3

As soon as he crossed the Rio Grande, he heard the explosion and turned to see the bridge in flames.

He got off the train in El Paso, carrying his folding black suitcase, what they called a Gladstone then, and dressed all in black except for the white expanse of cuffs and shirtfront. He’d told himself he wasn’t going to need much luggage on this trip. He walked a few blocks through the border town; he’d imagined it drearier and duller and older than it actually was, and sick, as well, of the Revolution, of the rage from across the river. Instead, it was a town of bright new automobiles, five-and-ten-cent stores, and young people, so young they could hardly have been born in the nineteenth century. In vain, he searched for his idea of the American frontier. It wasn’t going to be easy to buy a horse without having to fend off inopportune questions about the horseman’s destination.

He could cross the frontier and buy a horse in Mexico. But the old man wanted to make life difficult for himself. Besides, he’d got it in his head that he needed an American horse. If they opened his suitcase at customs, all they’d find would be a few ham sandwiches, a safety razor, a toothbrush, a couple of his own books, a copy of Don Quixote, a clean shirt, and a Colt .44 wrapped in his underclothes. He didn’t want to explain why he was traveling with such a light, if precise, array of provisions.

“I intend to be a good-looking corpse.”

“And the books, señor?”

“They’re mine.”

“No one suggested you’d stolen them.”

Resigned, the old man would offer no further explanations. “All my life I’ve wanted to read the Quixote. I’d like to do it before I die. I’ve given up writing forever.”

He imagined this scene, and told the man who sold him the horse that he was going to look north of the city for land to develop; a horse was still more useful in the sagebrush than one of those infernal machines. The dealer said that was true; he wished everyone thought like him, because no one was buying horses these days except agents for the Mexican rebels. But that’s why the price was a little steep; there was a revolution on the other side of the border, and revolutions are good for business.

“Yes, there’s still a place for a good horse,” said the old man, and rode off on a white mare that would be visible at night and would make life difficult for her owner when he wanted his life to be difficult.

Now he had to keep his sense of direction, because although the frontier was traced broad and clear by the river dividing El Paso from Ciudad Juárez, beyond the Mexican town there was no demarcation but the line in the distance where sky joined dry, dirty plain.

That horizon kept receding as the old man rode on, his long legs dangling beneath the mare’s belly, his black suitcase cradled in his lap. Some twenty kilometers west of El Paso, he forded the river at its narrowest point while everyone’s attention was diverted by the explosion on the bridge. At that instant, in the old man’s clear eyes were fused all the cities of gold, the expeditions that never returned, the lost priests, the nomadic and moribund tribes of Tobosos and Laguneros that had survived the epidemics of the Europeans and then fled the Spanish towns to master the horse, the bow, and later the rifle, in an endless ebb and flow of beginnings and dissolutions, mining bonanzas and depression, genocides as vast as the land itself and as forgotten as the accumulated bitterness of its men.

Rebellion and suppression, plague and famine—the old man knew he was entering the restless lands of Chihuahua and the Rio Grande, leaving behind the refuge of El Paso, founded with a hundred and thirty settlers and seven thousand head of cattle. He was abandoning the sacred refuge of fugitives from the north and from the south: a flimsy, precarious haven in harsh desert lands: one main street, a hotel and a pianola, soda fountains and hiccuping Fords, and the answer of the invading north to the mirages of the desert: an iron suspension bridge, a railroad station, a blue haze imported from Chicago and Philadelphia.

He himself was now a voluntary fugitive, as much a fugitive as the ancient survivors of the attacks of Conchos and Apaches whom cruel necessity, sickness, injustice, and disillusion had once again driven to wandering: all this was etched in the old gringo’s head as he crossed the frontier between Mexico and the United States. No wonder they had all tired of continual flight and for over a hundred years remained entangled in the thorns of the hacienda system.

But maybe he was carrying a different fear, one he voiced as he crossed the frontier: “I’m afraid that each of us carries the real frontier inside.”

The bridge exploded in the distance and he headed to the right and to the south, feeling sure of his bearings (he was already in Mexico, that was enough) when about dusk he smelled warm tortillas and beans.

He approached the small gray adobe hut and asked, in his accented Spanish, whether they could offer him a meal and a blanket to sleep on. The fat owners of the smoky house said yes, ésta es su casa, señor.

He knew the ritual phrase of Mexican courtesy but suspected that after having offered him the house, his host would feel free to subject his guest to all manner of whims and insults, especially any arising from jealous suspicion. But he curbed his desire to stir up a fight; not yet, he told himself, not yet. That night, drowsing on the straw mat in his black clothes, listening to the heavy breathing of his hosts and their dogs, smelling the heavy odors of the couple, different from his because they ate differently and thought and loved and feared differently, it pleased him that they’d offered him their house. What had he lost, in four successive and irreparable blows, but that? In the end, what other reason had he, he admitted, countering his own sleepy but malicious wink, for trotting off toward the south, the only frontier left to him after exhausting in his seventy-one years the other three boundaries of the North American continent, even the black frontier the Confederates had tried to establish in ’61? Now all that was left was the open south, the only door open to his encounter with the fifth, blind, murderous blow of fate.

Dawn rose over the edge of the mountain.

“Is this the way to Chihuahua?” he asked his fat host.

The Mexican nodded and in turn asked with a jealous glance toward the closed door of his house: “And what takes you to Chihuahua, mister?”

Speaking in Spanish, he added a faint ee that made the word sound like misteree, and the old man thought how the first advantage a gringo always has over a Mexican is that of being a mystery, something he doesn’t know how to take: friend or enemy. Although generally they didn’t get the benefit of the doubt.

The Mexican continued: “The fighting is thick around there; that’s Pancho Villa territory.”

His look was more eloquent than his words. The old man thanked him and set off. Behind him, he heard the Mexican open the door to scold the woman, who only then had dared to peer outside. The gringo thought he could imagine the black melancholy of her eyes; a journey is painful for the one who has to remain behind, but more beautiful than it can ever be for the traveler. The old gringo tried to reject the comforting notion that his presence in another man’s house might still provoke jealousy.

The mountains rose like worn, dark-skinned fists and the old man imagined the body of Mexico as a gigantic corpse with bones of silver, eyes of gold, flesh of stone, and balls hard as copper.

The mountains were the fists. He was going to pry them open, one after the other, hoping that sooner or later, like an ant scurrying along the furrowed palm, he would find what he was after.

That night he tied his horse to an enormous organ-pipe cactus and fell into a famished sleep, thankful for his woolen underwear. He dreamed about what he had seen before falling asleep: new bluish stars and dying yellow ones. He tried to forget his dead children, wondering which of the stars were already quenched, their light nothing more than his own illusion: a heritage from the dead stars to human eyes that would continue to praise them centuries after their extinction in an ancient catastrophe of dust and flames.

He dreamed he was crossing a flaming bridge. He awakened. He wasn’t dreaming. He’d seen the bridge that morning as he crossed into Mexico. But now as he gazed at the stars the old man said to himself: “My eyes shine brighter than any star. No one will ever see me old and decrepit. I will always be young because today I dare to be young again. I will always be remembered as I was.”

Steel-blue eyes beneath speckled, almost blond, eyebrows. They were not the best defense against the raging sun and the raw wind that the following day bore him into the heart of the desert, occasionally nibbling on a dry sandwich, settling a shapeless wide-brimmed black Stetson lower on his thatch of silvery hair. He felt like a gigantic albino monster in a world the sun had reserved for its favored, a people of shadow protected by darkness. The wind died down but the sun continued to burn. By afternoon, his skin would be peeling. He was deep in the Mexican desert, sister to the Sahara and the Gobi, continuation of the Arizona and Yuma deserts, mirror of the belt of sterile splendors girdling the globe as if to remind it that cold sands, burning skies, and barren beauty wait patiently and alertly to again overcome the earth from its very womb: the desert.

“The old gringo came to Mexico to die.”

And nevertheless, plodding steadily forward on the white mare, he felt that his wish to die was a mockery. He surveyed the desert around him. Agave rose wiry and sharp as a sword’s point. On every branch of the candlewood tree, thorns protected the untouchable beauty of a savagely red flower. The desert willow concentrated in a single pale, purplish flower all the sweetness of its nauseating perfume. The choya grew capricious and tall, shielding its yellow blossoms. The gringo may have come in search of Villa and the Revolution, but the desert was already the image of war: Spanish bayonet, war-like Apache plumes, and the aggressive, hook-like thorns of the palo verde. The desert’s advance guard were its ranks of tumbleweed, botanical brothers to the packs of nocturnal wolves.

Buzzards circled above; the old man raised his head, then alertly looked toward the ground. In the desert, scorpions and snakes strike only at strangers. A traveler is always a stranger. Dazed, he looked up, then down; he heard the mournful song of dark doves, swift as arrows, was confused by the flight of peregrine falcons. High overhead, birds trailed a sound like dry, rustling grass.

He closed his eyes but did not spur his horse.

Then the desert told him that death is nothing more than the exhaustion of the laws of nature: life is the rule of the game, not its exception, and even the seemingly dead desert hid a minute world of life that originated, prolonged, imitated the laws of human existence. He could not free himself—even if he wanted to—from the vital imperative of the barrenness to which he had come of his own free will, without anyone’s having commanded: Old gringo, get you to the desert.

Sand mounts the mesquite. The horizon shimmers and rises before the eyes. Implacable shadows of clouds clothe the earth in dotted veils. Earth smells fill the air. A rainbow spills into a mirror of itself. Thickets of snakeweed blaze in clustered yellow blooms. Everything is blasted by an alkaline wind.

The old gringo coughs, covers his face with a black scarf. His breathing ebbs, as long ago the waters had drawn back from the earth to create the desert. He thirsts for air as salt cedars on parched stream banks treasure moisture.

He has to stop, choked by asthma, dismount painfully, gasping for breath, and devoutly sink his face into the mare’s flank. In spite of everything, he says: “I am in control of my destiny.”