The Underdogs

by Mariano Azuela

  “You must know that bandit Macías, señora. I was in the penitentiary with ’im in Escobedo.”4

  “Sergeant, bring me a bottle of tequila. I’ve decided to spend the night in the kind company of this little brunette here. The colonel? What, why in the world are you speakin’ to me about the colonel at these hours? He can go straight to hell as far as I’m concerned! And if he gets upset, as far as I care . . . pop! Go on, Sergeant, tell the corporal to unsaddle the horses and prepare dinner. I’m stayin’ right here. Listen, little darlin’, you let my sergeant fry up the eggs and warm up the tortillas, and you come ’ere with me. Look, this little wallet of mine is stuffed with bills just for you. It’ll be my pleasure. Just imagine! I’m just a little bit drunk tha’s why, and tha’s why my voice is a little bit hoarse, too. I left half my gullet in Guadalajara, and I’ve been spittin’ the other half all the way up here! So what can you do? It’ll be my pleasure. Sergeant, my bottle, my bottle of tequila. But darlin’, you’re too far away. Come over ’ere, have a drink. What d’ya mean no? Are you afraid of . . . your husband . . . or whatever he is? If he’s hidin’ in some hole tell ’im to come out. As far as I care . . . pop! Let me assure you I’m not afraid of no rats.”

  A white silhouette suddenly filled the dark opening of the doorway.

  “Demetrio Macías!” the sergeant exclaimed, aghast, taking several steps back.

  The lieutenant got up, speechless, and stood cold and motionless as a statue.

  “Kill ’em!” the woman exclaimed, her throat dry.

  “Oh, forgive me, my friend! I didn’t know. But I respect brave men like you, truly.”

  Demetrio stood looking at them, an insolent and scornful smile warping his features.

  “And not only do I respect ’em, I also love ’em. Here, take the hand of a friend. That’s okay, Demetrio Macías, I know why you rebuke me. It’s because you don’t know me, it’s because you see me doin’ this damned dog of a job. But what d’ya want, my friend! We’re poor, we have large families to keep. Sergeant, let’s go. I always respect the house of a brave man, of a real man.”

  After they disappeared, the woman hugged Demetrio tightly.

  “Blessed Virgin of Jalpa!5What a scare! I thought they had shot you!”

  “Go on now to my father’s house,” Demetrio said.

  She tried to stop him. She begged, she cried. But he pushed her aside sweetly and answered in a somber voice:

  “I can feel that they’ll be back with the whole group.”

  “Why didn’t ya kill ’em?”

  “Just wasn’t their time yet!”

  They went out together, she with the child in her arms.

  Once at the door, they walked off in opposite directions.

  The moon filled the mountainside with dim, hazy shadows.

  At every cliff and at each scrub oak, Demetrio could still see the sorrowful silhouette of a woman with her child in her arms.

  After many hours of climbing, he turned around to look back. At the bottom of the canyon, near the river, he saw tall flames rising: his house was ablaze.

  II

  Everything was still in shadows as Demetrio Macías climbed down toward the bottom of the ravine. He was following a path along the narrow incline of a rough slope, between rocky terrain streaked with enormous cracks on one side and a drop of hundreds of meters, cut as if by a single cleft, on the other.

  As he descended with agility and speed, he thought:

  “Surely now the Federales will find our trail, and they’ll jump on us like dogs. Luckily for us, though, they don’t know any of the paths going in or out of the ravine. Unless someone from Moyahua1is with them as a guide, because the people from Limón, Santa Rosa, and the other ranchitos from the Sierra are reliable and would never turn us in. The cacique who has me running through these hills is from Moyahua, and he’d be more than pleased to see me strung up from a telegraph pole with my tongue hanging down to here . . .”

  He reached the bottom of the ravine as dawn was beginning to break. He lay down between the boulders and fell asleep.

  The river rushed along, singing in tiny cascades. The birds were chirping, hidden among the pitahaya cacti,2while the monotonous cicadas filled the solitude of the mountain with a sense of mystery.

  Demetrio woke up, startled. Then he waded across the river and started up the trail on the other side of the canyon. Like a large red ant he climbed toward the crest, his hands clutching like claws at the crags and cut-off branches, the soles of his feet clutching at the trail’s round, smooth stones.

  By the time he reached the summit, the sun was bathing the high plains of the Sierra in a lake of gold. Looking down toward the ravine, he could see enormous tapered stones, bristling protuberances like fantastic African heads, pitahaya cacti like the ossified fingers of a colossus, and trees stretching out toward the bottom of the abyss. And among the dry boulders and the parched bushes, the bright San Juan roses dawned like a white offering to the star beginning to spread its golden tendrils from stone to stone.

  Demetrio stopped at the summit. Then he reached back with his right hand, pulled out the horn hanging across his back, brought it to his thick lips, and blew into it three times, his cheeks filling out with air as he did so. Beyond the bordering crest three whistles responded to his signal.

  In the distance, from among a conical heaping of reeds and rotten hay, many men came forth, one after the other. They were dark and polished like old bronze statues, their chests and legs bare.

  Quickly they came to meet Demetrio.

  “They burned my house!” he said in response to their inquisitive looks.

  There were curses, threats, insults.

  Demetrio let them vent. Then he brought a bottle out from his shirt, took a drink, wiped it with the back of his hand, and passed it to the man next to him. The bottle went around from mouth to mouth and was quickly emptied. The men licked their lips.

  “God willin’,” Demetrio said, “tomorrow, or perhaps even tonight, we will get another close-up of the Federales. What do you say, muchachos? Ready to show ’em ’round these paths and trails?”

  The half-naked men jumped up and down, howling with joy. Then they repeated the insults, the curses, and the threats.

  “We don’t know how many of ’em there’s gonna be,” Demetrio stated, scrutinizing the faces around him. “But back in Hostotipaquillo,3Julián Medina4challenged all the pigs and Federales in town with just half a dozen scraggly men armed with knives sharpened on a metate,5and he crushed ’em all.”

  “And what do Medina’s men have that we don’t have?” said a massive, robust, bearded man with very dark, thick eyebrows and sweet eyes. “All I know,” he added, “is that if tomorrow I don’t have me a Mauser rifle, a good cartridge belt, pants, and shoes, then my name’s not Anastasio Montañés. Seriously! Look here, Quail,6don’t tell me you don’t believe me? I’ve been pumped fulla lead half a dozen times already. Ask my compadre Demetrio here if you don’t believe me. You know, I’m no more afraid of a little ball of candy than I am of bullets. Don’t tell me that ya don’t believe me?”

  “Long live Anastasio Montañés!” Lard7yelled.

  “No,” Anastasio replied. “Long live our leader Demetrio Macías. And long live God in heaven and long live the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

  “Long live Demetrio Macías!” they all yelled.

  They lit a fire using straw and dry wood, and placed strips of fresh meat on the live coals. Gathered around the fire, sitting back on their haunches, they hungrily smelled the meat as it sizzled and crackled on the embers.

  Near them, piled up on the blood-soaked ground, lay the golden hide of a calf, while the rest of the meat hung between two huisache trees,8suspended with twine, set to cure in the sun and the air.

  “Okay, then,” Demetrio said. “As you see, other than my thirty-thirty9here, we don’t have more than twenty rifles. If there’s only a few of ’em, we hit ’em until there’s none of ’em left. And if there
’s a lot of ’em, well then, then we give ’em a good run till they’re at least good ’n scared.”

  He loosened the belt from around his waist, untied one of its knots, and offered its contents to his comrades.

  “Salt!” they exclaimed with joy, each taking a pinch with the tips of his fingers.

  They ate avidly. When they had had enough, they lay back with their stomachs up to the sun and sang sad, monotonous songs, screeching shrill screams into the sky after each verse.

  III

  Demetrio Macías’s twenty-five men slept amid the weeds of the Sierra until the sound of the horn woke them up. Pancracio was blowing it from one of the mountaintops.

  “It’s time, muchachos. Look alive!” Anastasio Montañés said, inspecting the springs of his rifle.

  But an hour went by without the sound of anything other than the singing of the cicadas in the grassland and the croaking of the frogs in the hollows.

  The first silhouette of a soldier was finally seen along the tallest ridge of the trail just as the last beams of moonlight were fading in the slightly pinkish girdle of dawn. After him others appeared, followed by another ten, and then by another hundred. But all of them quickly vanished in the shadows. And then, as the splendid sun rose and shone brightly, the side of the cliff was covered with people: tiny men on tiny horses.

  “Look at ’em, how purty they look!” Pancracio exclaimed. “Come on, muchachos, let’s go have us some fun!”

  Those small moving pieces alternated between blending into the thickness of the chaparral and blackening farther below against the ocher of the crag.

  The voices of the leaders and the soldiers could be heard distinctly below them.

  Demetrio gave a signal, and the springs of all the rifles stretched and cocked.

  “Fire!” he ordered in a hushed voice.

  Twenty-one men fired at once, and as many Federales fell from their horses. The others, surprised, remained stationary, like bas-reliefs against the side of the cliff.

  A new discharge, and another twenty-one men rolled from rock to rock, their skulls cracked.

  “Show yourselves, bandits! Come out, dirty dogs!”

  “Death to the corn-grinding thieves!”

  “Death to the cattle rustlers!”

  The Federales yelled at the enemy, but Macías and his men remained hidden, stationary, and quiet, happy simply to continue practicing a marksmanship that was already their pride and fame.

  “Look, Pancracio,” said the Indian,1a man dark everywhere except for his teeth and the whites of his eyes. “This bullet’s for the one tha’s tryin’ to run behind that pitahaya cactus over there! Son of a ... ! Take that! Didya see that, right in ’is head? Now for the one ridin’ on that gray horse . . . Down you go, you blockhead!”

  “I’m gonna give that one who’s ridin’ along the ridge of the trail there a nice bath. You watch an’ tell me if he doesn’t fall right in the river, that no-good conservative pig down there. How ’bout that? D’ya see ’im fall right in?”

  “Come on, Anastasio, don’t be cruel! Let me use your rifle. Come on, let me have just one shot!”

  Lard, Quail, and the others who did not have firearms asked to use them, begging to be able to take at least one shot, as if asking for some supreme favor.

  “Show yourselves, if you’re men enough!”

  “Come out, mongrels. You lousy dogs.”

  The shouts could be heard from one side of the mountain to the other as clearly as if they were coming from across a street.

  All of a sudden Quail emerged from his hiding place with his pants off, and waved his trousers to tease the Federales, pretending he was fighting a bull. At that point shots began raining on Demetrio’s men.

  “Uh-oh! I think they launched a hornet’s nest over my head,” Anastasio Montañés said, already crouching down and hiding between the stones, not daring to look up.

  “Quail, you son of a . . . !” Demetrio roared. “Everyone, now, over to where I said before!”

  They dragged themselves along and took up a new position.

  The Federales began to shout with joy, celebrating their perceived victory. But just as soon as they had ceased firing, a new hailstorm of bullets baffled them again.

  “There’s more of ’em here now!” the soldiers clamored.

  Overwhelmed and panicked, many turned their horses around and retreated at once, while others abandoned their horses and climbed off, seeking refuge among the boulders. The leaders fired over the heads of the fugitives in an attempt to restore order.

  “Get them dogs down below. Get them dogs down below, ” Demetrio yelled, aiming his thirty-thirty down toward the crystalline stream of the river.

  A Federale fell into those very waters. And without fail, with each shot Macías took another man fell, one after the next, into the abyss. But he was the only one shooting down at the Federales near the river, and for each one that he killed, ten or twenty climbed unharmed up the other slope.

  “Get them dogs down below. Get them dogs down below, ” he kept shouting, enraged.

  Now sharing their weapons, the comrades were placing bets as they aimed at and hit their targets.

  “My leather belt if I don’t hit the one on the spotted gray horse in the head. Lend me your rifle, Indian.”

  “Twenty rounds for your Mauser and half a vara2of chorizo if you let me shoot the one ridin’ that black mare with a white mark on its forehead. Ready . . . now! Didya see how high he jumped? Like a deer!”

  “Don’t run off, you conservative mongrels! Come meet your Papi Demetrio Macías.”

  Now Macías’s men were the ones yelling out the insults. As Pancracio shouted, his smooth, otherwise immutable-as-stone face became completely distorted. And as Lard roared, the muscles on his neck tightened and the lines on his face stretched out, his eyes murderously grim.

  Demetrio continued shooting and warning his men of their grave danger, but they ignored his desperate cries until they heard the bullets whizzing right over their heads.

  “I’m hit, I’m hit!” Demetrio yelled, gnashing his teeth together. “Sons of a . . . !” he exclaimed as he slid down between the boulders of the ravine.

  IV

  Two men were missing: Serapio the candy maker and Antonio, who played the cymbals in the Juchipila1band.

  “We’ll just have to see if they can catch up with us farther along,” Demetrio said.

  They were disheartened. Only Anastasio Montañés maintained that sweet expression in his sleepy eyes and bearded face, while Pancracio maintained the repulsive immutability in his hard profile and his protruding jaws.

  The Federales had retreated. Demetrio was gathering all the horses that had been left behind, hidden in the Sierra.

  All of a sudden Quail shouted from where he was marching out in front: he had just seen the missing comrades, hanging from the branches of a mesquite tree.

  It was Serapio and Antonio. When they recognized them, Anastasio Montañés muttered a prayer between his teeth:

  “Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .”

  “Amen,” the others murmured, their heads bowed, their hats off, held tightly against their chests.

  Afterward, they immediately set off along Juchipila canyon, heading north, without taking any rest at all, even though it was already well past nightfall.

  Quail did not leave Anastasio’s side for a single moment. The silhouettes of men hanging and swaying softly in the breeze—necks limp, arms drooping, legs rigid—would not fade from his memory.

  The next day Demetrio began to complain heavily about his wound. He could no longer ride his horse. To be able to continue from there they had to improvise a stretcher out of oak branches and bundles of grass.

  “You’re still bleeding, compadre Demetrio,” Anastasio Montañés said. So he tore off one of the sleeves from his shirt, ripped a long strip from it, and tied it firmly around Demetrio’s thigh, just above the bullet wound.

  “Okay,�
�� Venancio said. “That’ll stop the bleeding and ease the pain.”

  Venancio was a barber, and in his town he pulled molars and applied caustics and leeches. To a certain extent, the men looked up to him because he had read The Wandering Jew and The Sun of May.2He was a man of few words who was well satisfied with his own wisdom, and whom everyone called doctor.

  They took turns carrying the stretcher, four at a time, through barren, rocky mesetas and along very steep slopes.

  At noon, when the heat was stifling and a low-lying haze made sight uncertain, the only sounds to be heard were the measured, monotone complaints of the wounded man accompanied by the incessant singing of the cicadas.

  They stopped and took their rest at every small hut they found along the way, always tucked into the craggy boulders of the Sierra.

  “Thank God that there’s always a compassionate soul waitin’ with a big ol’ bowl of chilies and frijoles!” Anastasio Montañés said, burping.

  And very enthusiastically shaking the calloused hands of Demetrio Macías’s men, the men from the Sierra would exclaim:

  “God bless you! God help you and lead you along the road! Today you’re heading out. Tomorrow, we’ll run too, running from the draft, chased by those damned government criminals who have declared a war to the death on all us poor people. You know that they steal our pigs, our chickens, and even the little bit of corn that we have to eat. You know that they burn our houses and take our women. And then, wherever they track you down, right there and then they finish you off as if you was a rotten dog.”

  As the sun set in a sudden blaze that imbued the sky with bright, vivid colors, they saw up ahead a handful of small, drab houses huddled together in a clearing between the bluish mountains. Demetrio had his men take him there.

  They found a few very poor straw huts at the river’s edge, surrounded by newly sprouted corn and frijole seedlings.