Cuernavaca, the Oriental City of the Western Hemisphere

Cuernavaca The Oriental City of the Western Hemisphere BY ELIZABETH R. CANNON Cuernavaca, Mexico, is a dream-city in a painted land. To the east belong its palms silhouetted against a pastel sky, its opalescent peaks in the distance, its flat, red-tiled roo.fs, with an occasional Byzantine dome, its pink and yellow and pea-green houses, its quaint cobble-stone streets fringed with voluptuously flowering oleanders, its Madonna-like women, lurking in church doorways, its biblical-looking girls, carrying water jars on their heads, and an occasional Mary, seated on an ass, cuddling a bigeyed, brown baby to her bosom. The open air market in the plaza resembles an Oriental bazaar. It is at its best in the early morning, for long before

CUERNAVACA 711 dawn, along the well worn ruts, have come the wares, some on the backs of burros, others on the backs of more patient men, and, more the shame, a few on the shoulders of women. The first glimpse in the brilliant sunlight cooled by a canyon breeze, gives an intoxicating sense of color. Tropical man, like parrots and butterflies, revels in the wealth of golds, crimsons, and greens. Under awnings of white cloth the market women squat behind their wares, displayed on rush mats. There is pottery formed in many shapes, set with mosaics and ornamented with lizards and heads of Maximilian. There are baskets plaited by hand, for this country offers the anomaly of having hand-made things cheaper than machine made. There are heaps of strange tropical fruits and luscious green vegetables which they sell by the cent's worth. After seeing the flower stalls, with their fragrant bunches of gardenias and narcissus, one can understand why the honey of this region is redolent with perfume. While the women sell and barter, the men engage in petty gambling games in the moorish fountain gutter, and at a convenient corner stands the pawn-shop, the most widely patronized institution of the town. In this, neatly ticketed, are many household treasures, varying from the nina's doll to her mother's irons. Here are old, felt sombreros trimmed with tarnished silver braid, that might tell of stirring times, and beside them are rare old blankets of rainbow hue. Here stands the palace of Cortez, which was an adjunct to his sugar hacienda, not many miles away. They show you the room where he smothered his wife (remarkable how many wives he had to dispose of), although I believe the house at Coyocan disputes this with the palace; nay, goes a step farther, for it shows vou the well down which he threw her body afterward. Here, among the lotus eaters, he came with his Indian love. Donna Marina, for a post mortem honeymoon, before he abandoned her to marry a duchess. Being a great conqueror, Cortez had always

712 IMPROVEMENT ERA labored under the idea that he ought to marry a great lady. "You will never prosper again," the Indian interpreter told him, nor did he. Then, being a sensible woman, with both beauty and fortune left, she promptly turned around and married another Spaniard. There, too, is the church built by Cortez, with the ancient sepulchres of some of the conquerors themselves in the yard, brooded over by a great umbrella tree. In the dim vista of the cathedral may be distinguished the pale luster of the silver and blue altar. Before a bleeding figure of the Savior an old man with hoary head lies flat, with arms extended, on the cold stone, expiating some sin. A mother kneels before Our Lady of Sorrows, praying for her absent son, and a young girl who has been supplicating St. Anthony, patron saint of marriage, arises with a sigh, and glancing hastily around, as if afraid of being seen, nervously draws her hebosa to hide her face and her secret, both. An old world garden in New Spain is the Borda. Picturesque lakes, bounded by portals and moss-grown tera patio races, battlemented walls and Moorish fountains, have been enclosed by the jungle. Beneath the guavas and the mammeys the coffee snows its white blossoms. Creepy, tropical vines hug the ancient walls, and roses and laurel fight bravely for existence, amid more flaunting tropic blossoms. Yellow pond lilies are mirrored in the yellow lake. Despite the swans that float thereon, the mariposa butterflies that coquet flirtatiously from flower to flower, and the lizard that creeps out upon the pavement once trod by the foot of an empress, the whole place seems dead, with the pregnant silence of the jungle. It reminds one of Omar and his Persian garden : "I sometimes think that never blows so red The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled. That every Hyacinth the Garden wears Dropt in her lap from some once lovely Head."

CUERNAVACA 713 This garden has its own dead. Of them Huberta, daughter of the inn-keeper of the Hotel Morelos, told me, as we loitered on its moss-grown terraces and looked from the mirador over the barranca at the hills turning to ashes of roses. The gardens were built by Jose de la Borda, a Frenchman, who took millions out of his mines at Tasco. Since he worked the Indians as slaves, he eased his conscience by giving a million dollars for a church, and with another he built these gardens for his own delectation. What he did with the other forty-odd millions, history does not state, but, like ill-gotten gains, it seemed to have vanished into the earth whence it came. Borda's son, a monk, loved an Indian girl, and, having two children by her, he offered $20,000 to the Pope to legitimatize them. The Pope refused the bribe and the edict, and the younger Borda and his money bags disappeared in these very gardens — probably slugged. Here Carlota, alone, dreamed her dreams of empire, and the shades of madness fell upon her. Maximilian, seven miles away, trjed, in the blandishments of Indian dancing girls, to forget what the Mexicans were going to do to him. He left there to be shot, at the order of a Zopotec Indian. The present owner of the gardens is in the insane asylum, and the lawyers are quarreling over the residue. Even the tenant, a sensible woman who runs a curiosity shop, has troubles of her own. The gardens are haunted. Instead of the regulation white, this ghost appears in full armor, and carries a gun. Whether it is the spirit of the murdered monk, or a live person interested in finding Borda's buried millions, he has been successful in driving everyone off the premises. Even a doughty Englishwoman, who valorously set up her bed in the front room, only stayed one night. The present tenant and her two daughters have made solemn affidavit that they have seen this ghost. As soon as they get better acquainted with him they will write a book on the subject. The evening shadows turned the yellow terraces gray, a lizard darted in front of us, and young America precipitately fled the gardens. Returning to the hotel, we climbed up to the roof garden, and here, reclining luxuriously, amid the purple bougainvillaea and palms, we busied ourselves watching the preparations for the' night at an inn, such as they have in the holy land, which shelters man and beast. Amid the braying of asses and stamping of