9

But the desert forgets us, the old gringo told himself that morning. At the same moment, Arroyo, staring at the sky, was thinking that everything had a home except him and the clouds. Harriet Winslow awoke saying the word “mañana,” accusing it of having prolonged her sleep only to awaken her with an uncomfortable sensation of having procrastinated in some duty. The old man’s question (Had she looked at herself in the ballroom mirror?) kept returning, and Harriet wondered, and why not?—even though mirrors were beginning to tell her a story that didn’t please her. Maybe last night the old man had wanted to ask her whether she had seen something different in the hacienda mirrors, or what she always saw.

“Your soul is no different from your dreams. Both are instantaneous.”

“The soul does not belong to the instant. It isn’t a dream. It is eternal.”

That is why the morning of the skirmish that was still unknown to her, she walked with a firm step to the village adjoining the hacienda, fresh and brisk in her shirtwaist and tie, full pleated wool skirt and high-button boots, the auburn hair pulled back into a bun, murmuring: First things first—forgetting that when she had awakened she had felt undecided about what she could have said but hadn’t in her encounters with the General and the old man, reconstructing the spectral hiatuses in her waking speech and actions that pursued her throughout the night. Daily activity was all the more important for that very fact, intending first to incorporate, but later destroy, the nocturnal attacks on the instant. But she would sleep again, she would dream again: dream’s interruption of the minute hand that daily grinds away true internal time in the mill of activity merely emphasizes, and intensifies, the world of the eternal instant that would return by night, while she slept and dreamed alone.

When the detachment returned at dusk, Arroyo found the men who had remained behind busy among the ruins of the hacienda, the women preparing great pails of whitewash, and the children seated around Miss Winslow in the ballroom that had been spared from destruction. The children were avoiding looking at themselves in the mirrors. The teacher had lectured strongly against vanity: This ballroom is a temptation sent to test our Christian humility, a ballroom filled with the sin of presumption.

“Did you look at yourselves in the mirrors when you entered the ballroom?”

She had learned some Spanish in her Washington normal school, and could speak with firmness, even correctness, when she was not frightened as she had been the night before: Presumption, Vanity, the Devil, Sin. The children thought that the nice American lady’s lesson was not very different from the sermons of the parish priest here on the hacienda, except that in the chapel there were prettier and more entertaining things to look at while the priest was talking. Miss Harriet Winslow questioned them and found them bright and forthcoming. But have you visited the pretty little chapel, señorita?

“Did you see anything different from what you saw in Washington; is the image always the same?”

When Tomás Arroyo, whip in hand, marched into the ballroom, Harriet Winslow met his eyes squarely. She saw his contained fury and she gloried in it. Who had given the señorita permission to rebuild the hacienda? Why had she commandeered his men?

“So that people can have a roof over their heads,” Miss Winslow answered simply. “Not everyone can sleep in a Pullman car designed for the Vanderbilts.”

The General stared at her through eyes narrower than ever. “I want this place to be a ruin. I want the house of the Mirandas to remain a ruin.”

“You are mad, sir,” said Harriet, with all the serenity she could muster.

His heels rang threateningly as he walked toward her, but he stopped short of touching her. “Arroyo. My name is General Arroyo.”

He waited, but she did not respond. He shouted: “You understand now? No one touches this place. It stays the way it is.”

“You are mad, sir.”

Now there was insult in Harriet’s voice. He seized her violently by the arm and she stifled a moan.

“Why don’t you say it? General. General Arroyo!”

“Let me go!”

“Answer me, I tell you!”

“Because you are not a general. No one appointed you. I am sure you named yourself.”

“Come with me.”

He dragged her out into the late evening. The old gringo was drinking a glass of tequila in the General’s car when he heard the commotion and went out on the platform. He saw them clearly, facing the setting sun: she, tall and slim; he, short for a man but muscular, his manliness compensating for what the American woman took from him in height or manners or whatever you might call what he now feared and desired from her. These were the old man’s thoughts as he watched and listened on the day of his heroic action, a day when he had not wanted to sit down and write to compensate for his physical exertion and so was getting drunk and praying that this day would soon end and the next day come, the day that might be the day of his death. But he knew that the prize, as always, went not to the brave but to the young: dying or writing, loving or dying. He closed his eyes in fear: what he had seen in the distance were a son and a daughter; he opaque, she transparent, but both born of the seed of the imagination called poetry and love. He was fearful because he did not want love again in his life.

Look, Arroyo said to Miss Winslow, as he had to the old gringo that morning, look at this land. She saw a dry, ugly, but beautifully dramatic world, strong, devoid of any generosity, alien to fruit easy for the picking: she saw a land whose scanty fruits had to be born of a dead womb, like a child that goes on living and fighting to be born from its dead mother’s womb.

Both Harriet and the old man were thinking of other, more opulent lands, of fertile, long, lazy rivers, of the splendor of waving wheat fields on land stretching flat as a tablecloth toward smoky blue mountains and gently rolling mountainsides covered with forests. The rivers: they thought especially of the rivers of the North, a litany that rolled from their tongues like a current of lost pleasures in that dry and thirsty Mexican evening. Hudson, the old man said; Ohio, Mississippi, she answered from the distance; Missouri, Potomac, Delaware, the old gringo concluded: the good, green waters.

What was it the old gringo had said to Miss Harriet last night? That she had come as a schoolmistress to a hacienda she had never seen, which no longer existed, to teach English to children she didn’t know, or know anything about, even if they did exist.

“They got bored,” Arroyo said, his words heavy and dry in this land without rivers.

They got bored: the masters of the hacienda came here from time to time, only as a vacation. An overseer administered everything for them. These were no longer the times of the resident landowner who kept a close eye on the cattle and weighed every quintal of grain. When these owners came, they got bored and drank cognac. They fought the young bulls. They also went galloping through the tilled fields, terrifying the peons bent over their humble Chihuahua crops, beans, wild lettuce, spindly wheat; they beat the backs of the weakest men with the flat of a machete, and they lassoed the weakest women and then raped them in the hacienda stables while the mothers of the young gentlemen pretended not to hear the screams of our mothers and the fathers of the young gentlemen drank cognac in the library and said, They’re young, this is the age for sowing their wild oats, better now than later. They’ll settle down. We did the same.

Now Arroyo wasn’t pointing toward the accursed land. Now he was forcing Harriet to look at the charred ruins of the hacienda. She did not physically resist because she did not mentally resist. She was conceding to Arroyo what was Arroyo’s, the old man told himself, drunk from his military exploits, the resurrected literary worm, his desire for death, his fear of a disfiguring death: dogs, knives, the memory of another’s pain when it becomes one’s own; his fear of dying choked by asthma; his desire to die by another’s hand. All these thoughts at the same time: “I want to be a good-looking corpse.”

“I am the son of some man’s wild oats, the son of chance and misfortune, señorita. No one protected my mother. She was a young girl. She had no husband, no one to defend her. I was born to defend her. Look, miss. No one defended anyone here. Not even the bulls. Castrating bulls, yes, that was more exciting than fucking the local girls. I saw their eyes shine as they cut off their balls, shouting, Ox, ox, sexless cows!”

He was gripping Harriet’s shoulders but she did not resist because she knew that Arroyo never said such things to anyone and maybe she understood that what Arroyo was saying was true only because he did not know the world. “Who named me general? I tell you who. Misfortune named me general. Silence named me general, having to hold my tongue. Here they killed you if you made any noise in bed. If a man and a woman moaned while they were in bed together, they were whipped. That was lack of respect for the Mirandas. They were decent people. We made love and we gave birth without a sound, señorita. Instead of a voice, I have a paper. Ask your friend the old man. Is he taking good care of you?” Arroyo asked as, without respect to the conventions, he passed abruptly from drama to comedy.

“Revenge,” said Harriet, ignoring him. “Revenge is your motive. This is your monument to revenge, but also to your scorn for your own people. You can’t eat revenge, General.”

“Ask them, then,” said Arroyo, gesturing toward his people.

(The brave Inocencio Mansalvo told her: “Me, I don’t like the land, señorita. I would lie if I told you I did. I do not want to spend my life stooped over in the fields. I want the haciendas to be destroyed; I want all the people who work the land to be free, so we can work wherever we want, in the city or in the North—in your country, señorita. And if it is not to be so, I will go on fighting forever. No more stooping for me; I want men to look me in the face.”)

(La Garduña told her: “My papa was a hardheaded man. He got it in his head to guard the worthless bit of land we’d moved onto, but armed men from the hacienda came and killed my papa and my mama, who was going to have a little brother or a little sister, who will ever know…? I was just a tiny kid and I hid under a cooking pot. Some neighbors sent me to Durango to live with my old-maid aunt, doña Josefa Arreola. One day the Revolution whirled by and a boy caught my eye, a boy who moved and seemed to call to me … Ay, my poor papa, ay, my poor mama, ay, the poor little dead angel…”)

(Colonel García told her: “They were smothering us in these provincial towns, Señorita Winslow. The very air was draped in mourning. Sometimes here you see the lowest people, former rustlers, peons who had nothing, or those who just plain like trouble. But look at me. I am the son of a merchant. Ask yourself how many like me have taken up arms to support the Revolution, and I am talking about professional people, writers, teachers, small manufacturers. We can govern ourselves, I assure you, señorita. We are tired of a world ruled by the caciques, the Church, and the strutting aristocrats we’ve always had here. You don’t think we are capable, then? Or do you fear the violence that has to precede freedom?”)

“Ask them, then,” said Arroyo, gesturing toward his people. He turned his back to Harriet, walking away proudly, his head to one side.

From the platform of the Pullman car, the old man watched and listened and imagined.

“What is the strongest pretext for loving? Is it different from the pretext for acting?”

Anyway, he understood that Arroyo was taking this opportunity to show him “what he had in his head” in place of an alphabet.