‘I am,’ said E. ‘My father voted for Woodrow Wilson twice; I cast my first vote for James Cox against the unfortunate Harding; I voted for John W. Davis against Coolidge …’
‘Against an incoming President?’ said Don Luís.
‘That’s kind of a Republican family you married into,’ said Mrs Rawlston.
‘Personally, Mrs Rawlston, I am a strong Roosevelt woman.’
‘We have had better, and we have had worse. I haven’t been home since the Arthur Administration. 1884. Well, have you heard the news? Mr Middleton’s had a pair of blacks to his house. Should have thought Mr Middleton knew better. Richard Middleton a nigger-lover! Wouldn’t have believed it. I sat down straight away and wrote to tell him what I think of him. Blacks in his house! Sitting down to tea with them, and poor Blanche pouring it out.’
‘You cannot mean the two gentlemen from Bombay, Mrs Rawlston? They are distinguished plant psychologists, and I believe high-caste Hindus.’
‘They’re black for all that, ain’t they? I saw them. Thought I heard you say you were a Democrat, Mrs A?
‘Now what are you all celebrating about?’ She turned to Don Enriquez. ‘How soon are you going to open this hotel?’
‘Very soon. Everything has been arranged.’
‘Have you got the road? Have you got a manager? Got a cook that can stay sober for two Sundays on end? Got any customers?’
‘There are still a few details. We only settled the most important.’
‘Got any linen? What about knives and forks? And china? Any of you thought of that? Thought of anything beside yourselves? Luís gave you all a fine scare, didn’t you, Luís? Who did you think the money came from?’
‘Some combine from the North,’ said Don Jaime.
‘Bet you all thought it was Felipe. I can see you did. Didn’t you, Concepción? Your brother never knew what to do with his money, and they say he’s got a grudge against you, Enriquez.’
There was no silence: speech flowed promptly from all sides almost before Mrs Rawlston had finished and I did not allow Anthony to catch my eye.
Some of Mrs Rawlston’s details came up that evening, and came up in front of us.
‘We shan’t have the road this year,’ said Don Enriquez. ‘It doesn’t matter: you can have the run of my boat. I shall put it in the company’s name.’
‘We shall have to buy new things,’ said Don Otavio. ‘Juan and I will make a list.’
‘It will be expensive,’ said Don Enriquez.
‘Victoria, what about Mama’s silver? And the big Sèvres?’ said Don Otavio.
‘What silver?’ said Don Enriquez.
‘The silver and china that were taken into Guadalajara when the Carrancistas were all over the lake,’ said Don Otavio.
‘Madre de Dios, do we still have all that stuff in our house, Victoria?’
‘You must have seen us use it, querido.’
‘You would not think of putting the family plate in an hotel?’ said Don Jaime.
‘I entirely agree with Jaime,’ said Doña Victoria.
‘So do I,’ said Don Luís. ‘I know a Northern American firm that sells hotel equipment. Nice, cheap things. They are going to make me very special prices. I brought their catalogue.’
‘We will use Mama’s,’ said Don Enriquez at once. ‘Don’t look at me, Victoria; it is my mother’s silver. Worse things can happen. The Saints know who is eating off yours now as it was stolen in the Revolutions. By your own servants, too; or so your father told me.’
‘Very well, Enriquez. You never think of your daughter, do you?’
‘Oh my daughter, my daughter. She is a handsome girl. Who knows? Perhaps I shall marry her to some foreign fellow who doesn’t expect twelve of this and a dozen of the other. Why should I throw good silver after my daughter?’
‘Now really, Enriquez,’ said Doña Victoria.
‘These days all foreigners who aren’t heretics, are either poor or South Americans,’ said Don Jaime.
‘There were such nice Irish girls at school,’ said Doña Concepción.
‘The Irish never had anything worth having,’ said Don Enriquez.
‘A bigoted lot,’ said Don Jaime.
‘Of course, there are always the French,’ said Doña Victoria.
‘All the really good fortunes are still intact,’ said Don Jaime.
‘All Frenchmen are atheists,’ said Doña Concepción.
‘Atheism is no heresy,’ said Don Jaime.
‘It doesn’t show,’ said Don Luís.
‘Atheists are nothing but relapsed Catholics,’ said Doña Victoria.
‘Reconversion is a very wonderful opportunity, a very great grace for a wife,’ said Doña Concepción.
‘That is true,’ said Don Luís.
‘We have looked to Europe for too long,’ said Don Enriquez; ‘there are many rich Catholic families in the United States of Northern North America, are there not, Doña E?’
CHAPTER TEN
A Party
Nous avons joué de la flûte, et personne a voulu danser.
Et quand nous avons voulu danser plus personne ne jouait de la flûte …
THE SANDS were running out.
On Sunday there was a party. Joaquím and Orazio and their sister arrived the night before; also four of the Jaimes’ almost grown-up children and Doña Concepción’s brother, Don Felipe, a lean, over-bred, dissolute-looking man in his forties. On the day, boatload upon boatload of men looking like Goyas and women looking like Doña Concepción disembarked at noon. Comparatively modest refreshment had been set out in the garden; more elaborate preparations were going on behind the scenes, and the band from Ajijíc, lent by Doña Anna, was hiding, silent, in the bushes. We had understood it to be an evening party. Don Otavio and Doña Concepción explained that Mexican parties always begin in the morning and in an apparently off-hand manner. You are not expected to expect your guests to like it well enough to stay. If they do, meals will appear at the proper times with apparent spontaneity. There must be a supply of drink against any length and number, but only a fraction of it suitable for a brief call visible at first. In due course, dinner for forty will be served and the guests contrive to adjust their clothes with the same air of improvisation.
‘What if the party doesn’t go?’ said Anthony.
‘That is very sad,’ said Don Otavio. ‘Then there is no music. They are told not to play.’
‘Does it happen often?’
‘It happens.’
‘Then does everybody go home?’
‘Oh no. That would not be polite.’
‘So they stay for lunch and tea and dinner all the same?’
‘They stay. But it is not the same.’
‘It is not the same at all,’ said Doña Concepción.
The men sat in the shade and smoked; the women chattered all over the house and lawn. They talked to E and me about their schools; Roehampton and the various branches of the Sacred Heart. E had been to one of them, greatly embarrassing the history class, and I had been to the Ursulines, so we were able to hold our own.
‘Doña E, how is it possible that poor Antonio is heretical when you are not?’ said Doña Concepción.
‘Well, his grandfather came from the South, and mine from Ireland,’ said E.
‘Yes, yes. But it must be so dreadful for you to have a Protestant in the family. Do you try to convert him?’
‘No,’ said E.
‘Such a pity,’ said Doña Victoria.
Huge amounts of food and case upon case of spirits were consumed, but no one was in the least the worse for liquor. At four, the band began to play and kept it up till midnight. After dinner there was dancing. The married women danced, the young girls did not. Anthony was gently refused by Don Enriquez’ daughter, ‘You must wait until I am casada, Don Antonio – housed.’
The guests went after their full span but at what was still a decorous hour, and the next morning the three brothers left San Pedro. The women stayed
on and entered a five days’ Retreat for a Special Intention, the success of the hotel. The Sixteenth of September was celebrated along the lake with much alcohol, bloodshed and fireworks in full sunlight. Waves of newly white-collared Indios arrived at Chapala by motor-bus. Nationalism and rowdy xenophobia were rampant. The lanes echoed with drunken groans and screams of Viva Mexico. For a week, children danced nightly around Mr Middleton’s bungalow shouting GRINGO, the opprobrious term for Americans. At Jocotepec, at the culminating point of the festival, several local mules joined loudly in the Grita de Dolores, the ritual cry burst into by the crowds at the stroke of midnight amidst a bedlam of bell-ringing and firing off of fire-arms; the unfortunate animals were arrested for patriotic blasphemy and taken off to gaol where they languished for days before their drunken owners noticed their absence and set to bail them out. Jesús had not returned.
‘He sold his mother’s cow,’ said Don Otavio, ‘so he will go to the North of North America, to Texas, to make his fortune. He has had a general disgust.’
‘What about his wife?’
‘She can marry Juan.’
‘Divorce?’
‘No, no. She and Jesús were not married enough. The Church does not like the Indios to get really married. There would be so much adultery. It would be a very great sin.’
At the end of the week Anthony left, borne off by water and motor car to Guadalajara and thence by air to the USA, and a few days later our time had come. Don Otavio embraced E; I was embraced by Guadalupe and Soledad, and we both gave a solemn promise to return at Christmas.
‘Why must you go on travels, niña?’ said Guadalupe. ‘It is expensive and not wise. Is it for a vow?’
‘No one goes anywhere except to Guadalajara and Mexico,’ said Don Otavio, ‘and to San José Purúa for the gout. Foreigners go to Acapulco to bathe, but it is very hot and nasty. If the hotel does well, Luís and I shall go to Juan-les-Pins. We hear it is very nice now. Oh why must you leave San Pedro?
‘No. You are very much mistaken. There is nothing to see in the Republic. Nothing. You will be very uncomfortable and not at all happy.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mazatlán: An Ordeal
Non, je ne suis pas heureuse ici.
PELLEAS ET MÉLISANDE
OUR FIRST DESTINATION was Mazatlán, a tropical port on the Pacific in the State of Sinaloa, a clearing house for sugar, gold and fruit, forgotten now, lagoon enclosed, idyllic. We had been charmed by a description in an old travel book, and although the place lay some six hundred kilometres off our intended route – slow progress through the Central Provinces to the Ruins in the South – we decided to go, and to spend a month at Mazatlán.
There is no road into Sinoloa from anywhere. Aeroplanes are small and few, but there is a railway. The Southern-Pacific Railway, in fact, which twice a week starts from Guadalajara, climbs down the Sierra to the West Coast and runs along the Pacific all the way to California. This is what we took.
We very nearly missed it. I was standing in a queue waiting to register a trunk. All auguries were fair. There were only half a dozen people in front of me with few encumbrances each, and there were four registration clerks scurrying about in a flurry of helpfulness. There was a full hour before even the official time of departure. Taking a train is a nervous ordeal to me: I sat on one side of the trunk trying to read a newspaper; the porter, a young man half my size, sat on the other. E had gone to the platform to find our seats. The station was squalid. Hundreds of people were sitting on the ground, wrapped in blankets or straw mats, asleep, cooking food, nursing babies.
‘Viajeros,’ said the porter.
‘Then why don’t they travel?’ said I. ‘It must be unusual to make camp before you have started; in peace time at least.’
‘The travellers are waiting for the trains,’ said the porter.
‘Are the trains as late as that?’
‘Not the trains. The travellers.’
‘Late? They look as though they’d come very early.’
‘Yes, early. Late and early. The travellers come at all times.’
‘Don’t they ever come in time for the trains?’
‘Who would know that?’ said the porter.
‘Don’t they find out?’
‘Why take so great a trouble? This is a nice station. All in the shade.’
Forty minutes passed and the four clerks were still attending to the first person in the queue. I got off the trunk, edged forward and peeked. The clerks were trying to put steel bands around a somewhat dishevelled bundle. The contrivance for clamping the steel bands did not seem to work. One clerk hugged the bundle in his arms, two held it laced in steel, the fourth advanced with the apparatus in the manner of a monkey imitating a dentist approaching the chair. He pounced: something snapped, steel bands writhed in the air, the bundle burst agape; then everything was dropped on the floor, comments were exchanged, the clerks rested from their labours. Then one approached the bundle and the identical process was repeated all over again. I edged back, unable to bear more.
Another twenty minutes and perseverance must have borne its fruit for the owner of the bundle strode away empty-handed, frowning at a slip of paper. The next man in line had not filled in his forms. Had no forms. He was told where to get them. He went. The clerks lolled back.
‘Why don’t they go on with the next person?’ said I, looking at my watch.
‘It is not his turn. It is the turn of the man who has no forms,’ said the porter. ‘It would not be polite. This is a very regular, modern railway.’
The man who had no forms returned. ‘You must fill them in,’ said the clerks.
‘I cannot write in forms,’ said the man.
‘You must go to a scribe,’ said the clerks.
There was a pause.
‘It is Sunday,’ said the man.
‘You should go yesterday,’ said the clerks.
‘Yesterday I had no forms,’ said the man.
‘That is true,’ said the clerks.
There was another pause.
‘The ticket clerk writes in forms,’ said the clerks. ‘We will ask him to do it.’
‘I can take the train another day,’ said the man.
‘We will ask the ticket clerk. He is very obliging.’
‘No, no. I shall take the train some other day; it is no matter.’ The man asked for his crate, it was lifted on to his head and he walked away.
The next man had forms and a straw trunk, neatly strapped and padlocked. The clerks produced the coil of steel band.
‘Not more steel bands?’ said I.
‘Steel bands for everything,’ said the porter.
‘That trunk is locked.’
‘Steel bands for every piece of baggage. It is the regulation.’
‘One does see why the thieves prefer to walk off with the whole piece. Now what about that train? It is an hour past its hour.’
‘Do not preoccupy yourself with the train, Señora. The train will not go for a long little while. It never leaves without everybody. It is a very regular train.’
The clerks had lit a spirit lamp and were dropping melted lead on the recalcitrant steel bands. The lead burnt a small hole into the straw trunk. The clerks poured some water from a carafe into the hole. The owner of the trunk giggled excitedly.
I will say Lycidas to myself; from beginning to end, very slowly this time, before looking up, I resolved. The porter seized my hand. ‘Come,’ he cried. He wrenched at the trunk. ‘Come! The train!’ We ran through the gate. The train was pulling out. I was pushed on. Two carriages further up, E was being assisted down. Our hand luggage lay piled at various points of the platform. I tried to get off. The porter howled, E saw me and was pushed on again. Two strangers grasped the trunk about its middle and, running, shoved it into an open door. Bystanders picked up bags and typewriters and flung them into passing windows. Peso notes fluttered in the wind of increasing speed.
E and I met and sat down.
�
�You had the passports.’
‘You had the tickets.’
‘You had the money.’
‘I should have got out at the first stop,’ said E, ‘and telegraphed the American Consulate and Don Otavio.’
‘Our first stop, my dear, is nine hours from here, at Tepic, in the Terra Caliente. Tepic, I have just learned, is a Nahoa word meaning hard stone.’
‘Don Otavio wasn’t at all enthusiastic about Mazatlán,’ said E; ‘frankly, S, I don’t think any forgotten tropical port is worth this.’
‘Let’s have lunch,’ said I.
The Pullman was full of people we had not seen in markets and buses, or met at San Pedro Tlayacán. The kind of people Don Jaime described as not having worn shoes long: petty bourgeois Mexicans, mestizos all, the fairly recent products of the towns. The men were broadhipped, soft and sweaty; the girls pretty; the women running to fat after seventeen. Every family had brought fruit, a provision of sweets and a bottle of tequila. The atmosphere was polite, complacent, reserved. No passenger passed another in the corridor without exchanging the compliments of the hour. Whenever someone stumbled against our trunk (now inevitably obstructing an aisle), he would apologise for touching our property. The whole train rang with dispénseme, con permiso, si Vd. lo permite, a sus órdenes, servidor di Ustéd. In the section opposite to ours, sat an enormous mestiza lady with folds and folds of purple chins and skin, and her two daughters who had very bad complexions and spent their time putting powder on their faces. E, an addict of the Bibliothèque Rose, called them Madame Crapaude et ses deux filles laides. Outside, valley after valley slid by in the September sunshine: tobacco, tequila plantations, maize, mangoes, more maize. The afternoon wore on. E read Persuasion; Madame Crapaude engaged me in snatches of dull conversation; the daughters prinked. We were running through a volcanic region, unplanted, uninhabited, cleft by mounds and crevasses the colour and texture of pumice stone. Then the scenery widened, became wholly panoramic with no foreground at all: clouds and clouds of mountain peaks and, beside the rails, a sheer drop of some thousand feet. The train slowed, dipped, and with all brakes drawn began descending at an exceedingly steep angle. We were creeping down the side of the Western Sierra Madre.
A Visit to Don Otavio Page 19