Mexico

National smell of urine

Christopher Howse

Sin is always different abroad. In Mexico there are still seven deadly ones, but the temptations are foreign to an English tem- perament. Since the peasants of Chiapas decided to rise up when I was there, I shall start with:

Anger. It was a tropical evening. It was either him or me. He lay there on his back against the wall, trying to fend off the blows. All I can remember is my hand rising and falling again and again. The next thing I knew he was dead.

He, of course, was a cockroach, and a particularly fine specimen: about three inches long with delicate yellowish colour-

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ings about his thorax and wing-casings. The only problem was that he was in my bath- room• and seemed to be making himself at home. I didn't want his six feet going any- where that either of my bare two went, par- ticularly at the same time; and I don't like things that go scrunch in the night. What finally did for him was some Boots spray anti-perspirant; God knows what it does for me.

Gluttony. Christmas Day was a fiesta that I expected to be accompanied by mariachi bands and excited crowds. It turned out to be much more English in character — in other words, the bars closed up at 7.30 on Christmas Eve and the shops stayed shut for two days. I thought I should have to sur- vive on four water biscuits and two Club World chocolates in a little cardboard box, courtesy of British Airways.

The trouble was that people back in Eng- land had given me very good health advice: don't take ice in your drinks, don't eat sal- ads, on no account eat those tempting tacos sold by typhoid-infested Indians at the roadside. That doesn't leave much scope .

Now, in Mexico City, unlike London, the Underground runs on Christmas Day, so I went to the great national shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, where the basilica, which has room for 20,000, was full of holi- day crowds. Outside in the summery sun- shine children ran around with balloons and little windmills. I saw a man breaking up a block of ice in a gutter where a dog had pissed, to cool his home-made orangeade. Everywhere there was the national smell of urine, burning charcoal, dust and frying tacos.

I don't know if I could have resisted temptation, but I was saved from Montezu- ma or worse by the discovery of the Café

Popular (on the Calle Cinco de Mayo): such black black coffee, such crumbly polverones. It is clean and open 24 hours. Even if you're not starving, I recommend it.

Envy. On 27 December 1839, the Scot- tish-born wife of the first Spanish ambas- sador to Mexico, Frances Calderon de la Barca, wrote: 'The weather is lovely, the air fresh and clear, the sky one vast expanse of bright blue, without a single cloud.' On 27 December 1993 the sky at the end of the street was brown, the newspapers were pro- claiming the worst pollution known and I had developed a hacking cough. It was time to head out of the valley of Mexico City.

I did envy Senora Calderon the pastoral peace of the Mexican suburbs (even though she had to dodge cannonballs in the street during one of the regular pronunci- amientos). But as the bus climbed over the surrounding mountains, the scene changed from the car-choked 1990s to a pre-war English countryside; stooks of wheat stood in the fields beside oaks in full leaf. Alti- tude makes all the difference, and as the bus careered down again round hairpin bends the temperature rose and we were among palm trees, tropical flowers and strange long-tailed blackbirds making whooping noises. Within an hour and a half I was sitting with a cooling drink in the gar- den of Sanborns, the ersatz English drug- store in Cuernavaca, the Harrogate of Mex- ico. But it does have 16th-century frescoes in the cathedral.

In Cuernavaca I bought some pure alco- hol to put on my blisters. It was called El Viejito (The Little Old Man) and the bottle was labelled potable. I don't envy the little old man.

Avarice. Where do you put your money if every shadow in the street could be a mug-

ger? Decentralisation is my motto, and so it was that I had the cash in the hip pocket and the credit cards in the inside jacket.

Hence my unorthodox reply sotto voce to the priest when he proclaimed the Gospel at Mass in the pretty colonial church of San Francisco. He said, `Lectio evangelii secun- dum Lucam.' I made the sign of the cross, felt my hip pocket and replied, 'Fuck, I've been dipped.'

I knew exactly how it had happened: that cheerful Cantina Rio Plata the night before, with the guitarist and the Dos Equis brown beer and the boot-black doing his round and the little Indian boy selling (or not selling) chewing gum and the Magno brandy all the way from Spain. It would be all too easy to brush past me at the bar and extract the goodies from my pocket.

Halfway through the Gospel next morn- ing I found the cards in the other top pock- et, next to the airline ticket. At the end of the Gospel the people answered, `Laos tibi Christi.' This time I joined in.

So much for decentralisation.

Pride. Mexicans have a lot to be proud of. I didn't see a single volcano or pyramid, but there are plenty of both around. I did see the most perfectly preserved baroque church in the mountain-side silver mining city of Taxco. It is called Santa Prisca and has 13 reredoses rising 60 feet around the walls, so thickly encrusted with gilt orna- ment they look like giant larvae of caddis-flies touched by King Midas. S. Vital, S. George, S. Isidro, S. Estolano, S. Joachim, S. Emerenslana, S. Pedro Arbues, S. Vicente De Paulo, S. Lorenzo Levita and a hundred more — and two dozen Virgin Marys.

Mexico Cathedral itself is vast and stuffed full of modernist scaffolding to stop

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it falling down (the earthquake plus water extraction). It was there I saw a thin Indian and his barefoot wife and their very dirty little child attending Mass one morning. They knelt on the marble floor; his hat lay on the altar rails and in it was a roll of bread, their breakfast for the day. That was humbling.

Sloth. The flight to Mexico takes nearly 12 hours (British Airways direct, three times a week). Now, even curling up with a good Trollope, that means quite a few hours of boredom, discomfort, anxiety, dehydration and annoying neighbours. Do you go World Traveller at £633 or Club at £2,126? I went Club because British Air- ways gave me a ticket, and very nice it was too: High Noon on the way out and It's a Wonderful Life on the way back. Lots of room too. I slept.

Lust. I wouldn't, if I were you.

Christopher Howse works for the Sunday Telegraph.