CHAPTER XIV.
THE TRAIL OF THE TANGLE-FOOT.
ON the plains of Tlaxcala, Apam and Puebla, in the rich lava beds, and on the desert which is so poor one can hardly raise a disturbance on it, are millions of acres of land devoted to the culture of the maguey and the preparation of one of the vilest drinks known to man.
The century plant, the agave, the aloe and the maguey are one and the same. It is called century plant, because outside of the tropics it might live a hundred years and never bloom, like our Louisiana sugar-cane; but here in Mexico from six to fourteen years are sufficient for its maturity, as it requires that much time to accumulate enough vitality for its crowning effort in life—the propagation of seed. When it has reached this stage it shoots up a central stalk a foot in diameter and twenty feet high, crowned by a panicle of beautiful greenish-yellow flowers, and then the plant dies down as completely as any annual.
But the pulque farmer does not permit the plant to blossom. When it shows indication of shooting up its central bud as large as a cabbage, the same is cut out, leaving a cavity capable of holding four or five quarts. Into this cavity the sap collects and is sold as agua miel or honey water. After twenty-four hours fermentation it becomes pulque, the national drink of Mexico, for, of the 350,000 inhabitants of the capital, 250,000 are pulque drinkers. A single plant can be milked five months and in that time will produce one hundred and sixty gallons of pulque. Each morning a small army of pulque gatherers will enter the field with long calabashes or gourds, through which they suck up the pulque on the siphon principle, and inject it into the pig-skin bottle held on the back by a band around the forehead. This skin-bottle is the same that is mentioned in the New Testament and is secured entire from the animal, and with the ends at the hoof tied and loaded with pulque, has the exact semblance of a hog on a man’s shoulder. The pulque must reach market the same day it is gathered, as it becomes vinegar within twenty-four hours, so special pulque trains run on all roads entering the city.
Seventy five thousand gallons is the daily consumption in the City of Mexico, and the railroads make a thousand dollars a day for carriage, and the custom houses collect on each gallon as it enters the garitas or city gates. When the sap first appears it is greenish in color and sweet, hence its name of agua miel, or honey water. Carbonic acid soon collects as fermentation advances, and then it is called pulque. Pulque has the color of soapsuds, almost the consistency of molasses and a compound taste not found in the dictionary nor listed in Materia Medica. As to smell, it is a cross between a slaughter house and a compost heap of decaying vegetables. Fermentation is so rapid it would explode a cask in a few minutes, so the gatherers empty it from the pigskins into tinnacals or ox hides strapped to a wooden frame. To retard fermentation, it is poured into vats and a little milk and rennet are added, which do not quite coagulate it, but give it the aromatic odor of Limburger cheese. From these vats it is loaded on the trains and hurried to the city where it is again transferred in pigskin to wagons loaded with hogsheads with the bung open. In front of the retail pulqueria, the wagon stops and the final unloading begins. A hogshead is turned on its side at the rear of the wagon and the spigot is pulled, and the ropy liquid is passed through a large funnel into a pigskin on the ground, by passing through a leg. This pigskin holds as much as a beer keg, and when full, the huge porter replaces the spigot, wraps a string around the leg and shoulders the pig which looks natural enough to squeal. The porter empties this into five or six huge casks which are setting on the counter, where the dealers dole it out at a cent a glass to the hundreds who push and fight for standing room until the last cask is empty, and a similar scene will take place every day in the year.
Just opposite my window I watched a crowd for hours that had overflowed the sidewalk struggling to get inside and they did not thin out till ten barrels had been emptied, which means five hundred gallons. And the same is true for every pulqueria in the city from the time the first train load arrives till every cask is empty. Pulquerias have no written sign, but over each door is a plaited awning of green maguey leaves which has all the power that an electric lamp has to swarms of night insects. At one cent a drink, even the paupers can get gloriously inflated, and it takes half the police force to drag off those who find the streets too narrow for their new style of perambulating.
The ordinary simon pure pulque is just liquid filth, no more, no less. Private families remove the Limburger essence by means of a harmless chemical and add sugar and orange juice, but the dealer at the pulque joint knows better; he adds a quantity of marihuana to the cask, and presto! he has the regulation Kentucky tangle-foot, warranted to kill at forty rods. With one or two drinks of this, the Mexican’s eyes look two ways at once, and he just spoils for a fight, and at once hunts some one to disagree with him. He will walk up to a stranger and look him over in a zigzag way and say: “Viva Mejico.” The other fellow was just out hunting ducks himself, so he replies: “Viva Espania,” or “Viva Cuba Libre,” and then their heads and feet change places, and when they come to their senses they are lying on the soft side of a stone floor in the “husga” and wondering “Who struck Billy Patterson.” After witnessing the surging, seething mass of frenzied men and women with their savage Indian nature all ablaze with pulque, no one longer wonders at the large number of police he meets. The government is absolutely powerless to stop the sale of drugged pulque, and the number of deaths annually from pulque fights is incredible. In one year, the number of fights with knives alone was over six thousand in the capital. I know of no more dangerous animal than a Mexican loaded with pulque and marihuana, face distorted and blood-shot eyes aflame, and a knife in his belt. Blood is his glory and he loves a long knife which he can throw thirty feet with the accuracy of a pistol bullet.
Outside the cities the duello is the code of honor and the long knife the peacemaker. Among the cow boys and miners the friends of each tie their left hands together and stick a bowie-knife in the ground by each and walk off. The one that lives longest may cut the cords and come back to camp. If neither returns the boys know that they crossed the Styx together. Pulque is not the only drink made from the maguey, it is only the swill of the great unwashed. For the more epicurean tastes the root of the plant is roasted and distilled and from the product is a fiery liquid, which for courtesy is called mescal, but in reality is molten lava, and its nearest kin is another distillation called tequila, which is almost pure alcohol. They are sold in saloons at three cents a drink, and the American who attempts to wrestle with the monster takes a glass of mescal and a glass of water and tries to swallow them both at the same moment in order to keep the lining of his throat from scalding off as the lava goes down. The native, to show his contempt for the method, will look you in the eye and drink the fiery liquid without water. It brings water to his eyes, and the clotted blood-shot spots appear almost as rapidly as the shades of a chameleon on a rose bush. I saw a maniac suffering with delirium tremens from mescal, and a more pitiable object I have never seen. How he pleaded and begged for three cents, offering his soul in exchange just for one more drink before he died. I went to a restaurant and got him some soup and it had the effect of water upon a hydrophobia victim and I can only liken him to a caged hyena.
The maguey must not be called a profligate because it gives birth to five different intoxicating drinks; it serves other purposes as well. From the leaves the natives thatch their houses, and the spines make needles and pins. The fibre of the leaf is used in making rope, wrapping-twine, hammocks, sisal, mats, carpets, hairbrushes, brooms, baskets, paper and thread, firewood, and from the roots a very palatable food is made, and upon its bountiful leaves there feeds an army of green caterpillars about the size of your middle finger, and epicures do say that when they are properly stewed and set before you that you forget all about clam-bakes and gumbo soup and shrimp-pies and edible birds’ nests and just concentrate your mind upon the gusanos de la maguey, to all of which I say amen. I had to concentrate all of my attention and other things, too, to prevent a violent volcanic eruption just looking at the tempting morsel. I do not doubt the epicures in the least; on the contrary, I had so much faith in their judgment that I was willing to take their word without the caterpillars. But I did eat one dozen—by proxy, that is paying for them and enjoying that consumptive Mexican’s appetite as the whole dozen followed each other down the chute, but I might add, I had to put a weight on my stomach to avoid—well a catastrophe.
The maguey is absolutely independent of rain or moisture. It grows on the mesa that does not get a rain in six years. It is a bulbous plant and multiplies by suckers set in holes. The usual method is to take a crow-bar and dig a hole among the rocks and give it just enough earth to hold the roots and it will do the rest. There is nothing more beautiful than a maguey farm on the plains of Tlaxcala, with the plants set ten feet each way and spread over the plain for forty or fifty miles. The plants are so green they seem to have a blue tint, and the rows are so symmetrical, no matter which way you look, your vision will focus to a point in the distance where all rows converge to the vanishing point like the rails of a railroad on level ground. For a hundred miles south of the capital, every available rod of ground is planted in maguey which grows without any cultivation whatever, and will yield to the farmer ten dollars to the stalk during the single five months of its productive period. No field gets ripe at once. An acre with several hundred stalks may not have two dozen to come to maturity this year, and as soon as they are exhausted new bulbs are set in their stead, which makes a perpetual orchard. A plant that is to mature this year is easily known by the bleaching of the leaves as it yields its last vitality to the central bud.
Whenever the train stops, hordes of women gather around to sell to the passengers from earthen-ware vessels at a cent a drink. As the passenger lifts the putrid liquid, the dripping vessel leaves a trail of viscid streamers, like the gossamers of the bridging spider, or the saliva from an ox under the yoke, and especially if the wind is blowing, the network of sticky pulque streamers from car windows is just about as pleasant as the opening chorus of a candy-pulling, or the closing scene at a turpentine still.
In the families of the Spanish and French, pulque is never taken, but wines, champagne and sherry, are the household drinks, and the great national drink of America, lager beer, is slowly adding the dignified William goat and the overflowing schooner to the pictorial decorations of the Mexican house-fronts. The amount of liquid refreshments these people, especially the women, can embrace within their anatomy is astonishing. The dinner hour is prolonged from one to two hours in conversation and guzzling, and when a gentleman sees a lady’s glass empty at any part of the table, it is customary for him to walk around to her chair and fill the glass from his bottle; and these opportunities are eagerly sought by the watchful men, as it indicates a lack of attention to permit a lady’s glass to become empty. But I have never seen this class of people drunk or tipsy. The liquor must be very weak to permit so many bottles being emptied without a knockout.
A young Mexican at Guadalupe attempted to make his national drink aristocratic by giving it a lofty name. He asked me if I would not seal our good friendship by joining him in a glass of vino blanco. I told him I did not know what white wine was, as red was the only fast color the Americans patronized, but I would seal the friendship all right and let him drink for both of us. To this he raised not a particle of objection. I doubt if any such magnanimous windfall had ever come his way before when he could drink for two. He landed me in a pulque joint and this was my awakening to the vino blanco.
I had come in search of knowledge, and found it by means of my nose, which I had to hold while I grandiloquently told him to “tank up.” The proprietor brought him a half gallon rancid soapsuds, which he first offered me. I backed off and told him I had not done a thing to him to deserve such punishment, and besides, soapsuds more than a week old always went against my constitution and by-laws, and that I was subject to heart-failure anyway, and had to guard against undue exertion, such as vomiting, etc. He said it was not soapsuds, but “vino blanco,” (pulque nueva), and if I did not believe it was new pulque, just smell. I told him that was exactly what ailed me now, I had smelled and was leaning against the counter on account of it, and if he would just let me off I would burn a candle to his choice saint. After my friend had “tanked up” and swallowed most of the fragrance, I was able to stand up once more, and then I very kindly asked that proprietor if he did not think that stuff was ripe enough to bury. I said, “Sir, in my country when a corpse is kept till the flies swarm in the house, it is a sure sign that it is time for the funeral. Now sir, just look at the flies.” “O yes,” said he, “los muscos love vino blanco also, and they come because they know a good thing when they se—smell it.” Now what was the use of wasting logic on this logician? So my friend and I entered the street. It was a warm day, and while we had argued, I think the heat had contracted the street. At any rate it was much too narrow for my friend and his vino blanco, and he and a lamp-post had quite an argument about who had the right of way.
I think the post must have hit him below the belt from the way he fell out, and with the guilt of the act resting so heavy on my conscience I fled from the scene and vowed I would never buy soapsuds any more for my poor, martyred Guadalupe guide.
