John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

One Sunday Mac and Concha and some Mexican newspaper men and Ben Stowell and his girl, Angustias, who was a chorusgirl at the Lirico, went out on the trolley to Xochimilco. They hired a boat with a table in it and an awning and an Indian to pole them round through the poplarbordered canals among the rich flowerpatches and vegetablegardens. They drank pulque and they had a bottle of whisky with them, and they bought the girls calla lilies. One of the Mexicans played a guitar and sang.

In the afternoon the Indian brought the boat back to a landing and they strolled off in couples into the woods. Mac suddenly felt very homesick and told Concha about his children in the U. S. and about Rose particularly, and she burst into tears and told him how much she loved children, but that when she was seventeen she had been very very sick and they’d thought she was going to die and now she couldn’t have any children, only Porfirio and Venustiano. Mac kissed her and told her that he’d always look after her.

When they got back to the trolleystation, loaded down with flowers, Mac and Ben let the girls go home alone and went to a cantina to have a drink. Ben said he was pretty tired of this sort of thing and wished he could make his pile and go back to the States to marry and have a home and a family. “You see, Mac,” he said, “I’m forty years old. Christ, a man can’t bat around all his life.” “Well, I’m not far from it,” said Mac. They didn’t say much, but Ben walked up with Mac as far as the office of The Mexican Herald and then went down town to the Iturbide to see some oilmen who were staying there. “Well, it’s a great life if you don’t weaken,” he said as he waved his hand at Mac and started down the street. He was a stocky bullnecked man with a bowlegged walk.

Several days later Ben came around to the Plaza del Carmen before Mac was out of bed. “Mac, you come and eat with me this noon,” he said. “There’s a guy named G. H. Barrow here I want to kinda show the town a little bit. He might be useful to us… I want to know what he’s after anyway.” The man was writing articles on the Mexican situation and was said to have some connection with the A. F. of L. At lunch he asked anxiously if the water was safe and whether it wasn’t dangerous to walk round the streets after nightfall. Ben Stowell kidded him along a little and told him stories of generals and their friends breaking into a bar and shooting into the floor to make the customers dance and then using the place for a shooting gallery. “The shooting gallery, that’s what they call congress here,” said Mac. Barrow said he was going to a meeting of the Union Nacional de Trabajadores that afternoon and would they mind going with him to interpret for him. It was Mac’s day off so they said, “All right.” He said he’d been instructed to try to make contacts with stable labor elements in Mexico with the hope of joining them up with the Pan-American Federation of Labor. Gompers would come down himself if something could be lined up. He said he’d been a shipping clerk and a Pullman conductor and had been in the office of the Railroad Brotherhood, but now he was working for the A. F. of L. He wished American workers had more ideas about the art of life. He’d been at the Second International meetings at Amsterdam and felt the European workers understood the art of life. When Mac asked him why the hell the Second International hadn’t done something to stop the World War, he said the time wasn’t ripe yet and spoke about German atrocities.

“The German atrocities are a Sundayschool picnic to what goes on every day in Mexico,” said Ben. Then Barrow went to ask whether Mexicans were as immoral as it was made out. The beer they were drinking with their lunch was pretty strong and they all loosened up a little. Barrow wanted to know whether it wasn’t pretty risky going out with girls here on account of the high percentage of syphilis. Mac said yes, but that he and Ben could show him some places that were all right if he wanted to look ’em over. Barrow tittered and looked embarrassed and said he’d just as soon look ’em over. “A man ought to see every side of things when he’s investigating conditions.” Ben Stowell slapped his hand on the edge of the table and said that Mac was just the man to show him the backside of Mexico.

They went to the meeting that was crowded with slender dark men in blue denim. At first they couldn’t get in on account of the crowd packed in the aisles and in the back of the hall, but Mac found an official he knew who gave them seats in a box. The hall was very stuffy and the band played and there was singing and the speeches were very long. Barrow said listening to a foreign language made him sleepy, and suggested that they walk around town; he’d heard that the red light district was… he was interested in conditions.

Outside the hall they ran across Enrique Salvador, a newspaperman that Ben knew. He had a car and a chauffeur. He shook hands and laughed and said the car belonged to the chief of police who was a friend of his and wouldn’t they like to ride out to San Angel? They went out the long avenue past Chapultepec, the Champs Elysées of Mexico, Salvador called it. Near Tacubaya Salvador pointed out the spot where Carranza’s troops had had a skirmish with the Zapatistas the week before and a corner where a rich clothing merchant had been murdered by bandits, and G. H. Barrow kept asking was it quite safe to go so far out in the country, and Salvador said, “I am a newspaperman. I am everybody’s friend.”

Out at San Angel they had some drinks and when they got back to the city they drove round the Pajaritos district. G. H. Barrow got very quiet and his eyes got a watery look when he saw the little lighted cribhouses, each one with a bed and some paperflowers and a crucifix that you could see through the open door, past a red or blue curtain, and the dark quiet Indian girls in short chemises standing outside their doors or sitting on the sill.

“You see,” said Ben Stowell, “it’s easy as rolling off a log… But I don’t advise you to get too careless round here… Salvador’ll show us a good joint after supper. He ought to know because he’s a friend of the chief of police and he runs most of them.”

But Barrow wanted to go into one of the cribs so they got out and talked to one of the girls and Salvador sent the chauffeur to get a couple of bottles of beer. The girl received them very politely and Barrow tried to get Mac to ask her questions, but Mac didn’t like asking her questions so he let Salvador do it. When G. H. Barrow put his hand on her bare shoulder and tried to pull her chemise off and asked how much did she want to let him see her all naked, the girl didn’t understand and tore herself away from him and yelled and cursed at him and Salvador wouldn’t translate what she said. “Let’s get this bastard outa here,” said Ben in a low voice to Mac, “before we have to get in a fight or somethin’.”

They had a tequila each before dinner at a little bar where nothing was sold but tequila out of varnished kegs. Salvador showed G. H. Barrow how to drink it, first putting salt on the hollow between his thumb and forefinger and then gulping the little glass of tequila, licking up the salt and swallowing some chile sauce to finish up with, but he got it down the wrong way and choked.

At supper they were pretty drunk and G. H. Barrow kept saying that Mexicans understood the art of life and that was meat for Salvador who talked about the Indian genius and the Latin genius and said that Mac and Ben were the only gringos he ever met he could get along with, and insisted on their not paying for their meal. He’d charge it to his friend the chief of police. Next they went to a cantina beside a theater where there were said to be French girls, but the French girls weren’t there. There were three old men in the cantina playing a cello, a violin and a piccolo. Salvador made them play La Adelita and everybody sang it and then La Cucaracha. There was an old man in a broadbrimmed hat with a huge shiny pistolholster on his back, who drank up his drink quickly when they came in and left the bar. Salvador whispered to Mac that he was General Gonzales and had left in order not to be seen drinking with gringos.