A Visit to Don Otavio: a Traveller’s Tale from Mexico, by Sybille Bedford (New York : Counterpoint Press, reprint 2003; first edition 1953)
In A Visit to Don Otavio: a Traveller’s Tale from Mexico, Sybille Bedford describes her 1952 “impromptu” journey to Mexico with her friend, Esther Murphy Arthur, “arriving without itinerary, without preconceptions, and with their senses open.” Described by Bruce Chatwin as “a book of marvels,” Sybille Bedford transports readers to time and place, describing the joys and challenges of travel in this “extravagantly beautiful and brutal country.” Although much has changed since Bedford set foot in Mexico City; Cuernavaca; Guadalajara; Mazatlán; Querétaro; Puebla; Lake Chapala, the location of Don Otavio’s “hacienda”; and other places; A Visit to Don Otavio remains a fine companion when traveling to Mexico, whether in person or vicariously.
We were then each working on a book and had reached midstream, that prosperous passage between the struggle of the beginning and the obsession of the end, when the book moves with its own existence and has not yet absorbed one's own, and the daily quarrying is an anchor rather than a burden, a secret discipline at once attaching and detaching, muffling and heightening the rest of living. Within these shafts we strayed at will between two dreams, the life of our books, and the life of the Hacienda.Every day we wore linen clothes, every day we bathed. We had never been so free. Letters were lost or late, everything else in abeyance among those birds and fruit and flowers—anxiety, money, love; the vicissitudes of friends, the miseries of politics, ourselves perhaps.” – from A Visit to Don Otavio: A Traveller's Tale from Mexico, by Sybille Beford