A Visit to Don Otavio Read Online Free PDF Page A

mathematical data in public places and priests started a Boston Tea Party because they might not breed silk-worms; where highwaymen shared their spoils with cabinet ministers, where a Stendhalian Indian second-lieutenant had himself crowned Emperor at the age of twenty-four, and Creole ladies went to Mass covered in diamonds leading pet leopards; where nuns lived and died for eighty years in secret cupboards, where squires were knifed in silence at high noon, and women in crinolines sat at banquet among the flies at Vera Cruz to welcome the Austrian Archduke who had come to pit the liberalism of enlightened princes against powers he neither understood nor suspected while themessengers of treason sped already along the uncertain roads; where at the Haciendas the family sat down to dinner thirty every day but the chairs had to be brought in from the bedrooms, where the peon’s yearly wage was paid in small copper coin and the haciendado lost his crop in louis d’or in a week at Monte; where the monuments to the devouring sun are indestructible, where baroque façades are writ in sandstone, and the markets are full of tourists and beads.
    Everything happened, and little was changed. There was the confusion, glitter and violence of shifting power but the birth-and deathrates remained unchecked. Indians, always other Indians, move and move about the unending hills with great loads upon their backs, sit and stare in the market-place, hour into hour, then cluster into one of their sudden pilgrimages and slowly swarm over the countryside in a massed crawl in search of a new face of the Mother of God.
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    Someone has come in to say that we shall be in Mexico City some time tomorrow morning and not very late after all. Everybody is getting restless. I have laid out a patience on a table kindly cleared for me by the rightful occupants. Two boys are dithering by the sides of my seat. They are terribly polite.
    â€˜Please, M’am, what kind of cards are these?’
    They are very small patience cards that used to be made in Vienna before the war, and I dare say are made there again.
    â€˜Have you ever seen such cute cards, Jeff? Aren’t they cute? Come and look at these cute cards, Fleecy-May. Miss Carter, M’am, come and look at these cards, have you ever seen such cute cards, Miss Carter, M’am?’
    â€˜Now Braxton, you must not disturb the lady.’
    â€˜What kind of solitaire is this, M’am?’
    â€˜Miss Milligan.’ It is almost my favourite patience and it hardly ever comes out. It needs much concentration.
    â€˜My Grandpa does one just like that.’
    â€˜Oh the Jack, M’am! The Jack of Diamonds on the Black Ten.’
    â€˜The Jack doesn’t go on the Ten, Dope, the Jack goes on the Queen. Doesn’t the Jack go on the Queen, M’am?’
    â€˜Braxton Bragg Jones, will you leave the lady alone,’ says Miss Carter.
    â€˜Oh, not at all,’ I say, ‘it’s perfectly all right. Please.’
    It does not come out. I could still use the privilege of waiving, but Braxton Bragg and Jefferson are beginning to get bored with Miss Milligan. I am shamed into starting something quick and simple with a spectacular lay-out.
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    As the train moves through the evening, the country grows more and more lovely, open and enriched. There are oxen in the fields, mulberry trees make garlands on the slopes, villages and churches stand out pink and gold in an extraordinarily limpid light as though the windows of our carriage were cut in crystal.
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    I start a conversation – so good for one’s Spanish – with the officer from Monterrey. Our exchange of the civilities takes this form.
    â€˜Where do you come from?’ I am asked.
    â€˜America.’
    â€˜This is America.’
    â€˜From North America.’
    â€˜This is North America.’
    â€˜From the United States.’
    â€˜These are the United States,
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