2

“The old gringo came to Mexico to die.”

Colonel Frutos García ordered the lanterns placed in a circle around the mound. Sweating soldiers, naked to the waist, with sweaty necks, grabbed their shovels and began to dig in earnest, driving their spades into the mesquite.

Old gringo: that’s what they called the man the Colonel was remembering now as young Pedro followed every move of the men laboring in the desert night; again, the boy saw a bullet piercing a silver peso in midair.

“It was pure chance that we met that morning in Chihuahua. He never told us, but we all knew why he’d come. He wanted us to kill him, us Mexicans. That’s why he was here. That’s why he’d crossed the frontier, back in the days when very few of us ever left the place where we were born.”

The spadefuls of dirt were like red clouds strayed from the sky: too low, too near the lantern light. They did, said Colonel García, yes, the gringos did. They spent their lives crossing frontiers, theirs and those that belonged to others, and now the old man had crossed to the south because he didn’t have any frontiers left to cross in his own country.

“Easy there.”

“And the frontier in here?” the North American woman had asked, tapping her forehead. “And the frontier in here?” General Arroyo had responded, touching his heart. “There’s one frontier we only dare to cross at night,” the old gringo said. “The frontier of our differences with others, of our battles with ourselves.”

“The old gringo died in Mexico. And all because he crossed the frontier. Wasn’t that reason enough?” asked Colonel Frutos García.

“Do you remember how he trembled if he cut his face shaving?” asked Inocencio Mansalvo, his narrow green eyes no more than slits.

“Or how afraid he was of mad dogs?” added the Colonel.

“That isn’t true,” said young Pedro. “He was brave.”

“Well, I always thought he was a saint,” said La Garduña, laughing.

“No, all he ever wanted was to be always remembered as he was,” said Harriet Winslow.

“Easy, easy there.”

“Much later, when little by little we were able to piece together the bits of his life, we understood why the old gringo had come to Mexico. He did the right thing, I suppose. As soon as he came, he let everyone know he was tired, that things just weren’t the same anymore, but we respected him because we never saw him tired here, and he proved himself as brave as any man. You’re right, boy. Too brave for his own good.”

“Easy.”

The spades struck wood and the soldiers paused for a minute, wiping the sweat from their foreheads.

The old gringo used to joke: “I want to go see if those Mexicans can shoot straight. My work is finished, and so am I.” I like the game, he’d said, I like the fighting; I want to see it.

“Yes sir, you could see ‘farewell’ in his eyes.”

“He didn’t have any family.”

“He retired and then wandered through the lands of his youth—California, where he’d worked as a journalist; the southern United States, where he’d fought during the Civil War; New Orleans, where he liked to drink and womanize and feel he was the devil himself.”

“Ah, our know-it-all colonel.”

“Watch it with our colonel; he makes you think he’s dead drunk but he’s really listening.”

“And now Mexico: a family memory. His father had been here, too, as a soldier, when they invaded us more than a half century ago.”

“He was a soldier, he fought against naked savages and followed his country’s flag to the capital of a civilized race far to the south.”

The old gringo joked: I want to see whether those Mexicans can shoot straight. “My work is finished, and so am I.”

“This is something we didn’t understand because what we saw was an erect old man, stiff as a ramrod, with hands steady as a rock. Yes, if he joined General Arroyo’s troops it was because you yourself, Pedrito, gave him the chance and he earned it with a Colt .44.”

The men knelt around the open grave and scrabbled at the corners of the pine box.

“But he also said that to be stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags was a pretty good way to depart this life. He used to smile and say: ‘It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.’”

The Colonel was silent for a moment: he had the distinct impression that he’d heard a raindrop falling in the middle of the desert. He looked at the clear sky. The ocean sound faded away.

“We never knew his real name,” he added, looking at Inocencio Mansalvo, half naked and sweating, on his knees before the heavy coffin tenaciously clinging to the desert, as if in such a short time it had taken root. “We have trouble with gringo names, just like gringo faces, they all look alike; their language sounds like Chinese.”

La Garduña, who wouldn’t miss a burial for anything in this world, to say nothing of an exhumation, bellowed her laughter. “Their blurred faces are Chinese to us, all exactly alike.”

Inocencio Mansalvo ripped a half-rotten plank from the coffin and they saw the face of the old gringo, devoured more by night than by death: devoured, thought Colonel Frutos García, by nature. The weather-beaten, greenish face was strangely smiling; the rictus of death exposed gums and long teeth—the teeth of a gringo or a horse—forming an eternally sardonic grimace.

Everyone stood for a minute looking at what the night lights revealed, the twin lights of the sunken but open eyes of the corpse. What caught the boy’s attention was that the gringo’s hair, in death, seemed neatly combed, every white strand in place, as if down there a tiny devil in charge of hair were responsible for a trim that would look as neat as a new-mown field when dead men found themselves face to face with the Grim Reaper.

“Grim Reaper!” guffawed the woman called La Garduña.

“Hurry it up, hurry now,” ordered Frutos García. “Let’s get him out of there. By tomorrow morning early, we’re supposed to have the old bastard in Camargo.” His voice was strained. “Hurry now; we have a long dusty road ahead of us, and if a wind comes up, the old gringo’ll be gone forever…”

The truth is, it almost happened that way, wind blowing across saline, boggy wasteland, this land of unconquered Indians and renegade Spanish, bold cattle rustlers and mines abandoned to the dark floods of hell. The truth is, the corpse of the old gringo almost faded into the desert wind, as if the frontier he had crossed one day had been air, not earth, and had encompassed all the times everyone could remember, suspended there, with an exhumed body in their arms: La Garduña brushing the dirt from the old gringo’s body, moaning, hurrying; the boy, not daring to touch the dead man; the others blindly remembering the long spans and vast spaces on both sides of the wound that to the north opened like the Rio Grande itself rushing down from steep canyons, as far up as the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, islands in the deserts of the north, ancient lands of the Pueblos, the Navajos and Apaches, hunters and peasants only half subdued by Spain’s adventures in the New World, they, from the lands of Chihuahua and the Rio Grande, both seemed to die here, on this high plain where a group of soldiers for a few seconds held the pose of the Pietà, dazed by what they’d done and by an accompanying compassion, until the Colonel broke the spell: Hurry, boys, we have to get the gringo back to his own country; those are our General’s orders.

And then he saw the sunken blue eyes of the dead man and he was afraid, because for an instant they lacked the distance men want death to have. And because they seemed still alive, he spoke to those eyes: “Haven’t you ever thought, you gringos, that all this land was once ours? Ah, our resentment and our memory go hand in hand.”

Inocencio Mansalvo stared at his colonel and put on his dirt-covered Stetson. He walked to his horse, spraying dirt from his hat, and then everything speeded up, actions, orders, movements: a single scene, farther and farther in the distance, fading until the group receded from view: Colonel Frutos García and young Pedro, the guffawing Garduña and the exhausted Inocencio Mansalvo, the soldiers and the rigid corpse of the old gringo wrapped in a blanket and strapped to the sled of the desert, a litter of ocote and leather thongs, dragged by two blindfolded horses.

“‘To be a gringo in Mexico.’” The Colonel smiled. “‘Ah, that is euthanasia.’ That’s what the old gringo said.”