From behind the railroad station, about a mile away, galloped a fresh battalion of Obregón’s cavalry, cunningly concealed there as a reserve. They struck when we were exhausted. Half our men were dead.
Candelario and I galloped through the smoke to find Pancho Villa.
“Chief, we can’t hold!” Candelario cried. “There’s no support from the right. Our battalion to the left is retreating. Let’s not die defending a lousy ditch! Let’s attack the bastards!”
A shell exploded fifty yards in front of us. “Order your men back,” Villa said grimly. “This isn’t a defeat. I can stand a defeat, but not a slaughter.”
Our main force, bogged down in the ditches and bracketed by the enemy guns, was being blown to shreds. The rest of us wheeled our horses, scooped up what infantrymen we could and picked our way back among the dead, across the battlefield and waist-deep in water through the trenches where we had fought with fire and sword … fought for nothing. Despite the thump of cannon and the whistle of bullets, I sagged in the saddle. My eyes closed before I could will otherwise. I might have fallen asleep if the soldier riding behind me, whose name I never bothered to ask, hadn’t talked at me, again and again, in a high brittle voice that had a touch of madness.
“Keep going, my colonel! Don’t fall off! You heard what the chief said. A defeat is nothing! We’ll fight again tomorrow. Don’t fall off, my colonel. We’ll win! You’ll see! Tomorrow, we’ll win … Tomorrow…”
A week later we attacked Celaya again and got whipped worse than the first time. Green flies clustered on our wounded, and rats gorged themselves on the corpses. Between battles Candelario and I picked lice off each other that were nearly as big as grains of rice.
The Northern Division, exhausted, stumbled north toward the city of León.
Felipe Angeles, on crutches, begged Villa not to attack again. “Go further north, my general. Make Obregón follow you to the border. Stretch him out. Then we’ll have him where we want him.”
But Villa wanted revenge and badly needed a victory. He executed a fine maneuver by night, cutting the railway line and surrounding Obregón’s army, which had occupied León.
There, in heat that rarely dipped below a hundred degrees, we fought for forty days. Obregón’s right arm was shattered by one of our shells. The pain was so great, we heard, that he tried to kill himself, but his pistol was empty. His luck held. He had the arm amputated and pickled in a jar of alcohol.
In each of those battles he defended himself the same way, with barbed wire and mounted reserves that pounded down on us after we had struggled for half a day to take a line of trenches. In each of the battles Villa attacked as before, always muttering that “the known road is the good road.”
By the time we limped northward from León we had more than ten thousand casualties. Obregón ordered all the Villista prisoners shoved into corrals, where they were machine-gunned to death. Unlike Fierro, he had no need to prove his marksmanship.
We kept moving north. In June we fought at Aguascalientes in another awful battle and lost. We lost Zacatecas in July and retreated north toward Torreón.
In the battle for León I was knocked unconscious by an exploding shell. I was put on the floor of a hospital train filled with dying men and taken to the military hospital in Torreón, the same hospital that had housed Miguel Bosques and the doomed prisoners.
I stayed there more than a month. Two ribs were broken and my shoulder dislocated. I mended slowly. After a time the body rebels against punishment. If it heals too quickly, it knows it will only be hurt again.
Candelario visited me in the hospital before he left for Chihuahua City, where Villa had ordered him to check on our gold. He told me that Yvette and Marie-Thérése had packed up and headed back to Columbus. He looked bewildered. “Válgame Dios! I’ll never understand women!”
“There was never any future in it, amigo.”
“I loved them both. It’s not over, Tomás. As soon as we start winning again, I’ll go get them. The whole world loves a winner.”
Felipe Angeles hobbled in to visit me too, bringing a bottle of port, some cold cuts and glacé fruit. I didn’t know such things could be found in wartime Mexico, but Angeles had sources that were denied to the rest of us. He wore a gray broad-brimmed hat and a shirt of olive drab wool; in Felipe’s dress as well as his manner there was always that autumnal quality.
In a few days, he told me, when the doctor removed the cast from his leg, he was going to Washington, D.C., as the chief’s emissary.
“What for?” I asked.
“To influence people.” His American friends, he said, believed that the United States government hadn’t given up hope of finding an alternative to Carranza as the next President of Mexico. William Jennings Bryan, the former Secretary of State, had remarked that despite his losses on the battlefields, “Villa was perhaps the safest man to tie to.”
“What does Bryan know,” I asked, “that we don’t know?”
Angeles smiled. “He’s a teetotaler, Tomás. So is the chief. Draw your own conclusions.”
“My conclusion is that men seem to take more care in picking their enemies than they do their friends.”
“How would you like to come with me?” Angeles asked. “If I requested you, I’m sure it could be arranged.”
“You don’t need an interpreter,” I said. “You speak better English than I do.”
“But I don’t think as a gringo. Sometimes I fear that I don’t even think as a Mexican. You would be useful, Tomás. And good company.”
I was flattered. But I remembered my one diplomatic mission, the meeting in Parral with Franz von Papen. “It’s not for me,” I said, keeping to the track of my destiny. “I don’t really know what good I’m doing here, but …” I shrugged.
Angeles nodded, his spirit submerged in a gentle melancholy. “You’re probably right,” he said. “Stay here with the chief. He needs his friends.”
He left then, and I never saw him again.
A few days later, when the remnants of the Division began trickling into Torreón, the doctors realized that the hospital beds would be needed for new wounded. Because I was a staff officer I was consulted, not ordered.
“If it’s necessary, of course I’ll go.”
“In a day or two, my colonel,” the doctor said. “There’s no rush yet. I just wanted you to be prepared.”
I was just glad to sleep twelve hours a night and have my food brought to a bedside table. I wondered about Parral, if I would ever see it or Elisa again. The ward was cool. Outside, the July sun beat down. I passed the time by writing slowly in my journal. I wished I had brought Tristram Shandy with me. I still had Shakespeare, warped and taped, the spine re-glued, but his darker sentiments were all that got through to me now. I needed comfort, not unsparing wisdom.
The next morning, when I woke in the early light, I felt a presence near my bed. The warm sun streamed through the dusty cracked glass of a window. Something soft in the air—a musky scent. A presence. Still half asleep, I was about to murmur Elisa’s name. But luckily I turned and opened my eyes.
“Rosa … ?”
“Yes, Tomás.”
“Am I awake?”
“Yes, Tomás. I hope so.”
She hadn’t changed much except that she looked thinner. Her dark eyes had the same glow, her long black hair the same luster. Absurdly, considering my state of shock, I realized that in less than a month she would be seventeen. That and other inconsequential thoughts invaded my mind and turned it to mush. Where had she come from? How had she found me?
She wore a plain gray dress—her best, for it had no patches—a red scarf knotted loosely round her throat and plain leather sandals. Oh God, I was gladdened, and I was dumbfounded.
“Rosa, I can’t believe it!” I clasped her hands. “Are you all right?”
“I am well. Are you badly hurt, Tomás?”
“I shouldn’t even be here. They want me to get out. Where did you come from?”
“Zacatecas. And then by train to Torreón. I arrived last night.”
Nearly a year had passed since she mounted the mare and rode off from me on the hill of La Sierpe. I had gone to find her and failed. Had she come for me, or had she another purpose? Was she en route to somewhere else?
“I knew you had been to Tomochic,” she said.
“Rosa, I don’t understand.”
I still could barely believe it. She was like a mirage, a will-o’-the-wisp delusion. But I listened to her murmuring voice, a real voice, as she told the tale of her wanderings.
News came late to the remote sierra hamlets such as Tomochic. In the winter, after the melodrama of the Revolutionary Convention at Aguascalientes, she had remembered my final words. “… when there’s peace, I’ll go back to marry Hannah. “ The convention had collapsed in ruins. There was no peace. She needed to cling to hope, to believe the letter more than the spirit of my words. She knew I might have gone to Texas, but then again—
“Si Dios quiere, God willing, you might have stayed. There was no way to know.” She sighed.
“I regretted leaving you in Zacatecas, Tomás. That was foolish. I should have tried to convince you to stay with me, but I felt too much pain. And I was too proud to beg, which was wrong. ‘Perhaps,’ I told myself later, ‘if I had stayed until he was ready to go, he might have changed his mind. He might have been unable to leave me if I had thrown myself at his feet and torn my hair and threatened to kill myself, as any sensible Mexican woman would do.’ “ She laughed softly.
“It was very hard for me in Tomochic, Tomás, thinking such thoughts. My mother thought I was crazy, or sick with a strange disease that I had brought back from the war. She treated me like an idiot. I saw no one. For many months I did nothing. I spoke to myself at night, alone in the corral. I thought that perhaps one night you would come for your gold. I didn’t want to miss that chance to see you. I did have a kind of disease, you see. And then, when I got a bit better, when I thought finally to search for you, I heard that Francisco Villa was in Mexico City. It was far to travel, and I was frightened. I had lost much confidence. But I was unhappy in Tomochic, and Chihuahua City was close. So I went there in the new year.”
In January? I had been there too, to get the gold and meet Candelario. She was close to me, and I hadn’t known it but had gone instead to Tomochic.
If the Northern Division went anywhere, she thought, they would go to Chihuahua City. And she would be waiting for me. For the first time, telling this to me, she allowed herself a small smile. I think, like me, she didn’t quite believe she had finally found me.
In Chihuahua City she found work, washing laundry for the occupying brigade. She waited, but no one came. Not Pancho Villa, not me. One evening at dusk, returning from the stream where she washed the soldiers’ clothes to the hovel that she shared with two families, she was stopped in the street by two drunken officers.
“They were Urbina’s officers,” she said. “He held the city then. It was dark and I couldn’t see their faces, but I could smell the pulque on their breath. I ran away, through the streets, when I understood what they wanted, but I tripped and they pulled me into a doorway of a hut that had been shelled. I fought, Tomás. I struggled as best I could. I ripped one of them in the face with my nails, so that blood flowed as when pigs are killed. I pray he carries the scar forever. But there were two of them, and they were too strong for me. In the doorway of the hut, they raped me.”
Pain struck my chest as if screws had been turned, and I groaned. In January! Urbina’s officers, she thought. But I knew better. I found a pretty one the other night, coming back from the river … Look, she gave me this …
I didn’t tell her. Rosa raised her eyes and looked at me calmly.
“I felt nothing, Tomás. It was awful, but I felt no shame. It was very dark, and I closed my eyes so that I couldn’t see them and would never remember their faces. In the war, I knew, such things happened. Still, I realized I could no longer stay there or it would happen again, and the next time, I knew, no matter what the risk, I would not permit it. I would fight until I was dead. So, when I felt better, I went back to Tomochic. Then I found out you had come looking for me. Mi capitán! I wept and beat my breast that I had ever been fool enough to leave. But still my heart soared. Now there was hope.
“And I set out again to find you.”
By then she knew there had been fighting in the south and it had gone badly for Villa. On a moonless night she dug up the trunk of gold buried behind the corral. From one of the sacks she took a handful of coins and tied them in a pouch that she put under her head scarf. All the rest she replaced, then smoothed the dirt over with a shovel.
“It was your gold, Tomás, not mine, and I had vowed to the Virgin that I would never touch it. But I needed it for the trains, and food. I decided that you would forgive me, and I would have to take my chances before God. Some risks are necessary.”
She reached Irapuato and learned how the Division had twice assaulted Celaya and twice been repulsed. By the time she reached León that battle was over too. The army of Obregón blocked her path. She had to be careful, for not only Urbina’s soldiers would offer an animal welcome to a pretty Indian girl on her own. Always a train journey behind the battles, she made her way north, to Aguascalientes and then Zacatecas, from pueblo to pueblo, stopping any stray wounded Villistas she could find and telling them that she sought her husband—a major, a gringo. Did they know him? Was he alive?
“It might be yes, señora … and then again …”
“I feared you were dead, Tomás. I feared that even more than I had feared that you had gone to Texas and married. I had to know.” She raised her head, brushing away the gossamer film of tears.
“And then I came here to Torreón. They told me the Division still held the city, but I didn’t truly believe it until I arrived. I found Julio at the Hotel Salvador, as before. He told me you were alive and in the hospital. That, indeed, you had gone back to Texas many months ago, and then returned. That you had not married. I wept for joy. And here I am. As you see me.”
I remembered that she had spoken those same words to me by the lake in Ascensión after she had told the tale of her young husband’s death. I clasped her hands. “No, Rosa, I didn’t marry her. I came close, but your shadow stood between us.”
“And have you found another woman?” she asked quietly.
“No,” I said, smiling as I lied.
I would learn from Elisa. I would make my own rules.
“Then will you have me as your woman, as before?”
“I came to Tomochic to ask you that, Rosa. You know I will.”
“The thing that happened to me in Chihuahua City—”
“You didn’t have to tell me that,” I said. “But you did. What happened doesn’t matter. We never have to talk about it. I love you.”
“It was worth everything to find you, mi capitán. “
She pressed her head down on my chest, and I felt the flow of tears as I had felt them on the banks of the Nazas River when she cried for another lost love. I never wanted her to cry again. I wanted to hold her, and comfort her, and keep her safe from all the evil in the world.
“I think I have forgotten to speak English,” she whispered, after a while. “Although sometimes, when your presence was strong, I spoke aloud to you in your language. I made up your answers. But it was not easy. You said funny things. I would like to learn again. Can you tell me how you say te quiero?”
“I love you.” I had never taught her that. There had been no need until now.
The doctor wrapped my ribs with fresh bandages, and I left with Rosa for the Hotel Salvador, where a room was waiting.
With my back pay I bought her a new dress and deerskin riding boots for her seventeenth birthday. Nothing had changed between us except that we were closer than ever before. And now, instead of Hannah hanging at the far side of my fantasies, there was the beckoning vision of Elisa Griensen.
>
I loved two women. In the dark of my mind I couldn’t lie. Elisa didn’t simply vanish because Rosa returned. It wasn’t frivolous. Greedy, perhaps. But far from being punished, I was rewarded … or so it seemed, for a time.
Chapter 26
“What! wouldst thou have
a serpent sting thee twice?”
Pancho Villa greeted me in his suite at the Hotel Salvador.
Surprisingly, he didn’t look too bad. He had lost weight fighting in the heat of the Bajio, and his waist was almost trim. The sagging jowls had firmed. He paced the carpet of his suite in the Hotel Salvador like a man with a purpose.
“Tomás, I knew you had been wounded at León, but I didn’t know how badly. I thought you might have died. I’m glad that’s not the case.”
“So am I, chief. What are we going to do now?”
“I’m going to keep fighting these bastards. Did you ever doubt that? Did I ever lack a plan? I’ve learned a trick or two from that one-armed chickpea farmer. The next time I fight him it’s going to be in a place of my choosing. If it’s a city, I’ll starve him out. If it’s out in the open, so much the better. I can use barbed wire too.”
His words cheered me, for I had been wondering ever since Celaya if he could adapt to the change in battle tactics. Obregón was fighting a modern war, learning from the Germans what worked and didn’t work in the mud of France. We were still shouting, “Adelante!” and charging across open plains.
I realized how much faith I’d had in the chief. He had forged a strategy and followed it nearly to the end. He had said to Angeles that he was a man who came into this world to attack, and if he was defeated by attacking today, he would win by attacking tomorrow. His own bullish bravery had defeated him; his rawness of vision had shattered his morale. His imagination had faltered.
“If they hadn’t brought a curve ball into this league,” he seemed to be saying, doggedly and before every losing battle, “I’d still be hitting home runs.”
TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border Page 43