Books: Mexican Tapestry

THE TAKERS OF THE CITY (376 pp.)—H. R. Hays — Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.75).

“Young Ricardo de la Fuente, handsome and schooled in the mannered ways of the Spanish aristocracy,” says this novel’s blurb, “came to 16th Century Mexico because of a romantic entanglement which violated the moral code of his class and time.” One of Ricardo’s first acts on reaching his sugar plantation in the New World was to violate Lucita, an Indian slave-girl: he calmed his conscience by muttering that she was “scarcely more than an animal.” And when he met his branded, filthy, full-eyed, Indian field hands for the first time, Ricardo’s only thought was how awful it was that a decent white man should have to put up with such stinking savages.

The Takers of the City is the story of how young Ricardo, helped by Lucita, underwent a change of heart and became a decent human being. It is also a well-painted picture, rich in color and action, of 16th Century Mexican life.

Even at the start, Ricardo was a better sort of man than most of his fellow colonists. To these rough, tough Spaniards, many of whom had fought as conquistadors, brutal subjugation of the Indians seemed the obvious and only way to solve the vast problems of the huge, semitropical land. Pious Emperor Charles V, in faraway Spain, tried to end the feudal system that made the Indians worse than slaves (no one was responsible for their care). He wanted the Indians to be given patient, Christian, religious instruction. Planters and priests alike flatly defied the royal edict. When the Emperor authorized his emissary. Bishop Bartolome de las Casas, to enforce the order, there began a battle between the rugged Bishop and his handful of Dominican friars on the one hand, and the furious planters and renegade clergy on the other, that was not resolved until slavery was abolished in Mexico in 1824.

Novelist Hays, whose last novel, Lie Down in Darkness (TIME, Sept. 18, 1944), was a suspenseful psychological study, is more successful in showing where his characters stand in relation to the brotherhood of man than in furnishing them with real legs. His Indians and friars have simple souls, his slave-owners display appropriate symptoms of spiritual and physical decay: everyone is more symbolical than human. But the colorful setting and the well-organized, well-dramatized facts of history set The Takers of the City well above the average of current historical novels.