19

Then Harriet Winslow saw General Tomás Arroyo returning to his railroad car, his head unnaturally bowed as if examining the dusty toes of his boots, seeming not to notice as the old man released Harriet and said: “Once I wrote something very funny. ‘Events have been matching themselves since the beginning of Time so that I may die here.’”

His hard eyes glistened as he spoke. He murmured that he had come here to be killed because he wasn’t capable of killing himself. He had felt freed the moment he crossed the border at Juárez, as if he had walked into a different world. Now he was sure: each of us has a secret frontier within him, and that is the most difficult frontier to cross because each of us hopes to find himself alone there, but finds only that he is more than ever in the company of others.

He hesitated for an instant and then added: “This is unexpected. It’s terrifying. It’s painful. And it’s good.”

He rubbed his clean-shaven cheek with a gesture of manly resignation and, before leaving Harriet, asked: “How do I look tonight?”

She didn’t answer with words; her nod told him that he was a good-looking old man.

Arroyo had told his men: “Respect the gringo. This is between him and me.”

All Harriet remembered was the old gringo entering General Arroyo’s private car, and that he had written about a fragmented consciousness, and she was trying to understand that as Arroyo, alien to the mystery of the two gringos, approached with a fragment of Harriet’s consciousness within his own mind, this general who was wise and brave because he had understood nothing of the world outside his land, this ostentatious and arrogant man who played games with his people’s beliefs and claimed the role of the great dispenser of the world’s goods: she saw it all clearly in the desert light, both dying, the desert and the light, though not the General: the Mexican, Spanish, Arab caudillo followed by a retinue of servants, clients, companions, flatterers and mercenaries, a man who had possessed her and been witness to her sensuality, who had been present at the secret encounter between her soul and her body’s responses, a man who had seen the moment when Harriet Winslow—who should have grown up wealthy in New York but had grown up in genteel poverty in Washington by grace of a pension and various absences—changed forever, and there inside the car was the other witness to her transformation, the man who had come to be killed, the old topographical engineer of the Indiana Volunteers who knew the value of papers, the papers that legitimized General Arroyo’s quest: bounty and vengeance and lust and pride and mere acceptance by his peers. Harriet Winslow’s fragmented consciousness leapt through the void into the mind of General Tomás Arroyo, who, like her, had no father; both were dead or unaware, or what is the same as dead, both unaware of their children, Harriet and Tomás: in the end, it’s always death and unawareness, always the mute and insentient peace of nonexistence and unconsciousness.

Now Arroyo was climbing up the steps of the railroad car and she was running toward him, crying, Stop! stop! and the woman with the moon face had run from the other end of the car and was struggling to hold her when they heard the shots, accompanied by Arroyo’s gargling sounds of rage but no sound at all from the old man, who managed to stagger out to the platform with the burned papers in his hand, and behind him Arroyo, still firing, in a rage like none Harriet Winslow had ever seen before or ever expected to see again; as Arroyo was witness to her sensuality, she was witness to death. Arroyo, standing with a smoking revolver in one hand and a long, flat, empty box of splintered rosewood in the other.

She had screamed at Arroyo to stop him: Think; in making love to each other they had known who they were, they had each bid farewell to an absent father, but also to their youth: she, consciously; he, by pure intuition; in the name of their lost youth, she begged him not to kill the only father either of them had known.

The first time she cried out with pleasure had been with him; he cried out for the first time with the woman with the moon face, after living so long in the silence the hacienda imposed on its slaves.

The old gringo fell dead and Harriet Winslow wanted to believe that he died wondering, as she now wondered, whether the sun would come out tonight, because from now on the sun would be her terror, not the darkness (now she sits alone and remembers). The old gringo fell dead and the earth was eternally alone in the middle of the sea, and the desert was eternally alone in the middle of the earth: he fell dead on the unique ocean of the earth; the old gringo fell dead and the words had been turned to ashes; the old gringo fell dead and his companions would have to speak now because the papers with their history would no longer speak for them. They would say: We worked this land for a thousand years before the surveyors and the lawyers and the army came to tell us, This land is not yours, this land has been sold, but stay here anyway, live here and serve the new owners, for if you don’t, you’ll die of hunger. The old gringo died and the words on the papers went flying across the desert, saying, We like to fight, we feel dead if we aren’t fighting, pray God this revolution never ends, but if it ends, we’ll go fight in a new revolution, fight till we drop into our graves. The old gringo fell dead; and the scorched words went flying far beyond the hacienda and the village and the church, saying, We never knew anyone outside this region, we didn’t know there was a world beyond our maize fields, now we know people from all parts, we sing our songs together, we dream our dreams together and argue whether we were happier isolated in our villages or now, whirling around everywhere, dizzied by so many dreams and so many different songs. The old gringo fell dead and the song of the scorched words spread across the desert inhabited by the ghosts of lakes and rivers and oceans: it’s all ours now because we took it, girls, clothes, money, horses; all we want is to go on like this till we die. The old gringo was dead, his back riddled with bullet holes, and the words were devoured by the alkaline wind he would never breathe again, deaf forever to the words that say, Beaten if we weren’t on our feet by four in the morning to work until sundown, beaten if we spoke to each other while we worked, beaten if they heard us making love, the only times we escaped being beaten was as babies crying, or as old men dying. When he died, the old gringo fell face down in the dust, the mountains moved a step closer, and the lowering clouds sought their mirror in the earth, seeing their image in the fiery words: The worst master was the one who said he loved us like a father, insulting us with his compassion, treating us like children, like idiots, like savages; we’re none of those; in our minds we know we’re none of those. When the old gringo bit the dust in Mexico, rain fell upon the desert as if to settle both blood and dust, and great sheets of water soaked the earth’s shroud so the scorched words would be as water, saying, Things were far away, now they’re near and we don’t know whether this is good or bad; now everything is so near to us we can touch it, and we’re afraid: is that what the Revolution is? When the old gringo went away forever, the mountains looked like petrified sand and the sky was dying beneath a rain of words that said everything was far away but Pancho Villa is near, and he’s like us, we’re all Villas!

When the old gringo died, life dared not come to a halt.

*   *   *

Harriet Winslow and the old gringo had watched him earlier, out of earshot, haranguing, persuading, putting his arms around this man’s shoulders, pinching that woman’s cheek, saying they didn’t need lessons or committees, what they needed were the balls for war and the love for peace, machine guns by day and kisses by night, where does a man prove himself? in battle or in bed, not in some election, he shouted above the braying of the burros with the foam-flecked muzzles: the Revolution is one big family, we all go together, the important thing is for us to go forward together, I depend on Villa as if he were my father and I depend on you as if you were my family; everything else can wait, except winning this war. He swept up a naked child and playfully spanked its buttocks, and they watched him from a distance, imagining that he was filling their ears with, I screwed the gringa woman, but that wasn’t important, nothing was important but to own the land, everything else owns you, and it’s bad to go through life thinking about what you own and being afraid to lose it, instead of living like a man and dying with honor and dignity.

But now the old gringo was dead and the rain was over and the desert smelled of wet creosote bush and General Tomás Arroyo was speaking to his great, silent, barefoot family: Look, look what I saved for you, the ballroom, the special places that used to be only for them. I didn’t touch that, I burned all the rest, the image of your servitude, their store where our children’s children would still owe the shirt off their backs, I burned that, the stables where the horses ate better than we did, the barracks where the Federal soldiers watched us all day, picking their teeth and sharpening their bayonets, you remember all that? the dining rooms where they stuffed themselves, the bedrooms filled with their fucking and their snoring, the polluted water, the stinking communal latrines, the mad dogs I see and fear in my dreams, my God, I destroyed it all for you, except for this building that, if we survive, will belong to you. A ballroom of mirrors.

“I spent my childhood spying. No one knew me. From my hiding places I knew them all. All because one day I discovered the ballroom of mirrors and I discovered I had a face and a body. I could see myself. Tomás Arroyo. For you, Rosario, Remedios, Jesús, Benjamín, José, Colonel García, Chencho Mansalvo, even you, La Garduña, in the name of the fleas and the straw sleeping mats, in the name of…”

Everyone was watching him now with a kind of fear, afraid for themselves and for him. Watching their leader, watching their protector, watching him with sadness. Pedrito watched him, Pedrito, who in 1914 had been a boy of eleven with a perforated silver peso in his shirt pocket, a peso he had retrieved in the church from between the feet of the faithful: look in this mirror and you will see yourselves.

“I’m no better than any of you, my children. But I am the one who safeguards the papers. Someone has to do it. The papers are the only proof we have that these lands are ours. They are the testament of our ancestors. Without the papers, we’re like orphans. I fight, you fight, every one of us fights so that these papers will be respected. Our lives … our souls…”

“I will never understand you,” Harriet had said.

*   *   *

And now the rain was over and the old gringo he’d asked them to respect was lying dead beneath a rainbow spilling across the dusk. The desert mirrored itself; it gnawed at the bottom of the ancient sea, the coarse sand of the great beach the waters had left behind, and General Tomás Arroyo, who because he had the papers had never spoken much, now had to speak in the name of the burned papers. Now memory depended on their leader, but it also depended on them. But the woman with the moon face knew that Tomás Arroyo was not a man of words but the man who kept the words.

Which is why she said, very quietly, to the trembling American: “When he talks so much, something is going to happen to him. Silence is his best friend.”

It was the troops themselves that quickly brought an end to their leader’s words, surging forward on the tide of their own voices, urging him to action, telling him he was right, they would live in spite of him. “It’s time for us to move on. It’s time to leave the mirrors behind, General. Things’ll go bad for us if we don’t join up with Villa. We may be a floating brigade, but we won’t get to Mexico City on our own.”

“My destiny is my own,” said Arroyo, when he was alone.

“What will the gringa do to him?” the woman with the moon face asked La Garduña at the hour when one whispers in secret, not to awaken the earth: What will she do to my man?

But La Garduña just cackled and said in a loud voice, not worrying about the world’s repose, that the papers and the mirrors didn’t matter a Wilson to her, as everyone said in Villa’s troops.

“What does matter to you?” asked the woman with the moon face.

And La Garduña remembered that she’d been lonely and innocent in her village in Durango, protected by the saintliness of her Aunt Josefa Arreola, when the first revolutionary troops had passed through and she’d gone out into the street, excited, and seen a handsome boy, but a boy with death written in his eyes, who’d caught her eye, who’d moved and seemed to call to her, so he wouldn’t be alone. She’d felt a kind of sad but pleasant warmth, something like pity, and she’d never gone back home but stayed by the side of the boy, who was a father to her daughter until a bullet killed him in the battle of La Ascensión. That’s how she became a whore, they said.

*   *   *

“At least, my destiny is my own,” General Tomás Arroyo said to himself many times in his uneasy dreams the night he killed the old gringo and it rained in the desert and the burned words went screaming on the wind.