A Visit to Don Otavio Read Online Free PDF Page B

was all very much in another country. Now I constantly hear his name on the train.
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    There is an air of expectancy in our coach, a feeling of the last night on board. The boys and girls are singing. The mistresses try to hush them but look awfully pleased themselves. The porter, however, is already banging up the beds. Everybody protests and it does no good. Pillow fights are in the air. I escape to the dining-car for some beer. One of the mistresses – what is called a nice type of woman – has escaped too.
    â€˜What is it really like?’ I ask her.
    â€˜Mexico? You will see marvels,’ she said with a look of illumination.
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    Prompted by some excitement, I wake and decide to get up at seven which is not my habit. I struggle into some clothes inside my buttoned tent and go to the dining-car where the windows are down at last and the air is flowing in clean and sharp, fresh with morning. And there under an intense light sky lies a shining plain succulent with sugar-cane and corn among the cacti, a bright rich tropical country miraculously laved: green, green, green, the Valley of Mexico.

CHAPTER THREE
Mexico City: First Clash
    A day or so must elapse before I can satisfy my curiosity by going out, while the necessary arrangements are making concerning carriages and horses, or mules, servants etc … for there is no walking, which in Mexico is considered wholly unfashionable … nor is it difficult to forsee, even from once passing through the streets, that only the more solid-built English carriages will stand the wear and tear of a Mexican life, and the comparatively flimsy coaches which roll over the well-paved streets of New York, will not endure for any length of time.
    MADAME CALDERON DE LA BARCA
    T HE FIRST impact of Mexico City is physical, immensely physical. Sun, Altitude, Movement, Smells, Noise. And it is inescapable. There is no taking refuge in one more insulating shell, no use sitting in the hotel bedroom fumbling with guide books: it is here, one is in it. A dazzling live sun beats in through a window; geranium scented white-washed cool comes from the patio; ear-drums are fluttering, dizziness fills the head as one is bending over a suitcase, one is eight thousand feet above the sea and the air one breathes is charged with lightness. So dazed, tempted, buoyed, one wanders out and like the stranger at the party who was handed a very large glass of champagne at the door, one floats along the streets in uncertain bliss, swept into rapids of doing, hooting, selling. Everything is agitated, crowded, spilling over; the pavements are narrow and covered with fruit. As one picks one’s way over mangoes and avocado pears, one is tumbled into the gutter by a water-carrier, avoids a Buick saloon and a basin of live charcoal, skips up again scaring a tethered chicken, shies from an exposed deformity and bumps into a Red Indian gentleman in a tight black suit. Now a parrot shrieks at one from an upper window, lottery tickets flutter in one’s face, one’s foot is trodden on by a goat and one’s skirt clutched at by a baby with the face of an idol. A person long confined to the consistent North may well imagine himself returned toone of the large Mediterranean ports, Naples perhaps: there are the people at once lounging and pressing, there is that oozing into the streets of business and domesticity; the show of motor traffic zigzagged by walking beasts; the lumps of country life, peasants and donkey carts, jars and straw, pushing their way along the pavements; there are the overflowing trams, the size and blaze of the Vermouth advertisements, the inky office clothes, the rich open food shops strung with great hams and cheeses, and the shoddy store with the mean bedroom suite; the ragged children, the carved fronts of palaces and the seven gimcrack skyscrapers. Nothing is lacking: monster cafés, Carpet Turks, the plate-glass window of the aeroplane agency, funeral wreaths for sale at every