A Visit to Don Otavio

by Sybille Bedford

  The cooking is good; the matière première excellent. The beef is tough, but not beyond the exercise of teeth. There are few sauces and little fat and flour, and very little cooked fat is used – instead, the piece of fresh butter on the vegetable, the drop of oil on the grilled chop as it goes to the table – and so the food, if abundant, is neither rich nor greasy. If one keeps off the sweets and the sweet breads (a pleasure to any person over ten), one will find that the meals are light, and a spoonful of fried black beans after several green salads not unwelcome. And although Indio babies munch red pepper, and chilli on maize cake is eaten by the poor like so much bread and cheese, Mexican cooking is not hot: there are a number of hot dishes, and these are very hot indeed and a bowl of salsa ranchera – raw chilli chopped with tomato and a little onion – is part of the condiment tray on every breakfast table; the run of the food, however, is bland and to suppose it over-spiced and highly seasoned would be as erroneous as deducing this character of English cooking from the indices of curried mutton, Lea and Perrin’s sauce and Mr Coleman’s mustard.

  Simple food then, robust, orderly, pleasant. Not the greatest simple food: the grilled sole, the spring vegetable so subtle that it may escape attention, the perfectly roast bird; but the older cycle of rice, beans and eggs, of garlic and tomato, gourds and squashes, poor meat, figs, roast fish, green herbs and lamb seethed in oil and lime. Cooking is at once the most and the least localised of the arts: it owes its development to commerce and to travel, and its preservation to stout regionalism; it must find its character in the resources at hand, yet may enrich these by some of the good things from outside. Every enlarging contribution was made by clever, articulate and travelled men, yet the burden is carried and handed on by obscure local women. The history of cooking, with its interchanges and migrations, is indeed hard to pin down. Certain styles of cooking run like a thread across the globe and certain folk themes appear over and over again at places unrelated to each other. The cooking of Mexico belongs loosely to the European Mediterranean. The link was obviously made by the Navigators and Spain; perhaps it was strengthened by some shared Oriental affinities. The new food was a graft that took well. It suited the climate and the land, and joined quite naturally with the indigenous roots, just as that Mediterranean tradition itself was a happy hybrid of Greece and Carthage, Gaul and Moor, native corn and Persian fruit.

  Querétaro is a country town, and the repository of some of the most splendidly modish examples of ecclesiastical late churrigueresque. The streets are full of ex-convents, rope and harness shops; straw is everywhere and a cattle-show might be held at any minute. The town is one of the few surviving places built before the Conquest; architecturally this does not make the slightest difference as the Spaniards never left a native stone unturned but it adds extra length to the always lurid past. Querétaro, by another name, was founded by the Otomics, a relatively unaggressive people who refused to fight Cortez’ troops with anything but bare fists, lost of course, and gave a dance for their new rulers. The town was taken from them by Montezuma, turned into a garrison and held through decade after decade against the Danubian hordes of the Aztec Empire, the Chimimecs. In due course and another name it was captured by the Spanish, and after some centuries of vice-regal rule became the official cradle of Mexican Independence and one of the major battle-grounds of that cause: La Corregidora, Doña Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez, the Joan of Arc and Pasionaria of the War of Independence, who housed, hid and abetted the conspirators against the crown, being the wife of the Mayor of Querétaro.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Emperor Maximilian at Querétaro

  Presque toute l’histoire n’est qu’une suite d’horreurs

  CHAMFORT

  MAXIMILIAN of Habsburg was sentenced to death by court-martial at Querétaro on June 15th, 1867, and shot four days later on a hill outside that town. He was not the first man to die through violence in that vicinity, though during those four days many people tried to save his life. Juarez’ headquarters at San Luís Potosí were connected by telegraph. The representatives of the civilised world interceded: Queen Victoria, the Queen of Spain, the Kings of Italy, Sweden, Belgium and Prussia pleaded for a commutation of the death sentence; President Johnson of the United States sent an envoy; Victor Hugo and Garibaldi each wrote an appeal; the French Consul and the Austrian Minister acted on their urgent instructions; the Princess Salm-Salm rode alone from Querétaro to San Luís to fling herself at Juarez’ knees. He was not impressed. After three years in the field, fighting, retreating, fighting, pushed north by French Artillery and Austrian Dragoons in sky-blue tunics and white patent leather cartridge belts, shifting the less and less impressive seat of a temporary government from market town to mountain village, pressed against the border, skipping into Texas, edging forward again: an outlaw, a guerrilla, a gathering power, President Juarez by military victory and capture of the Emperor was once more the de facto head of the Mexican Government. He had been in the wilderness a very long time. There had been death and death and death again. And now he was asked to spare the life of one man. The moral pressure put on Juarez was great; perhaps it was too much, perhaps, it came from the wrong quarters. He did not like Europe, and he was most self-consciously not a respecter of persons. He sent a telegram to Querétaro confirming the death sentence the day after it had been pronounced.

  Now it seems so easy. One generous gesture – a pardon, relief all round, a phantom consigned to exile and the new régime opening with an act of clemency. Why did Juarez not commute the sentence? Why, as we are led to believe, did he not even consider it? It was not his moment of perspective. Even so, something must have come through these anguished messages arriving at San Luís. Did he, a professed defender of human values, not grasp that here was a great moral, or at least a great rhetorical opportunity? If he could not respond to the instances of the Diplomatic Corps, he might have responded to President Johnson for, although he looked upon Europe with the suspicions of a surly New World peasant, Juarez admired the United States and above all he had admired Lincoln in whose struggle he saw a parallel to his own, without probably ever guessing at the intellectual self-doubt, the humanity, subtlety and range of that very great man with whom Juarez shared an initial hardship of getting themselves taught to read. He might have been moved by Victor Hugo, a brother radical and enemy of Napoleon III’s, and his so stirring appeal to their common ideals of liberty and justice. Perhaps they did not mean the same. Juarez was not brought up on the Voltairian principle of taking pains to make it possible for an adversary to express his noxious opinions, nor was he nurtured in the tradition of classical literature that condemns the tyrant and extols the moderation of the victor and at once discerns in him a new potential tyrant. He cannot have been much concerned with the victory of man over himself: freedom was the freedom to earn and eat one’s bread, and all of human bondage was caused by forces from without. These forces Juarez had set himself to destroy. He had his first chance when he was given the Ministry of Justice and Ecclesiastical Relations in the Juan Alvarez Government of 1855.

  Juarez was an Indian, a patriot, a lawyer and a practising reformer, and as such held the inevitable convictions as to the ultimate good of his reforms and his own indispensability in establishing them. Indeed, at the beginning of Juarez’ political life, in the Mexico of the 1850s, the prospect of any and every reform must have seemed both an improvement and a possibility beyond wildest dreams, and as Benito Juarez was not only tough, single-minded and obstinate like seven donkeys but also quite impermeable to material corruption, it was natural that he should have been considered the right man for this task by others and himself.

  The antecedents of the Juan Alvarez Presidency were the habitual ones, except for one of Alvarez’ predecessors, Mariano Arista, who was not only constitutionally elected but furthermore the first Mexican President thus chosen who lived to take office. When revolts broke out against him, that unusual man, rather than involve the country in another civil
war, resigned, actually left Mexico, stayed abroad, and died in poverty. After Arista’s departure, General Santa Anna took over once more. It was his fourth or fifth term as dictator and generalissimo, and as he was by then considered an almost disreputable character, his claims to office are not clear. He had lost a leg in some battle, and used to thump the wooden one during his public speeches in appeal to national gratitude. He had also at one time surrendered the entire Mexican army after a twenty-minute skirmish to General Houston. For this, Santa Anna’s countrymen had wished to shoot him, but he put himself under American military protection, signed away Texas to the United States, and escaped. Later he repudiated the Texan deal. Santa Anna spent much of his life sulking at his Hacienda or wandering about abroad, but he always popped up at some moment or other and was welcomed with open political arms. At one time, Madame Calderon de la Barca’s husband, the Spanish Ambassador, ‘gave him [Santa Anna] a letter from the Queen, written under the supposition of his being still President, with which he seemed much pleased.’ Madame de la Barca goes on to say, ‘he has a sallow complexion, fine dark eyes, soft and penetrating, and an interesting expression of face … It is strange how frequently this expression of philosophic resignation, of placid sadness, is to be remarked on the countenance of the deepest, most ambitious, and most designing men.’ During the present term, this fabulous mountebank did himself well. He began by selling a piece of land – some forty thousand square miles at the border – to the American Government, and thus in funds, revived the Order of Guadalupe, one of young Iturbide’s ephemeral imperial phantasies abolished these thirty years, and created himself Grand Master; then he recalled the Jesuits, recently expelled. Six months after his accession, with a kind of Punch-and-Judy effrontery, he proclaimed himself Perpetual Dictator by Decree. Revolutions broke loose and Santa Anna’s opponents marched upon the capital. Santa Anna sneaked away and two new liberal Presidents, General Alvarez and Ignacio Comonfort, arrived at Mexico City at the head of their respective armies. They made it up. Alvarez stayed President, Comonfort took the Secretaryship for War, and it was in this government that Juarez held his first office.

  The atmosphere of nineteenth-century Mexico was at once medieval and anarchical. No breath of Protestantism or Evolution had yet touched the spiritual authority of the Church; members of it were taking different sides in secular conflicts, the institution remained one-pointed, unique, its prestige intact. The Church in Mexico was very well off. It enjoyed many of the temporal prerogatives and exemptions abrogated then elsewhere; it held a quarter of the country’s landed property; its members were privileged and its hangers-on numerous; what with the people pawns and the governments self-seeking farce, the Church alone was untouchable and its abuses no doubt as open, customary and extreme as they have so often been described.

  Into this set-up, Juarez inserted a long and lawyer-like bill, the Lex Juarez, purporting to deal with general administration. This bill contained some clauses curtailing the powers of the Military and Ecclesiastical courts which so far had had exclusive jurisdiction in all cases, civil or criminal, involving soldiers or the clergy. Since the bulk of the male population had at one time or another been pressed into the soldiery, and benefice of clergy was sometimes pleaded down to members of the families of housekeepers of incumbents, and since the Ecclesiastical courts were liable to bias on points concerning property, and the Military completely casual in their handling of non-military crimes, Juarez’ thin end of the wedge was well chosen. Ils avaient compris tout de suite. There was an uproar. The Bishop of Michoacán cried heresy, half the army rebelled; the Government kept them down with the other half; Juarez continued. His next law quite bluntly ordered the compulsory sale of all Church land. These holdings were to be sold publicly at an assessed value to private persons; the Church was to get the money. The Bishop of Puebla cried sedition; the clerical party raised a levy of fifteen hundred men. The Archbishop of Mexico tried to mediate by suggesting submission of the problem to the Pope. This so infuriated the nationalistic susceptiblities of the Government that President Comonfort (Alvarez had meanwhile been pushed out) began to confiscate Church lands at once. The clericals, thereupon, joined forces with the military; the Church threatened with anathema persons buying ecclesiastical property at government sales; the Government promulgated a new and very truculent constitution; and the War of the Reform, one of the most savage of Mexican civil wars, was on.

  In 1857, Pius IX declared the Government of Mexico apocryphal, and put its members under ex-communication. Comonfort began to get frightened. He annulled the new constitution, arrested Juarez, and tried to form a compromise government. Then he took fright again, strengthened the National Guard, released Juarez, and re-established the constitution. Then he fled. The capital was in full revolt; other progressive leaders rallied at Querétaro and declared Juarez President of Mexico according to the provisions of the new constitution then again in force. The clericals elected an Anti-President by pronouncement a few days after Juarez had sworn his oath of office. The point of time is important because Juarez, whose adherence to the letter of the law was the faith of an atheist lawyer in an age of anarchy, always stressed the legality of his government. Clericals and Juaristas fought each other at Querétaro, at San Luís; there was engagement upon engagement further north. Juarez had to withdraw to Guadalajara, and so began the first stretch of his two three-year terms of fighting his way across the country, years that, apart from their hardships and their cruelty, their monotony and their dangers, must have seemed to him an intolerable waste of time and gifts and opportunity, a bitter delay of all he wished to give his country. At Guadalajara he was captured and on the point of being shot. He escaped and fought his way up the Pacific Coast, entered the United States and returned to Mexico by boat. He landed at Vera Cruz and held that port for two years against siege from land and sea by the forces of a succession of Counter-Presidents ensconced at Mexico City. From this position, with really reckless obstinacy, Juarez issued the famous Reform Laws. They went very far. Disestablishment, of course, and religious toleration; abolition of any of the special privileges of the clergy. The laws also declared marriage a civil contract only; decreed the dissolution of all religious orders and communities; forbade the Church to own any landed property at all, forbade its members to receive any pay whatsoever and directed them to subsist on the voluntary contributions of parishioners. By that time, several hundred thousand people were under arms, campaigning as Juaristas, clericals or bandits. Bans of excommunication issued from every bishopric, priests were murdered in their presbyteries and secret nunneries established in the cellars of the faithful; all sides shot prisoners and the clerical General Marquez (the Tiger of Tacubaya) had doctors executed for treating wounded Juaristas.

  Throughout 1860 Juarez’ forces were gaining. People like Don Otavio’s father began to join what they recognised as the right bandwaggon. And early in 1861, the Juaristas managed to enter Mexico City. Of course Juarez at once implemented the Reform Laws. He had all remaining Church property confiscated, exiled the bishops, and expelled the Papal Nuncio and the Spanish Envoy. The Bishops, the Anti-President, some ex-Anti-Presidents with a number of Mexican émigrés fled to Paris and began the intrigues which made an invasion of Mexico seem so attractive to the romantic ambitions of the Empress Eugenie so meritorious to the Vatican and so profitable to banking interests. Another of the Juarez Government’s troubles was money. Not unnaturally, there was none in the treasury, and there was also a relatively large foreign debt: ten thousand pounds – borrowed by Santa Anna – owed to Britain; inflated bonds held by France and Spain. Juarez suspended payment of interest. Hence the punitive expedition by these creditor countries, the French landing at Vera Cruz and the French campaign on Puebla. The war was on again. After a year and a half of it, the French entered Mexico City. President Juarez withdrew north with some troops and two faithful generals (one of them, Juarez’ most ironic legacy, General Diaz). The French spread into the Centr
al Provinces, Mexico became an occupied country and to the Chancelleries of Europe that problem and opportunity, a vacant throne. Hence the arrival of the Emperor Maximilian; hence three years later, Querétaro.

  This in 1867 was Benito Juarez’ past. (His future was five years of relatively undisturbed rule along his own lines, then sudden, natural death at the age of sixty-six. He was succeeded by a friend, Tejada, another lawyer, who carried the Reform Laws to an unpopular extreme and was kicked out in a civil war by another friend, Porfirio Diaz.) Could Juarez have made a different decision at San Luís Potosí? His lines then were dug deep; arrived at a given point, a man can only act as he must. The answers were all stacked for Juarez. Maximilian had conspired against the legitimate Government of Mexico; Maximilian had himself issued a decree putting under sentence of death any Mexican bearing arms against the Monarchy; Maximilian was backed by powers contrary to the public welfare of the country. His execution was legal; just; a warning. It was not very important. Regicide recoils? Juarez did not think of Maximilian of Habsburg as a Prince but as a kind of exotic, full-dress Counter-President. The two men never met. It was not in Juarez’ grasp to realise that Maximilian was essentially an innocent man, another like himself tied to a conception of duty, and now a man without reality or following, a man alone. It would have made small difference. The principles involved remained the same: Maximilian had broken the rules. To Juarez who had seen too many die, the rules were more lasting than life, and more important, and in such a case one can never ask, which rules? That brave and tenacious man, who had not spared himself, who had fretted with such patience through the misspent years, who had been able to bring about so much against such odds, could not reverse le juste retour des choses d’ici-bas, could not stop the cycle of retaliatory deeds. After a given point a man can only act as he must. Why did Maximilian go to Querétaro? Why did he not abdicate? Why did he not leave Mexico when he could? And why, if he did decide to fight it out, did he leave an open city and deliberately enter a town under siege?