Mexico City, February 1913
Something Terrible Has Happened
Things were going from bad to worse. I could see that Don Francisco and Don Gustavo were worried. They were always grumpy now, and Don Francisco hardly touched the delicious enchiladas de pollo and carne guisada we made for him. So much the better, I thought. More for me. In Durango we ate worse than the dogs, but here in Mexico City, Doña Sara let us cook extra and eat whatever was left in the pot after she and Don Francisco had their midday meal.
I didn’t like it when the men locked themselves in Don Francisco’s office and howled. I could hear them through the door, and I guessed it had something to do with the newspapers.
“Now that they can publish whatever they goddamn please, they’re attacking us right and left. They’re biting the very hand that freed them,” Don Gustavo growled. “You wanted freedom of the press, Paco, and this is how they thank you.”
I listened and scrubbed and wished it were Sunday. Lola and I hadn’t been mad at each other for a long time—over a year. Rage between little girls never lasts long, especially when there’s no one else to play with. Whenever she came over, we’d find our old spot by the ahuehuete tree and tell secrets like before. The Samaniegos no longer visited. They’d moved to California. The situation in Mexico was too dangerous, said Don Mariano. He spoke English and could make it in Los Angeles. People always needed a good dentist.
One day, Lola asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be a ballerina!”
“Me, too!” I giggled. It was a stupid answer. I didn’t even know what a ballerina was.
“You’re pretty enough to be a movie star, Mara,” said Lola, without a trace of mockery. I shrugged. I’d never seen a movie.
We laughed and played, but the grown-ups’ worry had infested the air, and both Lola and I suspected that terrible things were going on around us. What we didn’t—and couldn’t—understand was that the tide had turned. The peasants had flocked to Madero, spurred on by his promises of agrarian reform, but now that he was in office, his base was cracking. The followers of Villa and Zapata, once supporters of Madero, now found him weak, and the conservatives resented his eagerness to seek national reconciliation. All I knew was that the streets were throbbing with rock-throwing protesters. Sometimes we weren’t even allowed to go to school.
All the while, I could see that Lola was changing. She was almost nine and becoming a señorita. Gone were the pudgy cheeks and fingers. Her features had sharpened. Her forehead had grown broad and smooth, her eyes wide-set and intelligent, her nose well defined, and her lips full. She’d become more self-confident and poised. She still conjugated her French verbs and practiced her spins and leaps to the music of the Victrola, and with her hair in ringlets fastened by wide white bows and her dancer’s slender body, she looked like a princess-in-training.
I was changing, too. I could read and do simple arithmetic. I knew enough English to ask about the weather and tell time. In the evenings, Tía Emi taught me more advanced stitches, and I could hem a skirt. Using scraps of thread, I embroidered my clothes with flowers and birds.
“You’re going to be a good seamstress,” Tía Emi told me. She’d become a little more expansive, a little less harsh. “You won’t be shelling peas for a roof over your head when you’re my age.” She started to hum “The Ballad of Miguela Ruiz.”
“If you hate shelling peas so much, why did you even come to this house?”
“A falta de pan, tortillas,” she said. “You take what you can get.”
She reached out and squeezed my wrist, and for a moment, I almost thought she liked me.
“Remember when we first came here?” I said, feeling brave. “You told Marcela you could get rid of me. What were you going to do with me? Were you going to kill me?”
Tía Emi burst out laughing. “Puta madre, child! You’ve got shit where your brain should be. Of course not!”
I imagined my skull full of dog excrement.
“I knew if they took me, they’d take you, too. How could you think I would kill you, you mouse-brain? I carried you all the way from Durango, didn’t I?”
“Did you? I don’t remember anything.”
“Of course. Did you think you flew?”
“You didn’t have to...” I hesitated.
She looked at me long and hard.
“Of course I had to,” she said softly, and I think I actually heard tenderness in her voice.
After that, I didn’t see Lola for a couple of weeks. The streets were wild with screaming workers and students—Zapata! Zapata! Zapata! Better not to venture out, warned Doña Sara.
Then something awful happened. The next time Lola and her parents came to see Don Francisco and Doña Sara, it was for a wake. A few days before... Well, this is what happened:
It was still light out, even though it was nearly five, and Lola was standing in the courtyard waiting for her nanny, Rosa, to pick her up from school. It had been a beautiful day, sunny and dry. February was the perfect month to jump rope in the school patio. The rains hadn’t started yet, and every day was warm and pleasant. Happily, the nuns were nice about letting the children be children during the recreation. “After all,” said Lola, imitating Sister Madeleine, “on n’est enfant qu’une fois.” “You’re only a child once.” Now the girls weren’t playing, though. They were lined up to go home. But where was Rosa? Lola watched as one girl after the other left the courtyard with her nanny.
She turned to Sister Madeleine. “Rosa is always on time. I wonder where she is.”
“Don’t worry. She’ll be here,” said the nun reassuringly in French.
It was growing dark. It was time for vespers. Lola was sure Sister Madeleine wouldn’t leave her alone in the yard, but still...she wanted to go home. Where was the niñera?
Sister Françoise came out to get Sister Madeleine for the evening prayer. “Viens,” she said, signaling to Lola, “toi aussi.” Lola followed the nuns into the convent chapel adjacent to the school. She knelt beside them and sang: Deus, in adiutorium meum intende. Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina... “O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me...”
After vespers, she listened as Sister Madeleine read from Saint Teresa’s Camino de perfección in French. An hour later, they all sat down in the refectory for a light supper. Lola forced her lips not to tremble. She tightened her jaw and ate the meager meal. What could have happened? Had her family forgotten her? Had they abandoned her? Several girls lived at the convent. Was she going to be a boarder, too?
“Can you send a messenger to my house?” Lola was fighting back tears. She loved the nuns and knew she was safe with them, but she had never spent a night away from her mother.
“Of course,” said Sister Madeleine, this time in Spanish. “We will find someone to go.”
The bell clanged at the entrance to the convent. Maybe it was Rosa. Maybe she had been delayed by a commotion in the street or maybe...maybe something had happened to Mami or Papi. Lola held her breath. At last the tornera—the doorkeeper—appeared at the entrance to the refectory accompanied by a woman.
But it wasn’t Rosa. It was Doña Antonia. She was disheveled and unsteady on her feet. Her blue shawl was thrown around her shoulders as a protection against the evening air, but she had carelessly forgotten to fasten it with a brooch. Her hair had worked its way loose from her bun and flew out in all directions. Her eyes were red and swollen.
Lola knew she should curtsey and say, Bon soir, Maman, but instead, she ran to her mother wailing. “I was afraid something had happened to you!”
“Nothing has happened to me,” said Doña Antonia calmly. “And nothing has happened to Papá. But something has happened.” She was forcing her voice to be steady.
Doña Antonia disappeared into a small parlor with Sister Madeleine. When she reappeared, both women were pallid.
Doña Antonia took her daughter by the hand and left the convent. When they arrived home, Papá was sitting at his secretary writing a letter.
“What’s wrong?” Lola blurted out. “What happened? Why won’t anyone tell me?”
Don Jesús Leonardo put down his pen and went into the parlor. “Come here,” he said gently. “Mami and I have to explain something.”
Doña Antonia was standing in the arched doorway, a look of resignation on her face. She reminded Lola of the Virgin of Guadalupe in her niche.
Don Jesús Leonardo pulled Lola to him and sat her on his knee. “Tío Gustavo has been killed,” he said simply.
“Killed?” Lola felt her hands tremble. Tears burned her cheeks.
A long, piercing pause. A halting sigh.
“Some very bad men who don’t want democracy to triumph in Mexico...”
That’s all he said. How could he tell her the whole story? Could he explain that Victoriano Huerta, now commander of the armed forces, had conspired with Porfirio Díaz’s nephew against Madero, and that Huerta had had Gustavo kidnapped off the street, locked up inside the Gambrinus restaurant, and then tortured and murdered? Could he tell her that Doña Antonia, upon hearing of her cousin’s death, collapsed on the floor unconscious? Could he tell her that while she was waiting for Rosa in the courtyard of the Colegio Francés, her mother was lying in the hospital in a state of shock?
As Lola recounted the story, I could see it all unfolding in my mind—Tío Gustavo sprawled on the ground, a bullet hole in his head, his spectacular pompadour steeped in blood and mud. Lola sobbing. Jesús Leonardo cradling his little girl in his arms and soothing her, carrying her to her bedroom and tucking her in.
What none of us knew at the time, or could possibly suspect, was that three days later, we would be going through it all again. On February 18, Huerta staged a coup d’état and took over the presidency of Mexico. Then, a few days later, he had Lola’s Tío Paco taken out and shot.
“Puta madre!” moaned Tía Emi. “Next they’ll come after everyone in the household.”
She grabbed a pillowcase from Doña Sara’s linen closet and stuffed her few possessions into it. “Get your stuff together,” she barked. “We can’t stay here!”
Before I knew it, we were out on the road again, this time headed north.