We would talk out by the stables, working on the horses, or riding through the desert, and then sometimes in the bedroom before we lit the candles on the bedside tables and crawled under the perfumed sheets to romp in the shadows. Elisa was a full-grown woman in ways I realized I wasn’t yet a man, and the twelve years she had on me made a difference as wide as the Rio Bravo. But we met in the middle of the river and swam with the current. She was just steadier, more sure of herself, and content to let things happen without yanking too hard on the rudder. Many an hour we spent in the library, I deep in Tristram Shandy or dipping into some other book she thought I might like, and she sipping her brandy.
Sometimes she read aloud to me, a long passage of a poem that she liked, and one evening, her cool cheek pressed against mine, we read that scene from Romeo and Juliet where they wind up killing themselves from the pain of lost love. There were tears glistening in Elisa’s green eyes when we had finished. She was a fine woman, hard on the outside and hard in the core, but with plenty of softness in between.
The next morning we were riding Maximilian and the Appaloosa in the hot haze of the desert, and we reined up in the shade of some cottonwood trees to let the horses cool down.
“Elisa, I’ve been thinking. You know me now. Am I the right sort of man to ever get married?”
“I may know you, but I can’t answer that for you.”
“I don’t think I really know anymore what the word love means,” I said. The confession cost me something. “A man says he loves fried chicken, or his folks, or his offspring—and that’s clear enough. Simple desire. Not so simple habit. But loving a woman is something different. It’s a kind of crazy feeling … it hardly ever makes you feel peaceful, or easy inside your own skin.”
“Is that what you want from love? To feel peaceful and easy?”
“I sure don’t want to feel crazy.”
“Do you think real love has to make you feel a little crazy?” Laughing, I said, “It tends to, doesn’t it?”
“No law says so.”
“If you were younger, Elisa—” I stopped there, wishing I could bite back the words. She looked quickly away for a moment at the rippling horizon and the blast furnace of the sky, and I couldn’t see her face. But when she swung it back to me, she was at ease again.
“If horses had wings,” she said lightly, “we’d fly to the moon. If I were younger, Tom, I’d still be married. And even if that weren’t so, I’d be a different person. You might not feel the same way about me. We all change. Sometimes things happen, and the happening makes the moment right. So don’t fret about if and maybe. Think about what you’ve got, what you’re doing, and hang on to it or do it with a whole heart … or move along. Life is short,” she said, echoing Candelario, only with a touch of bitterness in her voice I had never heard before. “Too short to play the fool. Too short to …” She clamped her mouth shut a moment. “Well, just too short. You’ll find out. Look!”
She pointed over my shoulder.
A horseman came bobbing out of the heat haze, black against the white glare of the desert, sun flashing off his spurs. It was Candelario on the Morgan, coming up at a brisk canter. I let go the stock of my rifle.
Captain von Papen was back, he said, and waiting for us at the hacienda.
Our talk took longer than it should have because, as usual, Von Papen sowed a big crop of words before he got round to what I was waiting for: the list of supplies that the German government was willing to provide Pancho Villa. He had it typed in Spanish on some plain white paper, folded into a plain white envelope, and it was unsigned, but as soon as I read it I knew it would serve the purpose. The list included everything from new 7.62-mm Mauser rifles and gas-boosted light machine guns to 88-mm field artillery and Mercedes-Benz trucks—in enough quantities to equip an army of fifty thousand men.
I had only one idea in my head: that there might be a way to get the arms without invading Texas.
“I’ll give this to him, Captain. How should General Villa contact you when he’s made up his mind?”
“I’ll find him,” Von Papen said.
He didn’t waste any time after that but took his leave as soon as he had clicked his heels and exchanged salutes with me, and then he fogged out of there in another dust cloud toward Chihuahua City. I doubted I would ever see him again, but I was wrong.
It was my turn then to leave. I could have stayed on at the Hacienda de Los Flores for another week, or even longer, and been more content than a bee in a clover patch, but I knew that Pancho Villa would be somewhere around Irapuato fretting for the news, as well as the gold for Conchita. Still, I told Candelario we wouldn’t pull stakes until dawn.
So I had one more night to curl up against Elisa and drink her honey. I woke in the first fuzzy gray streak of day feeling worn out as a fresh-branded calf. Elisa was already in the kitchen frying a skilletful of eggs and brewing a pot of black coffee. Long goodbyes, I realized, wouldn’t be her style.
Candelario and I had decided to skip Chihuahua City and a run-in with Urbina, who might still be nursing the lump on his skull and a feeling for us that wasn’t exactly motherly love, and head southeast for Torreón where we could pick up the southbound train.
The revolution and human nature being what they were, Maximilian was too fine a horse to leave behind in some Torreón livery stable, so I told Elisa we would ride the nags we had come on. They had been well grazed and had put on some weight in the ten days we had been lazying around. I asked her to keep Maximilian for me until I came back. A little smile crinkled her tanned cheeks so that her dimples flashed.
“You think you’ll come back, Tom?”
I looked up from the kitchen floor where I was packing my bag. “I’ll come back. I wouldn’t leave a fine horse like that and just forget about it. I’ll be back … if I’m still welcome.”
“You’ll be welcome,” she said huskily, then turned away toward the stove.
It was a frosty morning and the horses still had humps in their backs, so after we ate we saddled them and let them soak for a spell to forget their friskiness. Even when I forked my saddle, that roan I’d picked up in Chihuahua had to iron out a few kinks and show me he wasn’t keen to leave a comfortable barn. I knew how he felt. We wheeled to and fro in the dust outside the stables until the animals settled down. Our trunk of gold was strapped to the pack mule. A cold wind blew off the sierra, and I bundled up in my serape. Patricio opened the gate.
I had told Elisa I would be back. The meaning of that hadn’t escaped me, even though the resolution and the strength of the desire had surprised me. I hadn’t lied to her. I would do it … somehow. I wanted that badly. I loved her. I had only told it to her once, that day in the library, and she had never responded in kind—but that didn’t matter.
Francisca, shivering, waved to Candelario from the kitchen door. Elisa wore the same outfit as the morning when we first arrived, with a blue rebozo thrown over her wide shoulders to keep off the chill.
“Go well, my sweet.” She looked up at me as the horse pawed the turf.
“I won’t forget you, Elisa.”
“I hope not.”
“And I’ll be back.”
“You told me that already. Don’t promise anything, Tom. I don’t want promises.”
There was no more to say that wouldn’t be a lie. I didn’t know what the future would hold. We were going to fight a battle somewhere, and that always meant there might not be a future. But for the first time in my life I felt fully purged and at ease inside my skin. That was Elisa’s gift. I wondered if I had given her anything of equal value.
If I were alive, I would come back. I knew it. I tried to tell her that with my eyes. Not a promise. A declaration of need. Maybe love, in the end, was no more than that. No more, but no less. She smiled fondly up at me. We kicked the horses out of the gate and trotted toward the unfriendly desert stretching south of Parral.
Chapter 24
“I see you standing like greyhounds in
the slips.”
from THE SCHOOLTEACHER’S JOURNAL
Fort Bliss
March 18, 1915
To continue my chronicle of events: … Obregón’s third occupation of Mexico City, following his defeat of Zapata at Puebla, was perhaps his most memorable. Swiftly he wreaked his vengeance on the merchants who had refused to pay the twenty million pesos he had demanded on his last visit. Men disappeared in the middle of the night or were snatched openly from their offices, never to return. All schools were closed, all public transportation halted. The Catholic Church then began to reap the fruits of one hundred years of loyalty to the wielders of power. Obregón’s soldiers sacked the churches, riding their horses up the aisles and smashing statues of the saints with the flats of their swords. Drunken soldiers wandered down the street, heads bizarrely thrust through religious paintings, or draped heavy gold crucifixes round the necks of the dead rats that piled up in the garbage heaps on the Reforma. More than two hundred priests were thrown into prison and held at ransom.
Everything of value in the city was shipped by mule and train to Veracruz, which Carranza had just declared to be the new capital of Mexico for the simple reason that he was there. No food was allowed into Mexico City, not even the shipments sent by the American Red Cross. All was given to Obregón’s Constitutionalist Army, camped to the north by the great pyramids of Teotihuacán with trainloads of rifles, artillery and barbed wire—all that had come off Ypiranga.
In order to eat, the poor had but one choice: join the army. In the space of ten days, Obregón received twenty thousand voluntary enlistments. Those men and their families were then fed.
As soon as Obregón had the men he needed to go with his arms, he headed north to do battle with Pancho Villa.
March 30, 1915
… The latest report is that Francisco Villa has joined his army at the railroad junction of Irapuato. Obregón is now in Celaya, only thirty miles to the east of them.
The two principal armies of Mexico thus face each other across a barren flat plain in the area called the Bajio. If there is to be a battle that will decide the future of Mexico, it must be now. Whatever the result, the Bajio will never be barren again. It will be watered with blood, and the decaying flesh of men will make the land bloom as never before.
Chapter 25
“And lay the summer’s dust
with showers of blood.”
The flat plain rippled in the heat, making me dizzy.
Three months had passed since I had left Elisa Griensen in Parral. Now, through the blaze of an April morning we were advancing toward the city of Celaya, to do battle with the army of Obregón. I tried not to think of Elisa because I had learned that if you wanted something too fiercely and too steadfastly, you almost never got it.
I had almost completely stopped thinking of Rosa, and perhaps that was the reason why, sooner than I dreamed, I was able to find her. Or, more accurately, the reason she was able to find me. The battle may have been the test, the trial.
A few strawberry fields had been trampled into rags by the artillery caissons, and just ahead of us some freshly planted wheat was about to receive the same bruising. Wagonloads of shells rattled forward, the drivers shrieking, while sweating soldiers wheeled their horses to lay quirts across the backs of stumbling mules. A chorus of bugles shrilled, telling me to do God only knew what. I was mounted on a young and skittish bay.
Julio cantered up to me, his face a narrow mask of dust. His eyes raked me up and down, resting briefly on my two cartridge belts and then more intently on my saddlebags.
“Are there any more bullets in there, Tomás?”
“Just what you see.” I tapped my pistol. “This is loaded, but …”
He understood that I had no spare shells for it. “Son of a whore,” he growled. “The cannon better shoot straight today.”
“Pray,” I said.
I had faith in the cannon and our gunners, but not in the shells they were going to fire. Most of our supply of Belgian-made shells had been exhausted in the second battle of Guadalajara, which our western brigades had again lost to Treviño, and the artillery now depended on shells manufactured in a little factory Villa had built in Torreón. Last week in the few skirmishes near Celaya, most of our shells had flown wide, or long, or short—you had no way of knowing in advance—and two of them had jammed the guns and rendered them useless. But the worst blow of all was that Felipe Angeles wasn’t there to nurse them back to life.
Returning from Parral, I had found Pancho Villa in Torreón, at the Hotel Salvador, anxiously awaiting the completion of the factory that would make his cannon shells. The chief gave me a potent welcoming embrazo, vigorous enough for me to feel the muscles beneath his fat. But he didn’t seem terribly surprised when I told him I’d come back to stay.
He said, “War gets in a man’s blood, Tomás. He hates it when he’s surrounded by death and suffering, and a little interlude of quiet is certainly desirable. But nothing matches war. It corrupts your senses, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You would have found that out eventually—you would have thought back on this time as the best years of your life. I confess, I’m only truly happy when I’m fighting or getting ready to fight. My only hope is to wear myself out. To grow old. Or to be killed …” He sighed. “I knew that in Mexico City. That’s why I behaved so foolishly about Conchita. Love may be the only substitute for war. They’re disgustingly similar.”
“And where is Conchita?” I asked. I hadn’t seen evidence of her in the suite.
“Gone.” He waved a hand in a mock gesture of goodbye. “I grew weary of her tears, and all that piety. You were right, Tomás. It wouldn’t have lasted, even if I had married her. I don’t need a woman now. I’m going to fight Obregón.”
My mouth must have gaped open in astonishment, because he blushed. I hunted for words. “In that case you’re lucky that Luz said no to me. To you, I mean. No divorce.”
“Yes, it was lucky,” he admitted. “But I suspected that’s what she’d say. Under the circumstances I had to try, didn’t I? Was she angry?”
“Not really. She treats you like a backward child.”
“Don’t be impertinent, Tomás.”
“I didn’t mean to be. I’m just stating a fact. As you said, she’s a remarkable woman.”
He took the chest of gold from us without comment; he hardly seemed to remember what it had been for. When Candelario and I told how I had nearly lost my life and how we had dispatched Urbina in order to rescue it, he only shrugged.
“You did the right thing. That’s Urbina’s fate. He can no more stop being a bandit than a loser can walk out of a poker game.”
He was more interested in my report on the talks with Franz von Papen, and he read the German’s list carefully. But then he stuffed it into his pocket with a batch of telegrams.
“You were clever, Tomás. I’ll have to think more about this. This German is certainly imaginative, but I don’t dislike the gringos enough to make war on them. And paper is cheap. Promises cost even less.”
In that he echoed Elisa, and I knew what he meant. But I was relieved that for the time being we weren’t going to invade Texas.
After that I moved into the Hotel Salvador and marched off with Villa every morning to the telegraph office at the railroad station, from where he conducted his preparations for the campaign against Carranza. A storm had been blowing up ever since Felipe had counseled against trusting Zapata’s army in the southern campaign, and in Torreón, beginning in February, the weather grew dark indeed. Felipe didn’t rub it in, but he looked so generally mournful and disgusted that you knew exactly how he felt.
Lounging in a wooden swivel chair as reports clicked in on the telegraph key from all over the country, he said with great conviction: “Don’t be distracted, Pancho. You’ve committed yourself to gaining full control of the north. That may have been foolish when we were able to strike at Carranza, but it’s done. Keep to the plan.”
�
�Obregón grows stronger every day,” Villa said.
He prowled back and forth on the concrete floor of the office, chewing cigarettes more than smoking them. His shoulders were hunched, his teeth bared. “The sonofabitch has thirty thousand men. If I let him alone for another month, he’ll finish training his workers and have forty thousand.”
Angeles argued patiently that the shortage of ammunition made it foolhardy to attack. In Celaya, Obregón was closer to his supply base in Veracruz, and Villa was farther from his own in Juárez. “Make him come to you. Draw him far away from where he’s comfortable. Harass him en route. Order Zapata to attack his rear and push him northward.”
“Order Zapata?” Villa howled. “That fucking Indian, with his tight pants and ridiculous hat? He’s worse than useless!” Villa had finally admitted it. He rolled back and forth across the little room, boots stirring up dust.
“I’ve got to attack!”
But all the reports, Angeles argued, indicated that Celaya was fortified and entrenched, that Obregón was well dug in and that his army had just received a fresh shipment of a hundred machine guns. Unlike Torreón, the open plain before Celaya was crisscrossed with irrigation ditches for cover.
“If the attack fails—”
“You talk too much of failure,” Villa said angrily. “Isn’t it true that Obregón will never fight unless he’s entrenched and fortified? That’s his style, cowardly as it may be. And it’s mine to attack.” His chest swelled; his eyes glared redly. “I’m a man who came into this world to attack. And if I’m defeated by attacking today, I’ll win by attacking tomorrow.”
Felipe wasn’t impressed. “You risk the entire Division.”
“And whose is it to risk? Do you think I sit on a hilltop,” Villa said cruelly, “with some cannon that can’t shoot straight? The Dorados will lead the attack on Celaya, and I’ll lead the Dorados. In a week’s time the church bells in Celaya will ring to celebrate our victory. If not, I’ll be dead. Then the Division is yours. You can do as you please with it. That’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?”
TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border Page 41