The Underdogs (16 page)

Bringing up the rearguard, trotting along, were Demetrio and Camila. She was still trembling, her lips dry and pale; he, in a bad mood because of how inane their move had been. There had been no Orozquistas, nor any battle even. Just a few dispersed Federales and a poor devil of a priest with about a hundred believers, all gathered under the archaic banner of “Religion and Order.” The priest was left dangling from a mesquite tree, while the surrounding field was littered with the dead, all with a small red insignia sewn to their chests that read: “Stop! The Sacred Heart of Jesus is with me!”

“Truth is, I've already more than paid myself all my back pay,” Quail said, showing off the gold watches and rings he had taken from the parish house.

“This kind of fightin' is really worth it,” Lard exclaimed, intermingling obscenities after each sentence. “At least ya know why ya're riskin' your hide!”

In the same hand in which he held the horse's reins, he clutched a shiny ornament he had torn off one of the holy statues in the church.

When Quail, who was quite an expert in these matters, greedily examined Lard's “advance,” he let out a grand burst of laughter:

“Your ornament is made out of tin!”

“Why are ya draggin' that piece of trash with ya?” Pancracio asked Towhead Margarito. One of the last to arrive, he had a prisoner with him.

“Do you want to know why? Because I have never seen the expression on the face of a man up close when a rope is tied tight around his neck.”

The prisoner was a very fat individual, and his breathing was labored. His face was beet red, his eyes bloodshot, and his forehead dripping sweat. They had his wrists tied and kept him walking.

“Anastasio, lend me your rope; my halter is breaking with this pig's weight. No, don't; now that I think about it, I do not need it. My Federale friend, I am going to kill you right now; you have suffered long enough. Look, the mesquite trees are still quite a ways away, and there is not even a telegraph post around here to hang you.”

Towhead Margarito took out his pistol, put the barrel of the gun on the prisoner's left temple, and immediately cocked back the trigger.

The Federale turned white as a corpse; his face stretched out and his glassy eyes shattered. His chest was heaving wildly, his entire body shaking as if overcome by a strong current.

Towhead Margarito kept his pistol in that position for several eternal seconds. During this time, his eyes glowed in a strange fashion, and his plump face, with its burning cheeks, lit up with a feeling of supreme voluptuousness.

“No, my Federale friend!” he said, slowly pulling back his weapon and returning it to its holster. “I do not want to kill you yet. You are going to go on as my orderly. You will see whether my heart is that evil!”

And he winked maliciously to everyone around.

The prisoner had gone mad. The only thing he did was make swallowing sounds, but his mouth and throat were completely dry.

Camila, who had remained back a ways, spurred her horse and reached Demetrio: “Ah, that Margarito, he's such a bad man! If ya'd only seen what he's been doin' with a prisoner!”

She proceeded to tell him what she had just witnessed.

Demetrio knit his brows but did not say anything in reply.

War Paint called Camila away.

“Hey, you, what kinda gossip are ya spreadin' to Demetrio? I love Towhead Margarito more than anybody in the whole wide world. Just so you know! And now I've told ya . . . Whatever ya have against 'im, it's against me, too. Consider yourself warned!”

Camila, very frightened, hurried back to Demetrio.

X

The troop made camp on a plain, near three small, solitary houses lined up in a row, their white walls contrasting against the purple ring of the horizon. Demetrio and Camila went toward them.

Inside the corral, a man wearing a simple white shirt and trousers was standing, avidly puffing at a cornhusk cigarette. Near him, sitting on a stone slab, another man was shelling corn, rubbing husks together between his two hands and frequently shaking one of his legs—which was withered and dried out and had something like a goat's hoof on its end— to shoo away the chickens.

“Hurry up, Pifanio,” said the man who was standing. “The sun has already set and you haven't brought down the water for the animals yet.”

A horse neighed outside, and both men looked up, startled.

Demetrio and Camila were looking at them from behind the thatch of the corral fence.

“I'm just lookin' for lodgings for me and my woman,” Demetrio said, reassuringly.

As soon as he explained that he was the leader of an army division that was going to spend the night nearby, the owner of the place—the man who had been standing up—anxiously asked them to come in. He ran to fetch a large tub of water and a broom, and immediately began to sweep and water down the best corner of the hut, so as to decently lodge such distinguished guests.

“Go on, Pifanio. Unsaddle the horses of the señor and the señora.”

The man who had been shelling corn stood up, with much difficulty. He wore rags for a shirt and vest, and scraps for pants, their seams torn all the way down; and he had enormous calluses protruding from his waist.

As he walked his step marked a grotesque rhythm.

“Wait, friend, you don't look like you should be workin'!” Demetrio exclaimed, stopping him from unsaddling the horses.

“Poor man,” the owner shouted from inside the hut. “He doesn't have much strength! But you should see how good he earns his salary! He starts workin' the minute God wakes up! And the sun's already set . . . and look at 'im, he's still goin'!”

Demetrio went out with Camila to take a look around the encampment. The plain, with its golden fallows, shorn even of bushes, stretched out, immense in its desolation. The three large ash trees in front of the small houses seemed like a veritable miracle, with their dark green tops, round and undulating, and their rich foliage drooping down to kiss the ground.

“I don't know what it is about this place, but it just makes me feel so sad!” Demetrio said.

“Yes,” Camila replied. “I feel the same.”

At the banks of a small creek, Pifanio was heaving roughly from the rope of a small water pump. An enormous pot spilled over a large pile of fresh herbs, and the crystal spray from the stream sparkled by the last light of the afternoon. A skinny cow, a wrecked horse, and a burro were drinking loudly.

Demetrio recognized the crippled laborer and asked him:

“How much do you make a day, my friend?”

“Sixteen cents, señor.”

He was a small, weak man, with scrofula scars, straight blond hair, and light blue eyes. He cursed the owner of the place, the ranch, and his dogged luck.

“You really earn your pay, my son,” Demetrio interrupted him, speaking gently. “You swear and swear, but still you work and work.”

And turning to Camila, he said: “There's always others worse off than those of us from the Sierra, right?”

“Yes,” Camila replied.

And they continued walking.

The valley was covered in darkness, and the stars came out.

Demetrio embraced Camila lovingly around the waist, and who knows what words he murmured into her ear.

“Yes,” she replied, weakly.

Because she was already “startin' to like 'im somewhat.”

Demetrio slept poorly. He left the house at a very early hour.

“Something's going to happen to me,” he thought.

It was a quiet dawn, filled with subtle happiness: a thrush chirping timidly in the ash tree, the animals in the corral rummaging through the refuse in the mud, and the pig grunting off his sleep. The orange hue of the sun appeared on the horizon, and the last little star went out.

Demetrio walked slowly toward the encampment.

He was thinking about his yoke and plow back home, about his two brand-new dark oxen, which he had worked for only two years, and about his two acres of well-fertilized land. He saw his young wife's outline faithfully reproduced in his mind: those sweet curves—infinitely yielding for the husband, but proud with indomitable energy for all strangers. But when he tried to conjure up the image of his son, all his attempts were in vain; he had forgotten what he looked like.

He reached the encampment. The soldiers slept, stretched out in the furrows of the field, alongside the horses—which were also lying down, their heads fallen, their eyes closed.

“The animals are pretty worn out, compadre Anastasio. It would be good to stay and rest at least for a day.”

“Oh, compadre Demetrio! You don't know how much I miss the Sierra already! If ya only knew . . . I bet ya don't believe me? But nothin' that I find 'round here . . . It's all sad and grim! God knows how much I miss it all!”

“How many hours is it from here to Limón?”

“It's not a matter of hours. It's a long three-day ride, compadre Demetrio.”

“If ya only knew! I really wanna see my wife!”

Not long after this War Paint went off to find Camila, and said to her:

“Oh, wow! I just heard Demetrio is about to leave ya. He just told me, he told me 'imself. He's gonna bring his wife here, he really is. And she's real purty, real light-skinned! Ya should see her features! But if ya don't wanna leave, ya can stay and be of some service: they have a kid and ya can take care of 'im . . .”

When Demetrio returned, a crying Camila told him everything War Paint had said.

“Don't pay any heed to that madwoman. It's lies, all lies . . .”

And as Demetrio did not go to Limón, or recall his wife again, Camila was very happy, while War Paint turned into a scorpion.

XI

They set out for Tepatitlán
¹
before dawn. Dispersed along the main road and the surrounding fields, their silhouettes undulated gently to the monotonous, measured gait of their horses, then faded into the pearl hue of the waning moon bathing the entire valley.

The barking of dogs could be heard in the distance.

“Today, by noon, we'll reach Tepatitlán. Tomorrow we'll be in Cuquío.
²
And then . . . the Sierra,” Demetrio said.

“Would it not be advisable, General,” Luis Cervantes commented in Demetrio's ear, “to stop first by Aguascalientes? ”
³

“What would we do there?”

“We are running out of money . . .”

“What! Forty thousand pesos in eight days?”

“Just this week, we recruited nearly five hundred men, and we spent it all on advances and bonuses,” Luis Cervantes replied, very softly.

“No. We're going straight to the Sierra. After that, we'll see . . .”

“Yeah, to the Sierra!” many around them exclaimed.

“The Sierra! The Sierra! There's no place like the Sierra.”

The plains continued to weigh heavily upon their chests. They spoke deliriously of the Sierra, full of enthusiasm, thinking of her as the longed-after lover whom they had not seen in a long time.

Dawn broke. Soon afterward, to the east, a reddish dust cloud arose and formed an immense curtain of burning purple.

Luis Cervantes reined in his horse and waited for Quail.

“So what is it going to be, Quail?”

“Like I told you before: two hundred just for the watch . . .”

“No. I will buy the whole stack from you: watches, rings, and all the other jewels. How much for the whole thing?”

Quail wavered, and his face turned pale. Then he quickly said:

“Let's say two thousand bills for everythin'.”

But Luis Cervantes gave himself away. His eyes shone with such evident greed that Quail backpedaled, exclaiming at once:

“No, no, no, I'm not sellin' nothin' . . . Just the watch, tha's all, and I'll sell it 'cause I owe those two hundred pesos to Pancracio, who beat me again last night.”

Luis Cervantes took out four crisp, brand-new “two-faced” bills
⁴
and placed them in Quail's hands.

“Really, though,” he said. “What I am interested in is the whole lot. No one is going to give you more than me for everything.”

They were feeling the sun above them when Lard suddenly yelled:

“Hey, Towhead Margarito, your orderly is ready to burst. Says he can't walk no more.”

The prisoner had let himself fall, exhausted, in the middle of the road.

“Quiet!” Towhead Margarito exclaimed, taking a few steps back. “So you are tired already, my friend? Poor little thing! I am going to buy a glass case to keep you in a corner of my house, like the Baby Jesus. But first we must reach the town, so I will help you get there.”

And he took out his saber and hit the poor wretch repeatedly with it.

“Let us have the rope, Pancracio,” he said then, his eyes shining strangely.

But as Quail pointed out to him that the Federale was no longer moving, he laughed loudly, and said:

“I am such an animal! Just when I had trained him to survive without eating!”

“This is it, we've arrived in Little Guadalajara,” Venancio said, spotting the small, pleasant town of Tepatitlán, nestled gently into the hillside.

They entered full of joy. Smiling faces with beautiful black eyes looked out through the windows.

The schools were transformed into quarters, and Demetrio took up lodgings in the sacristy of an abandoned chapel.