A Visit to Don Otavio (5 page)

As I leave the shop, a small child relieves me of my parcels. She does it with dignity, hinting that it is not so much her wish to earn a tip, as that it is not suitable for me to go about the streets with bottles done up in brown paper and half a dozen meat pasties dangling from my fingers by a string. I do not like being fetched and carried for by persons older or smaller than myself, but realise that here I must submit to so comfortable a custom. There are more shops like the first, and thanks to my companion I am now free to enjoy them all. I buy a bottle of tequila (two pesos a quart and every pint guaranteed to give DTs.), succumb to Campari, but resist Spanish Pernod. After these additions I have a suite. But it is always the first child who receives the parcels from my hands and distributes them among the other tots. We have some stilted conversation. A young man is sitting on the pavement outside a branch of His Master’s Voice with six avocado pears for sale. He shifts them before him in a pattern and as they are moved about in the dusk the avocados look like trained mice. I buy his stock. He has nothing to wrap it up in, so my head-child commandeers three passing babies with two empty
hands each. The notion of having acquired half a dozen avocado pears for threepence makes me slightly light-headed. I do not buy the two puppies from the man who came rushing out of a church, but I buy a pineapple, a heap of papayas, a straw hat, some plums, some sweets for the porters (squeamishness about plain money to children), some hot chestnuts and some flowers: two armloads of tuberoses, and they too cost next to nothing. As we trail back through the business streets,
Bolivar
and
Cinco del Mayo,
and the pitch black
Alameda
, I feel like the Pied Piper. In the lobby, the children accept their fruit drops and pennies with
self-possession.
They thank me and express wishes for my well-being in this world and the next,
que Dios la proteja, que la vaya bien,
hand their parcels to a rather older hotel child and depart like well-bred guests at an Edwardian dinner-party without haste or lingering.

I had the impression that the desk clerk was obscurely distressed by my purchases. Sure enough, ten minutes later we are visited by the housekeeper. She looks Spanish, one of those neat, middle-aged, efficient Latin women who are so much better at their linen cupboards than one can ever hope to be at anything. She does not come to the point. Does Mexico please us?

Oh, indeed.

‘Yes, it is pretty.’ We were not displeased by the rains?

We reassure her.

The hotel is also to our taste?

We try to say how pleased we are.

Yet those flowers. We did not like their flowers?

The vases were already filled with lilac and narcissus. Mexican hotels, that is Mexican-run hotels in Mexico, put flowers in their guest rooms with the towels and the bottle of drinking water. Fresh flowers every day, all year round. I try to explain that we had not been aware of this charming practice. We are not believed. The housekeeper leaves in a confusion of mutual apologies. Then the boy comes in from behind the door and bears away the lilac and narcissi. Next day, a great sheaf of tuberoses appears in my bedroom, and all during our stay there are fresh tuberoses every morning. I love them, and I am delighted.

T
HERE ARE THREE CLIMATIC ZONES in Mexico, one hot, one cold, one temperate. The
Tierras Calientes, Fría
and
Templada
. The Hot Zone is very hot, the Cold not as cold as it sounds; the Temperate is celestial perfection.

It is also the most inhabited portion of the Republic – the best part of the
Mesa Central
lies in
Tierra Templada.
Yet this plateau is not a temperate place at all: the mildness is luxuriant and dynamic, the temperance the product of the clash between two intemperances. It is a tropical region anomalously cool, combining the geographical extremes of Switzerland and Central Africa, high as Mont-Blanc, equatorial as the Sahara. At sea-level, the Mexican latitudes would be desert and jungle; in the north, the Mexican heights would be Alpine wastes. Joined, these excesses of parallel and altitude created a perennial Simla better than Simla. As a matter of recorded fact, the annual mean temperatures of the
Tierra Templada
vary between 66° and 73° Fahrenheit. The average rainfall is some 80 inches a year and concentrated within four months, June to October. In terms of human experience this means: it is always warm; it is never hot; it is never cold. It only rains in season and when it does it pours at fixed and regular hours, and afterwards the air again is dry and light, leaves and fields shine, there is no damp, no mud, no dripping, only a great new freshness.

Grey days are unknown. Except for a few minutes of dramatic preparation for the actual burst, the sky is always clear. There is little difference in the weather between July and February; it may get rather warm in the late spring and there are chilly evenings when the wind is
blowing from the Coast, yet a person with a change of clothes suitable for an exceptionally fine English June, a blanket and a hut made of waterproof leaves and bamboo canes, would be comfortable day and night from one end of the year to the other. Ownership of a mud cottage and some pine cones for a fire around Christmas would assure a sybaritic existence. This opens, and shuts, economic vistas. A promoter from Germany, Gruening, tells us in his wonderfully detailed
History of Mexico,
arrived some time in the nineteenth century full of business projects, and departed so disgusted that he wrote a long and angry volume on the natives’ cursed lack of wants, their
verdammte Beduerfnigslosigkeit.
He should see them now, poor man, sipping their Coca-Colas.

The second zone is at sea-level and frankly tropical. Hundreds of miles of jungle, beach and silted port on the Pacific. The Gulf, with Vera Cruz, the oil trade, coffee
fincas
and a certain commercial bustle. The deep South: Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche – swamps and forests, the Graham Greene country of
The Lawless Roads;
Yucatan and the pre-Columbian ruins. The third zone is not a region but a number of separate points of especial altitude. It is a matter of exposure, on the whole every place above seven thousand feet is considered to be
Terra Fría.

Thus Mexico City belongs to the cold land. It is, however, a rule unto itself. It has four distinct climates, one for the night – which is bitter – and three for every day. In the morning we are on the coast of New England. It is autumn. A golden late September; the air is brisk but informed with warmth, luminous with sun. The kind of morning when one cannot bear to be in bed, when numbed insects stir to a new lease and one picks up one’s teacup and walks out into the garden. Here the unexpected gift comes every day. Breakfast is laid in the patio: there is fruit, the absurd goldfish are swishing in the fountain and everything smells of geranium; warmth lies gently across one’s shoulders; E has ceased to talk politics, the housekeeper stops to chat, the boy comes running with hot rolls and butter … It is good to be alive.

At eleven, the climate becomes continental. It is the height of summer on the top of a mountain. The sun is burning, brilliant, not to be fooled with; the
fond de l’air
cool and flowing like fine water. One feels
tremendously exhilarated, charged with energy. This is the time of day when I like to pick my way through the streets, walk slowly across the Cathedral Square under the shade of the brim of my hat. This full noon lasts for several hours. Then comes the cloud-burst and through the early evening, rain falls with the sound of rain falling in the hot countries all over the world, in Egypt, in Burma … Later, it is a spring evening in a large city: mild, tenuous, nostalgic, laid out to be long. It is not long. Darkness descends with a sudden extinguishing sweep like the cover on the canary’s cage. Energy ebbs, the heart contracts with fear. This is no time to be out in the streets, this is the hour of return, of the house, the hearth, the familiar ritual.
Alors, il s’est retiré dans son intérieur.

The hotel room is desolate, the lamp dim. There is nothing then but the panicked dash for the clean, well-lighted places.

There are none. The current is wretched all over the city. The story goes that the last President’s brother is still selling power across the border. There are no cafés, no pubs, only bars for men and huge
pastry-shops.
You do not dine before ten, unless you are willing to eat waffles in a pharmacy got up like a mosque at Sanborn’s astonishing emporium; the cinemas waste no money on illumination; there is going to be a concert on Friday week … Some of the hotel bars are open to women. They are full of tourists and Mexicans emphatically without wives. Besides, this is not a good country to drink in: in daytime one does not want it at all, and at night one wants it too much.

We decide to have dinner at X’s, a French restaurant that enjoys a reputation in the hemisphere. We push through the doors. One night in the early nineteen-thirties, a friend was good enough to take me to a restaurant in London which in its day had been a very famous restaurant indeed. The list of its patrons was literary and glamorous, the wine and cooking admirable; it had a speakeasy cachet. Our elders and betters had talked and drunk there through the nights of the First War when they were young and notorious; they had dined there in the twenties when they were well-known and middle-aged. It had had the honours of at least five contemporary novels. Let us call it Spisa’s. I had never been there, and I believe it was my twentieth birthday, or the eve of my
twentieth birthday. When we got to Spisa’s the shutters were down, the dining-room was dark and the owner dying. I mean literally dying. Mr S was on his death-bed and the priest had just been. My friend was a face from the better days, so they were much touched to see her at this hour. She was also a Catholic. They took her in to Mr S’s where she stayed in prayer for some time. I was put into a parlour where an Austrian waiter and an Italian waiter were saying their rosaries. I had no rosary, but the Italian waiter went and found me one. Later they would not let us go but insisted that we have our dinner. They sent out for some chops and lager from the pub in Charlotte Street and made us eat it in the dining-room. There was just one lamp lit above our table, otherwise it was quite dark. As we ate people came to us and whispered to my friend in Italian. I could see she had been weeping. Presently we walked home and later became quite unreasonably gay.

As E and I pushed through X’s swing doors, there was just one lamp lit above one table. The waiters stood huddled in gloom. I sank, into self-pity. I know it is futile to indulge in my regret that I came too late upon this earth to enjoy the pleasures of the table at Edwardian house parties, but to think what I missed in my own time – I have never been to the Chapon Fin at Bordeaux, I was too late for Voisin’s at Paris, too late for Spisa’s, and now too late for X of Mexico City. Then I pulled myself together: a fellow creature was dying; I still had no rosary but I was ready to pay such respects as I could.

A second lamp was lit with small effect above a second table, chairs were pushed back and one of those French menus, large as a poster, was laid before us decorously like a floral tribute. Service as usual? But no, the place was too preposterous: the hush, the darkness, the gloom; no funeral parlour in the USA could stay in business for a week with such an atmosphere. We had yet to learn that this was merely the regular nightly aspect of public eating-places all over the Republic.

I must try a Mexican wine. I order a bottle of something called Santo Tomás. When poured out, it looks quite black. I sniff before tasting, so the shock when it comes is not as devastating as it might have been. I yell into the darkness to have the bottle removed.

The head waiter shuffles up gracefully. ‘Anything wrong, Señora?’

‘Taste it.’

He does. His face stays serene. Sheer self-control.

‘There is something very wrong with this bottle. Taste it again.’

‘? ? ? es regular.’

Regular? Cheap ink dosed with prune juice and industrial alcohol, as harsh on the tongue as a carrot-grater? Regular! What a country, what palates, what digestions. They refuse to change the Santo Tomás for another bottle of Mexican wine – rather disobliging of them I thought then – but insist that we take an imported wine instead. I choose a Spanish claret, one of the Marqués de Riscal’s honest
riojas
. It is good, but it costs ten shillings a bottle, which is too much to pay for one’s glass or two at dinner in a wine country. Perhaps, it begins to dawn on me, Mexico is not a wine country. It was by nature and in God knows what fashion before the Conquest; then the Spanish dug up the vines, the idea being to import wine from Spain and charge duty. For the same reason they cut down the olive trees and forbade the culture of silk-worms. Oil, silk and wine were to New Spain what rum and tea were to Massachusetts and Maryland. After Independence, everybody was too busy murdering each other to plant vineyards and olive groves, and what is being produced now is only a new incentive to murder. Santo Tomás comes from some infernal valley in Baja California where the climate is so unsalubrious that the very grapes breed acid antidotes inside their skins. And what the Indios do not do to those grapes … Santo Tomás is the best wine in the Republic. For one thing it contains only a limited amount of syrup, and the vats are always rinsed after being scrubbed with turkey excrement. I learned to swallow my Santo Tomás, with a liberal admixture of water, like a man.

The service at X’s is as regular as the lighting and the wine. To sit in the penumbra with nothing but death and Santo Tomás to occupy one’s mind is unnerving. My cries rend the shadows for something to eat.

‘Where is that
Terrine
we ordered? It must be ready.’

‘It is ready. But the Prawns-and-Rice are not.’

‘But we are having the
Terrine
first.’

‘Yes, the
Terrine
comes first, but the Prawns are not ready.’

‘We are not going to eat them at the same time. Please bring us the
Terrine
now.’

‘Señora: we must wait for the Prawns. Then you will eat the
Terrine
first.’

‘I mean first now, not first then.’

‘Yes, Señora, first. First in a little while.’

‘Will you please bring the
Terrine
at once.’

‘At your taste, Señora. I shall run to tell the chef to hurry up the Prawns.’

We wait. Then the
Terrine
is brought over from the sideboard in the Stygian corner where it had been reposing, and here on its heels are the Prawns, sizzling. So much is clear now, everything is allowed to take its time but once your dinner is on its breathless way, there must be no pause. The custom must have ruined tempers and digestions. It is unfathomable, and it is bedrock.