VIII

WEALTH, EDUCATION and travel often combine to render unimportant, persons who, had they stayed at home in a state of comparative poverty and ignorance, would, perhaps, have been worthy of one’s serious consideration. For money, books and the habit of ‘going a journey’ tend to draw their possessors towards the symmetrical eddy known as ‘society’, and society cannot for long endure anything essentially unlike itself. One’s lot may be cast in New York, Paris, London, St Petersburg, Rome, Madrid, or the City of Mexico, but in so far as one is ‘in society’ in any of those places one conforms, outwardly at least, to a system of ethics, etiquette, dress, food, drink and division of time that obtains, with a few local differences, in all the others. My acquaintance among Mexicans of wealth, education and extensive experience is not, I confess, numerous, but it is sufficient constantly to remind me of that ever-increasing ‘smallness of the world’ we hear so much about, and to impress upon me how distressingly nice and similar are persons the world over who have money, education, the habit of society and little else. One Mexican family I happened not long ago to see every day for three months was an excellent example of this pleasant, cosmopolitan blight. They somehow ought to have been as florid and real, as indigenous to the volcanic soil, as were the hundred and fifty others (we were at a small ‘health resort’) who had gathered under the same roof from all parts of the republic. Papa ought to have joined in the noisy, frantic games in the sala after dinner and with a complete and engaging lack of self-consciousness made a monkey of himself, as did the other men; mamma ought to have come to breakfast in an unbelted dressing sack with her long, black, wet hair hanging down her back against a blue or yellow bath towel attached by safety pins to her shoulders, as did her lady compatriots. The little daughter ought to have worn beruffled dresses of some inexpensive but gaudy fabric (scarlet gingham trimmed with coarse lace, for instance), and on Sunday a pair of rather soiled, high-buttoned shoes of white or pale-blue kid. The son – a youth of twenty-two – ought to have been an infinitely more tropical young man than he was; more emphatic and gesticulative in conversation, more obviously satisfied with himself, and as to his clothes, just a trifle wrong in every important detail.

But papa, who was a lawyer of some note, had been in the diplomatic service, and although one evening he did gravely take part in a game of ‘Button! button! Who’s got the button?’ he never permitted himself the graceful and popular diversion of dredging with his teeth for ten-cent pieces in a bowl of flour. Mamma not only did not squalidly appear at breakfast with her hair down – she did not appear at breakfast at all. The little girl dressed sometimes in the English fashion, sometimes in the French, and at all times was able to chatter fluently and idiomatically in four languages. The young man, in spite of his American and English clothes, could not have been mistaken for an American or an Englishman, but he might have been, at first sight, almost anything else. They had lived abroad – in France, in Belgium, in Germany – and they had lost their tags. They very much resembled the sort of persons one is invited to meet at dinner almost anywhere; persons who wear the right clothes, use the right fork, who neither come too early nor stay too late and to whom it is second nature to talk for three hours about nothing at all, with ease, amiability and an appearance of interest.

Their house in the City of Mexico was like themselves. It had, so to speak, been born Mexican and then denationalised. For although it had been built with a patio and tiled floors on the assumption that the climate of Mexico is hot, it had acquired half a dozen fireplaces, a complete epidermis of Oriental rugs, pretty and comfortable furniture, pictures that did not merely make one giggle, bric-a-brac that did not merely make one sick, a distinct personality, an atmosphere of comfort and all the other attributes a genuinely Mexican interior invariably lacks. It would be amusing to blindfold somebody in New York or London, transport him on a magic carpet to one of the señora’s dinner parties or afternoons at home, and ask him to guess where he was.

However much at a loss he might be for an answer in this particular instance, it would be impossible for him, on the other hand, to mistake his whereabouts could he be suddenly wafted to the little coffee town of Rebozo and set down in the abode of my friend, Don Juan Valera. For although it is said that Don Juan’s estimable wife has the tidy sum of a million dollars coming to her on the death of her father, and Don Juan has proved himself as discreet in the coffee business as he was in the business of matrimony, he is not a citizen of the world. A visit to Don Juan’s is an all-day affair – exhausting, ruinous to the digestion, quite delightful, and Mexican from beginning to end. In fact, there is about provincial Mexican hospitality a quality for which I can think of no more descriptive phrase than ‘old-fashioned’. It has a simplicity, a completeness, an amplitude that, to one who is accustomed to the quick, well-ordered festivities of modern civilisation, seem to belong to a remote period, the period of ‘old times’. We left Barranca at half-past eight in the morning – enthusiastic, vivacious, amiable and, in appearance, not, I am told, unprepossessing. We returned at seven in the evening – depleted, silent, irritable, and ages older-looking than our ages.

The train to Rebozo, where lives Don Juan, slides circuitously down the foothills through almost a tunnel of tropical vegetation and emerges at last in one of the great gardens of the world. One does not soon grow indifferent to tropical foliage. Even when one has come to the conclusion that there is after all nothing more wonderful in a gully full of plumelike ferns, twenty and thirty feet high, than in a row of familiar elm or maple trees, one involuntarily hangs out of the window to marvel at the ferns. The green, damp jungle depths, partly veiled in smoky vapour that detaches itself, sails diagonally up the hillside and then shreds into nothingness as the hot sunlight finds its way through the trees, recall ‘transformation scenes’ at the theatre, or long-forgotten pictures in old geographies. It is difficult for a Northerner simply to take their beauty for granted, as he does the beauty of trees and shrubs at home, for there is about nature in the tropics always a suggestion of mystery, suffocation – evil. I do not know if it is because one is reasonably suspicious of venomous snakes, poisonous plants and nameless, terrifying insects, but tropical nature, however exquisite, inspires neither confidence nor affection. The poet who first apostrophised ‘Mother Nature’ never put on a pair of poison-proof gloves and endeavoured to hack a path through jungle with a machete. In the tropics, the bosom of Mother Nature does not invite her children to repose.

Don Juan met us at the train – which deposits its passengers in the middle of Rebozo’s principal street – and, as it was still early in the morning and there were nine hours of sixty minutes each ahead of us, most of which we were aware would have to be consumed in sawing conversational wood at Don Juan’s, we called first upon the family of Don Pedro Valasquez – another local coffee magnate. Don Pedro’s wife – in a pink cotton wrapper, with her hair down, but heavily powdered and asphyxiatingly perfumed – had no doubt seen us get off the train, for she met us at the front door, kissed the two girls in our party (who, after calling on Mexican ladies, always declare they have contracted lead poisoning), and, chattering like a strange but kindly bird, took us into the sala.

There is in all truly Mexican salas a striking – a depressing – similarity one does not notice in the drawing-rooms of other countries. It is as if there were, somewhere in the republic, a sort of standard sala – just as there is in a glass case at Washington a standard of weight and a standard of measurement – which all the other salas try, now humbly, now magnificently, to approximate. I have sat in many Mexican salas and I have peeped from the street into many more, but it would be difficult if not impossible for me to know whether I were in the house of Don This rather than in the house of Don That, if none of the family were present to give me a clue. They are all long and high and bleak. In the exact geometric centre is a table with nothing on it but its chilly marble top. Over it hangs an electric chandelier (the unshaded incandescent light, like a bad deed in an excellent world, casts its little beam almost everywhere in Mexico), the size and elaborateness of which is a tolerably accurate symptom of the owner’s wealth and position. Around the walls is placed at intervals, as regular as the architecture will allow, a ‘set’ of furniture – usually of Austrian bentwood with rattan seats and backs – the kind that looks as if it were made of gas pipe painted black. Near the heavily barred windows, where they can be admired by the passers-by, are other marble-topped tables laden with trivial imported objects of china and glass and metal: bisque figurines painted in gay colours, little ornate vases that could not hold a single flower, fanciful inkstands, and statuettes of animals – rabbits and dogs and owls – standing about on mats horribly evolved out of worsted and beads. The few pictures are usually vivid in colour and obvious in sentiment.

In fact, the prominence given in Mexican houses to advertisements of brewers and grocers – calendars portraying, for example, a red-cheeked young person with two horticulturally improbable cherries dangling from her faultless mouth – is indicative of the warm, bright school of art for which the nation really cares. The floor is of tiles – sometimes light-coloured and ornamented, but more often dark red and plain – and the ceiling is almost invariably a false ceiling of painted canvas that eventually sags a trifle and somewhat disturbs a stranger accustomed to ceilings of plaster by spectrally rising and falling in the breeze. In hot weather the bareness and hardness and cleanliness of these places, the absence of upholstery and yielding surfaces, the fact that the floors can be sprinkled and swabbed off with a wet mop, are most agreeable. But whereas in some parts of Mexico one or two days of a month may be warm and the other twenty-nine or thirty cool or even cold, the sala, with its inevitable echo, frozen floors, and pitiless draughts, is usually as inviting as a mortuary chapel. Don Pedro’s, besides containing precisely what I have enumerated, had an upright piano, a canary and a phonograph, and if I had needed any proof of the fact that Mexican nerves are of an entirely different quality from our own, the hour and a half we spent there would have supplied it.

In the first place, when ‘entertaining company’ in Mexico everybody talks all the time, nobody listens, and the voices of the women are more often than not loud and harsh. When they hit upon a subject with possibilities in the way of narrative and detail, they cling to it, develop it, expand it, and exhaust it, and then go back and do it all over again. On this occasion the topic that naturally suggested itself when Don Pedro appeared, limping slightly and leaning on the arm of one of his daughters, was the accident he had met with some months before while out riding with three of the Americans who were now calling on him. There was the usual preliminary skirmish of politeness, and then followed the conversational engagement. It lasted for an hour and a quarter, and except for the fact that during its progress one of my compatriots developed a headache and I became temporarily deaf, it was no doubt a draw. Don Pedro told his story, which began with the pedigree and biography of the horse that had thrown him, the combination of circumstances that had led up to his riding him instead of some other horse, the nature of the weather on that historical morning, the condition of the roads, the various careless happy thoughts and remarks he had indulged in just before the fatal moment, the fatal moment itself, the sensations and reflections of a Mexican gentleman on returning to consciousness after a bump on the head…

But it must not be supposed that anyone except me (who had not been present at the accident) was listening to Don Pedro or paying the slightest attention to him. His wife, with hands outstretched and flung in the air, with eyes now rolling, now flashing, was screaming her version; just how she had spent her time between the departure of the blithesome cavalcade and its unexpected appearance with a litter in its midst; what she had unsuspectingly remarked to her daughter and one of the servants when first she descried it; what they had respectively replied; what she did next, and what she did after that and the sensations of a Mexican lady on hearing that her husband had been thrown from his horse and rendered unconscious…

My three American friends, who live in Mexico and have learned how to project themselves into the spirit of every social situation, were meeting the demands of the moment by bellowing their more or less fictitious tales, and in the narrow street beyond the long, open windows, the train we had just left (it was so near we could have leaned out and touched it) was making wholly unsuccessful efforts to return to Barranca. The whistle and bell of the engine shrieked and rang incessantly, the cars separated in an agony of noise and then slam-banged together again and again and again. Most of the time the engine was in front of the house sending a geyser of hoarse steam through one of the sala windows. When the six simultaneous narratives were nearing their climaxes and the train was at its loudest, a little girl came into the room, sat down at the piano, and began to practise scales; a little boy appeared from the patio for the purpose of making the phonograph play the sextette from ‘Lucia’, as rendered by four trombones and two cornets; and the canary bird went abruptly and completely mad. Most of this lasted without surcease for an hour and a quarter. The last fifteen minutes we spent in saying goodbye. The señora kissed the two ladies before we left the sala, and again at the door. They were more than ordinarily convinced that they had contracted lead poisoning. Then we strolled away to the house of Don Juan Valera, where we were received by Don Juan’s wife and five enchanting children, his mother who had come over from a neighbouring village to cook her son’s birthday dinner (she was ninety-three and as bald as an egg) and an orchestra of fourteen pieces.

No doubt one could become hardened to sitting all morning at one end of a parlour, gravely listening to the waltzes and two-steps of an orchestra at the other, and after every selection even more gravely adjourning with one’s host and the musicians to the dining-room for a glass of cognac. But there is about the first morning spent in this fashion a ghastly charm. As the ladies did not take cognac, upon them devolved the less invigorating task of preserving unbroken during our frequent absences the thread of conversation, and I grovelled before them in admiration every time I returned and found that the children and the weather as topics had not even begun to be exhausted. There was all the more to say about the weather by reason of the fact that there had been recently so little of it – rain had refused to fall for weeks and the coffee trees, laden with buds, were unable to flower. With the crop in imminent peril – with hundreds of thousands of dollars ready to dry up and blow away all around us – we could still experience a kind of social gratitude for the calamity, and towards noon I began to feel that among the many kindly acts of our host, his having had in all six children instead of only one or two was perhaps the kindliest. Race suicide on his part would have been not only race suicide but conversational murder. The eldest boy was at a Southern school in the United States, and (this, however, did not emerge during our visit; Don Juan perhaps did not know of it) he had on arriving, before the school opened, much to his amazement, been refused admittance, on account of his fine, dark skin (grandmamma was an Indian), to one hotel after another. The explanation of the person in charge of him to the effect that he was no more of African extraction than were the elegant young hotel clerks themselves, was unproductive of results.

‘I don’t care what he is – he isn’t white,’ was their unanimous verdict, and he found refuge at last in an obscure boarding house. But apparently he had lived down prejudice even in the South, for while Don Juan was proud of the progress he had made in his studies, he was positively vain of his success with the ladies, although still somewhat at a loss to account for the state of affairs that rendered such admitted conquests possible. As modestly as he could he conveyed to us that the girls were ‘crazy’ about Juanito, hastening to declare, as a parent should, that for his part he did not see precisely why.

‘No doubt it is because Juanito is a novelty to them,’ he sought to explain. ‘You know how women are: always attracted by something new. On Sunday afternoons they take long walks with him – but all alone, all alone. No mother, father, brother – no one. And afterwards they invite him in to supper. But nothing wrong – nothing wrong,’ (Juanito was not quite fifteen) he added, closing his eyes and solemnly waving his finger in front of his face.

The dinner (it was announced at last) was a revelation in the possibilities of Mexican cooking, and although the multitude of dishes were not new to me their savour was. Grandmamma cooked from recipes (‘muy, muy antiguas’, they were) whose origins had been obscured by subsequent history, and almost a century had in no way impaired her sense of taste or her lightness of touch. Even her tortillas were delicious, and a tortilla is a melancholy form of nourishment. The mole (a turkey soaked in a rich, mahogany-coloured sauce, composed of from twenty to half a hundred different ingredients) was of course the dinner’s climax – it always is – and afterwards, as the old lady did not come to the table, we all went to the kitchen to congratulate her and shake her hand while the maids who had been helping her looked on in ecstasy.

‘She doesn’t come to the table because she has only one tooth,’ her son explained as he gently caused her to display it, much as one exhibits the dental deficiencies of an old and well-beloved horse, ‘and on top there is no hair – none at all. You see – it’s all bare, just like parchment. She’s a wonderful woman,’ he declared, as he slid his finger back and forth on her skull.

Then we were shown the house; even – before we realised what was about to happen – the new bathroom, to whose undoubted conveniences Don Juan artlessly called out attention, and after examining separately every plant in the patio, we returned to the sala, where the darling weather proceeded almost immediately to save not only the situation but the coffee crop. A series of cloudbursts kept us all at the open windows fascinated, as for some reason one always is by the hissing of rain and the violent activities of tin waterspouts, until their sudden cessation enabled us to stroll out, accompanied by Don Juan and the children, to visit the town’s famous gardens for growing violets, azaleas, camelias, roses and gardenias for the market. There did not seem to be many of them, but it was only later, when Don Pedro and his wife came to the train with their arms full, that we knew why.

In two hours the coffee had flowered, and as the train lurched back to Barranca in the green, uncanny, storm-washed light, through acres and acres and acres of white coffee blossoms, it was difficult not to believe that there had been in the tropics a fall of snow.