Part 5 (1/2)

Along the way we picked up any amount of s.h.i.+ning black obsidian, some in the form of arrow-heads and crude knives that bore out the statement that the Indians once even shaved with them. It was nearly eleven when we sighted, down among the trees on the lake sh.o.r.e, the squat church tower of the once capital of Michoacan. A native we spoke with referred to it as a ”ciudad,” but in everything but name it was a dead, mud-and-straw Indian village, all but its main street a collection of mud, rags, pigs, and suns.h.i.+ne, and no evidence of what Prescott describes as splendid ruins. Earthquakes are not unknown, and the bells of the church, old as the conquest of Michoacan, hang in the trees before it. Inside, an old woman left her sweeping to pull aside the curtains of the reputed t.i.tian, a ”Descent from the Cross,” while I photographed it from the pulpit, for which privilege the young peon s.e.xton appeared in time to accept a silver coin.

The German, with whom business always took precedence over pleasure, had gone to find the house of the priest. When I reached the door of it on the blank main street, he was sitting on a wooden bench in the hallway with a dozen old women and peons. We were admitted immediately after, as befitted our high social standing. A plump little padre nearing sixty, of the general appearance of a well-stuffed grain sack draped in black robes, but of rather impressive features--and wearing gla.s.ses--greeted us with formality. The ”doctor” drew a black case from his pocket, went through some hocuspocus with a small mirror, and within two minutes, though his Spanish was little less excruciating than his English, had proved to the startled curate that the gla.s.ses he was wearing would have turned him stone-blind within a month but for the rare fortune of this great Berlin specialist's desire to visit the famous historical capital of the Tarascans. The priest smoked cigarette after cigarette while my companion fitted another pair of crystals and tucked the dangerous ones away in his own case--for the next victim. He did not even venture to haggle, but paid the two dollars demanded with the alacrity of a man who recognizes his good fortune, and to whom a matter of a few pesos more or less is of slight importance. For were there not a score of Indians waiting outside eager to pay as well for ma.s.ses, confessions, and all the rest of his own hocuspocus? There followed a social chat, well liquefied, after which we took our ceremonious leave. Once outside, I learned the distressing fact that the shape of the padre's bows had required crystals costing twelve cents, instead of the customary nine-cent ones.

The German set off in the blazing noonday at his swiftest pace. He was obliged to be back at the hotel by three, for the dinner must be paid for whether eaten or not. I fell behind, glad of the opportunity. Many groups of peons were returning now, without their loads, but maudlin and nasty tempered with the mescal for which they had exchanged them. My automatic was within easy reach. The oculist had criticized it as far too small for Mexican travel. He carried himself a revolver half the size of a rifle, and filed the ends of the bullets crosswise that they might split and spread on entering a body. In the outskirts of Patzcuaro there came hurrying toward me a flushed and drunken peon youth with an immense rock in his hand. I reached for my weapon, but he greeted me with a respectful ”Adios!” and hurried on. Soon he was overtaken by two more youths and dragged back to where an older peon lay in the middle of the road, his head mashed with a rock until trickles of brain protruded. The event seemed to cause little excitement. A few stood at their doors gazing with a mild sort of interest at the corpse, which still lay in the road when I turned a corner above.

Mules drag the tram-car of Patzcuaro laboriously up the three kilometers from the station to the main plaza, but gravitation serves for the down journey. When enough pa.s.sengers had boarded it to set it in motion, we slid with a falsetto rumble down the cobbled road, a ragged boy leaning on the brake. Beyond the main railroad track a spur ran out on a landing-stage patched together out of old boards and rubbish. Peons were loading into an iron scow bags of cement from an American box-car far from home. Indians paddled about the lake in canoes of a hollowed log with a high pointed nose, but chopped sharp off at the p.o.o.p. Their paddles were perfectly round pieces of wood, like churn-covers, on the end of long slim handles.

We were soon off for Morelia, capital of the State, across plains of cattle, with an occasional cut through the hills and a few brown ponds. At one station we pa.s.sed two carloads of soldiers, westbound. They were nearly all mere boys, as usual, and like the policemen and rurales of the country struck one as unwisely entrusted with dangerous weapons. Morelia is seen afar off in the lap of a broad rolling plain, her beautiful cathedral towers high above all the rest. It was brilliant noonday when I descended and walked the mile into town.

The birthplace of Jose Morelos and of Yturbide, first emperor of Mexico, sits 6200 feet above the sea and claims 37,000 inhabitants. It is warm and brown with dust. Architecturally it is Mexican, with flat roofs and none of the overhanging eaves of Patzcuaro and Uruapan. From the ”centro”--the nerve-center of the ”torpid State,” with two well-kept plazas, the plateresque cathedral of a pinkish stone worn faint and spotted with time, and the ”seat of the powers of the State,” all on the summit of a knoll--the entire town slopes gently down and quickly fades away into dirty, half-cobbled suburbs, brown and treeless, overrun with ragged, dust-tinted inhabitants, every street seeming to bring up against the low surrounding range. Its natural advantages are fully equal to those of Guadalajara, but here pulque grows and man is more torpid. All the place has a hopeless, or at least ambitionless, air, though in this splendid climate poverty has less tinge of misery and the appearance of a greater contentment with its lot. There is a local ”poet's walk” that is not particularly poetic, a wild park beyond that is more so, and a great aqueduct over which sprawl enormous ma.s.ses of the beautiful purple bourgainvillea. This ancient waterway resembles, but is far less striking than that of Segovia, for it runs across comparatively level ground and has only single arches of moderate height and too polished construction, instead of the ma.s.sive cyclopean work of immense blocks of stone without mortar of its Spanish counterpart.

Views and sunsets too often tempt the traveler in Mexico, or I might mention that from a little way out of town at the top of the road to Mexico City, where the cathedral towers all but reach the crest of the backing range, over which hung the ocher and light-pink and saffron-yellow clouds of the dying day.

The ”Hotel Soledad” a.s.serted its selectness by the announcement: ”En este hotel no se admiten companias de comicos ni toreros,” but the solitude of its wooden-floored beds at least was distinctly broken and often. The pompous, squeeze-centavo, old landlady sat incessantly in her place near the door between dining-room and kitchen, with a leather handbag from which she doled out, almost with tears, coppers for change and the keys to the larder, to the cringing servants and conferred long with them in whispers on how much she dared charge each guest, according to his appearance. But at least Mexico feeds well the traveler who is too hungry to be particular. He who will choose his dishes leads a sorry life, for the hotels are adamant in their fare and restaurants are almost unknown, except the dozens of little outdoor ones about the market-places where a white man would attract undue attention--if nothing less curable--among the ”pela'os” that make up 80 per cent. of the population.

The pa.s.sengers to Acambaro included two ladies of the fly-by-night species, who whiled away a somewhat monotonous journey by discussing the details of their profession with the admiring train-boy and drumming up trade in a coquettish pantomime. The junction town was in fiesta, and the second-cla.s.s car of the evening train to Celaya was literally stacked high with peons and their multifarious bundles, and from it issued a stench like unto that of a congress of polecats. I rode seated on a brake, showers of cinders and the cold night air swirling about me, until the festive natives thinned down enough to give me admittance. By that time we were drawing into Celaya, also in the throes of some bombastic celebration.

Like many another Mexican city the traveler chances into when the central plaza is bubbling with night life, light, and music, Celaya turned out rather a disappointment in the sunny commonplace of day. Its central square is a little garden, but almost all the rest of the town is a monotonous waste of square, bare, one-story houses with ugly plaster facades and no roofs--at least to be seen--each differing a bit from its neighbor in height, like a badly drawn up company of soldiers. The blazing sun and thick dust characteristic of all the high central plateau are here in full force. Like most Spanish things--conquests, history, buildings--it looked more striking at a distance than when examined in detail.

Celaya is far-famed for its candy. All over the republic sounds the cry of ”Cajetas de Celaya!” Mexico shows a great liking for sweets; no block is complete without its little stands or peregrinating hawkers of all manner of temptations to the sweet-toothed, ranging from squares of ”fudge” in all colors of the rainbow to barber-pole sticks a half-yard long. The station was surrounded with soap-less old women, boys, and even men offering for sale all sizes of the little wooden boxes of the chief local product, in appearance like axle-grease, but delicious far beyond its looks, and with vendors of everything imaginable, to say nothing of a ragged, dirty mult.i.tude of all ages with no business there--nor anywhere else.

When I had spread out over two wooden seats of the big, bustling El Paso Limited I was quickly reminded of the grim, business-bent, American engineer in gray hair, the unlit half of a cigar clamped tightly between his teeth, of whom I had caught a half-conscious glance in the cab window. One could literally _feel_ his firm American hand at the throttle as the heavy train gathered steady headway and raced away to the eastward. Across the car sat two handsome, solidly-knit young bull-fighters, their little rat-tail _coletas_ peering from behind their square-cut hats. We sped steadily across the sun-flooded, dry, brown plateau, slightly rolling, its fields alternating between the dead tint of dry corn and newly plowed patches. Here for the first time were pulque producing fields of maguey, planted in long, straight, emerald-green rows.

As Irapuato for its strawberries, and Celaya for its sweets, so Queretaro is famed for its huge, cheap hats, of a sort of reed, large enough to serve as umbrellas, and for its opals. From the time he steps off the train here until he boards it again, the traveler, especially the ”gringo,” is incessantly pestered by men and boys offering for sale these worthless bright pebbles--genuine and otherwise. Here again are the same endless rows of one-story, stucco houses, intersecting cobbled and dust-paved streets, running to the four corners of the compa.s.s from a central plaza planted with tall, slim trees, the interwoven branches of which almost completely shade it. The cathedral houses, among other disturbing, disgusting, and positively indecent representations of the Crucifixion and various martyrdoms done in the Aztec style of b.l.o.o.d.y realism, a life-size _Cristo_ with ma.s.ses of long real hair and a pair of knee-length knit drawers for decency's sake. One might fancy the place weighed down by a Puritan censors.h.i.+p. The local museum contains among other rubbish of the past the keyhole through which Josefa whispered in 1810 the words that started the revolution against Spanish power! Here, too, is what purports to be an authentic photograph of the execution of Maximilian, theatrical to a Spanish degree, the three victims standing in their places, the once ”Emperor of the Mexicans”

holding a large crucifix, and several of the boy soldiers who executed them crowded eagerly into the corners of the picture. More impressive to the incredulous is the plain, tapering, wooden coffin in which the chief body was placed, the bottom half covered with faded blood and on one of the sides the plain, dull-red imprint of a hand, as if the corpse had made some post-mortem effort to rise from the grave. The portrait of the transplanted scion of Austria shows a haughty, I-am-of-superior-clay man, of a distinctly mediocre grade of intellect, with a forest of beard that strives in vain to conceal an almost complete absence of chin.

History records that the deposed ruler reached by carriage his last earthly scene in the early morning of June 19, 1867. I arrived as early, though afoot. It is a twenty-minute walk from the center of town across the flat, fertile vega, green with gardens, to the Cerro de las Campanas, a bare, stern, stony hill, somewhat grown with cactus bushes, maguey, and tough shrubs, rising perhaps seventy feet above the level of the town. It runs up gently and evenly from the south, but falls away abruptly in a cragged, rock precipice on the side facing Queretaro, providing the only place in the vicinity where poorly aimed bullets cannot whistle away across the plain. Before them, as they faced the youthful, brown file of soldiers in their many-patched and faded garb, the three had a comprehensive view of the town, chiefly trees and churches sufficient to house the entire populace several times over. Nine immense structures, each with a great dome and a tower or two--steeples are unknown in Mexico--stand out against the bare, brown, flat-topped range beyond that barely rises above the highest tower. The last scene he looked on must have struck the refuted emperor as typical of a country he was sorry then ever to have seen, in spite of his regal control of facial expression,--a hard, stony plateau, the fertility and riches of which succ.u.mb chiefly to an all-devouring priesthood. Cold lead plays too large a part in the history of Mexico, but certainly its most unjust verdict was not the extinction of the ”divine right” in the person of this self-styled descendant of the Caesars at the hands of an Indian of Oaxaca. To-day a brown stone chapel, erected by Austria, stands where Maximilian fell, but the spot remains otherwise unchanged, and no doubt the fathers of these same peons who toiled now in the gardens of the vega under the morning sun lined the way through which the carriage bore to its American extinction a system foreign to the Western Hemisphere.

CHAPTER VI

TENOCHt.i.tLAN OF TO-DAY

The El Paso Limited picked me up again twenty-four hours later. Beyond Queretaro's ungainly aqueduct spread fields of tobacco, blooming with a flower not unlike the lily; then vast, almost endless stretches of dead, dry corn up low heights on either hand, and occasional fields of maguey in soldierly files. At San Juan del Rio, famous for its lariats, a dozen men and a woman stood in a row, some forty feet from the train, holding coils of woven-leather ropes of all sizes, but in glum and hopeless silence, while a policeman paced back and forth to prevent them from either canva.s.sing the train-windows or crying their wares. Evidently some antinuisance crusade had invaded San Juan.

Mexico is a country of such vast vistas that a man might easily be taken and executed by bandits within plain sight of his friends without their being able to lend him a.s.sistance. Nowhere can one look farther and see nothing. Yet entire companies of marauders might lie in wait in the many wild rocky barrancos of this apparently level brown plain. Up and up we climbed through a bare, stone-strewn land, touched here and there with the green of cactus, sometimes with long vistas of maize, which here hung dead in its half-grown youth because of the failure of the summer rains. Fields of maguey continued. The air grew perceptibly cooler as we wound back and forth, always at good speed behind the American engineer, mounting to the upper plateau surrounding the capital, not through mountains but by a vast, steadily rising world. Sometimes long, unmortared stone fences divided the landscape, more often mile after un.o.bstructed mile of slightly undulating brown plain, tinted here and there by maguey, rolled by us into the north.

A special train of soldiers, with a carload of arms and munitions, pa.s.sed on the way to head off the latest revolted ”general.” The newspapers of the capital appeared, some rabidly ”anti-American,”

stopping at nothing to stir up the excitable native against alleged subtle plans of the nation to the north to rob them of their territory and national existence, the more reputable ones with sane editorials imploring all Mexicans not to make intervention ”in the name of humanity and civilization” necessary. The former sold far more readily. The train wound hither and yon, as if looking for an entrance to the valley of Mexico. Unfortunately no train on either line reaches ancient Anahuac by daylight, and my plan to enter it afoot, perhaps by the same route as Cortez, had been frustrated. A red sun was just sinking behind haggard peaks when we reached the highest point of the line--8237 feet above the sea--with clumps and small forests of stocky oaks and half Mexico stretching out behind us, rolling brown to distant bare ranges backed by others growing blue and purple to farthest distance. The scene had a late October aspect, and a chilling, ozone-rich wind blew. By dusk the coat I had all but thrown away in the sweltering North was more than needed. We paused at San Antonio, a jumble of human kennels thrown together of old cans, sc.r.a.ps of lumber, mud, stones, and cactus leaves, with huge stacks of the charcoal with the soot of which all the inhabitants were covered, even to the postmaster who came in person for the mail sack. That week's issue of a frivolous sheet of the capital depicted an antonino charcoal-burner standing before his no less unwashed wife, holding a new-born babe and crying in the slovenly dialect of the ”pela'o”: ”Why, it is white! Woman, thou hast deceived me!”

At dark came Tula, ancient capital of the Toltecs, after which night hid all the scene there might have been, but for glimpses by the light of the train of the great _tajo_ cut through the hills to drain the ancient valley of Anahuac. On we sped through the night, which if anything became a trifle warmer. Gradually the car crowded to what would have been suffocation had we not soon pulled in at Buena Vista station, to fight our way through a howling pandemonium of touts, many shouting English, among whom were the first Negroes I had seen in Mexico.

Mexico City was a great disappointment. The hotel only a block from the cathedral and the site of the great _teocalli_ of the Aztecs, to which the German in Patzcuaro had directed me, differed not even in its smells from a Clark-street lodging-house in Chicago. The entire city with its cheap restaurants and sour smelling pulquerias uncountable, looked and sounded like a lower eastside New York turned Spanish in tongue. Even morning light discovered nothing like the charm of the rest of Mexico, and though I took up new lodgings en famille in aristocratic Chapultepec Avenue, with a panorama of snow-topped Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, her sleeping sister, and all the range seeming a bare gunshot away, the imagination was more inclined to hark back to the Bowery than to the great Tenocht.i.tlan of the days of Cortez.

In a word, the capital is much like many another modern city, somewhat bleak, cosmopolitan of population, with strong national lines of demarkation, and a caste system almost as fixed as that of India, but with none of the romance the reader of Prescott, Mme. Calderon, and the rest expects. Since anarchy fell upon the land, even the Sunday procession of carriages of beauty in silks and jewels, and of rancheros prancing by in thousand-dollar hats, on silver-mounted and bejeweled saddles, has disappeared from the life of the capital. To-day the Mexican is not anxious to parade his wealth, nor even to venture it in business. He is much more minded to bury it in the earth, to hide it in his socks, to lay it up in the great republic to the north, where neither presidents corrupt nor Zapatistas break in and steal.

By day moderate clothing was comfortable, but the night air is sharp and penetrating, and he who is not dressed for winter will be inclined to keep moving. Policemen and street-car employees tie a cloth across their mouths from sunset until the morning warms. Ragged peons swarm, feeding, when at all, chiefly from ambulating kitchens of as tattered hawkers. The well-to-do Mexican, the ”upper cla.s.s,” in general is a more churlish, impolite, irresponsible, completely inefficient fellow than even the countryman and the peon, in whom, if anywhere within its borders, lies the future hope of Mexico. To him outward appearance is everything, and the capital is especially overrun with the resultant hollow baubles of humanity.

There are a few short excursions of interest about the capital. Bandits have made several of them, such as the ascent of Popocatepetl, unpopular, but a few were still within the bounds of moderate safety.

Three miles away by highway or street-car looms up the church of Guadalupe, the sacred city of Mexico. It is a pleasing little town, recalling Puree of the Juggernaut-car by its scores of little stands for the feeding of pilgrims--at pilgrimage prices. Here are evidences of an idolatry equal to that of the Hindu. Peons knelt on the floor of the church, teaching their babies to cross themselves in the long intricate manner customary in Mexico. A side room was crowded with cheap cardboard paintings of devotees in the act of being ”saved” by the Virgin of Guadalupe--here a man lying on his back in front of a train which the Virgin in the sky above has just brought to a standstill; there a child being spared by her lifting the wheel of a heavy truck about to crush it. It would be hard to imagine anything more crude either in conception or execution than these signs of grat.i.tude. To judge by them the Virgin would make a dramatist of the first rank; there was not a picture in which the miraculous a.s.sistance came a moment too soon, never & hero of our ancient, pre-Edison melodramas appeared more exactly ”in the nick of time.” The famous portrait of the miraculous being herself, over the high altar, is dimly seen through thick gla.s.s. Inside the chapel under the blue and white dome pilgrims were dipping up the ”blessed” water from the bubbling well and filling bottles of all possible shapes, not a few of which had originally held American and Scotch whisky, that are sold in dozens of little stands outside the temple.

These they carry home, often hundreds of miles, to ”cure” the ailments of themselves or families, or to sell to others at monopoly prices.