21

Harriet Winslow identified the bullet-riddled body of the old man but she said yes, this is my father, and she buried him in Arlington Cemetery beside her mother, who had died near her lamp on the old lamp table, conquered finally by the shadows. So that first Harriet had thought of her poor mother, who had so wanted her to be a cultivated and respected young lady—although chivalry was little in evidence to a family in strained circumstances. The refinement of the spirit demands a social complement in everyday life: the presence of a gentleman. She had made allowances for both prejudices and differences of opinion, and trusted that in the end happiness would prevail and order triumph. Harriet Winslow thought how someday she herself would rest here beside her mother and a lonely old writer who had gone to Mexico to be killed.

“The old gringo came here to die.”

The night of his death, she had wandered dazed through the camp; suddenly she felt an overwhelming hunger she knew was not physical in origin but that only food could appease. On a whim, she sat down by a woman cooking tortillas over a small, smoking brazier. Mutely, she asked whether she could help. She took a small portion of the cornmeal mixture and formed tortillas, imitating the woman squatting beside her. Then she tasted them.

“You like tortillas?” the woman asked.

“I do.”

“They’re good. Soon we’ll be leaving. We’ve been here a long time now.”

“I know. This is his place. He really doesn’t want to leave.”

“Ah, well, it can’t be helped. We have to keep going. I follow my man, I cook for him and bear his children. Life doesn’t stop just because of a war. Will you be going with him?”

“Whom do you mean?”

“With our General Arroyo. Aren’t you his new woman?”

While she sat eating her tortilla beside the woman that long-ago night in the desert; or later, while she was sitting beside the old man’s tomb inscribed with her father’s name; or still later, as an old woman, alone, remembering all those things, she prepared herself for a sense of compassion she had betrayed perhaps only once in her life, when she demanded the old gringo’s body, knowing what the consequences would be. The new compassion granted her precisely by virtue of that sin, she owed to a young Mexican revolutionary who offered life and to an old American writer who sought death: they had given her enough life to live for many years, here in the United States, there in Mexico, anywhere at all: pity was the name of the emotion Harriet Winslow had felt when she looked into the face of violence and glory, and both were finally unmasked to show their true features: those of death.

Then came the Great War, and the Revolution on the southern frontier was swept off the front pages of the newspapers until Villa attacked a border town in New Mexico, and General Pershing was sent to chase him through the mountains of Chihuahua and of course never found him, not only because Villa knew those barrancas and dusty roads blindfolded, but for another, more powerful reason: Pancho Villa could be killed only by the traitor within.

That, thinks Harriet Winslow, is why, in spite of everything, she wished she had been present at the execution of General Tomás Arroyo, to see with her own eyes the flight of that destiny he always thought was his own, rooted in his will, not that of another person. But he died at the hands of his leader Pancho Villa and that ended any destiny at all. She always asked herself what Tomás Arroyo might have done had he survived (the Revolution killed him), what his destiny would have been in the future of Mexico. As the old gringo died, he may have burned a dual future: Tomás Arroyo’s and Mexico’s.

After the deaths, Harriet Winslow left her Camargo hotel room. At midnight she had heard the fusillade in the distance: the old gringo had died for the second time. Then there was a second round of shots—a first death—followed by a single shot. Arroyo also died twice.

At the reception desk of the hotel—a tiled patio with potted plants and canaries—the woman with the moon face was waiting for her.

She didn’t speak. Harriet followed her to a ruined chapel. Pancho Villa was standing in the doorway and said to them: Go in and see your men.

There lay the bodies of Tomás Arroyo and the old gringo. The woman with the moon face began to weep, and then to cry out, but Harriet Winslow remembered that Tomás Arroyo had cried out for the first time with this inconsolable woman, from the pure pleasure of being able to cry out when making love to a woman; and Harriet Winslow remembered that in the same way she had first cried out in pleasure with this dead man.

“My macho, my son, my man,” keened Tomás Arroyo’s woman on the night of his wake in a church in Camargo, where a Christ caged in glass, crowned with thorns and covered with a mantle of mockery, stared at them from His stand on an empty beer case.

All Harriet Winslow said to the old gringo’s corpse was: “An empty grave is waiting for you in a military cemetery, Papa.”

They also left Camargo together the following morning, biting and chill: two wooden coffins on two carts pulled by two tired mules. La Garduña, Inocencio Mansalvo, and young Pedro accompanied them as far as the crossroads. No one spoke. La Garduña was carrying her little girl wrapped in her rebozo, and when they came to the crossing, she again thanked Harriet Winslow. “You’ll see, my daughter will see to it that I’m buried in holy ground beside my Aunt Josefa Arreola in Durango.”

“I hope you will live many years,” said Harriet Winslow.

“Who knows? But I will die thinking of my little unborn brother, the angel, and giving thanks to you…”

“Where, doña, will they bury General Arroyo?” Inocencio Mansalvo asked the woman with the moon face.

She answered, with dry eyes, that she was going to bury him in the desert, where nothing more would ever be heard of him.

“I wish I could go with you,” said Inocencio. “But I must escort the American woman. General Villa’s orders.”

Tomás Arroyo’s woman nodded, prodded the old mule, and set off toward her unknown destination just as Colonel Frutos García was arriving to pay his last respects to his leader. The cart slowly disappeared into a cloud of dust and Frutos García looked at Harriet and said that they would escort her as far as the border, Inocencio Mansalvo and young Pedrito, too; he was a brave boy and he’d loved the old gringo very much. Besides, he added with a dash of Spanish roguishness, with a boy along, no one would get any ideas.

“You must not worry,” he added, more seriously now. “You did what you had to do. The old gringo came to die in Mexico. My God, who could have told him he was going to die over a gringa? In truth, he died because he crossed the frontier. Wasn’t that reason enough?”

“I did, too. I crossed it,” said Harriet.

“Don’t worry. We will respect both you and the old gringo. The old gringo, because he was brave. Because he had sorrow in his eyes. And because that was the last order our General Tomás Arroyo gave: Respect the old gringo.”

“And me?”

“You, because you are the one who will remember it all.”

Then he said goodbye and rode away.

On the long road from Camargo to Ciudad Juárez, Harriet Winslow had a long time to think about her life after she returned to Washington. But she felt a warm presence beside her now: a Mexican boy. Pedrito had loved the dead man who was being taken to the grave of Captain Winslow in Arlington. Inocencio Mansalvo took charge of everything on their journey: food and shelter, route and safety. He knew these unmarked roads very well. This territory was already in the camp of the Revolution, and here everyone was a Villista.

In Juárez, as Harriet was preparing to cross to the other side, young Pedrito spoke for the first time. “It happened the way you wanted, old man,” he said in farewell to the gringo’s corpse, while Harriet shuffled through the bureaucratic papers needed for the difficult entry of a dead body into the United States of America. “The way you wanted it, old man. Pancho Villa himself gave you the coup de grâce.”

Inocencio Mansalvo leaned, smoking, on the railing of the bridge. Burning in the heat of the border spring, he beckoned brusquely to Harriet. She obeyed his summons. This was her farewell to Mexico. Unspeaking, the two stared for a while at the swift but shallow dark waters of the river North Americans call the Grande and Mexicans call the Bravo.

For the first time Harriet really looked at Mansalvo. He was a thin man, with green eyes and hair black as an Oriental’s; two deep clefts furrowed his cheeks, two marked the corners of his mouth, and two crossed his forehead, all in pairs, as if twin artisans had hurriedly hacked him out with a machete, the sooner to thrust him out in the world. Even his handsome chin was split. Harriet chewed on her lip; until today, until this minute, she had never looked at this man.

She stared at him standing motionless and inscrutable, cleft in two from chin up, and she knew that he would always keep his eye on the long northern border of Mexico, because for Mexicans the only reason for war was always the gringos.

In spite of himself, Mansalvo looked across at the North American side of the border. “The old gringo used to say there weren’t any more frontiers for the gringos, not to the east or the west, not to the north, only to the south, always to the south,” said the guerrilla, unfolding a newspaper clipping.

Harriet, leaning on the railing beside Mansalvo, could smell the man’s alcohol, onion and black tobacco sweat. With him, she looked at the face of the old gringo in the clipping from a North American newspaper. Inocencio Mansalvo dropped the clipping into the river.

“What a shame,” he said. “I can’t read English. Now you won’t be able to read me what it said.”

Then Mansalvo turned and forcefully grasped Harriet by the arms. “What a shame! Why didn’t you fall in love with me? My general would still be alive today.” He let her go.

“Always to the south,” Inocencio Mansalvo repeated. “What a shame. They’re right when they say this isn’t a border. It’s a scar.”

Then he walked away and Harriet watched Inocencio Mansalvo’s receding back, the chamois jacket over a collarless shirt, the dirt-covered Stetson spraying dirt to the rhythm of his Mexican vaquero’s stride.

Harriet didn’t look at them again, not at him, not at the boy. When she crossed over to El Paso, a swarm of newspapermen were waiting for her. They, rather than the customs officials, had ascertained that Captain Winslow, missing in action in Cuba, surely confused, a victim of amnesia and of mistreatment in the Spanish prison camps, but infused with the martial courage his admirable daughter had recognized and rescued from the bloody battles of the Mexican revolutionaries … Harriet listened and assimilated the story spun by the press, accepting it as a fragment of the time she was to safeguard. The casket was placed on an army limber to be transported to the railroad station.

“You’re national news, Miss Winslow. Your friend in Washington, a Mr. Delaney, has stated that the Senate will be honored to hear you testify on the current barbarism in Mexico.”

Harriet stood still. Seeing him move away, she was afraid she would lose contact with her companion, the “recovered” corpse, a roving consciousness lost in death, more than ever in death, a consciousness peopled by ghosts, murdered fathers and lost sons.

“Miss Winslow … national news…”

A blue haze once more separated her from the old man: Harriet reached out a hand as if to hold back the errant corpse from the manmade haze, a steaming fog of punctuality and energy; to prevent their being separated, they, the two gringos who had come to Mexico, he consciously, she unintentionally, to confront the next frontier of American consciousness, the most difficult of all, Harriet nearly shouted, national news, national news, trying to detach herself from the group of newspapermen so she would not be separated from the corpse of the old man, the most difficult frontier of all, the strangest, because it was the closest and therefore the one most often forgotten, most often ignored, and most feared when it stirred from its long lethargy.

(“What a shame. Why didn’t you fall in love with me?”)

“Fiske, San Francisco Chronicle. You haven’t answered my question. Will you testify, so we can bring progress and democracy to Mexico? Realize…”

“We bring? Who?” asked Harriet, turning in circles, bewildered, separated from her dead man, her companion, seeing on one side a sunstruck suspension bridge and moribund dust; on the other, the quicksilver path of the rails and the blue haze of the railroad station: the casket wrapped in the United States flag.

“Who! The United States, Miss Winslow. You are an American citizen.”

“Fiske’s the name. You called me and stated that your father had been brutally murdered.”

“National news…”

“We were proud to help you. Now you…”

“Do you think we should intervene in Mexico?”

“Don’t you want to avenge your father’s death?”

“San Francisco Chronicle…”

“Washington Star…”

“Don’t you want us to save Mexico for democracy and progress, Miss Winslow?”

“No! No! I want to learn to live with Mexico, I don’t want to save it,” she blurted out, and fled from the group of newspapermen, fled from the corpse of the old man, ran back toward the border, the river, the weary sun of that day dying over the western border, ran as if she had forgotten something she did not tell the newspapermen, as if she wanted to tell something to those she had left behind, as if she could make them understand that those words meant nothing, “save Mexico for progress and democracy,” that what mattered was to live with Mexico in spite of progress and democracy, that each of us carries his Mexico and his United States within him, a dark and bloody frontier we dare to cross only at night: that’s what the old gringo had said.

She looked at young Pedrito and Inocencio Mansalvo on the other side of the river. She called to them, asking them to forgive her for the death of Tomás Arroyo, but they didn’t hear her, and if they had, they wouldn’t have understood her. I only carried out Arroyo’s wishes to die young, to take his time, safeguard it for him.

They didn’t hear her call as the bridge burst into flames: “I have been here. This land will always be a part of me.”

Their backs were turned to her, and they saw her forever entering a mirror-lined ballroom without looking at herself, because, in reality, she was entering a dream.