Chapter V

One December morning, while I was aimlessly strolling in the white, dry sunlight of Puebla, I wandered into the cathedral. The semireligious, semiculinary festival known as Christmas had come and gone for me in Jalapa, but as soon as I went into the church and walked beyond the choir, the awkward situation of which in Spanish cathedrals shows on the part of catholics an unusual indifference to general impressiveness, it was apparent--gorgeously, overwhelmingly apparent--that here Christmas still lingered. This cathedral is always gorgeous and always somewhat overpowering, for, unlike any other I can recall, that which, perhaps, was the original scheme of decoration looks as if it had been completed a few moments before one’s arrival. We have learned to expect in these places worn surfaces, tarnished gilt, a sense of invisible dust and tones instead of colors. So few of them look as they were intended to look that, just as we prefer Greek statues unpainted, we prefer the decorations of cathedrals to be in the nature of exquisite effacement. In the great church of Puebla, however, little is exquisite and certainly nothing is effaced. On entering, one is at first only surprised that an edifice so respectably old can be so jauntily new. But when, during mass, one passes slightly before the choir, and is confronted by the first possible view of any amplitude, it is something more than rhetoric to say that for a moment the cathedral of Puebla is overpowering.

The use of gold leaf in decoration is like money. A little is pleasant, merely too much is vulgar; but a positively staggering amount of it seems to justify itself. My own income is not vulgar; neither is Mr. Rockefeller’s. The ordinary white and gold drawing-room done by the local upholsterer is atrociously vulgar, but the cathedral of Puebla is not. Gold--polished, glittering, shameless gold--blazes down and up and across at one; from the stone rosettes in the vaulting overhead, from the grilles in front of the chapels, from the railings between which the priests walk to altar and choir, from the onyx pulpit and the barricade of gigantic candlesticks in front of the altar, from the altar itself--one of those carefully insane eighteenth-century affairs, in which a frankly pagan tiempolito and great lumps of Christian symbolism have become gloriously muddled for all time. Gold flashes in the long straight sun shafts overhead, twinkles in the candle flames, glitters from the censers and the chains of the censers. The back of the priest at the altar is incrusted with gold, and to-day--for Christmas lingers--all the pillars from capital to base are swathed in the finest of crimson velvet, fringed with gold. It isn’t vulgar, it isn’t even gaudy. It has surpassed all that and has entered into the realm of the bewildering--the flabbergastric.

As I sank upon one of the sparsely occupied benches “para los señores,” there was exhaled from the organ, somewhere behind and above me, a dozen or more bars of Chopin. During the many sartorial interims of the mass the organ coquetted frequently with Chopin as well as with Saint-Saëns, Massenet, and Gounod in some of his less popular but as successfully cloying moments--and never anywhere have I seen so much incense. As a rule, unless one sits well forward in churches, the incense only tantalizes. Swing and jerk as the little boys may, it persists in clinging to the altar and the priests, in being sucked into the draught of the candle flames and then floating up to the sunlight of the dome. It rarely reaches the populace until it has become cool and thin. At Puebla they may be more prodigal of it, or they may use a different kind. It at any rate belches out at one in fat, satiating clouds of pearl-gray and sea-blue, and what with Chopin and all the little gasping flames, the rich, deliberate, incrusted group about the altar, the forest of crimson pillars and the surfeit of gold, I experienced one of those agreeable, harmless, ecclesiastical debauches that in Mexico, where the apparatus of worship does not often rise above the tawdry, and the music is almost always execrable, are perforce rare.

Toward the end of it, the central and most splendid figure among those at the altar turned to execute some symbolic gesture and I recognized his grace, the Bishop. More than half incrusted with gold and, for the rest, swathed in white lace over purple, he was far more splendid than when, two years before, he had confirmed my godchild Geronimo, son of Felipe, in the weatherworn church at Mizantla. But he was none the less the same poisonous-looking old body with whom on that occasion I had had “words.” I recognized, among other things, his fat, overhanging underlip. By its own weight it fell outward from his lower teeth, turned half about and disclosed a rubbery inside that, with its blue veins against a background of congested red, had reminded me, I remember, of a piece of German fancy-work. Undoubtedly it was his grace on a visit to a neighboring see and officiating through the courtesy of a brother bishop in the great cathedral.

Strange, I thought, that such a looking old person should be associated in my mind with so pretty an incident and so springlike a day. For the sight of him took me back, as the saying is, to a hot, radiant February morning when the sun blazed down upon the ranch for the first time in two weeks and I had ridden into the village to have Geronimo, a charming child of six, confirmed. There was the inevitable Mexican delay in starting, while horses and mules fled around the pasture refusing to be caught, while the cook made out “la lista”--three cents worth of this and six cents worth of that--while mislaid tenates were found, provided with string handles and hung over pommels. But we staggered off at last--Felipe leading on foot with a sky-blue bundle under one arm (it was a clean pair of trousers) and his loose white drawers rolled up to his thighs. I wondered why, on this great occasion, he did not wear the neckerchief of mauve silk we had given him at Christmas until a moment later I discovered it in two pieces around the necks of his wife and Geronimo. His wife followed him on a horse, and Geronimo, astride at her back, clutched at her waist with one hand and with the other attempted most of the way in to prevent his cartwheel of a hat from bumping against his mother’s shoulder blades in front and falling off behind. Then a San Juan Indian in fluttering white, bearing on his back Felipe’s sick baby in a basket, pattered along over the mudholes with the aid of a staff. Trinidad, the mayordomo, followed next on his horse, and I came last on a mule, from where I could see the others vanishing one by one into the shady jungle, scrambling below me down wet, rocky hillsides and stringing through the hot pastures full of damp, sweet vapors and hidden birds that paused and listened to their own languid voices.

The river was high and swift after the rain, and for those who counted on another’s legs to get them across, there was the interminable three or four minutes when one takes a reef in one’s own, unconditionally surrenders to the steed, tries not to look down at the water, and with a pinched smile at the opposite shore reflects that: “If the beast keeps three or even two of his little hoofs on the stones at the same time until we reach the sand bar--how trivial! But if he doesn’t he will go swirling downstream like an empty barrel, my head will smash against the first boulder, and it will all be very sad.”

The bishop’s advent had, if not quite the importance of a fiesta, at least the enlivening qualities of a fiestita. There was so much movement and talk and color in the drowsy town, and so many drunken Indians shook hands with me and patted me on the back, that if it had not been Thursday, I should have known it was Sunday. The bishop had not been to Mizantla for some said five and others eight years. But in either period it seems that unconfirmed children pile up amazingly. Grouped about the weed-grown open space on the church’s shady side there were almost four hundred of them, not including parents and godparents, and this was the second of the three days’ opportunity.

But there was the same vagueness as to when the ceremony would begin that there had been about the date of the previous visit. Some, remembering perhaps that most gringos have an inscrutable prejudice in favor of the definite, courteously named an hour--any hour; two, five, half past six. Others recalled that evening was the time, while a few assured me the bishop had come and gone the day before. Nobody, however, seemed to care, and I asked myself as Felipe and Geronimo and I sat on a crumbling parapet and watched the bright colored crowd: “Why should I care? What difference does it make whether I sit here in the shade or in the shade at the ranch?”

But at last there began to be a slow activity--a going in and a coming out at the door of the priest’s house. I watched people go in empty-handed and come out with a slip of paper in one hand and a long yellow candle in the other. The slip of paper left me cold, but the tapering yellow candle mystically called. In Jalapa I had often stood for an hour staring at the moderate revolutions of the great hoop on which the pendent wicks grow fatter and fatter as the velero patiently bathes them in boiling tallow, and I had yearned to possess one. Yet, heretofore, I had denied myself; the desire, it seemed to me, was like that craving for heirlooms and ancestors on the part of persons to whom such innocent sensualities have been cruelly denied. To-day, however, long virtue was to have a short, vicarious reward, for Geronimo’s little soul was at the moment entirely in my hands, and it was but proper that his way to heaven should be lighted by a blessed candle. So when I came out of the priest’s house I, too, had one (“Bang! went saxpence”) as well as the “certificate of confirmation” (“Bang!” went another), on which was written my godchild’s name, and the names of his parents and my name. It took hours for everyone to be supplied, but they were as nothing compared to the hours we waited in the church for the bishop. Except in front of the altar, the nave had been fenced off by a continuous line of benches facing inward, and on these the children stood with their sponsors behind them. Like most Mexican children, their behavior was admirable. They rarely cry, they rarely quarrel, and their capacity for amusing themselves with nothing is without limit. Had I the ordering of this strange, unhappy world, I think all children would be born Mexican and remain so until they were fifteen.

That they in a measure outgrow their youthful serenity, however, seemed to be proved by exhausted relatives all about me who, after the first hour of waiting, began to roll their eyes when they met mine and dispatch a succession of Sister Annes to peer through the windows of the priest’s sala. “Está dormiendo” (he is sleeping), in a hoarse whisper, was repeated so often that--my breakfast had been a cup of chocolate and a cigarette--the hinges in my knees began to work both ways, and just outside the church door I recklessly bought and ate something (it cauterized me as it went down) wrapped in a tortilla. When I returned, the bishop, with three priests behind him, was standing at the top of the altar steps. He was wearing his miter and the tips of his fingers lightly touched one another, as a bishop’s fingers should, on the apex of his stomach. It was a thrilling moment.

Then, combining, in a quite wonderful fashion, extreme rapidity with an air of ecclesiastical calm, he made his confirmatory way down one side of the nave, across the end, and up the other, preceded by one priest and followed by two. The first gathered up the certificates (no laying on of hands unless one has paid one’s twenty-five centavos) and read the name of the child next in line to the bishop, who murmured the appropriate formula, made a tiny sign of the cross on a tiny forehead with the end of a large, dirty thumb, and moved on. The second, with a bit of absorbent cotton dipped in oil, swabbed the spot on which the cross had been signed, while the third, taking advantage of the general rapture, gently relieved everyone of his blessed candle (it had never been lighted) and carried it away to be sold again.

But by the time the first priest reached my family party he had grown tired and careless. Instead of collecting the certificates singly, he began to take them in twos and threes with the result that they became mixed, and Geronimo was confirmed, not as Geronimo, but as “Saturnina,” which happened to be the name of the little snubnosed Totonac girl standing next to him. When I realized what had happened, I protested. Whereupon his grace and I proceeded to have “words.” With exceeding bitterness he then reperformed the rite, and if the eyes of the first priest could have killed, I should have withered on my slender stalk. The priest with the cotton also sought to annihilate me with an undertoned remark to the effect that my conduct was a “barbaridad,” but the third was not only sinpatico--he was farther away from the bishop. As, with much tenderness, he disengaged Geronimo’s reluctant fingers from the candle, he severely looked at me and winked.

Then we wandered down to the shabby little plaza, where I bought Geronimo some toys and Felipe wanted to buy me a drink. But as Felipe was still looking prematurely old as the result of something suspiciously like delirium tremens a few weeks before, I sanctimoniously declined and bade them good-by.

There is no twilight in those tropics, and before the mayordomo and I reached home, darkness gathered in the deep valley, crept behind us up the mountainside, and all at once, as they say in Spanish, “it nighted.” It was impossible to see the trail or even the sky, and we lurched on and on as through an interminable world of black velvet. Most of the way I kept my eyes shut--crouching down on the pommel to escape overhanging vines and the terrible outstretched fingers of mala mujer. Twice we lost our hats, and once my mule stuck deep and fast in the mud until we jumped into it ourselves and pulled him out. On this road after dark it is usually difficult to think of anything except that in a little while one’s neck will be broken; but that evening, with my eyelids squeezed together and my feet prudently hanging free of the stirrups, I kept recalling Felipe’s clumsy, charming devotion to his ethereal little son and the satisfaction he had unconsciously displayed when Geronimo toddled out of the church--confirmed.

Although Felipe gets frightfully drunk, neglects his wife for other women, and regards a machete as the most convincing form of argument, he has excellent qualities; but I shouldn’t think of him as religious exactly. And yet--and yet--Felipe and his wife are really married (it seems rather snobbish of them, but it’s a fact), and from the knowledge that his children have been baptized by the priest and confirmed by the bishop, he gets some sort of an agreeable sensation.