Jan and I recently read Sybille Bedford’s A Visit to Don Otavio: A Mexican Odyssey, first published in 1953 by Victor Gollancz under the title The Sudden View: A Mexican Journey. Sybille was born in Charlottenburg, Prussia, in 1911. When her father, a collector of art and wine, died in 1925 she moved to Italy to live with her mother and stepfather. As Fascism rose to prominence in Italy, the family moved to a fishing village in Provence, where Sybille met a neighbour, Aldous Huxley, and other writers such as Thomas Mann and Bertold Brecht. Sybille and Huxley became friends and, when she was unable to renew her passport because of her Jewish ancestry and writings critical of the Nazis, Huxley’s wife Maria suggested the marry a gay British man to get a British passport. Sybille promptly married Walter “Terry” Bedford, who had been a lover of one of Aldous’s manservants. When the Nazi invasion of France was imminent, Sybille joined the Huxleys in California.
“[O]f course, I knew Sybille Bedford. She was a very dear friend of Aldous and Maria and a good friend of my parents. In fact, she wrote a wonderful biography of Aldous that my father thought was the best of all of them. As you may know, Sybille was a wine expert, and I believe the first female member of the French sommelier society. According to family accounts, Sybille made most of her living by recommending wines for first born sons of wealthy English families upon their birth. (Thus a son who turned 21 would have a fully mature, wine cellar when he came of age.) Sybille, of course, kept some wine for her herself and had a huge collection of wine stored somewhere, maybe under Kings Road, which leads to the following story. When I was 17 and on my first trip alone to England, I of course had to visit this ancient lady, Sybille Bedford. To be honest, I was rather reluctant, but of course, I was invited to her house for dinner where upon she produced three different bottles of wine which she opened and poured into three separate glasses for me to taste. At that time I had no real “wine words“ but I did tell her which I liked and why. She listened and then told me the following. “I have good news and I have bad news for you. The good news is you have a good palate the bad news is it’s fucking expensive.” To say the least it was certainly an experience I have never forgotten and one that I remember quite fondly. You should really read her biography of Aldous which is quite good.”
Sybille’s account of her train journey from Grand Central Station, New York, to Mexico City and her several months of travel in Mexico is written for quiet amusement if not quite for laughs, so some of her observations should not be taken too seriously. But nevertheless, she had a good eye for interesting characters and events. She had clearly read up on Mexican history. She refers, for instance, to the famous account of Frances Calderón de la Barca (a Scot née Frances Erskine Inglis) of her residence in Mexico from 1839-1841 as wife of the Spanish ambassador. However, her spin on Mexican history is always humorous: her brief career of the hapless Habsburg Emperor Maximilian imposed by Napoleon III is written as a tragi-comedy. Nevertheless, Jan and I both enjoyed comparing our impressions of Mexico in the 1970s and later with Sybille’s.
I can’t quite work out exactly when Sybille was in Mexico. Online sources give dates from 1940 to 1950. Her comment that the population of Mexico City was 1.5 million suggests the early 1940s, since the city had 1.6 million inhabitants in 1940 (by 1950 the figure was 3.1 million) . However, if Sybille’s travelling companion E was, in fact, Esther Murphy, her lover from 1945 for a few years, and a lifelong friend, then the two were in Mexico in the second half of the 1940s, during the presidency of Miguel Alemán, just over two decades after the culmination of the Mexican Revolution.
Sybille and E began their four-day train ride from Grand Central to Laredo Texas (a journey I replicated in two days some three decades later by Greyhound bus, but in far less style) with two large pink gins: Sybille had brought a pint of gin, a thermos of ice, Angostura bitters and two Woolworth glasses. She observed that ‘Whenever I can I bring my own provisions; it keeps one independent and agreeably employed, it is cheaper and usually much better.’ Sybille had supplied tins of tunny fish, a hunk of salami and of provolone, rye bread and black bread, but on their first night they followed their gins with fresh food: a roast chicken, Virginia ham, tomatoes, watercress, ‘a flute of bread,’ cream cheese, cherries and a jug of Lancer’s Sparkling Rosé.
As the train resumes for a few days more its long, laborious trek south (first stop Saltillo, some 300 kilometres), ‘hot, stony, dry country … Innocent of art and architecture’ and thinly populated, eventually yields to trees and fields, ‘young corn growing in small patches on the slopes; and a line and another line of mountains.’ The state of San Luis Potosí offers glimpses of ruins and churches, until eventually sugar-cane, corn and cacti announce ‘a bright rich tropical country miraculously laved; green, green, green, the Valley of Mexico.’
The two ladies settle into the capital, once the domain of Moctezuma and the centre of his empire. n‘The first impact of Mexico City is physical, immensely physical. Sun, Altitude, Movement, Smells, Noise. And it is inescapable…Everything is agitated, crowded, spilling over; the pavements are narrow and covered with fruit…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…lottery tickets flutter in one’s face…motor traffic zigzagged by walking beasts; the lumps of country life, peasants and donkey carts, jars and straw…there are the overflowing trams’.
Sybille and E tuck into a hearty Mexican comida corrida (a table d’hôte lunch): a vegetable soup, called a sopa aguada, or wet soup to distinguish it from the obligatory second sopa seca (dry soup) of rice with peas an pimento; followed in rapid order by an omelette, fish in tomato sauce, a ‘beef stew with spices’, vegetable marrow in cream, ‘thin beef-steaks like the soles of children’s shoes,’ ‘lettuce and radishes in an artistic pattern,’ chicken drumsticks and wings ‘smeared with some brown substance,’ mashed black beans, fruit stewed in treacle, a basket of rolls, ‘all slightly sweet,’ and a stack of tortillas, all washed down with Carta Blanca beer, coffee and pan dulce (sweet rolls). The verdict: ‘Everything tastes good, nearly everything is good,” and all for nine pesos (less than ten shillings). By the mid-1970s a less gargantuan, but sill filling, comida corrida in a modest neighbourhood restaurant (often the front room of the cook’s home) cost me 12 pesos, the equivalent of one US dollar.
The ladies’ hotel was in a colonial palace on Avenida Hidalgo, ‘a length of slummy palacios with oddments of Aztec masonry encrusted in their sixteenth-century façades, and no shops but a line of flowers stalls’ selling elaborate wreaths decorated with ‘beads, filigree and mother-of-pearl skulls.’ Across the Alameda park is another street altogether, Avenida Juárez, ‘ablaze with juke-box, movie theatre, haberdashery and soft-drink parlor,’ which leads to ‘as amazing structure as I could ever hope to see’: the National Theatre (now the Palacio de Bellas Artes), sinking into the spongy subsoil. After a siesta and the daily shower of the rainy season, Sybille heads for the colonial centre of the city and on Avenida Francisco Madero finds food and drink shops so good, ‘One might be at Fortnum’s.’ She stocks up with Bacardi rum, Mexican brandy, hot chicken pasties, tequila, Campari, and, on the pavement, six avocados, a pineapple, ‘a heap of papayas,’ a straw hat, plums, flowers. A team of children carry her purchases home for sweets and pennies. The flowers cause consternation at the hotel: the housekeeper asks indirectly if the ladies like Mexico and the hotel, finally getting to the point: don’t they like the hotel’s flowers? Thereafter, their rooms are decorated with great quantities daily.
The ladies’ only contacts are foreign. Exiled Spanish academics invite them to a tea party in Coyoacán, ‘the suburb in which Trotsky lives,’ where the other guests are Czechs, Germans, and a Frenchman. All ‘had given their political youth to anti-fascism,’ a cross-section of the many Europeans who found shelter in Mexico in the 1930s and 1940s. The exiles dispense advice: travel only on first class buses (advice still current, but now for greater security, rather than to avoid animals); go to hotels owned by Mexicans (‘better value, better manners, more to eat’); ‘Never come straight to a point’: Americans offend ‘Mexican Indians’ by being too direct or too friendly; and so on.
Sybille and E first make contact with aspects of Mexican life on a bus journey to colonial Morelia, ‘accompanied by decorous Indios with small farm animals on their laps, the coachwork rattles and the driver’s dashboard is clinking with holy medals and ex-votos.” (I was reminded of deciding to return to Mexico City with my mother on a local bus from Teotihuacan to Mexico City. Dust flew in the open windows and our fellow passengers were carrying their merchandise, including some live fowl, to the metropolis.) Sybille and E’s bus stops at ‘the station buffet’, a ‘mud hut’ with a yard where passengers are served with ‘hot chicken broth, meat stew, vegetables and fruit.’ ‘Two elderly women in decent black’ remain in their seats and ask the ladies to buy them broth and tortillas. Puzzled, Sybille and E comply. The ladies in black explain that they are nuns and are not allowed to enter a public-eating place. They travel in plain clothes because the law prohibits priests and nuns from wearing religious dress – a legacy of the long battles between church and state. After drinking the broth, the nuns take out an ample picnic and eat it with their tortillas.
The ladies’ longest contact with Mexicans is at the home of Don Otavio of the book’s title. Otavio receives Sybille and E with the unstintingly generous hospitality, still the norm even in modern urban Mexico, on the remains of a once enormous rural estate on the shores of Lake Chapala, the largest inland water in Mexico. Much of his family’s land was confiscated under the revolutionary agrarian reform. Otavio lives on the remainder of the property while his brothers make their livings in Guadalajara or Mexico City. All quarrel over what remains of the family real estate: Mexican inheritance law still promotes frequent disputes, even in much less affluent families. The family’s conversation laments the passing of the glory days of Don Porfirio, Mexico’s great dictator of the late nineteenth century, toppled in 1911 by the Revolution. Otavio’s father, a Governor of Jalisco under Díaz who died just in time to miss the Revolution, had sent his sons (except for Otavio, whose education was interrupted by the Revolution) to Downside School in England. The family had travelled abroad, owned fine silver and Sèvres porcelain (all removed to Guadalajara when the Carrancista revolutionaries ‘were all over the lake’). They had a family home in Guadalajara, where Otavio and his brothers were educated by a tutor in addition to their time at Downside. Sybille discovers that the family had kept a cellar of fine French wines, Lafittes, Margaux and the like, but Otavio and his brothers did not like them, preferring Sauternes, so Otavio had given them to a neighbour, much to Sybille’s disappointment.
Even in these straitened times, Don Otavio relied on servants for the conveniences of daily life. A prolonged stay at Chapala enabled Sybille to get to know the Mexicans whose labour made genteel life possible still. A beautiful young girl, Soledad, brings morning tea, closes shutters and lays out clothes for dinner. Guadalupe, the former wet nurse who now cares for the geese, hears that Sybille has been to Rome, so asks her if she saw the Virgin there. Sybille replies that she saw the Pope, to which Guadalupe replies: ‘Yes, yes,the Pope. A very good man no doubt. He looks after the Virgin. Did you see Her?’ Guadalupe times her cooking by her prayers: the Ave Maria for eggs, the Paternoster for cutlets, the Creed for frying. One day a wild shriek announces a stabbing: one servant has knifed another in the kitchen. The assailant Jesús flees, the victim Juan recovers, and after a bout of drinking Jesús returns minus his mother’s cow, which paid for his booze.
The Mexico of the late 1940s was not far removed from the political struggles of the 1920s and 1930s and the civil war between the Catholic faithful and the anticlerical revolutionary governments known as the ‘Cristiada’. Western Mexico where Don Otavio lived was the very heart of that rebellion and the ‘Cristeros’ who fought for their faith are mentioned a few times by Sybille or her acquaintances.
The two ladies shopped liberally and must have been carrying substantial amounts of cash in Mexican terms if not by US standards. Nevertheless, the stabbing was their only experience of violence. True, they were locked in their hotel in Mexico City one day because elections were taking place and it was deemed unsafe for them to be out and about. They had only one encounter with crime while on a bus journey. While passengers were in an adobe wayside building tucking into lunch, some considerate ‘bandits’ quietly searched the baggage on the roof of the bus and stole, inter alia, a trunk of E’s clothes and a case containing Sybille’s writings. No passenger was harmed, had lunch disturbed, or was even aware of the theft until lunch was finished.
Some of Sybille’s impressions are similar to our own, although we first encountered Mexico almost thirty years after her travels. Mexico City had grown to a metropolis of 9.5 million and was if anything more of an invigorating assault on the senses. I recall introducing Jan to the capital. We were staying with friends in Colonia Cuauhtémoc, where well-to-do Mexicans built elegant homes in the days of Porfirio Díaz. Our friend Alfonso was descended from an influential family (they had been friends of José Ives Limantour, Díaz’s Minister of Finance), and he lived still in the family home. One of the servants had been his nanny (rather like Don Otavio’s Guadalupe). When Jan became sick (my fault for taking insufficient care about what and where we ate), the doctor prescribed injections which he said I should administer. Jan was relieved to discover that the former nanny was experienced in injections, who saved her from me plunging a needle into her behind.
On our first day in the city we strolled the short distance to the Paseo de la Reforma, the broad avenue that leads to the former Chapultepec palace favoured by Emperor Maximilian, and later official residence of Don Porfirio Díaz. Sybille noted that in the 1940s Mexico City had a few ‘gimcrack’ skyscrapers. She would soon have had to change her opinion when the Torre Latinoamericana, the tallest building in the city and the first earthquake-resistant skyscraper in the world, was completed in 1956. By the 1970s those that lined Reforma were comfortably the equal of New York or Chicago, but as we turned the corner we encountered a man belching flames to earn a few pesos from passersby. What economists term the informal economy was, and still is, the source of income of many Mexicans, and at its lowest level are the performers and sellers of cheap goods at intersections, on main streets, and, in the 1970s, on the city’s buses and brand-new Metro trains. On the buses boys of 10 or 11 belted out heart-breaking songs of love betrayed by fickle women., while on the Alameda boys of similar ages upwards would shine your shoes, and try to inveigle you into paying for an expensive extra shine. At traffic lights there might be jugglers, unicyclists, somebody producing a rabbit (often a soft toy, but sometimes live) from a hat, or selling chewing gum, sweets or a cool drink.
The streets of central Mexico City are no longer congested by a mix of cars and donkey carts. By the 1970s the choking congestion caused by ancient buses belching fumes, cars, yellow Volkswagen Beetles, peseros (cars that travelled back and forth on major avenues like Reforma and crammed in as many passengers as could squeeze in for a fare of one peso), and trucks, crammed the streets and polluted the air. But petty commerce was still ever present on the streets: sellers of tortas (rolls stuffed with mashed beans, meat, chile and other delights); taco stalls; purveyors of aguas frescas (water flavoured with watermelon, tamarind, hibiscus flowers etc); grilled and stewed meats; quesadillas. There were also the noises that announced the presence of mobile sellers of roast sweet potatoes (a steam-driven whistle) or tamales Oaxaca style (¡Hay tamales oaxaqueños!, shouted at a volume that carried all round the neighbourhood).
Bustle and noise are the signatures of urban life in Mexico, in cities large and small. We discovered when we lived in Zamora, Michoacán, in 2018 that, if we were tempted to over-sleep, we were sure to be woken by loudspeakers announcing ¡Gas, hay gas! or the mobile cake seller announcing his low prices. We once arrived back at our hotel in Talpa de Allende, Michoacán, a town of only 13,000 or so people when the pilgrims are not in town, to find an outraged American guest complaining that he and his wife could not sleep for the noise on the street. They had innocently asked for a room overlooking the street to enjoy the view of downtown Talpa only to discover that, once night had fallen, the street filled with mobile food sellers playing loud music to attract customers, and the chatter of a few hundred diners.
The hospitality that Don Otavio lavished on Sybille and E, although on a scale we could never experience, is characteristic of Mexicans. A friend who was familiar with Mexico and who later lived in Madrid commented to me once that, when he and his wife moved to Spain, they became worried that they were social failures, since no Spaniards invited them to their homes. By contrast, they had been accustomed to numerous invitations in Mexico to dinner ‘en su casa’ (literally, in your home). For a Mexican, it is an honour that somebody holds them in high enough esteem to accept an invitation to a meal or a party in their home, while a Spaniard would consider it rather odd to offer dinner at home, preferring to meet in a restaurant. An invitation accepted by a foreigner is a very particular honour. There may be one or two aspects of hospitality that a foreign guest needs to adjust to. For example, our friends in Colonia Cuauhtémoc arranged a dinner for us to meet some friends. Jan and I were slightly surprised to be served (me first, Jan next), and encouraged to start eating, before the other guests.
This experience was repeated routinely in much more modest, provincial homes, when we visited our son Chris in Atlacomulco, about two hours from Mexico City. These families could not afford the domestic staff that our friends in the city employed, so we were served either by the lady of the household, or, if there was one, a young daughter. Over more than 50 years of visits to Mexico, it would be impossible to count the number of invitations we have been honoured to receive in ‘su casa’.
Friendships and other interpersonal relations, such as that between a father and his child’s godfather, are extremely important. For example, the parents of a young man who was Chris’ closest friend in Atlacomulco, invited us to their son’s wedding, and clearly considered it a particular honour for us to travel so far to attend. On a busy wedding day they insisted on collecting us from our hotel and driving us to the cathedral and then the party venue. The bride’s religious parents had insisted that no alcohol be served at the lunch and subsequent party, but the father of the groom arranged to have a private stash of tequila under his table and made sure that I was plentifully supplied. If you are religiously inclined, you need two weddings, the religious that has no legal status, and the civil. At the civil ceremony Chris, as an honoured friend of the groom was invited to be an honorary witness – he could not be a legal witness because he is not a Mexican citizen. He is about to become a padrino (godfather) to the son of another friend in Atlacomulco.
In 2018 in Zamora, we were neighbours of Don Pepe and his wife. We first met them when they were out for an evening stroll. We greeted one another and Don Pepe commented that ‘We’re still boyfriend and girlfriend after all these years.’ Don Pepe and I often had a neighbourly chat when he was sitting outside reading his newspaper. He owned some agricultural land (his ‘huerta’ – roughly translated as an orchard, although not planted only with fruit trees), some urban property and a greengrocer’s shop, now run by his son Manuel. Manuel and various daughters and their families lived in homes nearby in our neighbourhood. When Mexican Mother’s Day approached, the family invited us to their party – after all they said, Jan is a mother – in the garage of one of Don Pepe’s properties. The afternoon and evening passed agreeably in conversation, live music and much sing-along, a barbecue and the inevitable tequila.
Of course, there are plenty of not so nice things about Mexico. In a country where the minimum wage is 249 pesos per day (£10.73 or US$13.58), it is not surprising that visitors are at risk of theft. However, my only experience in more than 50 years visiting the country is of once having my pocket picked in Mexico City on the Metro, which, therefore, we no longer use. And one takes certain precaution such as never flagging down a taxi in the street (too much risk of being held up, in extremis at gunpoint). Rather one calls a taxi from a taxi rank or hires a trusted driver (our super-reliable driver in the capital is Jorge). Then there is corruption on both large and small-scale, for a foreigner most likely in interactions with the police, for example for real or alleged speeding, jumping a red light etc. I recall paying small and not so small bribes in the 1970s when crossing the border from Texas, when a friend who was driving me home was pulled over by police who alleged he had a faulty light (I paid since my friend had lost at poker), or to retrieve a package from my mother at the central post office in Mexico City.
Although the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero civil war were events of the (still recent) past by the late 1940s, a certain amount of violence and crime was still common, but Sybille and E seem to have been almost immune to trouble. Unfortunately, the violence of the drug cartels and against women now mars the beauty of the Mexico we have come to love. One does take certain decisions with the avoidance of risk in mind: where to go or not to go at night, whether to visit a particular place, when and how to travel, and so on. I have developed a certain expertise in the history of the state of Guerrero, an already troubled region in which, nevertheless, I travelled unmolested in the 1970s, and visited briefly with my family in 2006. However, people I trust have told me that any future visits would be unsafe. Nevertheless, I have only once heard gunshots in Mexico. In 1975, I was sitting at home in my lodgings in the Colonia Condesa district of Mexico City one Sunday when several gunshots shattered the peace of our street. The doorman of an apartment building had made some inappropriate comments to a young girl who lived there. Her brother borrowed a gun to warn the doorman to leave his sister alone, but tempers rose, things got out of hand and the young man fired several shots into the doorman.
Sybille spoke basic Spanish and had been to Spain, but she was not prepared for how alien, disconcerting and charming Mexico could be. After our first visit together to Mexico in the late 1970s, Jan, who spoke Spanish and had studied in Spain, observed that Mexico and Mexican Spanish had been much more of a contrast with Spain than she had expected. Even the common factor of language is not very common, since usage and vocabulary vary considerably, but above all the culture and the society are enormously different, full of characteristics and quirks to be enjoyed. The indomitable Sybille and E certainly experienced many quirks, and above all the unstinting hospitality and generosity of spirit so characteristic of Mexicans. In that sense they knew the Mexico that Jan, our son Chris and I have come to know so well.
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