A mediator class would have been hard put to emerge in Mexico. Where was it to come from? Who were to be its members? Occupied Indians? or the Gentlemen from Spain? The men who sought their fortunes and served their Faith and King in a far-away country? or the aborigines whose cultures were levelled and whose existence moulded into peonage? The Conquistadores and their descendants had their hands full. The Inquisition hovered over their consciences as the Home Government watched over their pockets – at any moment they might be accused of harbouring heresies or of salting away gold. They never sent enough gold as it was. Even land grants were full of strings; the audience might allot vast acres to a faithful servant, and then direct the proceeds towards the upkeep of some church. So the years passed: fighting, ruling, pleading. They were very much alone; severed from the established world, cut off from their place in the order of their time, every step was a new step, and yet they were hamstrung, pinned to Spain, by a hundred bureaucratic ties. They were no intellectuals, but they were men of intellectual appetites. And they lived them. The distinction between the spirit of adventure and the spirit of inquiry had not yet been drawn. There was the first Bishop of Michoacán who admired Sir Thomas More and thus wrote to the Council of the Indies for leave to set up a model of More’s Utopia amongst the Tarrascans. They were versatile men. They were scholars and poets, that is, they had plenty of Latin and read their Plato and composed Italian verse, but for all that they were neither artists nor philosophers. Their accomplishments were part of their renaissance make-up like a nineteenth-century young woman’s water-colours, and they did not dream of imparting them to the conquered country.
The respective descendants of Toltecs, Aztecs and Tarrascans, whose ancestors bore probably as little resemblance to each other as British shepherds did to contemporary Athenians, lived in common tutelage. They worked where they were told to, razing temples, building Cathedrals, mining; laws were made for them; a style was imported for their place of worship; they were received into their new religion – in violation of its basic tenets – as second-rank Christians, spiritual minors, held incapable of distinction between heresy and dogma, and thus neither subject to the Inquisition nor responsible for the purity of their faith.
Accepting the proposition that salvation is attainable within the Faith alone, that measure was an inevitable expedient, as it would have been beyond the scope and time of any tribunal to deal with the Indians’ many heresies, and as impossible to prevent them. The Indians were delighted to accept a new god, but reluctant to relinquish many of the old ones. Being allowed to muddle on with their mixed pantheon, they stayed contentedly enough in the new faith; and, as it turned out, became in time extremely fervent Catholics. In the course of a few centuries, the old gods faded into insignificant and occasional relics before the lustre of the Trinity, the Virgin and the Saints.
Huitzluiputzli is still about, got up sometimes in wing and crown, tucked away under the altar against a rainy day; yet if the Mexican Indians are still somewhat polytheistically inclined, most of their deities can now at least be found in the Book of Martyrs and the Christian Calendar.
So the Indians became devout Catholics, and learnt to speak Spanish. The Spaniards remained devout Catholics, and went on speaking Spanish. The first generation brought no wives so, there was, if not much inter-marriage, a great deal of inter-breeding. The Indians ceased to be pure Indians, and the Spaniards became Creoles. The country also did its part, and in due course the Creoles, through various stages of Mexification, became Mexican Creoles. After some hundred years of living together, neither Indians nor Spaniards were quite what they had originally been. In some ways they have become like each other; in others, they share nothing at all. The gulf between conqueror and conquered has settled into the gulf between class and class. Each still draws from a different tradition; neither has tried to learn consciously from the other’s. When they are on good terms, they call each other niños, children. There they live side by side, in domestic proximity, familiar and remote, trusting and aloof, like so many fréres de lait, boys, one from the village, one from the manor, who shared the same wet nurse.
Of course Guanajuato can not be what it seems. We know what is supposed to go on under these surfaces of probity and provincial calm, the wickedness – who has not read their Balzac? – the repressions – their Mauriac? their Julien Green? – the crimes. Every assizes reveals these respectable backwaters as the scene of yet another trial of the Ogre of Didier-le-Marché or Argemont-sous-Congre. Yet there is the surface. In France it is a natural cover, in Mexico it is not natural in the least. The elements are lacking. How this town has managed even to seem what it may not be, is a mystery. Perhaps it is a conjuring trick: the eye follows and the mind boggles.
Guanajuato is in Central Mexico. Guanajuato in Tarrascan means Frog’s Hill. The town is entered through a canyon. The altitude is seven thousand feet, the climate fair. Architecturally, it is very pretty: steep streets of white houses of a simple seventeenth-century Moorish cast, winding up and down a hillside. Its history was exceptionally savage, and its past prosperity fabulous.
It has one endearing absurdity, a neo-classical theatre with a great portico and nine muses standing waving on the cornice, the earnest product of somebody’s recollections of the Madeleine, the Parthenon and the present Comédie Française, and his more solid study of what may have been the Municipal Theatre at Toulouse built under the presidency of Jules Grévy. It is quite small and executed all over in bright green stone. This hallucinatory touch gives it – against every intention of the architect – a cozy and exotic charm. The town’s advertised chief sight is the Ossuary, a vault in which the bones of the very poor repose in a promiscuous heap, and the roughly embalmed bodies of the dead of intermediate means are stood upright against the walls. This place is open to visitors at regular hours. (Gratuity.)
Much of the worst fighting of the Revolutionary Wars was done in Central Mexico. In 1810 Guanajuato, which has a tremendous fortress, was held by the Spanish and besieged by an army of Independents headed by Hidalgo himself. Don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the present national hero, was, one might remember, a Creole parish priest. After a hard siege, the assault – an appalling struggle as both sides fought with utter courage and ferocity. It ended with fire set to wooden doors, hand-to-hand fighting in the patio and a kill on the roof. Then the victorious Independents sacked the town. Three days later the Guanajuatans reacted by breaking into the fortress and murdering the only people they could, the Royalist prisoners, some two hundred disarmed Spanish soldiers. Thereupon other Spaniards marched upon the town, set siege to it in their turn and in due course captured it from the Independents. They ordered the execution of every person captured, man, woman or child. And when a few months later Hidalgo, Ignacio Allende and some other Independence leaders were taken at Chihuahua and executed, their heads were sent to Guanajuato, put in iron cages and hung up outside the fortress. There they stayed exposed for ten years. Then the Independence Movement won, New Spain became the Republic of Mexico; the heads were taken to Mexico City in a crystal urn and given a state burial. Then ex-Lieutenant Augustín Iturbide, a very young mestizo and another of the revolutionary leaders, made himself Emperor of Mexico. Young as he was, Augustín I was married, and had his wife and himself solemnly crowned and anointed at Mexico Cathedral. The First Empire lasted three hundred and seven days. Augustín abdicated; was exiled; went to England; returned, and landed again in Mexico and, in the more summary fashion of that country, was shot. One wonders whether Stendhal ever heard of Augustín Iturbide.
Then the country became a Constitutional Republic. The first President changed his name from Fernandez to Guadalupe-Victoria, in honour both of his victory and the national patron saint, the Holy Virgin of Guadalupe. Then he abolished other people’s titles. Soon, two Franciscan Friars rose against the obtaining form of government; General Santa Anna, a Creole jack-in-the-box, rose to defend it; and there began the War between the Centralists and
the Federalists. Provinces revolted, bands gathered, armies were on the march, sieges laid. And so it went on.
Tobacco, maize and wheat now grow on the hollowed hills of Guanajuato, and canary seed is the district’s chief export staple. La Valenciana, El Melado, Las Reyas – once those hills held the richest deposits of gold and silver known to mankind. It was in the days of the immense prestige of gold when no question yet had arisen as to the intrinsic value of precious metals, and these mines changed the history of Europe and had their part in shaping the world we have today. For a century after the Conquest, the gold from Guanajuato was shipped to the Spanish Crown. The Iberian Peninsula did not become more fertile; if anything, rather less food was grown; but as the inhabitants of more fruitful regions were delighted to exchange consumers’ goods for handsome metals, Spain could command every commodity. A fraction of the silver extracted from La Valenciana paid for the men and timber that built the Armada. Spain became a power and of course a menace. Generations of Englishmen looked at it with the apprehension later felt by generations of Frenchmen looking at Germany. The scales of the Reformation were weighted. The very focus of Christendom was shifted from Rome to the Escurial, and thus from a mellow Latin worldliness to the barbarism and ascetic discipline of a risen Moorish Prussia.
A little gold is still extracted at Guanajuato. It is bought by the USA, who to prevent depreciation has guaranteed to take the output. It is shipped to Kentucky and buried again under Fort Knox.
La Valenciana is now empty of silver. On top of the hill, commanding the town, the canyon and a spacious valley, sun-drenched in the sparkling air, stands San Caetano, the church built as a thanks-offering in the heydays of the mine, churrigueresque, domed, honey-coloured, extravagant and melted, every stone glowing with the stored warmth of two hundred sunny years. We had come with a bottle of wine and a loaf, and sat below the shading walls, listening into the intense stillness of a crystalline early noon, eating and drinking, blinking into the valley, E talking of the Decline of the West: Spengler having, it appears, dedicated a long chapter to La Valenciana; the mine, not the church.
CHAPTER TWO
Querétaro: A Modest Inn
Où l’on pourra manger, et dormir, et s’asseoir
THE JOURNEY – by first-class bus – from Guadalajara to Guanajuato, broken by a day and night at Leon, an industrial centre remarkable mostly for its rural aspect, had been so pleasant that we were rash enough to try to get from Guanajuato to San Miguel de Allende despite the fact, somewhat contradicted by the existence of a bus service, that there appeared to be no road.
We were on our way to Querétaro. Guanajuato, San Miguel and Querétaro form a triangle. There is a good road between Guanajuato and Querétaro, and a road of sorts between Querétaro and San Miguel. None is shown on maps, local or general, between San Miguel and Guanajuato. As the distance between these two is by far the shortest, it seemed silly to go first to Querétaro, then all the way back to San Miguel, and then all the way back to Querétaro again. This I explained at length to the ticket-man at the bus station, who showed no signs of confusion but agreed with sympathy.
‘How far is it?’ said E.
‘This way, only about a hundred miles.’
‘How long can a hundred miles be?’
It was a second-class service. Arrangements on second-class buses are above-board enough: the insides are roped off into two parts – the front has seats and is reserved for passengers and their smaller animals, the back is for bullocks, crates, and such goats, pigs and sheep as have outgrown lap size. Seats are not reserved. But they are scrupulously left to those who have boarded the bus the night before and there is moreover plenty of standing space. The vehicles themselves are older first-class buses, re-painted and looking practically the same with the engines overhauled and capable of good speed, such deficiencies as there may be are only in the springs and brakes. Stops are by request.
There was a road-bed, in a fairly advanced stage of construction, much of it really passable. There was nothing that could be called a surface, and there was no grading, so the changes of level were at a degree unusual in public motor transport. At the worst stretches one got off, the beasts grazed and the male passengers gave a hand in steadying the bus on its descent over a flight of boulders.
‘You suppose it does it every day?’ said E.
All in all, it was a long hundred miles.
San Miguel de Allende proved unrewarding. The town seemed both uncouth and arty; full of great clumsy monuments in home-made peasant gothic, and coy little bead shops. There were signs (quite absent elsewhere in the Central Provinces) of a half-fulfilled bid for tourists; the plaza was up, and gusts of dust blowing over everything. Perhaps it was a bad week; nearly everyone I have talked to since about San Miguel said they loved the place and that it had much charm. We, after a few days rest, went on to Querétaro.
Arrival at these provincial towns follows a certain pattern. Whatever the size of the place, the bus stops, for good, a mile or two from the centre. A carrier will rise from the curb, pile your luggage on his back (always one carrier to however many trunks) and set off at a brisk running pace in a direction known to him. Naturally, you follow. At first there is a good long straight and you can see your bags bobbing three hundred yards ahead. Then, in a breathless trot, trying to catch glimpses of your new surroundings, you enter the town. Now the cargador begins to whizz round sharp corners at which you pause in agonised indecision and after half an hour reach the plaza where you will find him in shady repose outside the entrance of the main hotel.
A word on these provincial inns, the posadas. They are run by honest, mildly prosperous, commercial Mexicans for other mildly prosperous, commercial Mexicans. Travellers not fitting this description can go to one or two more modest establishments of essentially the same character, or they can go to the German Pension. Pilgrims sleep in the street; English and American tourists usually love Haus Heimat. The posadas are most jolly. The ground floor is always a large, unkempt parlour opening into the patio without much transition, full of overgrown plants, wicker-chairs, objects without visible use, birds free and caged, and a number of sleeping dogs. Here the innkeepers jot their accounts, sort the linen, drive bargains with the poultry woman and the egg child, arraign the servants, play the gramophone, drink chocolate, chat and doze; and here the guests sit, smoke cigars, have their hair cut, shout for servants, play the gramophone, drink rum and chocolate, chat and doze. Everybody has their own bottle, sent out for by the mozo. The innkeeper would think you mad to pay him bar prices; every time you draw cork he will supply you – compliments of the house – with glasses, limes, salt (without which spirits are considered to be unswallowable), pistachio nuts, fried anchovies, toasted tortillas strewn with crumbs of cheese and lettuce, stuffed cold maize dumplings and pickled chilli peppers.
The three more substantial meals are taken in the comidor, an uncompromising rectangle marked thus and partitioned off the parlour by a glass door. The bedrooms are very clean, quite bleak and full of beds. There is always plumbing, recent and proudly displayed. The rule is a basin, shower-bath and a WC right inside the room. There are no screens, and not always a window. In that case one leaves the door open and soon gets used to it, nobody inside or out ever paying the slightest attention. The service at some hours is zealous and alarmingly imaginative (in one place they unpacked for us and we found every article regardless of use arranged in a symmetrical pattern on the floor); at other hours, early morning, siesta, after dinner, there is no service at all. The terms are something between eight and ten shillings a day for accommodation (the room to yourself if you are alone and the room for seven if you are seven) and all the food you can eat. There are no taxes, no service charges, no extras; that is there are extras: errands run, coffee, chocolate, drinking water, sweet bread, fruit all day long, but you do not pay for them. Washing is one and sixpence a dozen, whether the dozen be shirts, dresses, flannels, socks or handkerchiefs, and is returned in i
mmaculate condition the same day.
Breakfast, round ten o’clock, is ham-and-eggs or eggs-and-chilli, followed by beefsteak with sliced tomatoes, followed by black beans; tortillas, rolls, buns, sweet bread and cake; jam, honey and stewed fruit: papayas, muskmelon, bananas and prickly pears; coffee or chocolate. The coffee nowadays is often imported from Guatamala, and very good; the chocolate can be ordered in three different styles, French, Mexican and Spanish. French chocolate is beaten frothy with cream, Mexican is plain thick black, and Spanish is black whipped with cinnamon. Some guests have four eggs, two beefsteaks, three cups of chocolate and an extra basket of sweet bread. Their smaller children sit hoisted on the laps of girl servants – a servant per baby – who hold their mouths open and stuff them with slow conscientiousness course for course like so many little geese. For luncheon there will be a tureen of soup; then a dish of dry soup; then fish; a baked vegetable; a made plat de résistance, sweet peppers stuffed with bean-paste-and-beef, or choyotes with pork-mince-and-curds, or turkey curry; then a vegetable salad; some scraps of fowl; a green salad; fried mashed beans; a very sweet sweet; stewed fruit; mangoes, papayas, guavas, persimmons, muskmelon, prickly pears and bananas; and of course tortillas, bread, sweet bread, cake, coffee and chocolate. Before lunch the men drink rum and Coca-Cola, just before lunch they drink tequila, with lunch they drink beer and after lunch coffee and chocolate. The women and children drink Coca-Cola, bottled orange fizz, more bottled orange fizz, and chocolate. Supper in the provinces is at nine, and a shorter meal – chicken broth, omelet, a hot vegetable course, beefsteak or cutlets, a salad, beans, fruit, breads and chocolate, perhaps an extra piece of cake for the children, but you may ask for many things that aren’t on the table.
A Visit to Don Otavio Page 21