TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (37 page)

Villa considered a moment and then said firmly: “In that, of course—by all that’s holy—he is not mistaken.”

“Do you not know

I am a woman?”

Huerta refused to salute the American admiral at Tampico. President Wilson heard the news while he was preparing to tee off at the fourteenth hole of his golf course and immediately left to convene first his cabinet, and then Congress, in order to debate the gravity of the insult. As a result, if you can call it that, on April 21, 1914, the U.S. Marines landed in Veracruz and got a toehold on Mexican soil.

Pancho Villa chuckled. “It’s Huerta’s bull that’s being gored, not mine.”

But Huerta wasn’t unhappy. He must have thought it would distract the revolutionists and unite all of Mexico behind him in the hour of national humiliation. For a short time it looked that way: the American Club in Mexico City was burned to the ground, the new statue of George Washington in some plaza knocked off its pedestal and shattered. The German freighter,
Ypiranga,
off-loaded its bullets and barbed wire anyway, at a more southerly port.

Carranza sent grave notes of protest in all directions, to Secretary of State Bryan and to the visiting German military attaché in Mexico City, Herr Franz von Papen.

Villa met with a group of American reporters. “Mr. Wilson is my friend,” he said, “and one of my most trusted aides is a gringo. Your navy may have been foolish in attacking Veracruz, but listen to me, boys—it can stay there as long as it likes. It can bottle up the port so tightly that not even a drop of whiskey gets through to Huerta. And now that I think of it, that’s a sure way to make him surrender.”

Carranza dithered and protested, and we attacked Zacatecas, the last obstacle before Mexico City.

Under a brooding sky and in a warm June rain, the fortress city fell to the assault of the Northern Division. Zacatecas was the decisive battle that Angeles preached, but it lasted a week and there was none bloodier. I watched as the bodies of the dead were thrown into mine shafts or stacked on flatcars to be hauled into the desert. Others were soaked in gasoline and burned, and the stench stayed in the city for a week.

The bodies, as the flames began to eat at them, flung themselves about as though some part of their souls still felt pain. Again, though I struggled against it, I remembered the men in the corral at Torreón …

Villa, keeping to his vegetarian diet, recruited almost all of the living to our side. Then, the day after Zacatecas finally surrendered, we ate lunch under some mesquite trees at an outdoor restaurant. With us was Carranza’s newly arrived personal representative, the lawyer, Jesús Acuña, who had first visited us in Ascensión with Chao. He bore papers appointing him the new provincial governor. I could tell that Villa didn’t like the man, but he was polite to him throughout most of the meal. Acuña ate delicately, declining to pick up his chicken leg in his hand. He drank chilled white wine, which stirred memories.

“There’s still good meat on those bones,” Villa pointed out. “Don’t be offended, but if you don’t want it, I do. There’s no disease I fear except clap, and you can’t get that from a chicken leg.”

He was hungry after the long battle, and he attacked Acuña’s plate like a famished wolf. Dr. Rauschbaum had been banished; the meatless phase of Pancho Villa’s life was suddenly over.

An avocado salad arrived, and so did a squad of our soldiers, escorting two dusty Federal officers who had somehow lost their boots. They had been hiding in a house nearby on the outskirts of town. A woman had betrayed them. The Villista soldiers, themselves former Federals, were unsure what to do with the captured officers.

His teeth still grinding into the new governor’s chicken leg, Villa solved their problem without benefit of debate.

“Shoot them.”

Acuña sputtered and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “General Villa! Is that really necessary?”

“Señor Acuña, I’ve spared all enlisted men. But your patron, Don Venus, has himself invoked the decree of Benito Juárez in 1857, that all captured enemy officers are to be executed, since they’re educated men who deliberately fight against the revolution. Would you have me refuse his orders? If I did that, we wouldn’t even be here in Zacatecas.”

One of the Federal officers, a captain, a small fellow with a waxed mustache, stepped forward and looked Villa straight in the eye.

“I have no objection,” he said calmly. “You may be sure that if we had won the battle and you were my prisoners, I would shoot you in the same way. And with special pleasure to you, Señor Villa, since I am a soldier doing my duty, and you, señor, are a bandit living on what you steal from the Mexican people.”

That fellow had nerve. Perhaps he thought it would win a pardon for him. Benton had thought so, too.

Villa kept on eating. He turned to Acuña. “You see? Here’s a brave man, although misguided. He’s going to die, but he speaks his mind. Why deprive him of believing that he dies for a good cause at the hands of a bandit?”

Acuña paled. Then the second officer, a lieutenant, much bigger and fiercer-looking than his companion, fell to his knees in the dirt. “General Villa! It’s not right!” he cried. “They told us we were coming north to fight the gringos! If I had known it was your army attacking, I would never have fought! I swear it on the life of my mother!” He began to sob, and he pissed his pants.

Villa’s nose wrinkled with disgust. I knew how he felt about such incontinence. “You’re a hell of an officer,” he said, and he turned again to the escort. “Carry out my orders.”

The young soldiers exchanged uneasy glances.

Acuña spoke up. “General Villa, must it be done here? We’re eating. We’re happy over our triumphs. For God’s sake, I beg you, spare us the sight of death at such a moment.”

Then Villa’s eyes really blazed. Throwing his chicken leg in the dust, he jumped to his feet.

“Death bothers you, señor? It bothers me too! I’ve just come from Zacatecas—from Torreón!—battlefields that stink of death, that are soaked with the blood of our own men. You chocolate-drinking politicians,” he shouted, “want to triumph without knowing how that triumph is achieved! But you
must
know, señor! And you must always remember!” He leveled a blunt finger at the soldiers. “Carry out the order!”

The captain, the little brave one, said, “General Villa, it’s obvious to me that your men are reluctant. They won’t shoot straight. To that, I seriously object.”

“You have reason,” Villa replied.

He pulled his own pistol. The squad of soldiers quickly scattered. The officer on the ground staggered to his feet, and the smaller man closed his eyes. Villa fired twice at each, once while they stood, and then once while the fallen bodies twitched on the ground. Blood trickled down the slight incline of the earth toward the luncheon table.

“Don’t touch the bodies,” he ordered, holstering the pistol. He thumped back into his iron chair. “Eat, señor,” he instructed Acuña, as he himself began to spear his avocado salad.

The bodies lay there throughout the rest of the lunch.

Acuña ate bravely, taking big mouthfuls to show his spirit, until at last the trickle of blood reached his feet. He moved the shiny toe of his black shoe slightly to the left, to avoid it. But the blood gently changed course, as if to search him out, as if it flowed at Villa’s orders, that Acuña might always remember. His toe retreated, and the blood of the two officers, mingled in one muddy river, stubbornly followed it. Acuña, in the midst of his caramel custard, turned gray in the face and excused himself. Behind a nearby tree, he was sick. Without another word, he left.

That evening in the telegraph office—where we had our man, of course—he sent a wire to Carranza giving full details of the incident.

The rains would never have stopped us from taking Mexico City. This time Villa was determined to fight in rain and mud or sleet and snow, for the Federals in the capital dared not retreat farther south into the waiting guns of Emiliano Zapata. But we needed coal, and we had captured none in Zacatecas. Ravel and Sommerfeld agreed to send us five hundred more carloads. It didn’t arrive, and no amount of angry telegrams to Hipólito could elicit more than the usual Mexican promise that it would be sent
“ahorita, “
which meant, literally, right away. If he had said “tomorrow” or “next Tuesday” we would have had hope, but the bold “right away” had the unmistakable meaning of “Who knows when?”

Everything was in short supply. The Northern Division had swelled to 22,000 men, with more than 15,000 horses, hundreds of cannon and machine guns—and the women and children had to be fed too. No longer a guerrilla army, it was a huge organization gobbling bullets and tortillas at a rate that alarmed any of us who stopped to consider it. Now that it was summer, the remuda could graze for miles throughout the blooming desert, but by October the land would be bare and the bushes would be following the dogs around. We had to store provisions as squirrels do nuts for winter.

Carranza promised us coal. It would come from the docks in Tampico …
ahorita.

“It doesn’t matter,” Villa said to me. “Huerta knows we’re here. He knows what to expect. He won’t get a night’s sleep until he hears our cannon, and then it will be too late for him. Let him sweat. By September, if he can last that long, he’ll be a broken man. The waiting is always worse than the battle, especially for the army that knows it will lose.”

The revolution made you as homeless as a poker chip. Rosa arrived at last from Torreón. Tired of hotel life, I quartered myself with her in a small abandoned house on the hill of La Sierpe, a thousand feet above the city. There the air was brisk and blue, the trees grew green under the deluge of afternoon rains and the summer winds blew gently. The house had crawling purple bougainvillea, leafy tomato bushes, eucalyptus and even a laden banana tree.

Candelario and Julio came up often with the French whores, although Julio still behaved toward them like a monk, and Rosa and I were like a young married couple having friends to lunch and dinner. Candelario was always able to liberate a wandering chicken or suckling pig, and Rosa would kill it in the backyard and barbecue it.

I had bought a schoolbook for her the last time I was in El Paso. Every afternoon I gave her a reading or writing lesson, and sometimes in the evening, when we were alone, we listened to the rain drip from the leaves in the garden, and we spoke in English.

“The weather is nice today, Thomas, was it not?”

“Yes, Rosa, it was fine. How about tomorrow? Do you think it will rain tomorrow?”

“Yes, it is rain tomorrow. It is rain tomorrow and past tomorrow.”

“It
will
rain tomorrow. And the day
after
tomorrow.”

“I think so too,” she said, kissing me.

She was quick. I was proud of her and proud of myself, and the waiting for what would happen or not happen in Mexico City wasn’t bad at all because we had each other on the hill of La Sierpe. I began to see the magic that can spring to life between a pupil and teacher, and how each becomes dependent on the other if the teaching is from the heart and the learning penetrates. I wondered if Pancho Villa, in his way, had become linked with me through that process, as I was being linked now with Rosa.

I remembered my Greek history: she was Galatea to my Pygmalion. She was sixteen now. Once she had been a waif, a burden; then a child concubine, a sewer of buttons. That seemed so long.

Hannah was far away, and not just in uncrossable miles. There was no way I could write to her, for the mails to the border were restricted to military dispatches. And even if I could have used my position to slip a letter into the daily pouch, what would I have said that wasn’t a lie? I didn’t miss her at all; that was a terrible thing to realize. Did I need her the way a man needs the woman he’s going to marry? Hannah fed my imagination and my wispy dreams of the future.

But living the life of a revolutionist in Mexico, nothing was left to imagination. And I had no future now, not there on La Sierpe. I was a soldier with his woman, a soldier between battles, living only in the present.

Rosa and I went out every Sunday to the bullfight, and sometimes in the morning, before it grew too hot, we would walk through the parks of the city and sip a lemonade in the shade of an oak tree. At night there was a cantina we liked, where guitarists came from all over the city to play until dawn, and one night a violinist, who had played with the national orchestra but now was a revolutionist like the rest of us, wandered in and began fiddling Beethoven sonatas, so that the bar fell silent and tears sprang to every listener’s eyes.

Not far from town we discovered an abandoned mineral spring, and when we tired of the guitarists we would ride out there and bathe naked in the starlight, letting the hot, sulfurous water soothe our bones. Those nights I slept like a baby and awoke like a satyr.

The one sin that didn’t come naturally to me was gluttony. I needed no more than what I had. And so we waited in Zacatecas for the coal, while the rains beat down.

Early one morning in July, I woke to the rapid pounding of hoofs on dirt. In the quiet, soft air, I heard my name shouted. Candelario and Julio pounded on the timbered door—the beams of the roof shook with the urgency of their fists. I struggled out of bed, where Rosa and I had just greeted sunrise in the proper amatory fashion. I threw on some clothes and opened the door.

Despite the cool morning, Candelario and Julio were sweating. Their horses were ground-tied, flanks heaving. Candelario flung his great arms around me, and the strength of his embrace made me gasp.

“Tomás! It’s over!”

“Hombre
…” I managed to shove him away. “Calm down. What are you talking about?”

“The revolution is over!
We’ve won!
Do you understand? Huerta’s quit! He got drunk with Orozco … sailed from Veracruz on some German battleship…”

He was out of breath; his face streamed with sweat. Julio shook his fists into the air with glee.

Villa had been right after all. Zacatecas had fallen. Huerta, staring into a glass of cognac, had glimpsed his destiny.