Read Online A Visit to Don Otavio by Sybille Bedford - Free Book Online
Authors: Sybille Bedford
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chafing dishes, trays piled with tiered triple boilers balancing casseroles, until one could no longer tell snack from meal. We were never charged for these treats. We did not hear any shooting. Next morning the housekeeper told us that there had been a few dead, one hundred? two hundred? just a small election.
Other days pass in a rhythm of going out and exhausted return to the cool, flower-scented peace of the patio. Outside everything is just a bit toonear, too loud, too much. One is always pressed upon, there is always something to dodge – the beggars, the insane traffic, the sun, pineapples cascading off a stall.
The Baedeker round is quickly done.
Palace and Cathedral are vast Spanish Colonial edifices conceived in ambition and the high if interested purposes of the Counter-Reformation, and built with rather more than the usual deal of delay through low funds, change of policy and volcanic tremor. The Paséo de la Reforma, Maximilian and Carlota’s Champs-Elysées, casts a dank Victorian pall, dispiritedly
dépaysé
with its unbending line of tropical trees mercilessly clipped à la française. The Gallery has its Rubens (a religious subject), its Murillo, ‘what,’ I am quoting
Terry
, ‘is believed by many to be a genuine Titian,’ cracked and darkened portraits of Spanish gentlemen with heads like Spanish Gentlemen painted by El Greco, many battle-pieces and room upon roomful of Schools. The Museum has the Aztec Calendar Stone, an assortment of sacrificial stones of all sizes and a large collection of imp-faced deities, but Pre-Columbian sculpture can be seen bigger and better in Oaxaca and at the British Museum.
Yes, the show-pieces on the itinerary are numbered and on the whole disappointing. But how much there is to see. Everywhere. No need, no point, to plan and rush, only to stand, to stroll and stare; to connect. Not great beauty, not the perfect proportions, the slow-grown, well-grown balance (you will never be further from Greece), not the long-tended masterpiece of thought and form, the tight French gem, but the haphazard, the absurd, the over-blown, the savage, the gruesome. The fantastic detail and the frightening vista; the exotically elegant; the vast, the far, the legendarily ancient.
Everywhere. In the thoroughfare where the baby mule is born; by the fountain in the cool courtyard of the Spanish merchant’s house where the Churrigueresque façade is gently weather-worn like a half-wiped slate; in the Street of the False Door of Saint-Andrew where two lovely, epicene young workmen are weaving a custom-made cage of soft twigs for a waiting parrot; in the lobby of the Ritz where of a Sunday morningCreole business-men sit, heavily powdered, missals on their laps, discussing fat deals.
The Church of the Assumption of María Santísima, the Cathedral of Mexico City, the Archiepiscopal See of the Distrito Federál, the Holy Metropolitan Church of Mexico, the Patriarchal Basilica of the Americas,
l’Iglesia Mayor
, the First Christian Church on American Soil, is dense from sunrise to nightfall with a religious rabble, the vagrant camp-followers of holy shrines, prostrate, agape, chanting, swaying, scraping on their knees, hugging images with oriental intensity – mindless, far-gone, possessed, separate and at one, unarrestable, frightening to the pitch of panic.
The City is full of bookshops, large recent establishments stocked with cheap, well-turned-out paper editions of
David Copperfield, Le Père Goriot, The Mill on the Floss, Point Counter Point.
The showcases are stuffed with the translated editions of Stephan Zweig, Emily Brontë and Professor Sigmund Freud. Who buys them? One quarter of the people cannot read. Another quarter can only read laboriously. Every grown-up, who can, is supposed by law to teach his letters to one illiterate grown-up a year. The question is often what letters. The current language is Spanish, but there are still two million Mexicans who speak only one
Other days pass in a rhythm of going out and exhausted return to the cool, flower-scented peace of the patio. Outside everything is just a bit toonear, too loud, too much. One is always pressed upon, there is always something to dodge – the beggars, the insane traffic, the sun, pineapples cascading off a stall.
The Baedeker round is quickly done.
Palace and Cathedral are vast Spanish Colonial edifices conceived in ambition and the high if interested purposes of the Counter-Reformation, and built with rather more than the usual deal of delay through low funds, change of policy and volcanic tremor. The Paséo de la Reforma, Maximilian and Carlota’s Champs-Elysées, casts a dank Victorian pall, dispiritedly
dépaysé
with its unbending line of tropical trees mercilessly clipped à la française. The Gallery has its Rubens (a religious subject), its Murillo, ‘what,’ I am quoting
Terry
, ‘is believed by many to be a genuine Titian,’ cracked and darkened portraits of Spanish gentlemen with heads like Spanish Gentlemen painted by El Greco, many battle-pieces and room upon roomful of Schools. The Museum has the Aztec Calendar Stone, an assortment of sacrificial stones of all sizes and a large collection of imp-faced deities, but Pre-Columbian sculpture can be seen bigger and better in Oaxaca and at the British Museum.
Yes, the show-pieces on the itinerary are numbered and on the whole disappointing. But how much there is to see. Everywhere. No need, no point, to plan and rush, only to stand, to stroll and stare; to connect. Not great beauty, not the perfect proportions, the slow-grown, well-grown balance (you will never be further from Greece), not the long-tended masterpiece of thought and form, the tight French gem, but the haphazard, the absurd, the over-blown, the savage, the gruesome. The fantastic detail and the frightening vista; the exotically elegant; the vast, the far, the legendarily ancient.
Everywhere. In the thoroughfare where the baby mule is born; by the fountain in the cool courtyard of the Spanish merchant’s house where the Churrigueresque façade is gently weather-worn like a half-wiped slate; in the Street of the False Door of Saint-Andrew where two lovely, epicene young workmen are weaving a custom-made cage of soft twigs for a waiting parrot; in the lobby of the Ritz where of a Sunday morningCreole business-men sit, heavily powdered, missals on their laps, discussing fat deals.
The Church of the Assumption of María Santísima, the Cathedral of Mexico City, the Archiepiscopal See of the Distrito Federál, the Holy Metropolitan Church of Mexico, the Patriarchal Basilica of the Americas,
l’Iglesia Mayor
, the First Christian Church on American Soil, is dense from sunrise to nightfall with a religious rabble, the vagrant camp-followers of holy shrines, prostrate, agape, chanting, swaying, scraping on their knees, hugging images with oriental intensity – mindless, far-gone, possessed, separate and at one, unarrestable, frightening to the pitch of panic.
The City is full of bookshops, large recent establishments stocked with cheap, well-turned-out paper editions of
David Copperfield, Le Père Goriot, The Mill on the Floss, Point Counter Point.
The showcases are stuffed with the translated editions of Stephan Zweig, Emily Brontë and Professor Sigmund Freud. Who buys them? One quarter of the people cannot read. Another quarter can only read laboriously. Every grown-up, who can, is supposed by law to teach his letters to one illiterate grown-up a year. The question is often what letters. The current language is Spanish, but there are still two million Mexicans who speak only one
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