Epilogue

At every station between the capital and the border, Sarmiento saw fresh evidence that México was disintegrating. The train was running two days behind schedule as it made its way to Arizona, diverted from bad track that had not been repaired because once again the countryside was filled with robbers and rebels. The first-class tickets he had purchased for José and himself bought few amenities—the food was barely edible, the service erratic. But poor service and bad food were the least of it as the train huffed slowly north. In the northern states, where Madero’s revolution had first taken root, a new rebellion against Huerta was shaking the arid landscape. At Torreón, federal soldiers had ripped out the seats of the second-class cars and packed themselves in, on their way to reinforce vulnerable garrisons in the border towns. At dun-colored villages the train was met not with the usual food and trinket vendors but frightened crowds anxious for news from the capital. He saw telegraph poles felled by the rebels to disrupt communications, deserted ranches where the corpses of cattle lay bloated in the sun, and in the swirling dust of the Chihuahua desert, men, women, and children walking along the tracks, refugees seeking shelter in the towns. Far off, low clouds of dust kicked up against the horizon marked the movement of rebel battalions.

Sarmiento watched it all with a weariness that sank into his bones. War was coming, if it had not already started, in the mountains, valleys, and deserts of the north. This time, though, unlike Madero’s revolution, there would be no quick resolution because Huerta was not Díaz. In the end, the old dictator had lost his taste for bloodshed and slipped away, but Huerta would soak the earth in the blood of his soldiers before he was killed or exiled. Among the rebels, there was no new Madero, no saintly figure to inspire and unite the little warlords rising up against Huerta. Carranza, Villa, Zapata. Each now fought for himself, for his own ambitions. Once they succeeded in defeating Huerta, they would turn on each other. Sarmiento could not see how this war would end, but with the memories of the Ten Tragic Days fresh in his mind, he knew it would bring a level of destruction to México not seen since the Spanish had razed Tenochtitlán. And who would suffer the most? As always, the Indians, the poor, the disenfranchised. He could have wept for his country, but the wells of pity had run dry in him when his wife had been murdered. What a fool he had been to have believed he could stir men’s consciences with his speech. He should have taken his cousin’s advice and slipped into the woodwork until the combatants had beaten each other bloody. Luis, he thought with a pang. Where was Luis? Would he ever see him again?

It was night. He stood at the front of the car smoking a cigarette beneath the brilliant desert sky. He had left José sleeping in their compartment. He had worried that the scenes of war would send his son into a panic, but on the journey the boy had shown the same stoicism he had displayed at his mother’s funeral, where, dry-eyed, he had kissed the casket before it was slipped into the family crypt. Her death had changed José—he carried himself with a man’s gravity rather than with a child’s gaiety. He no longer prattled on but spoke only rarely and thoughtfully. Sarmiento realized that the little boy who had alternately exasperated him and endeared himself with his dreamy vagueness had transformed himself into a serious-minded, self-contained young man. A stranger, one who looked more like Alicia with each passing day. Alicia’s beauty, which the smallpox had destroyed in her, was ripening in her son, who was becoming luminously beautiful. It disturbed Sarmiento that another male should be so physically compelling. This was a gift surely intended for women, and he could not guess what purpose it could possibly serve his son.

The train was approaching the American border town of Douglas, Arizona, the place where he had parted from Alicia in what seemed another lifetime. As the dust of México churned beneath the wheels of the train, he wondered when, and whether, he and José would ever return to their country. His heart was so filled with conflicting emotions that they had cancelled each other out, leaving him numb. He stared out into the night, through the veil of his cigarette smoke, where there appeared in the desert darkness an archway lit up with electric lights. It spelled out a greeting so simple in its unintentional arrogance he did not know whether the tears that filled his eyes were tears of anger or gratitude, but he wept them all the same as he spoke the words aloud: “Welcome to America.”