Mexican Landscape

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 488, 29 October 1948, Page 17

Mexican Landscape

VILLAGE IN THE SUN. By Dane Chandos. Michael Joseph. s REVIOUS writers on Mexico have made it sound neither pleasant nor comfortable. B. Traven in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Graham Greene in The Power and the Glory write of it from the outside, and see it through European eyes, with contempt for its disorder, its cruelty, and its lack of purpose. Although neither of these writers,

the one an_ egalitarian, the other a traditionalist, is par--ticularly wedded to. the idea of progress, both, perhaps in spite of themselves, have judged Mexico by. utilitarian standards. Not so Dane Chandos: he has lived in the Mexico of to-day, the Mexico ‘self dedicated to socialism, reform and efficiency, very happily. because of the ineffectiveness of

these innovations to change the ancient good manners, homely ingenuity, and inefficient kindliness of a people whose society reached emotional equilibrium long since. Dane Chandos, a cosmopolitan of English blood who happened to be born in Mexico and returned to it after years of wandering in Europe, writes the story of his first year’s residence in the pillage of Ajijic, beside a lake on the plateau of Western Mexico. He bought land and built a house. Both took time and patience. Meanwhile he kept house in a rented dwelling, accumulated servants almost imperceptibly, and eventually, without entirely losing his equivocal gringo status, became the friend and confidant of many of the villagers. He soon caught the mood of the country, in which time is of no importance, and even rows and quarrels are never followed to a logical conclusion, but dissolve into an acquiescent indifference. As well as having a human sympathy for the Mexicans as unhygienic primitives trying to put on the hard mask of modernity, Dane Chandos has a keen eye for character. Here is a village shopkeeper: "Bernardina is small and elderly and gentle and vague, and her eyes are neighbours that have fallen out." At the Holy Week fiesta, the mayor, Don Pedro, setting ‘up a bar on the shore of the lake, also sets up "as a final amenity" on a big tree on the beach this notice: "Within a hundred metres each side of the mole it is forbidden to bring cattle or women to wash." Chandos has as good an eye for nature as he has for man. In "the calms of May," "the time when everything seems to go slowly, the men and the animals and the hours," the cultivators burn tKeir land to clear it:

"By day, only pale plumes of smoke smear the hills. But at night long snakes of fire glitter all round the lake." The still lake, with its "satin water" and its "royal tones" offsetting more tender ones, brimmed with distant mountains, its shores studded with "wine-glass willows," where the population fishes and bathes and comes to play or to gossip, is the main element in descriptions of an external world as strange and beautiful as those who people it, "earth coloured: and close to the earth."

The literal translation of Spanish conversations creates a pleasantly curious effect. In spite of his rather indiscriminate use of American idioms, Chandos’s prose is clear, nervous and pointed. This is the best book of travel I have read in a long time, a document in anthropology in the broadest sense,. mass dbservation sub specie aeternatatis.