29

Moses in the Wilderness

The sinuous roots of a fig tree clung to the rock face around the cave’s entrance and formed a lattice in front of it. Strong, graceful, and tenacious, it was able to draw life from stone. It made Grace think of José’s people.

The cave was just big enough for the women and children and its entrance was hard to see even from close by. After a week traveling with Lieutenant Angel’s band, Grace knew she was lucky to have it as shelter from May’s nightly rains. Usually the men slept in the caves. The women dug burrows into the high riverbanks for themselves and their children.

Grace dreaded spending another night shivering between a flea-infested mat and an even livelier cotton blanket. She wanted to feel the clean, cool, polished tiles of the Colonial’s corridors under her bare feet. She wanted to hear the parrots chattering in the courtyard. She wondered if Lyda had gotten word of her disappearance to Rico in Veracruz, or if the letters he wrote to her twice a day were still piling up in her office.

Most of all, she worried that she would find the hotel deserted when she finally returned. Nature took over quickly here when civilization was negligent. Grace imagined her beloved home sliding into the sort of ruin it had been when she bought it.

This little band of Zapatistas had been moving higher and deeper into the mountains. They had been dodging federal troops and patrols, but José’s wife, Serafina, said that soon they would join Zapata’s main army. The thought of being caught in a battle between the rebels and the officers who had billeted at the Colonial made Grace’s stomach churn. So the next morning, when José introduced her to the mule, she recoiled, but she didn’t flee.

José beamed and held out the lead rope. “I’ve named him Moses because he will lead you to the Promised Land.”

Moses raised his grizzled muzzle, curled his purple lips back from his stumpy yellow teeth, and greeted Grace with a bray. She jumped and retreated several steps. José led the mule toward her and she backed up again. For Grace, approaching a sharp-hooved, snaggle-toothed creature the size of Moses was like trying to make friends with an animated threshing machine.

“Mamacita, Cuernavaca lies far from here. If you want to reach it you will have to ride him.”

“May I go to Cuernavaca on him today?”

“Quizás mañana.”

Maybe tomorrow. That was the answer he gave her every day. “Then I’ll get on him tomorrow.”

“He won’t hurt you, Mamacita.”

Grace didn’t believe that for a second.

José handed her a banana. “Give him this.”

Grace stood as far away from him as she could and extended the fruit. Moses folded up his prehensile lips again and grasped the end of it in his teeth. He eased it out of her hand with surprising delicacy and chewed it up, peel and all.

From then on he followed Grace wherever she went. She remembered one of Lyda’s observations: “Feed a man or a dog and you’ll never get rid of ’em.” Obviously that also held true for a mule.

She asked José to tie him up, but he brayed incessantly. When that didn’t bring freedom he chewed through the hemp line and set out to look for her. If any man came near her he would flatten his ears against his head, lower his muzzle, and swing it from side to side like a snake preparing to strike.

With the rain beating down on him, he stood guard all night outside the cave where Grace and the women slept. In the morning Grace decided that if he was indeed her means of going home, she should make her peace with him.

If he intended to kick her or take a chunk out of her arm with those teeth, now was the time to find it out. Serafina had given her an old straw sombrero and a large red bandana to hold it in place. Grace folded the bandana diagonally and tied it around his neck. She adjusted it to hang the way the rebel soldiers wore theirs, then stepped back to admire him.

“Don’t you look the swell, though.”

The expression in Moses’s eyes could only have been adoration. He lifted his whiskery chin, expanded his bony chest, and affected a swagger.

 

Lieutenant Angel’s band was on the move again. Serafina said lookouts had spotted a patrol of federales only a few miles from the camp.

Antonio gave Grace an old pair of khaki trousers to wear under her skirt and a piece of twine to hold them up. She used Serafina’s knife to rip the skirt up the front as far as her knees so she could ride astraddle. The clumsy wooden saddle rubbed her in all the wrong places, but it was better than walking. She shared Moses’s broad back with Serafina.

Grace didn’t recognize the villages they passed through, but that was to be expected. When she took the train across these mountains she had caught only glimpses of distant rooftops among the trees. The view from up close was unsettling. This was not the picturesque, tranquil Mexico she knew. Angel’s men usually sang to pass the hours as they rode, but not now.

Houses and fields were burned or abandoned. The old people were left to starve in the ruins. Angel’s men shared with them what little food they had.

Grace didn’t know where they had gotten any food at all since their own rations were scant. They probably had plundered it from haciendas. Grace should have disapproved of that, but she didn’t. The more she saw of the destruction, the more Lieutenant Angel and her comrades began to resemble Robin Hood and his men.

Many of Morelos’s landed elite frequented the Colonial’s restaurant, cantina, and ballroom. Grace was friendly with them and enjoyed their company, but she was certain that if the army had commited these atrocities, the hacendados were the cause of it. She was relieved that Rico had been assigned to Veracruz. At least he could not have been involved.

“Where are all the people?” Grace asked Serafina.

“El gobierno is sending the indios far away.”

“But why?” Grace asked.

“God knows. I do not.”

Then Grace noticed small yellow flags hanging on some of the doors. They reminded her of lithographs she had seen of English villages be-seiged by the plague. A body abandoned at the side of the road increased her sense of foreboding. It was wrapped like a tamale in a palm leaf mat with the bare feet sticking out. Serafina crossed herself and tied her bandana over her nose and mouth.

“Tifus.” She whispered it, as though to avoid attracting the notice of the disease.

“Tee’foos?” Grace asked.

“Sí. Tifus.”

Grace repeated it until the answer came to her. She had heard typhus called many names—“jail fever,” “famine fever,” “putrid fever,” “hospital fever,” “camp fever,” and “ship fever.” By any name it was lethal as often as not. She knew that lice spread it. The itching on her skin suddenly seemed more than merely bothersome.

 

Angel, Antonio, and José rode stone-faced through the ravaged countryside. No one felt like singing today.

“I am going to Cuernavaca,” José said. “I’ll meet you at Yautepec.”

Angel didn’t argue with him. She knew he was worried about his daughter.

“Take the gringa with you.”

José shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Fatso’s men have put up roadblocks everywhere. I will have to travel at night over dangerous trails. If los federales find her with me they might throw her in jail. Or worse.”

From the rear of the column came Grace’s husky alto. She was singing the women’s favorite song from her reportoire. “The Dreadful Wind and Rain” was about subjects dear to their hearts—passion, betrayal, murder, and a ghost. Antonio had helped her translate it into a haunting mix of Spanish and Nahuatl.

It told the story of the young woman drowned by her lover. A fiddler found her body and put it to good use. He made a bow of her long yellow hair and pegs of her finger bones. But the part the women loved best, and the men too, was this verse:

And he made a little fiddle of her breast bone,

Oh the wind and rain.

The sound could melt a heart of stone,

Cryin’, oh the dreadful wind and rain.

The more popular Inglesa became, the less Angel liked her. But though she wouldn’t admit it, she liked that song. She was surprised that Inglesa made the effort to sing it in Spanish, much less Nahuatl. Most gringos, especially those who spoke English, believed communication was impossible in any language but their own. Americans were particularly convinced that if they spoke English loudly enough, foreigners would understand them.

Inglesa, however, was a prime mimic. Every day she added to her stock of Spanish and Nahuatl words, what she called “Kitchen-Injun.” And her accent was almost perfect. She had learned the words and the harmony to “Valentina” and other favorites.

“You have to admit,” said José, “that Mamacita has spiced up our little corner of the revolution”

“The women like her,” added Antonio.

“No they don’t,” muttered Angel. “Everyone’s afraid that if they annoy her she’ll curse them with warts or a pig’s snout. They’re afraid she’ll make the women barren and the men impotent.”

Angel was right about that. Socorro had told her father about the séances at the Colonial and Grace’s heart-to-soul talk with La Llorona, the Weeping Woman on the second floor. News of Inglesa speaking with the dead could hardly be kept secret.

Angel turned in the saddle and scowled back at Moses and Grace, leading the flock of women and children.

“Nahualli,” she muttered. “Witch.”