A Visit to Don Otavio (20 page)

‘Cannot anyone go and
see
?' said E.

But the rains had churned the earth and, getting off the train, one sank at once ankle-deep into tough, sucking clay.

At ten, everyone had resorted to wet handkerchiefs against their foreheads; relief was still hoped for in shifted positions and adjusted windows, and E still eloquent on the various phenomena of heat prostration.

By eleven, nobody spoke. The mud on the pigs' backs had caked bone-dry. Had I still been capable of fellow-feeling, that spark would have gone to Madame Crapaude's heaving form. Stupor did not lull, it made
one with the heat and the duration and the box one sat wrapped in, the thick, grey, steaming bale of cotton wool: every heart-beat was the same, and every heart-beat was worse; there was no end in view and no end could now be envisaged.

After an existence of this the train moved smoothly out. There had been no warning. One conductor had to run for it, another got left behind. After a short pull, we stopped again, and at a station of similar aspect. Blocks of ice were piled on the roofs of the carriages, and once more we were off, headed towards the coast. It was three o'clock. We had spent nine hours at Ruiz.

Madame Crapaude's daughters shook out their powder-puffs. E and I misused our freshened faculties in figuring out how much of the delay we were likely to make up.

‘We were already a few hours late when we turned back this morning,' said I.

‘
And
late starting.'

‘Well, it's all straight and flat now. We ought to make Mazatlán in two or three hours. Four at the outside.'

The rains must have been heavy. Stretches of track were still under water. Cautiously we crept through steam and heat, green flat swamp and an amorphous vegetation. Impossible to tell tree from shrub and shrub from creeper. They were all creepers: spineless, rank rather than luxuriant. I had never seen tropical flora before, and was disappointed by the lack of colour. Mile upon mile upon mile: no people, no houses, though now and again a clump of cattle standing patiently, belly-deep, in water. One could see their faces and count their horns. We were not making up time.

‘We shall never know where that ice came from,' said E.

Night fell abruptly at seven. The carriage lights were opaque blue, we sat on in weary gloom among the made-up bunks: other wretches were staying on that train. At last the lights of Mazatlán gleamed in the thick night. Quite a number of lights for a forgotten port. A halt, a reverse, shunting, and at ten o'clock, seventeen hours late, we were in.

Madame Crapaude clasped E and me to her moist bosom, her
daughters extended flabby hands, men clapped our shoulders:
que Dios las proteja, que les vaya bien.

A station lit by flares. Greedy hands and impassive faces. A driver who had been to Texas and would not move off before having collected a commission on us from mysterious agents. A long drive in the dark, first on open road, then through lengths of straight, built-up streets. The emergence of the waterfront: a huge, iron-grey, concrete esplanade, a physical blow in its stark ugliness; beyond it the Pacific making its great noise. The hotel. A Victorian Moorish structure, vast, balconied. In the hall, a row of hatted gentlemen reclining in rocking-chairs by spittoons. A thick smell of dead-town, faded splendours and present bankruptcy. An indifferent clerk shoving a key, opening a register.

‘If you wanna eat, better eat quick.'

The desolate dining-room, pilastered, gilt. A dais for a band, empty. A wooden fan like a windmill whirring over our heads from the stuccoed ceiling.

‘What does it mean? Who was it built for?' said E. ‘Forgotten? I should say it was. Wiped off every civilised person's memory. But it must have been on someone's mind at some time: these chandeliers and this mahogany and that pier didn't get here by accident.'

The fish is off. The meat looks purple and is off too. The ice is also purple, but scented. It tastes of plaster stirred with hair-oil.

‘At San Pedro –' said I.

‘Do not mention San Pedro,' said E. ‘It would make me cry.'

A turn on the tree-less front, so like an English seaside pier, shorn of its amusements, its animation, transposed into a tropical environment.

Tomorrow we shall see the lagoons. Tomorrow we shall find somewhere to live. I did not look at E when I said it. Now sleep. It was then that we came to face the incredible room.

Double-doors led into a large, finely proportioned apartment. Two immense, naked, fly-blown windows fronted the Pacific without shutters or curtains but for one tattered velvet rag torn off half-ways. Plaster and paint were flaking off the walls and ceiling. Three huge fourposters were standing haphazardly about the room, their oak thick
with beetles. Roaches in the springs and spiders on the floor. A mahogany dressing-table, a kitchen-chair with a broken seat. No drinking water. The bathroom, a dank cavern. One tap was missing, the other yielded a murky trickle. The lavatory was half-dismantled for some no doubt essential repair. Nothing appeared to have been dusted for a very long period, and everything was on a really grand scale of dilapidation.

‘Do you see what I see? Or is it because I am so tired?'

‘At the best inn's best room,' said E. ‘This must have been the most splendid hotel of the Diaz era.'

‘S,' E said at dawn, ‘what is this ruthless roar? Is there a subway?'

‘It is the Pacific. It looks grey. And quite flat, except for those breakers. Exactly the way it looks at Santa Monica, California.'

‘The reward of travel,' said E.

The glare became unbearable. I went to procure relief. ‘Just anything,' I asked, ‘any odd piece of stuff to put over those great windows.'

‘Curtains?' said the manager. ‘Should I worry about curtains? Our ceilings are coming down.'

We saw a more modest and more livable, hotel in the centre. We saw some clean, comfortless rooms at three and sixpence a week on the waterfront. We found some quite edible eggs, beans and coffee for a very low price at a luncheon counter. We found that it was hot, but not intolerably so. We saw the unprepossessing town, boom-built during one bad period, run to seed in another. What stood up was a blaring art nouveau Cathedral and some municipal excrescences. Life seemed subdued, and there were no signs of port activities. We never saw the lagoons.

They could only be reached by taxi. Last night's driver was lying in wait, naming an impossible fare, ready for a good haggle. We lost heart.

So I bathed in the churning, tepid brine from a machine in a cement break-water in front of the hotel.

We were very, very depressed.

‘Where are we?' said E. ‘You have been so competent with the map.
Where are we in relation to
other
places? Do we have to take a journey to get out of here?'

I went to find the aeroplane agency. The next plane out of Mazatlán was in three days. It was full up. There was another one next week. It was full up too. I joined E in the bar, the only part of the hotel whose decay reflected an Edwardian afterglow. The mahogany, though worm-eaten, still shone in patches; the brasses were polished. The barman was neither Mexican nor American; he was a barman. He made us some absinthe cocktails.

‘You wouldn't want an Armaniac?' he said, ‘or a Benedictine? No, I suppose not at this hour. It's ten years since anyone has asked me for an Armaniac. It's all rum these days, and gin. One has to be thankful when it isn't
tequila
.'

‘There wouldn't be a boat out of Mazatlán to somewhere today?' said E.

‘A boat? Out of Mazatlán? There are no boats at Mazatlán. The port is silted. Didn't you know?'

‘Nobody told us.'

‘They don't talk much of Mazatlán nowadays. Silted these twenty years.'

E looked at me. ‘The train?'

‘The train.'

‘Today?'

‘Today.'

But the Southern-Pacific was not due again until Saturday. It was Wednesday.

‘We may as well have two more of these excellent drinks, barman,' said E, ‘if you will be so kind as to make them for us.'

‘Why don't you take the train of the day before yesterday?' said the barman.

‘Can one?' said E.

‘The train of the day before yesterday is late. It did not come through on Monday. It will probably come through tonight. If you go to the station this evening, you cannot miss it.'

‘Now we can send a wire to Don Otavio,' said E.

The train of the day before yesterday was full of wilted Americans. They had been frantic; now they were dead-beat with their three days' confinement.

‘The line was under water, and we crawled, just crawled all the way from Nogales. Have you ever heard of such a thing? No ma'm! You wouldn't want to make that trip twice.'

‘Not in ordinary circumstances,' said E.

We got into Guadalajara the next evening, only five hours late.

Don Otavio, and Andreas and Juan, and Don Enriquez' Pedro were on the platform.

‘I am so happy. Your rooms are ready for you. You must be so tired. You shall go straight to bed. Soledad will take you a tray.'

We drove into Guadalajara, which seemed like Paris, for a drink. Then we drove out to Chapala in Don Otavio's car. The air was fresh and smelt of hay. We went gently because cows were sleeping on the road with their calves. They had left the fields seeking the warmth of the still
sun-drenched
stones. They opened their eyes at us but did not get up. At Chapala we changed into Don Enriquez' motor boat. On the lake, the night was very clear, and filled with shooting stars. The mild water sparkled, phosphorescent, around our prow. Fish leaped, shone, and fell again. The shore lay softly, peaceful, half-divined. I was in that as it were tertiary state of fatigue where the nerves and senses lie bared to direct contact with the world and there is no longer distance or matter between the vision and the absorption, where the mind races, recording, lucid but empty, and beauty can become ours through osmosis. We landed and saw the façade of San Pedro standing in the moonlight.

H
ERE THERE IS ALWAYS CAUSE to sit up and rub one’s eyes. One had come to expect different things in different places, Aztec Temples in a hybrid Metropolis, echoes of Medieval Spain among swamp and hut, derelict Spas in South-Sea squalor, Byzantine Idylls twelve air hours from the USA, Don Quixote in a bank and the Marx Brothers in the Post Office. One expected to be cherished like a mascot, cradled in luxury, or crawl like vermin, unregarded, over immense distances exposed to every inclemency. One did not, could not, expect to find oneself in a quiet little town,
une brave petite ville, bien calme bien propre
, eating one’s table-d’hôte, en pension, napkin in ring, at the
Posada del Progreso
with the notary and the mayor’s clerk.

Mexico is still a country without a middle class. There are revolutionaries, but no lay mediators. There is public feeling, hideous waves of nationalism, on occasions. There is no public opinion.

There are of course a certain number of people who though literate and shod are neither Creoles nor
Anciens Riches
, but they do not make up a class; individually they either have few civic cares, or try to make a beeline for office. There is no trace of that
fundamental
power of a mediator class: the exercise of pressure through disinterested moral criticism distinct from any direct prerogative; that restraining mystique which has been a practical political reality from the Roman Republic through the modifications of the English Monarchy to the Dreyfus Case. And where this class and influence are missing, change, good or bad, usually comes – as it so largely did in the Latin Americas – through violence, through mob risings, schism among the military, palace revolution.

Revolutionary movements in those parts have always been curiously fickle. An interested individual would make use of a grievance to collect followers. The leader kept his end in view, the followers indulged themselves with a martial outing and forgot theirs. Thus, Mexican Indians had plenty of grievances – though of course few weapons – against Spain, yet secession from that country was only instigated and achieved when the conquerors had become too numerous for the spoils, and the Creole section of the ruling class set out against the Spanish-born and more privileged members.

A mediator class would have been hard put to emerge in Mexico. Where was it to come from? Who were to be its members? Occupied Indians? or the Gentlemen from Spain? The men who sought their fortunes and served their Faith and King in a far-away country? or the aborigines whose cultures were levelled and whose existence moulded into peonage? The Conquistadores and their descendants had their hands full. The Inquisition hovered over their consciences as the Home Government watched over their pockets – at any moment they might be accused of harbouring heresies or of salting away gold. They never sent enough gold as it was. Even land grants were full of strings; the audience might allot vast acres to a faithful servant, and then direct the proceeds towards the upkeep of some church. So the years passed: fighting, ruling, pleading. They were very much alone; severed from the established world, cut off from their place in the order of their time, every step was a new step, and yet they were hamstrung, pinned to Spain, by a hundred bureaucratic ties. They were no intellectuals, but they were men of intellectual appetites. And they lived them. The distinction between the spirit of adventure and the spirit of inquiry had not yet been drawn. There was the first Bishop of Michoacán who admired Sir Thomas More and thus wrote to the Council of the Indies for leave to set up a model of More’s Utopia amongst the Tarrascans. They were versatile men. They were scholars and poets, that is, they had plenty of Latin and read their Plato and composed Italian verse, but for all that they were neither artists nor philosophers. Their accomplishments were part of their renaissance make-up like a nineteenth-century young
woman’s water-colours, and they did not dream of imparting them to the conquered country.

The respective descendants of Toltecs, Aztecs and Tarrascans, whose ancestors bore probably as little resemblance to each other as British shepherds did to contemporary Athenians, lived in common tutelage. They worked where they were told to, razing temples, building Cathedrals, mining; laws were made for them; a style was imported for their place of worship; they were received into their new religion – in violation of its basic tenets – as second-rank Christians, spiritual minors, held incapable of distinction between heresy and dogma, and thus neither subject to the Inquisition nor responsible for the purity of their faith.

Accepting the proposition that salvation is attainable within the Faith alone, that measure was an inevitable expedient, as it would have been beyond the scope and time of any tribunal to deal with the Indians’ many heresies, and as impossible to prevent them. The Indians were delighted to accept a new god, but reluctant to relinquish many of the old ones. Being allowed to muddle on with their mixed pantheon, they stayed contentedly enough in the new faith; and, as it turned out, became in time extremely fervent Catholics. In the course of a few centuries, the old gods faded into insignificant and occasional relics before the lustre of the Trinity, the Virgin and the Saints.

Huitzluiputzli is still about, got up sometimes in wing and crown, tucked away under the altar against a rainy day; yet if the Mexican Indians are still somewhat polytheistically inclined, most of their deities can now at least be found in the
Book of Martyrs
and the Christian Calendar.

So the Indians became devout Catholics, and learnt to speak Spanish. The Spaniards remained devout Catholics, and went on speaking Spanish. The first generation brought no wives so, there was, if not much inter-marriage, a great deal of inter-breeding. The Indians ceased to be pure Indians, and the Spaniards became Creoles. The country also did its part, and in due course the Creoles, through various stages of Mexification, became Mexican Creoles. After some hundred years of living together, neither Indians nor Spaniards were quite what they had
originally been. In some ways they have become like each other; in others, they share nothing at all. The gulf between conqueror and conquered has settled into the gulf between class and class. Each still draws from a different tradition; neither has tried to learn consciously from the other’s. When they are on good terms, they call each other
niños
, children. There they live side by side, in domestic proximity, familiar and remote, trusting and aloof, like so many
fréres de lait,
boys, one from the village, one from the manor, who shared the same wet nurse.

Of course Guanajuato can not be what it seems. We know what is supposed to go on under these surfaces of probity and provincial calm, the wickedness – who has not read their Balzac? – the repressions – their Mauriac? their Julien Green? – the crimes. Every assizes reveals these respectable backwaters as the scene of yet another trial of the Ogre of Didier-le-Marché or Argemont-sous-Congre. Yet there is the surface. In France it is a natural cover, in Mexico it is not natural in the least. The elements are lacking. How this town has managed even to seem what it may not be, is a mystery. Perhaps it is a conjuring trick: the eye follows and the mind boggles.

Guanajuato is in Central Mexico. Guanajuato in Tarrascan means Frog’s Hill. The town is entered through a canyon. The altitude is seven thousand feet, the climate fair. Architecturally, it is very pretty: steep streets of white houses of a simple seventeenth-century Moorish cast, winding up and down a hillside. Its history was exceptionally savage, and its past prosperity fabulous.

It has one endearing absurdity, a neo-classical theatre with a great portico and nine muses standing waving on the cornice, the earnest product of somebody’s recollections of the Madeleine, the Parthenon and the present Comédie Française, and his more solid study of what may have been the Municipal Theatre at Toulouse built under the presidency of Jules Grévy. It is quite small and executed all over in bright green stone. This hallucinatory touch gives it – against every intention of the architect – a cozy and exotic charm. The town’s advertised chief sight is the Ossuary, a vault in which the bones of the very poor repose in a
promiscuous heap, and the roughly embalmed bodies of the dead of intermediate means are stood upright against the walls. This place is open to visitors at regular hours. (Gratuity.)

Much of the worst fighting of the Revolutionary Wars was done in Central Mexico. In 1810 Guanajuato, which has a tremendous fortress, was held by the Spanish and besieged by an army of Independents headed by Hidalgo himself. Don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the present national hero, was, one might remember, a Creole parish priest. After a hard siege, the assault – an appalling struggle as both sides fought with utter courage and ferocity. It ended with fire set to wooden doors, hand-to-hand fighting in the patio and a kill on the roof. Then the victorious Independents sacked the town. Three days later the Guanajuatans reacted by breaking into the fortress and murdering the only people they could, the Royalist prisoners, some two hundred disarmed Spanish soldiers. Thereupon other Spaniards marched upon the town, set siege to it in their turn and in due course captured it from the Independents.
They
ordered the execution of every person captured, man, woman or child. And when a few months later Hidalgo, Ignacio Allende and some other Independence leaders were taken at Chihuahua and executed, their heads were sent to Guanajuato, put in iron cages and hung up outside the fortress. There they stayed exposed for ten years. Then the Independence Movement won, New Spain became the Republic of Mexico; the heads were taken to Mexico City in a crystal urn and given a state burial. Then ex-Lieutenant Augustín Iturbide, a very young mestizo and another of the revolutionary leaders, made himself Emperor of Mexico. Young as he was, Augustín I was married, and had his wife and himself solemnly crowned and anointed at Mexico Cathedral. The First Empire lasted three hundred and seven days. Augustín abdicated; was exiled; went to England; returned, and landed again in Mexico and, in the more summary fashion of that country, was shot. One wonders whether Stendhal ever heard of Augustín Iturbide.

Then the country became a Constitutional Republic. The first President changed his name from Fernandez to Guadalupe-Victoria, in honour both of his victory and the national patron saint, the Holy Virgin
of Guadalupe. Then he abolished other people’s titles. Soon, two Franciscan Friars rose against the obtaining form of government; General Santa Anna, a Creole jack-in-the-box, rose to defend it; and there began the War between the Centralists and the Federalists. Provinces revolted, bands gathered, armies were on the march, sieges laid. And so it went on.

Tobacco, maize and wheat now grow on the hollowed hills of Guanajuato, and canary seed is the district’s chief export staple. La Valenciana, El Melado, Las Reyas – once those hills held the richest deposits of gold and silver known to mankind. It was in the days of the immense prestige of gold when no question yet had arisen as to the intrinsic value of precious metals, and these mines changed the history of Europe and had their part in shaping the world we have today. For a century after the Conquest, the gold from Guanajuato was shipped to the Spanish Crown. The Iberian Peninsula did not become more fertile; if anything, rather less food was grown; but as the inhabitants of more fruitful regions were delighted to exchange consumers’ goods for handsome metals, Spain could command every commodity. A fraction of the silver extracted from La Valenciana paid for the men and timber that built the Armada. Spain became a power and of course a menace. Generations of Englishmen looked at it with the apprehension later felt by generations of Frenchmen looking at Germany. The scales of the Reformation were weighted. The very focus of Christendom was shifted from Rome to the Escurial, and thus from a mellow Latin worldliness to the barbarism and ascetic discipline of a risen Moorish Prussia.

A little gold is still extracted at Guanajuato. It is bought by the USA, who to prevent depreciation has guaranteed to take the output. It is shipped to Kentucky and buried again under Fort Knox.

La Valenciana is now empty of silver. On top of the hill, commanding the town, the canyon and a spacious valley, sun-drenched in the sparkling air, stands San Caetano, the church built as a thanks-offering in the heydays of the mine, churrigueresque, domed, honey-coloured, extravagant and melted, every stone glowing with the stored warmth of two hundred sunny years. We had come with a bottle of wine and a loaf,
and sat below the shading walls, listening into the intense stillness of a crystalline early noon, eating and drinking, blinking into the valley, E talking of the Decline of the West: Spengler having, it appears, dedicated a long chapter to La Valenciana; the mine, not the church.