes, of course, to the National Museum to inspect the small but immensely valuable collection of Aztec remains (large compared to any other Aztec remains, but small, if one pauses to recall the remains in general that have remained elsewhere) and to receive the impression that the pre-Spanish inhabitants of the country, interesting as they undoubtedly were, had by no means attained that facility in the various arts which Prescott and other historians claim for them. After examining their grotesque and terrifying gods, the incoherent calendar and sacrificial stones, the pottery, the implements, and the few bits of crude, gold jewelry, one strolls into the small room in which are left, perhaps, the most tangible evidences of Maximilian’s “empire,” reflecting that Prescott’s monumental effort is one of the most entrancing works of fiction one knows. To the unarcheological, Maximilian’s state coach, almost as overwhelmingly magnificent as the gilded sledge in which Lillian Russell used to make her entrance in “The Grand Duchess,” his carriage for ordinary occasions, the saddle he was in when captured, and the colored fashion plates of his servants’ liveries, are sure to be the museum’s most interesting possessions. Not without a pardonable touch of malice, in the guise of a grave political lesson, is the fact that the severely simple, well-worn, eminently republican vehicle of Benito Juarez is displayed in the same room.

The four or five vast apartments of the Academy of San Carlos (the national picture gallery) suggests certain aspects of the Louvre, but their variously sized canvases suggest only the melancholy reflection that all over the world so many perfectly well-painted pictures are so perfectly uninteresting. One cannot but except, however, a dozen or more scattered little landscapes--absolutely faultless examples of the kind of picture (a very beautiful kind I have grown to think) that the grandparents of all good Bostonians felt it becoming their means and station to acquire fifty or sixty years ago in Rome. The Mexican Government, it no doubt will be surprising to hear, encourages painting and music by substantial scholarships. Talented students are sent abroad to study at government expense. One young man I happened to know was given his opportunity on the strength of an exquisite oil sketch of the patio of his parents’ house in the white glare of noon. He is in Paris now, painting pictures of naked women lying on their backs in vacant lots. Several of them, naturally, have been hung in the Salon.

But the guidebook will enumerate the sights, and the “Seeing Mexico” electric car will take one to them. Still there is one I do not believe the book mentions, and I am sure the car does not include. That is the city itself between five and six o’clock on a fair morning. It several times has been my good fortune (in disguise) to be obliged to get up at this hour for the purpose of saying good-by to people who were leaving on an early train, and in returning all the way on foot from the station to the Zócalo (as the stupendous square in front of the cathedral is called) I saw the place, I am happy to remember, in what was literally as well as figuratively a new light. Beyond a few laborers straggling to their work, and the men who were making the toilet of the Alameda with large, green bushes attached to the end of sticks, the city appeared to be blandly slumbering, and just as the face of some one we know will, while asleep, surprise us by a rare and unsuspected expression, the great, unfinished, unsympathetic capital smiled, wisely and a trifle wearily, in its dreams. It is at this hour, before the mongrel population has begun to swarm, that one should walk through the Alameda, inhale the first freshness of the wet roses and lilies, the gardenias and pansies and heliotrope in the flower market, and, undisturbed among the trees in front of the majestic cathedral, listen to “the echoed sob of history.”

THE END

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

Futhermore=> Furthermore {pg 73}

Oh que bonitas=> Oh qué bonitas {pg 179}

a desert=> a dessert {pg 185}

she as giving=> she was giving {pg 210}

exclaims her hushand=> exclaims her husband {pg 261}

innocent midemeanor=> innocent misdemeanor {pg 272}

of preoccuption while=> of preoccupation while {pg 281}