Edith O'Shaughnessy

“ Firecrackers are exploding as I write, bells are ringing from every belfry. Grief is noisy in the tropics, even for the laying in the tomb of the Son of Man.
When I came out of the cathedral I stopped at the flower-market near by. It is a modern, ugly, round, iron-roofed affair, but the flowers, the bright birds in their bamboo cages, and, above all, the dazzling air, fling a charm about it. Every modern, ugly thing in Mexico seems easily transmuted. In the old days the Indians brought their flowers straight to the Plaza in canoes by the Viga Canal. ”

“ When Madame Madero called yesterday her rather halting remark that Orozco es muy leal (Orozco is very loyal) was unconvincing, but of course they must hope. She was in dark, rich garments, somewhat too heavy in cut and texture for her size, with a very imposing plume-loaded hat over her pale, tired face. She now wears a beautiful string of pearls. All the life is in her vigilant eyes, and if there is an iron hand in the family, it is hers. ”

“ I shall miss her very much. Besides being one of the most admirable women I have known in public life, she is a pearl of a chefesse.
I have dwelt much on my easy, pleasant days here, surrounded by new beauty and new interests, books, companions—on this experience of an unknown land with nothing of the "pace that kills," nothing of the wearing "concurrence" of the great cities. In fact, I am experiencing to the full, in Elliott's phrase, "the comforts of the tropics."
Elim has been enticed into the tiniest and darlingest of pajamas on the ground of being ready for the next earthquake. ”

“ It is a saddening, mighty spectacle, the presentation of that immense area in the throes of revolution. A few enlightened viceroys at Mexico, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, might have saved the day. They were not ready for self-government, but for Spain the hour had sounded when she was to lose her great colonies; and Mexico, the dearest, the richest, the most accessible, the most [308] beautiful, was to enter on her century of horrors, heroisms, sacrifices—and the end is not yet.
I feel at times as if I were behind the scenes of a mighty drama. ”

“ You have no need for the firm hand when you are looking out upon a valley swimming in a strange transparency, where the hills seem of purest mother-of-pearl, inevitably leading to golden streets, not black heaps of earth peopled by passionate, starving human beings.
Am now off to the Red Cross. It is temporarily stationed in a beautiful old Spanish house, with a garden, and a large patio and fountain in the middle, and doors opening on to it, in the Calle Alamo, a once fashionable part of town. ”

“ These patios of Mexico are most attractive. One is forever peeking in through doorways of strange houses, where flowers, children, washing, mattresses, water-jars, dogs, sometimes a palm or a cypress, contrive to make something always alluring and mostly lovely. We lunched late in the auto, under the shade of some eucalyptus-trees, and then pressed on through the lovely hills and over meadow-bounded roads till we got to the little village of Magdalena, where an indescribable melancholy mingled with the slanting bronze afternoon light filtering through the shade of the old trees. ”

“ We went as far as the Plaza, drawn by the sound of some really snappy music. Indians, mantilla-covered, white-clad women, [14] little children in various stages of undress, and a foreigner or two smoking, were sitting or walking about in the palm-planted square, and under some arcades people were eating and drinking. The domed and belfried cathedral was only a dark mass against the sky, but all the same I deeply knew that it was the tropics, the Spanish tropics. Thus has many a one debarked in a tropical port, and there is nothing at all extraordinary about it, except one's own feeling. ”

“ After lunch we made the rounds of the hacienda buildings. The family to whom the vast estate belongs must have been absent not only one, but two generations—from the look of the rooms. It was the quintessence of "absentee landlordship."
We went through what seemed acres of corridors and half-dismantled rooms, with an occasional piece of good furniture or an old, faded brocade curtain. The library had rows upon rows of yellowing books and countless volumes of accounts of bygone administradores of the estate, the same thing that one finds piled up in every bookshop in Mexico City. ”

“ At San Angel we wandered about in a deserted garden-like orchard. Roses, heliotrope, and lilies mingled with fig, quince, apricot, peach, apple, and pear trees, and soft crumbling pink walls inclosed them all. Beyond were more beautiful blue hills linked to those of the morning, and now swimming in the afternoon haze the volcanoes towering above in a splendor of mother-of-pearl.
These old Mexican gardens are beautiful beyond words, but I think one must feel the magic of them in the flesh—not out of it—to know the full enchantment. ”

“ Mexico can hold the fancy quite independent of the work of man. But when one adds the activities of that creative, potent, Spanish race, infinitely inspired by the background already perfect, with the building materials, tepetate and tezontle, white and pink, giving them what they wanted to place against green and blue, the beauty of the result, wrapped in the strange transparence of the plateau, is not to be wondered at. ”

“ I have some beautiful books on Mexico which have been given me by various people—mostly large, heavy books,—Lumholz's Unknown Mexico, and Starr's Indian Mexico are the last,—or I would send them, that you might share more completely my Mexican étape. It has been a strange summer, taking it all in all.
Madero probably comes in on the 10th of November. It makes one's head swim to think of the mighty changes that are taking place all over the world. Haughty old China a republic!—and Mexico to be governed solely by brotherly love! ”

“ I can't call Mexico a melting-pot exactly, as things don't melt here. But it is a strange place, with strange people and peculiar situations. Society here, blown together by the four winds of the earth, is a mixed affair, and various people have disappeared from the rolls since our arrival. Some come to seek, some, it would appear, because they are being sought, others still whose life demands a change of setting. ”

“ Von Hintze was between Baroness Riedl and myself, and an unidentified Mexican official or member of the dynasty was on my other side. The lunch was sent out from town by Sylvain and was most excellent. We could look out at a great patch of blue sky, and fringing the brilliant edges of the grotto were various cacti and rows of peaked hats and a single graceful pepper-tree. The Indians always spring up, as if by magic, from any place where there is a gathering. ”

“ I have been looking into the history of Mexico since the "Independence"—to try to get some sort of a "line" on governmental psychology. So much bloodshed has always attended a change of government here.
First came men like the priest Hidalgo and Morelos, his disciple, men of burning hearts and flaming souls. Then appeared a set of what to-day we would call intellectuals: Comonfort, Lerdo, Juarez are types. The long reign of Diaz was preceded by all sorts of upheavals, in which any one who had anything to do with government lost his life. ”

“ As we walked in the garden I felt some strange magic [29] exhaling from it all, something possessing and almost imploring. There were such lights and shadows, such contours of cypress and eucalyptus, mingling with quince and pear trees. The old arbor in the carrefour is overgrown with white roses, and the rest of the garden is a mass of lilies of various kinds, heliotrope, and great tangles of trailing pink geranium and honeysuckle. Blue-flowered papyri were clustered about a microscopic, water-lilied lake, quite black in the late afternoon light. Around all was an old pink, vine-grown wall. ”

“ Each step is always historic or legendary, as well as beautiful. The next village is Teoloyucan, where one branches off to go to Tepozotlan.
Since leaving the posting-town we could see the belfry of the church looking pink and lovely against especially blue and lovely hills. The foreground was of maguey and maize fields stretching away to the mountains. Hedges of nopal, graceful willows and pepper-trees, and Indian life, mysterious, yet simple, living itself out on road and field. We were held up for quite a while by a dozen burros laden with fresh, shining skins bulging with pulque. ”

“ Lefaivre and I discussed European diplomatic appointments of his and my governments as we rowed about on the shallow, artificial lakes under the hottest of suns, between the made lands of the new section of the park.
But every time we passed under the little bridge into the dimness of the narrow, tree-and-vine-grown banks of the little stream leading from two sides of the duck-pond, even though the band played a waltz from "The Balkan Princess," and a selection of "Lohengrin," and children were shouting and motors coming and going, that magic fell upon us. ”

“ In this quiet, beauteous night, with the patio holding a thick, silver moonlight spilling over the square, dark roof, this gorgeous Indian world in strange unrest about me, and I myself far enough away to see, I can speak. Show him this some time when he is healed. What an adoring sister thought cannot hurt. I unite myself [200] with the millions who have had their loved ones hanging on the cross, who have heard their sitio. ”

“ The Mexican episode may be drawing to a close, but quién sabe? All life down here assumes a mysteriousness, even in its simplest manifestation. The natural phenomena, the things we consider quite impersonal in New York or Paris or Berlin, seem to perform their operations here in an astoundingly intimate way. A sunset is a more than daily occurrence, due to the cold fact that the earth revolves on its axis just so often; that moonlight experience of last autumn remains in memory, and a consciousness is always with one of an intimacy with natural decrees. ”

“ During the siege of the city the conquerors, watching from afar, are said to have sometimes seen their own captured comrades led up the great stairway to the stone on which they were placed, their chests opened with a special razor-like knife made of obsidian, the palpitating heart torn out, held for an instant toward the sun, this sun, and then flung at the feet of the god of war. ”

“ We were all awakened last night by a terrible, inhuman, mewing sound coming from the patio. It reminded us of "The White Leper" of Kipling. The moon was chiseling every stone and plant in the courtyard; a small light was in the porter's room, where a struggle seemed to be going on. All of a sudden a tall, stark-naked Indian, with his arms held stiff above his head, burst out and began to dance about in the moonlight, making strange passes and dippings of the body before something imaginary ”

“ Now the booths are full of toy wagons, with screaming, harsh-sounding wheels, rattles of every description—in fact, any harsh combination of sounds which represents the breaking of the bones of Judas.
The Indian must have gods—and it is better to have him worshiping the image of one God, the God of gods, and His attributes, than sacrificing to Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, and their like, in blood and terror, or wandering in the colorless and empty places of unbelief. ”

“ The letters which form this volume were written in a period of delightful leisure, when I was receiving my first impressions of Mexico. The might and beauty of the great Spanish civilization, set in a frame of exceeding natural loveliness, kindled new enthusiasms, and to it all was added the spectacle of that most passionately personal of human games, Mexican politics. ”

“ You can't tell an election from a revolution here. It's all lively to a degree. I have now seen both.
Madero has been duly elected, and the streets rang all night to vivas for him. Groups were passing continually up and down the Paseo, spilling into Calle Humboldt. Many students were among them and Latin-American youth seemed at its noisiest. There were some decided expressions of other political opinions, voiced largely in the now accustomed sound of Pino-no-no-no, but the Madero tide will doubtless wash him into the vice-presidency. It's quite irresistible. ”

“ As we passed in under the majestic old doors, wide enough to admit a couple of coaches and four abreast, students were being drilled in the beautiful colonnaded patio, said to be a remnant of the immediate post-Cortés period.
We went first to the Sala de Actas to see the famous seventeenth-century choir-stalls, once the glory of the San Agustin church. Everything one sees in Mexico has been most provokingly ripped from where it belonged and put somewhere else. I got quite sad at the thought of the continual transfers. Something beautiful always gets lost in the changes. ”

“ I always marvel at the self-restraint that prevents the Indians from falling on their own goods and devouring them.
One drives over what was once an Aztec causeway, through a squalid suburb, San Antonio de Abad, to get back into town, where the day of the dead was celebrated by an unusually lively attendance at the pulque-shops. That licor divino had so incapacitated an Indian lying on the road that we nearly lost our lives in the sudden swerve the chauffeur made to avoid running over him. ”

“ Life goes on here quietly, as far as I am personally concerned, but underneath it all there is the unmistakable beat and throb of changing governments, the passing of the old order, the beginning of the new, with all its potentialities. It is a many-colored background. I am sending an illustrated paper of the shooting done by the mob in my street, La Semana Ilustrada, which is printed at the other end of Calle Humboldt, as is also La Prensa, a newspaper belonging to Francisco Bulnes, the cleverest of the publicists here, and a star among the intellectuals. ”