HE WAS NOT a tall man, standing alone in front of the adobe wall. Neither tall nor broad. Indeed, his physique was not the thing that you marked first about him. Your eyes glossed over the body and went to the face; they stayed there.
A head that was well-formed; hair cut quite short, mid-brown in color. It had been pushed to one side, small tufts of it sticking up at the center.
Below the hairline, the forehead was broad, unfurrowed. The ears were well back, hardly breaking the line at the side of the face. The eyebrows were thick and hung low over the eyes, casting them into shadow. As if anything could dull those eyes.
They were brown, yet bright. Took what light there was, magnified and reflected it back again. Below them the nose was strong yet without any break or swelling, nostrils slightly flared. The moustache was wide, its ends curling round the contours of the face and out of sight. Thick, strong brown hair that totally covered the upper lip and most of the lower as well.
The chin rose at the center with the jaw line. Apart from the moustache, he was clean shaven. Freshly shaven.
It was an impressive face. It held strength—and more. And what extra there was lay in the eyes. They saw beyond the immediate scene. Saw things that even their owner perhaps failed as yet to understand.
The eyes of Emiliano Zapata.
He stood with his legs somewhat apart, holding a wide-brimmed off-white sombrero to one side. His pants were in dark cloth, in which a faint stripe was just visible. Jacket and waistcoat, both undone, were from a different suit, lighter than the pants, though also striped.
He wore a white shirt, that seemed newly laundered; a white scarf knotted close to the neck.
There was a gunbelt round his waist, the leather loops filled with shells. The bottom of a leather holster was visible under the edge of the jacket, but it was not possible to see the weapon it held.
A watch chain hung from one pocket high on the left side of the waistcoat down to another, lower one. An inch of crumpled handkerchief. At the ends of his sleeves, several inches of white shirt cuff.
The trousers were tight at the calves and wrinkled, worn outside his boots. The boots themselves had been cleaned.
Zapata looked down at the sombrero and called out a name. One of his men came running forward and Zapata tossed him the broad-brimmed hat.
It sailed through the air and the man caught it, smiling.
Zapata put one hand to his face and smoothed the ends of his moustache; then he adjusted his pose so that one leg was slightly in front of the other.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘Come, let it be done.’
There was a murmur amongst those watching. Fifteen feet in front of Zapata, a man ducked his head underneath a black cloth and poked an arm into the air, holding a plate-like implement as high as he could.
Zapata’s eyes stared at the man, at the cloth, at the camera set on its tripod.
There was a flash of light and a puff of smoke: Zapata did not blink. The murmuring grew to excited chatter. The cameraman bobbed his head back out of the cover.
‘Fine! That’s fine, señor. That’s ...’
‘Good.’ Zapata strode away from the wall and past the camera and its operator, heading for the building that was his temporary headquarters.
There were other things to concern him more than the taking of photographs; far more important. Such as arms, the shortage of arms and ammunition.
With a few rifles, a very few, and knives and machetes it was possible to gain so much, to have this and that success. But to do more; to fight armies ...
His face clouded over; the eyebrows met at the center of his frown. They had promised him arms would come. He had sent money; money he could scarcely spare. Had trusted.
And what had happened?
Dawn after dawn who came that was not the enemy or disease, that was not hunger or thirst, that was not death?
Nothing.
No one.
Zapata stepped from sunlight into shadow.
The state of Morelos is one of the smallest in Mexico. To the south of the country, almost in the middle of the thinning stretch of land between the Gulf of Mexico to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west, Morelos is directly below the Distrito Federal of Mexico City.
The area to the north is mountainous; range after range of steep inclines and precipices which cut off Morelos from the reach of the Federal Government and its forces. But once the mountains have been crossed the land settles into rich farm land, irrigated by the twin rivers of the Rio Yautepec and the Rio Cuautla, which lay on it like a tuning fork, joining to form Rio Balsas and flow out into the Pacific.
It was here in Morelos that Zapata had staged his revolution; a true revolution of the campesinos—the people of the fields.
Zapata had led them in a struggle to take back the land from the hacendados. Absentee landlords for the most part. Men who lived with their families at best in Mexico City—at worst in another country altogether. In Paris, France. In New York or Washington in the United States.
Men who saw the land not as something that might provide the people who worked it with the food they needed to live, but as capital. As a means of making a profit out of the labors of others.
So they stayed away and sent their daughters to convents in France and their sons to the Jesuit College in England called Stonyhurst. Twice a year they visited their estates and gave gifts to those who worked there, then returned, ignorant of how their affairs were managed by administrators who ruled like feudal lords.
Zapata was in the process of changing all this.
He had stirred the peones to rebel and follow him. They attacked the haciendas and threw out the jefes, claiming what was theirs by right of labor. More often than not they did more than dispossess them: they killed them, sometimes painfully, slowly. Remembering the indignities they had suffered; remembering, too, the rights that these men had claimed over the womenfolk, wives and daughters.
And when the land was taken, some of the peones remained behind to farm it, live on it. Zapata called new men to him and moved on, always evading the Federal forces who made their way across the mountains to try and flush him out.
As his revolution grew, so did those of Pancho Villa and Carranza and Obregon in the north. Beleaguered, the Mexican government fought more and more intensely, supported by friendly governments such as that of the United States, which saw its investments threatened.
Inside the low room with its crumbling white plaster, Zapata’s eyes no longer looked bright and alert. They were tired and something more: sad.
Not for himself, for what he was doing and what he knew must be his eventual death. Everyone must die. But for the fate of the struggle he had begun. Its necessity and its end.
And yet he never doubted. ‘Men of the South, it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.’
He had said it, believed it, acted upon it.
He smoothed again the ends of his moustache and turned towards the doorway. The sound of horsemen made his senses come alert; eight men or more, riding not too fast, together. One coming on ahead with more speed.
Automatically, he checked the gun at his side and stepped to the door, looking out.
The first rider reined in his lathered mount and swung one leg over the saddle in the same moment, jumping to the floor. His faded blue shirt and his baggy pants were thick with dust, some of which shook from his body as he came quickly to where Zapata was standing.
‘Gringos!’
The word was harsh, cracked from his dry throat. He wiped a sleeve across his face and spoke again. ‘Gringos!’
Zapata’s eyes became alive again. He looked past the man before him, towards the dust cloud that rose from the track through the hills. From the buildings on either side, more of his men came running. Many of them carried weapons, some of the most primitive kind.
‘We found them ... a day’s ride … Anenecuilco.’
‘Good. We shall see.’
Zapata set his right hand on the butt of his gun and waited. The cloud grew and then dispersed. The heads, bodies of men on horseback came into view. Four strangers riding in single file; six of his own men flanking them.
The gringos, certainly. But gringos who carried no arms, who brought nothing but themselves. Zapata’s eyes clouded over and he watched the procession for a few moments longer. Then he turned his back.
‘Bring them to me,’ he snapped, then disappeared inside, slapping his thigh as he went.
Zapata sat behind a heavy wood table, seated on a chair with an eagle carved ornately into the back. His sombrero was hanging from one side. He waited with arms folded on the surface of the table.
Although it was light outside, the room was dark, shaded. The only brightness came through the doorway and fell in a slanting rectangle across the floor, stopping a couple of feet short of the table.
Motes of dust danced within it.
The solitary window, to the right, was covered over with a black cloth.
Shadows filled out the doorway.
‘Come!’
They were pushed into the room, rifles at their backs. Four men, three white and one Negro. The one at the center, standing inches forward, was tall and clear-eyed. He set his face towards Zapata, the line of his mouth firm under a thick, black moustache. The leader.
To his right stood the Negro, a tall mountain of a man whose muscles threatened to split the clothes he wore. On the other side a somewhat shorter man whose eyes never seemed to be still, but flickered this way and that, as unable to settle as a butterfly. At his side, a young gringo half of whose face was covered by a patch of black leather.
Zapata looked slowly from one to the other, sizing them up, assessing. All of them were impressive men, each with a strong sense of danger, and yet his eyes kept returning to the one who stood before them.
Finally Zapata spoke. ‘Why have you come here? My men told me that you rode in search of my headquarters. That you offered no resistance when they brought you in under guard.’
Onslow took another pace forward. ‘I’m Cade Onslow. These are my men. We took a contract to supply arms. We were to deliver them to you in person.’
Zapata raised his right hand, palm outwards, fingers spread. ‘I see no weapons.’
‘There are none.’
‘You could not buy them. The embargo, perhaps? You have come to return the money.’
Onslow shook his head slowly. ‘We paid for the arms you wanted. The money has gone.’
‘And the arms?’
There was a second’s hesitation in which the men on either side of Onslow held their breath and looked at Zapata’s face.
‘The arms are gone, too.’
Zapata’s open hand became a fist. The fist fell and hammered the table. Zapata pushed back the chair and stood up, leaning forward, dark eyes truly bright now and burning into the face before him.
‘Gone!’
Onslow nodded. ‘We lost them on the way. There were troubles, we ...’
‘Why then did you continue your journey?’
‘To explain.’
Zapata raised both arms, eyes towards the ceiling. Around the gringos the guard stood closer, holding their rifles at the ready. The four men in the center of the room glanced from side to side, knowing that at any moment they might have to make a desperate break for their lives. And against odds that were almost overwhelming.
‘So ...’ Zapata spoke quietly now, sitting down as he did so, ‘ ... you will make your ... explanation. Now.’
Cade Onslow told of the ambush by the Texas Rangers and the flight from Galveston; of the storm at sea and the loss of the remaining cargo.
All the while Zapata’s expression didn’t alter; it was not possible to tell what he was thinking. When he had finished, Onslow stepped back in line with the other three gringos.
And waited.
A large fly buzzed against the window, somehow trapped between the black cloth and the glass. On and on and on. At length, one of the guards went across the room and lifted his hand upwards. He pressed on the pane and in the silence of the room it was possible to hear the small squelching sound of the insect being crushed.
Zapata looked up as if coming out of a deep sleep. His eyes blinked, four, five times. ‘You are fools. All fools. To ride in here and say what you have said. To put yourself at my mercy.’
‘Is it foolish, then, to be men of honor?’ Onslow asked. ‘I had heard that the great Emiliano Zapata was a man of honor. I believed that he would respect us for what we did by coming here honestly.’
Zapata stared at Onslow. ‘Do not treat me as a fool, señor. Do not talk to me as if this flattery will work its way to my heart. I am not interested in ... in ideas of honor. Only in actions. In things that can be seen. The idea of a gun, it is worth nothing. The gun itself …’
He stood and drew the weapon from his hip. It was an old Colt, a .45 Peacemaker. He held it in his right hand and spun the chamber.
‘It is like this with ammunition. If the hammer falls on an empty chamber, nothing will happen. My enemy will live and I will perish. But if it falls on a chamber that is loaded, what then?’
He smiled a rare smile.
‘You understand what I am saying? My philosophy is clear?’
Onslow nodded. ‘I understand.’
‘And you, you bring me talk of weapons and ammunition, but not the real things. You talk to me of ideas of honor but this honor is not proved by the guns you were sent to buy.’
Zapata raised the Colt .45 until it was pointing at Onslow’s chest. His finger began slowly, very slowly to squeeze back on the trigger.
‘Is there a shell or no? What is it to be ...?’
Onslow continued to stare Zapata full in the face, matching the intensity of the rebel leader’s stare. Ignoring the gun that was pointed at his heart. The hammer that was being cocked back. The gradual movement of the trigger back against the rear of the guard.
At the last second Jonas Strong leapt forward. With his left arm he pushed Onslow hard, while his right made a grab for Zapata’s gun.
As Onslow fell to the floor, Zapata moved faster than the Negro had expected. He raised his arm higher and brought the gun barrel down hard on the side of the Negro’s skull as the man lunged across the table.
There was a loud crack as if a branch had been snapped from a tree and Strong toppled towards the floor, only recovering himself when he was on his hands and knees.
A line of blood stood out against the shiny darkness of his skin.
Before he could move again two rifles were pressed into his back.
‘Take him out and lock him up,’ Zapata ordered.
Hands grabbed at the Negro, rifles threatened. With only a quick glance at the other gringos, Strong allowed himself to be bundled outside.
Zapata sat down in his eagle chair and broke the chamber of his Colt open. Six shells rolled over the heavy, scarred wood, one for each descent of the hammer, each pull of the trigger.
He looked past the shells at Onslow, who was now back on his feet. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Now …’