NEW YEAR IN MEXICO
By FREYA STARK
ONE of the pleasantest places to come upon when travelling is the small provincial capital of an agricultural district, well-to-do and not important in the world. It is very much the same, whether in Norfolk, Provence or Mexico. We should have known better, but we were surprised to find it in Mexico so very like anywhere else : the same characteristic markets too big for the surrounding streets and meant for farmers who jostle in a slow, vague tide ; the same relatively sumptuous vehicles, whether motor-car or buggy—for transport is the favourite luxury to people who live out of town ; the same innocent and unsophisticated glitter in shop-windows, meant to catch those who will carry away their wares and not compare them (one notes an obvious difference in shops where agricultural machinery is sold) ; and the same feeling of air and time that washes in from the country and wanders, like the farmers, about the city streets. Vera Cruz has some of this charm, but it is a sea-port, and violence and the international flavour of the sea confuse it. Mexico City already has the cold glitter of the cities of the north. But in our brief visit we discovered Puebla and Merida, and left our hearts in both.
We spent New Year's Day in Puebla, whose wide, uneven plain is slung like a hammock between three volcanoes, nearer than most places to the stars. Ixtishiva and the smooth snow-cone of Popocatapetl, with a smoke-mist faint as a dream drifting ever from its round mouth, hold half the western sky, and the road that Cortez followed can still be found in stretches, grass-overgrown and paved with stones as it climbs through the woods of Orisaba to the plateau, or naked on the brown earth as it passes by the church-crowned holy places of Cholula, heading for the gap between the two volcanoes whence the descent on Mexico was made. Puebla was built for the Conquistadores as a camp city in 1531 on the Mexico road, and was laid out in straight lines on the middle of the plain, like New York afterwards or Carcassonne before. At the end of every street the low undulations of the country appear, pepper-tree grey or disintegrated lava ; perhaps it is in a reaction to their monotony that colour and light are splashed wherever possible in Puebla. The facades of houses are patterned with decorated tiles set in red brick, in diamonds, lozenges, herring-bone fancies—from the simple seventeenth-century all-over work to glazed corbels and pelmets enclosed in scrolls on plain modern walls of brick, plaster or stone ; for the stone is the lava that has covered the whole plateau with its ancient corrosion, and when it is used by itself its ugliness makes the country villages look grey like blotches of disease round their painted churches, and makes the austere city churches with their deep unrelieved carving look almost as forbidding as the Inquisition itself, or the Aztec rites it supplanted. So the people of Puebla mix colour where they can—in their baskets and their funeral wreaths (gigantic trophies of pansies and gardenias and white flowers made to stand in purple dyes, triumphs over death and the cavilling of neighbours) ; in the cemeteries where grave- stones are painted pink or blue ; in the lights and electric signs that Illuminate every street like a nightly fair ; in the pastel washes of the poorer houses whose walls, shutters and window-frames all enter into the scheme of decoration ; and in the use of their tiles, which can embellish anything, from the kitchen sink ,Lo a shrine of the Redeemer, from the flowered plaque conunemorEng some patriot's death to the various advertisements built into garden benches in the cathedral square, where the children play and the public leans against the ceramic immortality of all the industrial products of the region.
The cathedral square is called the Zokalo, which they say is an Indian word—and is charming. Beside the grey, twin-towered heap of the cathedral it dozes in a green atmosphere of its own made by the shade of trees, where the worst monument I have ever seen, a fat Mexican woman wiping her nose on the flag with a dead young man curled round her toes, loses the squalor of its contours and enjoys what so much mediocrity ought to be thankful for—obscurity. The porticos that surround the square on three sides are painted blue, and rather low, and make another stream of cool light ; and against these two subdued backgrounds the city life flows to and fro in a gay welter of cars and buses, editors, Indians, sellers of candied fruit for local buyers, holders of small booths for tourists, bootblacks, carvers of alabaster, wearers of surrealist tics on Holly- wood suits, or of Mexican hats over ponchos.
All this has been welded into one by fortune and time. The feeling of something solid, indigenous and complete is the root of the Puebla charm. In must be due, one imagines, to some happy fundamental sympathy between conqueror and conquered, deep in their nature and unknown to either ; and to a lucky dosing of their numbers, which allowed them to be mutually absorbed. The mere tourist can have no theories about it, but a story came into my mind of the first four Englishmen in Goa, who—in danger of their lives and pretending to be Roman Catholics—sat through a service dedicated to Kali, the goddess of destruction, under the impression that they were attending High Mass. Perhaps some innocent Aztec may have done the opposite, and scarcely realised that the rites of the great cathedral were not his own. The first Bishop of Guatemala, they say, conciliated his Maya flock by welcoming their sacred books, deleting a few incompatibles (such as human sacrifice presumably) and admitting all into the great and tolerant bosom of the Church.
We went to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and thought of these things as we stood wedged in the devout and crowded nave. A man beside me knelt on the pavement with hands open and up- lifted, like those late saints, loosely painted, whose secret thoughts, one fears, are for their public. But this man was thinking of no public. A subdued, fervent gabble of prayer welled out of him ; his opaque Indian eyes were glazed with ecstasy, and I, close beside him, became unwillingly receptive to fleas which in platoons, it seemed, deserted him for a less religious grazing-ground.
The Spanish altars climb with tiers of saints to the vaulted arches against a background of gold. Great urns of incense, huge tripod candlesticks send up their smoke and flame. A gilt metal collar clips the wax candles and descends as they consume, and the flames sway gently in the wind of the golden priests as they move about the altar, of the worshippers as they kneel and rise in the nave. Two little girls in white lace veils, with candles in their white- gloved hands, arc taking their first communion at the chancel steps. A processional way cuts the middle of the cathedral, segregated by a bronze balustrade, where angels hold up electric bulbs, and leads to the choir and organ, supported by gilt angels and railed off with gold, a huge sort of ark near the cathedral doors. Though it is so different in meaning and origin, there is something not unlike the feeling of the fierce Aztec sculpure in all this heavy splendour. Some domes in Mexico have outer steps leading to the drum and pinnacle crucifix, not unreminisccnt of the pyramids and their sacrificial story. In the Rosary Chapel in Puebla, a gem of the seventeenth century involved and encrusted with gold, there is a Virgin in the south-east corner, a bold half-length figure carved and gilt with sunrays as a halo. In its hand it holds a bouquet by the stem, and the Child inside it in the place of flowers. It is as direct and primitive as any goddess of weather or of crops, and it is rare to go in there and not see an Indian or two from the country worshipping.
What we most 'noticed about the churches in Mexico was their masculine character. "the Virgin sometimes rides resplendent on the crescent moon, stiff from neck to feet in a rigid circular garment of brocade ; but mostly she wears what might be a street dress, half religious, of noble decent black, and stands smaller, feminine and sad, besides the crucified Son. It is He who has the votive tiny silver legs and arms and hearts pinned over his loincloth or against his background. Sometimes he is black, and always in these groups, however poor in execution, there is the drama, the intense feeling— Spanish or Aztec or both ?—for death. The bleeding Christ, thorned and chained, is in every church, with wounds that look inspired by the bull-ring.
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