A Visit to Don Otavio

by Sybille Bedford

  One could bathe, from our beach, only before sunrise and at brief dusk, that exquisite ten minutes when the waves stand almost black and fifty pelicans swoop plumply by one’s side teaching their young to fish.

  The bulk of the day one lay on one’s bed, between showers, and read. The book was heavy, the paper stuck, the light through close-drawn blinds was never right. Soon one dozed. For meals, one pulled oneself up, bathed, dressed, felt bucked by the change. There was ice but it was not comestible, so the manager kept a bottle of gin on it for us, of which we drank a tumblerful diluted with a little lime-juice before lunch and dinner, enjoying a moment, but a moment only, of refreshment. Then we ate a little dull food. Every scrap of clothes began to stick – the dining-room was always 95° – the jolly Saxonians sang, the Mexican mother puffed, the manager went about the tables moaning, quite truthfully, about the bad quality of everything, the soap, the plaster, the fish. So often before the pudding, one went upstairs again. Another shower, a book …

  In this limbo we stayed rather longer than we need have stayed. Until one day we performed the necessary actions, and got away.

  This time we broke the journey at Taxco, a hill-town on the high road between Mexico City and the Coast. The cool was delicious though after twenty-four hours we ceased to be aware or grateful, and here we spent three days which settled our congealing views on tourist Mexico.

  Few places in this country are ill-favoured by nature. Taxco has a lovely position – houses sprawling across a slope on four levels, everywhere red-tiled roofs, archways, flowers, prospects. At every turning another portion juts into view of the Cathedral, a very splendid affair, shimmering with chromatic tiles, too tall in parts, too squat in others, like a brilliant pastiche of late – very late – Hispano-American Baroque. The crafts flourish. Up and down the main street, the silversmiths squat in neat little shops tinkling away at buckles and ear-rings. Every white person is accosted with a string of uninflected words in debased English: stops, gapes, and buys. This street, these shops, these wares, are for the transient and the naïve, just as the displays of Capri are for the Sunday Swiss and the Scandinavian Tour; the foreigners who live at Taxco take villas and stay a very long time. Some may once have thought of writing a book; a few do paint. The bars are kept by other foreigners, known by their Christian names. Two to each bar.

  ‘Don’t look,’ said E. ‘There are Guillermo’s Barons. Rosenstern … Don’t look, they can’t see us.’

  But they could.

  They said they were sorry they had not been able to find out more about our stolen suitcases.

  We thanked them.

  ‘We were at Guadalajara last month. That sweet American Vice-Consul gave us your address and we went out to Lake Chapala to see you. We were so sorry to hear you had left, but that divine friend of yours asked us to stay with him. We had such a good time.’

  ‘You stayed at San Pedro?’

  ‘We only wished you’d been there.’

  The journey from Taxco to Mexico City has been described by Aldous Huxley in Beyond the Mexique Bay. Most accurately. The road is still as good, the drops as sheer. No parapets dull the sensations of the passengers; char-à-bancs and limousines still race each other down the pass round hairpin bends swiping the two-seaters off the track and meet head-on with lorries.

  We got into Mexico City on the eve of All Souls’. The windows of the pastry shops were displaying chocolate skulls in many sizes, inscribed with names in icing on the forehead, Juan, Manuela, Carmen, Padrecito … The next day all was closed in honour of the greatest holiday of the year; the cemeteries were packed with picknickers; we were presented with a mound of the Bread of the Dead and a nestful of skull-lets both by the hotel management and by Don Luís de X’s children, and the morning after, before sunrise, we drove out of the city on our way at last to the South and the Pre-Columbian ruins.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Oaxaca: Mitla & Monte Albán

  Et j’ai vu quelquefois ce que l’homme a cru voir

  FEBRUARY 3RD, 1544

  … I thought that having toiled in my youth, it should profit me to find rest in my old age; and so for forty years I have laboured, going sleepless, eating poorly and at times not at all, bearing armour on my back, risking my life in dangers, freely spending my means and years, all in the service of God; bringing sheep into His fold in a hemisphere far removed from ours …

  I begged Your Majesty in Madrid to be pleased to make plain his royal will to repay me for my services …

  I am old, poor and in debt in the realm to the tune of over twenty thousand ducats … I have not left the Court for a moment, and have had three sons with me there, to say nothing of lawyers, solicitors …

  Again and again I have begged Your Majesty … And this without delay … I am no longer of an age to spend my time travelling from inn to inn, but must rather settle down and make up my account with God. It is a long one, and I have but short time to balance it …

  EL MARQUES DEL VALLE DE OAXACA

  (From Cortez’ last letter to the Emperor Charles V)

  On the back of this letter someone wrote, Nay que Responder. There is No Reply.

  Cortez’ march south from Tenochtitlán took one year. They did not know where they were going, they did not know where it would end. Return was uncertain, hope lay in reaching again some day the sea. To the south the mountains of the plateau are higher, the distance between range and range grows longer, space opens. Below the Valley of Puebla the fertile country ends, foreground ceases; the changing, bounded prospects of Central Mexico, the hundred patterns of valley, hill and ridge, are abolished into a wide vast panorama of receding ranges, wave upon wave, converging on a remote horizon. Now, there is a road; built fifteen years ago; the traveller no more thinks of lacking water, risks no exposure, but the mind is still oppressed by the measureless expanse before it. Progress is not unlike flying, hour into hour, above clouds: the monotony, the isolation, the illimited confinement – space on to space and space and no exit, and the modern spirit quails after one day.

  The State of Oaxaca is a territory of some sixty thousand square miles inhabited by twenty-odd Indian tribes and half a million Mestizos. It has mountains twelve thousand feet high, acres of unexplored tropical forest and a level sea-coast. Coffee is grown in the cold hills, vanilla and coch–ineal produced in the plains; there is one town of thirty thousand inhabitants and one of ten; Oaxaca is the home of the tarantula and the widow-spider, the rivers are full of crocodiles, and the woods of pumas and tapirs, and there is an earthquake every spring.

  Southern Mexico, not unexpectedly, is very Southern. The meridional character of any country is a relative phenomenon, not consistently governed by latitude. Thus Southern England is below the Highlands, but below Southern England lies the grim industrial North of France. Marseilles is north of the teutonically scrubbed and honest province of Piedmont; Boston is south of Florence; New York on the parallel of Naples; and Alabama above that Mexican outpost of northern efficiency, Monterrey. In temperate countries, the characteristics of the South are the loosening of a straighter pattern, an opening up, greater ease between man and man. Life is more immediate, the next bus not so pressing. There is leisure and it is wide awake. In the geographical South begins a run-down: laissez-faire dissolves into laisser-aller, quiescence accommodates to sloth; tolerance, bonhomie, enjoyment become habits; the lilies in the field wax a little rank. In extremer regions everything snaps tight shut again. Torpor. Indifference. There are no answers, there are no questions: leisure is blank and man alone, the future must bury its dead, huis-clos.

  Southern Mexico is dour. It has the sluttish elements of the South – the flies, the dirt, the chafing harnesses on the bullock, and no gaiety; no vines, no garlands, only an obdurate, sempiternal sticking in the mud.

  On their march, Cortez and his men came upon the ruins of Mitla. The Spaniards were impressed. They may well have been.

  Nothing is known of the ancient Zapotecs, t
he people who may have come from Asia across the Bering Straits, and who are believed to have built – in the ninth century, the fourth, in eleven hundred BC? – those temples at Mitla and Monte Albán. Nothing, besides the fragments of the works they left. And these reveal a great deal. They are fragments only in so far as parts have not been excavated, not for any lack of durability in their construction. They are misnamed ruins: no decay has softened, no restorer’s hand has touched, no wars have chipped a splinter off those monoliths, those walls, those flights of stairs. They are there; putting across what they were meant to put across. Mitla and Monte Albán are conscious works of art like Chartres carried out to create a precise atmosphere. They were not meant to please. They glorified, and induced submission to, a certain pattern. They were meant to impress, not by splendour, not by beauty, not by intimations of another vision, but with strength, with will, with inflexibility of purpose; to exclude hope, to overwhelm with power. They succeeded.

  The medium is stone and space – natural space used in relation to masonry. At Monte Albán, the approaches to the sanctum are a series of stadia swept along a levelled hill-top; the courts, passages, and chambers of Mitla are so much space enclosed on a wasteland plain, conveying at once entombment and immensity. Everything is repeated, hard, grey. There is no diversionist sculpture, only a lapidary motif executed relentlessly by skilled mass labour under the whip-hand of an hierarchy. The Zapotec Temples are not large, by Roman and Egyptian standards they are quite small, yet they imply crushing size. The Alley of the Columns at Mitla, that row of strange, stark, neanderthalish pillars, is below fifteen feet high. It appears colossal. Yes, entirely successful, entirely frightening – exulting both the unimportance of the individual and the material dominance of men: the induration of the arbitrary, the organised, the State.

  If the Nazis had not been so cheap, had their taste been better and their instinct for self-dramatisation less Wagnerian, this is the way they would have built. They would have found in the Zapotec architecture the expression and the setting of all they stood for. They would have constructed Monte Albán at Nuremberg, and celebrated the Heldentot at Mitla.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Oaxaca: Some Agreeable People

  The flesh is bruckle, and the Fiend is slee: –

  Timor Mortis conturbat me.

  WE RETURNED FROM MITLA to the town of Oaxaca in an open motor lorry that happens to pass this way once a day picking up people out of nowhere along the gravelled road. A bitter wind was blowing across the cacti plains, and the passengers were shivering in their cottons. We shivered with them.

  ‘It comes from Vera Cruz,’ said our neighbour on the plank.

  ‘It could not,’ said I.

  ‘All their ill winds do,’ said E.

  On the floor of the lorry stood a small, open cardboard coffin, in it decorously laid out with lace and ribbons was the body of a child.

  ‘The little angel,’ said the passengers.

  ‘My fourth,’ said the mother.

  We stopped for a young Indio with a Remington Portable. He was a travelling scribe.

  ‘Do you have much business?’ we asked.

  ‘It depends. People are very backward. I come to houses where they do not know magic from the writing machine.’

  ‘Would it not be easier for you if you wrote by hand?’

  ‘I do not write with my hands; I write with the writing machine. It is progress.’

  ‘But you can write?’

  ‘With the writing machine. I was taught when I was a grown man. Now, only ignorant children are taught to write with their hands.’

  ‘And what are we stopping for now?’ said E.

  ‘The great Tree of Tule. Humboldt believed it to be the oldest living thing on earth, and the driver thinks we ought to look at it.’

  ‘In my native country I successfully avoided seeing the Grand Canyon; I avoided the Painted Desert, my nurse did not manage to drag me to Niagara. With all respect to Alexander von Humboldt, I will not get myself off this contraption to look at a tree however interesting.’

  ‘You need not,’ said I; ‘you can see it from here. This forest we are under, is it.’

  It was a remarkable monster, a kind of cypress as large as a house and as tall as a tree.

  ‘Good Lord,’ said E, ‘three thousand years in Oaxaca.’

  At the time of Cortez’ arrival the present capital of Oaxaca was no Tenochtitlán. There was no comfortable civilisation to destroy, only an Indian fort to conquer. The Spaniards fought their way down to the Isthmus; in later years Cortez sent lieutenants, reinforcements, returned himself. The struggle with the Zapotecs was as hard as had been that with the Aztecs. When it was over, officials, friars, a bishop arrived and set out to make the place more habitable. Charles V created Cortez Marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca. The town now is rather lovely. The houses, one-storeyed against earthquake, have rustic renaissance façades and are built of blocks of rough, greenish local stone. The Plaza lies in speckled shade. On Saturdays a market spreads along every street; there is a special inn for donkeys, and a baroque church covered every foot inside from niche to vaulting with a splendid absurdity of Saints and Angels in gilt and painted high-relief.

  Juarez came from Oaxaca, a fact commemorated by a bronze statue of the reformer, a broken crown at his feet, standing upon a concrete pedestal in an overgrown public garden.

  Coffee used to be produced in the neighbourhood before partition of the land. Now that the fincas are divided off, the bushes are growing to seed. Coffee is a year round business, not a household crop. One might admire the present owners’ lack of interest in profit (uncertain profit, by the way: one rain in the drying season, one flutter in the New York Produce Exchange, and bang goes a year’s effort), but Mexicans in towns are not pleased at having to get their coffee from Central America at three times the expense.

  I went for a morning walk. Mornings in Mexico are always serene. The young blue air floats lightly upon the arid land and one is wafted along with the empyrean balloon. It is the mood of the sketches D. H. Lawrence wrote here, but it is not the dominant note of Oaxaca. It seems an odd reversal that Lawrence should have written the shrill, foreboding, Plumed Serpent at Lake Chapala, yet strolled about the Oaxacan countryside laughing with the Indios calling to their dogs, producing the Mornings, one of his rare contented books. Lawrence was at Chapala in the early twenties at a time when the Christero Rey gangs used to shoot into Mrs Rawlston’s garden; he is supposed to have been upset by a particularly hideous murder near the place he lived and, from his letters, he was already beginning to be fed-up with living in Mexico. At Oaxaca the year before, all was still new and shiny. With Lawrence it was always one thing or another. He had layers and layers of insight into animals and people and places, but the layers did not always join. Reading him one often feels like following someone writing himself deeper and deeper into a tunnel of understanding, touch some climax of intuition, withdraw exhausted, then try another descent. Yet he could reach far. Some of the things he wrote on Mexico are amazing; certain passages, like the harping on the Aztec Mother-of-God’s being a black, obsedian knife, or the rave in the Plumed Serpent about America as a Dead Continent, only spring into relevance here, when one is up against it, and strike with their precise significance just as so much else he wrote seems to make sense only when read in England. Lawrence was alive to the two intermittent keynotes of Mexico: Allegro and Panic.

  At Mexico City I had been able to get hold at last of the work of a very different kind of writer. I had managed to borrow a library copy of Charles Macomb Flandrau’s Viva Mexico! the most enchanting, as well as extremely funny, book on Mexico. Flandrau was a Bostonian bachelor who spent the end of his life in France. He was a Harvardman, and wrote two or three other slim volumes. In 1906 he went to Mexico to keep company to a brother who was trying to raise coffee on a south-eastern slope. Viva Mexico! was published by Appleton, and is unfortunately out of print.* It is not easy to find now, particu
larly in Europe. I wish it were reprinted; I wish I had a copy.

  This I read aloud to E by a bad light in the evenings at Oaxaca. I transcribed one passage – accurately I hope – which I shall quote as it conveys something both of the quality of the author’s temper and the atmosphere of that part of the country:

  ‘I recalled an evening several years ago at my brother’s coffee place – sixty miles from anywhere in particular. As it was in winter, or the “dry season”, it had been raining, with but one or two brief intermissions, for twenty-four days. As the river was swollen and unfordable we had not been able for days to send to the village – an hour’s ride away – for provisions. Meat, of course, we did not have. In a tropical and iceless country, unless one can have fresh meat every day one does not have it at all. We had run out of potatoes, we had run out of bread – we had run out of flour … So we dined on a tin of sardines, some chilli verde and a pile of tortillas, which are not bad when patted thin and toasted to a crisp. Probably because there were forty thousand pounds of excellent coffee piled up in sacks on the piazza, we washed down this banquet with draughts of Sir Thomas Lipton’s mediocre tea. The evening was cold – as bitterly cold as it can only be in a thoroughly tropical country when the temperature drops to forty-three and a screaming wind is forcing the rain through spaces between the tiles overhead. We had also run out of petroleum and the flames of the candles on the dinner table were more often than not blue and horizontal. But somehow we dined with great gaiety and talked all the time. I remember how my brother summoned Concha the cook, and courteously attracted her attention to the fact that she had evidently dropped the teapot on the untiled kitchen floor – that the spout was clogged with mud and that it did not “wish to pour”, and how he again summoned her for the purpose of declaring that the three dead wasps he had just fished out of the chilli no doubt accounted perfectly for its unusually delicious flavour. We had scarcely anything to eat, but socially the dinner was a great success. Immediately afterwards we both went to bed – each with a reading candle, a book and a hot-water bag. After half an hour’s silence my brother irrelevantly exclaimed: