CHAPTER V. MEXICAN COTTAGES.

Across the way are a dozen Mexicans, wrapped in greasy old blankets, sitting like four-and-twenty blackbirds all in a row. I know their faces, and have not missed one in a month. They live in condition of body and mind hard for an American to realize. A kind of present existence, without loving reference to the past; a passive waiting for the future, without an inquiry or a wish, a fear or a hope. Small, lank, dark-brown fellows; eight with high cheek-bones and thick lips, betraying Indian blood; hair long, straight, black; eyes dark, suspicious, wavering; habitually silent; when speaking, with gloomy indifference, in a voice sad as memory. Elsewhere they would go as tramps; but tramping is a grand fatigue. They prefer to sit round, instead.

It is said this is the bearing of every conquered race; but such is the average Mexican wherever he is found. About the hill of royal Chapultepec, at the base of the pyramid of Cholula--last vestige of Aztecan grandeur--he basks in the sun with the chameleons and lizards, docile in temper, patient under abuse, idle as the wind that lifts his long, black locks. Think you such men care for advantages, natural or political--They know the joy of a splendid destiny fulfilled or the anguish of such a destiny lost? They come of brave blood--Spaniard, Moor, Indian--and how well they fight for their own, the United States, France, and Austria may testify; but to us never did life appear so empty, aimless, and joyless as the life of these sitters in the sun.

The puzzling question of to-day is: How do they keep soul and body together? Let us find one in his home, if the dingy den he inhabits may be called by that dear name. Leaving the Plaza, where vagrants most do congregate, we pass the cottages of “the military” (on whose heads be the blessing of those who entertain strangers), cross a sandy _arroya_, through which in the rainy season a mountain torrent sweeps roaring. Westward the straggling suburb stretches toward the foothills, and, stumbling along a stony path, we suddenly come up against a wall. It is about six feet high, made of mud mixed with ashes, coal, cow-horns, hoofs, mule-bones, barrel-hoops, the wheels of a baby-wagon, cans, broken bottles, boots, curry-combs, every refuse substance that may swell the mass in a treeless region. The top of the wall bristles with scraps of tin, which make it hard to climb. I doubt if Romeo would try it, even to seize the white wonder of Juliet’s hand. The gate is made of upright posts of dwarf cedar, thick as a man’s wrist, bound together by rawhide strings, and groans and creaks in a dismal note as we push it on wooden hinges. Not a trace of iron is to be seen.

This formidable outwork encloses three puppies, of the breed called cast-iron, which look like magnified rats and act wonderfully like cats. The proprietor of the estate and his spouse, in the doorway, sit in the artistic pose called squat, at leisure profound, if not elegant. He is evidently made of the same clay as his wretched mud shanty; might have sprouted up from the ground or dropped down from the eaves.

As we enter, they rise in unembarrassed politeness. He removes his slouch of a hat with decorous gravity, and the wife entreats us to enter, saying, with the air of a princess in exile, we do her great honor. The Spanish flavor is strong here, which may be the reason she wears dragging bright calicoes all the year, and sits in the door even when the snow falls. Her raven black hair and large, full eyes hint of by-gone beauty; but it is by-gone. Premature wrinkles are worn deep by the shriveling wind, her skin is swart and sunburnt, and the roses in her cheek are only ashes of roses.

“Would she give us a drink of water?”

“With much pleasure, _Señora_.”

She diffuses an air of elegance over her pink calico toilet by throwing a dreary old black shawl round her head; and, scorning to lift her voluminous train (twelve yards for a dollar), hastens to the nearest _acequia_, or irrigating ditch, fills a mug of Indian pottery, and offers it with sweetness and grace. No new country exuberance about her, nor revelling imagination, like Dick Swiveller’s; but a power of enchantment and a lofty self-poise which no surprise can startle or disturb. It is found alike in splendor or in squalor, the “grand air” of Old Spain, descended to all who have a dash of her blood.

My hostess regrets the water is not wine, and so catching is the fine charm that, ensnared and deluded, I am hardly sure it is not wine, and drink their health in the miserable ditch-water and am cheered by responsive _gracias_. I try to explain that I am under silken bonds--ribbons red, blue, white--not to look upon wine when it is red; but it is their first hearing of temperance, and they do not understand. She invites me to a seat on the _colchon_--a wool mattress folded against the wall and covered with a blanket, which serves the double purpose of bed by night and sofa by day, an Oriental custom, come down to them from the Moors. I excuse myself, being in mortal fear of old settlers in the mattress. There a lovely baby, with no dress to speak of, is tossing up its heels. I ask some questions, thinking of bright eyes far away; and she prettily says baby has no year yet, and her name is Lola Juanita Eloisa.

The earthen floor is swept with a bunch of broom, without handle, leaning against the mud fireplace in the corner of the room. There are no andirons, shovel, or tongs, and when fire is made the wood is placed on end against the back of the fireplace. A chest, a few pieces of crockery on a pine table, complete the furniture. Can you imagine love in such a cottage? Undoubtedly there is love, and in the poorest _jacal_ there is no brawling man, scolding, slapping wife, or crying baby. If the walls crack, they are daubed by Magdalena Rosalia with a fresh plaster of _yeso_, or gypsum, put on with a glove of sheepskin. If the outside flakes and cracks too badly, it is smeared with a new coating of soft mud. In the spring the ground floor has another layer of clay, the fireplace a thin coating of _tierra amarilla_, or yellow wash, and house-cleaning is ended. Does the roof leak, a dab of mud is slapped on. Is the outer wall in holes, a lump of clay will stop the wind away. There is no window, and when the door is closed the house must be dark and stifling as a dungeon. Above the fireplace, done in hectic chromo and framed in tin is a copy of the divine Madonna in the Louvre, named “Queen of Heaven”; a band of blue stars across her forehead, a tinsel crescent under her feet. Hanging below it is a plaster crucifix, under glass. When the bell chimes, Magdalena Rosalia will seek the old cathedral, whose vaulted interior is filled with shadows and silence--among them a few figures, motionless as the dead asleep under the floors--say her prayers across the rosary, confess, and be absolved. But Trinidad Gonzalez Ribera, in the gauzy blanket and vanishing pantaloons, will sit dozing in the sun, deaf to the ringing music, unmindful of bell, book, or candle. I pass from under the hospitable mud roof with repeated _adios_ and a feeling of unreality. I look for a garden. There is none. There are no chickens, no pig, no cow, no grass within the gravelly enclosure.

The only sign of life is a famished donkey, browsing on the strip of grass which borders the _acequia_ by the roadside. He is the property of our new friends, and occasionally the man of many names takes him to the mountains, loads him with limbs of dead _piñones_, and sells them for twenty-five cents a backload. Stopping on the plain, he digs a few roots of _amolé_, or soap-weed; the _yucca aloifolia_, which we cultivate for its rich cream-white blossoms. This is for the washing done by Magdalena Rosalia.

Do not think she briskly knocks so early Monday morning or comes Sunday night for the clothes, as wicked Protestants have been known to do. No; this daughter of a proud line will not shame her high ancestry by vulgar haste. She saunters along about noon, seats herself at ease, makes affectionate inquiries as to every member of the household, with a gift of continuance and native talent for rigmarole which would do honor to a legislative body. She deliberately ties the bundle of clothes, balances it on her head, and departs with sweeping courtesy and majestic flirt of pink calico train.

After walking a few blocks, she stops for a rest, adjusts her bundle into a cushion on the ground, takes from her pocket a little package of corn-husks, fills one with fine-cut tobacco from a paper box, rolls it into a _cigarrito_, and enjoys a smoke. A Monday picture in Santa Fé is the long row of wash-women, with the everlasting black shawls over their heads, sitting in the shade of mud walls, quietly gossiping and smoking. To get the clothes home is exertion enough for one day.

Tuesday she repairs to the Rio Santa Fé weakened by irrigating ditches to a shallow brook, and on its sandy bank makes a little fire for washing. Her machine is one bucket and a square tin box. She pounds the clothes between two stones. Flannels full, buttons fly, embroideries are a dream of things that were. She boils them in the box, set on granite; rinses in the pure snow-water of the Rio; and spreads them on the rocks to dry, as the young Roman girls do along the Tiber. Friday, in comes Magdalena Rosalia, with all beautifully white, folded in an Indian basket shaped like a deep saucer.

The proceeds of this labor buy a bag of blue corn-meal and the necessary tobacco. Twice a week they can afford a stew of _chili con carne_ (our old friend hash, made fiery hot with red pepper) and the living is made. As respects worldly goods, come he soon or late, Death will find this pair exactly as they entered life, exactly as their fathers lived and died, in the peaceful depths of contented poverty. Magdalena Rosalia walks as though she was born in the purple, to live like the lilies who toil not neither do they spin; and Trinidad Gonzalez Ribera is free of care as though his old Navajo blanket was a king’s coronation robe. At the grave’s edge it not unfrequently happens that his mourning friends, too poor to spare his blanket, strip it from his body, and lay him away in the dust from whence he sprung, shroudless and uncoffined.

These are the happy people sighed for by weary poets in all the ages. Simple souls who love the sun, live close to Nature, and in the dirt house, to which nothing is added, where nothing is repaired except by additional dirt, are serene as summer, filled with a measureless content. Can we say so much for the eager, ambitious conqueror in a struggle, a battle, and a race; always getting ready to live, looking to the future when he may have time to rest and enjoy?

The Mexican does not wait for better times. There is no day but this. He begins now and the future takes care of itself.

Oh! tired woman of “the States,” running on your nerve, trying to do all the public demands of you and all you require of yourself, leave the place where the door bell rings every half hour. Quit worrying over goose-parties for the Sunday-school, Jarley’s wax-works for the firemen; slip away from strawberry parties for the Gaboon Mission; slacken the fevered rush; loosen the strings at concert pitch and ready to snap; go to the Mexican woman, consider her ways, and learn how to rest.

Of course, you, my precious reader, know many things she does not. There never has been a woman’s meeting in this territory of 207,000 square miles; and, in consequence, the weak-minded creature is not aware that men are great rascals, rob women of their rights, and bar the avenues to wealth and fame against them. Sing the Iliad of your woes, and it will fall on heedless ears. And, though you harp how Juliet’s poetry flew up the kitchen-chimney and Portia’s eloquence burnt out over the gridiron where her

----“red right hand grew raging hot, Like Cranmer’s at the _steak_.”

she would quietly adjust the old black shawl (final remnant and melancholy reminder of the gay _rebosa_) and count the days till the next _fiesta_.

There are heights beyond her reach, and beyond your reach too, in spite of mighty purpose. She does not strain after them, wearing herself to skin and bone. While you, who have tasted bitter fruit from the tree of knowledge, are ready to die in a losing struggle for the unattainable, she loiters in happy valley, by good spirits tenanted, and in her easy shoe wears the four-leaved clover of perpetual content.