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

and jungle; in the north, the Mexican heights would be Alpine wastes. Joined, these excesses of parallel and altitude created a perennial Simla better than Simla. As a matter of recorded fact, the annual mean temperatures of the
Tierra Templada
vary between 66° and 73° Fahrenheit. The average rainfall is some 80 inches a year and concentrated within four months, June to October. In terms of human experience this means: it is always warm; it is never hot; it is never cold. It only rains in season and when it does it pours at fixed and regular hours, and afterwards the air again is dry and light, leaves and fields shine, there is no damp, no mud, no dripping, only a great new freshness.
    Grey days are unknown. Except for a few minutes of dramatic preparation for the actual burst, the sky is always clear. There is little difference in the weather between July and February; it may get rather warm in the late spring and there are chilly evenings when the wind isblowing from the Coast, yet a person with a change of clothes suitable for an exceptionally fine English June, a blanket and a hut made of waterproof leaves and bamboo canes, would be comfortable day and night from one end of the year to the other. Ownership of a mud cottage and some pine cones for a fire around Christmas would assure a sybaritic existence. This opens, and shuts, economic vistas. A promoter from Germany, Gruening, tells us in his wonderfully detailed
History of Mexico,
arrived some time in the nineteenth century full of business projects, and departed so disgusted that he wrote a long and angry volume on the natives’ cursed lack of wants, their
verdammte Beduerfnigslosigkeit.
He should see them now, poor man, sipping their Coca-Colas.
    The second zone is at sea-level and frankly tropical. Hundreds of miles of jungle, beach and silted port on the Pacific. The Gulf, with Vera Cruz, the oil trade, coffee
fincas
and a certain commercial bustle. The deep South: Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche – swamps and forests, the Graham Greene country of
The Lawless Roads;
Yucatan and the pre-Columbian ruins. The third zone is not a region but a number of separate points of especial altitude. It is a matter of exposure, on the whole every place above seven thousand feet is considered to be
Terra Fría.
    Thus Mexico City belongs to the cold land. It is, however, a rule unto itself. It has four distinct climates, one for the night – which is bitter – and three for every day. In the morning we are on the coast of New England. It is autumn. A golden late September; the air is brisk but informed with warmth, luminous with sun. The kind of morning when one cannot bear to be in bed, when numbed insects stir to a new lease and one picks up one’s teacup and walks out into the garden. Here the unexpected gift comes every day. Breakfast is laid in the patio: there is fruit, the absurd goldfish are swishing in the fountain and everything smells of geranium; warmth lies gently across one’s shoulders; E has ceased to talk politics, the housekeeper stops to chat, the boy comes running with hot rolls and butter … It is good to be alive.
    At eleven, the climate becomes continental. It is the height of summer on the top of a mountain. The sun is burning, brilliant, not to be fooled with; the
fond de l’air
cool and flowing like fine water. One feelstremendously exhilarated, charged with energy. This is the time of day when I like to pick my way through the streets, walk slowly across the Cathedral Square under the shade of the brim of my hat. This full noon lasts for several hours. Then comes the cloud-burst and through the early evening, rain falls with the sound of rain falling in the hot countries all over the world, in Egypt, in Burma … Later, it is a spring evening in a large city: mild, tenuous, nostalgic, laid out to be long. It is not long. Darkness descends with a sudden extinguishing sweep like the cover on the canary’s cage. Energy ebbs, the heart contracts with