4

Inocencio Mansalvo said as soon as he saw the gringo approaching the encampment: “That man came here to die.”

As Pedro was only eleven and still a long way from being on equal terms with a brave guerrilla like the man from Torreón, Coahuila, he didn’t understand very well what Inocencio meant. But from that moment the gringo had all his respect. Mansalvo may have been a lion in battle, but he was even more deadly when it came to predicting a person’s fate. And as it turned out, the old gringo was braver than anyone in the battles fought in Chihuahua. Maybe Mansalvo sensed the gringo’s suicidal courage the minute he saw him and that’s why he said what he said.

“That gringo comes riding in here as if he was ready for a fight, as if he wanted to take us all on, even if it meant we jump him and cut him in little pieces.”

“You can see that he is a man of honor; he comes with no bad intentions,” said Colonel Frutos García, whose father was a Spaniard. “You can see that at once.”

“I tell you, he’s come to die,” Inocencio insisted.

“But with honor,” repeated the Colonel.

“I don’t know about ‘with honor,’ since he’s a gringo. But die, yes,” Mansalvo said once again. “What does a gringo expect from us but that, death?”

“Why does it have to be so?”

Inocencio’s teeth shone so brightly that his eyes glowed green. “Because he crossed the frontier. Isn’t that reason enough?”

“My God, no,” said La Garduña, laughing—an appalling whore from Durango who’d attached herself to the troops, the only professional among the many decent women following the forces of “our” General Arroyo. “What he’s doing is praying. He must be a holy man.” She laughed so hard the paint on her fat cheeks cracked like varnish dried in the sun. She buried her nose in a bunch of dead roses she always wore pinned to her breast.

Later, in the few days he rode with the Villa troops, both Inocencio and the Colonel found that the old gringo was as careful about his looks as a young girl getting ready for her first dance. He had his own razor and kept it carefully honed; he rummaged through the camp until he found boiling water to get the smoothest shave; he even—the old peacock!—got to where he expected a warm towel. But oh, if he was clumsy and cut himself!—though he had a good mirror at his disposal in General Arroyo’s railroad car. None of the rest of us ever shaved looking in a mirror, always by feel, or at the most in the flowing mirror of a river. But oh, if that old man nicked himself, what a caper he cut: he turned even paler; he dabbed at it as if he were going to bleed to death; he pulled out some tiny white papers and quickly covered the wound, as if he cared less about the bleeding or infection than he did about his looks.

“The thing is, he’s never been dead before in all his life,” screeched La Garduña, looking less as if she’d come from a whorehouse in Durango than from the holy ground next to it where priests refused to bury women like her.

“All of you say that Death sent him,” she said, sneezing, as if her flowers were still fresh. “I say the devil sent him, because not even the devil wants him. What’s he doing here? He’s got to be as poor as all of you or as fucked up as me or as mean … as himself.”

“He looks like he’s praying, looking for something,” Mansalvo said from a distance.

“He has a sorrow in his eyes,” La Garduña said suddenly, and from that moment respected him.

He was finally there, in sight of the plain, after four days of solitary slogging across the dry land: a plain dotted with smoking camps scattered like creosote brush around a paralyzed train squatting on the rails. As he trotted now through the sagebrush, the scene lay before him: railroad cars like rolling homes for the women and children of the soldiers resting on the roofs of the coaches and smoking loosely rolled, yellowish cigarettes.

He’d made it.

He was finally here. Cantering, he asked himself whether he really knew anything about this country. Like lightning, through his blue eyes flashed the distant image of the editorial room of the San Francisco Chronicle, where news of Mexico hovered lazily through the air, unlike the arrows that kept the reporters hopping: local scandals, national events; the reporters of William Randolph Hearst’s empire were energetic American Achilleses, not Mexican tortoises, swift on the trail of news, inventing news if necessary. News stories, trophies of the hunt, burst through the windows of the Hearst editorial room: in Wisconsin, La Follette elected on a populist platform; Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle; Taft inaugurated, promising tariff reforms; and an ancient, bemedaled pharaoh was ensconced in Chapultepec Castle, saying evening after evening, “Kill them, while they’re hot!” and keeping himself alive only by maintaining a vigilant and hostile eye on the buzzards circling the palaces and churches of Mexico. A vigilant old man, the delight of newspapermen, an aged tyrant with a genius for publishable phrases: “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” Trivial, irritating news items, news like fat green flies on a summer afternoon, buzzing into the newsroom of the San Francisco Chronicle, where sluggish big brown fans struggled vainly to stir the sultry air. Princeton University had produced Wilson; Teddy Roosevelt had split away to form the Bull Moose Party; and in Mexico, bandits named Carranza, Obregón, Villa, and Zapata had taken up arms with the secondary aim of avenging the death of Madero and overthrowing that drunken tyrant Victoriano Huerta, but with the principal aim of stealing Hearst’s land. Wilson spoke of the New Freedom and said he would teach the Mexicans democracy. Hearst demanded: Intervention, War, Indemnification.

“You didn’t have to come to Mexico to be killed, son,” the shade of his father said to him. “Do you remember when you began writing? There were some who took bets on your longevity.”

“What he’s doing is, he’s praying,” said La Garduña. “He must be a holy man.”

“They’ll never bury you in holy ground,” said Inocencio, laughing.

“Oh, no?” said La Garduña. “I have it all arranged with my family in Durango. When I die, they’re going to say that I’m my Aunt Josefa Arreola. She was a virgin all her life, so pure no one remembers anything about her. Priests only remember sinners.”

“Well, we’ll see what side the gringo’s on, the saints’ or the sinners’.”

“What can a gringo want from us?”

The old gringo knew there were swarms of newspapermen like him, from both coasts, prowling around Pancho Villa’s army, so nobody stopped him as he rode through the camp. But they looked at him doubtfully: he didn’t look like a newspaperman, Colonel Frutos García always said; and no wonder they would look so strangely at a tall, skinny old man, white-haired and blue-eyed, pink skin scored with wrinkles like the furrows of a corn field, legs hanging below his stirrups. As his father was a Spaniard and a businessman in Salamanca, Guanajuato, Frutos García said that that’s how the goatherds and rough serving girls had looked at Don Quixote when he came poking into their villages without being invited, riding a bony old nag and with his lance charging armies of sorcerers.

“Doctor! Doctor!” they cried to him from the crowded boxcars as they spied the black bag.

“No. Not doctor. Villa. I am looking for Pancho Villa,” the old man shouted back.

“Villa! Villa! Viva Villa!” they shouted in chorus, until a soldier in a sweat- and dirt-streaked yellow sombrero yelled, laughing, from the roof of a baggage car: “We are all Villa!”

The old gringo felt someone tugging at his trouser leg and glanced down. A boy of eleven with eyes like black marbles and with two bandoliers slung across his chest said: “You want to meet Pancho Villa? The General is going to see him tonight. Come see the General, señor.”

The boy took the reins of the old man’s horse and led him toward one of the railroad cars, where a man with a strong jawbone, a sparse mustache, and narrow yellow eyes was eating tacos, blowing a lank, rebellious lock of copper hair from his eyes.

“Who’re you, gringo? Another newspaperman?” asked the man with the slit eyes, swinging leather-legging-covered legs from the open door of the shunted car. “Or have you come to sell us supplies?”

“This man has come here looking for death,” Inocencio Mansalvo wanted to tell his chief, but La Garduña clapped her hand over his mouth in time: she wanted to see if what her three friends thought that morning was true. The eleven-year-old led the stranger’s horse.

The old man shook his head and said he’d come to join Villa’s army. “I want to fight.”

The slit eyes opened a fraction; the dusty mask split open in mirth. La Garduña echoed the laughter, and she was chorused by the women dressed in long ragged skirts who came from the kitchen at the far end of the baggage car, wrapped in their rebozos, to see what was making the General laugh so loud.

“Old man! Old man!” said the young general, laughing. “You’re too old! Go water your garden, old man! What’re you doing here? We don’t need any dead weight. We shoot our prisoners of war to keep from having to haul them along with us. This is an army of guerrilla fighters, you understand what that is?”

“I came to fight,” said the gringo.

“He came to die,” said Inocencio Mansalvo.

“We move fast and make no noise; your hair would glow at night like a white flare, old man. Go away, leave us alone. This is an army, not a home for old men.”

“Try me,” said the old man, and he said it coldly, the Colonel remembers.

The women had been chirping like birds, but they fell silent when the General looked at the old man as coldly as the old man had spoken. The General pulled out a long Colt .44. The old man didn’t stir in his saddle. Then the General threw him the pistol and the old man caught it on the fly.

They waited again. The General thrust his hand into the deep pocket of his white peasant’s trousers, pulled out a shiny silver peso, big as an egg and flat as a watch, and tossed it straight and high in the air. The old man waited without moving until the coin fell to within a foot of the General’s nose; then he fired; the women screamed; La Garduña looked at the other women; the Colonel and Inocencio looked at their chief; only the boy looked at the gringo.

The General barely flicked his head. The boy ran to look for the coin; he picked it out of the dust, rubbed the barely bent surface against his bandolier, and returned it to the General. A perfect hole pierced the body of the eagle.

“Keep the coin, Pedrito, you brought him to us,” the General said, smiling, and the silver piece almost burned his fingers. “I don’t think anything but a Colt .44 could have pierced a peso like that. It was my first treasure. You won it, Pedrito, you keep it.”

“This man came to die,” said Mansalvo.

“Now I’m not so sure he is a holy man,” said La Garduña, sniffing her roses.

What is a gringo doing in Mexico, the Colonel asked himself.

“His eyes were filled with prayers”—now she sits alone and remembers—and if the old gringo did not read the minds of those who watched as he descended from the metallic mountains to the desert, he repeated his own written words to them from afar: “This fragment of humanity, this type and example of acute sensation, this handiwork of man and beast, this humble, unheroic Prometheus, comes praying, yes, imploring everything for the boon of oblivion.

“To the earth and sky alike, to the vegetation of the desert, to whatever took form in sense or consciousness, this incarnate suffering addressed that silent plea: ‘I have come to die. Give me the coup de grâce.’”