Benjamin Zeledón heads the resistance. The chief of the patriots has a fresh-looking face and startled eyes. The invaders cannot bribe him because Zeledón spits on money, so they defeat him by treachery.
Augusto César Sandino, a no-account peon from a no-account village, sees Zeledón’s corpse pass by, dragged through the dust, hands and feet bound to the saddle of a drunken invader.
(10 and 56)
1912: Mexico City
Huerta
looks like a malignant corpse. His shiny dark glasses are all that seem alive in his face.
Veteran bodyguard of Porfirio Díaz, Victoriano Huerta converted to democracy on the day the dictatorship fell. Now he is President Madero’s right-hand man, and has dedicated himself to hunting down revolutionaries. In the north he catches Pancho Villa, in the south Zapata’s lieutenant, Gildardo Magaña, and orders them shot. The firing squad are stroking their triggers when the presidential pardon interrupts the ceremony. “Death came for me,” sighs Villa, “but missed the appointment.”
The resuscitated pair end up in the same cell in Tlatelolco prison. They pass days, months, chatting. Magaña talks of Zapata, of his plan for agrarian reform, and of Madero, who turns a deaf ear, so eager is he to offend neither campesinos nor landlords, riding two horses at once.
A small blackboard and a few books arrive. Pancho Villa knows how to read people, but not letters. Magaña teaches him, and together they enter, word by word, sword-thrust by sword-thrust, the castles of The Three Musketeers. Then they start the journey through Don Quixote de la Mancha, crazy roads of old Spain; and Pancho Villa, fierce warrior of the desert, strokes the pages with the hand of a lover.
Magaña tells him: “This book … You know? A jailbird wrote it. One of us.”
(194 and 206)
1913: Mexico City
An Eighteen-Cent Rope
President Madero imposes a tax, a tiny tax, on the heretofore untouched oil companies, and North American ambassador Henry Lane Wilson threatens invasion. Several warships are heading for the ports of Mexico, announces the ambassador, while General Huerta rebels and his troops bombard the National Palace.
The fate of Mexico is discussed in the smoking lounge of the U.S. embassy. It is decided to invoke the shot-while-trying-to-escape law, so they put Madero in a car, order him to get out of town, and riddle him with bullets when he tries to.
General Huerta, the new president, attends a banquet at the Jockey Club. There he announces that he has a good remedy, an eighteen-cent rope, for Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa and the other enemies of order.
(194 and 246)
1913: Jonacatepec
The Hordes Are Not Destroyed
Huerta’s officers, old hands at massacring rebellious Indians, propose to clean up the southern areas—burning villages and hunting down campesinos. Anyone they meet falls dead or prisoner, for in the south, who is not with Zapata?
Zapata’s forces are hungry and sick, frayed, but the leader of the landless knows what he wants, and his people believe in what he does; neither fire nor deceit can prevail against that. While the capital’s newspapers report that the Zapata hordes have been totally destroyed, Zapata blows up trains, surprises garrisons and annihilates them, occupies villages, attacks cities, and moves wherever he wants across impenetrable mountains, through impassable ravines, fighting and loving as though it’s all in a day’s work.
Zapata sleeps where he likes with anyone he likes, but of them all he prefers two who are one.
(468)
Zapata and Those Two
We were twins. We were both named Luz for the day of our baptism and Gregoria for the day we were born. They called her Luz and me Gregoria and there we were, two young girls in the house, when Zapata’s boys came along, and then their chief, trying to persuade my sister to go with him.
“Look, come with me.”
And precisely one September 15 he came by and took her.
Afterward, in this continuous moving around, my sister died in Huautla of a disease that they call—what do they call it?—Saint Vitus, the Saint Vitus disease.
Three days and three nights chief Zapata was there with us, not eating or drinking a thing. We had only just lit the candles for my sister when ay, ay, ay, he took me by force. He said I belonged to him, because my sister and I were one …
(244)
1913: The Plains of Chihuahua
The North of Mexico Celebrates War and Fiesta
The cocks crow whenever they feel like it. This land has caught fire, gone crazy. Everyone is in rebellion.
“We’re off to the war, woman.”
“But why me?”
“Do you want me to die of starvation in the war? Who’ll make my tortillas?”
Flocks of vultures follow the armed peons over plains and mountains. If life is worth nothing, what can death be worth? Men roll themselves like dice into the tumult, and find vengeance or oblivion, land to feed them or to cover them.
“Here comes Pancho Villa!” the peons exult.
“Here comes Pancho Villa!” cry the overseers, crossing themselves.
“Where, where is he?” asks General Huerta.
“In the north, south, east, and west, and also nowhere,” replies the Chihuahua garrison commander.
Confronting the enemy, Pancho Villa is always the first to charge, right into the smoking jaws of the guns. When the battle gets hot, he just horse-laughs. His heart thumps like a fish out of water.
“There’s nothing wrong with the general. He’s just a bit emotional,” his officers explain.
And so he is. With a single shot, for pure fun, he has been known to disembowel the messenger who gallops up with good news from the front.
(206 and 260)
1913: Culiacán
Bullets
There are bullets with imagination, Martín Luis Guzmán discovers. Bullets which amuse themselves in afflicting the flesh. He has known serious bullets, which serve human fury, but not these bullets that play with human pain.
For being a bad marksman with a good heart, the young novelist is assigned to direct one of Pancho Villa’s hospitals. The wounded pile up in the dirt with no recourse but to clench their teeth, if they have any.
Checking the jammed wards, Guzmán confirms the improbable trajectories of these fanciful bullets, capable of emptying an eye-socket while leaving a body alive, or of sticking a piece of ear into the neck and a piece of neck into the foot. And he witnesses the sinister joy of bullets, which, having been ordered to kill a soldier, condemn him never again to sit down or never again to eat with his mouth.
(216)
1913: The Fields of Chihuahua
One of These Mornings I Murdered Myself,
on some dusty Mexican road, and the event left a deep impression on me.
This wasn’t the first crime I committed. From the time I was born in Ohio seventy-one years ago and received the name Ambrose Bierce, until my recent death, I have played havoc with the lives of my parents and various relatives, friends, and colleagues. These touching episodes have splashed blood over my days—or my stories, which is all the same to me: the difference between the life I lived and the life I wrote is a matter for the jokers who execute human law, literary criticism, and the will of God in this world.
To put an end to my days, I joined the troops of Pancho Villa and chose one of those many stray bullets zooming through the Mexican sky these days. This method proved more practical than hanging, cheaper than poison, more convenient than firing with my own finger, and more dignified than waiting for disease or old age.
1914: Montevideo
Batlle
He writes articles slandering the saints and makes speeches attacking the company that sells real estate in the Great Beyond. When he assumed the presidency of Uruguay, he had no alternative but to swear before God and the Holy Evangels, but explained immediately that he didn’t believe in any of that.
José Batlle y Ordonez governs in defiance of the pow
ers of heaven and earth. The Church has promised him a nice place in hell; companies he nationalized, or forced to respect their workers’ unions and the eight-hour work day, will feed the fire; and the Devil will avenge his offenses against male-supremacists.
“He is legalizing licentiousness,” say his enemies when he approves a law permitting women to sue for divorce.
“He is dissolving the family,” they say, when he extends inheritance rights to illegitimate children.
“The female brain is inferior,” they say, when he creates a women’s university and announces that women will soon have the vote so that Uruguayan democracy need not walk on just one leg, and so that women will not forever be children passing from the hands of the father to those of the husband.
(35 and 271)
1914: San Ignacio
Quiroga
From the Paraná River jungle where he lives in voluntary exile, Horacio Quiroga applauds Batlle’s reforms and that ardent faith in noble things.
But Quiroga is indeed far from Uruguay. He left the country some years ago, fleeing the shadow of death. A curse has darkened his life since he killed his best friend while trying to defend him; or perhaps he was cursed from the beginning.
In the jungle, a step away from the ruins of the Jesuit missions, Quiroga lives surrounded by bugs and palm trees. He writes stories without detours, just as he opens paths through the thicket with his machete. He works the word with the same rugged love as he does the soil, and wood, and iron.
What Quiroga seeks he could never find away from here. Here, yes, though only very occasionally. In this house which his hands built by the river, Quiroga has at times the joy of hearing voices more powerful than the call of death: rare and fleeting certainties of life, which while they last are as absolute as the sun.
(20, 357, 358, and 390)
1914: Montevideo
Delmira
In this rented room she had an appointment with the man who had been her husband. Wanting to possess her, wanting to stay with her, he made love to her, killed her, then killed himself.
The Uruguayan papers publish a photo of the body lying beside the bed: Delmira struck down by two bullets, naked like her poems, all unclothed in red.
Let’s go further in the night, let’s …
Delmira Agustini wrote in a trance. She sang to the fevers of love without shame, and was condemned by those who punish women for what they applaud in men, because chastity is a feminine duty, and desire, like reason, a male privilege. In Uruguay the laws march ahead of the people, who still separate soul from body as if they were Beauty and the Beast. Before the corpse of Delmira flow tears and phrases about this irreplaceable loss to national letters, but deep down the mourners feel some relief: the woman is dead, and better so.
But is she dead? Will not all the lovers burning in the nights of the world be the shadows of her voice and the echoes of her body? In the nights of the world won’t they make a small place where her unfettered voice can sing and her radiant feet can dance?
(49 and 426)
1914: Ciudad Jiménez
Chronicler of Angry Peoples
From shock to shock, from marvel to marvel, John Reed travels the roads of northern Mexico. He is looking for Pancho Villa and finds him at every step.
Reed, chronicler of revolution, sleeps wherever night catches up with him. No one ever steals from him, or ever lets him pay for anything except dance music; and there’s always someone to offer him a piece of tortilla or a place on his horse.
“Where do you come from?”
“From New York.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about New York, but I’ll bet you don’t see such fine cattle going through the streets as you see in the streets of Jiménez.”
A woman carries a pitcher on her head. Another, squatting, suckles her baby. Another, on her knees, grinds corn. Enveloped in faded serapes, the men sit in a circle, drinking and smoking.
“Listen, Juanito, why is it your people don’t like Mexicans? Why do they call us ‘greasers’?”
Everyone has something to ask this thin, bespectacled, blond man who looks as if he were here by mistake.
“Listen, Juanito, how do you say ‘mula’ in English?”
“Goddamn stubborn—fathead mule …”
(368)
1914: Salt Lake City
Songster of Angry Peoples
They condemn him for singing red ballads that make fun of God, that wake up the worker, that curse money. The sentence doesn’t say that Joe Hill is a proletarian troubadour, or worse, a foreigner seeking to subvert the good order of business. The sentence speaks of assault and crime. There is no proof, the witnesses change their stories each time they testify, and the defense lawyers act as if they were the prosecutors. But these details lack importance for the judges and for all who make decisions in Salt Lake City. Joe Hill will be bound to a chair with a cardboard circle pinned over his heart as a target for the firing squad.
Joe Hill came from Sweden. In the United States he wandered the roads. In the cities he cleaned spittoons and built walls; in the countryside he stacked wheat and picked fruit, dug copper in the mines, toted sacks on the piers, slept under bridges and in barns, sang anywhere at any hour, and never stopped singing. He bids his comrades farewell singing, now that he’s off to Mars to disturb its social peace.
(167)
1914: Torreón
By Rail They March to Battle
In the red car, which displays his name in big gilt letters, General Pancho Villa receives John Reed. He receives him in his underpants, pours him coffee, and studies him for a long moment. Deciding that this gringo deserves the truth, he begins to talk.
“The chocolate politicians want to win without dirtying their hands. Those perfumed …”
Then he takes him to visit the field hospital, a train with a surgery and doctors to heal their own men and others: and he shows him the cars that take corn, sugar, coffee, and tobacco to the front. He also shows him the platform on which traitors are shot.
The railroads were the work of Porfirio Díaz, the key to peace and order, masterkey to the progress of a country without rivers or roads. They had been created not to transport an armed people but cheap raw materials, docile workers, and the executioners of rebellions. But General Villa makes war by train. From Camargo he turns loose a locomotive at full speed and smashes a trainful of soldiers. Villa’s men enter Ciudad Juárez crouching in innocent coal cars, and after firing a few shots occupy it, more out of fun than necessity. By train the Villista troops roll to the front lines of the war. The locomotive gasps, painfully climbing the bare northern slopes. From behind a plume of black smoke come creaking shaking cars filled with soldiers and horses. On their roofs sprout rifles, sombreros, and stoves. Up there, among soldiers singing mañanitas and shooting into the air, children bawl and women cook—the women, the soldaderas, dressed in bridal gowns and silk shoes from the last looting.
(246 and 368)
1914: The Fields of Morelos
It’s Time to Get Moving and Fight,
and the roars and rifle shots echo like mountain landslides. The army of Zapata—down with the haciendas, up with the villages—opens the way to Mexico City.
Around chief Zapata, General Genovevo de la O meditates and cleans his rifle, his face like a mustachioed sun, while Otilio Montaño, anarchist, discusses a manifesto with Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, socialist.
Among Zapata’s officers and advisers there is but one woman. Colonel Rosa Bobadilla, who won her rank in battle, commands a troop of cavalrymen and maintains a ban on drinking so much as a drop of tequila. They obey her, mysteriously, although they remain convinced that women are only good for adorning the world, making children, and cooking corn, chili, beans, or whatever God provides and permits.
(296 and 468)
1914: Mexico City
Huerta Flees
on the same ship that took Porfirio Díaz from Mexico.
Rags are winning
the war against lace. A campesino tide beats against the capital. Zapata, the Attila of Morelos, and Pancho Villa, the orangutan who eats raw meat and gnaws bones, attack from north and south, avenging wrongs. Just before Christmas, the front pages of Mexico City’s newspapers appear with black borders, mourning the arrival of the outlaws, barbarian violators of young ladies and locks.
Turbulent years. Now nobody knows who is who. The city trembles in panic and sighs with nostalgia. Only yesterday at the hub of the world were the masters in their big houses with their lackeys and pianos, candelabra and Carrara marble baths; and all around, serfs, the poor of the barrios, dizzy with pulque, drowning in garbage, condemned to the wages or tips which barely bought some occasional watered milk or frijol coffee or burro meat.
(194 and 246)
1915: Mexico City
Power Ungrasped
A timid knock, somewhere between wanting and not wanting. A door that half opens. An uncovered head, enormous sombrero clutched in hands pleading, for the love of God, for water or tortillas. Zapata’s men, Indians in white pants, cartridge belts crossed on chests, wander the streets of the city that scorns and fears them. Nowhere are they invited in. In no time they run into Villa’s men, also foreigners lost, blind.
Soft click of sandals, chas-ches, chas-ches, on the marble stairways, feet that are frightened by the pleasure of carpets, faces staring bewildered at themselves in the mirrors of waxed floors: Zapata’s and Villa’s men enter the National Palace as if begging pardon. Pancho Villa sits on the gilt armchair that was Porfirio Díaz’s throne to see how it feels, while at his side Zapata, in a very embroidered suit, with an expression of being there without being there, murmurs answers to the reporters’ questions.
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 74