Say ail revoir But not good-bye This parting brings A bitter sigli. . . .
It really does, when you find yourself in an unkempt Pullman trailing through endless deserts, south o£ El Paso, fed on doubtful scraps at enormous charge and at the will of a rather shoddy smallpox-marked Mexican Pullman-boy who knows there’s been a revolution and that his end is up. Then you remember the neat and nice nigger who looked after you as far as El Paso, before you crossed the Rio Grande into desert and chaos, and you sigh, if you have time before a curse chokes you.
Yet, U. S. A., you do put a strain on the nerves. Mexico puts a strain on the temper. Choose which you prefer. Mine’s the latter. I’d rather be in a temper than be pulled taut. Which is what the U. S. A. did to me. Tight as a fiddle string, tense over the bridge of the solar plexus. Anyhow the solar plexus goes a bit loose and has a bit of play down here.
I still don’t know why the U. S. A. pulls one so tight and makes one feel like a chicken that is being drawn. The people on the whole are quite as amenable as people anywhere else. They don’t pick your pocket, or even your personality. They’re not unfriendly. It’s not the people. Something in the air tightens one’s nerves like fiddle strings, screws them up, squeak-squeak! . . . till one’s nerves will give out nothing but a shrill fine shriek of overwroughtness. Why, in the name of heaven? Nobody knows. It’s just the spirit of place.
You cross the Rio Grande and change from tension into exasperation. You feel like hitting the impudent Pullman waiter with a beer- bottle. In the U. S. A. you don’t even think of such a thing.
Of course, one might get used to a state of tension. And then one would pine for the United States. Meanwhile one merely snarls back at the dragons of San Juan Teotihuacan.
It’s a queer continent — as much as I’ve seen of it. It’s a fanged continent. It’s got a rattlesnake coiled in its heart, has this democracy of the New World. It’s a dangerous animal, once it lifts its head again. Meanwhile, the dove still nests in the coils of the rattle-snake, the stone coiled rattlesnake of Aztec eternity. The dove lavs her eggs on his flat head.
The old people had a marvellous feeling for snakes and fangs, down here in Mexico. And after all, Mexico is only the sort of solar plexus of North America. The great paleface overlay hasn’t gone into the soil half an inch. The Spanish churches and palaces stagger, the most rickety things imaginable, always just on the point of falling down. And the peon still grins his Indian grin behind the Cross. And there’s quite a lively light in his eyes, much more so than in the eyes of the northern Indian. He knows his gods.
These old civilizations down here, they never got any higher than Quetzalcoatl. And he’s just a sort of feathered snake. Who needed the smoke of a little heart’s-blood now and then, even he.
“Only the ugly is aesthetic now,” said the young Mexican artist. Personally, he seems as gentle and self-effacing as the nicest of lambs. Yet his caricatures are hideous, hideous without mirth or whimsicality. Blood-hideous. Grim, earnest hideousness.
Like the Aztec things, the Aztec carvings. They all twist and bite. That’s all they do. Twist and writhe and bite, or crouch in lumps. And coiled rattlesnakes, many, like dark heaps of excrement. And out at San Juan Teotihuacan where are the great pyramids of a vanished, pre-Aztec people, as we are told — and the so-called Temple of Quetzalcoatl — there, behold you, huge gnashing heads jut out jagged from the wall-face of the low pyramid, and a huge snake stretches along the base, and one grasps at a carved fish, that swims in old stone and for once seems harmless. Actually a harmless fish!
But look out! The great stone heads snarl at you from the wall, trying to bite you: and one great dark, green blob of an obsidian eye, you never saw anything so blindly malevolent: and then white fangs. Great white fangs, smooth today, the white fangs, with tiny cracks in them. Enamelled. These bygone pyramid-building Americans, who were a dead-and-gone mystery even to the Aztecs, when the Spaniards arrived, they applied their highest art to the enamelling of the great fangs of these venomous stone heads, and there is the enamel today, white and smooth. You can stroke the great fang with your finger and see. And the blob of an obsidian eye looks down at you.
It’s a queer continent. The anthropologists may make what pretti- ness they like out of myths. But come here, and you’ll see that the gods bit. There is none of the phallic preoccupation of the old Mediterranean. Here they hadn’t got even as far as hot-blooded sex.
Fangs, and cold serpent folds, and bird-snakes with fierce cold blood and claws.
I admit that I feel bewildered. There is always something a bit amiably comic about Chinese dragons and contortions. There’s nothing amiably comic in these ancient monsters. They’re dead in earnest about biting and writhing, snake-blooded birds.
And the Spanish white superimposition, with rococo church- towers among pepper-trees and column cactuses, seems so rickety and temporary, the pyramids seem so indigenous, rising like hills out of the earth itself. The one goes down with a clatter, the other remains.
And this is what seems to me the difference between Mexico and the United States. And this is why, it seems to me, Mexico exasperates, whereas the U. S. A. puts an unbearable tension on one. Because here in Mexico the fangs are still obvious. Everybody knows the gods are going to bite within the next five minutes. While in the United States, the gods have had their teeth pulled, and their claws cut, and their tails docked, till they seem real mild lambs. Yet all the time, inside, it’s the same old dragon’s blood. The same old American dragon’s blood.
And that discrepancy of course is a strain on the human psyche.