Tarascan Town
I
‘DON CARLOS is at the door with the servant and horses.’ I never thought that in my lifetime I should hear such words said to me — and yet Don Carlos really was at the door, with a pointed white beard and carved gloves, and he was attended by a dark-complexioned youth leading a milk-white palfrey named Robespierra. And hark — a distant horn! The mule car is approaching with all four mules. ’T is but of everyday occurrence in this Tarascan town called Uruapan. The place is very difficult to leave.
Unless you go on horseback you can leave it in but one direction, for it lies at the end of the rail line in the midst of the mountainous Mexican state of Michoacán, which stretches on to the Pacific Ocean, with Guerrero to the south of it and Jalisco to the north. It has for centuries been an Indian metropolis, though less ancient than the mysterious towns of Lake Pátzcuaro and its islands near by. They say now that the railroad is to be extended from Uruapan down through the hot lands to the fine harbor of Zihuatanejo — hacendados of the rice lands hope soon, but, granting that it means progress, I murmur, ‘Heaven delay it!’
For with a railroad leading from coast to capital there will be fewer burro caravans winding through the seemingly pathless forests of orchidhonored live oak and pine. There will be fewer little hoofs pattering along the age-old trails, rough, steep, and perilous, to carry rice up to Uruapan and take back a strange mixture of wares for the needs of the monarehial isolated haciendas that lie fruitful in the almighty sunlight of the uncivilized hot country. The hot country — where there are wild cattle even today that have to be roped, and not as an exhibition, either; where dwells a straight, tall, fair race of people, who do as they please and look the white dueño calmly in the eye! I could not bear to see these things changed, after living in Uruapan. I shall go down into the Tierra Caliente before the railroad does and view those haciendas from a horse.
From one of the hills which overlook it, my Tarascan town is a cluster of glittering houses in a green cup of earth, surrounded without a break by lonely wooded mountains, on one of which, Tancítaro, snow lies some days. At the end of every street the green mountains wait for me. The roofs overhang the sidewalks, and you may shop with no umbrella in the rainy season. And when a roof has a certain decorated cornice, that shows that it’s the house of a chief!
This is a city of a long story, an unprosperous present, an indestructible racial individuality—and Mexicans love to speak of it as ‘the paradise of Michoacán.’ But it is a paradise not without worldly temptations and ruddy drama. Its people are operatic-looking beyond belief; they’ are serene and kindly, too, but naturally a draught of festive aguardiente fills them with gusto, and late at night they set off rockets and other explosives, and there is tuneful, passionate singing in the streets. I had been there but a day or so when I felt with some apprehension that all this was just my game.
A Tarascan city at the end of the line, remote and sufficient to itself. One’s friends have never heard of it. They refuse to say the easy name, Oo-roo-áh-pan, and they wonder why you linger there, babbling of spurs and jasmine. If you try to tell them, there is all of a different world to tell.
To-day in riding we saw some of those winsome flowers that the Indians call ‘sandals of San Miguel.’ But it is strange that they call them sandals, because it was the glory and praise of Fray Juan de San Miguel, the Franciscan whose memory is still beloved and blessed throughout Tarascan country, that he went through all that wild region, in the days after the conquest, ‘alone, afoot, unshod,’ — the words recur like a refrain in every story of him, — no ravine being too deep, no peak too rugged, no way too hostile for his devoted feet. Fray Miguel was the founder of Uruapan on its present site, but the dates of the occasion are disputed and I take no stand for any year from 1533 to 1540. It was one of those. However, the city was dwelt in at the time of the wanderings of the Aztecs.
‘At its foundation Uruapan numbered more than a thousand fires,’ says an old Franciscan chronicler, and, reading this, I thought how to-day a (ire still means a home. Riding out in the cold starlight of early morning, you see a gay flame bloom at the door of a poor hut, and you know that the occupants are getting up the fire to make the tortillas — that an Indian woman is kneeling beside it, patting into cakes the corn that she has ground with so much labor in her stone metate, tossing them lightly on to the hot tin.
Fray Miguel divided Uruapan into nine barrios, and eight still exist, just as he planned them. La Magdalena is the barrio I like best. Its walls are hidden by vines of the night-blooming cereus and by orchids. Its brown or cobbled ways are bordered by poinsettias and darkened by cypresses and undipped coffee trees gemmed with green and scarlet berries. Drooping bananas shade its dooryards, and I see other fruit trees of dark foliage — guavas, cherimoyas, avocados, oranges, and mulberries. On the ground, of a peaceful Saturday afternoon, sit whole families together, making firm white baskets of many shapes from the tall carrizos that grow along the river banks. La Magdalena is all aflower; whatever else these wretched huts may lack, it is never bloom.
As he restored and laid out the towns of the Sierra, Fray Miguel consecrated each one to a saint and gave to each its own peculiar industry. The people of Arantepacua made out of palm leaves those strange raincoats which are still worn here. Cocucho produced rosaries and molinillos — little chocolate-whirlers fashioned of cunningly carved wooden wheels, inlaid with bone. The other name of Parangaricutiro was Saint John of the Counterpanes! Tanaco made reatas (ropes); San Felipe, spurs; and the men of Tzacán were filarmónicos — musicians who played for hire at fiestas near and far.
And these callings stay unchanged! Many towns maintained themselves by la arriería (pack-animal driving) and by a trade whose name is racy of the place to-day; la trajinería con hatajos. Hatajos are strings of burros, or more rarely of mules or horses, and they were and are the freight trains, the post, the passenger service for women and babies, and the very emblem of Uruapan. ‘Traffic with burros’! Even now there are vast regions accessible in no other way. To Mexico it was as important as the covered wagon of our West, and without it the galleons could never have sent their cargoes inland over ranges or taken out the new country’s wealth. So we read that the Indians of Tzirosto in Fray Miguel’s day ‘supported themselves by traffic with pack animals and by practice and playing on all kinds of wind instruments’ — a satisfying combination. They do so now.
I love to say over these Tarascan names of towns. There’s Cheranhátzicurin; Pomacuarán, Quinceo, Tingambato; many a queer procession of syllables, exploding at the end. And if you can repeat Parangaricutiro, Erongarícuaro, Jarácuaro, Puacuaro, Tzentzenhuaro, and Zurumútaro very rapidly you won’t be doing much, after all, for they are plain Tarascan and pronounced just as they are spelled. And it is well to know a little Tarascan if you are riding far from Uruapan, at the end of the line. Spanish is not answered everywhere.
II
Before ever I rode away from it I wanted to be friends with the town itself. The days of autumn, winter, early spring, went by in brilliance and ended in cool fragrance as the patio shrubs were sprinkled with brooms from the fountain, and the sensitive tree, a tremulous mimosa, at six o’clock precisely shut its million leaves and slept.
I arrived from the station in one of the mule cars that provide Uruapan’s thrilling if not rapid transit. Somehow the indomitable creatures, drawling scores of passengers, scramble up the rough, ditched roads, their hoofs striking fire from the cobblestones. Baggage follows on the plataforma or flat car, and as those who come are usually returning hacendados of the rice, sugar, and lumber lands, or merchants or salesmen, it has much to bear. But nothing seems to be beyond the strength of these transitory mules.
Now I am the only woman and the only foreigner in a bowerlike hotel which offers ‘superb cooking and the most rigid morality,’ and, if you take the first, the second is obligatory. I savor the experience of being alone and never lonely, of daily sitting in my doorway in sunlight of an Indian winter that warms but does not burn, of enjoying day and night the companionship of plants. For both window and tall door give upon the flower-thronged patio, which responds to the incessant care bestowed upon it with a fresh glory of bloom and fragrance every morning. As I go to sleep in milky moonlight I can see from my pillow, above the lower blinds, cerise hibiscus flowers, ivory-white odorous magnolias — a foot across — hanging high in dark foliage, clusters of oleanders, and one perfect white rose which has lifted itself alone upon a ten-foot stem. Shadows of great palmlike plumy grasses stir upon the wall.
And in daylight I carefully tread the narrow paths leading out from the central fountain and see how the ‘mantle of San José’ has spread new petals of sheer, clear canary silk, how tuberoses and jasmine seem to enchant the butterflies no more than petunias, geraniums, and marguerites, for over these too pass waves and flurries of black and yellow wings. The tree dahlia with its double lavender blooms branches overhead, and you must look up to see Uruapan’s Madonna lilies. So much for this sun; yet the patio is no less lovely under the soft winter rain, which makes the leaves glitter and dimples the fountain.
North, south, winter, summer, mingle. Here are chrysanthemums and azaleas, crimson camellias and gladioli, and always tea roses, softly tinted and sweet as roses of old time. There are cinnamon pinks and tiny scarlet peppers, borne upon a bush; orchids, petunias, begonias, cannas, lady’s-slippers — all in a dark green background of aromatic herbs, like the cedron, of lustrous leaves and ferns. When that whispering patio stirs in the rippling breeze of dusk and the tree toads play upon their little harps in the magnolia boughs, then I feel that I have come to some imagined country of the soul. But still there is supper.
To-night I shall have pan dulce and hot chocolate, made as it was served at Montezuma’s banquets — foamy and flavored with cinnamon! For dessert we may have passion fruit, nísperos del Japón, manzanillas, or stewed cactus, or there will be something with an imposing name: dulce de tejocote, or dulce de ciruela. The first is three little haws in syrup, alone in a large saucer, looking like the golden apples of Hesperides when clustered on the tree, and, next to cup custard, the great standard dessert of all Mexico. The dulce de ciruela is prunes.
It is for the best, I suppose, that I have never had enough hot chocolate as our pretty Tarascan cook makes it. I go out into the kitchen and watch her at the rite. The big, tiled, star-shaped brasero is in full blast, — a bed of glowing charcoal in each point of the star, — and a brown clay cup with my chocolate in it stands right upon the coals. When it has boiled she takes it off and begins the whirling process. This is done as it was centuries ago, with a highly ornamented wooden whirler, and she twirls and she twirls until the cup is more than half full of brown spicy foam. I try, for it looks so easy, but nothing occurs beyond an agitation in the cup.
All the minutiæ of life are different here. They sweep with witches’ brooms made of palm leaves. Charcoal is the only fuel, and the barefoot Indian who brings it in from the mountains is somewhat terrible to look upon — bent beneath the bursting sack, bearded, and completely blackened, like a demon of the wilderness. He trots past my door in the early morning, his blackened little boy beside him, and I think how precious fire still is — how hard to keep. Charcoal burners know.
At daybreak, too, I like to hear our breakfast bread arriving at that same Indian trot. A handsome aborigine brings a day’s supply for the entire hotel in his hat — a vast hat with a little central peak that fits upon the head and rolls out into an unfathomable brim laden with pan dulce — sweet bread of many flavors and fantastic shapes — and the good crusty loaflets called pan bolillo.
I rise and close the wooden blinds to dress. ‘Hay pulque!' chants a merchant from the street, his goatskin of maguey nectar swung over his shoulder. Some butterflies have flown in, and alight upon the typewriter. Miguel, the waiter, makes a statement through a crack: ‘They have brought cherimoyas from Tingambato, señorita.’ Now Tingambato is a cherimoya capital, so I hurry, and there they are, my favorite fruit, looking like objects of rough, dark green pottery, and disclosing flowerfragrant, snow-white flesh, starred with dark seeds — utterly delicious!
Then sometimes I have a mamey. We passed a tree of them along the road, and Don Carlos said, ‘My friend has a fortune in that one tree alone. It bears three thousand mameys a year — an orchard in itself!’
Some of the finest coffee in the world — the caracolillo — is grown in the huertas of Uruapan. We roast our own, here in the hotel, and I sniff with delight every third afternoon when Vicente, the watchman, crouching on the stones of the back patio, slowly turns the charcoal-heated roasting cylinder.
This whole high, tiled room is washed every day by Primitivo, the able Tarascan who is an artist sometimes, sometimes a teacher or a scholar, but whose work is as the work of ten, done at a tireless trot. He will brush the rug, which is the undressed skin of a bull calf; he will bring drinking water from the well; and for a last touch he will arrange ‘the bouquet,’ without which no day is well begun.
Primitivo in a month has never repeated a design for the bouquet and rarely uses the same flowers twice. To-day I may be honored with two dozen queenly calla lilies. Yesterday it was marguerites with one wide dark rose. For a holiday came seven kinds of tea roses with ferns and geraniums, and there have been wild marigolds and pink cosmos, brought in from the fields around Uruapan. You should see my cream-colored dahlias with a crimson camellia, my pitchers of hibiscus bloom, oleanders arranged with palm leaves, moonlike magnolias, as refreshing to smell as newly cut limes. Once there was a broad bowl of moss whence sprang heliotrope and tiny pinks. And Primitivo’s white masterpiece is made of pale geraniums, roses, azaleas, oleanders, magnolias, lilies, and marguerites, mingled with ferns. He conceived it while mopping.
III
On Sunday evenings, says Primitivo, there is mucho movimiento in the plaza, and there is. A new general has come, with a splendid brass band, and while it plays near the priestless church you may watch hour after hour the traditional promenade of mediæval Spanish times. Around the little flowery and fountained park curves a walk, trodden steadily and lightly by the beauty, chivalry, posterity, villainy, and chaperonage of Uruapan. The girls, women, and staid married couples walk on the inside, clockwise; the men and boys without, counterclockwise. Glances from the outer circle intersect the inner, but the ladies ignore them. One would suppose that they had put on those carmine lips, those combs and rebozos and high heels, merely in order to take the air. The more they are looked at, the less do their gazes waver from the coiffures of sprightly promenaders in front of them.
Young cavaliers still park their coursers and sing at barred windows in Uruapan. Flirting still knows finesse. Even more charming, youth’s idea of diversion is to take guitars and harps and sing in groups on street corners in the night, especially by moonlight. They call it ‘drawing out a cock,’ sacar un gallo, and the gallos of Uruapan are melodious, prolonged, and late. It seems like a very pleasing way of carrying on.
The plaza at the centre of the circles is dim and inviting, with designs in tiny border plants commemorating martyrs to patriotism. There are white and purple iris, acanthus, ferns, and violets. But none but me turns out to walk there. A sign among the roses says, ‘It is forbidden to violate in this garden the Commandments.’
There is an easy, unaffected, and very winning democracy about it all. The barefoot and the shod step together. Every kind of trouser is represented, from the peon’s white cotton pajama to the college cut. The Indian matrons wear modest, long, full skirts, while paler misses affect Paris, but not extremely. A few gentlemen, scarcely prosperous, retain the dramatic black Spanish cloak. There are a great many white teeth and long dark braids. The decorum among the ladies is impressive.
Mucho movimiento! The sellers of sweetmeats, fruits, and gay cakes in the portales are doing well. Nothing is wrapped up. If you want peanuts you carry them home in your hat or handkerchief. But when you can purchase a pile for half a cent, and four newly picked oranges for five cents, you scarcely expect string and paper too.
Along the portales you progress from specialty to specialty. This is the cloth bazaar, and fabrics dyed in high colors are stretched upon the stones, lighted by flares. Gorgeous neckerchiefs and sarapes flutter in clusters. Here are the ambulant restaurants, where expert Indian cooks, squatting on the cobbles with stone metates and griddles, toss tortillas, while others make chalupas and malotes out of bits of meat or potatoes rolled in corn cakes. Busily they mix their fearful hot sauces and fan their braseros with palm-leaf fans.
Fare for all tastes! Sugar cane is stacked in little cords, and children gnaw it joyously. There is a puesto of cheeses and of bananas no bigger than your finger and rarely sweet. Great piles of oranges glow in taper light. Here are green coconuts from the inland hot country, — though coco palms are expected to love the sea, — broad wooden bowls of honey, and ears of maize roasted over charcoal. On this curbstone you may buy naranjalimas, the insipid offspring of an orange and a lime, as well as legitimate limes, small and pungent or huge and sweet. Does your mocking bird lack pepper berries? Here nod coral plumes of them. Do the children want some jícamas? (They usually do.) You may find this turnipy-looking, cool-tasting vegetable in quantities, already scrubbed and peeled, while chayotes in their prickly coats — son buenos para el estómago — are for sale both cooked and raw. Papayas, too, are beneficent with pepsin, and I find granadillas, or passion fruit, tomatoes, and tiny jitomates, with enough kinds of zapotes in season to drive a gourmet mad, particularly if he should begin with the chico-zapote, whose grainy flesh tastes delicately of maple, or with the ‘dark one,’the zapote prieto, which, broken, looks like the inside of an unripe puffball or some other product of forest decay, but whose black pulp, beaten up with cream and a dash of cognac, makes a divine dessert.
All such things you must know, to appreciate life in Uruapan. Otherwise you are likely to waste your days in seeking angrily for imported fare which cannot match delicacies which the hot lands offer to the open-minded intruder.
Chiles! Who dreamed there were so many peppers in the world? Gorgeouscolored, gemlike in the torchlight, they hang in festoons or are spread for the thoughtful choice of those who know. For in nothing else is a Mexican cook’s art so tested as in her selection and use of peppers. There are more than a score of distinctly different kinds in the market place of Uruapan, and some are cheap, while some cost more than a dollar a pound. These chile aristocrats are bought only for making the festive and ceremonial gravy, mole (for wild turkey fricassee), one of Mexico’s major contributions to cookery. If the ground peppers are n’t blended to the finest nuance the mole will ‘result’ unworthy and perhaps ruin a wedding feast. No foreign tender-tongue could keep the honor of the Mexican chile.
The Uruapan cobblers, who have almost a whole portale for their trade, are selling briskly to-night. Theirs is all handwork. Not the simplest machine aids them as they sit on the curb and add to the ranks of strangely shaped footwear that is built to withstand these punishing roads. Some sandals turn up at the toe in an Oriental way. Many are woven of fine leather thongs.
Whoever knows the native handicrafts of America has heard of the famous Tarascan lacas, whose lustre, fine designs, and pure lasting colors were the despair of all who sought to copy them, and which gave the state of Michoacán a high position in the world of Indian art. As Oaxaca is renowned for silver filigree, Saltillo for sarapes, and San Pedro Tlaquepaque for ceramics, so Uruapan is the metropolis of the painted gourds.
How do they make them? Books have been written about the craft. The Germans, in particular, were annoyed until they discovered that the secret of the lustre was largely what New England knows as ‘elbow grease,’ for the Tarascan artisan polishes his lacas with the inside of the wrist. Once earth colors only were used, but now, alas, the Indians find it simpler to import their paints, which of course are not so good as those of antiquity. The lymph of a plant louse is still used as a drying agent; the finest gourds still grow on Mount Tancítaro; the most brilliant products of the art are still for sale on the sidewalks of Uruapan on Sunday nights.
Primitivo is anxious to have me appreciate the lacas with understanding. He takes me on Monday to a ‘studio’ where men are carving designs into the clay, and women with agile thumbs are filling them in with color. Plants with leaves six feet long — cárdmicuas — stand about in tubs; a resplendent macaw disapproves of us; a gigantic pig, pampered for profit, grunts in dream as we step around him.
‘These are the old colors.’ Primitivo points to peculiar yellows, pinks, and greens in a specimen standing on a shelf. ‘These’ — he includes the work of the toiling artists with a wave of his arm — ‘are new, from Germany. A pity. This vine design, señorita, is two hundred years old; this one they took from a new ribbon from Paris.’
The Tarascans laugh gently because I cannot call the names of the shapes of the lacas of Uruapan. How strange to be a foreigner and have no knowledge of such ancient, essential things! A gourd with a little lid to it is, of course, a tecomate. A half gourd, which makes a bowl, is a jícara. The broad, flat tip of an enormous calabash,— who would thiiik that gourds grew so big? —used for a tray, is a batea. Little gourds with the seeds left inside to make a rattle are guajes. And all of them glow, when finished, with wild hues and a burnish like that of a general’s boots.
IV
At holiday times the plaza is exciting and exotic. One store lias tried to fix up a Christmas window in a stylish Northern manner, and there a little cypress tree is hung with tiny bottles of inflaming tequila and with boxes of foreign candy, while in the corners of the case great orchids have been strewn with artificial snow. Among the sweets for sale on the sidewalk appear whole clouds of what looks like pink cotton. I thought it was, till I saw the Indian babies cry for and eat it. Spun sugar!
The fruit women, between sales, busily make piñatas, which will rain favors when hung in the centre of the room and broken by a blindfolded guest at a Christmas party. The shapes are delightful, — a white Pierrot, a monster green parrot, a Spanish cavalier, a swan, a horn of plenty,— all fashioned out of tissue paper by dark, hard-working fingers.
It’s not Christmas without a pinata in the home, but, though I had none myself, I enjoyed the day, for I took two little Indians to the béisbol. Baseball is pure pleasure in Uruapan — not a crudely emotional affair. The blue winter sky was darkening when we reached the seventh inning, and three señora cows, let out to pasture, walked sedately across the diamond. The players waited for them. At other tense moments of the game the military band from Morelia would take it into its chic head to play a bit, and all the spectators then turned away from the battling nines and gave their attention to the bandmaster. Pink button roses like those in Victorian bonnets bloomed in the hedges; fascinating horsemen rode past the field.
‘Emilio,’ I ask, as we suck our paletas, ‘do you play too?’
‘Señorita, yes — more or less. Pero no me preocupo mucho.’ He does not preoccupy himself with baseball. lie is twelve. But never think of Emilio as solemn. He is a dark Tarascan elf with a glittering grin.
‘Did you go horseback when you accompanied the new gentleman to the falls of Tzaráracua?’ It is a grilling hike of five brown miles.
‘Yes, señorita. He wished it. But I would rather go anywhere on foot, because then I can dance all the way, and play as I go.’ He dances naturally, like a pixie. He dances on errands.
And polite!
‘Emilio.’
‘Command, señorita.’
‘Is the duck which you recently adopted in good health?’
‘A thousand thanks, senorita. The duck is as usual.’
I like to shop in Uruapan, but I cannot unless I remember to be accompanied by Emilio. For without causing a social cataclysm I could not carry anything myself. A small purse — possibly. A hand bag — no! Before I knew this I bought a machete for a Northern woodland relative and took it back to the hotel by hand. Citizens suspended operations. Tote your own peanuts and your caste is gone. Not that you mind, but it offends Tarascan decorum. It’s like crudely insisting upon keeping to the right, when they wish to honor you by giving you the inside of the walk.
So when I go to town to take a bath Emilio bears my comb, and at the Baths of the Jasmine another attendant will carefully put a pink egg of soap into the bird’s nest of excelsior which is the local wash cloth. Sometimes the responsibility of being the señorita americana becomes appalling.
En route to the tub we pass stores called The French Post, The Two Worlds, The Sandbar of Tampico, and The Port of Liverpool and other ports. But best I like the harness shop and its perfect name — El Potro Abajeño: The Colt from the Coast. The globular proprietor came up from a Pacific town when a boy, and now he has a trio of Indian apprentices, — dark youths with artful fingers, — and they embroider cartridge belts and holsters and machete holders and make huge saddles and shining bridles all day long. You think such a glitter must mean a jewelry shop! Horses’ headdresses stitched in silver thread; stirrups like a sultan’s shoes!
The ranchcros of Mexico take great pride in all their accoutrements, especially (since these form a part of their regular dress) in cartridge belts which are filled with highly burnished cartridges, too bright to use in any common argument. At Uruapan belts, holsters, and many bridles and saddles are adorned with cunning embroidery in thread called pita de Oaxaca, made from a certain maguey fibre rolled between thumb and finger, glossy and creamy-white. The Colt from the Coast offers beautiful equine embroideries.
Partly because of their clothes, the arrival of a party of ranchcros for breakfast at the hotel is a treat. There is a great clatter of hoofs on the cobbles at the door. The mozos lead away the steeds, and the cavaliers from the hot lands enter, spurred, booted, scarlet-kerchicfed, sable of moustache and flashing-toothed. They lay aside their broad gray hats, but not their weapons. The ceintures of polished cartridges catch the morning light as they sit down and order a breakfast fit for a horseman who has ridden since two in the morning to avoid the sun — beans, wine, coffee, and several meats. For in this equestrian region man almost lives by meat alone.
Yes, they are choice to look at. One day as we were riding far off in the mountains, Don Carlos reined in The Dream upon a ridge and gestured toward a dark, wooded valley with his whip. ‘The bandit town is down there. They have a tradition of kidnapping only the most beautiful women. Perfectly natural selection.’ Since that time I have put extra powder into my vanity case every day when riding in that direction, but ah, there’s been no occasion to use it.
Many of the bandits around here are very amiable — ‘Yesterday were run off the horses of Don Jesús,’ you overhear at supper, or ‘They were at this place two weeks ago’ is whispered in a village where you pause to get your bearings. Don Carlos sometimes engages one to be his mozo when he is making a long trip to a hacienda in the hot lands.
All Michoacán is still very horsy — muy de á caballo! Not so long ago this was the correct form for letters of introduction to someone dwelling in the Uruapan region: ‘Permit me to present the Señor don Fulano de Tal, muy honrado y muy de á caballo’ (much respected and a splendid horseman).
It is a fine phrase. Don Carlos leans over and extracts a garrapata (tick) from Robespierra’s ear. ‘How—when I could n’t?’ ‘Muy,’ he says modestly, ‘de á caballo.'' And I vow that ere I quit Uruapan I will be muy de ád caballo myself.
But I meant to tell about the huertas!
A huerta is the nearest thing to Eden now left on earth. It is a garden, an orchard, a pleasaunce, a bower, a plantation, an Elysian field, and a truck farm. There are many in Uruapan, the source of all those fruits and vegetables for sale in the portales, but of them three, as Emilio says, are the más elegantes.
And of the three fair and seignorial huertas of Uruapan my favorite is La Camelina.
It blooms in deep silence, even as the Garden before the curse of labor was laid on man. A grave Tarascan unbars the tall roofed gate and receives your permiso, and along paths bordered by a thousand tea roses, soft yellow, ivory, and salmon pink, you slowly go, unnoted, breathing that clear, shimmering, fragrant air. Often a guava falls, its pale skin crimson-mottled. The citron is in blossom, and it is a delicate pleasure to distinguish this perfume from that of the lime and lemon and the orange and grapefruit blooms, no less waxen. Here on coffee trees shine the pretty white flowers along with the berries, red and green, and I eat the pulp and wonder who first thought to roast and brew the seed.
A fine magenta bougainvillæa climbs toward the sunlight out of all this shade and gives the huerta its name, for Tarascans call this shrub the camelina. You find still other paths, and now through the blissful stillness sounds the exultant speech of water. The Cupatitzio, born under a rock in the dark jungle above, nourishes all the huertas and has energy left to provide Uruapan with electric light and a sawmill. Three streams arc drawn off from the river, and yet if leaps along in spangles.
I stand in a mirador and look out with unutterable contentment upon this paradise of ferns and waterfalls, fruit and roses, blessed by such a winter sun. A brook flows at my feet, and it is just as a brook should be, brimful, cool, clear green, mirroring lavender wild tobacco flowers and scarlet spurge, and overarched by ferns in six-foot filigree. I see the pebbles far under — no fishes live in the waters of the Cupatitzio.
Down the steep hillside on the far side of the river white scarfs and banners of thin-spun water stream. It is clothed solely in a lacework of water and great fern fronds, hanging like green waterfalls themselves. The long leaves of the banana plants droop unfrayed and luminous in the sunlight here. The glossy dark foliage glitters on guava, coffee, and aguacate trees. Granadillas hang heavy from the passion vine. Sweet single violets, such as I never saw except in water colors, gather in the shadows, and I come upon a fruit that I never even heard of and whose Tarascan name I cannot spell; it looks like a cluster of hard bananas, scarcely out of the bud and fairy size.
Roses and pines to breathe, water to hear, sun to feel, ripe guavas scattered. La Camelina is paradise, and beyond the gate, as I pass through at twilight, I encounter the devil’s sport of a cockfight. The poor birds are cutting one another to pieces with the little swords fastened to their spurs. Rescue, though it be but temporary, is worth a peso or two, and it can be arranged.
V
Days go by in a Uruapan huerta, and sometimes you remember how a dim antiquity harbored subways and alarm clocks, but it matters little enough. They cannot pass these sheltering mountains.
If I dream through an afternoon in La Camelina, at morning I walk in the Huerta Hurtado. That’s where the poinsettias live.
Passing down the street, you are startled to look through a poor and dingy dwelling and see in the small courtyard on the other side a glow of scarlet — a tall poinsettia shrub hung with bracts like the incredible flowers embroidered at the centre of a Spanish shawl. They call this the rosa del pastor in Uruapan (the shepherd’s rose), or sometimes the Christmas Eve flower, because it reaches its full glory at that time.
But in the Iluerta Hurtado this flame of the poinsettia becomes a conflagration, the more gorgeous because some have yellow bracts. Poinsettias grow in avenues here; they rise above your head. With great white datura ‘wedding bells’ they arc reflected from the lake waters, while at its margins bend calla lilies and mimosas, and in the midst rises an island of dripping pink patience plants. Ducks in handsome livery swim around it. If La Camelina is dream, the Huerta Hurtado is joyous life.
We come to a shadowy cedar bower, and within there is debris of fruits. ‘Niña,’ complains the old huertero, ‘ the bats gather guavas and bring them here every night to eat while they hang upside down.’
I gasp at the barbarous splendor of the colorines, the trees almost leafless now, and somehow infernal-looking, with their peeling reddish bark and bare boughs set with that strange vermilion inflorescence, like marine forms. Crotons of maroon and violet foliage border the beds of azaleas and yellow marguerites. Orchids nest among high branches, and jasmine rides every breeze. Little fluttering rills slip past. The evergreens wear fantastic shapes of birds, baskets, and fountains, and the castor plants here are as big as forest trees.
Across a deep glade crowded with shining-leaved bananas I see the sweet, wooded Uruapan hills and then distant peaks, cutting a sky so blue that it looks like flowers when it shows in little snippets through an arbor. I have friends who have lived in Mexico forty years and never heard of these huertas. I feel jealous now; I would keep this place a secret.
And off there to the south lies a whole unknown empire — the rich hot country of Michoacán. Ride but twentyfive miles out of Uruapan and you see the sunlit Tierra Caliente spread below you like another world. I have not been so stirred, I think, by any of earth’s sights which I have looked upon.
We set forth in starlight, passing through the Glen of the Goats, and reached the Slope of the Creature with One Ear Turned Down (La Cuesta del Gacho) in the fresh forenoon. Dismounting, we sat upon a boulder, and I tried to place and name the storied haciendas and the villages that lay within the enormous valley at our feet.
It is almost another day’s ride to Nueva Italia, the domain of the Cusis, the rice kings of Mexico, where old Don Dante reigned among his peons, an absolute monarch, for so many years. Theirs, too, is Lombardía, with all its ranches — Charapendo, La Gallina, Los Jasmines. The Cupatitzio, which becomes the Marqués, winds among these fertile, vast hectares to join the Río Grande dc Tepalcatepec and flow into the mighty Balsas, and so into the Pacific at last. The Balsas, to the left of us, divides Michoacan from Guerrero State, whose hills of Inguarán we can see. Yonder rise the twin peaks of the Condémbaro Mountains, and even a new eye can make out the pueblos of Los Buncos, Parácuaro, Apatzingan — all without access to any railroad. To the right — sometimes you can see it faintly — rises the great volcano of Colima. Behind us the long and almost indistinguishable way leads back through the forests to Uruapan. Before, far off, is the ocean. We arc gazing out from the Sierra de Uruapan to the stupendous system of peaks and ranges called the Sierra Madre del Sur.
‘How much country do you suppose you see now?’ demands Don Carlos, with narrow eyes upon the distant rice lands. He figures for a moment. ‘At least — I should say — 1728 square leagues. About twenty-eight haciendas. Quite a golpe dc vista!' There is Uruapano pride in his voice.
In level, tillable land alone the haciendas of Nueva Italia and Lombardía comprise more than seventytwo thousand acres, so Don Eugenio Cusi, one of the present owners, told me. In all they are much vaster, but he pointed out that some haciendas here attain to one hundred and fifty thousand acres. And the expenses arc Gargantuan, too. The Cusis often spend twelve thousand pesos a year merely for chasing ducks and other birds out of the rice. The ducks swim in the irrigating ditches and feed heavily in darkness.
‘When I first went to Nueva Italia,’ Don Eugenio chuckled, ‘I was puzzled to find so many expense items for pateando de noche (kicking the covers off in the night), till I found that dowm here it means hunting ducks by night. Other robbers come to our rice in flocks that darken the sun — small blackbirds, thrushes, and turtledoves.’
The Cusis in the busy season employ some five thousand peons, and Don Eugenio says that the average wage at Nueva Italia is eighteen pesos — about nine dollars — a week.
‘But some of them own as many as fifty cows. They “borrow” the rice from us and fatten their pigs. They have horses and chickens, too. Each one has his house, and he may use as much land as he needs.’
A mediæval domain. The Cusis maintain two schools for their peons’ children. They employ a doctor and furnish medicines and give a sick allowance.
‘We keep only a few hundred burros ourselves because we employ arrieros with their hatajos de mulas to transport our crops up to Uruapan.’ This trip takes a loaded burro three days.
The Cusi haciendas produce, conservatively, fifty thousand cargas of rice a year, a cargo, weighing six hundred pounds and being worth about thirty pesos. Other crops raised abundantly are sesame (ajonjolí), cascalote or dividivi pods for tanning, cacao, and coffee. Fruits include lemons, oranges, grapefruit, mangoes, coconuts, the chico-zapote, avocado, and melons. Still more important are sugar cane, maize, and beans, while cattle rank with rice.
But, concerning the numbers of their multitudinous cattle, the Cusis are reticent. ‘Thousands and thousands?’ I ask. ‘And thousands,’ adds Don Eugenio. The cheese produced alone pays all of the expenses of keeping the cows. The calves get the other half of their milk. The Cusi cowboys are expert with the rope. They work in groups of two to eight under an officer called a caporal. Other hacienda officials arc the superintendent, or mayordomo, and his staff, including bookkeepers.
‘The people of that country are very clean and very independent,’ says Don Eugenio. ‘Soldiers never succeed in bossing them. They are great shots and unconquerable fighters. And they have civilized beds — not straw mats such as most peons use — with embroidered counterpanes!’
It is through this region that ‘the interests’ want to build a railroad. The hacendados, the state of Michoacan, and the Mexican Government are planning to divide the expense, and many thousands of pesos have been subscribed for the project. The engineers count on transporting eight thousand tons of sugar yearly to the coast from these valleys of Taretán, Nueva Italia and Lombardía, and Apatzingan. There will also be the yield of the great lemon orchards and dairy farms, with some other fruits and maize, but first of all there will be those Cusi tons of rice. From Uruapan to the harbor of Zihuatanejo is about three hundred kilometres, all through Tierra Caliente, still unopened and rich as paradise.
As I lay on the boulder under the pine trees and looked out upon it from the Slope of the Creature with One Ear Turned Down, the burro caravans, climbing up the trail to Uruapan or returning to the haciendas, passed and repassed in a strange silence. One scarcely heard their sure small hoofs. ‘Burro!’ shouts the arricro, and they go faster for a minute. ‘Míralol’ lie sings out in a reproachful baritone at one lagging. ‘Just look at him!’ — and the embarrassed little burden bearer returns to the line.
Rice! Panniers of rice! All day, all night they carry it, the drivers camping at dusk in the forest. Only a few animals are loaded with cheese or fruits. They return with barbed wire, stone mortars for maize, coffee, pulque, flour, mats. There goes a woman holding a nursing baby as she calmly sits her tiny burro while he slides down the ravine.
We must turn out every little while for the caravans as we ride home. We have met hundreds of burros, in strings of from three to forty, winding up the gullies, keeping to very ancient roads that to me are utterly invisible. I never knew what burros meant before. I think how down in the hot lands the unkind jaguar goes free, with never a lash, a burden, or a sore back, while these lovely creatures, so gentle, patient, faithful, and small, bear everything.
We rode slowly through the afternoon under branches hung with orchids, and we saw a woman in a scarlet skirt, her black braids swaying, kneeling as she washed clothes in a forest stream. We met three dark, barefoot harpers coming over the hills. They were bound to play for the posadas at haciendas far away. I never thought that I should see such things. Where else might you chance to meet three harpers in the hills?