SUPERFICIALLY, MEXICO is a prolonged romance. For even its brutal realities – of which there are many – are the realities of an intensely pictorial people among surroundings that, to Northern eyes, are never quite commonplace. I once, for instance, saw a plucky little policeman shoot and kill an insanely drunken shoemaker who, in the marketplace a few minutes before, apropos of nothing except the fact that he was insanely drunk, had cut the throat of a young milkman. The policeman pursued him in his mad flight for home and, just as they passed me on a deserted street near the outskirts of the town, returned a quick stab in the stomach from the shoemaker’s knife (still reeking with the milkman’s blood) by a revolver shot. They then both collapsed in a mud puddle, and to me was appointed the role of arousing the neighbourhood, unbuttoning the policeman’s clothes and slipping two pillows under his pale, brave head.
Of course it was the most squalid of incidents; precisely what happens every little while in New York and Pittsburg and San Francisco, and every few minutes, so we are told, in Chicago. But in Barranca, somehow, the squalor of the affair could not successfully compete with the dramatic interest and the stage-setting. The people who emerged from their blue and pink and yellow and green houses at my alarm (no one in Mexico is alarmed by the sound of firearms), the distracted widow – who, however, postponed complete distraction until after she had carefully gone through her dead husband’s pockets – the pompous arrival of the chief of police, the colour and costuming and arrangement of it all, were far too like the last scenes of Carmen or Cavalleria Rusticana to permit of one’s experiencing any but an agreeably theatrical sensation of horror.
I strolled away after the shoemaker was removed to the police station and the canvas-covered litter had been sent back for the gasping policeman, asking myself by what strange alchemy drunkenness, murder and retribution in a mud puddle could be made so entertaining. The brutish spectacle, I realised, ought to have shocked me, and the remainder of my walk should have been spent in reflecting that the world was a very wicked place. But I had not been shocked at all, and the world just then seemed not so much wicked as unusually interesting. And this, I flatter myself, was not on my part a moral obtuseness, but an innate quality of the general Mexican scene. For it is always pictorial and always dramatic; it is not only invariably a painting, but the kind of painting that tells a story. Paintings that tell stories are declared by critics to be ‘bad art’. Perhaps this is why so many travellers in Mexico find so little to admire.
At first, I confess, almost everybody in the republic looks like a home-made cigar. But when your eyes have become properly focused, it is difficult to remember having thought of so cheap a comparison. Whether your relations with the people be agreeable or otherwise, you cannot but admit, after becoming used to the type, that there is among all classes an extraordinary amount of beauty. In every Mexican crowd there are, naturally, a great many ugly persons and plain persons and average-looking persons. An omnipotent Creator for, no doubt, some perfectly good reason that surpasseth all my little understanding, chooses, in perpetuating the human race, to depart, as a rule, very far from perfection and even from charm. But in Mexico, although the departure can be as far, it is somehow not as frequent.
In its way, the mixture of Spaniard and tropical Indian – which was the original recipe for making the contemporary Mexican – is physically a pleasing one. It isn’t our way, but one doesn’t after a while find it less attractive for that. The Indians, in the part of Mexico I happen to know best, have at least the outward characteristics of a ‘gentle’ race. Even when they are tall, they are inevitably and – one might almost say – incorrigibly plump. One never ceases to marvel at the superhuman strength existing beneath the pretty and effeminate modelling of their arms and legs and backs. Except when they grow old and wither up, which they do, like all tropical races, while they are still young, they yet display no angles. However great may be their muscular development from trotting up and down perpendicular mountain trails with incredible loads of corn, or pottery, or tiles, or firewood, or human beings on their backs, the muscles themselves never stand out. The legs of an American ‘strong man’ look usually like an anatomical chart, but the legs of the most powerful Totonac Indian – and the power of many of them is beyond belief – would serve admirably as one of those idealised extremities on which women’s hosiery is displayed in shop windows. In spite of their constantly surprising exhibitions both of unpremeditated strength and long endurance, there is in the general aspect of their physique more of prettiness than of vigour, more grace than virility.
With these people and others like them, the Spaniards began to mingle in the year 1519, and from the union of Spanish men and aboriginal women sprang the Mexican of today. In them the physical traits of both races are obvious. If, by alliance, the native lost some of his round, sleek modelling, the conqueror renounced much of his gauntness and austerity. For the modern Mexican, roughly speaking, is neither a rugged type nor an unmanly one. He is, as a rule, a ‘spare’, small-waisted creature whose muscles, when he has any, show – unlike those of the pure Indian – in the ordinary way, but whose small feet and slender, beautiful hands are deceptive. A cargador of my acquaintance, whose hands are like those of a slim girl, and who, if he wore shoes, would require a narrow five, thinks nothing of transporting on his back from the railway station to the centre of the town, a distance of more than a mile up a steep hill, a gigantic trunk (the kind that used to be known as a ‘Saratoga’), a smaller trunk, half a dozen ‘dress-suit cases’, a bundle of rugs and a steamer chair. They by no means lack strength, but it is more often than not concealed in a body all sallow slenderness and grace. And gracefulness in a nation is a characteristic no good American fresh from ‘God’s country’ – whatever that patriotic if strangely un-Christian phrase may mean – can in his heart of hearts forgive. The typical Mexican, although not effeminately, is delicately formed, and, in addition to the prevailing lightness and sensitiveness of his structure, a great factor in the general high average of his good looks is the almost complete elimination of the matter of complexion.
With Northern races it is difficult to disassociate the thought of beauty in either sex from a certain clear glowing quality of the epidermis known as ‘a complexion’. But in Mexico this consideration – in spite of the quarter of an inch of powder which the ladies of the upper classes apply to their faces on a substratum of glycerine – does not enter. You know that even under the powder all Mexican complexions approximate a satisfactory café au lait standard, and that, if the owners are not positively suffering from smallpox, they are all good. They impress you, after your eyes become acclimatised, as being an extraordinarily ornamental race, and it is always amusing to notice that, however strong may be the aversion to them of an American or British resident, he cannot refrain now and then from an involuntary tribute to their unconscious habit of quietly or violently ‘composing’ themselves at every moment of their lives into some kind of a framable picture.
‘I hate ’em all,’ an American building contractor once exclaimed to me with deep sincerity. ‘But,’ he added, ‘after my work is over for the day, I like to sit on a bench in the plaza and look at ’em. I sit there a couple of hours every evening. Even when the rascals ain’t doing anything in particular, you always sort of feel as if there was something doing.’
This feeling – for the accurate description of which I was truly grateful – is largely responsible in Mexico for the plaza and balcony habit that one immediately acquires and that becomes one’s chief form of diversion. In a small city of the United States or in England, even a person of unlimited leisure would have to be doddering, or an invalid or a tramp, before he would consent to sit daily for two or three hours on a bench in a public square, or lean over a balcony watching the same people pursue their ordinary vocations in the street below. The monotony of the thing, the procession’s dead level of prosperous mediocrity, would very soon prove intolerable, and he would find someone, anyone, to talk to or endeavour to forget himself in a book or a newspaper.
In Mexico, however, complete idleness is rarely a bore. ‘Even when the rascals ain’t doing anything in particular, you always sort of feel as if there was something doing.’ One afternoon in a small Mexican town I kept a tab from my balcony on what, for about eight minutes, took place in the street below. Although the town was small and the day an unusually quiet one, owing to a fiesta in the neighbourhood to which many of the inhabitants had gone, there was no dearth of incident against the usual background of big-hatted cargadores waiting for employment in the middle of the street; of burros, each with four large cobblestones in a box on its back; of biblical-looking girls (an endless stream of them) bearing huge water jars to and from a circular fountain lined with pale-blue tiles; of old men who wail at intervals that they are selling pineapple ice cream; of old women with handfuls of white and yellow and green lottery tickets; of basket sellers and sellers of flowers (the kind of adorable bouquets that haven’t been seen anywhere else since the early seventies; composed of damp moss, tinfoil, toothpicks, a lace petticoat, a wooden handle, and, yes, some flowers arranged in circles according to colour); of mozos who you feel sure have been sent on an errand and told to ‘come right back’, but who have apparently no intention of returning for several hours; of ladies draped in black lace on their way to meditate in church; of hundreds of other leisurely moving figures that were as a bright-coloured, shifting chorus to the more striking episodes.
Item one (so runs my page of hasty notes): three rather fragile-looking young men swinging along with a grand piano on their heads. Under my window they all stop a moment to let one of them ask a passer-by to stick a cigarette in his mouth and light it, which is duly done.
Item two: a flock of sheep followed by a shepherd in clean white cotton with a crimson sarape around his shoulders. He looks like Vedder’s Lazarus. The sheep have just piled into the open door of the hotel and are trying to come upstairs. In the excitement a new-born lamb has its leg hurt. The shepherd gathers it in his arms, wraps it in the sarape, thoughtfully kisses it twice on the head and proceeds.
Item three: a funeral. As there are only three streets in this place that aren’t built up and down a mountainside, there are no vehicles, and coffins, like everything else, are carried on men’s backs. This is an unusually expensive coffin, but then of course the silver handles are only hired for the occasion. They’ll be removed at the grave, as otherwise they would be dug up and stolen. I wonder why women so rarely go to funerals here? There is a string of men a block long, but no women. Some of them (probably relatives) have in their hands lighted candles tied with crape. They are nice, fat candles and don’t blow out. Everybody in the street takes his hat off as the cortège passes.
Item four: the daily pack train of mules from the Concepción sugar hacienda. There must be two hundred and fifty of them, and their hoofs clatter on the cobblestones like magnified hail. The street is jammed with them, and where the sidewalk narrows to almost nothing, people are trying to efface themselves against the wall. A wonderful exhibition of movement and colour in the blazing sunlight: the warm seal-brown of the mules, the paler yellow-brown of the burlap in which are wrapped the conical sugar loaves (eight to a mule), with the arrieros in yellow straw hats, brilliant blue shirts and scarlet waist bandas bringing up the rear.
Item five: a dog fight.
Item six: another and much worse dog fight.
Item seven: an Indian woman with apparently a whole poultry farm half-concealed upon her person. She calls up to ask if I would like to buy a chicken. Why on earth should a young man on a balcony of a hotel bedroom like to buy a chicken?
Item eight: an acquaintance makes a megaphone of his hands and enquires if I am very busy. I reply, ‘Yes, frightfully’, and we adjourn to the plaza for the afternoon.