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Authors: Sybille Bedford
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of sixty different pre-Columbian tribal dialects. In the State of Sonora, they do not even use Arabic or Roman numerals, but a system they invented on their own.
I bought a Manual of Conversation. In the section headed
Useful Words and Phrases,
I find on page one:
‘Are you interested in death, Count?’
‘Yes, very much, your Excellency.’
One of the happiest places in this town is a room of early nineteenth-century Creole genre paintings in the Chapultepec Museum. These graceful pictures of hummingbird, butterfly and country life (unusual subjects of inspiration in Latin America) are quite unlike anything onehas ever seen, luxuriant but domestic, naïve and worldly, fresh, faintly absurd, wholly delicious. Young women in striped silk on a verandah mocked by a lemur, a muslin dress shimmering through magnolia trees, fruit like flowers and flowers like birds, give intimations of a better world. One can hear the leaf fans rustling through the afternoon, soft sucking of bare feet on patio tiles, ice clinking in punch glasses …
But here too, the other note is sounded. There is a picture of a small boy led by a governess through a most peculiar garden of sugar cane and coffee bush, followed by a curly lap dog and an Indian boy carrying his doll, a neatly dressed and bonneted baby skeleton.
There are three active volcanoes in the valley, all within easy lava-throw of the City. Popocatepetl, Iztaccihúatl, Xinantecatl – monsters in name and size, fragile in appearance; Japanese contoured shapes of pastel blue and porcelain snow, and three thin formal curls of smoke afloat in a limpid sky. There is also an unobtrusive mound, a tiny volcano now quiescent, Peñon, which according to the geologists will one day destroy the City.
In the spaces of the Plaza Mayor, walking over the grave of a pyramid, one is assailed by infinity, seized at the throat by an awful sense of the past stretching and stretching backwards through tunnels of time … Can this be Here, can one be in it? One is in a legend, one is walking in Troy.
CHAPTER SIX
Coyacán: Tea and Advice
Some Mexican visits appear to me to surpass in duration all that one can imagine of a visit, rarely lasting less than one hour, and sometimes extending over the greater part of the day. And gentlemen, at least, arrive at no particular time. If you are going to breakfast, they go also â if to dinner, the same â if you are asleep, they wait till you awaken â if out, they call again. An indifferent sort of man, whose name I did not even hear, arrived yesterday, a little after breakfast, sat still, and walked in to a late dinner with us!
MADAME CALDERON DE LA BARCA
W E WERE ASKED to tea by some academic friends of friends, Spanish refugees, Mexican residents for some ten years. Their house was at Coyacán, the suburb in which Trotsky lived and was murdered. We set out with little idea of how to get there. Asking oneâs way is an uncertain business as pleasantness seems to be the guiding principle of oneâs informants, not truth. Everything is made to appear wonderfully near. Thus, the hotel porter suppressed the second tram, and the women at the terminal a mile of walk on an unpaved road full of mudholes and happy grubbing pigs, and we arrived very late at the Cs.
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The unprepossessing road ended in an alley by a small door in a high unbroken wall. A manservant in a striped coat and no shoes, opened from within and we stepped into the colonnaded garden of a Carmelite convent choked with bougainvillaea and large, lush, rambling roses. Seven or eight people were waiting for their tea and chocolate in a long domed room lined with books, french windows open to the garden. We were punctiliously introduced, shook hands and apologised for being late.
âYou found? You came by taxi, yes?â
E explained that I had prevented her from doing so.
The company seemed favourably impressed. âAnd you walked after tramway? That is
I bought a Manual of Conversation. In the section headed
Useful Words and Phrases,
I find on page one:
‘Are you interested in death, Count?’
‘Yes, very much, your Excellency.’
One of the happiest places in this town is a room of early nineteenth-century Creole genre paintings in the Chapultepec Museum. These graceful pictures of hummingbird, butterfly and country life (unusual subjects of inspiration in Latin America) are quite unlike anything onehas ever seen, luxuriant but domestic, naïve and worldly, fresh, faintly absurd, wholly delicious. Young women in striped silk on a verandah mocked by a lemur, a muslin dress shimmering through magnolia trees, fruit like flowers and flowers like birds, give intimations of a better world. One can hear the leaf fans rustling through the afternoon, soft sucking of bare feet on patio tiles, ice clinking in punch glasses …
But here too, the other note is sounded. There is a picture of a small boy led by a governess through a most peculiar garden of sugar cane and coffee bush, followed by a curly lap dog and an Indian boy carrying his doll, a neatly dressed and bonneted baby skeleton.
There are three active volcanoes in the valley, all within easy lava-throw of the City. Popocatepetl, Iztaccihúatl, Xinantecatl – monsters in name and size, fragile in appearance; Japanese contoured shapes of pastel blue and porcelain snow, and three thin formal curls of smoke afloat in a limpid sky. There is also an unobtrusive mound, a tiny volcano now quiescent, Peñon, which according to the geologists will one day destroy the City.
In the spaces of the Plaza Mayor, walking over the grave of a pyramid, one is assailed by infinity, seized at the throat by an awful sense of the past stretching and stretching backwards through tunnels of time … Can this be Here, can one be in it? One is in a legend, one is walking in Troy.
CHAPTER SIX
Coyacán: Tea and Advice
Some Mexican visits appear to me to surpass in duration all that one can imagine of a visit, rarely lasting less than one hour, and sometimes extending over the greater part of the day. And gentlemen, at least, arrive at no particular time. If you are going to breakfast, they go also â if to dinner, the same â if you are asleep, they wait till you awaken â if out, they call again. An indifferent sort of man, whose name I did not even hear, arrived yesterday, a little after breakfast, sat still, and walked in to a late dinner with us!
MADAME CALDERON DE LA BARCA
W E WERE ASKED to tea by some academic friends of friends, Spanish refugees, Mexican residents for some ten years. Their house was at Coyacán, the suburb in which Trotsky lived and was murdered. We set out with little idea of how to get there. Asking oneâs way is an uncertain business as pleasantness seems to be the guiding principle of oneâs informants, not truth. Everything is made to appear wonderfully near. Thus, the hotel porter suppressed the second tram, and the women at the terminal a mile of walk on an unpaved road full of mudholes and happy grubbing pigs, and we arrived very late at the Cs.
Â
The unprepossessing road ended in an alley by a small door in a high unbroken wall. A manservant in a striped coat and no shoes, opened from within and we stepped into the colonnaded garden of a Carmelite convent choked with bougainvillaea and large, lush, rambling roses. Seven or eight people were waiting for their tea and chocolate in a long domed room lined with books, french windows open to the garden. We were punctiliously introduced, shook hands and apologised for being late.
âYou found? You came by taxi, yes?â
E explained that I had prevented her from doing so.
The company seemed favourably impressed. âAnd you walked after tramway? That is
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