Free A Visit to Don Otavio by Sybille Bedford Page B

Past and the Present
    All, all of a piece throughout
    Thy chase had a beast in view,
    Thy wars brought nothing about,
    Thy lovers were all untrue.
    W HO BUILT THE CITY? What is the history of this jumble of main street and chunks intact from an almost legendary past, this rather tremendous place, so squalid, so splendid, that bears the megalomaniac imprint of three civilisations?
    Many hundred years ago, the Valley of Mexico, an oval seven thousand feet above the seas, walled and sheltered by porphyry and immense volcanic rock, was a valley of great lakes and flowering tropical forests. Here on fifty islands and the shore of Lake Taxcuoco rose the city. Waterways fronted by low-roofed palaces of pink stone, plazas at anchor, floating gardens: Tenochtitlán, waterbound, canal-crossed, bridge-linked, ablaze with flowers … And amid the soft magic, a huge temple, a pyramid, squat, vast, solid, dedicated to some deity of war, piled without help of pack animal or metal tool, stone to stone forever.
    For three centuries, back entrances were lapped by water; canoes glided to market upon canals pompous with lilies, shaded by roof-grown trees, and the royal barges sailed the lake between the mainland and the Summer Palace.
     
    Then the Spaniards came and changed everything. They couldn’t have been more thorough. After four years the city is destroyed and rebuilt, the lakes drained, the waterways filled in, the canals dry, the forests decimated. The countryside begins to look like the bare hills of Castille. Naturally the climate changes too, and the soil. The new terra firma turnsinto swamp. There are floods, landslides … Nine thousand Spaniards die of the fevers. Native deaths are not recorded. Only that martian temple, the pyramid, escaped. Too solid for the old world’s most accomplished efforts at destruction, it resisted demolition for some years; then by its own weight, sank out of sight into the boggy ground. There it lies, intact below the main square, waiting for archaeologist or messiah. The Spanish built a cathedral on top of it and dedicated it to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, some four hundred years before the recent promulgation of that dogma. Opposite, on the site of Montezuma’s town house (razed), they began a renaissance mansion, first Cortez’ residence, then in turn Gubernatorial, Viceregal, National, Imperial and Presidential Palace.
    The fabulous past is over. From now on the history of the city is that of any sixteenth-century outpost. Ecclesiastical and administrative magnificence, throne-room and
audiencia
, space and façade, the prestige building exacted by empire and counter-reformation. Good sound Roman masonry, as contemporarily practised at Segovia and Tarragona, but applied to
tezontle
the local soft volcanic stone, and to adobe the native clay. Colonial products of a good period: renaissance, plateresque, baroque, churrigueresque …
     
    The City grows, the population increases – more people living, cooking, dying at close quarters. There are no drains. As the names of the Viceroys grow longer, the administrative machine becomes creaky; from Garcia Guerra to Diego Osorio de Escobar y Llamas, to Antonio Sebastian de Toledo Molina y Salazar, to Diego Lopez Pacheco Cabrera y Bobadilla Duque de Escalona y Marques de Villena. By 1750, Spain is in full decline and Mexico a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants.
    These are the years of the rat, the open sewers, of garbage rotting in the unpaved streets, of the cut-purse and the cut-throat, of cholera and fire unchecked. Madrid is considered the filthiest town in Europe; Mexico City is the death-trap of the New World. There were five major inundations since the Conquest, each followed by an epidemic. The cellars are never dry. Once the city was under water for six years and abandoned to the lower orders. At the end of the eighteenth century there is some attempt atreform. Charles III in Spain, Viceroy Conde de Revillagigedo over here. A number