TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (41 page)

Candelario ran to help him. Julio and I flung ourselves toward the little men crouched behind the trees, our pistols drawn.

“Don’t shoot him! For Christ’s sake, stop!”

The Zapatistas looked up slowly, their soft eyes bright with alarm. “But my colonel—those are Federals—”

“No, no,” Julio panted. “Firemen. They have red uniforms too. They put out fires. With water—see the hoses? Go help the man you’ve shot. Get him a doctor.”

When they were gone, we looked at each other. These were Villa’s potential allies.

“No wonder they never left Morelos,” Julio said. “They’re not soldiers. They’re backward children.”

Following Obregón’s flight to the east, the Zapatistas had come up from the south to occupy the capital. The citizens expected the occupation to be far worse than the systematic rape perpetrated that summer by the Obregonistas, for the mountain men of Morelos had been depicted as bloodthirsty savages who skinned fair-haired people alive and ate iguanas for breakfast.

But they arrived without bugles or drums and filed silently down the boulevards, never firing their guns in the air as the more exuberant warriors of the north were prone to do. They entered the glittering establishment of Sanborn’s on the Paseo de la Reforma, called the capped-and-gowned waitresses “Esteemed lady,” asked to be shown the proper way of holding the cutlery and then paid their bills with silver coins. Around their necks they wore silver crosses and jade amulets against the evil eye. They were polite to the more rowdy soldiers of the Northern Division and in exchange for a few extra cartridges would offer them bags of marijuana. The Zapatistas smoked it day and night, which may have accounted for their simplicity.

Following the shooting of the fireman—a fine example of Zapatista judgment—I saw a sight early one morning that typified Zapatista justice.

In the gray dawn light, propped against the Monument to Motherhood off Avenida Insurgentes, waiting for the garbage cart to come and haul them away, lay three blood-soaked bodies in big braided sombreros and the floppy white cotton clothing of Morelos. Centavo coins had been placed on the eyelids of the three corpses, and to avoid any mistaken speculation as to who was responsible, a hand-lettered cardboard sign was pinned to each Zapatista’s hat, signed by a Zapatista colonel.

The first sign said: “This man was shot because he was a traitor.”

The second said: “This man was shot for stealing.”

The third said: “This man was shot by mistake.”

Emiliano Zapata set up his headquarters in a modest hotel on the outskirts of the city. He told all journalists in the briefest possible words that he supported President Gutiérrez, hoped that land would be given to the people, and looked forward to meeting the great revolutionist of the north, Pancho Villa.

But the next day, as we approached the city, Zapata scurried back to the mountains of Cuernavaca like a frightened hare. The meeting didn’t take place until a week later.

During that week I played the role of tourist, and Pancho Villa that of unrequited lover. His second day in the city, at a bullfight, he was introduced to a twenty-year-old girl named Conchita del Hierro, a sloe-eyed orphan whose parents had died of typhus during the summer occupation of Obregón. Now penniless, she worked as a receptionist in the Hotel Palacio, and she was under the guardianship of her aunt, an imperious woman named Isabel del Hierro.

The girl was rather beautiful, I thought, and more refined than Villa’s usual choice of wife, although she had the powerful breasts and tawny features that he always admired. I was at the bullfight too, sitting between Villa and Conchita’s Aunt Isabel, and after the introduction, before the toreros appeared to circle the ring, the lady leaned toward me and stage-whispered in my ear, “What a marvelous man your general is! One hears so many tales of him, one hardly knows what to believe. But he is so masterful! So simple, yet so obviously complex. What a pity,” she sighed.

“What is a pity, señora?” I asked.

“That he’s married.”

“Why is that a pity?”

“Because, Major, I have made a study of the stars. General Villa is a Gemini, is he not? My niece Conchita is a Sagittarius. We think we control our own fate, but we are often in the hands of superior forces. Conchita and your general were destined to fall in love and marry.”

She must have known something. For three days Pancho Villa squired Conchita del Hierro about Mexico City, to parties and dances and little lunches in bowered hotel gardens. He even went riding with her through Chapultepec Park in the early morning to pick flowers, as if he were a botanist. I watched lazily from a distance, wondering if wedding bells would soon be ringing after a priest had faced the wrong end of a pistol.

On the fourth day I dropped by Villa’s house, a splendid three-story colonial mansion on Calle Liverpool that had been owned formerly by a Huertista banker, to find out when our meeting with Zapata would take place.

The chief welcomed me eagerly, then fell into a leather chair like a bull cleanly killed. His eyes were bloodshot, and his cheeks, usually so ruddy, were pale.

“Tomás, I’m glad you haven’t gone yet. I must talk to someone. I have a terrible problem.”

“What’s Carranza done now?”

“Piss on Carranza—I can deal with that.”

The story then poured out like a waterfall. As he talked he kept lighting cigarettes, stubbing them out half-smoked on the arms of chairs and tabletops, so that by the time he had finished the floor was littered with butts and ashes and the carpet had been scorched in three or four places. He never noticed.

He was in love with Conchita del Hierro, and as far as he could tell, she returned his affections. He spent about five minutes describing to me how beautiful he found her, how intelligent, how sympathetic and sensitive. He had never met a girl like her. He was ready to die for her bones, as the Mexicans say. She was only twenty, but she had the wisdom of Cleopatra and Sheba combined, the courage of Joan of Arc, the queenly bearing of Victoria.

Naturally he had asked her to marry him. The result was not what he expected.

“She told me I was married already, and so the answer was no. I explained that Luz was like a sister to me, and the others—” He dismissed that gang with an upward movement of his hand. “But still she said no, and when I persisted, she began to leak tears. Tomás, I can’t stand it when women cry. Luz did a lot of that in the beginning, but not anymore. She’s learned. But when Conchita cried, my heart nearly broke in half. Naturally, I changed the subject. She could ask me to get down on all fours and moo like a cow, and I would do it.”

The next day, he continued, Aunt Isabel paid him a visit, and they lunched in the garden of the Hotel Palacio. Villa had bought a new dark green tweed suit and a polka-dotted bow tie, and he wore the shiny boots that gave him corns. With a man in love, I realized, anything is possible. Señora del Hierro arrived in a magnificent white lace dress that revealed as much as possible of her white bosom, probably intended to remind Villa that under Conchita’s blouse there dwelled the same splendors.

Birds chirped in the patchy sunlight of the little garden, which they had quite to themselves, Villa having ordered it closed to everyone else. The señora began the conversation over her sherry by relating to him the troubles of the del Hierro family, who had owned silver mines near Zacatecas. They had never mistreated the mine workers, she stressed, and therefore weren’t as rich as some of the other owners, but their historical kindliness was of no avail when the revolution began.

“So I gathered she needed money,” Villa said to me, “and I immediately wrote out a draft for five thousand pesos. But there was more. She thanked me, and then she explained that Conchita was religious and would be glad to give herself to me in marriage … if I would divorce my other wives. The stars had foretold our union, she said! Can you imagine? Conchita was destined to marry a great man astride a prancing black horse. I told her it sounded like she would become the next Señora Carranza, but the old bitch didn’t even smile.”

“Will you do it?” I asked.

“Marry her, yes. Divorce the others, no. Tomás, I’m their lighthouse and their shepherd. Can a lighthouse darken its beam? Can a shepherd turn his back and leave his flock bleating in misery—dishonored? It would be unthinkable. And yet I love this girl—I
must
have her.”

He waited for me to comment, but I wasn’t particularly moved. I sat on an antique wooden footstool, restlessly scuffing my boots at a pile of ashes he had dropped on the carpet. It struck me that he had more important things to worry about, but I knew the power of love and how it twisted the imagination.

“Can’t you have an affair with her,” I suggested, “and let things take their natural course?”

“She’s willing,” he said darkly, “and she’s already given me a little taste of her honey. I suppose she thinks she can trap me that way. She’s getting advice from the aunt, I’m sure. But what hold can a man have on a woman if she’s not his wife? She can leave him anytime she pleases. Look at that Indian one you had, that Rosa. She left you, didn’t she? Could
you
stop her?”

“It wasn’t quite the same,” I said unhappily.

He ignored that. “Tomás, I offered Conchita my love and my name. Don’t you think that’s honorable? But she still won’t marry me! I thought of going to a
curandera. “

“For a potion?”

“They say it can work. Some men carry a dead hummingbird in their pocket, or put the leg of a beetle in the girl’s glass of soda pop. You can also use powder made of crushed bones from a human skull, but too much of it makes her crazy. I’ve seen a
curandera
in Durango treat a bad dose of clap by rubbing the pecker with a live black chicken. The chicken became crippled. The pecker stood up and was fine. What should I do?”

He was quite serious, as I found out later, but clearly pessimistic. Besides, unlike most men, he wasn’t bent on seduction without marriage. Beyond stating the obvious, I couldn’t help him.

“Have an affair, chief. You’ll get tired of her, just as you do in your marriages. Then you’ll pay her off, just as you do with your wives. It all comes to the same thing in the end. Meanwhile,” I said, “pay more attention to the war, or the revolution, or whatever you call it these days.”

That wasn’t what he wanted to hear, and he realized he wasn’t going to get any more solace from me if he kept up his laments.

“It helped me to talk to you, Tomás,” he said, a bit coldly, “even if we didn’t find an answer. Now, what can I do for you? Why did you come by?”

“I’m ready to head for Texas. I wanted to know when we’re going to meet Zapata.”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “It’s been arranged—at Xochimilco. Be ready to leave at dawn.”

The village of Xochimilco was a Zapatista stronghold near the floating flower gardens south of Mexico City. We rode on horseback, with a cloudless sky and the sun like a ripe tomato rising above the snowy peak of Popocatépetl.

Trotting through cobbled streets that smelled of sizzling corn oil, Villa tilted his hat back and closed his eyes. Despite his troubles with Conchita del Hierro, his mouth drooped in a lazy smile; through the figurehead of Gutiérrez, he ruled Mexico. That wasn’t what he wanted—he had always said so—but it didn’t seem to displease him.

On the edge of Xochimilco we were met by Professor Otilio Montaño, the burly schoolteacher who had translated all of Zapata’s thoughts into the Plan of Ayala. It was the best revolutionist document I had ever read, because it was the shortest.

While the horses drank from goatskin buckets of water brought by Indian women, children ran out with wreaths of poppies and roses that they dumped in our path. The sun shone brightly on a breathlessly hot morning; the scent of the flowers was overpowering.

Villa began to sneeze.

“My hay fever is coming back.” He turned to me, groaning quietly. “I’ll be dead by the time we get there.”

The village band of Xochimilco, a few trumpets, a tuba and a bass drum, played “Las Mañanitas,” and then the legendary leader from Morelos appeared, sauntering down the dusty main street with his retinue as we dismounted in front of the schoolhouse. I had seen pictures of Zapata, a former melon grower and army sergeant, but I still wasn’t prepared for the man in the flesh.

Pancho Villa had come dressed in the clothes he had worn in the northern campaigns—his tan sweater with its frayed elbows, baggy khaki pants and riding boots, and the cool pith helmet that was now stained much the same color as his shirt. The rest of us, except for Rodolfo Fierro, wore our Texas scout hats and cartridge belts.

Zapata looked as if the finest tailors in Mexico City had prepared him for the occasion and sewn his clothes around his body. His black
charro
pants were so tight that his private parts bulged like an apple with a thick stem, and the seams glittered in the sunlight with oversized silver buttons. He wore a brilliant lavender shirt, a blue neckerchief and a short black silk jacket from whose pockets protruded two scarlet handkerchiefs. He was a short man, and his pointed Spanish boots sported four-inch-high heels. The gold-braided twenty-gallon sombrero made it dangerous to come within two feet of him without risking that the brim might cut your throat. His mustache extended beyond his cheeks; his dark eyes were large, liquid and mysterious.

Candelario whispered to me, “He looks like the leader of a mariachi band.”

But Villa, eyes leaking tears from the bouquets of flowers the children had pressed into his arms, ducked under the sombrero and gave Zapata the promised
abrazo.

“Señor General, today I realize my dream. I meet the chief of the great revolution of the south.”

In a languid voice, Zapata replied, “And I meet with honor the chief of the Northern Division.”

Arm in arm they strolled into the schoolhouse where a large wooden table, scratched with the initials of children and lovers, had been placed in the center of a small classroom whose flaking walls were yellowed with age. Termites worked busily in the wooden beams overhead, so that peppery brown dust dropped steadily on our papers. Zapata had with him his brother Eufemio, Otilio Montaño, three generals and a journalist named Paulino Martinez.