12

As they were returning to camp, Arroyo retreated into himself like a turtle. His serape was his shell and he buried himself in it up to his nose, while he pulled his sombrero down to the painful root of his ears. All you could see were his gleaming eyes. And no one would want to look into those deep yellow wells, La Garduña said when she saw him ride into town; those weren’t friendly eyes. Inocencio Mansalvo commented that victory seemed far away.

It was not a triumphal march. The only spark of hope or happiness or sensual satisfaction or anything—if some of those things were what Arroyo really hoped to find behind his ideals of justice and behind the hasty tactics that justified but also degraded justice—lay in the forward movement of his troops, in their collective wish to leave the ruined hacienda for the next goal, to join the bulk of Villa’s army, to push toward the capital, perhaps to shake the hand of their brother from the south, Zapata. Certainly Arroyo dreamed these things, or knew them because his men dreamed them. Since this morning, he had wanted to tell them to the old man, before he greeted Miss Harriet with a kiss. But he also wanted, darkly, dreamily, to prolong his stay on the hacienda where he had been born and raised.

“Will we be leaving now?” Mansalvo asked young Pedrito, as if he thought that truth was heard only from the mouths of drunks and babes.

“I don’t know,” the boy said. “He was born here and raised here; I guess he likes it pretty well.”

“Well, the troops don’t; they’re getting restless,” observed Colonel Frutos García.

The gringo felt the tension as soon as they started back toward the hacienda. This wasn’t the time to provoke Arroyo; his sense of dramatic unity—the old writer grinned—would feel violated by another death, on top of the battle and the death of the Federal colonel. He laughed: he was no Shakespeare, not even if it was his own death. He dropped behind, with the infantry, but he also felt the tension there. Spontaneously, the tired but still malicious soldiers maneuvered the gringo toward the rear, toward the very last rows, occupied by the turncoats who had gone over to Villa but hadn’t yet proved their mettle. The gringo had. For the first time, he had known fear in battle; a grave fear, not the vain fear he felt when faced with pain, or a mirror. He just smiled, and spit into the dust beyond his horse’s head.

“No, I’ll never forget,” General Frutos García told his friends after the Revolution, after the former colonel was promoted, to make amends this way for Villa’s defeat and unite the many factions of the Revolution. “The gringo had come looking for death, nothing more. What he was finding, though, was glory—and the bitter fruit of glory, envy.”

Again the gringo aimed, and his dark spit raised the dust in the distance. He laughed at himself. Years ago he’d written something about the Civil War: “A simple recipe for being a good soldier: Try always to get yourself killed.”

Try always to get yourself killed—that was the last thing General Frutos García said before he died in 1964 in his home in Mexico City, and his words became famous among the anecdotes told by the men who had fought in the Revolution.

The Indiana General pounded the pommel of his saddle with his fist and felt the excitement of his literary imagination sweeping over him again, a nervous tickling that rose from his boots through his long, skinny legs to the web of emotions knotted in his solar plexus. Was he here to die or to write a novel about a Mexican general and an old gringo and a Washington schoolteacher lost in the deserts of northern Mexico?

He hadn’t the time or strength to imagine her now, while they were fulfilling their masculine rites of courage and death, and she had been left behind on the hacienda with the strength of an idea in her head that was in direct collision with the General’s. As she loosened her tie beneath the harsh morning sun, after the bulk of the troops had left and she was alone with the drowsy garrison and the women and children, Harriet was not thinking of marching toward the next battle, or the meeting with Villa, or the triumphal march to Mexico City that constituted the thoughts and wishes of everyone else. What she had on her mind was to establish a basic schedule for the elementary instruction of the children, the salvage chores of the women, and the rebuilding chores of the men. Today—not mañana—the children would start learning the basic skills, the three Rs of English-language instruction: reading, writing, and ’rithmetic. The women would rummage through the huge armoires and fragrant chests the troops had dragged onto the patios before the fire and sort what was scorched from what was not, and divide everything neatly, putting the unscorched articles back where they belonged and cutting down and sewing the damaged clothing for their personal use. The men would whitewash the walls as soon as repairs were completed, and clean away the stains and remove the ashes. And she, Miss Harriet Winslow, would set the example; she would be the symbol around which all the work of restoring the hacienda would revolve.

In her haste, Señora Miranda had left behind a small coffer hidden in the hollow of the wall behind her bed, protected by a huge crucifix that had burned, saving the coffer but revealing what it hid. The jewel box contained several beautiful pearl necklaces. Harriet was repelled by the idea of jewels hidden behind the figure of the dying Christ (who, furthermore, safeguarded the carnal passions of the wealthy couple sleeping at His feet); an unholy congress between God’s suffering and worldly possessions. So she placed the coffer in full view, not in the glittering ballroom, where it seemed to her she would be coupling luxury with luxury (to her manner of thinking, if not idolatry, at least bad taste), but in the simple vaulted passageway leading to the ballroom. She displayed the coffer on a small walnut table in this corridor, in solitary, but tempting, splendor. That it was tempting, Miss Winslow admitted, but temptation was necessary to teach these people that private property should be respected and that learning this is as important as learning to read.

The work of the morning sped by, and then came the hour of a lunch that was too large and exotic for Miss Harriet’s taste (bubbling casseroles, chili sauces, fragrant herbs, and warm, steaming tortillas), and before they asked for permission to go to the fields to tend their poor crops and look after their own houses, she played her strongest, her most surprising, her most definitive card. She called them into the ballroom and told them they would meet here regularly—once a week, if matters so required—and they would elect their own officials, a secretary and a treasurer; they would form committees to be in charge of cattle raising, education, maintenance, and also supplies. They must get started at once. When the legitimate owners returned, they would find an accomplished fact, the hacienda would have an organization that spoke for the people who lived and worked there, and would protect their rights. That would come later. But today, when he returned, General Arroyo would find that the people were already governing themselves, truly governing themselves, not talking a lot of vague ideas about how things would be when the war was over and then came the millennium, no, right now! listen to me, he will go on fighting until he dies, he will never stop fighting, even if he wins, but you will still be here. He says that he liberated you. Well, now you show him he’s right, even if it means challenging what he says.

After Miss Harriet spoke, they stared at her from behind campesino masks that didn’t say yes and didn’t say no or we understand or we don’t understand or we have our own ways or we can learn without you. No, they said none of these things, as she announced that class was dismissed and they would see each other tomorrow.

Rapidly, she buttoned the neck of her blouse, but the people did not leave immediately, they stood talking quietly among themselves, sorry for her but not really wanting to show it, as La Garduña said, who could only watch these goings-on with amazement, everyone wondering whether they ought to tell her today why tomorrow it would be impossible to do what she had said today.

Poor señorita, one woman said; she is nice, but she does not know what day tomorrow is.

They felt sorry for her, and laughed like playful little birds.

Now she sits and remembers.

She yielded to the siesta; she felt degraded, immoral, for falling asleep at four in the afternoon: her mind was still in the ballroom, she alone, and seeking in vain the eyes that would share the uneasiness of her dreams, when she wanted to get up but felt as if a hand were holding her back, keeping her captive in the bed, soaking the sheet that covered her damp, naked, musky body smelling of dead magnolia petals and dank cellars, her body, dragging her back into sleep.

Harriet Winslow always awakened with a certain feeling of guilt for what she had said or left unsaid the previous day: guilt for the errors and omissions of the day gone by.

Today, conflict and sensation were worse than ever, and the question that held her—against her will (she was convinced of that), lying in bed at four o’clock in the afternoon—was one that she had formulated before: When was I most happy?

She did not often ask herself the question, because she always remembered her mother’s beatific ritornello: Happiness prevails. In spite of that, she answered herself: “I was happiest when my adored father left us and I could be the responsible one; I felt that now everything depended on me; it was I who had to sacrifice, to strive, to temporize, and not only on my own behalf, but on behalf of all those who love me and whom I love in return.” Happy fulfilling my duty. This link between her dream and her actions brought her closer to the image she wanted to preserve of her father. It brought her closer to everything he had said, at random, at the family table: that kind of rambling philosophy everyone hears and learns at home: life is difficult, life is easy, everything will turn out well, order will triumph, charity begins at home, do unto others as…; strong, thrifty, wise: God-fearing, sober Methodists, no baroque altars here, God-fearing; these things became her duty when her father left, more than her mother’s, whom Harriet could not bear as a dejected shadow but whom she loved once again when she reflected the light of innocence, the quasi-simple happiness of her daughter’s youth, before the father marched away and was declared missing in action.

“Why do you stay on here with me, Harriet? Aren’t you bored?”

In Mexico, her duty was more than ever her duty. But something was lacking in her dream. There was something more, something without which simple duty was not enough. She tried to invoke a different dream within her dream, a light, a back yard strewn with fallen dogwood blossoms, a moan from a black pit.

The old man, on the road back, was not thinking of her. Nor Arroyo. Suddenly, she awakened. Before she saw the faces or heard the voices, she murmured, still in her dream, that unless you attempt to organize life as soon as you awaken, you’ll have to confront your dreams. My baby’s afraid, oh, she’s so afraid!: La Garduña, brutal, rouged face, small sharp teeth, was weeping beside her; she was shaking her, she was telling her a hysterical, melodramatic tale she couldn’t understand; she understood only one thing: Help us, miss, my baby is dying.

A small bluish bundle, skin tinged with pain, the dying child, choking to death while the alkaline wind of the desert blew outside, and Harriet, on her knees in the railroad car, as in a dream, imagined herself a child, the daughter of a military man in the field, ill, in a railroad car that served as house and kitchen and now as hospital: the child-that-was-she was choking and everyone was talking at once, a grief-stricken Garduña, the woman with the moon face: Save her, miss, we don’t know what else to do, it came on all at once, La Garduña’s baby girl, she’s only two years old, don’t let her die, she’s choking, she caught a draft, look at her color; and Harriet, helpless, no medicine, no syringe, nothing except a small packet of aspirin in her valise, toothpaste, brushes for her hair and her clothing and her teeth: La Garduña’s knife-sharp teeth and Harriet’s fresh, clean mouth; no medicine, she could only save the child with her body, run get the aspirin, but we gave her aspirin, and scrubbing and cleansing with twigs, and there is no priest here, he ran away. My body, Harriet thought: when shall I bathe my body, when will I be able to wash, I’m covered with filth and death, death and dream, dreaming of my father missing in the Cuban campaign, and his empty grave in Arlington, carrying dream and filth and death and fear ever since I disembarked in Veracruz, Cuba and Veracruz, always the back yards of my country, occupied by my country because our destiny is to be strong with the weak, the port of Veracruz occupied by the United States Marines following a supposed insult to the Stars and Stripes.

“Did you have any difficulty when you disembarked, Miss Winslow?”

“Did the occupation authorities poke and pry, Miss Winslow?”

“Did they ask you, rather rudely, where you were going and what was the motive for your trip, Miss Winslow?”

“Did you show them with pride the notarized papers that prove you are able to fend for yourself and earn your own living, Miss Winslow?”

“Did you tell them they needn’t worry about repatriating a lost and hungry American girl; this girl had come to teach the English tongue to the children of a wealthy family, Miss Winslow?”

“Did you tell them you weren’t a nurse but a schoolteacher, what you had always been, an instructress, not a governess, Miss Winslow?”

“Did you see the shell-pocked walls of the old prison of San Juan de Ulúa, thinking that you might end up there yourself, Miss Winslow?”

“Did you realize that the walls of the city are also pockmarked by recent cannon fire from gringo warships, Miss Winslow?”

“Did you realize that the white candles with white rosettes and flowers in the streets marked the places where the cadets of the Naval College of Veracruz fell, Miss Winslow?”

“Did two Marines escort you in a carriage to the train station through streets filled with dog packs and gathering buzzards, Miss Winslow?”

“Did a Mexican sharpshooter fire at you from a flat roof, and before one of the Marines fell dead beside you, staining your rose-colored blouse with the blood of the wheat fields of Ohio, did he manage to tell you where he was from, Miss Winslow?”

“Trembling, did you board the train that would carry you to Mexico City, Miss Winslow, amid priests and young men and businessmen who were fleeing from but fell captive to confused stories of an alien revolution, Miss Winslow?”

“Did you see how they took the young men who wanted to go to Veracruz and instead sent them by train to Chihuahua, Miss Winslow?”

“Did they tell you they wanted to fight the Yankees in Veracruz but instead were impressed by Huerta to fight against Villa in the north, Miss Winslow?”

“Did you understand anything that was happening in your back yard, Miss Winslow?”

A carpet of dogwood blossoms. A deep, black moan. She could give only her mind to these things, because she had to press her mouth to the sick child’s mouth, suck, kiss, air, in and out, receive, spit out, the obstruction, the child’s phlegm, tell herself, it doesn’t matter, I have been vaccinated, the baby hasn’t, spit out the phlegm, viscous, black, blue as the tiny body of the child, think of her arrival in Mexico, not about what she was doing, and the child cried, strong and clear, as if she were newborn.

La Garduña kissed Miss Harriet’s hands. “God bless you, señorita!”

“It’s a miracle,” said the woman with the moon face.

“No, no,” Harriet protested. “It was something that had to be done. It wasn’t a miracle, but it must have been predestined. It may be what I came to Mexico to do. Now give her salt water, and sugar water. The little girl will live.”

The little girl will live because I held her by the feet and spanked her buttocks, hard! The child will live because my spanking jarred the phlegm from her throat. The child was crying and begging me not to spank her, don’t spank me anymore. But I enjoyed spanking her. My anger saved her. I never had children. But I saved the child. It’s difficult for me to find love in what I don’t know. I conceive and protect love like a great mystery.

This is what Harriet Winslow told General Tomás Arroyo one night.

“I will never have children.”