20

Pancho Villa rode into Camargo one brilliant spring morning: his copper-hard head was crowned by a large gold-embroidered sombrero, a sombrero stained with dust and blood, not a luxury but an instrument of power and a symbol of struggle, like his wide, callused hands and his bronze stirrups buffed by the mountain winds. A patina of gunpowder, thorn, and rock, pine trails and endless, blinding plains clung to his rough antelope-colored suit, his chamois leggings, his steel machete and silver parade goad, the gold and silver buttons of his short jacket and trousers, everything gleaming with silver and gold, not precious treasures to be hoarded but metals to adorn us in battle and in death: a suit of lights.

Villa was a man of the north, tall and robust, his torso longer than his short Indian legs, but with long arms and powerful hands and a head that might have been lopped long ago from the body of another man, in former times and distant places, a severed head from the past welded like a precious metal casque to a mortal body, powerful but powerless, from the present. Oriental eyes, smiling but cruel, set in a plain of laugh lines; a ready smile, teeth shining like kernels of white corn; a scrawny mustache and three days’ growth of beard; a head that had been seen in Mongolia and Andalusia and the Rif, among the nomadic tribes of North America, and was now here in Camargo, Chihuahua, grinning and blinking and squinting against the onslaught of the light, a head stored with vast reserves of intuition and ferocity and generosity, a head come to rest on the shoulders of Pancho Villa.

The landowners had fled and the moneylenders were in hiding. A laughing Villa scarcely reined in his chestnut horse on the rocky streets of Camargo, where the central column of the Northern Division had come to join those of the other generals before attacking Zacatecas, the commercial center of the ruined haciendas he had sacked to free people from slavery and usury and debt. Villa’s horse’s hoofs clattered on the cobbles, preceding a train of metallic sounds that rang in counterpoint to the strange hollowness of the stone streets: copper and steel bits and curbs and curb chains jingled and clinked; horsehair crops and quirts hissed and whips cracked in the air.

All the town was out, throwing confetti from wroughtiron balconies, draping serpentines from lampposts, muffling the encounter between metal and stone in a tide of the pink, blue, and scarlet of Mexican fiestas, overflowing large glass demijohns of refreshing drinks, many-colored candy slices, and huge earthen casseroles bubbling with black and red and green sauces.

The reporters were there, too, the gringo newspapermen and photographers, with a new invention, the movie camera. Villa was already captivated, he didn’t have to be convinced a second time. He was well aware that the little machine could capture the ghost of his body if not the flesh of his soul—that belonged only to him, to his dear dead mother, and to the Revolution; his moving body, generous and domineering, his panther-like body, that, yes, could be captured and set free again in a darkroom, like a Lazarus risen not from the dead but from faraway times and spaces, in a black room on a white wall, anywhere, in New York or in Paris. He promised Walsh, the gringo with the camera: “Don’t worry, don Raúl. If you say the light at four in the morning isn’t right for your little machine, well, no problem. The executions will take place at six. But no later. Afterwards we march and fight. Understood?”

Now all the Yankee newspapermen gathered in Camargo were besieging him with questions before he moved on Zacatecas to decide the fate of the revolution against Huerta and, in passing, the fate of Wilson’s Mexican policy. “Do you expect the United States government to recognize you if you win?”

“That problem doesn’t exist. I am subordinate to Carranza, the first leader of the Revolution.”

“Everyone knows that you and Carranza don’t get along, General.”

“Who knows it? Do you know it? Tell me about it, please.”

“We intercepted a telegram your General Maclovio Herrera sent to Carranza after you were denied the right to launch your attack on Zacatecas, General Villa. The text is very brief. It says, ‘You son of a bitch.’”

“Oh, my little friend. I don’t know how to say those bad words in Spanish. I swear to you, I can only say them in English. In any case, Señor Carranza has decided to send the Arrieta brothers to take Zacatecas.”

“But you’re here with a whole division, with artillery and ten thousand men…”

“At the service of the Revolution, señores. If the Arrieta brothers, as they usually do, get stuck in Zacatecas, I can be there in five days’ time to give them a hand. That’s all I need!”

“And last, General Villa. What do you think of the American occupation of Veracruz?”

“An unwelcome guest and a dead man both stink after two days.”

“Can you be a little more specific, General?”

“The Marines landed in Veracruz after bombarding the city and killing young Mexican cadets. Instead of swamping Huerta, they made him stronger by rousing the people’s patriotism. They split support for the Revolution and made it possible for Huerta, that drunken bum, to impose his filthy levy. Boys who thought they were being sent to fight the gringos in Veracruz were sent to fight against me in Coahuila. I don’t know whether that’s what you’re looking for, but it seems to me that when gringos aren’t too smart for their own good, they’re plenty dumb.”

“Is it true you had an American officer shot in the back? That a captain in the United States Army was killed in cold blood by one of your own men, General?”

“What the shit…?”

“Responsible sources in the United States have branded you as nothing less than a common bandit, General Villa. Public opinion questions whether you can guarantee safety here in Mexico. Do you respect human life? Can you deal with civilized nations?”

“Who the shit said all this?”

“A Miss … uh, Harriet Winslow … uh, from Washington, D.C. She says she was witness to the events. Her father had been missing in action ever since the war in Cuba. It seems he had only wanted to avoid family obligations, but decided he wanted to see his little girl, a grown woman now, before he died. She came here to see him. They’ve accused a general in your army, General Villa. What did ya say his name is, Art?”

“Arroyo’s the name. General Tomás Arroyo. She says she saw him shoot her daddy dead.”

“With all due respect, General, we remind you that the bodies of United States citizens killed in Mexico, or anywhere else in the world, must be returned on the request of their families, to be given a decent Christian burial.”

“Is that what the law says?” Villa grunted.

“Indeed it does, General.”

“Show me where it’s written.”

“Many of our laws are unwritten, General Villa.”

“A law that isn’t written down on paper? Then why the devil learn to read?” a bewildered Villa replied, with a scornful grin. Then he laughed, and they all laughed with him, and stepped aside for the man who symbolized the Revolution and who was preparing to show the world that it wasn’t Carranza, a perfumed old senator, one of the so-called decent people of Mexico, who deserved that appellation but precisely what Carranza most despised, a barefoot, illiterate, pulque-swilling, taco-chomping campesino from the restless hills of Durango who had been beaten by the same hacienda owners who raped his sisters. No, he laughed, and he assured his distinguished artillery commander General Felipe Ángeles, a graduate of the French Academy of St.-Cyr, I don’t say this to you, don Felipe, but to them, you’ve just seen them; the gringos act as if we didn’t exist, and then one fine day they discover us, and watch out! we’re the devil himself ready to take their lives and property; well, why not give them a real scare—Pancho Villa grinned—why not invade them for once and let them see what it feels like?

Then he flew into a terrible rage to think there might be anyone who didn’t understand his situation. Carranza had him paralyzed in Chihuahua, so Villa wouldn’t be the one to lead the way to Mexico City, so the glory would go to the pretty boys, oh, what griped his balls most was that that old he-goat bastard never let a chance go by to remind the former cattle rustler from Chihuahua that they came from very different backgrounds: no, being a lousy lawyer isn’t the same as risking your hide! He asked his secretary, the professor, to write his resignation from the Division, so the fat’s in the fire, let’s see whether Natera and the fancy Arrieta brothers could take Zacatecas by themselves, see why that hypocrite Pablo González hadn’t sent coal or munitions from Monterrey, and see whether their civil authority would do them any good without Pancho Villa’s military support; let’s get it decided here and now. And to think that on top of everything else, some shitass hanging around in Chihuahua is making problems for me with the gringos! Villa exploded, but, as always, was calmed by a night of lovemaking.

*   *   *

General Tomás Arroyo received the order to dig up the gringo wherever he was and bring him to Camargo. No, they’d lied to him on purpose. No family was claiming the body, but a newspaper, the Washington Star, he was told. But when this order finally tore the flying brigade away from the burned hacienda of the Mirandas, Arroyo knew full well the name of the person who was claiming the body. He saw her in his dreams, with the old man’s blasted head in her arms, looking at Arroyo standing in the door of the railroad car, as if he had killed something that belonged to her, but also to him; and now they were both alone again, orphans, looking at each other with hatred, no longer capable of nourishing each other through a living creature, or of filling the tormented void that she felt in herself and he in him.

“Look what he has in his hand! Look what he has clenched in his hand.” This was all Arroyo could say. She saw the burned papers and Arroyo was saying that the gringo had burned his soul, and she admitted he had burned something more: the history of Mexico; but that was no excuse, because the life of a person is worth more than the history of a country, and Harriet Winslow was convinced that, in spite of everything, the desert of Chihuahua cried out with her: murderer, pig, greaser, stinking coward! She screamed at him: You had me, but you had to kill him, too.

“He came here to provoke me,” Arroyo said, panting. “Just like you. You both came to provoke me. Fucking, sonofabitching gringos!”

No, you provoked yourself, she said, as that long day came to an end, you provoked yourself to prove to yourself who you are. Your name isn’t Arroyo, like your mother’s; your name is Miranda, after your father. Yes, she said, as the rain dissolved the ashes of the papers, you’re the resentful heir, disguised as a rebel.

“You poor bastard. You are Tomás Miranda.”

She said it savagely, wanting to wound him, but knowing she could have said it calmly to the old man lying beside the wheels of the railroad car, every bullet hole clearly visible on his back; but she said it with rage for the sake of justice, to remind him that she, too, could fight, fight back, blow for blow. Tomás was beyond understanding anything. He had killed the old gringo. He couldn’t imagine that Harriet Winslow still had fight left in her; she must feel as drained as he. The old gringo, and the burned papers.

“I would have taken anything from you two gringos. Anything, except this,” Arroyo said, pointing to the ruin of the papers.

“You needn’t worry,” Harriet Winslow replied, with her few remaining remnants of humor and compassion. “He thought he was already dead.”

But on that evening Arroyo wanted to burn his own soul. “What is the life of an old man compared to the rights of my people?”

“I just told you, you killed a dead man. Be thankful. You saved yourself the expense of an execution.”

*   *   *

An execution was what Villa demanded of Tomás Arroyo when he saw the old man’s bullet-riddled body, as he checked the famous temper that terrorized both his own men and his enemies. Pancho Villa touched the bullet-riddled back of the old gringo and remembered something one of the Yankee reporters had told him when they interviewed him in Camargo: “I have a saying for you, General Villa. ‘What we call dying is simply the last pain.’”

“Who said that?”

“Oh, a bitter old man.”

“Then it was written?”

“As I said, by a bitter old man.”

“Oh, by…”

Villa ordered the execution for that same night, for midnight. He warned it would be a secret execution; no one was to know anything about it except him, Villa, General Arroyo, and the firing squad. Let Mr. Walsh and his camera go fuck themselves. This wasn’t for him.

With some difficulty, they propped the old gringo against the wall, facing the firing squad, his head drooping on his chest, his knees limp, his face slightly disfigured by the acids of his first burial in the desert.

The order was given in the patio behind Villa’s headquarters; the light of the lanterns placed at intervals on the ground cast strange shadows on the men’s faces. Shots rang out and the old gringo fell for the second time into the arms of his old friend, death.

“Now he is legally shot from the front, in accordance with the law,” said Pancho Villa.

“What do we do with the corpse, General?” asked the commander of the firing squad.

“We’re going to send it to whoever claimed it in the United States. We’ll say he died in a battle against the Federales, that they captured him and shot him.”

Villa didn’t look at Arroyo but said he didn’t want to be dragging around the body of any gringo that could give Wilson an excuse to recognize Carranza or intervene against Villa in the north.

“We’ll kill a few gringos, all right,” said Villa with a ferocious grin, “but in good time and when I decide.”

He turned to Arroyo without changing expression. “He was a brave man, wasn’t he? A brave gringo? I’ve heard about all he did. Now he’s been shot fairly, from the front, not in the back like a coward, because he wasn’t a coward, was he, Tomás Arroyo?”

“No, General. The gringo was the bravest of us all.”

“Here, Tomasito. Give him the coup de grâce. You know you’re like a son to me. Do it well. We have to do everything aboveboard and according to the law. This time I don’t want you to make me any mistakes. We have to be ready for anything. It seems to me you had a good rest at that hacienda, you were there long enough and even became famous, right?”

(“Arroyo,” said the Yankee newspaperman. “Arroyo is the name.”)

“Yes, General,” Arroyo answered simply.

Arroyo walked to where the body of the old gringo lay before the wall, knelt beside him, and pulled out his Colt. He administered the coup de grâce with precision. No blood flowed from the old gringo’s neck now. Then Villa gave the order to fire on the unfortunate Arroyo, whose face was the living image of pain and disbelief. Even so, he managed to call out, “Viva Villa!”

Arroyo fell beside the old gringo, and Villa said he wouldn’t put up with officers playing their little games with foreigners and creating unnecessary problems for him. When it came to killing gringos, only he, Pancho Villa, would say when and why. The body of the old man would be sent back with his daughter and the matter would be forgotten forever.

The eyes, the blazing blue eyes of the old Indiana General, were closed forever that night in Camargo by the hands of a boy with eyes black as marbles and with two bandoliers slung across his chest, a boy who one day had asked, “You want to meet Pancho Villa?”

Pedrito pulled from his pants pocket the peso perforated by the same Colt .44 that Arroyo had thrown to the old gringo, and placed it in the stained shirt pocket of the man who had died twice. Villa himself administered the coup de grâce to Tomás Arroyo.