A Visit to Don Otavio by Sybille Bedford Read Free Book Online

is not suitable for me to go about the streets with bottles done up in brown paper and half a dozen meat pasties dangling from my fingers by a string. I do not like being fetched and carried for by persons older or smaller than myself, but realise that here I must submit to so comfortable a custom. There are more shops like the first, and thanks to my companion I am now free to enjoy them all. I buy a bottle of tequila (two pesos a quart and every pint guaranteed to give DTs.), succumb to Campari, but resist Spanish Pernod. After these additions I have a suite. But it is always the first child who receives the parcels from my hands and distributes them among the other tots. We have some stilted conversation. A young man is sitting on the pavement outside a branch of His Master’s Voice with six avocado pears for sale. He shifts them before him in a pattern and as they are moved about in the dusk the avocados look like trained mice. I buy his stock. He has nothing to wrap it up in, so my head-child commandeers three passing babies with two emptyhands each. The notion of having acquired half a dozen avocado pears for threepence makes me slightly light-headed. I do not buy the two puppies from the man who came rushing out of a church, but I buy a pineapple, a heap of papayas, a straw hat, some plums, some sweets for the porters (squeamishness about plain money to children), some hot chestnuts and some flowers: two armloads of tuberoses, and they too cost next to nothing. As we trail back through the business streets,
Bolivar
and
Cinco del Mayo,
and the pitch black
Alameda
, I feel like the Pied Piper. In the lobby, the children accept their fruit drops and pennies with self-possession. They thank me and express wishes for my well-being in this world and the next,
que Dios la proteja, que la vaya bien,
hand their parcels to a rather older hotel child and depart like well-bred guests at an Edwardian dinner-party without haste or lingering.
    I had the impression that the desk clerk was obscurely distressed by my purchases. Sure enough, ten minutes later we are visited by the housekeeper. She looks Spanish, one of those neat, middle-aged, efficient Latin women who are so much better at their linen cupboards than one can ever hope to be at anything. She does not come to the point. Does Mexico please us?
    Oh, indeed.
    ‘Yes, it is pretty.’ We were not displeased by the rains?
    We reassure her.
    The hotel is also to our taste?
    We try to say how pleased we are.
    Yet those flowers. We did not like their flowers?
    The vases were already filled with lilac and narcissus. Mexican hotels, that is Mexican-run hotels in Mexico, put flowers in their guest rooms with the towels and the bottle of drinking water. Fresh flowers every day, all year round. I try to explain that we had not been aware of this charming practice. We are not believed. The housekeeper leaves in a confusion of mutual apologies. Then the boy comes in from behind the door and bears away the lilac and narcissi. Next day, a great sheaf of tuberoses appears in my bedroom, and all during our stay there are fresh tuberoses every morning. I love them, and I am delighted.

CHAPTER FOUR
Mexico City: Climates & a Dinner
    Glaciers, soleils d’argent, flots nacreux, cieux de braises …
    T HERE ARE THREE CLIMATIC ZONES in Mexico, one hot, one cold, one temperate. The
Tierras Calientes, Fría
and
Templada
. The Hot Zone is very hot, the Cold not as cold as it sounds; the Temperate is celestial perfection.
    It is also the most inhabited portion of the Republic – the best part of the
Mesa Central
lies in
Tierra Templada.
Yet this plateau is not a temperate place at all: the mildness is luxuriant and dynamic, the temperance the product of the clash between two intemperances. It is a tropical region anomalously cool, combining the geographical extremes of Switzerland and Central Africa, high as Mont-Blanc, equatorial as the Sahara. At sea-level, the Mexican latitudes would be desert