Charles Macomb Flandrau

“ It is a hot and drowsy sound; the Mexican equivalent of the sound made by a lawn mower in an American “front yard” in August. It would send me to sleep, I think, if it were not counteracted by the peculiar rustling of a clump of banana trees outside the window. The slightest breath of air puts their torn ribbons into motion that is a prolonged patter, indistinguishable usually from the patter of rain. To-day it is more like the plashing of a fountain—a fountain that, on account of the goldfish, plashes gently. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One afternoon at sunset, before we had even sighted land, a little French boy accurately summed up for us the vague and various sensations that, during the last few hours of the hot afternoon, had stolen over us all. He had been born in Yucatan and was returning there with his father after a first visit to France. Suddenly in his race around the deck with some other children he stopped short, glanced at the group of half-dozing, half-fanning women in steamer chairs, at the listless men against the rail, at the calm, lemon-colored sky and the floating islands of seaweed on the green water. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Like most Mexicans he is fond of animals. In fact, there is in Mexico more emotion expended on pet animals than in any country I know. They make pets of their sheep and their pigs, and one frequently sees a child sitting in a doorway or by the roadside nursing a contented chicken. Yet in emotion it more often than not begins and ends. Their lack of real kindness, of consideration, of thought, in a word, is infuriating. Everyone on the ranch has dogs, and at times they are petted, played with, admired, and called by affectionate names—but they are never fed. ”

“ For minor objective afflictions there is always some sort of an alleviator, and for loneliness I have found a remedy in reflecting that the sensation itself is never as interesting or as important as the circumstances that cause it. All of which brings me back again to this hillside clearing in the jungle with its lovely views, its outrageous climate, its mysterious people, its insidious fascination. Do you ever have a feeling of skepticism as to the continued existence of places you are no longer in? ”

“ In seventy-five or a hundred years there will be many fine old formal gardens in the United States—finer than the Borda ever was. Under the pergolas of some of them there is much tea and pleasant conversation and one greatly admires their marble furniture imported from Italy—their careful riot of flowers. But at present it is difficult to forget that their prevailing color is wealth, and to forget it will take at least another century. If they have everything that Joseph’s garden lacks, they all lack the thing it has. ”

“ Perhaps this is why so many travelers 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. ”

“ It was novel and pleasant occasionally to putter alone for a few hours in one’s room, or in solitude to lose oneself in an absorbing book, with the half{96}-formed purpose of soon finding somebody with whom to discuss it. But to walk alone, to dine alone, to go to the theater alone—to think alone! To be, in a word, for any length of time, on one’s own hands—face to face with nothing but oneself! ”

“ 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. ”

“ The only legally valid marriage ceremony in Mexico is the civil ceremony, but to a Mexican peon the civil ceremony means nothing whatever; he can’t grasp its significance, and there is nothing in the prosaic, businesslike proceeding to touch his heart and stir his imagination. The only ceremony he recognizes is one conducted by a priest in a church. When he is married by a priest he believes himself to be married—which for moral and spiritual purposes is just as valuable as if he actually were. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On an isolated Mexican farm one spends many odd moments in considering and attempting to explain the traits of the people who condescend to work for one. For most of the problems of one’s daily life there arise from those traits, and by them, all are complicated. The amicable relations between employer and employed everywhere is one that necessitates on the former’s part considerable tact to preserve, but in Mexico both the nation’s history and the people’s temperament combine to render the situation one of unusual delicacy. ”

“ An always interesting phase of the American in Mexico is the annual invasion of the country, from January to March, by immense parties of “personally conducted” tourists from the United States.{223} In private cars—even in private trains—they descend every few days upon the cities and towns of chief pictorial and historic interest, and just as the American residents of England, Germany, Italy, and France shudder at the ancient and honorable name of “Thomas Cook and Sons,” do the Americans who have chosen Mexico as the land of their adoption shrug and laugh at the mention of “las turistas.” ”

“ For money, books, and the habit of “going a journey” tend to draw their possessors toward 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. ”

“ Or did you merely ask me if I didn’t find this kind of a life desperately lonely? Everybody at home has asked me this until I have come to believe that the modern American’s greatest dread, greater even than the dread of sickness or of death, is the dread of being alone. ”

“ The entire working force of an isolated ranch will abruptly cease from its labors on hearing from some meddlesome passerby that in more populous localities the day is being celebrated. That it is, may or may not be a fact, and if a supply of liquor cannot be procured there is no very definite way of enjoying unpremeditated idleness. But a fiesta is a fiesta, and everyone stands about all day unwilling to work, unable to play—the prey of ennui and capricious tempers. ”

“ Here and there the light of a brazero in a laborer’s bamboo hut flared for an instant through the coffee trees. On the piazza, the tired Indians, shivering in their flimsy, cotton garments, had covered themselves with matting and empty coffee sacks and were trying to sleep. In the kitchen doorway a very old, white-bearded man was improvising poetry—sometimes sentimental, sometimes heroic, sometimes obscene—to a huddled and enthralled audience all big hats,{201} crimson blankets, and beautiful eyes. ”

“ Then everyone will mysteriously fade away among the trees, and before going back to the house I shall linger alone a moment to look at the black tracery of the bamboo plumes against the yellow afterglow, with a single star trembling through an azure lake above them—perhaps I shall wait for the moon to come out of the gulf and disperse the silver moon mist that{122} already has begun to gather on the horizon. The world will seem to be a very quiet one—not silent with the intense and terrifying silence of desert places, but peacefully, domestically silent. ”

“ When traveling on a horse or a mule, a night’s lodging for the steed is, of course, even more essential than for the rider, and the mesón, as I have said, is a combination of inn and stable. Primitive and comfortless as they often are, they have for me a fascination—the fascination of something read and thought of in childhood that in later life suddenly and unexpectedly comes true. ”

“ After traveling for three weeks in Mexico, almost anyone can write an entertaining and oracular volume, but after living there for several years, the oracle—unless subsidized by the Government—has a tendency to become dumb. For, in a country where theory and practice are so at variance, personal experience becomes the chart by which one is accustomed to steer, and although it is a valuable one, it may, for a hundred quaint reasons, be entirely different from that of the man whose ranch, or mine, or coffee place adjoins one’s own. ”

“ It is impossible to deny that on some haciendas, perhaps on many, this form of slavery is a happier, a more comfortable arrangement than would be the freedom so energetically insisted on in the constitution. Still, slavery is neither a pretty word nor a pretty idea, and yet, in spite of the constitution, the idea obtains in Mexico quite as it obtains in the United States. ”

“ Oh, yes, there is always a thrill in it—this setting sail for the hot countries. It begins on the dock, slightly increases as one steams past the low, monotonous coast of Florida, becomes disturbing in the exquisite little harbor of Havana, and at Progreso,{11} where for thirty-six hours one stares at the shallow, green gulf water, the indolent sharks and the stretch of sand and palm trees wavering in heat, that is Yucatan, it enslaves one like a drug of which one disapproves, but to which one nevertheless succumbs. ”

“ From end to end of Europe the United States is, and for a long time has been, a synonym of political and financial corruption. We are popularly supposed to be a nation of sharks who have all grown fabulously rich by the simple, effective method of eating one another—and everybody else—up. This is not perhaps the topic the French ambassador picks out to expound at White House dinners, nor does it form the burden of the Duke of Abruzzi’s remarks on the occasion of planting a tree at Washington’s tomb. It is merely a conviction of the great majority of their fellow countrymen at home. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All these people were indebted to their employer for loans, for medicines—for assistance of various kinds too numerous to mention or to remember, and, in their way, they liked him and liked the ranch. I can account for such inconsiderate imbecility only by supposing that after generations of oppression the desire among an ignorant and emotional people to assert their independence in small matters becomes irresistible from time to time, even when they cannot discover that their rights have been in any way infringed upon. ”

“ It is, perhaps, unnecessary to record that I know men in Mexico whose methods of business are fastidiously honorable with Mexican and compatriot alike, but they are extremely rare; far more rare than they are at home. If in Mexico I were forced to choose between trusting in a business matter to the representations of a Mexican whom I knew and liked and an American whom I knew and liked, I should, except in one or two cases, where I should be betting, so to speak, on a certainty, trust the Mexican. ”