AS HE SHAMBLED BACK to his hotel, Diego felt drugged by the afternoon heat. His head swam, and his limbs felt weak. He found his way to a broken wrought-iron bench and lowered himself onto the seat. He needed to rest, to settle his thoughts, to calm the throbbing in his head. He knew now that he was very ill. It was el vómito as likely as not. The yellow fever. The blood thudded in his temples, but his mind kept returning to thoughts of Baldemar. Even now, three years later, he remembered perfectly well all that had happened in that dark time when Melchor Ocampo was killed.
Baldemar and his sister were related by marriage to Ocampo, who was an uncle on their mother’s side. Ocampo was also the leading architect of Mexico’s sweeping liberal reforms, all effected during the early presidency of Benito Juárez, when Ocampo was already advanced in age. After reaching his seventh decade, the celebrated reformer withdrew from public service and retired with his wife and their four daughters to a hacienda in the highlands of Michoacán in central Mexico. There, he busied himself by writing on a variety of themes and by conducting a range of scientific investigations.
On the thirtieth day of May in the year 1861, Ocampo found himself alone at the estancia save for a handful of servants. His wife and daughters had journeyed to the town of Maravatío to attend a wedding celebration, travelling under armed guard. The most recent civil war had ended only five months earlier, a circumstance that meant little to those who continued to fight. Mexico was a treacherous country then, as it was now, and it would have been worth anyone’s life to travel any distance at all without arms and the wherewithal to use them. Even given such protection, life was cheap and readily squandered. The armed guard that accompanied the Ocampo women to Maravatío meant that Ocampo himself was all but undefended.
On the day following the women’s departure, a band of horsemen rode up to the main house. Ocampo strode out to receive them. As soon as he observed the men at close quarters, he must have known that trouble had come. It was easy to imagine what he saw—an assortment of roughriders, a hard-looking lot. From what Diego later ascertained, all of the men carried pistols in weathered leather holsters, and two had long arms affixed to their high Mexican saddles. Given the condition of their horses, whose legs must have been streaked with dirt, their flanks lathered with sweat, it seemed they had ridden a long way, over rugged country, and at speed.
The leader of the men introduced himself as Captain Saúl Cajiga, a Spaniard by birth to judge by his accent. He steadied his horse and tipped his large, round-brimmed hat. “To whom have I the pleasure of addressing myself?”
“My name is Melchor Ocampo, at your service.”
“Formerly the minister of state?”
“Just so.”
“We are well met then.” Cajiga smiled and used his thumbnail to pick something from his teeth. He leaned to the side and spat on the ground, not far from Ocampo’s feet. The other men with him—five in number—traded glances and sniggered.
“I am glad to hear it,” said Ocampo, who could not have been glad at all. But he did not betray his alarm, deciding instead to make a show of hospitality. He glanced up at this Cajiga and observed that the day was hot, the sun nearly at its height. Might the men care for a drink? Why, only this morning he had ventured into the orchard and picked a quantity of granaditas that even now were being converted into a delicious libation. He had chirimoyas as well, not to mention limes, oranges, and sapotas. If his guests preferred, they might have mezcal.
“We have not come to drink,” said Cajiga.
“No,” said Ocampo. “I suppose not.”
“We have come on an important mission, with orders of a most specific nature, whose terms we have committed to memory.” The captain reached up and tapped his forehead twice with the tips of the fingers of his left hand. “We well remember what must now be done.”
“You have the advantage of me, then,” said Ocampo, “for I have never been able to remember the future.”
“It is a useful skill. What a shame that now you will not have the opportunity to acquire it. You have left this project too late.”
Cajiga nodded toward a barefoot manservant, one of Ocampo’s Indian retainers, who had emerged from the house shortly after Ocampo and now stood cowering in its shadows. Policarpo was his name, and it was he who later related the gist of this conversation to Diego.
“You there,” the Spaniard said. “Prepare a horse for your master. He is coming with us.”
They departed in short order, Ocampo surrounded by Cajiga and his five companions.
In a matter of days, news of these events reached the offices of Benito Juárez, the president, who spoke at once with a new minister of state, Francisco Zarco. It so happened that Zarco was also publisher and editor of the liberal newspaper El Siglo XIX, to which Diego was a frequent contributor. As one of only two survivors of the Massacre of Tacubaya, he was deemed to be a man of grit and promise, and so it was his name that cropped up when Zarco required someone to seek out the kidnappers, determine their demands, and, if possible, negotiate with them.
Diego departed the capital the following day, in company with Baldemar, who had also survived the killings at Tacubaya and had long been his closest friend. El gordo y el indio, they had been called at school. The fat one and the Indian.
They set off through waving fields of blond grass, their horses scaling the pine-clad heights north of Mexico City. Later, the highland conifers gave way to groves of Mexican oak and mesquite scrub. The two men rode past maguey plantations and rolling cornfields, bordered by fences of organ pipe cactus.
Three days it took them to reach the hills of Michoacán, and they argued every step of the way. They called each other the worst names they could think of, and disagreed about everything imaginable, from the attractions or defects of women they both knew to the dismal state of Mexico. To Baldemar, the country’s condition resulted entirely from the predations of conservatives—conservatives in alliance with the Holy Roman Church. But Diego wondered if liberals did not share their portion of the blame as well. He was a liberal. They both were. Both had fought on the liberal side. But, so far, the vaunted reforms instituted under Juárez had produced no improvement in the lives of the people. Yes, ecclesiastical property had been seized from the grip of the Church, but to what end? So that looters could sack the churches and convents, melting crucifixes down for the gold? Where was the advantage in that? But it had happened. And, yes, el Cinco de Mayo had been a glorious victory, but what difference had it made in the end? The French had returned in greater numbers, and this time there had been no stopping them.
But Baldemar had an answer for that, one that effectively cut off all discussion. After all, he had fought in the battle of el Cinco de Mayo, whereas Diego had not. One-armed as he was, Diego had stayed behind in Puebla to work in an improvised medical clinic and had suffered the French bombardment, same as everyone else, while Baldemar had ridden out to fight. That seemed to mean that nothing anyone else had to say on the subject warranted any attention at all.
“Muy bien,” said Diego.
He pressed his heels into his horse’s flanks, she broke into a loping stride, and the two men cantered across a broad plain stippled by scrub trees and saguaro cactus. It was nearing sunset, and clouds drifted in thin purple rafts above the low range of hills to the west.
They picked up the trail of Ocampo’s kidnappers at the town of Maravatío. From there, they followed a trail of cooking fires and spoor. The men who had abducted Ocampo were either deeply inept or unimaginably brazen. A child could have tracked their route. It occurred to Diego that these men wanted to be followed. But why should that be so?
Two more days of riding brought them to the village of Huapango, where the local people said that, yes, a party of riders had shown up not two weeks earlier, with a prisoner in their power. General Leonardo Márquez had been waiting, along with his own party of riders. The two bands had merged and ridden off as one, making no secret of their destination. The villagers pointed the way to a hamlet named Tepeji del Río. There, the locals provided Diego and Baldemar with further guidance, and they took up the trail once again. Two hours later, they rounded a crest of rocks and rode into a forest clearing.
“Ay Dios,” said Baldemar.
A man’s bloated and shirtless body dangled upside down in the middle of the clearing, strung by the ankles from the branches of a Mexican oak tree. The dead man’s head was suspended a good five feet from the ground, and his arms hung freely beneath him, the shoulders having dislodged themselves from their sockets by the force of their weight.
Baldemar kicked his heels, and his horse scooted forward. He drew a long-bladed knife from his belt and cut the rope, letting the cadaver fall. The two men dismounted and briefly observed what Márquez had done. The corpse was badly swollen and had started to decompose, but it did not seem that Ocampo had been mutilated in any way prior to his death. He had simply been strung up by his heels and left to dangle in the nighttime cold or burn in the late-day sun. It would have been a slow and miserable death.
Diego’s eyes stung, and he blinked them repeatedly. “They couldn’t have hanged him properly?” he said. “By the neck? Like civilized men? They couldn’t have shot him in the head?”
“Guess not.”
Baldemar looked away, out across the broad green valley that unfolded to the west. He said nothing. What could he say? For a long while, neither man uttered a word. They just glared off in different directions, both too angry to talk. They’d known the journey would end in something like this. Now that it had, they were in no way prepared. Diego closed his eyes, as if all of this could simply be willed out of existence—this path, this clearing, the corpse on the ground. But, when he opened his eyes again, nothing had changed.
“Pinche cabrón.” Baldemar turned away and spat, as though the taste of the obscene words was itself an affront.
Soon, they set about the task of binding the corpse in the blankets they had brought for their own comfort. Baldemar’s horse was much the larger and sturdier of the two, and they draped the body behind his high-backed saddle and rode to Tepeji del Río. They stored the corpse of Melchor Ocampo in a disused shed of mud and wattles to protect it from the disrespect of dogs. The following morning, they set out to retrace their route. They wore kerchiefs over their mouths and nostrils, knotted behind their necks. The reek was vile beyond belief.
In due course, they reached the former minister’s estate, where they delivered the body of Melchor Ocampo to his wife, doña Ana María Escobar de Ocampo, who was Baldemar’s aunt. The nine days of mourning commenced.
Later, after Ocampo’s body had been laid to rest, the government of Benito Juárez dispatched a succession of armies, each commanded by yet another in a seemingly endless series of inept generals, all charged with identical orders: to capture General Márquez alive, if possible, or else kill him in battle. One after another, the armies accepted the challenge but failed to meet it. Two of the generals gave their lives.
General Márquez remained in his mountain redoubt, biding his time and awaiting some change in his fortunes. In the meantime, Mexico was at peace at last—if you could call it that. What passed for peace in Mexico was really just a respite between wars.