Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/42

32 large corn tortillas, the bread of the poor of Mexico, a cup of boiled beans, unflavored, and a bowl of fish—putrid, stinking fish, fish that reeked with an odor that stuck in my system for days. How could they ever eat it? Ah, well, to vary a weary, unending row of meals consisting of only beans and tortillas a time must come when the most refined palate will water to the touch of something different, though that something is fish which offends the heavens with its rottenness.

"Beans, tortillas, fish!" I suppose that they can at least keep alive on it," I told myself, "provided they do no worse at the other two meals." "By the way," I turned to the adminstrador, who was showing us about, "what do they get at the other two meals?"

"The other two meals?" The administrador was puzzled. "The other two meals? Why, there aren't any others. This is the only meal they have!"

Beans, tortillas, fish, once a day, and a dozen hours under the hottest sun that ever shone!

"But, no," the administrador corrected himself. "They do get something else, something very fine, too, something that they can carry to the field with them and eat when they wish. Here is one now."

At this he picked up from one of the tables of the women a something about the size of his two small fists, and handed it to me, triumphantly. I took the round, soggy mass in my fingers, pinched, smelled and tasted it. It proved to be corn dough, half fermented and patted into a ball. This, then, was the other two meals, the rest of the substance besides beans, tortillas and decayed fish which sustained the toilers throughout the long day. I turned to a young Maya who was carefully picking a fish bone.