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

fear. This is no time to be out in the streets, this is the hour of return, of the house, the hearth, the familiar ritual.
Alors, il s’est retiré dans son intérieur.
    The hotel room is desolate, the lamp dim. There is nothing then but the panicked dash for the clean, well-lighted places.
    There are none. The current is wretched all over the city. The story goes that the last President’s brother is still selling power across the border. There are no cafés, no pubs, only bars for men and huge pastry-shops. You do not dine before ten, unless you are willing to eat waffles in a pharmacy got up like a mosque at Sanborn’s astonishing emporium; the cinemas waste no money on illumination; there is going to be a concert on Friday week … Some of the hotel bars are open to women. They are full of tourists and Mexicans emphatically without wives. Besides, this is not a good country to drink in: in daytime one does not want it at all, and at night one wants it too much.
    We decide to have dinner at X’s, a French restaurant that enjoys a reputation in the hemisphere. We push through the doors. One night in the early nineteen-thirties, a friend was good enough to take me to a restaurant in London which in its day had been a very famous restaurant indeed. The list of its patrons was literary and glamorous, the wine and cooking admirable; it had a speakeasy cachet. Our elders and betters had talked and drunk there through the nights of the First War when they were young and notorious; they had dined there in the twenties when they were well-known and middle-aged. It had had the honours of at least five contemporary novels. Let us call it Spisa’s. I had never been there, and I believe it was my twentieth birthday, or the eve of mytwentieth birthday. When we got to Spisa’s the shutters were down, the dining-room was dark and the owner dying. I mean literally dying. Mr S was on his death-bed and the priest had just been. My friend was a face from the better days, so they were much touched to see her at this hour. She was also a Catholic. They took her in to Mr S’s where she stayed in prayer for some time. I was put into a parlour where an Austrian waiter and an Italian waiter were saying their rosaries. I had no rosary, but the Italian waiter went and found me one. Later they would not let us go but insisted that we have our dinner. They sent out for some chops and lager from the pub in Charlotte Street and made us eat it in the dining-room. There was just one lamp lit above our table, otherwise it was quite dark. As we ate people came to us and whispered to my friend in Italian. I could see she had been weeping. Presently we walked home and later became quite unreasonably gay.
    As E and I pushed through X’s swing doors, there was just one lamp lit above one table. The waiters stood huddled in gloom. I sank, into self-pity. I know it is futile to indulge in my regret that I came too late upon this earth to enjoy the pleasures of the table at Edwardian house parties, but to think what I missed in my own time – I have never been to the Chapon Fin at Bordeaux, I was too late for Voisin’s at Paris, too late for Spisa’s, and now too late for X of Mexico City. Then I pulled myself together: a fellow creature was dying; I still had no rosary but I was ready to pay such respects as I could.
    A second lamp was lit with small effect above a second table, chairs were pushed back and one of those French menus, large as a poster, was laid before us decorously like a floral tribute. Service as usual? But no, the place was too preposterous: the hush, the darkness, the gloom; no funeral parlour in the USA could stay in business for a week with such an atmosphere. We had yet to learn that this was merely the regular nightly aspect of public eating-places all over the Republic.
    I must try a Mexican wine. I order a bottle of something called Santo Tomás. When poured out, it looks quite black. I sniff before tasting, so the shock when it