Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [162]
To Susan’s eye, the island ports they touched at on the way down were unbearably picturesque. They wore the patina of romantic time, their fortresses had been guarding the approaches to the Americas when her own home on the Hudson knew nothing but wild men dancing feast dances. She begrudged sleep, stayed up late to watch the lights and listen to the sounds from shore, and to see the moon set behind palms, got up before dawn to see the light grow across the perfumed open sea. As if on a honeymoon cruise, she and Oliver danced, dined, drank champagne at the captain’s table, listened to Spanish love-songs from the Cubans down in steerage, sat up half one moonlit night to hear a fantastic recitation of the Frithjof Saga in the original by a young Swedish engineer on his way to build a Mexican railroad.
He reminded her of themselves; she liked the way he took his tradition with him into cultural strangeness. She herself, who thought herself an especially understanding audience because of all the Vikings she had drawn for Thomas, Longfellow, and Boyesen, went to bed that night and reassembled her own somewhat dispersed inheritance, resolved not to let it be weakened by whatever Mexico should provide. One of the charming things about nineteenth-century America was its cultural patriotism–not jingoism, just patriotism, the feeling that no matter how colorful, exotic, and cultivated other countries might be, there was no place so ultimately right, so morally sound, so in tune with the hopeful future, as the U.S.A.
Then after five days they went on deck one morning and saw a rosy snow-peak floating high on a white bed of cloud: Orizaba. A little later they steamed into the harbor of Veracruz, and Mexico rose before Susan Ward like something rubbed up out of a lamp, as different from the false fronts, cowhide boots, flapping vests, and harsh disappointments of Leadville as anything could possibly have been. Mexico was an interlude of magic between a chapter of defeats and an unturned page.
My grandfather, operating on his belief that ladies were to be protected, conspired with the Swedish engineer to fill all the seats in the first-class carriage to Mexico City with the more desirable passengers, but he had no such control over the diligence that took them from Mexico City to Morelia. For four days they sat jammed into an old Concord coach with six other people, none of whom spoke English but all of whom turned out to be of an excruciating politeness. Grandmother’s first article drily remarks that their intimacy ripened rapidly from their being thrown much together. Their driver, ancestor of all modern Mexican bus drivers, was one of those who put on speed for towns, arrivals, departures, turns, steep down grades, and stretches of rough road. Beside him on the box a mozo with a leather sack of stones encouraged the lead mules when they needed encouragement. Beside and before and behind, a protection against bandits, rode a detachment of guardia civil in gray uniforms, with carbines and swords, and in the intervals between their bursts of speed, to which they responded as hunting dogs respond to sight and smell of a gun, they dozed in their saddles or eyed the ladies in the diligence or sang to themselves endless corridos, those improvised songs that are part ballad, part newspaper, part wish-fulfillment.
If they eyed the ladies, so did one lady eye them. She saw everything and drew much of it; her sketchbooks, if they had been preserved, are something I would have cherished. All I know of them is that Thomas Hudson thought them superb and that Winslow Horner and Joseph Pennell both praised them. Even the two dozen woodcuts that were developed from the sketchbooks have great variety and spirit: Toluca with its sixteenth-century profile of bell towers, terraced roofs, tiled domes, and cypresses; Indian huts where women set out on cloths weighted with stones the pulque, tortillas, and fruit of roadside refreshment ; packmules and burros, old subjects from New Almaden; bullock