A Visit to Don Otavio (10 page)

There were none. Or six rooms would lead out of each other, with a cradle and three extra cots to each. I went from inn to inn, reluctant to leave the streets, open to the sense of being in a spacious and peculiar country that for all the stares and pinches and beggars had kept itself to itself and not been gone through, like Italy and France, with a fine-tooth comb; a closed country, the only one among the Latins that has secrets, and where the screws of logic might be turned to the pitch of the Mad
Hatter. When I returned, the sheets had been changed and everyone quietened down, and we all felt a bit absurd in the town of Saint Theresa. In the morning there was another fuss because I thought I had lost a ring in the washbasin, and that was too much and we left for Madrid in a hired motor and soon afterwards returned to France, the land of good sense and the competent, worldly widow where a door had got to be either open or shut and where at first we found everything too obvious and flat to bear, then settled down and forgot.

I have not been to Spain since.

Under next morning's sun, Morelia does not look like Avila and autumnal Castille. All the same it is very Spanish. A town of under fifty thousand, architecturally homogeneous, of long lines of arcades and seventeenth-century façades, compact, grey, handsome, dwindling into mud huts, ending abruptly in unbroken countryside. It is quiet after Mexico City, serene by day and melancholy by night. There is nothing particular to see. From the hotel roof, the view over the plain is enchanting. The inside of the Cathedral is decorated to the last square inch in eighteen-ninety polychrome. Christ wears a wig of real hair, the Saints' tears are pearly beads, the Martyrs' blood lozenges of crimson wax, and all the images are kissed to a high polish. Before independence, Morelia was called Valladolid, Valladolid of Michoacán. Yes, it is very Spanish, but it is not Spain. Like the Puritans on New England, the Spaniards impressed themselves on Mexico. Both settled in a part of the continent whose climate and countryside was familiar and congenial. Both established their language, their religion and a style of building. However, unlike the Puritans, the Spaniards did not eliminate the Indians. In fact, the Indians have about eliminated them. There are now supposed to be only some forty thousand Whites left in a population of three million pure Indians and seventeen million Mestizos, and many of these Whites are white only by courtesy or the use of face powder.

A letter from Anthony announcing his arrival at Mexico City. It seems too bad that we should have lingered there so long and no longer, and he all
the way from Baltimore. It cannot be helped now; he will have to catch up with us here.

‘So you have come from Mexico,' said the waiter.

‘It seems hardly possible,' said I.

‘Yes, yes, the porter told me. On the bus.'

‘
Did
we get that far? It
was
a long way,' said E.

‘It is a long way to Mexico,' said the waiter.

‘Still?' said E. ‘How splendidly metaphysical.'

‘Long and expensive,' said the waiter.

‘Very true,' said E, ‘and now I am under the delusion that I have reached it.'

‘They say it is unforgettable,' said the waiter; ‘one day I shall get to Mexico.'

‘I never cared for Kafka, S,' said E, ‘tell that tiresome man to bring the soup.'

‘Where did you stay in Mexico?' said the hotel manager.

‘We think we are still there,' said I.

‘No doubt you kept your rooms on,' said the manager.

‘So you have been to Mexico?' said the girl at the café.

‘That is what we shall tell our friends at home,' said I.

‘But you have really been?'

‘I am almost convinced of it now,' said E.

‘Do you know Mexico?' said the man at the tobacco store.

‘Less and less,' said I.

‘But you have been there?'

‘We believe we
are
there.'

‘You are in Morelia,' said the man and spat.

‘Morelia is in Mexico.'

‘No, no,' said the man, ‘Morelia is Morelia, and Mexico is Mexico. Mexico is bigger, but Morelia is more pretty.'

‘In the Dark Ages, identical heresies are said to have sprung up simultaneously in different parts of a community,' said E.

‘They are foreigners,' said the man to another man.

‘
And
perhaps protestants,' said the other man. ‘Everyone knows that the women of protestants are not allowed to go to school.'

‘That is so,' said a woman. ‘They do not know much.'

It is true. It has taken us all that time and longer to catch on that Mexico (unless preceded by Viva) means the capital and the capital alone, and that the country as a whole is hardly a concept to the people. It has an official name,
Estados Unidos Mexicanos
, several sets of administrative initials, and is referred to in political speeches as the Soaring Eagle, the Bleeding Lamb or simply as
La Patria;
in private conversation it is called the Peninsula or the Republic or America, but never, never is the country of the Mexicans (they do call themselves that) called Mexico.

We needed some mending done and the porter told me of a lady who might oblige. I made up a bundle and walked to the address at the end of the town. It was not far. Over the entrance, a bamboo curtain, was a printed notice saying
DEATH TO PROTESTANTS
. Inside was a single room with a dirt floor, about nine feet by six. It contained a hammock, a straw pallet, a small statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe; a calendar, by courtesy of El Aguila cigars, depicting a bull-fighter in full regalia kneeling before a shrine; a Singer sewing-machine, a tin trunk, some fresh flowers, a number of children, an Indian woman dressed in black, and two three-legged stools. The woman rose, pulled out the other stool and began conversation. I liked Morelia? It
was
a pretty little town. Civilised. Not like some villages, full of black people. Ignorant. One would not care to live among those.

The children looked charming, some bright, some grave, all handsome. They were well-behaved without seeming in the least suppressed. I told their mother so.

‘Oh yes, the dears. Come and give your
mamacita
a kiss, Paco. And you should see the other ones, Señora.'

‘How many children have you got, Señora?'

‘Eleven, Señora. Six at home, five angels.'

Later I worked round to my bundle of clothes. ‘I made out a list of what I want done,' I said.

‘I do not read paper,' said the lady. ‘I read the clock.'

At nightfall, booths off the plaza light braziers, put out clay pots and set about to cook the town's supper. The life of the very poor is often public; in good climates not unpleasantly so. The middle classes find it cheaper to eat in, the poor are often hard put to get themselves a meal at home. In countries where the gas-ring does not exist, inhabitants of mud hut and tenement have to cook in the street or suffocate with smoke. In working quarters in Rome, one often sees a woman or a boy start a charcoal fire on the pavement. On winter evenings the slums are full of small braziers flaming with twigs and kindling, fanned and watched over until the coal has caught and the embers are carried indoors for the actual cooking. Then the food goes out again – a panful of macaroni, a bowl of minestrone wrapped in a dishcloth, a length of bread, an infant, carried by a family to a wine-shop where for the price of a measure of wine they may enjoy light, moderate warmth, a table to themselves and conversation with their fellows. Dinner at Morelia is quieter and more simple. Single Indios wander up to the cook-booths at all hours, carrying neither dish nor spoon. They buy their meal, have it wrapped in a pancake, walk on a few steps, then sit on the kerb, lean against a lamp post, and eat. Later they may push through the low swingdoors into the drinking places or squat in groups bent over some game of luck. The night is packed but the animation is sombre, the business of eating and selling subdued. There is no gaiety. As usual the town lighting is poor. Clustered globes of ineffectual street-lamps fail against the night, against white acetylene hissing from the cookshops and the softer glow of coals, and thus the scene is both shadowy and sharp: small pools of light and immense distorted shadows on the walls, the lighting and movement indeed of Goya. Figures are decorous and silent; squalor is transmogrified into the fantastic. There is no singing, no music, human or mechanical, there are
only smells. Smells of goat and garlic, smells of acetylene and charcoal, and the sickening smell of
tequila
– raw alcohol with an underwhiff of festering sweetness as though chrysanthemums had rotted in gin.

After eleven, activity ceases. Lights and fires are put out, booths shut down; here and there on the kerb sits a soldier in arms or a beggar, quite still, a handkerchief tied across his nose and mouth to exclude the night air. Our footsteps sound loud on the pavements, and again I feel as though I had seen the ghost of Spain.

We stayed four days at Morelia, depressed and captivated by the atmosphere. E said she liked Morelia the way people say they like a grey day or a cemetery. Then we wired Anthony to join us at Lake Pazcuaro, and set off in search of summer quarters in a vehicle so preposterous, so crowded, so lumbering, so smelly, that we decide that the Cs must have been out of their minds to recommend such transport. How
can
it be so frightful?

‘Señora, it is regular,' says the driver.

‘Not regular for a first-class bus, surely?'

‘This is not a first-class bus.'

‘But the tickets say it is.'

‘There is no first-class bus to Pazcuaro,' says the driver.

‘Then why say first-class on the tickets?'

‘Because that is the only class there is.'

‘They shouldn't say that when there is no first.'

‘Yes, yes,
first
. The first class there is.'

A well-grown sow lies heaving in the aisle. My neighbour has a live turkey hen on her lap and the bird simply cannot help it, she must partly sit on my lap too. This is very hot. Also she keeps fluffing out her surprisingly harsh feathers. From time to time, probably to ease her own discomfort, the bird stands up. Supported on six pointed claws, one set of them on my knee, she digs her weight into us and shakes herself. Dust and lice emerge. On my other side, in the aisle, stands a little boy with a rod on which dangles a dead, though no doubt freshly caught, fish. With every lurch of the conveyance, and it is all lurches, the fish, moist but not cool,
touches my arm and sometimes my averted cheek. E has found a seat in the back where, she being of the build of Don Quixote, her knees touch her chin. On one of her feet sits a little old man, obviously very tight. He has a stone crock standing next to him on the floor, which from time to time he lifts to his lips, an operation which pervades the entire vehicle with strong alcoholic vapours. Sometimes he bumps the crock back on to the floor, and sometimes on E's free foot. She winces and twitches, but hasn't got the room to extricate herself. He seems a kind old man. He crawls out at the stops and returns with the crown of his hat dripping with muddy water which he takes around to the children on the bus to drink, and when poor E lets out a small squeak of pain as the crock is once more slammed down on her exposed foot, the old man with an angelic smile lifts it and presses it against her mouth. She takes a polite gulp. It was very strong, she said afterwards, and quite sweet. Then the old fellow scrambled up, tumbled over the sow, hugged the driver and began addressing the air. He was making rather a nuisance of himself. Nobody paid the slightest attention. Then two men got up, seized him, opened the door of the moving bus and with the driver stepping on the gas hurled the old man out into the road. Someone threw the crock after him; everybody craned to get a receding glimpse of a man lying bent double in pool of blood. Then the whole bus burst into laughter.

At the end of this journey we were deposited in a twilit Indian town. Low roofs of mellow red, propped by elaborate carved beams, hung over steep cobbled streets, and the one-storeyed houses looked very old. They must have been built after the Conquest, but are best described as Medieval Indian. The town was dusty, poor and silent. There was no wheeled traffic and nobody wore shoes. It was a mile's walk to the lake shore and the inn, and looking back one could see the red, weathered roofs of Pazcuaro spread upon the hillside like a fan. In a way, it was beautiful. The lake, set in an expanse of shrub and stone, was the colour of clay; reedy, forlorn to make one cry. The inn was a frame bungalow. There was a verandah wired with mosquito netting, a barman in a spotty white jacket, a pingpong table and no guests.

Our room was unswept, there was a rusty shower-bath that dripped and someone's hairpins on the warped chest whose drawers we did not explore. Everything was damp. We spent the evening sitting on the verandah – the barman had said to stay in because of the miasma, and anyway there was nowhere to sit out-of-doors – drinking
tequila
in speechless gloom. The food tasted of swamps. At last we went to bed. The muslin nets smelled and had holes, insects whirred and our thoughts ran on malaria.

In the morning I walked into the town to send a telegram to Anthony care of American Express, Mexico City, telling him not to join us on Lake Pazcuaro. Now, there are two kinds of countries, the countries in which sending a telegram is nothing – you hand in a shilling or a quarter, and a form, and walk out again – and the countries in which it is hell. They're out of forms, they're out of ink, the pen scratches, you've been waiting at the wrong guichet, your destination does not exist, the postmistress pretends she cannot read. The worse the postal service, the better the climate, wine and food. Without such compensations, Pazcuaro beats any telegraph office between the Bosphorus and the Mexique Bay.