by Michael Nava
“How did you get past the gringo embargo?”
Luis rubbed his fingers together in the universal sign for bribes. “How goes the revolution?”
Sarmiento spread his hand across the encampment. “As you see. Everyone is waiting for something to happen.”
“They won’t be waiting much longer.” Luis flicked his cigarette to the ground. “Ángel has pitched a tent for us somewhere in this chaos,” he said, “I’m off to find him and beg a couple of tortillas from a soldada. I’ll come by later with a bottle of American whiskey.”
“It’s good to see you, Luis,” Sarmiento said warmly. “To see family.”
“Don’t worry, Miguel, you’ll be back in your wife’s bed by the end of the month.” Luis slipped into the darkness, whistling a waltz.
15
Alicia sat in her parlor embroidering an altar cloth for the altar at San Francisco Tlalco. In past times she would have been at the weekly luncheon of the Daughters of Jerusalem hosted by the first lady at Chapultepec castle. Soon after she had returned from Arizona, however, and it became common knowledge that Miguel had joined Madero’s rebellion, a stiff note had arrived from Carmen Díaz revoking Alicia’s membership in the charitable organization. The other ladies of Señora Díaz’s circle quickly followed the first lady’s lead and dropped Alicia thoroughly and completely. Even her sisters were reluctant to appear with her in public and her brother-in-law Damian had told her that only a direct appeal from him to Don Porfirio had spared her an extremely unpleasant visit by the officers of la seguridad.
“I assured him you know nothing of Miguel’s activities,” he said.
“But that is entirely true,” she said.
He had sat on the sofa where she now sewed and given her a long, hard look. “You accompanied him to the border,” he said accusingly.
“On business of my own,” she replied.
“Business that involved a young Indian girl you removed from the orphanage, who traveled with you and did not return when you did.”
His words disquieted her for she had told no one about Tomasa. “How do you know this?”
“These old walls have ears,” he said, with a gesture that encompassed the entire palace. Then, softly, he added, “Servants can be bribed, Alicia. I warn you that even your rank will not protect you if you continue to involve yourself in—indiscretions.” He stood up, leaned casually against the chiffonier, and said, “Like your adventure in Coyoacán.”
She looked up sharply. “How … ?” Then she understood. “Your money bribes my servants.”
“Better me than Díaz,” he replied. “Far better, believe me.”
“For how long have you spied on us?” she demanded.
“For as long as I have been married to your sister,” he said. With a tight, humorless smile, he continued, “Spare me your indignation. Saturino may fancy himself the head of this family, but I am the one who works ceaselessly to preserve its status and prosperity. Listen to me, Alicia. I like your husband, and I am your greatest admirer, but I will not have either one of you endanger what I have labored so hard to create and maintain. Labors, which, by the way, support you, your mother, and this absurd residence.” He withdrew a cigarette from his gold-plated cigarette case and lit it. “Don’t misunderstand me. I have never begrudged that support. Indeed, I find this fairy-tale world that you and your mother inhabit to be rather charming. I advise you to remain in it and leave reality to those, like me, who are capable of directing it. Henceforth, you will quietly devote yourself to your child and to your charities. No more mysterious trips to the border. No more hospices for Indians. Is that understood?”
“What about Miguel?”
Damian shrugged. “I cannot help him now that he has turned himself into a renegade. When this charade is over, I will do what I can to prevent him from ending up in front of a firing squad.”
She paused in her work and remembered how shaken the conversation with Damian had left her. It had forced her to realize that one form of her spiritual vanity was the unacknowledged pride she took in her disinterest in worldly affairs. Damian’s words had emphatically impressed upon her that her inattention was a luxury she could no longer afford. For, while she had been regarding with mild contempt the world of men like Damian and their machinations, that world had been insinuating itself into her existence. She had been spied upon by her own servants and been made, by her own actions, an object of suspicion to Don Porfirio himself. She had drawn herself into the spider’s web, where her only hope for survival now was to remain still. All she could do was pray night and day for the success of Madero’s rebellion.
Neither a soldier nor a lawyer, Sarmiento’s seat at Madero’s daily staff meetings reflected his symbolic value as the son of Benito Juárez’s personal physician. By the beginning of May, the meetings had devolved into profane shouting matches between the peasant generals and the perfumado civilian advisors. The fuse that had exploded the divisions between the two groups was the arrival of secret emissaries from Díaz offering a negotiated settlement. Díaz promised to appoint Madero his vice president and successor and to retire at the end of his term in 1914 in exchange for the disbanding of Madero’s forces. Orozco and Villa demanded that Madero allow them to lead their soldiers in a frontal attack against Ciudad Juárez, while the perfumados insisted that he continue negotiations with Díaz.
“Díaz is shitting his pants,” Pascual Orozco proclaimed. “Now is the time to strike Juárez, Don Francisco.”
“But if we attack and fail,” replied a portly lawyer, “Díaz will lose any incentive to continue to negotiate. No, I say we use his fear to wring some more concessions from him.”
“What shit are you talking, fatso?” Orozco replied contemptuously. “‘Incentive’? ‘Concessions’? What the fuck do those words even mean?”
“They mean, you bastard cowboy, that you’re not going to take Juárez using machetes against machine guns and bows and arrows against artillery guns.”
“Gentlemen,” Madero said, raising a small, pale hand. “There is no question about the bravery and dedication of our troops, but Don Gerardo is right. The federales have a huge advantage in weaponry. We will only have one opportunity to take Juárez, and if we fail, well, it’s the gallows or the firing squad for all of us, and an end to our dreams of a better day for México. For now, we will continue to talk with Don Porfirio’s emissaries.” He faced down the angry shouts from the generals. “You are courageous fighters,” he told them. “And I know you love your men. Knowing that, I must ask you, why would you sacrifice their lives to achieve what we might yet achieve without bloodshed, the end of Porfirio Díaz?”
Luis said, “Pardon me, Don Francisco, but Díaz is a soldier. Whatever his emissaries may tell you, the only thing he really respects is force. He will not resign until it is clear that his army can no longer guarantee his survival. I agree with Don Pascual and General Villa. We should attack now. Díaz has sent his best troops into Juárez. If the city falls, his regime will be exposed as defenseless and his government will collapse.”
Now it was the perfumados who shouted. Sarmiento felt Madero’s mild eye fall upon him and his throat tightened.
“What do you say, Doctor?” Madero asked. “You are doubtless the most impartial man in the room.”
“Not so impartial as ignorant,” Sarmiento replied, temporizing.
But Madero would not have it. “Come, Miguel. No believes you are ignorant. Tell us what you think.”
“My job is to save lives, not to endanger them,” he said. “But since you ask, I would say that I don’t know if our men can take Juárez, but I know they are ready to try.”
“And risk failure?” the fat lawyer pressed him.
“My father was a man of many sayings,” Sarmiento replied. “And one of them was ‘A mas honor, mas dolor.’ No risk, no reward. He said he learned that dicho from Don Benito Juárez himself.”
His invocation of the hallowed name of Juárez momentarily silenced the room, but then the
men resumed their quarrel, each side loudly claiming that Juárez would have supported their position. After another half hour of this, Sarmiento slipped out and walked out into the desert to smoke a cigarette and clear his head before he began his day of doctoring.
“Did Juárez really teach your father that saying?”
He turned to find Madero smiling at him. “Honestly, I do not know, Don Francisco. If Don Benito said even half the things my father claimed he said, then the man never stopped talking. Is the meeting over?”
“For now,” Madero said. He touched Sarmiento’s shoulder. “Of course, another one is about to start, so I must go. I’m glad you’re here, Miguel. You are the most civilized of men.”
“That doesn’t seem to be much of a virtue under the circumstances.”
“War is destruction and destruction is easy,” Madero said. “I will need the civilized to rebuild México.”
When Sarmiento arrived at the staff meeting the next morning, the air in the room was charged. He took his customary seat by the door. Madero was standing in front of a large map of México with a pointer, indicating a spot just south of the capital.
“Gentlemen, early this morning we learned that General Zapata and his Army of the South have taken Cuautla from Don Porfirio’s Fifth Calvary. The road to the capital now lies open to our brother revolutionaries from Morelos. Therefore, I am ordering an attack on Ciudad Juárez to begin tomorrow morning.” He paused and waited for the outcry in the room—cheers from the generals, groans from the civilians—to die down.
One of the generals called, “Why wait for tomorrow? My men are ready to kill the bastards now!”
Madero put out his hands and quieted the room. “I have just informed President Díaz’s emissaries of my decision, and it only seems fair to give them time to consult with the government and respond. General Garibaldi will explain the plan of attack.”
Madero stepped aside for his chief of staff. Garibaldi, grandson of the liberator of Italy, came forward dressed, as always, in a Norfolk jacket, jodhpurs, a Tyrolean hat, and a red shirt and tie, like a country gentleman about to go out on a shoot. Tall, bespectacled, and mustached, he resembled the American president, Theodore Roosevelt. He was one of a number of foreign soldiers who had joined Madero out of idealism or for the adventure. In his heavily accented Spanish he set out his strategy to take Juárez. Orozco’s men would attack from the east along the Rio Bravo and make for the railway station, Villa’s army would attack from the south and advance to the cathedral in the central plaza, and Garibaldi would move from the west with the customs house as his objective. Once inside the city, the three groups would join forces and capture the federal garrison.
“But the federales are entrenched in ditches around the city,” a civilian advisor objected. “Their machine guns will slaughter you.”
“They have not had time to complete their trench work,” Garibaldi replied. “There are weak spots where they have barricaded themselves behind brick walls and in old houses. We will blast our way through those defenses.”
“With what?” the same man asked skeptically. “We have no artillery.”
“We have dynamite,” Garibaldi said. “Not as precise as artillery shells but quite as effective.”
As the discussion continued, Sarmiento slowly realized what the attack would mean for him. He was the only physician in the entire camp, and he had yet to experience battlefield conditions. The patients he had treated were more often sick with one of the diseases that festered in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions than wounded from the brief skirmishes with the federales. Dread gripped him as he imagined the carnage to come.
He spent the rest of the day setting up a field hospital in a copse of alamo trees on a slight rise that gave him an unencumbered view of Juárez. Luis, seeing him packing and moving supplies, sent Ángel to help him. Sarmiento had rarely seen his cousin’s young companion since arriving at camp and had never been alone with him. The boy—for Sarmiento guessed he was no more than nineteen or twenty—was slender, but when he removed his shirt against the midday heat, Sarmiento saw he had the long, hard muscles of someone accustomed to hard labor. There was a patch of discoloration on his left shoulder that looked like a healed bullet wound and across his back were faded scars that could only have been made by a rawhide whip. Ángel’s reserve bordered on hostility, and Sarmiento knew better than to ask the boy directly about his wounds. Still, he was curious not only about the scars, but whether Ángel shared Luis’s understanding of what he was, an invert, a homosexual. For there was not the slightest hint of effeminacy about Ángel, nothing to distinguish him from the hundreds of other young Indian soldiers at the camp. Like them, Ángel had the soft features of a child and the wary eyes of a coyote.
Working in silence, the two men set up tents for the wounded to be brought into when they first arrived, as well as tents for surgery and recovery. Sarmiento stocked his supplies in the surgical tent—basins, bandages, chloroform, morphine, and whiskey. They filled immense water jars at the small tributary stream of the Rio Bravo that ran at the edge of the camp and carried them up the hill. Sarmiento knew he would need help once the battle began and, on an impulse, asked Ángel if he would stay.
The young Indian, who was setting up cots beneath the alamo trees, replied without looking at him. “Tomorrow I fight with Luis.” A moment later, he added, “I will tell him to send some women to help you.”
Ángel spoke his cousin’s name with a familiarity that surprised Sarmiento. He had expected that the boy—who addressed him with the formal “usted”—would call Luis by something equally formal and distant. Instead, he referred to Luis as an equal, a friend, a companion. Sarmiento was unexpectedly moved.
“Is there anything else you want me to do, sir?” Ángel asked.
Sarmiento looked around. Everything was in order. “No, thank you, Ángel. You can go now.” But before the boy could leave, Sarmiento said, “Ángel, tomorrow … watch out for yourself and for Luis. I love him as if he were my own brother, and as you are his friend, you are also my friend.”
The dark, inscrutable eyes gazed at him; the unreadable expression on his face did not change. “I would die myself before I let harm come his way,” the boy said, turned, and slipped away.
Through a pair of field glasses, Sarmiento watched the battle of Ciudad Juárez begin at seven o’clock the next morning when, disregarding Garibaldi’s orders to launch an infantry attack, Pancho Villa sent his cavalry charging the trenches of the federales, where they were annihilated by machine gun fire. At the same time, Sarmiento heard the earthshaking explosions of artillery shells and dynamite. Pillars of dust, Biblical in girth and density, rose out of the assaulted desert like furious wraiths. By seven-thirty, the first casualties had begun to arrive and thereafter, Sarmiento’s view of the battle was of the mangled bodies of the wounded.
Months later, Sarmiento would remember the strange idea that had taken hold of him on that endless day in Juárez as he worked on the soldiers. It had begun to seem to him that the bullets that had maimed the men were not inanimate metal projectiles but imbued with tiny, malignant spirits that directed their destructive courses with an evil humor. Thus, a bullet sheared off the nipple on one man’s chest, nearly, but not quite, severing it, before it interred itself in his neck, where it would cost him the power of speech. Another took out a general’s eye but did no further damage, while a third tore a tuft of hair from a soldier’s scalp and buried it in a furrow that it dug between his shoulders. A fourth made a precise, clean hole in a soldier’s armpit from which it sailed whimsically into his heart. There was the bullet that nicked a fingertip before shattering a collarbone; the bullet that caromed within the body like a billiard ball; the bullet that efficiently perforated the bowel and departed, consigning its victim to an agonizing death from peritonitis; the bullet that chose to burrow into the soft, warm folds of the thirteen-year-old soldier’s brain, blinding him, but leaving him alive. As he removed the bullets that
he could, Sarmiento cursed them as if they could hear and understand his epithets. Tears of exhaustion and grief ran down his dusty face. Blood dripped into his shoes from his blood-soaked trousers and his feet squished with each step. That was how Madero found him at the end of the day when the little man appeared to console the wounded. He took one look at Sarmiento and embraced him, smearing himself with the blood of his soldiers, and whispered into Sarmiento’s ear, “You are the bravest of all, Miguel, to face this unbearable suffering and to work to alleviate it.”
Sometime later, in the darkness of a night he thought would never fall, Luis appeared. He led Sarmiento away from the charnel house that his hospital had become. Luis took Sarmiento to his room, where he helped him clean himself up and change into fresh clothes. From there, they went to the mess, where Luis made him eat a plate of beans that he washed down with whiskey. He returned Sarmiento to his room and put him into his bed.
“No,” Sarmiento said hoarsely, trying to get up. “The wounded are still coming in.”
Luis pressed down gently on his chest, forcing him to lie down. “You’ll take better care of them when you’re rested,” he said. “Get some sleep. I’ll wake you if you’re needed.”
Sarmiento wanted to raise his voice in further protest, but his eyelids felt as if they were weighted with stones. With his fading vision he saw that Luis’s shirtfront was smeared with blood.
“You are wounded,” he croaked, touching his hand to his cousin’s shirt.
Luis shook his head. “No, it’s not my blood. It’s Ángel’s. He died in my arms this morning.” Luis stroked Sarmiento’s face. “Sleep now, Primito. Tomorrow will be a better day.”
“How could it be?” It was a cry of agony.
With a melancholy smile, Luis replied, “We are victorious, Miguel. Ciudad Juárez has fallen.”
Alicia could almost hear the collective gasp of shock from her circle when news reached the capital that Ciudad Júarez had fallen. In the days that followed, the shock deepened to dismay and then panic as rich refugees from the northern states began to trickle into the city with tales of marauding revolutionaries and the mass desertions of federal troops to Madero. She could not help but be affected by what looked to be the imminent collapse of Don Porfirio’s regime. Such a thing was almost unimaginable to the generations of Mexicans like hers that had never known another president. He had seemed as solid in his place as the National Palace itself, but the loss of a single city had revealed him as he was, an enfeebled, old man of eighty clinging by his fingertips to his throne as a whirlwind bore down upon him. Day after day, the Zócalo was filled with protesters against whom the police and the army were vastly outnumbered. The once docile press began to publish stories about the actual conditions of the country and call for vast social and political changes. The government issued contradictory communiqués, some promising reforms, others stubbornly rejecting any need for them, that no one believed. Madero’s portraits began to appear everywhere in the capital and beneath them the caption “The Apostle of Freedom,” while Don Porfirio’s were discreetly removed. Meanwhile, the once conspicuous rich deserted their usual playgrounds and retired to their mansions or quietly made preparations to leave for Europe or the United States after first shipping their assets to foreign banks.