Free A Visit to Don Otavio by Sybille Bedford

read in bed. You will find a bulb in mid-ceiling and the switch by the door.
    â€˜Never come straight to a point. Mexican Indians are formalists.Americans offend them by being businesslike or friendly, both are considered
una barbaridad.
Always be
polite
.
    â€˜â€¦ Water: don’t touch what comes out of a tap. You needn’t always buy bottled water. You can trust the carafes they put in the bedrooms. The water is electrically sterilised, or at least boiled.’
    â€˜Do they take the trouble? It would be so easy to cheat.’
    â€˜They won’t. Crime is a profession here. You either set up as a bandit or you are an honest man. Cheating is outside their habits and characters.’
    â€˜Except in Mexico City,’ said Señora C.
    â€˜Except in Mexico City,’ said her husband.
    â€˜â€¦ Food: you said you liked chile? One does need a touch of good hot pepper sometimes. Eat anything you please. There’s too much fuss among foreigners about that. As a matter of fact, you’d be hard put to find fresher food anywhere. Nothing stored, nothing frozen, or lugged across half a continent in freight cars. Everything produced in small quantities near the consumer. Vegetables picked and eggs laid just in time for dinner. Alas, meat is killed in time for dinner too. I shouldn’t eat uncooked lettuce though, unless I knew where it came from; certainly not in Mexico City where the market gardens are watered from the city sewer. It’s different in the Provinces. Everything is.’
    They all sighed, and again I was aware of the note of revulsion whenever the City is mentioned.
    â€˜It is an evil place,’ said Señora C.
    â€˜The people’s diet is sound enough.
Frijoles
and
tortillas
. Black beans, hand-ground maize cakes; and chile pepper. That’s what the Aztecs ate and that’s what they are eating now. It never changed. It’s not the most energy-building diet, but it’s complete. Down to all the vitamins. We only found out in the laboratories what they’ve known by instinct for three thousand years. You see, the Aztecs had no cattle, which meant no milk. The rich ate turkey, eggs and game, and fresh vegetables, but no one had any butter, or butcher’s meat, or even pork. All that, with the horses and goats and pack animals, came with the blessings of the Conquest. The Indios haven’t really taken to the new food. They say butter turns parrots mute, and they won’t eat bread. As it takes four hours to grind the maizefor one person’s daily
tortillas
, you can imagine what this means in a household. We need two servants to run this place, and two servants to keep them and themselves in
tortillas
, and a fifth to tend the baking braziers. She has no teeth, so the others feed her on mashed beans and chile which are luxury food, but save us,
pobres académicos
, a sixth servant.’
    I was fascinated and quite shameless.
    â€˜If you
really
want to know, we pay our manservant a peso a day. The cook gets a bit more as she comes from Monterrey, which is supposed to have a faint Yankee chic. The
tortilla
menials are paid in coppers. Oh yes, it’s all cheap enough by Western standards. In Mexico everything is cheap and everybody is underpaid.
    â€˜Take the electric light. You don’t pay for the current you consume, you pay for the number of sockets you have in the house. Of course the system is quite mad. It comes to as much for a ballroom chandelier blazing away all night with hundreds of watts as for the bulb on your attic steps. So far so bad. Now comes the collector, who is so ill-paid that he couldn’t exist without bribes, literally not exist. You have just taken a house, he goes into your living-room and counts the sockets – ceiling light, standing lamp, side lamps,
unos, dos, tres, cuatros
… “Nonsense,” he says, “you must put in one point and connect all your lights with extension wires.” It