A visit to Don Otavio: a traveller's tale from Mexico

382 Pages·2003·1.365 MB·English

by  Bedford, Sybille

Praise for A Visit to Don Otavio
“Before I am ready to call it quits,I would like to reread every book
I ever deeply enjoyed,beginning with Jane Austen and Isaac Babel
and Sybille Bedford’s A Visit to Don Otavio.”
—William Maxwell,The New York Times Sunday Magazine
“A work that evokes Mexico,that disturbing and paradoxical country,
as vividly as anything by D. H. Lawrence and, to my mind, more
vividly than Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano ...A wonderful
book.”
—Bruce Chatwin,Vogue
“A gay work of damaging wit ...A powerful response to landscape
and to people.Mrs.Bedford has the art of putting one bodily in the
country with all senses awake, and one emerges with her from
the Mexican experience bruised,shocked,but elated and with one’s
brain turned on.”
—V.S.Pritchett,New Statesman
“A delightful,unclassifiable,and shimmering book.”
—The New Yorker
“Mrs Bedford is perceptive,lively,aware of the significance of trifles,
and a fine writer.Applied to a beautiful,various,and still inscrutable
country,these talents yield a singularly delightful result.”
—The Times
“Here is an absolutely first-class writer at the top of her powers.”
—MarkAmory,Literary Review
“Mrs.Bedford brings it all blessedly to life:I cannot recall when last
I enjoyed so keenly the description of an unfamiliar place,so sharp
the eye for character,so alive the ear to the run of speech ...A book
radiant with comedy and color.”
—Raymond Mortimer,The Sunday Times
“Mrs.Bedford is capable of exercising a fine sort of detachment while
telling an intensely personal story ...With a perceptive paragraph
here,a bit of description there,a conversation recorded without com-
ment,she extracts the very essence of rural and small-town Mexicans.
In these pages they absolutely live;this is the way they are.”
—Anatole Broyard,The New York Times
Books by Sybille Bedford
A Visit to Don Otavio
A Traveller’s Tale from Mexico
A Legacy
A Novel
The Best We Can Do
The Trial of Dr.Adams
The Faces of Justice
A Traveller’s Report
A Favourite of the Gods
A Novel
A Compass Error
A Novel
Aldous Huxley
A Biography
Jigsaw:An Unsentimental Education
A Biographical Novel
As It Was
Pleasures,Landscapes and Justice
Pleasures and Landscapes
A Traveller’s Tales from Europe
A Visit to Don Otavio
A Traveller’s Tale from Mexico
(cid:2)
Sybille Be dford
Introduction by
Bruce Chatwin
COUNTERPOINT
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York
{Page:4}
Copyright © 1953,1960by Sybille Bedford
Introduction copyright © 1986by Bruce Chatwin
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission of the Publisher,
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or
reviews.
First published in Great Britain in 1953as The Sudden View:A Mexi-
can Journeyby Victor Gollancz Ltd.,London
Reprinted,with slight revisions,in 1960as A Visit to Don Otavioby
William Collins Sons & Co.Ltd.,London
This Counterpoint paperback edition published in 2003by arrange-
ment with Picador,an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Ltd.,London
A cataloging-in-publication record for this book is available from the
Library of Congress.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that
meets the American National Standards Institute Z39–48Standard.
Counterpoint
387Park Avenue South
New York,N.Y.10016
Counterpoint is a member of the Perseus Books Group.
03 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
{Page:5}
Contents
Introduction ix
part one
In Searchof a Journey
i New York to NuevoLaredo 3
ii Mesa del Norte– MesaCentral– Valle de
Mexico 23
iii MexicoCity: FirstClash 34
iv MexicoCity: Climatesand a Dinner 45
v MexicoCity: The BaedekerRound 52
vi Coyaca´n: Tea and Advice 62
vii MexicoCity: The Past and the Present 70
viii Cuernavaca 75
ix Morelia– Pazcuaro– A Hold-Up 87
x Money and the TarrascanIndians 109
xi Guadalajara 118
part two
Don Otavio
i San PedroTlayaca´n 131
ii A Well-RunHouse 141
iii Tea with Mr Middleton 148
iv Le Dineren Musique 155
v Mrs Rawlston’sFirstAppearance 162
vi Bridgewith Mrs Rawlston 168
v
{Page:6}
contents
vii Don EnriquezUnfoldsa Plan 178
viii Doublecrossings 204
ix A Family and a Fortune 212
x A Party 217
xi Mazatla´n:An Ordeal 221
part three
Travels
i Guanajuatoor Sic Transit 239
ii Quere´taro:A ModestInn 247
iii The EmperorMaximilianat Quere´taro 254
iv Cuernavaca– Acapulco– Taxco 278
v Oaxaca:Mitla and Monte Alba´n 288
vi Oaxaca:SomeAgreeablePeople 292
vii Puebla: A Generaland a Ship 299
viii Tuscueca:The Last of the Journeys 311
part four
The End of a Visit
i Returnto San Pedro 327
ii Clouds 333
iii A Trip in the Jungle:Mr MiddletonWins 336
iv Local Medicine 350
v The Best of All PossibleWorlds 354
vi
{Page:7}
To
Esther MurphyArthur
and to
Allanah Harper
{Page:8}
N
A
T
A S
N Gulfulf OfOf MexicoMexico YUC TABASCO CHIAPA Tuxtla
G uz
Galveston Brownsville Tampico VERATlaxcalaVera CrCRUPueblaZ Oaxaca OAXACAO
o R
San AntonioUSA Rio GrandeLaredoNuevoLaredo COAHUILAS NUEVOi eMonterreyr SaltillorSLEONDurangoaSAAcPMcCILaiUE SAdNdAr LUZacatecasISTeMenAAAguascalientestTOCraPiOTOSIleAnGuanajuatotZaleGuadalajaraTepicQueretaroL. ChapalaMoreliaMEXICO CITYJALISCOCuernavaca ColimaTaxcMICHOACANPUEBLA GUERRE Acapulco
O

e
r
d O n
UAHUA S ie rra M a GNARUD Mazatlá
H
HI
C
RA N I A
SONO B A JA C A LIF O R Pacific Ocean EXICO 200300400500miles
M 100
0
{Page:9}
INTRODUCTION
A
mong the many mysteries of twentieth-century pub-
lishing is the fact that Sybille Bedford’s A Visit to Don
Otavio could ever have gone out of print. For when the
history of modern prose in English comes to be written,Mrs
Bedford will have to appear in any list of its most dazzling
practitioners. ‘Travel books’ (that meaningless category!) did
admittedly go through a slump in the 1960s, while many
pretentious and unreadable novels remained in print. But
thenthisisnomoreatraveloguethanTurgenev’sSportsman’s
Sketches is a book about shooting woodcock. It is a novel in
thebestsense–thesenseofsomething‘newandfresh’–and,
assuch,itbelongsamongherthreemoreorlessautobiograph-
ical novels that begin with A Legacy. It is a story of release
from the claustrophobia of living in wartime New York; it
tackles that most intractable of subjects, Mexico (where so
many literary reputations have come to grief); and ends up
with the portrait of one unforgettable Mexican, Don Otavio
deXyXyX.
‘Of course it’s a novel,’ Mrs Bedford once said to me. ‘I
wanted to make something light and poetic ... I didn’t take
asinglenotewhenIwasinMexico...Ifyouclutteryourself
with notesitallgoes away.Idid,ofcourse,sendpostcardsto
friends,andwhenIstartedwriting,Icalledthemin.’
She is a most lively and articulate woman, resolutelyblind
to the commonplace, whose three inseparable passions are
ix
{Page:10}
introduction
writing, friendship, and the finest claret. She was born in
Germany some years before the First War, yet seems to have
been born on the move. Her mother was a compulsive
wanderer of bohemian temperament and varied nationality.
Her father was a south German baron, the ‘friend of all the
best chefs in London and Paris’, who, when she was six,
taught her how not to overcook his haricots verts and how to
recognize a great vintage: ‘It would never have occurred to
myfatherthatachildofsixwouldnothaveapalate.’
He died a year later – whereupon she was bundled off to
her mother in Italy, and then shipped off to England ‘for so-
called education which did not take place’. Later, as a young
girl adrift in the south of France, she steeped herself in
Baudelaire, Stendhal, Flaubert – and read none of the great
English classics. Aldous Huxley first encouraged her to write
and, under his influence, she wrote (but never published)
‘three portentous novels of ideas’. When the war came, she
escaped from France to North America; and when the war
wasover,shetravelledsouthtoMexico:‘Ihadagreatlonging
to move, to hear another language, eat new food; to be in a
country with a long nasty history in the past and as little
present history as possible. Surely there was scope in the
Americas, the New World that had touched the imagination
oftheElizabethans?’
There is no point in trying to summarize the trials, sights,
tastes, and delicious surprises of Mrs Bedford’s ‘Wonder
Voyage’, nor to comment on the uncluttered lucidity of her
style. It is simply a book of marvels, to be read again and
again and again. She never stoops to satire. She is never
facetious, never pontificates, never makes use of the cheap
ironic asides that are the stock-in-trade of the travelling
writer. Even when expounding the murky chronicles of
x