A Visit to Don Otavio Read Online Free PDF

Mexicanos
.’
    â€˜I see. Oh dear. Then the Señora here,’ I point to E, ‘is what? Not an American? Not a North American? What is she?’
    â€˜Yanqui. La Señora es Yanqui.’
    â€˜But only North Americans are called Yankees … I mean only Americans from the North of the United States … I mean only North Americans from the States … North Americans from the North … I mean only Yankees from the Northern States are called Yankees.’
    â€˜Por favor?
’
    Â 
    In happier days it used to be one’s custom to read about a country before one went there. One made out a library list, consulted learned friends, then buckled down through the winter evenings. This time I did nothingof the sort. Yet there is a kind of jumbled residue; I find that at one time and another, here and there, I must have read a certain amount about Mexico. The kind of books that come one’s way through the years, nothing systematic or, except for Madame Calderon, recent. Prescott’s
Conquest
when I was quite young, and by no means all of it. Cortez’ letters. Volumes on Maximilian and Carlota, none of them really good and all of them fascinating. Travel miscellany of the French Occupation always called something like
Le Siège de Puebla: Souvenir d’une Campagne ou Cinq Ans au Mexique par un Officier de Marine en Retraite, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, Attaché à l’Etat-Major du Maréchal Bazaine.
Excruciating volumes where sometimes a mad, enchanting detail of farm kitchen or highway robbery pierced through the purple lull of pre-impressionist descriptions
où jallissaient les cimes majestueuses et enneigées du vénérable Popocatepetl
.
    The writer who first made people of my generation aware of Mexico as a contemporary reality was D. H. Lawrence in his letters,
Mornings in Mexico
and
The Plumed Serpent.
Mornings in
Mexico
had a lyrical quality, spontaneous, warmed, like a long stroll in the sun.
The Plumed Serpent
was full of fear and violence, and Lawrence loudly kept the reader’s nose to the grindstone: he
had
to loathe the crowds in the Bull Ring, he
had
to be awed by the native ritual. Perhaps the reality, for better or for worse, was Lawrence’s rather than Mexico’s. There were two realities actually. The
Mornings
were written down in the South at Oaxaca, in the Zapotec country;
The Plumed Serpent
in the West at Chapala, by a lake. I never liked
The Plumed Serpent
. It seemed portentous without good reason.
Something
was being constantly expostulated and one never knew quite what, though at times one was forced into accepting it at its created face-value. And Lawrence’s mysterious Indians, those repositories of power, wisdom and evil, remained after chapters and chapters of protesting very mysterious Indians indeed.
    Nor were those stacks of
littérature engagée
particularly enlightening. One read one book and became convinced that the Mexican Indians lived outside the grip of economic cycles in a wise man’s paradise of handicrafts; one read another and was left with the impression that they werethe conscious pioneers of an awakening working-class. There were villains – the Mexican Diet, so lowering; Drink; Oil; the Church; the Persecution of the Church; President Cardenas, so like Stalin and that Man in the White House. Panacea – Partition of the Land; Irrigation; Confiscation of Foreign Holdings; the Church; the Closing of the Church; President Cardenas, so like Lenin and FDR.
    The thirties were the wrong time to be much stirred by the Diaz controversy: Good Don Porfirio or the Despot? One knew that he had been a practical man in a vulgar era, a champion of order and a business promoter in a land of sloth and anarchy, who gaoled his opponents, cooked his elections and had no truck with the liberty of the press. It did seem rather mild and remote and old-fashioned; Diaz had been dead a long time and it