A Visit to Don Ottavio:
That
Customs inspection is a malevolent rigmarole. One
fails to see its practical point. The peso is
considered hard
currency and Mexico has no money restrictions.
Cigarettes,
spirits, French scent, textiles, tea and coffee
are all much
cheaper in Mexico than in the United States, so
no one would
bother to bring them in contraband. Everybody
has registered
their visible cameras. Indeed,’it is revealed
that few of these
hopeful spinsters have brought much besides the
print dresses,
the one warm tailored suit and the raincoat
prescribed by
Terry Guide, which most sensibly admonishes
one to travel
light, and it seems futile to suspect them of
smuggling sewing
machines, harvesters and electric wash tubs. All
they are bent
on is spending their dollars on a huge loot of
native arts and
crafts, and bringing them home in original
Mexican baskets.
To subject the luggage of these benefactresses
to those thorough
and callous indiscretions can have no other
purpose than using
power and inflicting discomfort on the
temporarily powerless
by the temporarily powerful.
British passport officials sometimes bring to
bear the pressure
of their better accents and better clothes on
the elderly refugee
fumbling in her handbag for that letter of
invitation from the
lady at Great Marlborough. Here, the passportees
are borne
down upon by the underpaid, the brutish and the
ignorant.
One might be in the Balkans or the East. For the
individual
there is more danger, more degradation, more
delay, but also
more hope—there is always the bribe. There is
also no hope at
all. Among Anglo-Saxon officials the decencies
are often
replaced by loyalties and so turn to ashes;
here, the decencies
civic or human do not exist. There is corruption
as a matter of
course, cynicism without thought, ill-will as a
first reaction,
life and pain held cheap, and the invincible
ignorance of man
of man.
* * ** * * *
The
first stop is a town called Saltillo. It is the capital of one
of those enormous territories stretching from
the U.S. frontier
roughly to the. Tropic of Cancer: the States of
Coahuila,
Chihuahua, Baja California, Sonora and Durango,
which are
the limbo and ante-room to Mexico. Chihuahua
alone is the
size of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales,
the others
afinount to a good chunk of Western Europe.
Between them,
the population is rather less than that of the
city of Birmingham;
which means that there is just about one person
to every barren
square mile. It is hot, stony, dry country,
almost without rivers
or rain, part desert, part mountain, part mining
district
Innocent of art and architecture, yet innocent
also of the
amenities, these states are a kind of natural
poor relations to the
Western American ones across the border, and a
reminder that
a very large portion of the earth’s surface is,
if not uninhabit-
able, unattractive to inhabit. Some are born
there, no one
goes to Sahuaripa or Santa Maria del Oro except
to drill a
shaft, lay a railway or quell a rebellion.
********
Since 1810 and Secession from Spain, Mexico has had a dozen
full-blown Constitutions and a larger number of
Declarations
of Independence, Principle and Reform. Many of
the con-
stitutions were modelled after that of the
United States. In
their time, some were called liberal, some
radical, some
centralizing. All were wonders of theoretical
perfection; all
followed as well as initiated a great deal of
bloodshed. The
Constitutional Assembly would sit in a besieged
mountain
town while two rebel generals advanced on it
from the North;
another general of yet uncertain allegiance
would be advancing
from the Coast; there would be a
Counter-President at Vera
Cruz and a Revolt in Mexico City. There would be
a Con-
stitutional Party and a Reform Party, an
Agrarian Party and
a Liberal Party. There would be Church interests
and Land-
owners’ interests and Creole interests, and the
interests of
foreign capital.
Some
of these interests combined, others did
not. There would be an elected President whose
election was
illegal, a constitutionally elected President
who was murdered
after election, and a President by
pronunciamento. One would
not be recognized by the American
administration, another
not supported by British oil interests, a third
would be fought
by the French. Between actual sieges and pitched
battles,
liberators, reformers and upholders of the Faith
rushed
about the countryside with armed bands, burning
crops and
villages, murdering everyone in sight. Meanwhile
the people
got poorer and confused, and in turn more
frightened, angry,
fatalistic, murderous and cowed. This millennium
continued
for a hundred and twenty years, from Hidalgo’s
revolt against
Spanish rule until Calle’s suppression of
the Spring Revolution
of 1929. Sometimes a general would be more
victorious than
usual and have a chance to look around and
create Order.
Sometimes more people would be involved in the
actual
killing, sometimes less. BUT THERE WAS NEVER ANY
PEACE. The
unhappy country only enjoyed two breathing spaces: the
U.S. Mexican War of 1848 in which it was
defeated and lost
half its territory, and the forty years’
despotism of the Diaz
Dictatorship.
(Only once again did Providence spare Mexico. In
the war
of 1.914, Germany drafted a secret note
proposing an alliance
against the United States, offering in return the
restitution of
what could hardly be _called the Mexican
Alsace-Lorraine,
the states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico,
California, Utah
and Nevada. In a moment of abstraction, Dr.
Albrecht, a
member of the German Embassy, left the dispatch
case with
the draft in a carriage of the Third Avenue
Elevated Railway
of New York City. The contents were published in
the New York
World. Mexico remained neutral.)
We
are now on the through train to Mexico City. It is called
the Sunshine Special, and is a slowish, shabby
sort of train.
We no longer have a compartment, only a section
of a sleeping-
car, which means a lower and an upper bunk in
one of those
faintly comic dormitories known from the films,
where men and
women undress and sleep, buttoned inside
curtained recesses.
In day-time bed, draperies and partitions are
somehow
doubled‘ back and tucked away in a cumbersome,
ingenious
manner, and the car takes on the aspect of a
tram with tables.
The arrangement is as old as the American
railroads. The
distances made it necessary to devise an
inexpensive way for
every person on the train to lay his head during
the many
nights. It is not bad at all. The air is cool
and neutral, and
although there are some forty people to a car,
one is anony-
mously semi-private the way one would be on a
large bus.
We felt like hot food that night and went to the
dining-car,
which turned out to be an apartment decorated
with machine-
carved Spanish Renaissance woodwork of
astonishing gloom
and ugliness. Dinner, which you are supposed to
order like a
deaf-mute scribbling your unattainable wishes on
a pad of
paper, was a nondescript travesty of food served
with the quite
imaginative disregard of what goes with what that
seems to be
the tradition of the American table d’hote. The
one starch and
vegetable of the day is supposed to be eaten as
an accompani-
ment to any of the main dishes on the menu. So
if it is cauli-
flower and F rench-fried potatoes, cauliflower and
French-fried
potatoes will appear on your plate whether you
are having the
Broiled Halibut Steak, the Corned-beef Hash, the
Omelet or
the Lamb Chops. I have seen—not eaten———such
inspired
misalliances as tinned asparagus tips and
spaghetti curled
around a fried mackerel. This is not a
traveller’s tale.
Last night somewhere in the depths of Arkansas,
the machine
broke down. Something went wrong with the
air-cooling. It
stopped, and as there is no way of letting in
the outer air, the
temperature in the car quietly rose to what we
were later told
was 110° Fahrenheit. When I woke I thought I was
in the
inside of a haystack, and of course delirious.
Such a scene.
Faces peering from behind curtains, calling for
ladders _and
explanation; purple faces on the verge of
apoplexy, livid faces
gasping for air; babies squalling, men in
underclothes struggling
in upper bunks, angelic Negro porters helping
ladies in kimonos
down the aisle.
One woman went on sleeping through it all.
“Lady, Lady,”
a porter crooned to her, “you’s better wake up,
Lady, or you
find you’self with a lily in you’ hand.”
“Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it"
