Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras | Page 8

whose
entire stock could not be worth fifteen cents sat all day without selling
more than half of it. An old woman stopped to pick up four grains of
corn and greedily tucked them away in the rags that covered her
emaciated frame. Now and then a better-dressed potosino passed,
making purchases, a peon, male or female, slinking along behind with a
basket; for it is a horrible breach of etiquette for a ten-dollar-a-month
Mexican to be publicly seen carrying anything.
One wondered why there was not general suicide in such a community
of unmitigated misery. Why did they not spring upon me and snatch the
purse I displayed or die in the attempt? How did they resist eating up
their own wares? It seemed strange that these sunken-chested, hobbling,
halt, shuffling, shivering, starved creatures should still fight on for life.
Why did they not suddenly rise and sack the city? No wonder those are
ripe for revolution whose condition cannot be made worse.
Policemen in sandals and dark-blue shoddy cap and cloak looked little
less miserable than the peons. All about the covered market were peon
restaurants, a ragged strip of canvas as roof, under it an ancient wooden
table and two benches. Unwashed Indian women cooked in several
open earthen bowls the favorite Mexican dishes,--frijoles (a stew of
brown beans), chile con carne, rice, stews of stray scraps of meat and
the leavings of the butcher-shops. These were dished up in brown
glazed jars and eaten with strips of tortilla folded between the fingers,
as the Arab eats with gkebis. Indeed there were many things
reminiscent of the markets and streets of Damascus, more customs
similar to those of the Moor than the Spaniard could have brought over,
and the brown, wrinkled old women much resembled those of Palestine,
though their noses were flatter and their features heavier.

Yet it was a good-natured crowd. In all my wandering in it I heard not
an unpleasant word, not a jest at my expense, almost no evidence of
anti-foreign feeling, which seems not indigenous to the peon, but
implanted in him by those of ulterior motives. Nor did they once ask
alms or attempt to push misery forward. The least charitable would be
strongly tempted to succor any one of the throng individually, but here
a hundred dollars in American money divided into Mexican centavos
would hardly go round. Here and there were pulquerías full of besotted,
shouting men--and who would not drink to drown such misery?
There was not a male of any species but had his colored blanket, red,
purple, Indian-yellow, generally with two black stripes, the poorer with
a strip of old carpet. These they wound about their bodies, folding them
across the chest, the arms hugged together inside in such a way as to
bring a corner across the mouth and nose, leaving their pipe-stem legs
below, and wandered thus dismally about in the frequent spurts of cold
rain. Now and then a lowest of the low passed in the cast-off remnants
of "European" clothes, which were evidently considered far inferior to
peon garb, however bedraggled. Bare or sandaled feet seemed
impervious to cold, again like the Arab, as was also this fear of the raw
air and half covering of the face that gave a Mohammedan touch,
especially to the women. To me the atmosphere was no different than
late October in the States. The peons evidently never shaved, though
there were many miserable little barber-shops. On the farther outskirts
of the hawkers were long rows of shanties, shacks made of everything
under the sun, flattened tin cans, scraps of rubbish, two sticks holding
up a couple of ragged bags under which huddled old women with
scraps of cactus and bundles of tiny fagots.
Scattered through the throng were several "readers." One half-Indian
woman I passed many times was reading incessantly, with the speed of
a Frenchman, from printed strips of cheap colored paper which she
offered for sale at a cent each. They were political in nature, often in
verse, insulting in treatment, and mixed with a crass obscenity at which
the dismal multitude laughed bestially. Three musicians, one with a
rude harp, a boy striking a triangle steel, sang mournful dirges similar
to those of Andalusia. The peons listened to both music and reading

motionless, with expressionless faces, with never a "move on" from the
policeman, who seemed the least obstrusive of mortals.
San Luís Potosí has many large rich churches, misery and
pseudo-religion being common joint-legacies of Spanish rule. Small
chance these creatures would have of feeling at home in a place so
different from their earthly surroundings as the Christian heaven. The
thump of church bells, some with the voice of battered old tin pans,
broke out frequently. Now and then one of