11

General Arroyo told him that the Federal army, whose officers had studied in the French Military Academy, were waiting to engage them in formal combat, where they knew all the rules and the guerrillas didn’t. “They are like virgins,” said the young Mexican general, hard and dark as a glazed pot. “They want to follow the rules. I want to make them.”

Had the old man heard what Señorita Winslow said last night? Had he heard what the people in the camp and from the hacienda were saying? Why couldn’t the people govern themselves here in their own land: was that too much to dream? He clenched his jaws and said that maybe he and the señorita wanted the same thing, but she didn’t want the violence that had to come first. He knew, though, Arroyo told the old gringo, he knew there had to be a new violence to end the old violence. Colonel Frutos García was a man who had read many books, and he said that without the new violence the old violence would go on forever, just the same, yes? Isn’t that right, Indiana General?

For a long time the old man’s eyes were fixed on the rugged trail they were following. Then he said that he understood what the General was trying to say, and he was grateful he had the words to say it. They were the words of a man, he said, and he thanked him for them because they bound him once again to other men, after he had made a profession of refusing solidarity—or any other virtue, why deny it, said the old gringo, hoping his hat would hide his smile.

They rode alone in silence toward the rendezvous. The old man thought, here he was in Mexico looking for death, and what did he know about the country? Last night, remembering that his father had participated in the invasion of 1847 and the occupation of Mexico City, he had quoted a sentence to the desert. Then he remembered that Hearst had sent a radical from his newspaper to report on Porfirio Díaz’s Mexico and that the journalist had returned and said that Díaz was a tyrant who did not tolerate opposition and had frozen the country in a kind of servitude where the people were the servants of large landowners, the army, and foreigners. Hearst did not allow the story to be published: this powerful baron of the press had his radical and his tyrant; he liked them both, but he defended only the tyrant. So what if Díaz was a tyrant, he was the father of his people, a weak people who needed a strict father, Hearst had said, picking his way through the many treasures stacked amid boxes and sawdust and nails in the storerooms of his mansion.

“There is something you don’t know,” Arroyo said to the gringo. “When he was young, Porfirio Díaz was a brave soldier, the best guerrilla ever to fight against Maximilian and the French Army. When he was my age, he was a poor general like me, a revolutionary and a patriot. I bet you didn’t know that!”

No, the gringo said, he hadn’t known. He only knew that fathers appear to their sons at night and on horseback, outlined atop a high cliff, serving in the opposing army and bidding their sons: “Carry out your duty. Fire upon your fathers.”

At this early desert hour the mountains seem to await the horsemen in every ravine, as if they were in truth horsemen of the sky; horizons disappear, and at the bend of a trail the mountain waits to spring on the rider like a ravening beast. In the desert, as the saying goes, two or three times a day you may look upon God’s face. The old gringo feared a similar fate: seeing the face of his father; he was riding beside a son: Arroyo, the son of misfortune.

How subtle, the old gringo thought in that early hour, is the knowledge a father inherits from all his fathers and transmits to all his sons. He thought he knew this better than many, he said, speaking aloud now, not knowing or caring whether Arroyo understood him: he had to say it. He had been accused of fictional parenticide, but not at the level of an entire people who lived their history as a series of murders of old, no longer useful, fathers. No, he knew what he was talking about; even when he had so rapidly diagnosed and filed Miss Winslow; he, the old man, the bitter jester who had come to the end of his personal tether, the son of a hellfire Calvinist who also loved Byron, and who one day feared his son would try to kill him as he slept, this son, first overly imaginative and then hideously in contempt of everything the family had inherited and naturally hoped to prolong: parsimony, thrift, faith, love for one’s parents, a sense of responsibility. He looked at Arroyo, who hadn’t even heard him. The gringo thought how ironic it was that he the son was traveling the same road his father had followed in 1847.

“Look at the cattle,” said Arroyo. “They’re dying.”

But the old man did not see the pasturelands of the Mirandas; his eyes were blinded by a fog of self-contradiction as he thought of his dead father alive in Mexico in a different century, asking the son whether—knowing the accusations that had been made, the resentment Mexico felt toward all Americans—he hadn’t come here for that very reason but, further adding his injury to the insult of his homeland, to provoke Mexico to do for him what he didn’t dare do for himself, out of some sense of honor and self-respect: not die, as he had thought, but succumb to love for a young girl.

“Would you fall in love with a young girl, if you were my age?” the old gringo asked jokingly.

“You should make it your job to take care of young girls and see that nothing bad happens to them.” Arroyo smiled in return. “I already told you, see that this one is well protected and think of her as your own daughter.”

“That’s what I meant, General.”

“That’s all you meant, Indiana General?”

The old man smiled. Sometime he had to begin to do what he pleased; now was as good a time as any. Who could say that it wouldn’t be Arroyo, not he, who was the most distinguished dead man this day?

“Yes, I’ve been thinking about your fate, General Arroyo.”

Arroyo laughed. “My fate is my business.”

“Let’s just imagine that it will be the same as that of Porfirio Díaz,” the gringo continued, undaunted. “Let me imagine for you a future of power, force, oppression, pride, indifference. Do you know any revolution that has escaped that fate, General? Why would the children of their mother the Revolution escape her fate?”

“You tell me. Has any country avoided those evils—even yours, gringo?” Arroyo asked, leaning forward in the saddle, and calm as the old gringo himself.

“No, I’m talking about your personal destiny, not the destiny of any country, General Arroyo. The only way you will escape corruption is to die young.”

Contrary to the old man’s intentions, his words seemed to please Arroyo. “You guessed my thoughts, Indiana General. I have never dreamed of myself as an old man. And you? Why didn’t you die in time, you old bastard?” Arroyo laughed aloud.

The old gringo surrendered before the Mexican’s humor, and said only what he sometimes said to the stars: This land … He had never seen it before; he had attacked it by orders of his boss Hearst, who had enormous investments in ranches and other property and feared the Revolution; but as he couldn’t say, Go protect my property, he had to say, Go protect our lives, there are North American citizens in danger, intervene!

“Ah, these gringos,” Arroyo exclaimed with biting sarcasm. “Didn’t I tell you they all talk Chinese … You have no idea what we have a right to, you don’t know anything about it! Anyone who is born with the stink of a straw roof in his nose has a right to anything, Indiana General, anything!”

There was no time to answer, or even think, because they had come to a steep, stony slope where a lookout was waiting for the General. He said that everything was ready, as the General had ordered.

Arroyo looked directly at the old man and told him that now he had to make a choice. They were going to play a trick on the Federal troops. Half of the rebels were to march across the plain to meet the regular army the way they liked, head on, as they had been taught in their academies. The other half would fan out through the mountains behind the Federal lines, keeping out of sight, blending into the mountains like lizards, you can bet your old ass, Arroyo guffawed sourly, and while the Federales were fighting their formal battle with the decoy guerrilla troops on the plain, they would cut their supply lines, attack them from the rear, and catch them like rats in a trap.

“You say I have to make a choice?”

“Yes, Indiana General. Where do you want to be?”

“On the plain,” the old man replied, without an instant’s hesitation. “Not for the glory, you understand, but for the danger.”

“Oh, so you think guerrilla fighting is not so dangerous?”

“It’s more dangerous, but less glorious. You fight under cover, General Arroyo. And you are forced to improvise. If I understand my role clearly, on the plain all I have to do is march straight ahead while looking brave, trying not to think about the fact that a cannonball might blow off my head. Let me do that.”

The Asiatic mask of Arroyo’s face betrayed no emotion. He spurred his horse along the rocky trail, and the lookout led the old man to join the troops on the plain. He looked at the soldiers’ faces, as impassive as Arroyo’s. Were they thinking the same things he was thinking? Did they know? Were they brave, as he was, or were they merely following orders, convinced they would be lucky? Would they fight with conviction on the stage set their remarkable General Arroyo had constructed, the son, the gringo thought, not of misfortune but of a complex inheritance: the genetic General Arroyo?

Once in the midst of the battle, the old man stopped thinking, or else was thinking what no one else was thinking: of being immersed in a tide of horses, of an earthquake of snorting animals and thundering hoofs on the hard desert floor, of the stillness of the noonday clouds and the swiftness of the rebel bayonets leaving dead behind and flashing over the heavy, motionless French cannons while dazed artillerymen heard, felt, and feared the sounds rushing like a waterfall at their backs, a trembling, a deafening roar from the very mountains, an avalanche of surefooted, fearless horses, of whooping and yelling rebel troops, bullets gleaming in bandoliers on bare chests, sombreros tossed into the air like twins to the spinning sun.

The Federales were roasting in their tight French Foreign Legion uniforms, their ridiculous kepis pressing on their skulls, while the rebels on the plain, commanded by the dauntless gringo, rode straight for the artillery without so much as a glance back at the corpses littering the plain, besieged now from the air by the eternal circling buzzards of the Mexican skies and on the ground by suspicious pigs freed from the pigsty of a miserable little adobe hut and ranging free across the sterile land, bristly, phlegm-colored beasts, sniffing the air to see whether the bodies were really dead and incapable of further harm, before grunting and snuffling their way toward them to begin their feast just at the hour of the crimson sunset.

He hadn’t been wounded. He wasn’t dead.

This was the only thing that surprised him; his grizzled old head was filled with amazement. They rounded up the captured Federales, and the two rebel forces met in victory. This time they did not repeat the celebrations of the previous day, when the gringo had lassoed the machine gun. Maybe there were too many dead comrades on the battlefield. They were dead; not he. He wanted death and was still here, deserving of an ironic pity, helping surround what remained of the Federal regiment, feeling finally the boiling rancor he had expected: the gringo didn’t die, he was the bravest among us, he marched straight on again, like yesterday, as if he wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody, but he didn’t die: Old Gringo!

He was not unduly surprised by what he saw and heard in the hastily erected camp beside the crumbling adobe walls of the hut from which the pigs had fled in famished terror. Arroyo told the prisoners that anyone who wanted to join the revolutionary army of Pancho Villa would be welcomed, but anyone who refused would be shot that same night, because they traveled light and didn’t plan to haul around a lot of useless prisoners.

The great majority of the soldiers silently ripped off their Federal insignia and joined the Villa troops. Some resisted, and the gringo stared at them as one always stares at exceptions. Their faces were proud, or demented, or simply exhausted. They lined up behind their five officers, none of whom had budged.

Now the night wind was beginning to blow and the old gringo feared the return of his suffocating enemy. The hungry snuffling of the hogs on the battlefield filled the silence around Arroyo’s proposition and the wordless actions that followed. The commanding colonel of the Federal troops walked over to Arroyo and with great dignity offered Arroyo a small, shiny, almost toy-like sword. Arroyo took it without ceremony and used it to cut a slice from the loin of one of the suckling pigs roasting over an open fire.

“You know it’s a crime to execute captured officers or troops,” the Colonel said.

He had sleepy, hooded green eyes and thick, blond, pointed mustaches. What a chore, the gringo thought, to keep those points waxed day and night.

“You are brave, so you have no worry,” Arroyo replied, and bit into the slice of pork.

“What do your words mean?” the sleepy-eyed but haughty Colonel asked. “Bravery has nothing to do with it. I am speaking of the law.”

“Of course, the law,” said Arroyo, with a sad, steady gaze. “But I am asking you which is more important, the way we live or the way we die?”

The officer hesitated a moment. “Put that way, of course it is the manner in which one dies.”

The old man said nothing, but he mulled over the words that might have been Arroyo’s honor code and which the old man could, if he chose, take as being directed to him. Arroyo handed the sword to the gringo and invited him to eat pork as the porkers were eating the corpses on the field. The old man must have been concentrating very hard, for he was the target first of the Colonel’s eye and then of his words.

“There is a brave man,” the Colonel said, his eyes ready for death. Arroyo grunted and the Colonel added: “I, too, was brave. Do you admit it?” Again, Arroyo grunted. “Yet that brave old man is not going to die. I am. It could have been the other way around. But I suppose that is war.”

“No,” Arroyo said, finally. “That is life.”

“And death,” the Colonel added in a tone of presumptuous intimacy.

“As long as you don’t separate them,” Arroyo concluded.

The Colonel smiled and said that there was something exceptional about being too brave, whether in life or in death. He, for example, was going to die in a high, cold desert far from the sea of his native Veracruz, he who could still smell on his skin the smells of the European ships anchored in port, he was going to be executed on a night of campfires and grunting pigs. It wouldn’t matter at all whether he was brave as he died; soon he would not be an annoyance to anyone. But to be too brave and still live, now that is a problem, General, that is a problem for both our armies, he said: the indecently brave man. He shows us all up. He makes all of us look a little ridiculous.

“You see,” said the Federal colonel, “we all fear a coward, and admit it; but no one admits he fears a brave man even more, because alongside him we look like cowards. It’s not a bad thing to be a little afraid in battle. Then you are like everyone else. But the man who has no fear demoralizes everyone. I tell you one thing, General. Both sides should join together and, in a manner of speaking, eliminate the brave man. Honor him, yes, but not weep over him.”

The words of the talkative Veracruzano did not seem to make much of an impression on Arroyo, who was squatting on his heels, rolling a pork taco in agile fingers.

“Are you that man?” he asked.

The Colonel laughed softly, if nervously. “No, of course not. Not I. Not in the least.”

The old man hoped no one was looking at him eating his taco, the first food of the day since a breakfast of eggs and steaming coffee. Arroyo was recounting to them the feat of the valiant General Fierro, Villa’s right arm, who had got rid of his prisoners by offering to free any man who could run from the jail across the patio to the prison wall and jump over it without getting shot by Fierro—with the condition that he couldn’t shoot twice at any one man. Only three prisoners escaped. Fierro killed some three hundred men that night.

He, Arroyo, general of the Northern Division, was not going to compete with the famous General Fierro, one of Villa’s favored few, the Dorados, his golden boys. He was much more modest than that. But there was riding with him a brave man, a general from the North American Civil War, the bravest man among them, everyone had seen that today. Arroyo sprang to his feet like a bobcat, speaking now not to the captured officer but to the old man. Ha! The Indiana General was always wanting to be the bravest soldier of the war, now he was going to be the bravest executioner. If he was brave facing death, he must also be brave facing life—yes?—since they were the same thing; the old man had come to Mexico to learn that, and he’d learned it, hadn’t he? if he hadn’t learned it by now, then his trip hadn’t been worth shit, wasn’t that true?

Tonight the old man would do what Fierro had done that other night. It was agreed: the officers and men of that drunken sot Huerta would be given the chance to run from the crumbling adobe wall to the creaking gate of the pigpen and from there to the field of pigs and corpses. The Indiana General would let them run as far as the gate. Then he would fire. If he missed, the Federates could flee like rabbits. If he got them, then they were dead. Brave Indiana General!

Later (not later in life, because his life was suspended, outside of time, like a drop of water on a solitary winter leaf when the only question is which will fall first: the leaf or the drop) he would say that he did the only thing he could have done. He said it to Miss Harriet in her now, which incorporated his impossible then: I did the only thing I could have done, because I hadn’t had the good fortune to be killed discreetly, or naturally, or even with some nobility, by an anonymous hand on the field of battle.

“I could have been just another corpse, devoured by the hogs. God, how they grunted and shit in the cold night air.”

(“What was the only thing you could have done?” asked his father, mounted on the steed of the wind.

“To refuse another the death I wanted for myself.”)

How he wished he were the slightly effeminate but strangely courageous Federal colonel of the sleepy, disdainful smile and the pomaded mustaches still stiff after a day of battle, who walked to the adobe wall and stood there staring at the gringo, waiting for the command to be given.

“You see, Father, I wished to be in that man’s boots.”

“Run!” ordered Arroyo.

Reluctantly, the Colonel stepped away, as if all his life the crumbling and partially collapsed wall had been the final harbor to his imagination: a hearth in his own land. He walked normally at first, turning his back to Arroyo and to the old man, who held the Colt firmly in his hand. The Colonel hesitated, turned to face his enemies, and then walked backward, looking at his appointed executioner, at Arroyo, at Colonel Frutos García, at Inocencio Mansalvo, who together formed the unrecognizable face that had sentenced him without a trial. You wouldn’t shoot me in the back? He was sure the old man would not dishonor himself by such an act, and both the old man and Arroyo, as he caught the gringo’s eye, knew what he was thinking. Now the Colonel looked slightly ridiculous. He stumbled and fell, and then got to his feet and ran for his life.

“Shoot!” thundered Arroyo.

The old man pointed the pistol at the fleeing colonel, then at a hog. He held the sights on the hog as he pulled the trigger, and the bullet cut cleanly through the spongy, worm-infested flesh of the scavenging animal. Arroyo jumped forward with his own pistol in his hand and fired one shot at the fleeing figure of the prisoner. The remaining condemned prisoners exchanged startled glances.

The Colonel had fallen face forward. Arroyo ignored the old gringo, walked to the fallen man, and fired the coup de grâce. The officer jerked and then was still. The captured officers and soldiers, proud or stubborn and simply exhausted, who could know? lined up against the adobe wall and the old man looked at them there, at that collection of mankind, some pissing in their pants, some with idiotic, distant expressions, one or two lighting a final cigarette, some humming a song that reminded them of wife or family. And one was smiling, not foolish, not exhausted, not brave, merely incapable of distinguishing any longer between life and death.

He was the one who caught General Arroyo’s eye. “The General stared at him a long time, you remember?” Pedrito asked. “How could I forget,” Mansalvo replied. “When our leader was so generous. Don’t kill them, he said. Just cut off their ears as a warning, and if we ever meet them a second time, we’ll know, and they won’t get out of that alive.”

“What a big heart our general has!”