On the Mexican Highlands, with a Passing Glimpse of Cuba

We finally drew into a large newly-built station of white sandstone. Pandemonium reigned upon the platform alongside which we stopped. Men were embracing each other, slapping each other’s backs and kissing either cheek. Women flew into each other’s arms and children kissed their elders’ hands. We passed along through wide gateways and into a paved semicircular courtyard, where were drawn up carriages with bands of yellow or red or blue across the door. Those with yellow bands are cheap and dirty, those with blue bands mean a double fare and those with red bands are clean and make a reasonable charge, all of which is regulated by the Federal government. I entered one of the red-banded vehicles. The driver called two cargadores, who seized my steamer trunks, loaded them on their backs and ran along beside us. The horses started on a half gallop and when we reached the hotel, the cargadores, with the trunks upon their backs were there as well, less out of breath than the panting team, and each was gratified with a Mexican quarter for his pay (equal to an American dime), while my cochero swore in profuse Spanish because I did not pay him five times his legal fare.

I was come to the one-time palace of the Emperor Iturbide, and was welcomed by the American speaking Administrador, in softly accented Louisianian speech.

V

First Impressions of Mexico City

Hotel Iturbide,November 20th.

When I awoke this morning, the bare stone walls of my chamber, the stone-paved floor, the thin morning air drifting in through the wide-open casements, all combined to give me that sensation of nipping chilliness, which may perhaps only be met in altitudes as high as these. I am a mile and a quarter in the air above the city of Charleston-Kanawha, a mile and half above the city of New York. By the time I had made my hasty toilet, my fingers were numb with the cold. I put on my winter clothes, which I had brought with me for use when returning to Virginia in January. I also put on my overcoat.

Leaving my vault-like chamber, I passed along the stone-flagged hallways, down the stone flights of stairs, into the stone-paved court, passed out through the narrow porter’s door and found myself among the footfarers on the Calle de San Francisco. It was early. The street was still in the morning shadows. The passers-by, whom I met, were warmly wrapped up. The rebozos of the women were wound about the head and mouth. The zerapes of the men were held closely about the shoulders and covered the lower face. Overcoats were everywhere in evidence, and scarfs shielded the mouths of the Frenchly uniformed police. All these were precautions against the dread pneumonia, the most feared and fatal ailment of Mexico.

I entered a restaurant kept by an Irishman speaking with a Limerick brogue, but calling himself a citizen of the United States. I came into a high, square room with stone walls, stone floor, windows without glass, with many little tables accommodating three and four. Here were a few Americans with their hats off, and many Mexicans with their hats on. A dish of strawberries was my first course, the berries not very large, a pale pink in color, very faint in flavor. These are gathered every day in the year from the gardens in the neighborhood of the city. My coffee was con leche (with milk). I asked for rolls and a couple of blanquillos (eggs) passados por agua (passed through the water, i. e. soft boiled). For a tip, cinco centavos (five cents in Mexican, equal to two cents in United States) was regarded as liberal by the Indian waiter. Upon leaving the wide entrance, I found the shadows fled and the sunshine flooding its white rays upon the street.

Leaving my overcoat in the hotel, I took my way toward the lovely Alameda Park, where, choosing a seat beneath a splendid cypress, I sat in the delicious sunshine and watched the moving crowds. Many droves of mules, laden with products of the soil, were coming into the city. Later in the day, these same carriers of freight go out again, laden with merchandise for distribution to all the cities and villages of the mountain hinterlands.

An Indian mother passes by, her baby caught in the folds of her rebozo. I toss her a centavo, and she allows me to kodak herself and child.

A handsome man riding a fine, black horse, pauses a moment at the curb. He is gratified that I should admire the splendid animal. He reins him in, and I capture a view.

A rancherro in all the gaudy splendor of gilt braid, silver-laced pantaloones, and costly saddle, behung with ornaments of trailing angora goat’s wool, draws near me. He permits me to photograph his fine sorrel horse, but will never allow me to take himself face to face. He halts, that his animal may be admired by the passing throngs; he chats with friends who linger by his side, but whenever I try to catch his face he wheels about.

The dulce sellers bearing sweets in trays upon their heads; the flower venders carrying baskets piled high, such roses as only veritable trees may yield, come also within the vision of my kodak.

Later, I take my way to the Plaza Grande, fronting the Cathedral, and there again catch glimpses of the life of the city. Here are men bearing upon their shoulders casks, apparently filled, bales of garden produce, crates of chickens. Every sort of portable thing is here borne upon the human back. Now and then one or another seats himself upon the stone and iron benches and engages in gossip. Of these, also, my camera makes note.

Later in the morning, I saunter through many streets, inquiring my way to one of the great markets. Here I linger, going about from stall to stall and taking a picture as my fancy urges. A policeman, uniformed like a Paris gendarme, eyes me curiously, comprehends the power of my camera, and comes up to me smiling. He drives back the crowd, calls up his companion-in-arms and stands at attention, begging me to send him a copy of the picture. A group of errand boys, who carry large flat baskets, and will take anything home you buy, attracted by the mysterious black box, line up and motion that their pictures also be taken. The instantaneous movement of the shutter strikes them with wonder, when, throwing a few centavos among them, I catch them now struggling for the coin. I have become the center of attraction. The swarming street crowd crushes about me, all eager to face the magic instrument, till I am fain to call upon my policemen friends to fend them off.

Standing there, joking with my guardians and keeping the good will of the increasing mob, I am accosted by a tall, thin-bearded gentleman in rusty though once fashionable black. He speaks to me in French. He is from Paris, he says; and Ah! have I really been there in Paris! Très jolie Paris! He also enjoys coming to the markets, and wandering among the stalls, and watching the people, and noting their habits and their ways. He guides me about among the different sections, commenting on the fruits and vegetables and wares. When we have spent an interesting hour, he invites me to share a bottle of French wine, a delicious claret, and then, lifting his hat, bids me adieu and is lost forever among the swarming multitudes.

There is so much to see in this ancient city, so much to feel! It is so filled with historical romance! As I wander about it, my mind and imagination are continually going back to the pages of Prescott and Arthur Helps, whose histories of Spanish invasion and conquest I used to pore over when a boy, and to the tragedies which Rider Haggard and Lew Wallace so graphically portray. I scarcely dare take up my pen, so afraid am I of retelling what you already know. I am ever seeing the house tops swarming with the dark hosts of Montezuma, hurling the rocks and raining the arrows upon the steel-clad ranks of Cortez and his Christian bandits as they fight for life and for dominion in these very streets below.

I stood, this morning, within the splendid cathedral, built upon the very spot where once towered the gigantic pyramid on whose summit the Aztec priests sacrificed their human victims to their gods, while down in the dungeons beneath my feet, the Holy Inquisition, a few years later, had also tortured men to their death, human victims sacrificed to the glory of the Roman Church. An Aztec pagan, a Spanish Christian, both sped the soul to Paradise through blood and pain, and I wondered, as I watched an Indian mother kneel in humble penitence before an effigy of the Virgin, and fix a lighted taper upon the altar before the shrine, whether she, too, felt clustering about her, in the sombre shadows of the semi-twilight, memories of these tragedies which have so oppressed her race.

On these pavements, also, I review in fancy the serried regiments of France and Austria marshaled in the attempt to thrust Maximillian upon a cis-Atlantic Imperial throne. In this day, one recalls almost with incredulity the insolence of this conspiracy by European Monarchy to steal a march on Western liberty, when it was thought that democracy was forever smitten to the death by civil war. But the bold scheme was done to death by Juarez, the Aztec, without Sheridan’s having to come further south than the Rio Grande.

All these pictures of the past, and many more, crowd thick upon me as I walk the streets and avenues of this now splendid modern city.

I have also tried to see what I could of the churches, – the more important of them – which here abound, but my brain is all in a whirl, and saints and Madonnas troop by me in confused and interminable train.

Ever since Cortez roasted Guatemozin upon a bed of coals, to hasten his conversion to the Roman faith and quicken his memory as to the location of Montezuma’s hidden treasure, the Spanish conquerors have been building churches, shrines and chapels to the glory of the Virgin, the salvation of their own souls and the profit of their private purse. Whenever a Spaniard got in a tight place, he vowed a church, a chapel or a shrine to the Virgin or a saint. If luck was with him, he hadn’t the nerve to back down, but made some show of keeping his vow and, the work once started, there were enough other vowing sinners to push the job along. Mexican genius has found its highest expression in its many and beautiful churches, and perhaps it has been a good thing for genius that so many sinners have been ready to gamble on a vow.

When Juarez shot Maximillian he also smote the Roman Church. The Archbishop of Mexico, and the church of which he was virtual primate, had backed the Austrian invader. Even Pope Pius IX had shed benedictions on the plot. When the Republic crushed the conspirators, the Roman Church was at once deprived of all visible power. Every foot of land, every church edifice, every monastery, every convent the church owned in all Mexico was confiscated by the Republic. The lands and many buildings were sold and the money put in the National Treasury. Monks and nuns were banished. Priests were prohibited from wearing any but ordinary garb. The Roman Church was forbidden ever again to own a rod of stone or a foot of land.

So now it is, that the priest wears a “bee-gum” hat and Glengarry coat, and the state takes whatever church-edifices it wants for public use. The church of San Augustin is a public library. Many churches have been converted into schools. Others have been pulled down, and modern buildings erected in their stead. The cloisters and chapel of the monastery of the Franciscans are leased to laymen, and have become the hotel Jardin. What churches the Republic did not need to use, it has been willing to rent to the Roman hierarchy for the religious uses of the people. So many have been these edifices that, despite the government’s appropriations and private occupations, there yet remain church buildings innumerable where the pious may worship and the priesthood celebrate the mass. But the Roman hierarchy has no longer the wealth and will to keep these buildings in repair and in all of those I visited there was much dilapidation.

While it is true that the stern laws of the Republic debar the Roman Church from owning land, yet, it is said, this law is now evaded by a system of subrosa trusteeships, whereby secret trustees already hold vast accumulations of land and money to its use. And although the church cannot go into court to enforce the trust, yet the threat of dire pains in Purgatory is seemingly so effective that there is said to have been extraordinary little loss by stealing. The promise of easy passage to Paradise also makes easy the evasion of human law.

VI

Vivid Characteristics of Mexican Life

Hotel Iturbide, Mexico,November 22d.

This limpid atmosphere, this vivifying sun, – how they redden the blood and exhilarate the spirit! This is a sunshine which never brings the sweat. But yet, however hot the sun may be, it is cold in the shadow, and at this I am perpetually surprised.

The custom of the hotels in this Latin land is to let rooms upon the “European” plan, leaving the guest free to dine in the separate café of the hotel itself, or to take his meals wherever he may choose among the city’s multitude of lunch rooms and restaurants. Thus I may take my desayuno in an “American” restaurant, where the dishes are of the American type, and my almuerzo, the midmorning meal, in an Italian restaurant where the dishes of sunny Italy are served; while for my comida, I stroll through a narrow doorway between sky blue pillars, and enter a long, stone-flagged chamber, where neat tables are set about and where the Creole French of Louisiana is the speech of the proprietor. Here are served the most delicious meals I have yet discovered. If you want fish, a swarthy Indian waiter presents before you a large silver salver on which are arranged different sorts of fish fresh from the sea, for these are daily received in the city. Or, perhaps, you desire game, when a tray upon which are spread ducks and snipe and plover, the heads and wings yet feathered, is presented to you. Or a platter of beefsteaks, chops and cutlets is held before you. From these you select what you may wish. If you like, you may accompany the waiter who hands your choice to the cook, and you may stand and see the fish or duck or chop done to a turn, as you shall approve, upon the fire before your eyes. You are asked to take nothing for granted, but having ascertained to your own satisfaction that the food is fresh, you may verify its preparation, and eat it contentedly without misgiving. In this autumn season, flocks of ducks come to spend their winters upon the lakes surrounding the city. At a cost of thirty cents, our money, you may have a delicious broiled teal with fresh peas and lettuce, and as much fragrant coffee as you will drink. The food is cheap, wholesome and abundant. And what is time to a cook whose wages may be ten or fifteen centavos a day, although his skill be of the greatest!

The city is full of fine big shops whose large windows present lavish displays of sumptuous fabrics. There is great wealth in Mexico. There is also abject poverty. The income of the rich comes to them without toil from their vast estates, often inherited in direct descent from the Royal Grants of Ferdinand and Isabella to the Conquestadores of Cortez, when the fruitful lands of the conquered Aztecs were parceled out among the hungry Spanish compañeros of the Conqueror. Some of these farms or haciendas, as they are called, contain as many as a million acres.

Mexico is to all intents and purposes a free trade country, and the fabrics and goods of Europe mostly supply the needs and fancies of the Mexicans. The dry goods stores are in the hands of the French, with here and there a Spaniard from old Spain; the drug stores are kept by Germans, who all speak fluent Spanish, and the cheap cutlery and hardware are generally of German make. The wholesale and retail grocers have been Spaniards, but this trade is now drifting to the Americans. There are some fine jewelry stores, and gems and gold work are displayed in their windows calculated to dazzle even an American. The Mexican delights in jewels, and men and women love to have their fingers ablaze with sparkling diamonds, and their fronts behung with many chains of gold. And opals! Everyone will sell you opals!

In leather work, the Mexican is a master artist. He has inherited the art from the clever artificers among the ancient Moors. Coats and pantaloons (I use purposely the word pantaloons) and hats are made of leather, soft, light and elastic as woven fibre. And as for saddles and bridles, all the accoutrements of the caballero are here made more sumptuously than anywhere in all the world.

The shops are opened early in the morning and remain open until noon, when most of them are closed until three o’clock, while the clerks are allowed to take their siesta, the midday rest. Then in the cool hours of the evening they stay open until late.

Over on one side of a small park, under the projecting loggia of a long, low building, I noticed, to-day, a dozen or more little tables, by each of which sat a dignified, solemn-looking man. Some were waiting for customers, others were writing at the dictation of their clients; several were evidently composing love letters for the shy, brown muchachas who whispered to them. Of the thirteen millions constituting the population of the Mexican Republic, less than two millions can read and write. Hence it is, that this profession of scribe is one of influence and profit.

I have once more visited the famous cathedral which faces the Plaza Grande. From the north tower of it, to the top of which I climbed by a wonderful convoluted staircase, ninety-two spiral steps without a core, I gained a view of the city. North and south and east and west it spread out several miles in extent. It lies beneath the view, a city of flat roofs, covering structures rarely more than two stories high, of stone and sun-dried brick, and painted sky blue, pink and yellow, or else remaining as white and clean as when first built, who knows how many hundreds of years ago? For here are no chimneys, no smoke and no soot! To the south I could descry the glistening surface of Lake Tezcoco, and to the west, at a greater distance, Lakes Chalco and Xochomilco. Never a cloud flecked the dark blue dome of the sky. Only, overhead, I noted one burst of refulgent whiteness. It was with difficulty that I could compel my comprehension to grasp the fact that this was nothing less than the snow summit of mighty Popocatepetl, so distant that tree and earth and rock along its base, even in this pellucid atmosphere, were hid in perpetual haze.

It is said that peoples differ from one another not merely in color, in form and in manners, but equally so in their peculiar and individual odors. The Chinese are said to find the European offensive to their olfactory nerves because he smells so much like a sheep. The Englishman vows the Italian reeks with the scent of garlic. The Frenchman declares the German unpleasant because his presence suggests the fumes of beer. Just so, have I been told that the great cities of the world may be distinguished by their odors. Paris is said to exhale absinthe. London is said to smell of ale and stale tobacco, and Mexico City, I think, may be said to be enwrapped with the scent of pulque (Pool-Kay). “Pulque, blessed pulque,” says the Mexican! Pulque, the great national drink of the ancient Aztec, which has been readily adopted by the Spanish conqueror, and which is to-day the favorite intoxicating beverage of every bibulating Mexican. At the railway stations, as we descended into the great valley wherein Mexico City lies, Indian women handed up little brown pitchers of pulque, fresh pulque new tapped. Sweet and cool and delicious it was, as mild as lemonade (in this unfermented condition it is called agua miel, honey water). The thirsty passengers reached out of the car windows and gladly paid the cinco centavos (five cents) and drank it at leisure as the train rolled on. Through miles and miles we traversed plantations of the maguey plant from which the pulque is extracted. For pulque is merely the sap of the maguey or “century plant,” which accumulates at the base of the flower stalk, just before it begins to shoot up. The pulque-gatherer thrusts a long, hollow reed into the stalk, sucks it full to the mouth, using the tongue for a stopper, and then blows it into a pigskin sack which he carries on his back. When the pigskin is full of juice, it is emptied into a tub, and when the tub is filled with liquor it is poured into a cask, and the cask is shipped to the nearest market. Itinerant peddlars tramp through the towns and villages, bearing a pigskin of pulque on their shoulders and selling drinks to whosoever is thirsty and may have the uno centavo (one cent) to pay for it. When fresh, the drink is delightful and innocuous. But when the liquid has begun to ferment, it is said to generate narcotic qualities which make it the finest thing for a steady, long-continuing and thorough-going drunk which Providence has yet put within the reach of man. Thousands of gallons of pulque are consumed in Mexico City every twenty-four hours, and the government has enacted stringent laws providing against the sale of pulque which shall be more than twenty-four hours old. The older it grows the greater the drunk, and the less you need drink to become intoxicated, hence, it is the aim of every thirsty Mexican to procure the oldest pulque he can get. In every pulque shop, where only the mild, sweet agua miel, fresh and innocuous, is supposed to be sold, there is, as a matter of fact, always on hand a well fermented supply, a few nips of which will knock out the most confirmed drinker almost as soon as he can swallow it.

I was passing a pulque shop this afternoon when I noticed a tall, brawny Indian coming out. He walked steadily and soberly half way across the street, when all of a sudden the fermented brew within him took effect and he doubled up like a jackknife, then and there. Two men thereupon came out of the self same doorway, picked him up head and heels, and I saw them sling him, like a sack of meal, into the far corner of the shop, there to lie, perhaps twenty-four hours, till he would come out of his narcotic stupor.

Riding out to the shrine of Guadeloupe the other afternoon, I passed many Indians leaving the city for their homes. Some were bearing burdens upon their backs, some were driving donkeys loaded with goods. Upon the back of one donkey was tied a pulque drunkard. His legs were tied about the donkey’s neck and his body was lashed fast to the donkey’s back. His eyes and mouth were open. His head wagged from side to side with the burro’s trot. He was apparently dead. He had swallowed too much fermented pulque. His compañeros were taking him home to save him from the city jail.

The Mexicans have a legend about the origin of their pulque. It runs thus: One of their mighty emperors, long before the days of Montezuma’s rule, when on a war raid to the south, lost his heart to the daughter of a conquered chief and brought her back to Tenochtitlan as his bride. Her name was Xochitl and she gained extraordinary power over her lord, brewing with her fair, brown hands a drink for which he acquired a prodigious thirst. He never could imbibe enough and, when tanked full, contentedly resigned to her the right to rule. Other Aztec ladies perceiving its soothing soporific influence upon the emperor, acquired the secret of its make and secured domestic peace by also administering it to their lords. Thus pulque became the drink adored by every Aztec. The acquisitive Spaniard soon “caught on” and has never yet let go.

The one redeeming feature about the pulque is that he who gets drunk on it becomes torpid and is incapable of fight. Hence, while it is so widely drunk, there comes little violence from those who drink it.

But not so is it with mescal, a brandy distilled from the lower leaves and roasted roots of the maguey plant. It is the more high priced and less generally tasted liquor. Men who drink it become mad and, when filled with it, sharpen their long knives and start to get even with some real or imaginary foe. Fortunately, mescal has few persistent patrons. It is pulque, the soporific pulque that is the honored and national beverage of the Mexican.