5

The old gringo smiled as General Tomás Arroyo puffed at the lock of copper hair falling over his eyes and thrust out his lower lip to draw a breath of air before jumping to the ground and planting himself, fists on hips, before the stranger: “I am General Tomás Arroyo.”

He shot out the name firmly, but the personal dart was the military title, and from that instant the gringo knew that all the commonplaces of Mexican machismo would be rained upon his white head, one after another, until they found how far they could go with him; testing him, yes, but also masking themselves before him, refusing to show him their true faces.

They cheered him after his feat with the Colt .44 and gave him a new broad-brimmed sombrero; they forced tacos on him, with burning-hot chilis and blood sausage; they showed him the bottle of mescal with the fat worm settled at the bottom of the liquor, meant to test the stomach of the queasy.

“So we have a gringo general with us.”

“Topographical engineer,” said the old man. “Ninth Regiment of the Indiana Volunteers. North American Civil War.”

“Civil War! But that was over fifty years ago, when we were busy defending ourselves against the French.”

“What’s in these tacos?”

“Bull’s testicles and blood, Indiana General. You’ll need both if you join the army of Pancho Villa.”

“And what’s in the alcohol?”

“Don’t worry, Indiana General. The little worm is not alive. It just lengthens the life of the mescal.”

The women served the tacos. Arroyo and his boys exchanged glances, their faces perfectly blank. The old gringo ate in silence, swallowing the chilis whole; his eyes didn’t water and his face didn’t turn red. Gringos complain that they get sick in Mexico. But no Mexican dies of diarrhea from eating or drinking in his own country. It’s like this bottle, said Arroyo. If the bottle and you carry the little worm all your life, the two of you grow old like good comrades. The worm eats some things and you eat others. But if you eat things like I saw in El Paso, food wrapped in paper and sealed so not even a fly can touch it, then the worm will attack you because you don’t know him and he doesn’t know you, Indiana General.

The old gringo decided he could wait with all the patience in the world—all the patience of his dispassionate Protestant ancestors assured of salvation through faith—for General Tomás Arroyo to offer him the face the world didn’t know.

They were in the General’s private car, which reminded the old gringo of the interior of one of the whorehouses he’d liked to visit in New Orleans. He sank into a deep red velvet armchair and sardonically stroked the tassels of the gold-lamé curtains. The chandelier hanging precariously above their heads tinkled as the train began chugging down the track. Young General Arroyo tossed down his glass of mescal, and the old man, without a word, imitated him.

The old gringo’s mocking gaze as he surveyed the sumptuous carriage with its lacquered walls and tufted ceiling had not escaped Arroyo’s notice. The old gringo was keeping a tight rein on his natural banter and irony, constantly reminding himself: “Not yet.”

What is strange is that from the beginning he also felt the need to control a different sentiment—a paternal affection for Arroyo. He wanted to curb both, but Arroyo, his own eyes invisible behind narrow slits, saw only (or wanted to see only) the look of contained mockery. The train seemed determined that this was not the moment to be halted; it worked up to a steady pace, making its way through the desolate dusk of the desert, moving away from mountains that still testified to the titanic struggle in which some had engendered others, tilted against each other to hold themselves upright, grumbling at times, lifting enormous red- and gold-crowned towers into the dusk, their hulking bodies striated in blues and greens. Now the silent sea of the desert lay at their feet and from the car window the old man could recognize and name the furtive growth of the smoke tree.

Arroyo told him that the train had belonged to a very wealthy family, owners of half the state of Chihuahua and parts of Durango and Coahuila as well. Had the gringo really looked at the troops who greeted his arrival? For example, an innocent-looking guy with dirt on his Stetson, and a disreputable whore? He must have noticed the boy who led him here, the one he had told he could keep the blistering peso with the decapitated eagle? Well, now this train belonged to them. Arroyo said he could understand why such a train was needed—he said it with a kind of bilious grimace—since it took two days and a night to cross the Miranda family estate.

“The owners?” the old man asked, his face wooden.

“Prove it!” Arroyo barked.

The old man shrugged his shoulders. “You just said it. This is their estate.”

“But not their property.”

It was one thing to take something, something that isn’t yours, the way the Miranda family had taken this cattle country in the north surrounded by a desert they wanted sterile and harsh for their own protection, a wall of sun and mesquite enclosing the land they had grabbed, said Arroyo. But it was something else to be the true owner because you had worked for it. His hand fell from the gold curtain and he asked the old man to count his calluses. The gringo said he could sympathize that the General had been a peon on the Miranda hacienda and now he was getting even, riding around in the flashy private railroad car that had once belonged to his masters. Wasn’t that how it was?

“You don’t understand, gringo,” said Arroyo in a thick and incredulous voice. “You really don’t understand. Our papers are older than theirs.”

He walked to a strongbox hidden behind a row of soft damask cushions, opened it, and removed a long flat box of worn green velveteen and splintered rosewood. He opened it before the old man’s eyes.

The General and the gringo looked at the papers as brittle as old silk.

The General and the gringo looked at each other in silence, communicating from opposite sides of a deep chasm: the looks were their words, and the land flowing past the train window behind each of them told the story of the papers, which was the story of Arroyo, and also the history in the books, which was the story of the gringo. (The old man thought with a bitter smile: papers for both, in the end, but the manner of knowing them, not knowing them, preserving them, was so different: This archive of the desert is flowing along and I don’t know where it will stop, I don’t know, that much the old gringo accepted, but I know what I want.) He saw in Arroyo’s eyes what Arroyo was telling him in different words, he saw in the passing Chihuahua landscape, in its tragic gesture of loss, less than Arroyo could tell him but more than he himself knew. This was one gringo who would not set foot in a land before he knew the history of that land; this gringo would know the last detail of the land he had chosen to receive his seventy-one years of bone and hide. As if the story kept flowing without interrupting the rhythm of the train, or the rhythm of Arroyo’s memory (the gringo knew that Arroyo was remembering, but he only knew: the Mexican stroked the papers as he would stroke his mother’s cheek, or the curve of his lover’s hip), each watched the advances, the retreats, the movements in the eyes of the other: flee from the Spanish, flee from the Indians, flee from the servile labor of the encomienda, accept the great cattle ranches as the lesser evil, preserve like precious islands the few communal lands, the rights to land and water guaranteed in Nueva Vizcaya by the Spanish Crown, avoid forced labor and, for a few, seek to preserve the communal property granted by the King, resist being rustlers or slaves or rebels or displaced Indians, but finally, even they, the strongest, the most honorable, the most humble and at the same time the most proud, conquered by a destiny of defeat: slaves and rustlers, never free men, except by being rebels. That was the story of this land and the old bookworm of American libraries knew it and looked into Arroyo’s eyes to confirm that the General knew it, too: slaves or rustlers, never free men, and yet possessors of the right that allowed them to be free: their rebellion.

“You see, gringo General? You see what’s written here? You see the writing? You see the precious red seal? These lands have always been ours, ours, a handful of hardworking men granted protection against the encomienda system and against the attacks of the Toboso Indians. The King of Spain himself said so. Even he acknowledged it was ours. It says so right here. Written in his own hand. This is his signature. I am the keeper of these papers. The papers prove that no one else has a right to these lands.”

“My dear General, you can read?” the gringo asked, a glinting smile in his gaze. The mescal was fiery stuff that stirred his worst instincts. But it also stirred his paternal feelings. Arroyo grasped the gringo’s hand forcefully, though not threateningly. He almost patted it, and it was a surge of affection that snapped the old man brutally from his halfhearted parry, bringing thoughts, and sudden, dizzying pain, of his own two sons. The General said, Look outside before the sun sets, look at the land they were leaving behind, the twisted, thirsty sculptures of plants struggling to conserve water, as if to tell the rest of the dying desert that there was hope, and that in spite of all appearances they were not yet dead.

“You think that organ-pipe cactus can read and I can’t? You are a fool, gringo. I may not be able to read, but I can remember. I cannot read the papers I have in safekeeping for my people; our Colonel Frutos García does me the favor of reading them for me. But I know what my papers mean better than any who can read. You understand?”

The old man replied only that it is the law of the marketplace that property should change hands; no wealth can develop from stagnant property. On the side toward the window, he felt a glow on his cheek, and for a minute believed that the warmth was his own reaction to the terror sparked by the sun each evening as it abandons us: its terror and ours. He stared straight into the fierce yellow eyes of Tomás Arroyo. Repeatedly, the General tapped his brow with his forefinger: all the stories, all the histories, are here in my head, a whole library of words; the history of my people, my village, our pain: here in my head.

“I know who I am, old man. Do you?”

It wasn’t the vanished sunlight that burned the gringo’s cheek through the window. It was a fire on the plain. The vanished sun had been replaced by fire.

“Ah, those boys of mine.” General Arroyo sighed with a kind of pride. He ran toward the rear platform. The old man followed with as much dignity as he could muster.

“Ah, those boys. They got here ahead of me.” He pointed toward the fire and said, Look, old man, the glory of the Mirandas going up in smoke. He had told his boys he would be there by dusk. They had got there ahead of him. But they were not robbing him of his pleasure; they knew this was his pleasure, that he should arrive as the hacienda was going up in flames.

“Good planning, gringo.”

“A bad business, General.”

As the train pulled into the station of the Miranda hacienda, a band was playing the Zacatecas March. The gringo could not distinguish the smell of the burning hacienda from the smell of burnt tortillas. A thick, ashy haze enveloped men and women, children and improvised kitchens, horses and stray cattle, trains and abandoned wagons. Colonel García’s and Inocencio Mansalvo’s shouted orders could be heard above the indistinguishable sounds of the other, almost natural, uproar.

“Guard, halt…!”

“Maize for our general’s horse!”

“Brigade, at-ten-shun!”

“We’ll really live it up tonight!”

Dogs were barking as General Arroyo descended from the railroad carriage, his enormous sombrero heavy with embroidered silver vine leaves set like a war crown above his shadowed face. He looked up and for the first time saw fear on the old gringo’s face. The dogs’ barking was for the stranger, who hesitated to take the next step and jump to the ground.

“Here, Mansalvo,” he ordered, “get those dogs away from the gringo general.” Then he smiled, “Oh, my brave gringo. The Federal soldiers are far more savage than these sickly mongrels.”

There was no pleasure in Arroyo’s face as the old gringo followed, his tall, ungainly body contrasting with the shorter, younger, more dramatically muscular form of the General, who was walking across the dusty flat beyond the station toward the flaming compound of main house and buildings amid a metallic clatter of spurs and belts and pistols and rapidly retired artillery and the rising murmur of the desert breeze playing over the only leaves in sight—the silver leaves on the General’s sombrero.

A whistling sound settled over everything as the old gringo stared with atavistic horror at the row of hanged men strung on the telegraph poles, mouths agape, tongues protruding. They were all whistling, swinging in the soft desert breeze, all along the avenue leading to the burning hacienda.