TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (26 page)

“You see how the people smile, Tomás? This isn’t music to make them forget their troubles. It’s to remind them that the soldiers are their servants.”

As we left the park a small boy, dressed in rags and chewing a piece of sugar cane, followed us. He stayed in the shadow of the horses and just looked up, his large brown eyes fastened on Pancho Villa. Finally, when the chief noticed him, he reined up and peered down. The boy must have been eight or nine years old.

Villa leaned from the saddle and snatched the sugar cane. He bit off a piece and began to chew it with his stumpy red-brown teeth.

The boy said nothing.

The chief laughed. “Aren’t you angry, boy?”

“No, señor.”

“And aren’t you afraid?”

“No, señor.” In fact, the boy was utterly calm and unblinking.

Villa frowned ferociously. “The bandit Pancho Villa is going to steal all your sugar cane! Watch out! Don’t you know that Pancho Villa came into the world to rob and kill?”

“I didn’t know that. Are you Pancho Villa?”

“Yes,” Villa said solemnly. “And now I want you to tell me why you followed us through the street.”

“Señor Villa, I like to look at you.”

“And why do you like to look at me?”

“I don’t know,” the boy murmured.

“Will you sell me this piece of cane? How much did it cost you?”

“Two centavos, señor. You can keep it if you like it.”

Villa reached into his pocket and took out a peso coin, which he flipped so that it spun brightly in the sunlight. The boy caught it in the air.

“What will you do with the money? Buy more cane?”

“Give it to my father.”

“Ah, you have a father. A mother too?”

“Not anymore, señor.”

“And why are you out on the street? Doesn’t your father send you to school?”

“No, señor, he can’t do that.”

“Can’t? What do you mean,
can’t?”

“Because I help him in his store. He sells bananas and mangos. He is all alone except for me. This is the siesta hour—I don’t have to work.”

“So you don’t go to school
at all?”

“No, señor.”

Villa turned to me across our horses, his voice high and quivering. “Listen to me, Tomás. This child, without knowing who I am, follows me down the streets of Chihuahua and even wants to give me what he eats—this bit of cane that cost him two miserable centavos, which is certainly all he had. Can you tell me why? I’m not handsome. I’m not dressed in the fine uniform of a general. Why does he do such a thing unless he senses in me the soul of a man who struggles for the salvation of just such children as himself? There is no other explanation.”

Villa’s eyes shone like emeralds. “I dedicate my life to this boy, and that’s why I fight. He will be a better man than I. But to do that,” he suddenly shouted, so that the boy flinched, “he must go to school! He must read and write! To make him work is a crime, a crime worse than murder! If you kill a man, you put him out of his misery. If you make a boy such as this work, if you keep him from school, you doom him to that misery.” Villa turned back to the boy.

“Go tell your father,” he said, “that Pancho Villa orders him to send you to school tomorrow. If he doesn’t follow that order, he will be shot. Do you understand? Will you swear to tell him?”

The boy didn’t reply and didn’t so swear, which I could well understand.

“All right,” Villa said, sighing. “Where is your father’s store?”

“Not far, señor.”

With one powerful arm Villa hauled the boy up into the saddle. He sat snugly behind the horn, in front of General Pancho Villa. Despite the boy’s worry, I could see the sparkle in his eyes. The world must have seemed to lie at his feet, and be glorious.

We rode down some narrow dirt alleys to a part of the city that shouted its poverty and degradation. The shutters were closed, so Villa dismounted with the boy and pounded with his fist on the closed door. After a few minutes it opened to disclose a weary-looking Mexican in a frayed shirt and torn trousers. His shop with its mangos and other fruit was about as big as a large closet. Two hammocks were slung in the back from hooks on the walls, but if they hadn’t been slung at angles they wouldn’t have fit.

Without wasting any time on pleasantries, Villa said, “Señor, I am General Francisco Villa. What is your name?”

Looking confused, sleepy—wary, too—the man gave his name. “At your orders, my general.”

“My orders are that you will send your son to school, beginning tomorrow, or you will be shot.”

“School?”

“You know what that is, don’t you?”

“Shot,
señor?”

“You know what that is, too.”

The wretched man pleaded his case. “Señor General, if I sent him to school, who would help me in the store? I have no wife. My daughters work in a sausage factory. They give me nothing. Without the boy’s help, I can’t run my store. How will he eat?”

“I know nothing about your store,” Villa shouted. “I care that your son goes to school! And I tell you that if you don’t send him tomorrow, you’ll be shot. If the greed of the rich deprived you of your schooling, as it did me, and you are so poor that you have only this ridiculous hole in the wall you call a store, then
go out and steal!
Steal whatever it is you need to send your son to school! If you steal for that reason, you have my solemn word I won’t shoot you. But if by not stealing you force your son to remain a filthy street urchin who will be as miserable all his life as you are, and perhaps even turn to crime and drunkenness—for I smell pulque on your breath, señor, if you wish to know the truth—you have Francisco Villa’s solemn word that you’ll be shot.”

The man turned pale and wrung his hands, and that’s when I butted in.

By now I knew Villa’s temperament fairly well. He always meant what he said, and although he was capable of changing his mind on a whim, it was never something you could count on. The boy’s father was close to death, if not from a bullet, then from fear.

The boy, however, remained remarkably serene, and more than anything that was what moved me. He had faith. I had to make sure it was not misplaced.

“Chief,” I said quietly, “if you send this man out to steal so that this kid can go to school, he’s liable to be shot before anyone finds out you gave him permission. You’ve strung him on the horns of a dilemma that he can’t solve. You’ve given him a choice as to who will shoot him.”

“I’ll give him a paper,” Villa proclaimed, “with my signature.”

I wanted to laugh, but I knew that wouldn’t convince him. “How many of our men can read?” I asked. “And if they can, they’ll be reading it after he’s dead.”

I decided to press him a little harder. “Listen, chief. You can’t cure an evil by curing the symptoms. If there’s a drought and the cattle are starving, you can fatten ‘em up with a load of grain—but they’ll go right back to starving unless you move ‘em to decent pasture. This man and his son aren’t your problem. The problem is they’re
poor.
If he steals, he might be better off for a while, but it’s going to make the man he steals from even poorer. Is that a solution? And what’s more, I’ll bet you a peso there’s no free school in this quarter. So what can the man do except die?”

Villa had listened to me carefully, brow furrowed in a mixture of concentration and annoyance. But he didn’t blow up or reach for his pistol. He thought awhile, then turned to the wretched father.

“Is that so? Is there no school in this quarter?”

“None, Señor General. And the few schools in the other quarters are so full they turn their own children away. This is a fact. You can ask. You owe your officer a peso.”

Villa didn’t remark on this boldness or bother to point out that he hadn’t taken the bet. “What is the name of this street?” he demanded.

“Calle Aldama, señor.”

“Tomorrow we’ll tear down a house here and build a school. Until then, we’ll use that shoe shop next door as a school. I’ll send a teacher. Tell the other fathers to have their children here at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Tomás?”

“Yes, chief?”

“Do you have any money with you? I gave this kid my last peso for his sugar cane.”

I fished around in my pockets and came up with a five-peso note and a two-dollar bill.

Villa took them and handed them to the man. “This is for your trouble, señor.”

I left him then, but the next morning the chief sent for me again, and we rode once more through the streets of Chihuahua City to Calle Aldama. We halted in front of what had been a shoe shop. About fifteen children were crowded in there on wooden stools, including the boy with the sugar cane, and a young woman stood before a wobbly blackboard with a bit of chalk, scratching out the alphabet. Across the street twenty men from one of our brigades pounded with sledgehammers to destroy two old adobe houses.

All over the city, Villa said, beginning today, gangs of soldiers under civilian engineers were tearing down such buildings, making way for forty new schools. Each of the children who attended were to be given ten pesos a week to bring home to their fathers.

“Well, Tomás? Does Alvaro Obregón do this? Does the illustrious Señor Carranza, the First Chief? He declares new national holidays. Does he build schools? Does he pay the fathers of the children so that they accept the sacrifice? Can I hold my head high when I meet your General Pershing?”

“Yes, chief,” I said. “You can do that.”

He was an actor, no doubt of it, but it seemed he was more than Henry the Fifth. Come to think of it, Shakespeare would have had to write a whole new play to do him justice. I had a fresh rush of faith, almost equal to that of the boy with the cane.

The only thing I wondered about was where all the money would come from to pay for this construction, but when I got back to the hotel Candelario enlightened me. Villa had already asked Carranza for five million pesos to finance the planned spring offensive toward Mexico City, but the First Chief protested that he didn’t have it. He was supporting two other divisions as well— Obregón’s in the northwest, General Pablo González’s in Coahuila. Villa confiscated the state printing presses in the basement of the old Governor’s Palace, put two local artists to work and began to print his own currency—three million pesos’ worth on the first run. There were eagles and swords and the usual olive branches, and one side carried twin portraits of President Madero and Abraham Gonzalez, the pro-revolutionary governor who had also been murdered by Huerta, so that the bills quickly got to be called
dos caras,
or “two-faces.” All the former government money was declared illegal and had to be traded for the two-faces.

Then Villa promptly shipped the incoming supply of cash up to El Paso to pay for more coal and guns. A move, I reckoned, worthy of J. P. Morgan.

The next day, again, the chief asked me to meet him in front of the Fermont, but this time he waved a hand at the Packard.

“Get in, Tomás,” he said, and I stepped inside. Washed and waxed, gleaming like a jewel in the sun, the Packard had matching green leather cushions and a glass partition. I put my boots up on the jump seat.

So this is what it was like to be rich. I could learn to like it.

“We’ll go to my house,” he said. “This is a special day. The schools are open all over the city, and your inspiration helped it to come about. I invite you for lunch.”

“What house?”

“To meet my wife.”

“I’ve met her. I mean I’ve met them.”

“No, no. My
real
wife, Luz Corral. I’ve told you about her, haven’t I? She’s been hiding in the mountains, but now she’s here in Chihuahua, although I’m going to send her to Texas. This is still no place for her and the child, not until the revolution’s won.”

“You have a child? And a house?”

“I have plenty of children, without doubt, but this one bears my name. Tomás, you ask a lot of dumb questions. Luz cooks well. We’ll have a fine lunch.”

I was too flabbergasted by the revelation of this domestic existence to go on bleating any longer. The house wasn’t far away, just outside the center of the city, and Villa told me that it was called Quinta Luz in honor of its owner.

“I met her here in 1910,” he said, “just before the revolution began. It was love at first sight, which is the way I still am, as you know. But it took awhile to persuade her to marry me. She was much too level-headed. Finally I promised to buy her this house, and that did the trick. Here we are.”

From the outside the brown stone building didn’t appear very sumptuous, but inside it was enormous, with sagging armchairs, pictures of Villa and his wife on the walls, a Mexican flag, glass cases with cheap bric-a-brac, an old oak desk and several main rooms that led to a large courtyard of worn cobbles flanked on all sides with other rooms—forty in all, Villa claimed.

“Who lives here?” I asked.

“Luz and her family. Parents, cousins, aunts and uncles, cousins of cousins, orphans … I can’t keep track. She’ll take in anybody who has a hard-luck story. I pay for it. I want to keep her happy. If I don’t, she nags at me.”

Luz Corral greeted us in the patio. She was a handsome woman in her early twenties, on the bosomy side, with light brown hair, calm gray eyes and a queenly bearing. She was so different from Pancho Villa’s other two wives that it was hard for me to believe that he had chosen her.

“This is my
güera,
“ he said tenderly. “My
chulita. “
Both were affectionate words for fair-haired one. He had told her all about me, he explained. His belly heaved with a low chuckle. “I didn’t say that you were my gringo, Tomás.”

She had a kindly manner, and she said, “You take good care of my Pancho, don’t you? He claims all his officers do. He never has the time to take care of himself. And he always speaks well of you, Captain.”

My Pancho? The general, who had led the charge into Torreón, just smiled.

We ate lunch in the patio in the welcome shade of some lemon trees, surrounded by potted plants, clinging purple bougainvillea and little patches of sunflowers. A pair of bright green lovebirds screeched in a cage that hung from a branch of a lemon tree. Half a dozen small children galloped in and out of various doorways, playing games and calling shrilly to each other.