Humorously enough in a large employer of Mexican labor, Blumey has never in twenty years learned to keep up with all the holidays that are so enthusiastically observed in Mexico, and his waiters, barkeeps, bookkeepers, and such now and then pull what he calls a “sneak fiesta” on him, leaving his projects understaffed and himself close to hysteria.
The pleasures, beauties, and various humors of any trip to Mexico are, even in the bounds of individual experience, far too multitudinous to bear repetition, but this department will not forget the item on a restaurant menu at Jalapa with its translation: “Ham Spanish, With Style”; nor the new and shiny motorcycle parked, for reasons of property preservation on the part of its proud owner, directly adjacent to the reception desk in the lobby of the Hotel Iturbide in Monterrey; nor the drug store in the same town which maintained a band of strolling musicians for the pleasure of its patrons, a touch which lent a melancholy grandeur to the purchase of tooth paste and shaving soap; nor the street urchins who shout “goodbye” under the impression this is a hilariously friendly salutation; nor the misery with which Mexicans of all classes seem to endure wet weather, as though its existence were a direct negation of God; nor the full eight-course dinners any working man can be seen cooking in the streets of any city in as many little earthenware pots over a charcoal fire during siesta; nor the penny fireworks the picnickers explode throughout the countryside wherever a banana tree offers its shade, simply to celebrate the only Sunday in the week; nor the bordertown liquor merchants who get the potential customer mildly pie-eyed on samples, a custom that should be universally encouraged; nor the delusion common to Americans on their first trip that English is universally spoken and that they need no Spanish at all.
And the farrago of his souvenirs will include the multitude of the gardenias, even as advertised, at Fortin de las Flores; the elaborate and hilarious cocktail parties at the American Embassy whenever the arrival of a distinguished national gave the staff the opportunity; the diamonds, summer sables, and off-the-face hats at the bull fights on Sundays, fit to give Valentina Schlee the vapors; the beers on the terrace of the tavern across the Plaza in Taxco while the moon mounted incredibly between the staggeringly baroque spires of the cathedral; the fantastic supper parties given by Dolores Del Rio at her suburban villa beginning at two o'clock in the morning with the dinner-jacketed guests overflowing through the French windows into the courtyards with its trees that were old when the Spanish first came; reading Billy Rose in the Mexico City Herald at breakfast and feeling that the Diamond Horseshoe on Forty-sixth Street was very far away; the immemorial patterns of the “China Road” and its ageless stone culverts, leading down through the tropics to Acapulco; the stars, each equatorial one of them as big as a Cartier silver cake dish, just above the tips of the fiddlers' bows in the roof café of the Reforma-Casablanca with the band playing “Night of Love.”
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