8

At dawn, General Arroyo informed the old gringo that their assignment was to clear out the countryside, mopping up what was left of the resistance in the region. Pockets of soldiers from the Federal army were trying to dig strongholds in the hills of the Sierra Madre, hoping to snipe at them and pin them down indefinitely, while the bulk of Villa’s division was far to the south and had already taken the towns of the Laguna area. We have to move forward, the General said in a hard, dense voice, join Villa, but first we have to clean out the terrain here.

Then they weren’t on their way to join Villa now? the old man asked uneasily. No, Arroyo replied. We’ll meet General Villa later, wherever he decides, then together we’ll ride against the city of Zacatecas and then Mexico City. That’s the prize of the campaign. We have to get there before Obregón’s and Carranza’s men. Pancho Villa says that it’s important for the Revolution. We represent the people; they’re nothing but a bunch of pretty boys. Villa is pressing on; we’re to mop up the rearguard so they don’t surprise us from behind, said Arroyo, now smiling. “We’re what you call the ‘floating brigade.’ It isn’t the most glorious job…”

The old man saw no reason to smile. The time had come and Pancho Villa was still a long way away. He said he would be ready in five minutes. He walked to the rear of the car, where the woman with the moon face lay asleep on the floor. She had given her bed to Miss Winslow. The Mexican woman awakened when the old man entered. He motioned her to be silent. She was not alarmed, and closed her eyes again. For a moment the old man stood gazing at the sleeping face of the beautiful American. He stroked her shining auburn hair; he pulled the serape over a small, round, half-exposed breast, and softly brushed the warm cheek with his lips. Maybe (or so the old gringo wished) the woman with the moon face understood his tenderness.

Dream is our personal myth, the old gringo said to himself as he kissed the sleeping Harriet, and he asked that her dream outlast the war, triumph over war itself, so that when he returned to her, dead or alive, she would welcome him in this uninterrupted dream that he—by the force of his desire and inducing by desire—was able to see and understand in the brief duration of a dream, and which later memory, or lack of memory, would restore as an elaborate plot peopled with details, structures, and incidents. Perhaps he wanted to invite her into his own dream; but his was a dream of death that could not be shared with anyone. However, as long as they both lived, no matter how great the distance between them, they could penetrate each other’s dreams, share those dreams. He made a tremendous effort, as if this might be the last act of his life, and in an instant he dreamed with open eyes and clenched lips Harriet’s entire dream, everything: the missing father; the mother, a prisoner of shadows; the transfer of the fixed light on the table and the fleeting light in the abandoned house.

“I am very lonely.”

“You may have me at your pleasure.”

“… did you look at yourself in the mirror…?”

“Did you see how they looked at themselves yesterday in the mirrors?” Arroyo asked as he mounted his black horse beside the gringo on his white mare. The old man stared from beneath white eyebrows. The battered Stetson did not conceal the icy-blue gaze. He nodded.

“They had never seen their whole bodies before. They didn’t know their bodies were more than a piece of their imagination or a broken reflection in a river. Now they know.”

“Is that why the ballroom was spared?”

“You’re right, gringo. For that very reason.”

“Why was everything else destroyed? What did you gain by that?”

“Look at those fields, Indiana General.” Arroyo gestured with a swift, weary movement of his arm which pushed his sombrero onto his shoulders. “Not much grows here. Except memory and bitterness.”

“And you believe that resentment and justice are the same thing, General,” said the old man, smiling.

Arroyo’s only reply was: “We’re getting close to the foothills.”

Then they were there. The old man saw a high sierra notched with yellow basalt. The mountains stood like ancient, exhausted beasts thrust from the womb of an infinitely indifferent and self-perpetuating range. The old man forced himself to remember that the Federal soldiers hidden there were not at all exhausted. He must be on the alert, just as when the Indiana Volunteers had helped Sherman wipe out what was left of Johnston’s rebel army after the fall of Fayetteville. A terrible emptiness, almost an oblivion, filled the old gringo’s head at that instant; then, a young man, he had wanted to fight on the side of the Blue, with the Union, against the Gray, the Rebels, simply because he had dreamed that his father was serving in the Army of the Confederacy, against Lincoln. He wanted what he had dreamed: the revolutionary drama of son against father.

“If they’re going to attack, it’s now or never,” said the old man, swooping back to reality like a hawk on its prey. “We’re in plain view now.”

“If they attack, we’ll know where they are,” said Arroyo.

Bullets pierced the hard-crusted ground a dozen feet away.

“They’re nervous.” Arroyo grinned. “That’s why they don’t hit us.”

He ordered a halt; everyone dismounted. Except the old man. He continued forward.

“Hey, Indiana General. Can’t you handle your horse? I ordered a halt,” Arroyo shouted.

And he continued to shout as the old man began to trot straight toward the rugged rocks from which the shots were being fired. “Hey, you fool gringo. Didn’t you hear my order? Come back here, you old idiot!”

But the old man continued straight on while the burst of machine-gun fire passed over his head, aimed at Arroyo and his men, not at the mirage of a white knight on a white horse, so visible he seemed invisible, trotting forward as if unaware of the fire, readying himself, loosening his lasso from the pommel of his saddle. Arroyo and his men fell flat against the ground, more frightened for the old gringo than for themselves or for the Federales lying in ambush. There on their bellies, they realized that the Federal soldiers had miscalculated, that the machine-gun fire was neither reaching them nor hitting the old man. But any minute now they would realize their error. And then, adios, old gringo, murmured Arroyo, his breast pressed to the ground.

They saw him coming, but the truth was, they didn’t believe it. The old man understood what was happening as soon as he saw their astonished faces. He wasn’t like them, he was an avenging white devil, he had eyes that only God in the churches had, his Stetson flew off and they saw revealed the image of God the Father. He was in their imaginations; he wasn’t real. The handful of Federal soldiers were so stunned by the vision that they were slow to recover their senses, clumsy in exchanging machine gun for rifles, never realizing that behind them a Confederate commander on horseback, his sword unsheathed, was urging them on to victory, and that it was toward this horseman, flashing his anger from the mountaintop, the gringo rode, not toward them, their machine gun lost now, lassoed and tumbled out of sight, and then the wrinkled, sere apparition fired on the four sharpshooters and they lay dead beneath the burning sun, flat on the fiery rocks, their faces hot in death, their feet digging into the surprised dust as if wanting to run toward their deaths, challenge death to a footrace. A single shout burst from the rebel force, but the gringo did not hear it; he was still firing upward, toward the peaks where first rode, and then fell, the horseman dressed in gray, but whiter than he, hurtling through the air: the horseman in the sky.

Everyone ran to the old gringo, to stop him, to congratulate him, brushing dirt and burrs from their chests, but he was still firing toward the cliff, toward the sky, oblivious to the shouting of his comrades, who could not know that for him a story was becoming a ghostly reality, a story in which he was a Union Army lookout who had fallen asleep for a minute and then was awakened by a voice never heard by mortal, the voice of his Southern father, riding a white horse along the ridge of a high cliff: Do what you conceive to be your duty, sir.

“I have killed my father.”

“You are a brave man, Indiana General,” Arroyo said.

The old man stared long and hard into the General’s eyes, thinking that he could tell him many things. But no one would be interested in his story. Except maybe Harriet Winslow. And even she, who had lost a father in a war, would take such a story too literally. For the old gringo, dazed by the fragility of the planet that separates reality from fiction, the problem was different: journalist or writer, he was still pursued by alternatives. It was not the same, but he must shake all the options from his head. He could not go on believing that he was going to live, to work, to choose between the news directed to Hearst and his readers and the fiction directed to the father and the woman; nor was it possible for him to continue to sacrifice the latter to the former. There was only one option, and that is why his only response to Arroyo was: “It’s not difficult to be brave when you’re not afraid to die.”

But Arroyo knew that the mountains were already shouting it, from chasm to peak, from cave to canyon, across barrancas and bone-dry creeks: A brave man has come here, a brave man is among us, a brave man has set foot on our stones.