Part 4 (1/2)
The interest of the manager did not extend beyond the cut-and-dried formalities common to all Mexicans. In spite of his honeyed words, it was evident he looked upon me as a necessary evil, purposely come to the hacienda to seek food and lodging, and to be gotten rid of as soon as possible, compatible with the sacred Arabian rules of hospitality. I had not yet learned that a letter of introduction in Latin America, given on the slightest provocation, is of just the grade of importance such custom would warrant. Not that Don Carlos was rude. Indeed, he strove outwardly to be highly _simpatico_. But one read the insincerity underneath by a kind of intuition, and longed for the abrupt but honestly frank Texan.
The two front corners of the estate residence were taken up by the hacienda store and church respectively--a handy arrangement by virtue of which whatever went out the pay window to the peons (and it was not much) came in again at one or the other of the corner doors. Adjoining the building and half surrounding it was an entire village, with a flowery plaza and promenades for its inhabitants. The owners of the estate were less churlishly selfish than their prototypes in our own country, in that they permitted the public, which is to say their own workmen and families, to go freely anywhere in the family residence and its patio, except into the dwelling-rooms proper.
When darkness came on we sat in the piazza garden overlooking the mule-yard. The evening church service over, the estate priest came to join us, putting on his huge black ”Texas” hat and lighting a cigarette on the chapel threshold. He wore an innumerable series of long black robes, which still did not conceal the fact that the curve from chest to waist was the opposite of that common to sculptured figures, and his hand-shake was particularly soft and snaky. He quickly took charge of the conversation and led it into anecdotes very few of which could be set down by the writers of modern days, denied the catholic privileges of old Boccaccio and Rabelais.
Toward eight supper was announced. But instead of the conversational feast amid a company of educated Mexican men and women I had pictured to myself during the day's tramp, I was led into a bare stone room with a long, white-clothed table, on a corner of which sat in solitary state two plates and a salt cellar. A peon waiter brought an ample, though by no means epicurean, supper, through all which Don Carlos sat smoking over his empty plate opposite me, alleging that he never ate after noonday for dread of taking on still greater weight, and striving to keep a well-bred false politeness in the voice in which he answered my few questions. He had spent a year in a college of New Jersey, but had not even learned to p.r.o.nounce the name of that State. Having pointed out to me the room I was to occupy, he excused himself for a ”moment.i.to,” and I have never seen him since.
Evidently horrified at the sight of a white man, even if only a ”gringo,” traveling on foot, the manager had insisted on lending me a horse and mozo to the railroad station of Moreno, fifteen miles distant, but still within the confines of the hacienda. It may be also that he gave orders to have me out of his sight before he rose. At any rate it was barely three when a knock at the door aroused me and by four I stumbled out into the black starlit night to find saddled for me in the mule-corral what might by a considerable stretch of the word be called a horse. The mozo was well mounted, however, and the family chauffeur, carrying in one hand a basket of eggs he had been sent to fetch the estate owner in Guadalajara, rode a magnificent white animal. Without even the formal leave-taking cup of coffee, we set off on the road to the eastward. For road in Mexico always read--at best a winding stretch of dried mud with narrow paths meandering through the smoother parts of it, the whole tumbled everywhere with stones and rocks and broken by frequent unexpected deep cracks and stony gorges. My ”horse” was as striking a caricature of that species of quadruped as could have been found in an all-night search in the region, which indeed there was reason to believe had been produced in just that manner. But at least it had the advantage of being unable to keep up with my companions, leaving me alone behind in far more pleasant company.
We wound through several long peon villages, mere gra.s.s huts on the bare earth floors of which the inhabitants lay rolled up in their blankets. I had not been supplied with spurs, essential to all horsemans.h.i.+p in Mexico, and was compelled at thirty second intervals to p.r.i.c.k up the jade between my legs with the point of a lead pencil, the only weapon at hand, or be left behind entirely. As the stars dimmed and the horizon ahead took on a thin gray streak, peons wrapped in their sarapes pa.s.sed now and then noiselessly in their soft leather _huarachas_ close beside me. In huts along the way frowsy, unwashed women might be heard already crus.h.i.+ng in their stone mortars, under stone rolling-pins, maize for the morning atole and tortillas, while thick smoke began to wander lazily out from the low doorways. Swiftly it grew lighter until suddenly an immense red sun leaped full-grown above the ragged horizon ahead, just as we sighted an isolated station building in the wilderness that now surrounded us on all sides.
A two-car train rambled through a light-wooded, half-mountainous country, stopping at every collection of huts to pick up or set down a peon or two, and drew up at length in Zamora. It was a populous, flat-roofed, ill-smelling, typical Mexican city of checkerboard pattern, on the plaza of which faced the ”Hotel Morelos,” formerly the ”Porfirio Diaz,” but with that seditious name now carefully painted over. Being barely a mile above sea-level, the town has a suggestion of the tropics and the temperature of midday is distinctly noticeable.
Zamora ranks as the most fanatical spot in Michoacan, which is itself so throttled by the church that it is known as the ”estado torpe,” the torpid State. Its bishop is rated second in all Mexico only to that of the sacred city of Guadalupe. Here are monasteries, and monks, and nuns in seclusion, priests roam the streets in robes and vestments, form processions, and display publicly the ”host” and other paraphernalia of their faith; all of which is forbidden by the laws of Mexico. When I emerged from the hotel, every person in sight, from newsboys to lawyers in frock coats, was kneeling wherever he happened to be, on his veranda, on the sidewalk, or in the middle of the street, his hat laid on the ground before him, facing a high churchman in flowing robes and a ”stove-pipe” hat strutting across the plaza toward the cathedral. Traveling priests wear their regalia of office as far as Yurecuaro on the main line, changing there to civilian garb.
Nor is the power of the church here confined to things spiritual. Vast portions of the richest sections of the State are church owned, though ostensibly property of the lawyers that control them. Holding the reins, the ecclesiastics make it impossible for companies to open up enterprises except under their tutelage. The population of the State is some eighty per cent, illiterate, yet even foreigners find it impossible to set up schools for their own employees. The women _of all cla.s.ses_ are almost without exception illiterate. The church refuses to educate them, and sternly forbids any one else to do so. An American Catholic long resident reported even the priests ignorant beyond belief, and a.s.serted that usury and immorality was almost universal among the churchmen of all grades. The peasants are forced to give a tenth of all they produce, be it only a patch of corn, to the church, which holds its stores until prices are high, while the poverty-stricken peon must sell for what he can get. Those married by the church are forbidden to contract the civil ceremony, though the former is unlawful and lack of the latter makes their children legally illegitimate. The local form of wors.h.i.+p includes many of the barbaric superst.i.tions of the Indians grafted on the stems of Catholicism, and weird pagan dances before the altar are a part of many a _fiesta_. The town has already churches sufficient to house easily all the population, yet an immense new cathedral is building. The purpose of its erection, according to the bishop, is ”for the greater glorification of G.o.d.”
I spent two days with the American superintendent of ”Plata.n.a.l,” the electric plant run by water power a few miles out of town through fields of head-high maize. The night before my arrival bandits had raided the establishment and one of them had been killed. The president of Zamora had profusely thanked the ”gringo” in charge when he presented himself in town with the body. On pay-day the manager went and came from the bank with two immense revolvers and a loaded rifle.
The current supplied by the rapids of ”Plata.n.a.l” is carried on high-tension wires to several cities far distant, including Guanajuato, a hundred miles away. Let the dynamo here break down and the cage of ”Pinguico” mine hangs suspended in its shaft and Stygian darkness falls in the labyrinth below. In the rainy season lightning causes much trouble, and immense flocks of birds migrating south or north, according to the period of year, keep the repair gangs busy by flying against the wires and causing short circuits through their dead bodies. Woodp.e.c.k.e.rs eat away the wooden cross-pieces on the iron towers with disheartening rapidity. The company is philanthropically inclined toward its employees. Even the peons are given two weeks' vacation on full pay, during which many rent a patch of land on the mountainside to plant with corn. A savings bank system is maintained, strict sanitation is insisted upon in the houses furnished by the company, and the methods of the haciendas of the region, of paying the peon the lowest possible wages for his labor and produce and selling to him at the highest possible prices at the estate store, thereby keeping him in constant debt and a species of slavery, are avoided. The result is a permanent force of high Mexican grade. All attempts of the company to introduce schools, however, even on its own property, have been frustrated by the powerful churchmen. A bright young native in the plant was an expert at figures, which he had been surrept.i.tiously taught by his ”gringo” superior, but he could not sign his name.
CHAPTER V
ON THE TRAIL IN MICHOACaN
My compatriot strongly opposed my plan of walking to Uruapan--at least without an armed guard! The mountains were full of bandits, the Tarascan Indians, living much as they did at the time of the Conquest, did not even speak Spanish, they were unfriendly to whites, and above all dangerously superst.i.tious on the subject of photography. There are persons who would consider it perilous to walk the length of Broadway, and lose sight even of the added attraction of that reputed drawback.
I was off at dawn. Hundreds of Indians from the interior had slept in scattered groups all along the road to town, beside the produce they had come to sell on market day. For it is against the law to be found out of doors in Zamora after ten! My compatriot had twice fallen foul of the vigilant police there and been roundly mulcted--once the bolt of the hired carriage in which he was riding broke, the conveyance turned turtle, mashed his foot, and covered his face with blood, and he was imprisoned and fined for ”escandalo.” On another occasion he spent some time in jail because his mozo behind him accidentally knocked over the lantern of a policeman set in the middle of the street.
But let us leave so straight-laced a spot behind. The rocky ”road”
could not hold to the same opinion for a hundred consecutive yards, but kept changing its mind as often as it caught sight of some new corner of the landscape. The Indians, who crowded the way during the first hour, were not friendly, but neither did they show any dangerous propensities, and never failed in greeting if spoken to first. There were many of them of pure aboriginal blood. The stony road climbed somewhat to gain Tangantzicuaro, then stumbled across a flatter country growing more wooded to Chilota, a large town with a tiny plaza and curious, overhanging eaves, reminiscent of j.a.pan, stretching down its checker-board streets in all directions.
The trail, which had gone a mile or more out of its way to visit the place, no sooner left it than it fell abruptly into the bed of what in other weather would have been a rocky mountain torrent, and set off with it in a totally new direction, as if, having fallen in with congenial company, it had entirely forgotten the errand on which it had first set forth. The land was fertile, with much corn. In time road and river bed parted company, though only after several attempts, like old gossips, and the former took to climbing upward through thin forests of pine in which the wind whispered an imitation of some distant, small waterfall. For some miles there were no houses. Up and down and in and out of valleys thin with pine we wandered, with now and then a rough shelter of rubbish and thatch, halting places of traveling Indians or the guard-houses of their fields, while the sky ahead was always filled half-way up by peaks of many shapes wooded in every inch with brightest evergreens. Michoacan is celebrated for its forests.
The population showed no great difference from the peasants elsewhere. I ran early into their superst.i.tions against photography, however, their belief, common to many uncivilized races, being that once their image is reproduced any fate that befalls it must occur to them in person. When I stepped into a field toward a man behind his wooden plow, he said in a very decided tone of voice, ”No, senor, no quiero!”
”Why not?” I asked.
”Porque no quiero, senor,” and he swung the sort of small adze he carried to break up the clods of the field rather loosely and with a determined gleam in his eye. I did not want the picture so badly as all that.
There was no such objection in the straggling town made of thatch and rubbish I found along the way early in the afternoon. The hut I entered for food had an unleveled earth floor, many wide cracks in the roof, and every inch within was black with soot of the cooking-stove--three large stones with a steaming earthen pot on them. There was _carne de carnero_, tortillas and water, all for five cents. The weak-kneed table was spread with a white cloth, there were several awkward, _shallow_, home-made chairs, and against the wall a large primitive sideboard with glistening brown earthen pots and carefully polished plates and bowls. When I had photographed the interior, la senora asked if I would take a second picture, and raced away to another hut. She soon returned with a very small and poor amateur print of two peons in Sunday dress. One of them was her son, who had been killed by a falling pine, and the simple creature fancied the magic contrivance I carried could turn this tiny likeness into a life-size portrait.
Beyond, were more rocks and wooded mountains, with vast seas of Indian corn stretching to pine-clad cliffs, around the ”sh.o.r.es” of which were dozens of make-s.h.i.+ft shacks for the guardians against theft of the grain. Later I pa.s.sed an enormous field of maize, which more than a hundred Indians of both s.e.xes and every age that could stand on its own legs were harvesting. It was a communal corn-field, of which there are many in this region. They picked the ears from the dry stalks still standing and, tossing them into baskets, heaped them up in various parts of the field and at little temporary shanties a bit above the general level on the surrounding ”coast.” As I pa.s.sed, the gang broke up and peons in all colors, male, female, and in embryo, went away in all directions like a scattering flock of birds.
Thus far there had been no suggestion of the reputed dangers of the road. But trouble is never far off in Mexico, since the failure of its rapidly changing governments to put down bands of marauders has given every rascal in the country the notion of being his own master. The sun was just setting when, among several groups coming and going, I heard ahead five peons, maudlin with mescal, singing and howling at the top of their voices. As they drew near, one of them said something to his companions about ”armas.” I fancied he was expressing some idle drunken wonder as to whether I was armed or not, and as he held a hand behind him as if it might grasp a rock, I kept a weather eye on him as we approached. Had the weapon I carried in sight been a huge six-shooter, even without cartridges, it would probably have been more effective than the toy automatic well loaded. As the group pa.s.sed, howling drunkenly, a veritable giant of a fellow suddenly jumped toward me with an oath. I drew my putative weapon, and at the same moment the hand I had guessed to be full of rock appeared with an enormous revolver, s.h.i.+ning new. With drunken flourishes the peon invited me to a duel. I kept him unostentatiously covered but continued serenely on my way. To have shown fear would have been as dangerous as for a lion-tamer in the cage with his pets. On the other hand, to have killed or seriously wounded one of the group would in all likelihood have meant at least a none-too-well-housed delay of several years in my journey, for the courts of Mexico seldom admit pleas of provocation from a ”gringo.” The group bawled after me and finally, when I was nearly a hundred yards beyond, the fellow fired four shots in my general direction. But as his bright new weapon, like so many furnished his cla.s.s by our enterprising arms factories, was made to sell rather than to shoot, and his marksmans.h.i.+p was distinctly tempered with mescal fumes, the four bullets harmlessly kicked up the dust at some distance on as many sides of me, with danger chiefly to the several groups of frightened peasants cowering behind all the rocks and rises of ground in the vicinity.
The dangers of the road in Mexico are chiefly from peons mixed with fire-water. When he is sober, the native's att.i.tude verges on the over-cautious. But it is a double danger to the wandering ”gringo,” for the reason above mentioned, while the native who kills a foreigner not infrequently escapes with impunity, and ”gun toting” is limited now among all cla.s.ses of the men only by the disparity between their wealth and the price of a weapon.
As I pa.s.sed on over the rise of ground ahead, huddled groups of men, women, and children fell in after me as if for protection from their own people. At dusk I entered Paracho with a good thirty miles behind me. It was a quaint little town in a lap of valley surrounded by pined hills and with the overhanging j.a.panese eaves peculiar to the region.