Read Ebook: Land without chimneys; or the byways of Mexico by Coffin Alfred Oscar

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Ebook has 629 lines and 100729 words, and 13 pages

We walk around the forbidding walls until we come to a massive iron gate, and through its opening we see a forest of wooden crosses which tell their own tale, but the sexton will tell another.

"A relic of by-gone days was he, And his hair was white as the foaming sea."

He had dug a row of twenty-four graves, twenty-three of which were open, but the other was filled to the brim with bones and scraps of clothing taken from the others. A peep into these revealed cross-sections of leg-bones here, two ribs and a hand there, with a jawbone or a vertebra lying in the bottom. The sexton explained that a person may rest in peace for the period of five years, and if, after that time his relatives do not pay a tax on his grave, his resurrection day will come to make room for newer tenants and better renters.

And so on for a hundred years or more they will begin at the gate and dig graves and collect taxes until they reach the rear wall, and then start over. If everybody paid, the yard would remain intact and the sexton would have to start a new farm; but with the average Mexican, the cost of remaining alive is a far more serious question than remaining dead for an orthodox resurrection.

He much prefers using his spare cash during those five years in buying masses from the priest to get the soul of his late departed out of Purgatory, and if he succeeds in that, the bones may go; so every five years he is prepared to see his friend's lodging aired and let to new lodgers. The wealthy rent tombs which are built in the outer wall, and here they can peep through the glass doors and see the dust of their fathers sifting down upon the ashes of their grandfathers to the third and fourth generation. The sexton was not very careful in removing his renters, and would leave a leg in No. 7 and carry the other remains to 24. I asked him if that would not complicate matters a little in the final resurrection. He assured me that Purgatory was the place to right such small matters, and if the priest was paid enough he would get them all together. That reminds me of a wealthy man who died, and the priest, with an eye to business, called upon the son of the late departed, and impressed upon him the urgency of paying for enough masses to take his father's soul from Purgatory. The son asked how much would do it. The priest, after a careful calculation said: "He was a pretty hard case and no less than five hundred dollars will move him," and the son paid the money.

After a while they met again. "And how is my father getting along?" asked the son. "You see," said the priest, "your father was in the middle of Purgatory and I had to move him a long way, but I have him towards the outer edge now, and I think two hundred dollars more will pass him out." The money was paid without protest, and this so encouraged the priest that he resolved to make one more deal.

"And how is my father now?" was asked when they met again. "Well, I have him right at the edge of Purgatory with one foot over the line, and I think another fifty dollars will pass him into heaven."

"O no!" said the son. "You don't know my father. If he has one foot in heaven, St. Peter and all Purgatory can't keep him out and so I will save this fifty dollars."

As the sexton and I talked, a funeral procession entered the gate, consisting of two men and two women of the poorer class. On the head of one man was a dead child stretched upon a board. The other came to the sexton for instructions. He pointed them to a row of thirteen small graves, dug about two feet deep and two of them were filled with the bones from the others.

The child was taken from the board and chucked in, but was found to be several inches too long for the grave, so its head was bent up until the pall-bearer could gouge out enough dirt to admit the body straight, and then enough dirt and bones were raked in to cover it a foot and a half. Meanwhile, the women sat upon neighboring graves, chatting and smoking cigarettes until the grave was filled. Thirteen minutes after they had entered they were gone, leaving the sexton and myself alone with the dead. Within ten minutes another procession entered, preceded by a company of priests with lighted candles, followed by a hearse with a velvet covered coffin. Behind the hearse walked a procession of young men with lighted candles, and then I knew a man was dead, for no women attend the funerals of men.

On entering, the body was taken from the coffin and buried, and the coffin returned to the undertaker. Wood is too scarce in Mexico to buy coffins when a rented one will do as well, and besides, it would give the sexton too much trouble in his impromptu resurrections if he had to dig through hard wood boards.

Nothing better illustrates the stature of these people than the death of an American. He was a conductor, and the railroad employees determined to give him an orthodox Christian burial, but no coffin could be found long enough, so he was put into one with both ends knocked out. Then came the inspection, and official announcement and permit, and enough red tape to consume two whole days and all the patience of the American colony, and involved enough writing to have chartered the city.

All cemeteries are reached by mule car; and for those who cannot afford a hearse, a funeral car and as many empties as are needed, are always to be had. The funeral car is painted black or white, with a raised dais to support the coffin, and in a sweeping gallop the cortege is soon at the cemetery gates on schedule time.

The cathedral in all Mexican cities is the one place of attraction. The one here was used as a powder magazine during the Mexican war, and the walls still bear the grim ear-marks of cannon balls.

The finest church here is Nuestra Se?ora del Roble, which is old, but seems never to be finished, and thereby hangs a tale.

No church property is taxable here until it is finished, so the astute priests rarely finish one. There are churches here whose foundations were laid three hundred years ago, and as you stand in the grand nave, bits of stone falling around you will be the only evidence of the workmen two hundred feet above.

A workman will take an intricate pattern of wall-paper, and, with a paint-pot and brush, will spread that design over ten thousand square yards of surface, and at a distance of ten feet you cannot detect his work from genuine wall-paper. The perspective is so deceptive in one church in Monterey, that you almost run into the rear wall before you are aware that the long aisle is a painted one. You must stand or kneel in the churches, as no seats are provided. One church in Puebla is the only exception. Most of the churches are bedizened with cheap gew-gaws and tinsel, which gives you an impression of a child's playhouse.

The church of San Francisco is the oldest in town, and its bells were cast in Spain.

It all reminds me of February 22, in New York, when national proclivities will rise against time and circumstances, and George Washington will blaze with all his calm dignity from the Teuton's shop window with a huge glass of lager in his hand, and the citizen from County Cork flashes him forth from his aldermanic window with an extra width to his supermaxillary, while Hop Long Quick displays him with his weekly washee washee, sporting a three foot queue.

I suppose all this proves that we think a lot more of ourselves than we do of others, and of our nationality: "My country, may she ever be right, but right or wrong, my country."

I sincerely hope Ramona got the letter and rewarded the young man for his splendid sculpturing, but I doubt if he "sculped" all the things I read.

Some were avowals to the service of the Virgin, and I know of no place better calculated to inspire such thoughts of worship than the little chapel of Guadalupe.

Beyond the chapel was a young man quarrying stone, and in his idle hours he had chiseled out a small miniature chapel, about three feet long and similar in design to Guadalupe. Perhaps he was the one who wrote the pious inscription, but he looked just about old enough to have boiled over with that effervescence about Ramona.

While he was at work, I slyly investigated his means of saving grace. Within the little chapel were candles and tinsels of gold leaf and silver, and symbols made of pewter and tin, and bits of broken crockery and other childish playthings, while around it were planted a row of resurrection plants.

What the lower classes here do not know about the bible would fill a book.

The city of Monterey is supplied with water from a famous spring in the heart of the city, which also gives birth to the Santa Lucia, which is crossed by numerous bridges, and is the public bath-house and laundry. A whole company of soldiers will march from the barracks down the principal street, and the first bridge they reach, down they go into the water, and every man will take off his shirt, wade in and begin his laundering. In all likelihood, they will find as many women already in the water enjoying a bath, and they will all sit in the sun and smoke cigarettes together while their clothes dry.

The little proprieties which most people attach to a bath do not seem to trouble these innocent people, especially when an orthodox bath-house charges a quarter of a dollar for what the city gives free gratis for nothing. If cleanliness is next to godliness, these people must be away up in the line of promotion, for from sunrise to sunset, I have seen every rod of this canal a moving panorama of black-haired swimmers, men, women and children, while the banks were white with drying laundry.

The painter who first made that picture about the mermaids sitting upon a rock and combing their raven locks, must have been standing on a

bridge here and got his idea from the Mexican houris trying to dry their hair before they--well, while waiting for their clothes to get dry.

Like Mahomet's mountain, the Mexican laundress always carries her clothes to the water, and rests upon her knees by the brink. She casts a garment into the stream until it is wet, and then wads it upon a flat stone, and soaps it until it is a mass of foam. She then puts it in a wooden tray, such as we use in our kitchen, and rubs all the soap out of it, and immediately empties the water and repeats the process.

If she dips a piece a dozen times, she soaps it just as often, and empties the soapsuds after each rubbing, and never, never uses the soapsuds a second time.

This is very hard on a bar of soap, but the linen is returned to you as white as snow.

There are many Americans in Monterey, and they are trying very hard to implant their American customs upon the country, one of which is the color line in public places.

All the streets are paved with smooth, round cobble stones from the mountain gorges. They are about the size and shape of a butter-dish, and they make just about as smooth a pavement as so many acres of cannon balls would make, buried half way in cement, and meeting about as closely as round objects usually meet.

I can think of no American equivalent, except a corduroy log bridge, or driving across the railroad tracks in a switch-yard.

The gutter is always in the middle of the street, which is a foot or more lower than the rest. An American has gained a concession to lay one street with Texas vitrified brick, and let us hope it is a fore-runner of others. But, come to think of it, it might work a hardship to a time-honored custom; an innovation to some might prove an iconoclast to the church.

It has long been a custom during Passion week and other fiestas, for the priests to prescribe a penance for those who confessed to a sin in thought or word or deed either in the past, present or future tense; and one of the favorite punishments is to require a number of maidens to walk down a street leading to a church, and return, crawling upon their bare knees to the church to be absolved. As they would leave a trail of blood over the cruel stones, some agonized lover would east his zerape before his beloved and beseech her to let him lead it in front of her to the church and spare the laceration; but poor ignorant creatures, they have been taught that this is the only way to have their sins forgiven.

I notice I never see men in these pilgrimages, and it must prove that the men have more hard sense than the women, or else the priests have their own reasons for appointing women only.

In Monterey are a number of smelting works, where the lead and silver ore is reduced to pigs, and here we see the applied difference in wages.

The hardest work in the smelter is to weigh in and deliver to the furnace a thousand pounds of ore every fifteen minutes, and this is not unskilled labor either. The man has a two-wheeled cart into which he must weigh in 600 pounds of ore, and 400 pounds of coke and flux material. Those ores are perhaps fifty yards away at the dump, and if the ore is very refractory, he must mix four or five grades in different proportions. His cart must be always on scales as he goes from one pile to the other, and he must make four trips an hour, and for this he cannot possibly make over a dollar a day, and the regulation wages for even the hardest work is 67 1/2 cents for a maximum, if he is able to make eight full hours.

I saw an Indian boy who had become so expert, he could load his cart with three or four different ores and not miss the amount by more than ten pounds when weighed.

Two railroads pass Monterey. The Mexican Central to Tampico on the Gulf, and the Mexican National to the City; and on the latter we now leave for Saltillo and the battle-field of Buena Vista.

SALTILLO AND THE PLATEAU.

From Monterey to Saltillo is sixty-seven miles as the crow flies, 5,300 feet in elevation as the barometer creeps, and fifty rise to the mile as the train runs. Up, up we go with two powerful engines to the train, and the ever-present query, "If the train should break in two, where would I land?"

This is no idle question either, and to reduce possibilities, the Pullmans follow the baggage, the first-class cars next, and the second and third-class last. This is very necessary in steep grades and sharp curves, where the heavy Pullmans with their momentum would always endeavor to strike off segments and chords across the arcs.

Up we go between mountains bare of vegetation, which enables you to see them in their naked grandeur and sublimity. You very soon conclude that the train is on the trail of the little river, and trying to track it out of the canon, and you also discover that it was impossible to have built the road over any other route than the bed of the noisy, fretful little San Juan. We pass through the canon with the little stream first on one side and then on the other, clinging to the side of the mountain by a path that hardly saves the train from destruction by the overhanging rocks, but ever upward. Indeed, railroad men say that when a car breaks loose from the yard in Saltillo, it runs all the way back to Monterey. I don't believe it. It might come part of the way, but I think before it got half way down that grade, it would leave the track and make the rest of the journey in mid-air, and in considerable less than a mile a minute, too.

On the way up we pass the little puebla of Garcia, where a peak of the mountain has an opening through it, as though some Titanic cannon-ball had crashed its way through there, showing the sunlight on the other side. As we pass, all good Catholics take off their hats and cross themselves. Far up the peaks, tiny spirals of smoke show where the charcoal burners have found some isolated shrubs and are reducing them to merchantable form. In the cleft of the rocks are also to be seen the tuna-bearing cacti, which the half-clad Indian women are gathering for food. At last the grade is surmounted and we reach Saltillo, the capital of the State of Coahuila to which once also was attached the State of Texas.

One of the causes of the Texas revolution was that the Texans had to go to Saltillo, fully a thousand miles from Red River, to attend to their legal business. They asked for a separate state, and at the head of the Texas army they kindly persuaded Santa Anna to grant it. There is great persuasive power in a gun.

The train passes through a long street, lined on both sides with gardens of peaches and apples and oranges and bananas and figs. The altitude is a mile above sea-level, so that the heat of summer is never known, and one must sleep under blankets, even in July and August. It is a favorite summer resort for those who want a climate with no changes whatever. The city has a population of 20,000, but no horse-cars, so you take your foot in your hand and go off to see the town. There is but little to see, but of course there is the Grand Plaza, all Mexican cities have that, and of course the Cathedral faces the Plaza, there is no exception to that rule. The town is 300 years old, but the Cathedral was not begun till 1745, and the main body was completed in 1800.

The towers were begun in 1873, and may continue a hundred years longer. In keeping with the custom of the country, the churches must be as fine as time and money can make them, and the people give both, freely. The Alameda is as beautiful and as restful as one could wish, with fountains and flowers, and birds and trees to drive dull care away. I was honestly trying to do this when a school dismissed near by, and I called several of the "Kids" by to let me look at their text books, which consisted of a Catechism of the Catholic faith, and an Arithmetic. There must have been nearly a dozen boys around me, when all of a sudden they scattered like quails before a hawk, as a watchful policeman headed for us.

Ten miles from Saltillo is the battle-field of Buena Vista, where General Taylor, after a two days' fight, defeated the Mexicans. After the battle the Mexican women went among the wounded, ministering to the American as well as to the Mexican soldiers.

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