On the train that carried me southward from Hermosillo I met “The General.”
He was young—scarcely out of his teens—slender, mild-mannered, almost feminine in voice and appearance. His large, dark eyes were shaded with long, girlish lashes. One felt startled when, upon more intimate acquaintance, he confided that he was an ex-bandit.
His rank, in reality, was only that of teniente, than which one could not be much lower in a Mexican army, but it pleased him so much when I first addressed him as “General” that I continued the practice.
Our meeting was accidental. Eustace and I, still traveling together, found him in a double-seat, with his handbags spread over whatever space he did not fill himself. As we paused before him, he looked up in surprise, apparently feeling that the railway had not made proper provision for so many passengers.
“Pardon, General, but is this bench reserved?”
He smiled. He removed his baggage most graciously. Within half an hour he had announced himself our humble servant, and was planning gay parties for us at the several stopping-places ahead. He knew all the girls along the West Coast, he said, both respectable and otherwise. He would see that we enjoyed the trip. He would be our guide and mentor in things Mexican. And when we reached Mazatlán—the southern terminus of the road, some three or four days distant—his house would be our house. We should attend his wedding, which was to be celebrated immediately upon his arrival, and if we remained long enough, we should be the godfathers to his first child.
And although he impressed me as somewhat too lavish in his promises, he proved an entertaining companion on the long journey—a journey through a monotonous continuation of the Sonora desert, with stop-overs at cities which, with minor variations, were replicas of Hermosillo—at Guaymas, San Blas, and Culiacán—cities pleasant and interesting, yet never so interesting to me as my first Mexican friend, the little General.
The young teniente was typical in many ways not only of the Mexicans, but of most of the Latin-Americans.
He lived completely in the present, with scarcely a thought of the morrow. For him tempus did not fugit, save very rarely, and even then there was sure to be more tempus afterward.
He had unlimited time for friendliness and politeness. In his friendliness he was prone to those professions of love which to the Anglo-Saxon mind savor of hypocrisy; in his politeness he was inclined toward phraseology that suggested figurative language; yet if this were hypocrisy, it was tempered with self-deception, and the phraseology was intended frankly as figurative language.
If he sometimes lacked veracity, it was because his code of etiquette called not for the truth, but for some statement that would give more satisfaction than the truth. Seldom thinking beyond the immediate present, he apparently did not reflect that an ultimate discovery of reality might bring disappointment greater than the original satisfaction.
One encounters this mental habit everywhere in Latin America. If one inquires of a fellow-passenger whether he is nearing his destination, he invariably is assured that he is, although a half-day’s journey may confront him. If one asks a hotel servant whether laundry may be washed before to-morrow night, he invariably learns that it may, although the servant knows perfectly well that the laundress will not call until the day after to-morrow.
In Guaymas, our first stopping-place, the General was to meet us in the Plaza at three o’clock to take us to visit his uncle. At about five, we bumped into him accidentally upon the street.
“Amigos!” he cried delightedly, enfolding each of us in a Latin embrace. “So glad I am to see you! I wish to take you to visit my uncle.”
“You were going to do that at three.”
“So I was! So I was! I was on my way to the plaza, but I met a friend, and we had two or three drinks of tequila, and I forgot all about it!”
He spoke not in apology. He merely offered what he considered a satisfactory explanation. To him, as to most Mexicans, an engagement was merely a tentative agreement, to prove binding only in the event that neither party forget it or happen to be doing something else at the appointed hour. He was delightfully free from any troublesome sense of obligation. While an Anglo-Saxon would rise each morning, taking mental inventory of the many things to be done during the next sixteen hours, the Mexican solved life’s problems by merely reflecting, “Here’s another pleasant day!”
Having met us upon the street, the General promptly forgot the date he had made with some one else, and took us to call upon his uncle. His uncle was not at home.
The Mexican is by nature impractical. When he makes a promise, he usually means it. Afterwards he discovers that he has promised something which he can not fulfill.
“To-night,” said the General, “I shall arrange a dance in your honor.”
And this time, he did meet us at the appointed hour—or soon thereafter. He had with him the musicians, two barefooted peons with mandolin and guitar, and we started again for his uncle’s residence. Everything was ready for the dance except that the uncle had not been informed that he was to be the host, or that any such affair was to transpire.
The General, however, was determined that we should have a good time. We were duly presented to a middle-class family of a dozen or more individuals, all eager to be friendly, but all a trifle embarrassed. The musicians played some dance that had long since faded from popularity north of the border—it was either “Smiles” or “Hindustan,” which are still the rage in Mexico—and the General made the rounds in search of a partner. In turn he offered his arm to each of his cousins—three rather shy little olive-faced girls of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen—while each in turn pleaded:
“I don’t know how to dance. I wish I did.”
He finally discovered a stout, middle-aged lady who professed some slight knowledge of terpsichore, and marched with her thrice about the room, as is the fashion in Latin America. Then he seized her manfully, and sped away in a two-step. The lady, taken seemingly by surprise, did not move, and the little General came to a sliding stop. Still determined, he recovered his balance, and sped away in the other direction, with the same result. There was then a discussion as to whether this were a waltz or not. That question being settled by the musicians, who said it was a polka, both parties danced in the same direction, until they had made a couple of flying rounds, when they stopped, and the General offered his partner to me. It was somewhat reminiscent of putting out the ash-barrels on Monday morning, but the lady was willing, and for the next three hours Eustace and I and the General took turns whirling her over the adobe floor.
“A little excitement like that,” said the General, as we finally took our departure, “breaks the monotony of life.”
As I came to know the Mexicans better, I discovered that such an evening, although it impressed a Gringo as a trifle boresome, was quite an event in middle-class Mexican existence.
The Latin-American had an amazing knack of not being bored. This, too, was a product of his mental habit of living wholly in the present. He never suffered from the Anglo-Saxon sense of a waste of time; he was never afflicted with reflections about countless other ways of spending his evening.
He could sit every night in the same plaza, looking at the same faces. He could meet the same friends day after day, and be just as pleased to see them, and ask them the same questions about their many relatives, and part with the same elaborate courtesies. He could listen hour after hour with the same enjoyment to the same pieces of music that the village band had played for the past ten years. And he could talk with the same neighbors about exactly the same things again and again, and never lose his enthusiasm either as speaker or listener.
After supper, at the hotels along the way, proprietor and guests would bring their chairs to the sidewalk, where they could see the passers-by, and would remain there for hours, chatting with tremendous zest about nothing at all. Inconsequential remarks, which Americans of equal intelligence might consider unworthy either of utterance or audience, would be offered for popular consideration with emphatic statement, and received almost with applause. I recall the declaration of a young señorita to the effect that she considered a bath very refreshing. This bit of wisdom, which elsewhere in the world might have been accepted as trite and obvious, brought every member of the circle into enthusiastic agreement. It was quite as though she had advanced a startling new theory, which had long been hovering vaguely in the minds of the others, but which they now heard propounded for the first time. It stimulated cries of “Yes, indeed!” or “You have spoken most truly!” and the discussion lasted for half an hour.
With Mexican kindliness, they always included me in the conversation, although I spoke their language abominably. Had a foreigner murdered English as I murdered Spanish, I should not have had the patience to listen to him. Yet they listened avidly, knitting their brows sometimes in their effort to guess the meaning. If they smiled, their smiles were kindly. They were pleased that the foreigner should try to learn their language. If they disliked Americans in general, they were quickly ready to like any individual American who would meet them half-way. And the moment he showed a willingness to adopt their own elaborate courtesy, they described him as muy simpatico—an expression that means infinitely more than our nearest equivalent of “very sympathetic”—and hailed him as “paisano”—“fellow-countryman.” And they would promise him anything.
If at first impression, the elaborate Spanish politeness seems boresome, it gradually seeps its way into the soul of the average visitor so insidiously that within two weeks he finds himself resenting the rudeness of Americans more recently arrived than himself.
I met one on the train that took me out of Guaymas.
He was trying to tell the conductor that this passenger coach would have been condemned long ago in the good old U.S.A. Since the official did not understand English, even when shouted, the newcomer was growing a trifle peeved. He turned disgustedly to Eustace and myself:
“Damn these spigs, anyway! How do they expect anybody to come down here and do business with them when they can’t talk like other people?”
He seemed out of place in Mexico. He belonged essentially to the smoking compartment of an American Pullman, where his counterpart can invariably be found with thumbs beneath suspender straps, telling the world about the big deals which his type seems always to have “just pulled off between trains in Detroit.”
In Mexico, he admitted failure. He was selling soap—“the best grade of pure white bath soap on the market.” But buyers were too ignorant to converse with him in his language, and they showed a ridiculous inclination to purchase the brilliant scarlet soaps turned out by a German firm that catered to the native love of bright color.
“If I’d known what they were like,” he said, speaking loudly, “I’d have laid in a side-line of perfume and bug powder.”
We suggested that some of the passengers might understand English.
“What the hell do I care? Let ’em hear it. It’ll do ’em good. Let the dirty greasers know what we Americans think of ’em! Say, I’m glad I met you fellows. I’ve been lonesome for somebody from God’s country.”
He attached himself to us, and stuck like a leech. At Culiacán, where we stopped over for a day, he made the discovery that “whiskey” was the same in Spanish as in English. After imbibing freely in a little saloon kept by an elderly lady whose manners were those of royalty, he propped his feet on the table and expectorated with impressive accuracy at a picture of the Madonna that hung on the wall.
We dragged him out, and led him toward the hotel.
“What do I care about her?” he growled. “Damned spig! Let ’er call a policeman. I’ll lick ten Mexican policemen!”
At the hotel, after we had persuaded him not to hit the General, he favored our friend with another discourse on the relative prowess of Americans and “Greasers.”
“Any time we get good and ready, we’ll come down here and take this rotten republic and make a decent place out of it! We’ll clean up your spig army in two weeks! All you guys can do is knife people in the back! When you have a war, you point your rifles around the corner of a building and pull the trigger without lookin’ where you shoot! Any good Yank can lick ten of you—ten of you—with one arm tied behind his back!”
The General’s face darkened. I watched him, rather hoping that the slender little Mexican would proceed to mop up the floor with the valiant soap-salesman. Beneath his politeness, I knew, there was a sensitive, proud nature quick to resent an insult. Yet so ingrained were his traditions of courtesy that—even while a tigerish gleam in his eyes betrayed his wrath—he merely smiled.
“The señor,” he said, “is feeling very lively to-night.”
As he walked away, we feared that he had no further use for gringos, but on the following morning, as we sat in the plaza, the General came up to embrace us with more than his usual ardor. He was feeling “very lively” himself. He announced that he had been up all night, and that he was now ready to wander over to the shady side of town to call upon a few of the “girls.”
When we suggested that it was too early in the day, and advocated rest rather than recreation, he was agreeable, as always. He was even tractable. He would allow us to lead him back to the hotel; at the door he would embrace us again, promising to go straight to bed; fifteen minutes later he would come strolling up to us in the plaza, falling upon our necks as though it were our first meeting, and repeating his suggestion about calling upon the girls.
“How about your fiancée in Mazatlán?” Eustace inquired.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“But she is in Mazatlán! And I am in Culiacán!”
“Don’t you love her?”
“Love her! Ah, señor, who would not love her! So good, so pure, so true, so beautiful, so like an angel in Heaven! For two whole years I have dreamed of her! Throughout the two years that I was Villista in Chihuahua!
“Listen, señor. Two years ago I left Mazatlán. She promised that she would marry me. But I was penniless, señor. And in Mexico, the man must buy his bride’s trousseau. I was mechanic, and I went to Sonora to work in the mines. I was in the village of San Pedro when the Villistas came through. Some youths from the town fired upon the rear-guard, killing Villa’s cousin. And Villa ordered that every man in San Pedro should die in punishment. They herded me with the others in the public square, and took us out, twenty at a time, to the church wall, where our youths were slaughtered with pistol and machine-gun. But they spared me, for I was mechanic, and Villa had use for mechanic.
“Of course, I became Villista. Who, señor, would not? And I fought Carranza with the others. Why not? Who was Carranza but a general more fortunate than Villa, who captured Mexico City, and made himself president? I fought with Villa all through Chihuahua. Yes, I helped to fire upon Columbus, in your own New Mexico, but I liked Americans, and I fired in the air. I would have come home, but I had no money for the journey. There came a day when we took Juarez. I was lieutenant then. I captured a building with my men. It was gambling house. There was gold upon the tables, and I filled my pockets. Why not, señor? Some one else would have taken it. I ran away from the Villistas. I rode four hundred miles—four hundred miles, señor—through the mountains and across the Yaqui desert.”
Unconsciously he struck a dramatic pose.
“Would I have done that, señor, if I did not love the girl?”
Then he climbed into a coach, and rode away toward a questionable destination with a gay little wave of his hand.
I was inclined to doubt the General’s story.
He was manifestly a poseur. He possessed, among other qualities, an inordinate desire to attract attention. He knew, for instance, that he was handsome, and would spend hours combing his dark hair, or powdering his face. He loved to be stared at by the young girls in the plaza. He basked in admiration and reveled in adulation or flattery.
His vanity manifested itself also in a desire to be photographed. If I wished to snap a landscape or a street scene, Eustace had almost to hold him, lest he arrange himself artistically in the immediate foreground. Upon his return from the red light district that morning, he announced that he had promised its inmates to bring us there with our camera for a group picture.
He led us to the outskirts of town to a region where several slatternly brown females sat upon the curb in negligée, smoking cheap cigars, and introduced us in a speech which seemed more elaborate than such an informal occasion required. The ladies, surprised as Mexicans always are when some one keeps an agreement, begged that we wait while they beautified themselves, and we waited for over an hour. They appeared eventually, in silk finery, with an eighth of an inch of powder laid upon a facial coating of glycerine.
Then ensued the difficulties that confront every photographer in Latin America. They protested against venturing into the sunlight. Sunlight would ruin the complexion! When, in response to explanations, they did step out from the shade, they kept raising their hands to shelter their faces. And finally, when we had them properly grouped with the General in the center, some one exclaimed that she must be holding her doll, and while she searched for the doll, the group broke up and scurried out of the sunlight.
At length, the picture being taken, they all clamored to see it at once. To my statement that it had to be developed by a photographer, they listened with suspicion. Their familiarity with the itinerant tin-type man had bred a distrust of my slow methods. Yet they, with the politeness that extends in Latin America even to the underworld, did not voice the suspicion. And when, in the afternoon, we returned with what we considered an excellent picture, they rushed excitedly to view it.
There was a disappointed silence. They did not intend to be rude, but their grief escaped them.
“I’m not smiling!”
“My face came out dark!”
My camera, being a Gringo camera, had insulted them by its blunt frankness. But they tried to conceal their disappointment. They thanked us profusely. And they carried away the film, to destroy it as soon as our backs were turned.
“You were very foolish,” said the General afterwards. “You did not have to take a real picture. You should have pointed the camera and clicked something else. It would have pleased them.”
Strangely enough, the more hypocrisy one discovered in the little General, the more one liked him.
It was a hypocrisy leavened by kindliness and humor. And to him, as to other Latin-Americans, it was not hypocrisy at all, for his was a code of life wherein our Anglo-Saxon standards were completely inverted.
Each race has developed its own ideas as to what is important in human conduct. The Anglo-Saxon, being by nature blunt and frank, regards truth as a supreme virtue. When he discovers something wrong, he sets about correcting it. The Latin-American, being by nature suave and courteous, regards truth as an irritating and offensive bad habit. When he discovers something wrong, he politely ignores it.
From our viewpoint, the Latin-American appears shallow and superficial. He lives a life of pretense, completely satisfied so long as outward effect is properly maintained. He lies cheerfully and gracefully as a matter of good form. He offers one short change with a knightly gesture. If reminded gently that he has made an “error” in his count, he is extremely grateful for the correction. If informed that he has cheated, he becomes highly indignant that his honor has been so rudely questioned. He wears handsome clothes and shabby underwear. He usually lets the tailor wait indefinitely for payment, and when pressed to settle a bill, he says with impressive dignity, “Because you insult me in your implication that I am not to be trusted, I shall not pay you for another month!”
He is inordinately fond of parading himself in public. He deliberately caters to theatrical taste. He is by nature no more impulsive than an Anglo-Saxon, but upon the right occasion, since it attracts attention and distinguishes him as a temperamental creature, he indulges in great emotion. He makes a wild demonstration of enthusiasm over friends. He affects much grief over the death of his mother-in-law. He grows furious at times, but usually in the absence of the enemy, in the presence of an enemy whom he believes he can lick, or under the influence of alcohol. He is courageous enough—frequently to a point of recklessness which the Anglo-Saxon seldom equals—but usually when he believes the object worth the risk, or when vanity overcomes his judgment, to lure him into a dramatic scene before an admiring audience.
He understands the shallow pretenses of his fellows, but he accepts them as real, just as they accept his. He professes unlimited faith and confidence in their loyalty and integrity, although he suspects that they can be trusted only so long as it is to their advantage. He knows them to be—like himself—indolent, undependable, and potentially dishonest, yet he makes eloquent speeches to them, extolling their energy, reliability, and general uprightness. By a process of self-hypnotism, he convinces himself momentarily that he means these lavish professions. When they respond with similar praises of his own worth, he glows all over with a very much gratified self-satisfaction.
Generalizations of this sort, I admit, are always unjust. Out of the mass of the Latin-American population stand many splendid individuals to whom this character analysis does not apply. Even in the mass, the various characteristics are subject to variation from country to country. But on the whole, from an Anglo-Saxon viewpoint, these people appear idealists in speech and materialists in action. One hand counts the rosary while the other scratches fleas. Judged by the Anglo-Saxon, they have few real virtues. Yet one must remember that each race has its own standards, created out of an unconscious desire to glorify itself by worshiping as virtues the qualities which it happens to possess. Judged by their own standards, their vices are virtues, and our virtues are vices.
It is the Latin-American’s many faults that make him likeable. His own defects, which he understands but refuses to admit, have made him extremely tolerant toward the defects of others. Being supersensitive, he is considerate of a stranger’s feelings. Loving flattery, he is lavish in its bestowal. Being vain, he is eager to make a good impression, and frequently proves generous and hospitable. Being indolent, he has infinite leisure for entertainment. At all times he is friendly, agreeable, and courteous.
To-day, several years after my first visit to Mexico, when I have lived among the natives of twenty-six different lands, and met travelers from many others, there is no people whose company I have enjoyed more than that of the Latin-Americans. And no one individual who proved a more pleasant companion than the little Mexican General.
He was still with us when Eustace and I set out upon the last stage of our railway journey to Mazatlán.
So, incidentally, was the soap-salesman.
The train brought us to the end of the long stretch of desert that extended from Sonora far down into Sinaloa. An occasional palm tree rose among the cactus. Adobe huts gave way to structures of cane and thatch. A delicious balminess in the air heralded the approach of the tropics. A tang of salt came from the Pacific breezes, and the sea itself loomed presently before us, a glorious blue beneath a cloudless sky.
The little General leaned from the window, his eyes shining.
“Home! Home at last, señores!”
Then the eyes darkened, with a somber melancholy that came at times into their depths. I suspected, as often I had suspected, that he was playing his dramatic rôle to gain our sympathy.
“You are worrying about the authorities?” I asked.
But he spoke without effort at effect:
“There is danger. I have informed them of my coming. But I can prove that Villa took me prisoner—that I could not help myself.”
“The girl will be waiting for you, of course?”
“I have not informed her. It will be a surprise! Such a surprise, señores!”
He did not know that she had already married a rival. He never did know. Somewhere at the edge of the desert, the train stopped, and a party of federal soldiers came aboard. A Carranzista officer walked quickly up the aisle, scanning the faces of the passengers. Before the little General, he paused.
“Ramón Vásquez?”
“Sí, señor.”
“Come with me.”
The General rose. He was strangely calm. He seemed suddenly to have gained in stature. There was a quiet pride in his bearing—a poise—a distinction. He shook hands with each of us, even with the American who had insulted him.
“There is an army post here, señores. I had hoped to go home to-night to see the girl. But it is better, perhaps, that the investigation come first. Remember, señores, in Mazatlán my house is your house.”
There was no investigation.
The soldiers cast a noose about his neck, and threw the other end over the limb of a tree. A horseman made it fast to his saddle. For the moment, so unbelievable was the proceeding, I was stunned. Then, my heart pounding as though the noose were about my own neck, I hurried with Eustace to the scene, protesting.
The General smiled at us.
“You are good friends,” he said. “I am grateful. But you can not help me, and you may invite trouble for yourselves. If in Mazatlán you should meet the Señorita”—and he whispered her name reverently—“please to tell her that I would have come. Good-by, my friends.”
He glanced toward the car window, where the other American stared with blanched face. And he laughed. Then, with characteristic vanity, he stroked back the hair from his forehead.
“If any one shoots,” he said, “please not to shoot at the face.”
The horseman dug his spurs into the beast, and the rope tightened. The tree was not high enough. The little General reached earthward with his toes, barely touching the ground with them, balancing there in an instinctive effort to preserve life, even for a moment. The officer gave an order. The men unslung their rifles, and fired a scattering volley.
As the smoke cleared away, the train crawled slowly onward toward Mazatlán. For a long time, no one spoke. When Eustace finally broke the silence, it was in a futile effort to turn our minds to another subject.
“We’ll get there just in time to catch the boat south.”
The soap-salesman came out of his reverie with a start.
“I don’t know as I’ll go south. I think I’ll catch a boat north to Frisco. You can’t do business with these spi—with these Mexicans.”