Chapter II

At first you are both amazed and annoyed by what seems like not only lack of curiosity but positive ignorance on the part of Americans who live in Mexico. As a new arrival, I had an admirable thirst for information which I endeavored to slake at what I supposed were fountains of knowledge as well as of afternoon tea. The tea was delicious and plentiful; but the knowledge simply did not exist.

“What is the population of Barranca?” you ask of an intelligent compatriot who has lived in Barranca for ten years.

“Why, I don’t know exactly,” he replies, as if the question were an interesting one that had never before occurred to him.

“Oh, I don’t mean exactly--but is it eight thousand, or fourteen, or twenty-five? It’s rather difficult for a stranger to form an idea; the towns are built so differently from ours. Although they may not be really large, they are so compact that they look more populous and ‘citified’ than places of the same size in the United States,” you explain.

“Yes, that’s very true, and it _is_ difficult,” he agrees.

“Do you suppose I could find out anywhere? Do they ever take the census?” you pursue.

“The census? Why, I don’t know about that. But there’s Smith on the bench over there having his shoes shined. He’s been in the country for fifteen years--he’ll be able to tell you. Smith, I want to introduce a friend of mine who is very anxious to know the population of Barranca and whether they ever take the census.”

“The census?” muses Smith, ignoring the population entirely. “I don’t know if they take the census, but they take your taxes with great regularity,” he declares with a laugh. Then follows a pleasant ten minutes with Smith, during which the reason of your introduction to him does not recur, and after precisely the same thing has happened several other times with several other persons, you would almost rather start a revolution than an inquiry into the population of Barranca.

The specific instance is perhaps a trivial one, but it is typical, and, as I said, you are for a time amazed and irritated, on asking intelligent questions about the federal and state governments, the judiciary, the army, education, morality, and even so obvious a matter as the climate, to receive from American acquaintances replies that are never accurate and rarely as much as inaccurately definite. Some of them frankly admit that, as they never have had personal relations with the establishments you seek to learn about (barring the climate), they have not taken the trouble to inform themselves. Others appear to experience a belated regret at their long indifference, promise to look the matter up and let you know. But they never do, and it is rather discouraging. You yearn to acquire a respectably comprehensive idea of the conditions in which you are living, yet the only people with whom you can carry on any but a most staccato and indispensable conversation are unable to throw light. So, being the only one really intelligent foreigner in the republic, you resort to the medium of art, and begin to read books.

Everyone you know has at some time or other read and enjoyed Prescott’s “Conquest,” but it does not emerge that on the subject of Mexico they have ever read anything else, and for a while you quietly revel in your mental alertness and superior intelligence. You are learning all about the country--its institutions and laws, its products and habits--while your listless friends still sit in darkness. Then one fine morning something happens--something of no especial importance, but something that nevertheless serves to insert the thin edge of suspicion’s wedge between you and your learning.

You have, for instance, read that “in virtue of the constitution adopted February 5, 1857, arrest is prohibited, save in the case of crimes meriting corporal punishment,” and it has seemed to you a wise and just provision. You have also, let us say, employed two competent stone masons to build a coffee tank, a fireplace, a pigpen, or some such useful accessory of life in the tropics, and you become much disturbed when, after they have worked steadily and well for three or four days, they fail to appear. That afternoon as you stroll through the plaza lamenting their perfidy, you are astonished at receiving two friendly, sheepish greetings from two sheepish, friendly stone masons who are engaged in laying municipal cobblestones, together with thirty or forty other prisoners, under the eyes of several heavily armed policemen. Unmistakably they are your masons, and with much bewilderment you demand of Smith--who, no doubt, is strolling with you--just what it means.

“It merely means,” Smith explains, “that the town is repairing part of the plaza pavement and needs competent masons. So they arrested yours.”

“But on what grounds?”

“Oh, drunkenness probably.”

“Do you suppose they were drunk? They seemed like very steady men.”

“Why, they may have been a trifle elated,” Smith laughs. “The assumption that they were isn’t a particularly startling one in this part of the world. But that wasn’t why they were arrested. They were arrested because they were good masons and the city happens to need them. If they hadn’t been drunk, some one would have been sent out to make them so--never, unfortunately, a very arduous undertaking.”

“Oh, indeed; how simple and efficacious!” you murmur, and go home to read some more.

Still other wise and just provisions of the same excellent document are that no person may be obliged to work for another person without freely consenting so to work, nor without receiving just remuneration, and that imprisonment for debts of a purely civil nature is prohibited. But as your Spanish gradually improves and you are able to have more sustained talks with the natives, you learn that the entire lives of a great number of peones working on haciendas contain two alternatives, one of which is practical slavery and the other imprisonment for debt to his employer.

A young man goes to work on, say, a sugar plantation for the magnificent wages of thirty-six Mexican cents a day. In the course of time--usually a very short time--he acquires a family. If he acquires it after certain preliminary formalities, such as a marriage ceremony and its attendant festivities, his employer has loaned him the forty or fifty pesos--unpayable sum--necessary to defray the costs of the priest and the piper, and the young man’s eternal indebtedness begins from the beginning. If, however, there are no formalities, the financial burden is not assumed until the birth of the first child.

Mexicans of every station adore their children, and even when, as frequently happens among the lower classes, the parents are neither civilly nor religiously married (in Mexico only the civil ceremony is recognized by the law) nothing is too good or too expensive for the offspring. They are baptized and, if the informal union of the parents lasts long enough, they are confirmed. But in Mexico, as elsewhere, the kingdom of heaven costs money, and this money the young man’s employer cheerfully advances. Then in the natural march of events some one dies. Death, of course, all the world over, has become one of our grossest extravagances. Again the employer delightedly pays.

Now he has the young man--no longer so young--exactly where his sugar plantation wants him. On thirty-six cents a day there is no possibility of a laborer’s paying a debt of a hundred or more pesos and moving away, and if he attempts to depart without paying it, a word from the hacendado to his friend the jefe politico would suffice to land him in jail and keep him there. It is impossible to deny that on some haciendas, perhaps on many, this form of slavery is a happier, a more comfortable arrangement than would be the freedom so energetically insisted on in the constitution. Still, slavery is neither a pretty word nor a pretty idea, and yet, in spite of the constitution, the idea obtains in Mexico quite as it obtains in the United States.

Then again you read with satisfaction that among other forms of freedom--“freedom of education, freedom to exercise the liberal professions, freedom of thought,” and so on--the freedom of the press is guaranteed; guaranteed, that is to say, with the reservation that “private rights and the public peace shall not be violated.” The manner in which this reservation can be construed, however, does not occur to you until you read in _El Imparcial_ or in the _Mexican Herald_--the best Spanish and American daily papers--an account of, let us say, a strike of the mill operatives at Orizaba, and then, a week later, chance to learn what actually happened.

“I see by the _Herald_ that you had a little strike at Orizaba the other day,” you remark to the middle-aged British manager of a large Orizaba jute mill, with whom you find yourself in the same swimming pond at the baths of Tehuacan. “The _Herald_ said that in a clash with the troops several strikers were killed and twenty-five were injured.”

“Did it indeed?” remarks the manager dryly, and later, when you are sitting together in the sun after your bath, he explains that the strike was an incipient revolution engineered by a junta in St. Louis, that the Government sent down a regiment from the City of Mexico, that in an impromptu sort of way six hundred strikers were immediately shot, and that the next morning thirty-four were formally, elaborately, and officially executed. This prompt and heroic measure, he informs you, ended both the strike and the incipient revolution, and as you compare what you have read in the papers with what is the truth, you can tell yourself that it has also ended your illusions as to the freedom of the Mexican press.

In fact you begin to realize why, when you ask American residents of the country for information, their replies are usually so vague, so contradictory, so uninforming. It is not, as a rule, because they know too little, but because they know too much. Theoretical Mexico--the Mexico of constitutions, reform laws, statutes, and books of travel--has ceased, long since, vitally to concern them. It is Mexico as they day by day find it that interests them and that in the least counts. And practical, every-day Mexico is an entirely different, infinitely more mysterious, fascinating affair.

“Does it rain here in summer as much as it does in winter?” I once asked a Mexican lady in a saturated mountain village in the State of Vera Cruz.

“No hay reglas fijas, señor” (there are no fixed rules), she replied, after a thoughtful silence, with a shrug.

No hay reglas fijas! It is not perhaps a detailed description of the great Don Porfirio’s republic, but it is a consummate epitome, and once you have committed it to memory and “taken it to heart,” your literary pursuits begin to languish. After traveling for three weeks in Mexico, almost anyone can write an entertaining and oracular volume, but after living there for several years, the oracle--unless subsidized by the Government--has a tendency to become dumb. For, in a country where theory and practice are so at variance, personal experience becomes the chart by which one is accustomed to steer, and although it is a valuable one, it may, for a hundred quaint reasons, be entirely different from that of the man whose ranch, or mine, or coffee place adjoins one’s own.

In just this, I feel sure, lies much of the indisputable charm of Mexico. No hay reglas fijas. Everyone’s experience is different, and everyone, in a sense, is a pioneer groping his way--like Cortés on his prodigious march up from the sea. One never knows, from the largest to the smallest circumstances of life, just what to expect, and Ultimate Truth abideth not. This is not so much because Mexicans are instinctive and facile liars, as because the usual methods of ascertaining and disseminating news are not employed. At home we demand facts and get them. In Mexico one subsists on rumor and never demands anything. A well-regulated, systematic, and precise person always detests Mexico and can rarely bring himself to say a kind word about anything in it, including the scenery. But if one is not inclined to exaggerate the importance of exactitude and is perpetually interested in the casual, the florid, and the problematic, Mexico is one long, carelessly written but absorbing romance.