A Visit to Don Otavio (25 page)

I
T IS A PROPOSITION of Mexican geographical logic that the nearest way between two points is by a distant third. The only way in fact. If one wishes to get from one place to another, one must go first somewhere else, and we had learnt the folly of attempting to demonstrate this a fallacy. Cross-country communications in England are governed by somewhat the same principle, but the scale involved is not the same. Once more, a difference in degree is a difference in kind.

At this stage we should have liked to continue to Yucatán, from Oaxaca a matter of a mere six or seven hundred miles across the swamps of Chiapas and the forests of Campeche, but it appeared that we could not. There is no road, and there is no railway. As the Indios are so fond of saying, it did not lend itself. If we wanted to get to the Ruins of Uxmal and Chichen-Itzá, we should have to proceed in an opposite direction and either take an aeroplane at Mexico City or a boat at Vera Cruz. To get to either of the latter, we should have to go to Puebla.

It was a weary journey. Back again – tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow – over all those mountains. The buses in the South are not at all comfortable. Every nine hours or so there would be somewhere to stop for something to eat: saucers of eggs and chilli fried in lard, clay mugs with goat-milk and sugared coffee set out in a row outside a hut. There were no forks and knives, or spoons; and there was no bread. The passengers carried their own
tortillas
. A man gave us some of his for a present. It was the one human moment on that journey, and it was cheap to notice and
sad to mind that he had produced the
tortillas
from inside his shirt. Hygiene has cut off man from man more than any class distinctions. Throughout it, E read. I cannot think now how she managed it. I do not know how she stood it at all, how we both stood it. If we live to an old age, we shall tell ourselves about the thousands and thousands of miles we rocked through noons and nightfalls over the surface of Mexico in second-class motor buses, and we shall be dazzled –
Ah, que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes.
Then we were just inured.

Nevertheless at Puebla we took a cab to the best hotel. We found it stuffed from lounge to bedroom passages with authentic Louise-Philippe commodes and looking-glasses. The French were here a long time. Like Guadalajara, Puebla
fait ville
– few Mexican towns do – and like Guadalajara it has kept its character.

There was a shipping office.
‘Servidor,
’ they said, ‘at the disposal of Your Graces.’

But they knew little about the movements of boats to Yucatán, except that they were not always regular. ‘No doubt, you will find out in Vera Cruz.’

‘No doubt. Only, we don’t want to go to Vera Cruz unless we are certain of getting a boat from there.’

‘That is so. If you want to get a boat you must take it at Vera Cruz.’

‘If there is a boat?’

‘You will know in Vera Cruz.’

Unfortunately Vera Cruz did not have a good name with E.

‘Twice,’ she said, ‘I allowed myself to be dragged to a Pacific paradise: you
will not
get me down that Sierra a third time.’

‘Vera Cruz is on the Atlantic,’ said I, ‘and nobody’s ever called it a paradise.’

‘There is that,’ said E.

What was disclosed, from other sources, about the nature of these elusive vessels was not encouraging. One rather eccentric feature was that you were supposed to bring your own food for the voyage. I am fond of reading old P & O menus, and found this disappointing.

Our chief informant was a retired mestizo general who did not live but spent his mornings at our hotel.

‘Good morning, General.’

‘Good morning, Madam. I kiss your feet. How are you?’

‘Very well, thank you. And how are you?’

‘At
your
service. And you, Madam, are you well?’

‘Such a lovely day, isn’t it?’

‘It is not worthy of you.’

‘So glad that dreadful wind’s died down. Do you often get it?’

‘Not while you are favouring this undeserving town with your exalted presences.’

‘The very elements are considerate in Mexico,’ said E.

The General bowed.

‘How many tons did you say that freighter had, the one that goes to Progreso?’ said I.

‘A number not commensurate with your merits.’

‘As long as it gets there …’

‘Ah,’ said the General. The polite part of the call being now behind, he would launch into circumstantial accounts of rotten hulls, defective machinery and drunken captains.

‘Drunk?’ said E. ‘That’s bad. Our Navy and Merchant Marine are dry.’

‘Worse than drunk,’ said the General. ‘Traitors. That Captain is conspiring with the Government at Mexico. There will be a mutiny next voyage. The First Officer is an important Jesuit.’

The General, like many of his kind, had a grievance against the Government. It had halved his pension. Not, he explained, that a respectable general was expected to live on his pension, or that the pension had often been paid, but it was the principle of the thing.

‘I was awarded this annuity after I had the honour of placing my humble services at the disposal of President Calles,’ he said. ‘Now these traitors at Mexico write to me that they’ve cut it. If I have a valid reason against it, I should state it in writing. They expect me to write to them! The impudence. When I was young, no officer
wrote
to a government: we marched on them. Ah, times aren’t what they used to be, and nor am I, or I’d show them. Pen and ink, indeed. Bullets is what they want. I tell you what’s wrong these days – modern arms. Too damned expensive for poor
devils like myself. Those fellows at Mexico are using machine guns now, I dare say from aeroplanes. A government has always a way of getting hold of a bit of cash. My men had their knives, and a chap would consider himself lucky if he had a dozen rifles to a company. Some were clever at making bombs … never had much use for them myself, women’s stuff, not soldier-like, if you know what I mean.
Of course
, when I had the privilege of serving General Villa …’

They were so pleasant at the shipping office that I went on seeing them in the hope of something turning up. They were getting tired of disappointing me and I could see from their faces that they were going to produce quite soon. Meanwhile, we strolled about the town. Puebla was planned four centuries ago on the lines of a modern American city: straight streets intersecting at right angles, so many houses to a block, so many flats to a house. This sobriety is off-set by extreme gaudiness in everything else. The interiors of the churches are blazing forests of gold and exotic statuary, and all the fronts of all the buildings a glaze of every period, shape and colour of
mudéjar
tiles, while cornices and casements are moulded – not reticently – in white stucco. Some of the tiling is pretty, plain gold circlets on azure or deep red; some is hideous. On the whole an arty job for modern taste, but delicately managed, and the momentary effect quite charming. The tiling is not solid like so many mosques and baths, but panels are set in varying proportions in a brick façade, and this is a redeeming feature. Not much brick shows, but the occasional base or edging gives a rest and starting point to the eye.

E stalked past it all, the way Doctor Johnson must have stalked about the Hebrides.

I made the mistake of taking her to the Secret Convent. I knew it the minute we were inside and the guide tapped the wainscoting and invited us to crawl through the opening in the revolving chimney-piece.

The Secret Convent of Santa Monica appears to be a respectable historical fact. It was closed by the Reform Laws in 1857; the premises were sold for secular habitation and the nuns believed to have returned to private life. In 1935, when as the result of a concordat public worship was
resumed, it was found that they had not. The convent had gone underground, literally into the walls and cupboards of a block of houses in a central street of Puebla, and functioned as a religious community for seventy-eight years. During this time the nuns, being of a cloistered order, never emerged. A number of Puebla families were in it; and these helped the nuns in the comings and goings of the priest and the disposal of their dead, covered up undue amounts of ash and smoke and refuse, and guarded them from discovery by blundering tenants. They supplied them with food and – it sounds incredible – with novices. In fact, when after three-quarters of a century the Convent came again into the open, the number of its actual and professed members, although all the original nuns were dead, had increased from fifty to some eighty. There were denunciations; police often searched the interested houses. Nothing was ever found. Were they taken in by the trick panelling? The families who lived in the ostensible parts of these buildings were respectable, they led public lives. Bribes may have passed; perhaps more simply, the search parties did not take their task quite seriously – they might have discovered quick enough the single priest inside the hollow chimney, but the official mind shied off when it came to looking for fifty women supposed to be living these forty years in what unaccounted space there might be in the houses of the Director of the Inter-Oceanic Railway and the Chairman of the National Credit of Puebla. With a little sang-froid, the inspector and his booted oafs breaking in upon the family breakfast could have been made to look very foolish indeed.

In the twentieth century, the rumours died down, and the discovery of the existence of the Convent fifteen years ago came as a shock to the inhabitants of Puebla.

On this scene of unfathomable human faith and fortitude – surely an abstract and solitary theme – now gaping tourists and slobbering village women are made to proceed on hands and knees through
double-bottomed
sideboards and factitious bookcases into a kind of catacombs where they blub or giggle over immured skeletons and a conjurer’s altar. This degrading side-show is called Religious Museum.

With the best of wills it would have been hard for a person of E’s
height to get herself through these openings, and E had no goodwill at all. Pressed onward with the tour we had got as far as a kind of concrete barrel, the Secret Chapel; the guide had finished his
peroraciónes
and was rounding up the congregation to squeeze themselves one by one through the grating in the confessional. He looked at E and recognised the material difficulty, if no other.

‘Favour to bend yourself. I will push Your Excellency.’

E did not bend.

‘Give me your hand,’ a woman said. ‘I will have the honour of preceding you, then I shall pull.’

‘There
must
be another way out,’ said E.

There was. They were obliged to open it for her. I used it too. Only it was not the exit, but the way into the Secret Refectory; and presently the members of the tour appeared, heads forward, wriggling in through a hole below a panel. When they were complete, the guide said his piece, the women touched and kissed, then he pressed a button: a trap-door swung open from under a prie-dieu, the tour dived. E waited. A door behind a tapestry was unlocked for her. It led into the Mother Superior’s cell. And so it went on. An hour and twenty-five minutes of it, from secret cell to secret parlour, from sacristry to robing-room, whisked through a discreet door from one oppressive little stone chamber to another, waiting for the tour to catch up laboriously on their bellies, until at last through a commodious collapsible looking-glass we all emerged again into the drawing-room whence we started. E felt outraged, the guide humiliated, the trippers cheated; the pious women whispered,
hereticas
.

‘Oh S,’ said E, ‘the sights are worse than the journeys.’

After this I went to Cholula for the day. By myself. Cholula is a monument to human thoroughness. The Spanish as a matter of general policy razed every native temple in conquered territory and built a Christian church on its site. Now, Cholula at that time was not only a flourishing town, it was also something in the nature of the Aztec Rome. Quetzalcoatl in his passage on earth had spent decades teaching at Cholula. After his passing, disciples built the Great Pyramid. They also
built nine minor pyramids and a temple or two on every square, at every crossing, in every street. The Spaniards counted them, three hundred and sixty-five in all. They razed three hundred and sixty-four temples and built three hundred and sixty-four churches. On top of the Great Pyramid they built a Basilica. Will and labour were not lacking, even so three hundred and sixty-four churches took a long time. They look indeed like approximate samples of the various styles of ecclesiastical architecture now represented at Rome. And they are
all
that remains of Cholula. The rest of the town, but for some four hundred inhabitants and their hovels, has disappeared. The Aztecs became impoverished, in any case the meaning of Cholula went with the temples. The Spaniards had never cared for it; instead, they founded Puebla a few miles further up where they were less hampered in their plans by the predestined locations of so many places of worship.

Now there is only one parish, but the three hundred and sixty-five are still churches, kept consecrated by mass being said in each of them one day a year. On the other days, the four hundred Cholulans and some country devotees potter about them at their will, adding to reliquary and decorations such items of worship as may take their unorthodox fancies. Toad gods puff their copper bellies in the tabernacles, angels sport feathers and Saint Anthony is hydra-headed. And thus, after all, the purpose of the Spaniards was defeated.

Seen from the top of the Pyramid-Basilica the aspect of the town is most improbable, diminished as it has in size but not in circumference. Between church and church there are only scarless rural gaps, but the distance between a central and a suburban church is still the length of a whole town. Imagine looking upon Manhattan from the Empire State and finding nothing standing except all the drug-stores in excellent repair.