THE SOLDADERA
In 1913 my grandaunt Adela ran away with a boy intent on joining Pancho Villa’s Army of the North. She was sixteen. The Revolution promised freedom from tyrants such as Diaz and Huerta—from her own father, the cavalry colonel who venerated them both. The family was landed, rich, its blue veins but slightly darkened with the Indio blood it long denied. Only Adela’s youngest brother did not disown her. We still have the faded photograph he framed, clipped from a Chihuahua newspaper, showing Villa and Carranza standing side by side and squinting in dusty sunlight and mutual distrust—and there, directly behind them, her arms around the necks of fierce-faced compañeros, her breasts crossed with bandoleers, is Tía Adela. The boy she ran away with is not in the picture. Years later he showed up at my grandfather’s door on a crutch, one pant leg folded and pinned to a back pocket. He told tales of Adelita: how she rode on the packed roofs of boxcars jammed with horses and artillery; how she shot more federales in the battle of Zacatecas than anyone else in the brigade; how she danced around a campfire with Fierro the butcher and took a kiss on the mouth from Villa himself. How, at the horror of Celaya, she got caught on Obregón’s barbed wire and was shot to pieces by the machine guns.
THE COLONEL
From the veranda of the hillside mansion serving as our headquarters, I watched the firing squad do its work in the plaza below. The wailing of widows and wounded men carried up to mingle with the furious piano music from the ballroom behind me. In the plaza a federal captain stood against the church wall and made a hasty sign of the cross just before the rifle volley shook him and he fell dead on the cobblestones. As a labor detail dragged him away, the next man in the line of condemned stepped up to the wall: a hatless whitehaired colonel who stood at attention. The captain in charge of the executions raised his saber and gave the commands: “Ready! . . . Aim! . . . Fire!” The rifles thundered and the colonel rebounded off the wall and dropped to the ground. And then slowly, awkwardly, as the spectators gasped and began to raise a great jabbering, he got to his feet and slumped against the wall.
The riflemen looked at the captain. The captain stared at the colonel—and then thrust his saber up and yelled, “Ready!” I had never seen one get back on his feet before. “Aim!” The old man pushed off the wall and stood weaving, trying to square his shoulders. “Fire!” He bounced off the wall and fell in a heap. Then pushed up on his elbows. Then made it to his hands and knees. The crowd hushed utterly. People blessed themselves and knelt in the street. I thought, holy shit.
The captain spotted me and yelled, “What now, my general?” With twelve bullets in him the old man sat on his heels with his shoulder against the wall. He brushed vaguely at the blood soaking his tunic.
“Once more!” I ordered. “If he’s still breathing after the next one, we’ll give him a clean uniform and command of a regiment.”
The colonel was on one knee and still trying to rise when the next volley hit him. I rued not having spoken to him before he died.
THE TRIUMPH
We looted the city to its bones. Whatever we didn’t want or couldn’t take we destroyed. Every grievance we had against the bluebloods, the Spanish, the Church, the bosses, against our own fathers, against life, we redressed against Zacatecas. The streets ran with blood. We shot military prisoners standing against the wall, priests kneeling at the altars, rich bastards groveling on the floors of their fine big houses. We packed the mineshafts with corpses, piled and burned them in the streets. A little boy watching the flames constricting the tendons of the blackening dead cried, “Look, mamá! They’re dancing!” We rode horses into the mansion salons, grinding horseshit into parquetry, shredding Middle Eastern carpets to rags. Into roaring fireplaces we threw books, ledgers, letters, photographs. Not a sculpture in town went unbroken, not a windowpane stayed intact. Our soldaderas paraded the streets in silk dresses, in bridal gowns of delicate lace trailing in the dust. Their feet scuffed the cobbles in satin slippers. We picked the churches clean of their gold and silver. We stripped houses, stores, stables of everything that could be carried away. Toward our trains flowed a steady stream of stock and wagons loaded with strongboxes, stoves, furniture, clothes, gilt picture frames and chandeliers. Every automobile in town that still ran was driven onto the flatcars. The mules walked stiff-legged under loads of booty. The wagons creaked with the weight of it. The trains groaned. It was our greatest victory in the war against the oppressions of the rich. As we pulled out of Zacatecas the air was heavy with the odors of smoldering ashes, blood-dampened dust, enemy flesh going to rot. All the powerful smells of triumph.