Step down, elder brother.

• Author: Niggli, Josefina
• Position: LATITUDES - Excerpt

Monterrey in February is not a happy place. The tourist season, which lasts from middle March until the end of January, is splashed with sunshine and the ever-changing panorama of flowers; but February is winter, and winter in Monterrey is very dull. Even the mountains reject their city, drawing a gray veil of mist between themselves and the town. The sun retires behind a curtain of heavy clouds; the begonias in the patios take this month to rest from blooming.

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Since most of the wealthier families choose February to go to the ever-golden beach at Acapulco, to Mexico City, to Cuernavaca, for one last burst of gaiety before the mourning days of Lent, their fine automobiles are frugally kept in storage, and even the traffic dims from its usual brilliance.

Of course there is no lack of cars. The traffic still snarls through the streets. There is great need for the signal light at the corner of Zaragoza and Padre Mier. But it lacks the fine elegance, the arrogance, of traffic in season.

The people on the streets do not stroll in February. They hurry, with their heads bowed. Some of the poorer classes wrap handkerchiefs across their noses to prevent the dread "catching of air." Woolen shawls lie heavy on the shoulders of old women, and old men wrap their bodies in blankets.

It is cold in February, and the brilliant sun has so thinned the blood that there is no resistance to the winds that come down from the mountains to whistle across the flat roofs. In the poverty sections of San Luisito and Guadalupe, pneumonia and influenza brush the houses, and the gates of the cemeteries on Avenida Carranza are always open to the diggers of new graves.

February is a bitter month, a month of tears and death, a month to be endured while it is present and forgotten as quickly as it has passed. And yet, to Domingo Vasquez de Anda it was, in some ways, the most satisfactory month of the whole year.

This afternoon--it was still early, not yet five-thirty--as he walked up Escobedo Street to the offices of the morning newspaper: El Despertador del Norte (the Awakener of the North), he moved much more slowly than was usual to his restless...