Free A Visit to Don Otavio by Sybille Bedford Page A

saves you four-fifths of the bill, and you split the saving. This is where your troubles begin. The one point is overstressed, your lights fuse, you keep tripping over wires. Then a controller appears and threatens to denounce you for what he quite correctly calls fraud. You bribe him as expected, and at the end of the year you are fined by the company anyhow. If you refuse this arrangement to begin with – we all did – you never get any current at all. Your application’s simply not honoured. It gets lost.
    â€˜â€¦ Health: better get yourselves re-vaccinated against smallpox. Yes, there is a lot of typhoid and dysentry. In fact, one-fifth of the people die of some kind of intestinal infection. The rest die of malaria, bronchitis, whooping-cough and the measles. They all die young and fast. There is no heart disease, they don’t live old enough. Oh, they’ve got a sort of wirystrength – you’ve seen them with those pianos on their backs – but they get tired quickly, no staying power, they just slip out of life. There’s not much of a dividing line. They don’t prepare against death any more than they prepare against the next dry season. Although they do have a high opinion of Paradise.
    â€˜Doctors are not bad on the whole. Good surgeons. The trouble is that they won’t set up practice outside the larger towns. The Government tried to make them. Passed a law that a man couldn’t take his degree unless he signed up to work seven years in an Indian village. But you know what
laws
are here. Too many of them as it is. Even old Don Porfirio used to complain about them.’
    â€˜Diaz?’ said I.
    â€˜The old devil could be quite sensible at times. Don’t look shocked. It takes ten years in Mexico to make a Catalonian Anarchist put in a good word for Diaz.
    â€˜The Indios don’t go to doctors much anyway. It’s not that they prefer the witches, they’re afraid of snubbing them. Nursing’s poor too, with so many of the nuns still gone. When the Sisters were allowed back a few years ago, the people knelt in the streets and kissed their skirts. Lay skirts, of course. Nuns and priests still may not wear their habits in public.’
    â€˜What do you really think of the expulsion of the clergy?’ said E.
    There was a weary pause. ‘You might say that we are not exactly proclerical. The Mexican Church used to be quite fantastically corrupt. But the Reform Laws – a hundred years of them, soon made so much bitterness and misery … Such violence, such brutality, such excesses on all sides. They put half the country and half the world against Juarez, they helped to make that Hapsburg foolery possible; they kept the Revolutions going for an extra decade. After six or seven years of war and eighty years of persecutions, one doesn’t think so much about the original rights and wrongs. One accepts the Concordat. Such as it is.
    â€˜Some of the priests are hogs, others are good men. One used to talk about the Church keeping people in ignorance. Well, they
are
ignorant. I’m not so sure now that our brand of universal education wouldn’t merely add another kind of ignorance. Mexico has the most up-to-datehumanitarian legislation imaginable, but even when it doesn’t stay on paper, it seems to have no impact on any known Indio’s life. Perhaps only the priests could be a power against bestiality … This is not a Western country. They are not the heirs of the French Revolution. Here, one lives to learn the futility of the principle of equality.’
    Â 
    We stay for supper, and presently the Cs’ daughter offers to drive us back. From that graceful house we tumble into a pitch black lane and feel our way to the Model A Ford waiting at the end. It is mild; the road leads through an avenue of tamarinds, frogs are croaking in the streets of Coyacán, but the night is without beauty.

CHAPTER SEVEN
Mexico City: The