A Visit to Don Otavio (4 page)

Nor were those stacks of
littérature engagée
particularly enlightening. One read one book and became convinced that the Mexican Indians lived outside the grip of economic cycles in a wise man's paradise of handicrafts; one read another and was left with the impression that they were
the conscious pioneers of an awakening working-class. There were villains – the Mexican Diet, so lowering; Drink; Oil; the Church; the Persecution of the Church; President Cardenas, so like Stalin and that Man in the White House. Panacea – Partition of the Land; Irrigation; Confiscation of Foreign Holdings; the Church; the Closing of the Church; President Cardenas, so like Lenin and FDR.

The thirties were the wrong time to be much stirred by the Diaz controversy: Good Don Porfirio or the Despot? One knew that he had been a practical man in a vulgar era, a champion of order and a business promoter in a land of sloth and anarchy, who gaoled his opponents, cooked his elections and had no truck with the liberty of the press. It did seem rather mild and remote and old-fashioned; Diaz had been dead a long time and it was all very much in another country. Now I constantly hear his name on the train.

There is an air of expectancy in our coach, a feeling of the last night on board. The boys and girls are singing. The mistresses try to hush them but look awfully pleased themselves. The porter, however, is already banging up the beds. Everybody protests and it does no good. Pillow fights are in the air. I escape to the dining-car for some beer. One of the mistresses – what is called a nice type of woman – has escaped too.

‘What is it really like?' I ask her.

‘Mexico? You will see marvels,' she said with a look of illumination.

Prompted by some excitement, I wake and decide to get up at seven which is not my habit. I struggle into some clothes inside my buttoned tent and go to the dining-car where the windows are down at last and the air is flowing in clean and sharp, fresh with morning. And there under an intense light sky lies a shining plain succulent with sugar-cane and corn among the cacti, a bright rich tropical country miraculously laved: green, green, green, the Valley of Mexico.

T
HE FIRST impact of Mexico City is physical, immensely physical. Sun, Altitude, Movement, Smells, Noise. And it is inescapable. There is no taking refuge in one more insulating shell, no use sitting in the hotel bedroom fumbling with guide books: it is here, one is in it. A dazzling live sun beats in through a window; geranium scented white-washed cool comes from the patio; ear-drums are fluttering, dizziness fills the head as one is bending over a suitcase, one is eight thousand feet above the sea and the air one breathes is charged with lightness. So dazed, tempted, buoyed, one wanders out and like the stranger at the party who was handed a very large glass of champagne at the door, one floats along the streets in uncertain bliss, swept into rapids of doing, hooting, selling. Everything is agitated, crowded, spilling over; the pavements are narrow and covered with fruit. As one picks one’s way over mangoes and avocado pears, one is tumbled into the gutter by a water-carrier, avoids a Buick saloon and a basin of live charcoal, skips up again scaring a tethered chicken, shies from an exposed deformity and bumps into a Red Indian gentleman in a tight black suit. Now a parrot shrieks at one from an upper window, lottery tickets flutter in one’s face, one’s foot is trodden on by a goat and one’s skirt clutched at by a baby with the face of an idol. A person long confined to the consistent North may well imagine himself returned to
one of the large Mediterranean ports, Naples perhaps: there are the people at once lounging and pressing, there is that oozing into the streets of business and domesticity; the show of motor traffic zigzagged by walking beasts; the lumps of country life, peasants and donkey carts, jars and straw, pushing their way along the pavements; there are the overflowing trams, the size and blaze of the Vermouth advertisements, the inky office clothes, the rich open food shops strung with great hams and cheeses, and the shoddy store with the mean bedroom suite; the ragged children, the carved fronts of palaces and the seven gimcrack skyscrapers. Nothing is lacking: monster cafés, Carpet Turks, the plate-glass window of the aeroplane agency, funeral wreaths for sale at every corner and that unconvincing air of urban modernity. One looks, one snuffs, one breathes – familiar, haunting, long-missed, memories and present merge, and for a happy quarter of an hour one is plunged into the loved element of lost travels. Then Something Else creeps in. Something Else was always here. These were not the looks, not the gestures. Where is the openness of Italy, that ready bosom? This summer does not have the Southern warmth, that round hug as from a fellow creature. Here, a vertical sun aims at one’s head like a dagger – how well the Aztecs read its nature – while the layers of the air remain inviolate like mountain streams, cool, fine, flowing, as though refreshed by some bubbling spring. Europe is six thousand miles across the seas and this glacier city in a tropical latitude has never, never been touched by the Mediterranean. In a minor, a comfortable, loop-holed, mitigated way, one faces what Cortez faced in the absolute five hundred years ago: the unknown.

Well what does one do? Where does one begin, where does one turn to first? Here we are in the capital of this immense country and we know nothing of either. We don’t know anybody. We hardly know the language. We have an idea of what there is to see, but we do not know where anything is from where, nor how to get there. We do not have much money to spend, and we have much too much luggage. Winter clothes and clothes for the tropics, town clothes and country clothes and the bottom of our bags are falling out with books. We have a few letters of
introduction. They are not promising. From vague friends to their vague friends, Europeans with uncertain addresses who are supposed to have gone to Mexico before the war. Guillermo had pressed a letter into my hand at the station; a German name covered most of the envelope. ‘Great friends,’ he had said, ‘they have had such trouble with their papers.’ E had been told to put her name down at the American Embassy. Nobody seemed to know any Mexicans. No one had written to people running a mine or a sugar place; or heard of some local sage, a Norman Douglas of the Latin Americas, who knew everything, the people and the stories, plants and old brawls, how to keep the bores at bay and where to get good wine.

God be praised we have a roof over our heads and it is not the roof of the Pensión Hernandez. The spirit that made us fall in with Guillermo’s suggestion has waned, already there is a South-wind change. A man on the train told us about a small hotel, Mexican run, in front of a park. To this we drove from the station, and found a Colonial palace with a weather-beaten pink façade. Of course there were rooms. We have a whole suiteful of them. Bedrooms and sitting-room and dressing-room, and a kind of pantry with a sink, a bathroom and a trunk closet and a cupboard with a sky-light. Everything clean as clean and chock-full of imitation Spanish furniture, straight-backed tapestry chairs, twisty iron lamps with weak bulbs. There is a balcony on to the square and a terrace on to the patio. The patio has a pleasant Moorish shape; it is whitewashed, full of flowers, with a fountain in the middle and goldfish in the fountain, and all of it for thirty shillings a day.

The first step obviously is luncheon. Time, too, we were off the streets. That sun! E’s face is a most peculiar colour. One had been warned to take it easy. One had been warned not to drink the water, to keep one’s head covered, to have typhoid injections, beware of chile, stay in after dark, never to touch ice, eat lettuce, butter, shell-fish, goat cheese, cream, uncooked fruit … We turned into a restaurant. I had a small deposit of past tourist Spanish to draw on; it did not flow, but it was equal to ordering the
comida corrida,
the table d’hôte luncheon. Every table is occupied with what in an Anglo-Saxon country would be a party but here
seems just the family. Complexions are either café-au-lait, nourished chestnut, glowing copper, or milky mauve and dirty yellow. Everybody looks either quite exquisite or too monstrous to be true, without any transitional age between flowering ephebe and oozing hippopotamus. The male ephebes are dressed in extreme, skin-tight versions of California sports clothes, shiny, gabardiny, belted slack-suits in ice-cream colours, pistachio and rich chocolate; their elders are compressed in the darkest, dingiest kind of ready-made business outfits, and ladies of all proportions draped in lengths of sleezy material in the more decorative solid colours, blood orange, emerald, chrome yellow, azure. There is a wait of twenty-five minutes, then a succession of courses is deposited before us in a breathless rush. We dip our spoons into the soup, a delicious cream of vegetable that would have done honour to a private house in the French Provinces before the war of 1870, when two small platefuls of rice symmetrically embellished with peas and pimento appear at our elbows.

‘Y aquí la sopa seca.’
The dry soup.

We are still trying to enjoy the wet one, when the eggs are there: two flat, round, brown omelets.

Nothing is whisked away before it is finished, only more and more courses are put in front of us in two waxing semi-circles of cooling dishes. Two spiny fishes covered in tomato sauce. Two platefuls of beef stew with spices. Two bowlfuls of vegetable marrow swimming in fresh cream. Two thin beef-steaks like the soles of children’s shoes. Two platters of lettuce and radishes in an artistic pattern. Two platefuls of bird bones, lean drumstick and pointed wing smeared with some brown substance. Two platefuls of mashed black beans; two saucers with fruit stewed in treacle. A basket of rolls, all slightly sweet; and a stack of
tortillas
, limp, cold, pallid pancakes made of maize and mortar. We eat heartily of everything. Everything tastes good, nearly everything is good. Only the chicken has given its best to a long and strenuous life and the stock pot, and the stewed fruit is too sticky for anyone above the age of six. The eggs, the stew, the vegetables, the salad, rice and beans are very good indeed. Nothing remotely equals the quality of the soup. We are drinking a bottled beer,
called Carta Blanca, and find it excellent. At an early stage of the meal we had been asked whether we desired chocolate or coffee at the end of it, and accordingly a large cupful was placed at once at the end of the line with another basket of frankly sugared rolls. This
pan dulce
and the coffee are included in the lunch. The bill for the two of us, beer and all, comes to nine pesos, that is something under ten shillings.

It is four o’clock and the sun has not budged from its central position in the sky. We do not fool with hats and shade, but return to the hotel by cab. I close the shutters, lie down, and when I wake I do not know where I am nor where I was just now. I hardly know who I am. These pieces of escaped knowledge seem immediately paramount; hardly awake I struggle to fill the blanks as though it were for air. When identity is cleared, I cannot put a finger on my time, this is When? At last the place, too, clicks into place. It must have taken half a minute, a minute, to catch up with my supposed reality. It seemed much longer. One sleeps like this perhaps two or three times in a life and one never forgets these moments of coming to. That intense pang of regret. For what? The boundless promise of that unfilled space before memory rushed in? Or for the so hermetically forgotten region before waking, for the where-we-were in that sleep which we cannot know but which left such a taste of happiness? This time reaction is reversed, opportunity lies before not behind, adjustment is a joy. I am at the edge of Mexico – I rush to the window. It must have been raining. It has. This is the rainy season, and it does every afternoon from May till October. The square looks washed, water glistens on leaves and the sky is still wildly dramatic like an El Greco landscape. Half the male citizenry is unbuttoning their American mackintoshes and shaking the water out of the brims of their sombreros; the other half is huddling in soaked white cotton pyjamas, their chins and shoulders wrapped in those thin, gaudy horse blankets known as
sarapes
in the arts and crafts. It is no longer hot, only mild like a spring evening. Two hours ago we were in August, now it is April.

I take a look at a plan and set out. I cross the Alameda, a rather glum squareful of vegetation cherished as a park. It was started, like so much else in Mexico, in honour of some anniversary of Independence, and its
plant life seems to be all rubber trees. I come out into Avenida Juarez ablare with juke-box, movie theatre, haberdashery and soft-drink parlour. Our street, Avenida Hidalgo, was handsome if run down – a length of slummy
palacios
with oddments of Aztec masonry encrusted in their sixteenth-century façades, and no shops but a line of flower stalls selling funeral
pièces montées,
huge wreaths and crosses worked with beads, filigree and mother-of-pearl skulls. The wrong side of the Alameda, we are later told. The right side looks like the Strand.

I walk on and am stunned by the sight of as amazing a structure as I could ever hope to see. It is the National Theatre and was obviously built by Diaz and in the early nineteen-hundreds. I had best leave the description of this masterpiece of eclecticism to
Terry
:

This sounds an optimistic note. But no, the Teatro Nacionál is no iceberg, there are still some three hundred feet to sink.

When I reach the centre it is quite suddenly night. On Avenida Francesco Madero – a murdered President – the shops are bright with neons. Wells Fargo, where I had hoped to collect some letters, keep American hours and are closed. Everything else is open and bustling. After the three-hour lunch, the siesta and the rains, a new lease of business begins at about eight. The food shops are as good as they look. Great sacks of coffee in the bean, York hams and Parma hams, gorgonzolas, olive oil.

‘May I buy all the ham I want?’ I feel compelled to ask.

‘How many hams, Señora?’

I have no intention of leaving this entrancing shop. It is as clean as it is lavish, and they are so polite … One might be at Fortnum’s. Only this is more expansive: that warm smell of roasting coffee and fresh bread. And the wines! Rows and rows of claret, pretty names and sonorous names of
Deuxième Crus,
Château Gruaud-Larose-Sarget, Château Pichon-Longueville, Château Ducru-Beaucaillou, alas all are expensive. A tray of small hot pasties is brought in,
mille feuilles
bubbling with butter.

‘¿Qué hay en el interiór?’

‘Anchovy, cheese, chicken.’

I have some done up to take back to E. There is French brandy, Scotch whisky, Campari Bitter, none of them really ruinous, but none of them cheap. Decidedly, the local produce. I get a quart of Bacardi rum, the best, darkest kind. Five pesos. A peso is almost exactly a shilling. And a bottle of Mexican brandy. The name of this unknown quantity is appropriate,
Cinco Equis
, Five X’s. It costs nine pesos and has three stars. We shall see.