My home’s in Mexico, That’s where you want to go. Life’s one long cine show. . . .
As a matter of fact, I am a hard-worked, lean individual poked in the corner of a would-be important building in Mexico D. F.
That’s that.
I am — married, so this is not a matrimonial ad. But I am, as I said, lean, pale, hard-worked, with indiscriminate fair hair and, I hope, nice blue eyes. Anyhow they aren’t black. And I am young. And I am Mexican: oh, don’t doubt it for a second. Mejicano soy. La-la-la-la! I’ll jabber your head off in Spanish. But where is my gun and red sash?
Ay de mi! That’s how one sighs in Spanish. I am sighing because I am Mexican, for who would be a Mexican? Where would he be if he was one? I am an official — without doubt important, since every four-farthing sparrow, etc. And being an important official, I am always having to receive people. Receive. Deceive. Believe. Rather, they’re not usually people. They’re almost always commissions.
“Please to meet you, Mister,” they say. “Not American, are you?”
I seize my chin in trepidation. “Good God! Am I?” There is a Monroe doctrine, and there is a continent, or two continents. Am I American? by any chance?
“Pardon me one moment!” I say, with true Mexican courtesy.
And I dash upstairs to the top floor — the fourth — no elevators — to my little corner office that looks out over the flat roofs and bubbly church-domes and streaks of wire of Mexico D. F. I rush to the window, I look out, and ah! — Yes! Que tal? Amigo! How lucky you’re there! Say, boy, will you tell me whether you’re American or not? Because if you are, I am.
This interesting announcement is addressed to my old friend Popo, who is lounging his heavy shoulders under the sky, smoking a cigarette end, a la Mexicaine. Further, since I’m paid to give information, Popo is the imperturbable volcano, known at length as Popocatepetl, with the accent on the tay, so I beg you not to put it on the cat, who is usually loitering in the vicinity of Mexico D. F.
No, I shan’t tell you what the D. F. is: or who it is. Take it for yourself if you like. I never come pulling the tail of your D. C. — Washington.
Popo gives another puff to his eternal cigarette, and replies, as every Mexican should:
“Quien sabe?”
“Who knows? — Ask me another, boy!”
Ca!~as a matter of fact, we don’t say Caramba! very much. But I’ll say it to please. I say it. I tear my hair. I dash downstairs to the Committee, or rather Commission, which is waiting with bated breath (mint) to know whether I’m American or not. I smile ingratiatingly.
“Do pardon me for the interruption, gentlemen. (One of them is usually a lady, but she’s best interpreted by gentlemen.) You ask me, am I American? — Quien sabe?”
“Then you’re not.”
“Am I not, gentlemen? Ay de mi!”
“Ever been in America?”
Good God! Again? Ah, my chin, let me seize thee!
Once more I flee upstairs and poke myself out of that window and say Oiga! Viejo! Oiga is a very important word. And I am in the Bureau of Information.
“Oiga! Viejo! Are you in America?”
“Quien sabe?” He bumps the other white shoulder at me. Snow!
“Oh, gentlemen!” I pant. “Quien sabe?”
“Then you haven’t.”
“But I’ve been to New York.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“Have I been to America?”
“Hey! Who’s running this Information Bureau?”
“I am. Let me run it.”
So I dart upstairs again, and address myself to Popo.
“Popo! I have been to America, via New York, and you haven’t.”
Down I dart, to my Commission. On the way I remember how everything — I mean the loud walls — in New York, said SEE AMERICA FIRST. Thank God! I say to myself, wiping my wet face before entering to the Commission: On American evidence, I’ve seen him, her, or it. But whether en todo or en parte, quien sabe?
I open the door, and I give a supercilious sniff. Such are my American manners.
I am just smelling my Commission. — As usual! I say to myself, snobbishly: Oil!
There are all sorts and sizes of commissions, every sort and size and condition of commission. But oil predominates. Usually, I can smell oil down the telephone.
There are others — Railway Commissions, Mines Commissions, American Women’s Christian Missions, American Bankers’ Missions, American Bootleggers’ Missions, American Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Mormon, and Jewish Missions, American Tramps’ Missions . . .
I, however, in my little office, am Mohammed. If you would like to see Mexico summed up into one unique figure, see me, a la Mohammed, in my little office, saying: Let these mountains come to me.
And they come. They come in whole ranges, in sierras, in cordil- leras. I smell oil, and I see the backbone of America walking up the stair-case (no elevator). I hear the chink of silver, and behold the entire Sierra Madre marching me-wards. Ask me if [sic] leave Mohammed with cold feet! Oh, I am muy Mejicano, I am!
I feel I am SEEING AMERICA FIRST, and they are seeing Mexico after. I feel myself getting starrier and stripyer every day, I see such a lot of America first.
But what happens to them, when they see Mexico after?
Quien sabe!
I am always murmuring: You see, Mexico and America are not in the same boat.
I want to add: They’re not even floating on the same ocean. I doubt if they’re gyrating in the same cosmos.
But superlatives are not well-mannered.
Still, it is hard on a young man like me to be merely Mexican, when my father, merely by moving up the map a little while he was still strong and lusty, might have left me hundred-per-cent American. I’m sure I should have been plus.
It is hard on me, I say. As it is hard on Popo. He might have been Mount Brown or Mount Abraham. How can any mountain, when you come to think of it, be Popocatepetl? — and iay-petl at that!
There, there! let me soothe myself.
In fact, I am always a little sorry for the Americans who come seeing Mexico after. “I am left such a long way behind!” as the burro said when he fell down an abandoned mine.
Still, the commissioners and missioners often stay quite brisk. They really do wonders. They put up chimneys and they make all sorts of wheels go round. The Mexicans are simply enraptured. But after a while, being nothing but naughty boys and greasers, they are pining to put their spokes in those wheels. Mischief, I tell you. Brummmm! go the spokes! And the wheels pause to wonder, while the bits fly. That’s fun!
Other gentlemen who are very sharp-eyed, seeing Mexico after, are the political see-ers. America is too hot for them, as a rule, so they move into cool, cool Mexico. They are some boys, they are! At least, so they tell me. And they belong to weird things that only exist as initials, such I.W.W.’s and A.F.L.’s and P.J.P.’s. Give me a job, say these gentlemen, and I’ll take the rest.
Why certainly, what could be more accommodating! Whereupon instantly, these gentlemen acquire the gift of Spanish, with an almost Pentecostal suddenness; they pat you on the shoulder and tell you sulphureous Mexican stories which certainly you would never have heard but for them. Oh, hot stuff! Hot dog! They even cry aloud Perro caliente! — and the walls of the city quake.
Moreover they proceed to organize our labour, after having so firmly insisted that we haven’t any. But we produce some, for their sakes. And they proceed to organize it: without music. And in throes of self-esteem they cry: Ah, Mexico’s the place. America can’t touch it! God bless Mexico!
Whereupon all the Mexicans present burst into tears.
You want no darn gringoes and gringo capital down here! they say.
We cross ourselves rapidly! Absit omen.
But alas, these thrilling gentlemen always leave us. They return with luggage, having come without, to AMERICA.
Well, adios! eh, boy? Come up there one day. Show you something.
Tears; the train moves out.
No, I am Mexican. I might as well be Jonah in the whale’s belly, so perfectly, so mysteriously am I nowhere.
But they come. They come as tourists, for example, looking round the whale’s interior.
“My wife’s a college graduate,” says the he-man.
She looks it. And she may thank her lucky stars — Rudolph Valentino is the first-magnitude — she will go on looking it all her days.
Ah, the first time she felt Rudolfino’s Italianino-Argentino-swoon- between-o kisses! On the screen, of course — Ah, that first time!
On the back porch, afterwards: Bill, I’m so tired of clean, hygienic kisses.
Poor Bill spits away his still-good, five-cent, mint-covered Wrigley’s chewing-gum gag, and with it, the last straw he had to cling to.
Now, aged thirty-four, and never quite a Valentino, he’s brought her to see Mexico after — she’d seen Ramon Novarro’s face, with the skin-you-love-to-touch. On the screen, of course.
Bill has brought her south. She has crossed the border with Bill. Ah, her eyes at the Pullman window! Where is the skin I would love to touch? they cry. And a dirty Indian pushes his black face and glaring eyes towards her, offering to sell her enchiladas.
It is no use my being sorry for her. Bill is better-looking than I am. So she re-falls in love with Bill; the dark-eyed flour-faced creatures make such eyes at him, down here. Call them women! Downtrodden things!
The escaped husband is another one. He drinks, swears, looks at all the women meaningly over a red nose, and lives with a prostitute. Hot dog!
Then the young lady collecting information! Golly! Quite nice- looking too. And the things she does! One would think the invisible unicorn that protects virgins was ramping round her every moment. But it’s not that. Not even the toughest bandit, not even Pancho Villa, could carry off all that information, though she as good as typed out her temptation to him.
Then the home-town aristocrats, of Little Bull, Arizona, or of Old Hat, Illinois. They are just looking round for something: seeing Mexico after: and very rarely finding it. It really is extraordinary the things there are in Little Bull and in Old Hat, that there aren’t in Mexico. Cold slaw, for example! Why, in Little Bull — !
San Juan Teotihuacan! Hey, boy, why don’t you get the parson to sprinkle him with a new tag? Never stand a name like that for half a day, in Little Bull, Illinois. Or was it Arizona?
Such a pity, to have to see Mexico after you’ve seen America first: or at least, Little Bull, which is probably more so.
The ends won’t meet. America isn’t just a civilization, it is civilization. So what is Mexico? Beside Little Bull, what is Mexico?
Of course Mexico went in for civilization long, long, long ago. But it got left. The snake crawled on, leaving the tail behind him.
The snake crawled, lap by lap, all round the globe, till it got back to America. And by that time he was some snake, was civilization. But where was his tail? He’d forgotten it?
Hey, boyl What’s that?
Mexico!
Mexico! — the snake didn’t know his own tail. Mexico! Gam!
That’s nothing. It’s mere nothing, but the darn silly emptiness where I’m not. Not yet.
So he opens his mouth, and Mexico, his old tail, shivers. But before civilization swallows its own tail, that tail will buzz. For civilization’s a rattler: anyhow Mexico is.