Life in Mexico
The Sudden View : a Mexican Journey. By Sybille Bedford. (Gollancz. 18s.) MEXICANS reading this entertaining and perspicacious travel-book will be deeply offended. Mrs. Bedford's host at the idyllic lake- side quinta where she stayed so enjoyably for so long will never forgive her: "His hands and complexion were white as asses' milk; his face, a long oval with slightly softened contours crested by a plume of silvery hair, was a generic face: one of those inherited handsome faces of Goya's minor courtiers, where the' acumen, pride and will of an earlier mould have run to fatuity and craft; a set face, narrow, stiff and sad. He turned out one of the kindest men I ever met."
But Mrs. Bedford is an accomplished story-teller; perhaps her Don Otavio is a fictitious character.
The authoress travelled to Mexico because she had come across and been enchanted by Fanny Calderon de la Barca's little classic, published in 1843, Life in Mexico. Fanny—a Scotswoman married to Spain's first Minister to the republic of Mexico—was intelligent, interested in everything she saw and heard, a lively woman with a warm heart. She disapproved of many things in Mexico, and said so; but her touch was unfailingly gentle. She never made fun of the Mexicans; she allowed them to make their own jokes. Mrs. Bedford, on the other hand, never misses an opportunity to display her skill at spotting and describing the comic.
"At the seventh rendering of a piece called, I believe, Siempre Jalisco, the musicians, to more sensitive ears than ours, appeared to be running down.
" 'Play up, said Dona Anna."
So far as it goes this book is accurate. The essential quality of Mexico is conveyed. For example, Mrs. Bedford is not content merely to describe' the superficial features of the crowded, busy, exhilarating streets of the capital city: - "Everything is agitated, crowded, spilling over; the pavements are narrow and covered with fruit. As one picks one's way over mangoes and avocado pears, one is tumbled into the gutter by a water-carrier, avoids a Buick Saloon and a basin of live charcoal, skips up again scaring a tethered chicken, shies from an exposed deformity and bumps into a Red Indian gentleman in a tight black suit. Now a parrot shrieks at one from an upper window, lottery tickets flutter in one's face, one's foot is trodden on by a goat and one's skirt clutched at by a baby with the face of an idol.... Then Something Else creeps in. Something Else was always here. . . . Where is the openness of Italy, that ready bosom? This summer does not have the Southern warmth, that round hug as from a fellow creature. Here, a vertical sun aims at one's head like a dagger— how well the Aztecs read its nature... .. In a minor, a comfortable, loop-holed, mitigated way, one faces what Cortez faced in the absolute five hundred years ago: the unknown."
Mrs. Bedford has an original vision anda sprightly style. Referring to the short Mexican evenings, the absence of twilight, she writes: "Darkness descends with a sudden extinguishing sweep like the cover on the canary's _cage." The book is peppered rather hap- hazardly with grave and acute accents and cedillas; and often where there should be an accent there is none. GEORGE PENDLE.
Previous page
