Madame Crapaude’s deux filles laides squealed.
‘I believe this is a very great engineering feat,’ said E. ‘We had the same problem in the Rocky Mountains. No rail-bed can take that kind of stress long. You remember the Colorado-Pass Rail Wreck in ’39?’
On the map, Mexico looks like the headless part of a large fish, hacked across the middle. Its shape and situation are roughly that of Italy only that Mexico is about seven times as large. Like the Italian peninsula, it is attached in the north to the mass of a continent, and stretches southwards into the sea. Like Italy, it is wide across the top, then tapers down; like Italy it is flanked by two long, opposing coast-lines. Unlike the boot, it is not straight but curves around the gulf like a dolphin’s back. And the peninsula is not a peninsula: the fish’s tail is not washed by the sea but joined to Central America by a short, forked land-border with Guatamala and British Honduras.
Not a peninsula in fact, but in shape and feeling. It is often thought of as the bridge between the North American Continent and Central America; this, apart from the inhabitant’s conviction of being part of North America, is misleading, as the concept of a bridge implies a smoothness and regularity which the land mass of Mexico lacks to a fantastic degree. Two-thirds of its length are filled by the plateau (another misleading term), and from the north this is accessible enough. It used to be said that one could drive from Texas on to Mexico in a coach-and-four: the drive-in is hundreds of miles wide, the rise from sea-level gradual. The southern exit is a different matter. It is narrower, very steep and furrowed by canyons. It has one – recent – road. And of course the plateau itself is not level, but a rugged base for other mountains. The surface of this singular tableland is slit by gorges, gashed by ravines, rent by chasms, blocked by volcanoes and crossed by expanse beyond expanse of lateral ranges. If progress north to south is thus impeded, access from west or east is hardly possible at all as the long sides of the plateau are the two stupendous Sierras dropping perpendicularly into the sea and, across these, the coasts can only be reached at a few hair-raising points.
Soon darkness mercifully veiled the secrets of that descent. Nothing similar occurred to dim the sharpness of the recollections of a century of rail wrecks that issued from E’s memory.
That night I lay in my bunk across from where Madame Crapaude’s daughters had squeezed themselves into one upper, dozing wakefully, lucid and lonely. The train jerked, pitched, halted, in our slow advance over one of the world’s most uninhabited mountain passes. Que diable allais-je chercher dans cette galère?
We were due at Mazatlán at five o’clock; in itself a prospect not conducive to a quiet night’s rest. The stops became longer. At last I decided we were going to be late, and fell asleep. I was woken by voices. Cannot get through, I heard. Line’s washed away; we’ll have to go back. And indeed after another wait the train began to reverse. It had become impossibly stuffy inside the bunks, so by six o’clock everybody was up and dressed, sticky and dirty with only a tepid trickle to wash under in the stinking lavatory, and ready to face the situation. No one knew what that was. Engine trouble, said some. A bridge was down. There had been floods though the rains ought to be over, and the line was under water. A local tribe, inimical to railways, had tampered with the ties. Meanwhile we had gone back a stretch and come to a halt in what the breaking light of day revealed to be a swamp; and further light, a supposed station.
The name RUIZ was peeling off a board nailed to a degraded hut, housing no doubt some signals and the stationmaster’s family. This hut was the extent of the station buildings. There were no further huts, no platform, no facilities; no village in sight. There was no shelter of any kind. We were now across the Sierra Madre, and Ruiz would be in Nayarít, the territory of the Nayarítos, the only aborigines who managed to dawdle over their conversion to the Catholic faith from the Conquest well into the eighteenth century, and Nayarít lay in the coastal plains and therefore in the hot zone. Even at that early hour there was no need of such geography to make it clear that this was going to be as hot a day as any of us had ever feared to live through. Mosquitoes, too, were already up and about. A number of pigs now assembled round the train, and presently boarded it, looking and begging for food. They were dripping with liquid yellow mud. Information as to the length of our sojourn at Ruiz was not unanimous. Some said six hours, some ten; some said we would leave at midday, some at nightfall. Some said next morning, others in three days. The last train from the North had been four days late. There was also the hypothesis that we would be returned to Guadalajara. None of this was improbable.
The morning got under way. We all sat. E and I consciously. It is hard on a Westerner to sit in a train that does not move. He may have a book, he may have something to talk about, he may be comfortable – we were not – and all the time he will be aware that something is missing, that something is wrong. It will jab and nibble at his nerves, scatter his concentration, tumble his equilibrium. If only the damn thing would move: the heat, the dirt, the boredom, all would be tolerable. Oh, if only it would move!
‘Is nothing being done about this?’ said E, standing up.
The Mexicans munched and sipped and chattered – seguro, it was hot. Madame Crapaude wielded a desperate fan. They were discussing developments with detached interest. We were in touch with Guymas – by the telegraph – with Tepíc, with Guadalajara. Someone was on his way to repair what had to be repaired. Repairs were going on almost now.
‘Cannot anyone go and see?’ said E.
But the rains had churned the earth and, getting off the train, one sank at once ankle-deep into tough, sucking clay.
At ten, everyone had resorted to wet handkerchiefs against their foreheads; relief was still hoped for in shifted positions and adjusted windows, and E still eloquent on the various phenomena of heat prostration.
By eleven, nobody spoke. The mud on the pigs’ backs had caked bone-dry. Had I still been capable of fellow-feeling, that spark would have gone to Madame Crapaude’s heaving form. Stupor did not lull, it made one with the heat and the duration and the box one sat wrapped in, the thick, grey, steaming bale of cotton wool: every heart-beat was the same, and every heart-beat was worse; there was no end in view and no end could now be envisaged.
After an existence of this the train moved smoothly out. There had been no warning. One conductor had to run for it, another got left behind. After a short pull, we stopped again, and at a station of similar aspect. Blocks of ice were piled on the roofs of the carriages, and once more we were off, headed towards the coast. It was three o’clock. We had spent nine hours at Ruiz.
Madame Crapaude’s daughters shook out their powder-puffs. E and I misused our freshened faculties in figuring out how much of the delay we were likely to make up.
‘We were already a few hours late when we turned back this morning,’ said I.
‘And late starting.’
‘Well, it’s all straight and flat now. We ought to make Mazatlán in two or three hours. Four at the outside.’
The rains must have been heavy. Stretches of track were still under water. Cautiously we crept through steam and heat, green flat swamp and an amorphous vegetation. Impossible to tell tree from shrub and shrub from creeper. They were all creepers: spineless, rank rather than luxuriant. I had never seen tropical flora before, and was disappointed by the lack of colour. Mile upon mile upon mile: no people, no houses, though now and again a clump of cattle standing patiently, belly-deep, in water. One could see their faces and count their horns. We were not making up time.
‘We shall never know where that ice came from,’ said E.
Night fell abruptly at seven. The carriage lights were opaque blue, we sat on in weary gloom among the made-up bunks: other wretches were staying on that train. At last the lights of Mazatlán gleamed in the thick night. Quite a number of lights for a forgotten port. A halt, a reverse, shunting, and at ten o’clock, seventeen hours late, we were in.
Madame Crapaude cla
sped E and me to her moist bosom, her daughters extended flabby hands, men clapped our shoulders: que Dios las proteja, que les vaya bien.
A station lit by flares. Greedy hands and impassive faces. A driver who had been to Texas and would not move off before having collected a commission on us from mysterious agents. A long drive in the dark, first on open road, then through lengths of straight, built-up streets. The emergence of the waterfront: a huge, iron-grey, concrete esplanade, a physical blow in its stark ugliness; beyond it the Pacific making its great noise. The hotel. A Victorian Moorish structure, vast, balconied. In the hall, a row of hatted gentlemen reclining in rocking-chairs by spittoons. A thick smell of dead-town, faded splendours and present bankruptcy. An indifferent clerk shoving a key, opening a register.
‘If you wanna eat, better eat quick.’
The desolate dining-room, pilastered, gilt. A dais for a band, empty. A wooden fan like a windmill whirring over our heads from the stuccoed ceiling.
‘What does it mean? Who was it built for?’ said E. ‘Forgotten? I should say it was. Wiped off every civilised person’s memory. But it must have been on someone’s mind at some time: these chandeliers and this mahogany and that pier didn’t get here by accident.’
The fish is off. The meat looks purple and is off too. The ice is also purple, but scented. It tastes of plaster stirred with hair-oil.
‘At San Pedro –’ said I.
‘Do not mention San Pedro,’ said E. ‘It would make me cry.’
A turn on the tree-less front, so like an English seaside pier, shorn of its amusements, its animation, transposed into a tropical environment.
Tomorrow we shall see the lagoons. Tomorrow we shall find somewhere to live. I did not look at E when I said it. Now sleep. It was then that we came to face the incredible room.
Double-doors led into a large, finely proportioned apartment. Two immense, naked, fly-blown windows fronted the Pacific without shutters or curtains but for one tattered velvet rag torn off half-ways. Plaster and paint were flaking off the walls and ceiling. Three huge fourposters were standing haphazardly about the room, their oak thick with beetles. Roaches in the springs and spiders on the floor. A mahogany dressing-table, a kitchen-chair with a broken seat. No drinking water. The bathroom, a dank cavern. One tap was missing, the other yielded a murky trickle. The lavatory was half-dismantled for some no doubt essential repair. Nothing appeared to have been dusted for a very long period, and everything was on a really grand scale of dilapidation.
‘Do you see what I see? Or is it because I am so tired?’
‘At the best inn’s best room,’ said E. ‘This must have been the most splendid hotel of the Diaz era.’
‘S,’ E said at dawn, ‘what is this ruthless roar? Is there a subway?’
‘It is the Pacific. It looks grey. And quite flat, except for those breakers. Exactly the way it looks at Santa Monica, California.’
‘The reward of travel,’ said E.
The glare became unbearable. I went to procure relief. ‘Just anything,’ I asked, ‘any odd piece of stuff to put over those great windows.’
‘Curtains?’ said the manager. ‘Should I worry about curtains? Our ceilings are coming down.’
We saw a more modest and more livable, hotel in the centre. We saw some clean, comfortless rooms at three and sixpence a week on the waterfront. We found some quite edible eggs, beans and coffee for a very low price at a luncheon counter. We found that it was hot, but not intolerably so. We saw the unprepossessing town, boom-built during one bad period, run to seed in another. What stood up was a blaring art nouveau Cathedral and some municipal excrescences. Life seemed subdued, and there were no signs of port activities. We never saw the lagoons.
They could only be reached by taxi. Last night’s driver was lying in wait, naming an impossible fare, ready for a good haggle. We lost heart.
So I bathed in the churning, tepid brine from a machine in a cement break-water in front of the hotel.
We were very, very depressed.
‘Where are we?’ said E. ‘You have been so competent with the map. Where are we in relation to other places? Do we have to take a journey to get out of here?’
I went to find the aeroplane agency. The next plane out of Mazatlán was in three days. It was full up. There was another one next week. It was full up too. I joined E in the bar, the only part of the hotel whose decay reflected an Edwardian afterglow. The mahogany, though worm-eaten, still shone in patches; the brasses were polished. The barman was neither Mexican nor American; he was a barman. He made us some absinthe cocktails.
‘You wouldn’t want an Armaniac?’ he said, ‘or a Benedictine? No, I suppose not at this hour. It’s ten years since anyone has asked me for an Armaniac. It’s all rum these days, and gin. One has to be thankful when it isn’t tequila.’
‘There wouldn’t be a boat out of Mazatlán to somewhere today?’ said E.
‘A boat? Out of Mazatlán? There are no boats at Mazatlán. The port is silted. Didn’t you know?’
‘Nobody told us.’
‘They don’t talk much of Mazatlán nowadays. Silted these twenty years.’
E looked at me. ‘The train?’
‘The train.’
‘Today?’
‘Today.’
But the Southern-Pacific was not due again until Saturday. It was Wednesday.
‘We may as well have two more of these excellent drinks, barman,’ said E, ‘if you will be so kind as to make them for us.’
‘Why don’t you take the train of the day before yesterday?’ said the barman.
‘Can one?’ said E.
‘The train of the day before yesterday is late. It did not come through on Monday. It will probably come through tonight. If you go to the station this evening, you cannot miss it.’
‘Now we can send a wire to Don Otavio,’ said E.
The train of the day before yesterday was full of wilted Americans. They had been frantic; now they were dead-beat with their three days’ confinement.
‘The line was under water, and we crawled, just crawled all the way from Nogales. Have you ever heard of such a thing? No ma’m! You wouldn’t want to make that trip twice.’
‘Not in ordinary circumstances,’ said E.
We got into Guadalajara the next evening, only five hours late.
Don Otavio, and Andreas and Juan, and Don Enriquez’ Pedro were on the platform.
‘I am so happy. Your rooms are ready for you. You must be so tired. You shall go straight to bed. Soledad will take you a tray.’
We drove into Guadalajara, which seemed like Paris, for a drink. Then we drove out to Chapala in Don Otavio’s car. The air was fresh and smelt of hay. We went gently because cows were sleeping on the road with their calves. They had left the fields seeking the warmth of the still sun-drenched stones. They opened their eyes at us but did not get up. At Chapala we changed into Don Enriquez’ motor boat. On the lake, the night was very clear, and filled with shooting stars. The mild water sparkled, phosphorescent, around our prow. Fish leaped, shone, and fell again. The shore lay softly, peaceful, half-divined. I was in that as it were tertiary state of fatigue where the nerves and senses lie bared to direct contact with the world and there is no longer distance or matter between the vision and the absorption, where the mind races, recording, lucid but empty, and beauty can become ours through osmosis. We landed and saw the façade of San Pedro standing in the moonlight.
PART THREE
Travels
Dites, qu’avez-vous vu?
CHAPTER ONE
Guanajuato or Sic Transit
Ah Madame, soyez tranquille.
Vous voilà
dans la Bonne Province Française.
HERE THERE IS ALWAYS CAUSE to sit up and rub one’s eyes. One had come to expect different things in different places, Aztec Temples in a hybrid Metropolis, echoes of Medieval Spain among swamp and hut, derelict Spas in South-Sea squalor, Byzantine Idylls twelve air hours from the USA
, Don Quixote in a bank and the Marx Brothers in the Post Office. One expected to be cherished like a mascot, cradled in luxury, or crawl like vermin, unregarded, over immense distances exposed to every inclemency. One did not, could not, expect to find oneself in a quiet little town, une brave petite ville, bien calme bien propre, eating one’s table-d’hôte, en pension, napkin in ring, at the Posada del Progreso with the notary and the mayor’s clerk.
Mexico is still a country without a middle class. There are revolutionaries, but no lay mediators. There is public feeling, hideous waves of nationalism, on occasions. There is no public opinion.
There are of course a certain number of people who though literate and shod are neither Creoles nor Anciens Riches, but they do not make up a class; individually they either have few civic cares, or try to make a beeline for office. There is no trace of that fundamental power of a mediator class: the exercise of pressure through disinterested moral criticism distinct from any direct prerogative; that restraining mystique which has been a practical political reality from the Roman Republic through the modifications of the English Monarchy to the Dreyfus Case. And where this class and influence are missing, change, good or bad, usually comes – as it so largely did in the Latin Americas – through violence, through mob risings, schism among the military, palace revolution.
Revolutionary movements in those parts have always been curiously fickle. An interested individual would make use of a grievance to collect followers. The leader kept his end in view, the followers indulged themselves with a martial outing and forgot theirs. Thus, Mexican Indians had plenty of grievances – though of course few weapons – against Spain, yet secession from that country was only instigated and achieved when the conquerors had become too numerous for the spoils, and the Creole section of the ruling class set out against the Spanish-born and more privileged members.
A Visit to Don Otavio Page 20