Read A Visit to Don Otavio for Free Online

corner and that unconvincing air of urban modernity. One looks, one snuffs, one breathes – familiar, haunting, long-missed, memories and present merge, and for a happy quarter of an hour one is plunged into the loved element of lost travels. Then Something Else creeps in. Something Else was always here. These were not the looks, not the gestures. Where is the openness of Italy, that ready bosom? This summer does not have the Southern warmth, that round hug as from a fellow creature. Here, a vertical sun aims at one’s head like a dagger – how well the Aztecs read its nature – while the layers of the air remain inviolate like mountain streams, cool, fine, flowing, as though refreshed by some bubbling spring. Europe is six thousand miles across the seas and this glacier city in a tropical latitude has never, never been touched by the Mediterranean. In a minor, a comfortable, loop-holed, mitigated way, one faces what Cortez faced in the absolute five hundred years ago: the unknown.
     
    Well what does one do? Where does one begin, where does one turn to first? Here we are in the capital of this immense country and we know nothing of either. We don’t know anybody. We hardly know the language. We have an idea of what there is to see, but we do not know where anything is from where, nor how to get there. We do not have much money to spend, and we have much too much luggage. Winter clothes and clothes for the tropics, town clothes and country clothes and the bottom of our bags are falling out with books. We have a few letters ofintroduction. They are not promising. From vague friends to their vague friends, Europeans with uncertain addresses who are supposed to have gone to Mexico before the war. Guillermo had pressed a letter into my hand at the station; a German name covered most of the envelope. ‘Great friends,’ he had said, ‘they have had such trouble with their papers.’ E had been told to put her name down at the American Embassy. Nobody seemed to know any Mexicans. No one had written to people running a mine or a sugar place; or heard of some local sage, a Norman Douglas of the Latin Americas, who knew everything, the people and the stories, plants and old brawls, how to keep the bores at bay and where to get good wine.
    God be praised we have a roof over our heads and it is not the roof of the Pensión Hernandez. The spirit that made us fall in with Guillermo’s suggestion has waned, already there is a South-wind change. A man on the train told us about a small hotel, Mexican run, in front of a park. To this we drove from the station, and found a Colonial palace with a weather-beaten pink façade. Of course there were rooms. We have a whole suiteful of them. Bedrooms and sitting-room and dressing-room, and a kind of pantry with a sink, a bathroom and a trunk closet and a cupboard with a sky-light. Everything clean as clean and chock-full of imitation Spanish furniture, straight-backed tapestry chairs, twisty iron lamps with weak bulbs. There is a balcony on to the square and a terrace on to the patio. The patio has a pleasant Moorish shape; it is whitewashed, full of flowers, with a fountain in the middle and goldfish in the fountain, and all of it for thirty shillings a day.
    The first step obviously is luncheon. Time, too, we were off the streets. That sun! E’s face is a most peculiar colour. One had been warned to take it easy. One had been warned not to drink the water, to keep one’s head covered, to have typhoid injections, beware of chile, stay in after dark, never to touch ice, eat lettuce, butter, shell-fish, goat cheese, cream, uncooked fruit … We turned into a restaurant. I had a small deposit of past tourist Spanish to draw on; it did not flow, but it was equal to ordering the
comida corrida,
the table d’hôte luncheon. Every table is occupied with what in an Anglo-Saxon country would be a party but hereseems just the family. Complexions are either café-au-lait, nourished chestnut, glowing