A Visit to Don Otavio: A Mexican Journey by Sybille Bedford

Under the next morning's sun, Morelia does not look like Avila and autumnal Castile. All the same it is very Spanish. A town of under fifty thousand, architecturally homogenous, of long lines of arcades and seventeenth-century facades, compact, grey, handsome, dwindling into mud huts, ending abruptly in unbroken countryside. It is quiet after Mexico City, serene by day and melancholy by night. There is nothing particular to see. From the hotel roof, the view over the plain is enchanting. The inside of the cathedral is decorated to the last square inch in 1890 polychrome. Christ wears a wig of real hair, the Saints' tears are pearly beads, the Martyrs' blood lozenges of crimson wax, and the images are kissed to a high polish. Before independence, Morelia was called Valladolid, Valladolid of Michoacán. Yes, it is very Spanish, but it is not Spain. Like the Puritans of New England, the Spanish impressed themselves on Mexico. Both settle in a part of the continent whose climate and countryside were familiar and congenial. Both established their language, their religion and a style of building, However, unlike the Puritans, the Spaniards did not eliminate the Indians. In fact, the Indians have about eliminated them. There are now supposed to be only some forty thousand whites left in a population of three million pure Indians and seventeen million mestizos, and many of these whites are only whites by courtesy or the use of face powder.

Shortly after World War II, German-English writer Sybille Bedford got tired of the United States and decided she wanted to take a trip to Mexico. She took with her a companion identified here only as E.--in truth, her lover Evelyn Gendel--and spent a year traveling the country by rail, by automobile, by boat, and by airplane. What she found was a country of great natural beauty, suffused with history, and not at all like the fashionable travel destinations of Europe. It's not said, but it may have been that Bedford, who from what I understand was sort of rushed out of Europe by her literary friends when the war came calling, had become disillusioned with Europe as an idea; Mexico, the oldest country in the Americas (as Bedford describes it) seems paradoxically quite new, totally undiscovered.

Bedford's Mexico is a country that has not quite become friendly to visitors: to drive anywhere, you must first go somewhere else in the other direction. Much of the narrative is taken up by travel mishaps, by waiting around for a bus or a boat to appear, which it sometimes does, and sometimes doesn't. An attempt to drive through the jungle to the Pacific coast goes as well as you'd imagine. In one hotel, S. and E. try to return to the lobby only to discover there are no stairs. It's in this environment that Don Otavio de X. y X. y X., the charismatic hacendado who invites S. and E. to stay with him in the book's central sections, wishes to turn his ancestral home into a hotel. There is much wrangling among Otavio and his family about who will invest in the hotel, and what will remain reserved for whom in the hacienda; I didn't quite understand it, but it was funny. The main obstacle for Don Otavio is that a long-promised road around Lake Chapala has yet to be built, so visitors must come by boat. Which is to say that the general disorderliness of the Mexican authorities is only one manifestation of a larger, perhaps spiritual, shabbiness to which S. and E. must accustom themselves.

Bedford comes to Mexico with an intense interest in the country's history. On the long train rides, on the second-class buses where she is crammed next to the chickens, she reads about the ill-fated "Emperor of Mexico" Maximilian, installed by European powers and later killed by Mexican republicans, who didn't take much to the idea of a European leader. Maximilian, as Bedford describes him, was a well-meaning fool, whose reformist ideals were quite different from the conservative powers who invited him to rule, and who thought that would be enough to stave off revolution. In a way, Maximilian is mirrored in the many European and American exiles that Bedford meets at Don Otavio's: the meddlesome Englishman, the German homeopath who locals consider a witch, the poisonously racist Virginian. Perhaps they are all castoffs, fled to Mexico because their idiosyncrasies have made them impossible to deal with in the places from which they came. Next to them, Don Otavio's fecklessness is charming, and seems of a piece with his openness and warmth.

No doubt today's Mexico is not much like the Mexico of Bedford's day. The charming villages are, in many cases, sprawling urban cities. I would guess that there are working roads between, say, Puebla and Vera Cruz, though I can't say for sure. Still, Bedford's travelogue gave me an appetite to see it for myself: the vistas, the volcanoes, the haciendas and churches, the roadside stands of tortillas and beans, the tierra caliente and the tierra templada.