TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (39 page)

She didn’t even kiss me goodbye. She mounted the mare while I stood on the porch, an undoubtedly comic figure if there had been other eyes to see, wearing long johns, bleary-eyed and with tangled hair … as her hair had been by the lake on the day I met her. She was dry-eyed and seemingly confident. I loved her terribly.

“Goodbye, mi capitán. “

“Goodbye, Rosa.”

Perhaps I didn’t believe she would really go. But she did. She rode off on the dirt road and never looked back, and after a few minutes she vanished from sight, and then the dust slowly settled.

“Take the gold!”
I shouted after her into the morning silence. It was a fine Mexican morning, crisp and dewy, with a clear bright blue sky, a morning that should have been one of glorious promise. “Take the gold! It’s yours!”

I bent to one knee and laid a palm on the dusty Mexican earth. I shut my eyes against the hurting glare.

True love. High adventure. Fortune. I had found them all, then lost them all. Rosa had never displeased me. It was I, in the end, who had displeased her.

Part Two

Villa? Obregón? Carranza? What’s the difference? I love the revolution like a volcano in eruption. I love the volcano because it’s a volcano, the revolution because it’s a revolution.

—Mariano Azuela
,The Underdogs

“The cankers of a calm world

and a long peace.”

from THE SCHOOLTEACHER’S JOURNAL

Fort Bliss

September 20, 1914

Lieutenant Patton receives a steady flow of intelligence reports from Mexico which he discusses with me, and my comments are then passed along in written form to his superiors. He told me that General Pershing no longer greatly esteems Francisco Villa—despite his recent remark to the newspapers that “Villa is the man of the hour”—but thinks Venustiano Carranza is a more noble sort of leader, armed with dignity rather than a pistol.

General Scott, on the other hand, still admires Villa not merely as a resourceful field commander but as a man of powerful purpose and seems to turn a deaf ear to any tales of Pancho’s villainy.

Thus, a steady stream of conflicting reports reaches President Wilson from his generals on the border, and it is no wonder that to us here at Fort Bliss the White House seems almost paralyzed by indecisiveness.

“Wilson will have to make a choice one of these days,” Lieutenant Patton confided to me this morning, in the midst of his Spanish lesson. “Villa or Carranza. But from what he hears, it’s kind of like choosing between syphilis and the clap.”

September 27, 1914

… my life is not unpleasant, although I have the feeling now and then that I am merely marking time. I am paid well and regularly, have a comfortable room at the post barracks, eat with the enlisted men and am learning to shoot a rifle—one of the dividends of my relationship with the lieutenant, who treats me more like a trusted friend than a menial servant.

I have met a young woman in town. She works as a chambermaid in the Gateway Hotel, and she is twenty years old, widowed with a child. She lives

across the river in Juárez with her uncle but sometimes spends the night with me. The experience makes me feel that I am coming alive again. I think less about Colonel Fierro and Captain—now Major—Mix.

But that is not what I want. I want to remember. The incident in El Paso last February, when I tried to kill Captain Mix, revealed the depth of my intentions to Lieutenant Patton. He was shocked. Like most Americans, he has the proper humanitarian emotions, but like most Americans he lacks the background of suffering with which to understand the thirst for vengeance, the dark need to destroy at all costs. Taking its place, as in the lieutenant, is an induced thirst for law and order tempered by a wavering sentimentality. He even apologized for placing me under arrest.

“I know how you feel. But Jesus, if you had shot the man,” he cried, “we would’ve had to
hang
you! Can’t you see that it leads nowhere? Forget revenge, Bosques. Live your life!”

“I could forget revenge,” I confessed, “if I could forget the horror. But that seems to be impossible.”

“You know what I believe?” he said, in an uncharacteristic manner. “If each day all color is reinvented by the sun, then the chance to be present is worth all risk. Life is very full. Life is good. You just have to believe that and make the best of whatever comes your way. Stay awake and ready.”

“I’ll try, Lieutenant. I’ll follow your example.”

In two months’ detention in the guardhouse I ate better than I ever had during thirty years in Mexico. During that time Lieutenant Patton came to visit me three or four times a week, ostensibly for his Spanish lesson. He has begun to reveal himself to me.

A strange man, gifted but fundamentally unsure of himself—a horseman, hunter, steeplechaser, football player, swordsman, ardent student of military history—above all, a soldier. And yet, at the age of thirty, still a lowly lieutenant, he feels that glory and opportunity have eluded him. I suspect he knows that his superiors consider him a dilettante, and dislike him because he owns the finest string of polo ponies between Fort Riley and California, and is married to a beautiful woman with eight million dollars.

He is convinced that hostilities are not over in Mexico, that the United States will somehow become involved and that the revolutionists—in particular, Villa—are our natural enemies. But one afternoon during his Spanish lesson he made a revealing statement.

“I don’t care who we fight,” he said, “as long as it’s a long war and a good big one, and I get my share of it.”

He sees a war against Mexico as the only chance to make his mark before it is too late, since Mr. Wilson seems more determined than ever to keep his country out of the European conflict.

He cried, “Look at me, Bosques! I lie around shooting ducks and drilling men on a parade ground … playing polo … reading the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
for the third time. Christ, I’m a soldier! I’ve had a good time in life, sure, but I’ve worked hard. And yet … have I done one solitary thing worth doing? Shithouse mouse!
Hijo de puta!
Don’t you see? I want to write my name on something bigger than a section-room bench or a stock certificate!”

After the Benton killing last April he sent a plan to General Pershing that called for a fast cavalry strike across the border to retrieve the body. “Let Villa get in our way/’ he told me at the time, grinding his teeth on his pipe. “We’ll go through him like crap through a goose.”

Meanwhile, in Mexico, the revolution has triumphed. Does that mean the end of war and suffering? The people of Mexico City might supply an interesting answer.

The capital was occupied in August by the army of Alvaro Obregón, who immediately declared martial law. Then he began to take revenge on the civilian population, most of whom, since they had lived under Victoriano Huerta’s yoke for two years, had been supporters of the government. When Obregón entered from the northwest he found a dry city—silent, sullen and hungry, and, above all, thirsty, for the pumping machinery of the city’s water supply had been dynamited by the evacuating Huertistas. Obregón seized all available water and food for his troops. The poor, naturally, suffered the most.

They began by eating the stray cats and dogs; they wound up trapping rats in the sewers. Children loitered near the military barracks and tried to sneak between the soldiers’ legs for a few sips of water being given to the horses. It was an informal rule among the Obregonistas that anyone over twelve caught stealing water from the horses was shot.

Obregón levied a tax of twenty million pesos on the merchants of the city, ostensibly to relieve the suffering of the multitude. The merchants and bankers refused to pay it, and the city quickly became a scene from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Corpses were collected in milk wagons every morning by volunteers and burned in Chapultepec Park, the stench borne as far south as Xochimilco by the swirling winds. The sewer system, untended, overflowed and made the city stink like a slaughterhouse.

Carranza, during this macabre period of “peace,” sits quietly in a luxury hotel, refusing to enter the National Palace, for by his own words in the Plan of Guadalupe he has disqualified himself for the presidency—”unless, of course, the people insist.” His photograph has been taken a hundred times, always looking distinguished, always signing some decree. Emiliano Zapata, who has never met Carranza but nevertheless despises him, has refused to leave Morelos.

Francisco Villa, a lion with sheathed claws, camps with his powerful army outside Zacatecas.

All hope seems now to be centered on the Revolutionary Convention which begins any day in Aguascalientes. Every faction will be represented. At best, what can come of it other than a more refined definition of chaos? At worst, it will be a fatal struggle between irreconcilable forces: Villa and Carranza. If they can make peace, establish law and order, agree on who shall rule the country, there is hope. If not, there will be war. Men will march off to die with bugles and banners, to the cheers of children. Isn’t it the easiest way to resolve human differences?

How prosaic this sunny world would be if the knife and the bullet had not been invented …

Law and order! Such fine words, which one hears often here, and now even in Mexico since the Revolutionary Convention is about to start. But they neglect the raw root of human passion. At best, like cages for vicious animals, they keep men at bay from each other. For a while.

“The bow is bent and drawn,

make from the shaft.”

One October night at the Morelos Theater in Aguascalientes, where they had been flag-waving and going for each other’s throats for nearly a month, they showed movies. The theater was so jammed you could easily button up the wrong fly. The revolution’s leaders were packed holster to holster in the aisles—Carranzistas, Obregónistas and Villistas— even the little cocoa-skinned Zapatistas, with their sleepy eyes and gigantic sombreros, who had finally agreed to show up and sulk in public.

Cigarette smoke hung from the balcony like a solid gray cloud, as if a bomb had just exploded. The air was barely breathable, and you had to wonder when some of these fellows had last seen a bathtub.

A large white cotton curtain hung on the stage, flanked by two limp Mexican flags. That was the screen. The movie promised to be a panorama of the revolution, a collection of newsreel bits that some enterprising journalist in Mexico City had pieced together.

I arrived late with Candelario and Julio, but as soon as they realized how crowded and hot it would be in the theater, Candelario objected.

“We can use our time better. Do you like Frenchwomen, Tomás? By pure chance, I know two. You’re on your own now, my friend. What a blessing! Let’s get drunk and find them.”

But I hadn’t been to the movies in a year, and the film might be important. Since Rosa had left Zacatecas and we had journeyed to Aguascalientes for the Convention, I had spent most of my nights in cantinas, or gazing up at the stars that glittered so coldly and implacably in the autumn skies. It seemed to me that on the high Mexican plateau the stars were closer to the earth than anywhere else I knew. It was an illusion … but what wasn’t? I had heard it said that their light, streaming down on us with such mocking certainty and wondrous beauty, had existed billions of years ago and had only just reached us, and for all we knew those same stars might not now exist. Which meant if there was anyone up there and they could see our planet, they viewed a barren earth, antique and uninhabited except for crawling things. A desolation. I wished I knew.

Rosa, in Tomochic, if she arched her head to gaze at the night, would see the same stars, glimpse the same mystery. That was all we shared now.

Outside the Morelos Theater, Candelario kept arguing that we were wasting our time.
“Hombre,
there are no seats! Is this movie going to show us something we haven’t already seen?”

“I want to see it,” I said doggedly. “And I have an idea. That screen is just a cloth curtain. I’ll bet if we go backstage and sit behind it, we’ll see perfectly.”

“Yes,” Candelario said, “but backwards.”

“Does that mean,” Julio asked, brandishing a nearly empty tequila bottle, “that we’ll be retreating when we were really advancing?”

Full of tequila and stubborn energy, I had my way. We trooped round to the back entrance of the theater. For a few pesos the stagehands were glad to rummage in the prop room and find chairs for us directly behind the screen, so that we sat with our boots resting comfortably on some greasy coils of rope. No one in the audience could see us; we couldn’t see them, either, but we could hear them. These were the ranking officers of the various revolutionary divisions, the leaders of Mexico, struggling to find a solution to the conflict between Villa and Carranza. They hooted at each other like banshees.

At midnight the movie started. A bellow of approval surged like a thunderclap as the titles flashed on the screen. We had some trouble reading them backwards, but I had guessed right and we could see the images perfectly. As the action began, the theater grew hushed.

First came a file of long-haired Yaqui soldiers, marching to the beat of a drum which you could see but couldn’t hear. They marched for two minutes, while the audience stirred restlessly.

Then Obregón appeared, standing like Napoleon by an artillery piece. The officers surrounding him all smiled awkwardly because they knew the camera was grinding away.

“Viva Obregón!”
the crowd yelled.

“Long live the Army of the Northwest!”

Carranza, beard flowing majestically, sat outdoors in front of his shuttered house in Monclava, solemnly signing a proclamation—left-handed, from our point of view.

“Long live the First Chief!”

Some boos became mixed in with the cheers.

Pancho Villa galloped into view, the all-conquering centaur, grinning and urging his superb black stallion. The audience roared and stamped their feet, so that the theater shook.

“Long live the Northern Division!”