TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border

by Clifford Irving

  Dinner was by candlelight at the big oak table: a raucous and jolly feast. Villa, now that he was mending and making new plans, which he loved almost as much as fighting battles, reminisced about his days as a bandit and told a tale about hiding out with Fierro and Urbina in the ghost town of Las Palomas, near Bachinava—he had been more frightened of the ghosts, he said, than of the rurales. Wine gurgled from the bottle. The bones of Francisca’s jugged hare were picked clean.

  Finally Villa yawned. Hipólito’s head was already slumping, and Candelario was ready to hunt for his Francisca, who wouldn’t be hard to find. We drank a last toast to Julio, wherever he was, and then they all bowlegged off to bed, leaving me at the table to make my way with Rosa and Elisa.

  “Well …” I cleared my throat a few times. “Fine dinner. Really fine.”

  Hands behind her head, Elisa leaned back, smiling sociably, showing that long white throat. “You’ve had enough, Tomás?”

  “Stuffed. I truly am.”

  “A cognac?”

  “That might just cut a breathing hole through the meat and potatoes.”

  In the library she poured three amber tumblers. Rosa, her face already flushed from the wine, waved her hand in protest.

  “Not so much, señora. You know what it does to me.”

  She wore a simple white cotton dress that revealed the strong swell of her bosom. Elisa was in white too—an Indian blouse and flowing skirt, so that the color of her hair by candlelight seemed even more pale and lemony. Neither of them showed any desire to quit the field and make it easy for me. I started to feel uncomfortable. I didn’t have it in me to march off with one and leave the other sitting there to twiddle her thumbs. My cowardice in this situation, which I had thought might have gone off to hibernate for a while, woke up with a vengeance and began to yell for elbow room.

  I excused myself to take a leak, and while I splashed into the bowl I sorted things out as best my fuzzed brain would allow. There was only one thing to do: make some excuse and head for a cold bed. I buttoned up and wandered back to the library, starting my speech as soon as I entered the room.

  “Well, I’m kind of worn out and—”

  But Elisa stood by a bookshelf, alone, smiling at me, hands outstretched. I glanced around the room.

  “Rosa felt dizzy and went to bed. Come upstairs, Tom. If you’re tired, we can just sleep.”

  I breathed a private amen. Still, I thought, where can it lead? How could Rosa go on accepting it? How could I?

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodnight to her…”

  Elisa handed me the oil lamp from the table and followed me upstairs—that well-traveled route. In the shadows of her bedroom she unbuttoned my shirt and kissed me on both nipples. They popped right up through the hair, and I tingled from scalp to toes. My pecker didn’t remember that I had claimed to be worn out … it rose up quick as a poked cat. As usual, there wasn’t much connection between my supposedly finer parts and the lower region. Like Candelario, I was cursed by lust. I remembered what Rosa had told me about hearing through the walls and resolved not to make my usual ruckus tonight.

  The breeze blew through the balcony curtains, and a nearly full moon stood clear in the velvet sky, casting its light across the four-poster.

  “Blow out the candles,” Elisa said.

  She took off her clothes, and the moonlight bathed her with a porcelain glow. She unpinned her hair—the gesture I loved. The golden storm fell about my shoulders. My pecker quivered against her belly, and she squirmed. When we stretched out on the bed and I began to kiss her breasts, she groaned loudly.

  “Elisa … shhh … ! Don’t make a racket.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Rosa can hear.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Yes. I’m sure of it. She told me.”

  “But the walls are stone. Three feet thick.” She reached up behind her over the carved wooden headboard and rapped her knuckles hard against the wall. A hollow thump resulted. Some flakes of white plaster fell off.

  “Elisa … she’ll hear! That’s her room!”

  My pecker might have dwindled then, except that her other hand had it in a feathery grip, one oiled finger peeling back the foreskin and gently stroking. Before I could say anything more, she pulled me up next to her and drew my lips into the warm cave of her mouth. I loved her mouth: it was wide, and the lips were full, carved, with a hardness to the edges and a softness in the inner pink flesh. Her tongue slid over my gums and then inside my teeth. I just let go, relaxed, let her thrill me.

  I began to drift into a state that was half agonizing, half utter peace, the state that anesthetized your mind and made you know with total certainty—which could never last—that the mind was the enemy of all true pleasure, and this feeling that ran from earlobes to toes was a poor human’s revenge for all the conundrums that God had set before him on the dusty earth. It was a state that didn’t last long; it brought you suddenly, man or woman, to a craziness that you would not have thought possible. Here was a magic that even Doña Corazon couldn’t work.

  A distant creaking sound got through to me … then the click of a latch. I heard steps on the carpet—bare feet. I wanted to turn, but Elisa’s strong hand gripped my neck and slid up to press my mouth harder into hers. Sweat popped from my forehead. Whatever I mumbled was lost between her lips. Then a third hand—gentle and cool—touched my hip, and I believe my hair almost stood on end. I couldn’t speak … not even if my tongue had been untrapped.

  A garment rustled. The breeze of it falling to the carpet raised goose pimples on my arms. A body, cooler than the hand that had announced it, pressed softly against my back. I felt the fullness of Rosa’s breasts on my shoulder blades, felt her breath in my ear.

  My eyes bored wildly into Elisa’s, which were half-closed—but the moonlight didn’t allow her to lie and I saw the edges crinkle. Her mouth beneath mine widened in a smile. I worked my lips loose.

  “Rosa must be cold,” she murmured, before I could speak. “Make room for her, Tom…”

  That’s how it happened to me in Parral, in the house of flowers. It was my twenty-sixth year. Given a grace that few men merit, I wasn’t contrary enough to say no. “Divided, “ Elisa had said to me, “although that needn’t be … “

  I loved them both. They returned that emotion, and they loved each other. How it would work or what would come of it, I didn’t know—but there was no more need for an inquisition. The women ruled in this house, and they didn’t torture themselves. They weren’t female men.

  Elisa took a third pillow out of the closet and put it on the bed. For a week the three of us slept together: cool nights, siestas in the warmth of the afternoon when the sweat of our bodies so mingled that you didn’t know who was where or who was doing what to the other. For a couple of days Rosa had her curse and retired to sleep in her room. But she wasn’t shut out; it was her choice. One night soon after that Elisa had a headache—or said she did—and sent me next door to Rosa’s bed. In the morning at the kitchen table, over a pitcher of orange juice and a skilletful of eggs, there were still only smiles and laughter.

  Laughter … not just then, but at the scene of the crime. The morning after our first night together, at dawn before we made love again, they laughed until I thought they would either weep or wet the bed. At least that’s what Elisa claimed would happen if I didn’t stop making a jackass of myself by asking questions.

  “Poor Tomás,” Rosa giggled, after she had quieted down a bit. “I worried you might think it was a ghost.”

  “Ghosts don’t smell like that. Ghosts don’t have … well, they don’t do what you did to me. You’re wicked and scheming women, both of you. Jezebel and Lady Macbeth. Delilah and Circe.”

  “No,” Elisa said. “It was an inspiration.”

  “You knocked on the wall, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, that. Well, by then it was settled. But if we’d asked you in the library, would you have c
ome upstairs with us both?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ve always wanted this, ever since I left for the Púlpito. I just didn’t know it. I wasn’t able to think that way. If I had,” I confessed, “I probably would have said no last night. God! That would have been awful. That would have been a sin.”

  I didn’t quite understand all that I wanted to say, but I understand now. In my time since then I’ve known men who wanted such an arrangement in their lives, either because they were divided in their desire—although that was rare—or because their lasciviousness was unchecked and they were driven to crack the bounds of what was permissible and common. Some were hungry to prove their manhood; some were jaded, unable to make love any other way; some were voyeurs. But there was no spontaneity; all of them plotted their moves in advance, some cajoled and even begged, and I knew one man in Beverly Hills who used opium to seduce his wife and her sister. Where was the joy? I never understood. That’s not how it was at Los Flores. I planned nothing. I wasn’t heroic and purposeful, as Pancho Villa would have been had he wanted such a thing.

  But I was ready. No guilt impeded me, no obsession consumed me. I took what came, took it wholeheartedly, and so did they. We were innocent partners in our desire. We were happy. After a while the gods must have frowned.

  To love and be loved by such women, with no green-eyed devil of jealousy sharing the bed, no barbs, no worry that one was being cheated at the expense of the other … this was a blessing. If each had not made a separate peace with her own life, it would not have worked. But work it did. And Elisa had said, when we rode to Atotonilco: “What works, works.”

  I never had to question the direction of either tenderness or lust, because there was enough to go round and in that time I loved Rosa and Elisa equally—not the one less than the other, never the one more. Which isn’t to say that they weren’t different in their ways and needs, or that I didn’t sometimes spend my sweat in an unbalanced way. That was a matter of mood and occasion, even opportunity, and they understood it without my having to make excuses. When my blood was up I could go on for an unconscionably long time, and one night, when I had got at her again, Rosa groaned and said, “I’m worn out, Tomás. You’re a bull. This time, if I may, I will watch.” She giggled. “I can learn much, mi capitán. “

  It was true: Elisa had the knowledge of a grown woman, and she didn’t mind exhibiting it. Rosa was as quick to learn that as she was to read and write. So she watched, and did something to herself that I wouldn’t have thought possible. But why not? She was an innocent. She had never left her own country, but still she was an explorer. Then, the next afternoon, something extraordinary happened.

  I took Elisa from behind, while Rosa straddled me to rub her fur against my thigh, hands cupping the weight of her own breasts. Elisa flattened out and rolled over on her back, mouth red from the bite of her own teeth, breath coming quickly. I moved behind Rosa, who lay on her side, and then Elisa pressed against her, kissed her and bit one swollen brown nipple. That startled me for a moment … what would Rosa do? Before, at other times, one had held the hand of the other, or gently stroked an arm, but this was different. It roused me powerfully and I fired into Rosa like a cannon, while she gasped into Elisa’s mouth, threw her buttocks back at me and thrust her hand between Elisa’s thighs. The little devil. I no longer saw her as quite so innocent. Bed doesn’t do much for man’s vision of women’s delicacy. But it wasn’t wrong—nothing could happen in that bed that was wrong. They loved each other as sisters, as kindred souls, as beautiful women, and now all that could find expression and voice. Elisa cried Rosa’s name and mine in a way I knew too well. There was magic in that moment.

  Gazing down at them, I felt rich. I didn’t own their bodies or their minds, but I owned this moment, this sight, for memory and age. One was so fair, the other dark. One was young and the other womanly … one rounded, the other slender. The swelling bosom, tipped so sweetly, softened against the small white breasts, the only place but one where the sun never tanned Elisa’s skin. The black hair mingled on the pillow with the pale gold. The rising musk of their bodies dizzied me. They kissed each other lightly—now, afterward, there was nothing but friendliness between them. I was apart, a momentary stranger, but it didn’t trouble me a hair.

  I felt as if I had bestowed a blessing in return for what I had received.

  In that time—not then, but when I was alone once in the garden—I thought of Hannah and what a fool I had almost been. How close I had come! If I had married her I would never have been content. It wouldn’t have been her fault. I would have known that and stayed with her … grown a bitter man, dreaming of what might have been. Now I had found something else—a life that would have shocked many, but not those who were living it. It wouldn’t be an ambitious or profound life, but it would be mine, not one forced on me by habit or sloth. Not one I could resent.

  I would work hard—we would breed horses here and live off the land. Already we had begun to make plans. How long could this last? That didn’t matter. We would see it through to its natural end. I had given enough of my energy to war.

  Life was short … that refrain beat in my ears. Dreams blurred, the body withered. We all returned to dust. What was wrong in grasping at pleasure if it caused no pain?

  But I wasn’t alone in the world, and no one but Elisa and Rosa knew the changes that were taking place inside me. One evening when Villa called me to his room, Candelario and Hipólito were already there. The chief was oiling his pistol, and he looked well rested, with color in his cheeks and a purposeful glitter in his eyes.

  “This has been pleasant,” he said to me. “The kindness of this woman is beyond value. But in war there’s a time to rest and a time to move on. I can ride now, my leg grows stronger every day. I’ve decided what we’ll do.”

  “And what’s that, chief?” I dropped down on the edge of his bed and looked at him worriedly.

  He was going to fight again, of course. He would never give up. Our old friend Colonel Medina, who had vanished from sight for a while, had appeared in the town of San Juan Bautista, south of Chihuahua City, with three hundred loyal men. “That’s all I need to begin,” Villa explained. “But I won’t make the same mistakes I’ve been making. We’ll fight in Coahuila, to the east, far from the cavalry. All we need is arms. Tomás, you’ll go north with Candelario and Hipólito. Go first to the gringos and send them west into the sierra. Then get our gold out of Lake Ascensión. I can’t fight without arms and equipment. Saving that gold was the smartest thing I ever did. Hipólito will carry it to Texas and find new Jews. It won’t take long, but however long it takes, it will be done.” He paused, and I saw the familiar narrowing of his eyes, catlike and perilous. “What’s the matter, Tomás?”

  “I’m finished with it,” I said.

  “You don’t want to fight?”

  “Not anymore. I’m going to stay here.”

  He digested that, considered awhile and then said quietly, “I understand. I thought that might be the case, and I can’t blame you. But why? Have you lost faith in me?”

  “No,” I said, “but I’ve got faith in something else, and it’s stronger.” Still he frowned. “Tomás, no one knows exactly where the gold is except you. Candelario has an idea, but he’s not sure. And no one else can send the cavalry in the wrong direction. They still trust you.”

  He was right, of course. And it wouldn’t take long. After that, I would be free.

  “I’ll do that much,” I said. “Then I’ll come back here.”

  “That’s all I ask. You had my blessing a long time ago, in Mexico City. I don’t withdraw it, because I see that you don’t withdraw your love for me.”

  “Never, chief. When do you want us to leave?”

  “Tomorrow. Pick up Rodolfo and the rest of the men on your way out of Parral. They’ll ride to Texas with Hipólito. I want the gold well guarded.”

  So I said goodbye to him for the second time in my life, although I never believed for a
minute that I wouldn’t see him again. And I was right.

  That night I told Rosa and Elisa I was going in the morning. “A week or two is what I figure. Then we’ll go up to Tomochic and get our own gold. I want to start on new stables, a bigger corral. Tell the Indians we want to buy mustangs. Wild ones. I can break them.”

  They might have talked me out of going, but they didn’t try. They believed me when I said it was the last thing I would ever do for Pancho Villa … and I was right about that. They couldn’t know what evil would befall me.

  At dawn Elisa woke me. Rosa was already dressed, pinning up her hair. I left my Shakespeare on the bedside table, not as proof of my intention to return, but as a charm … as part of me.

  “Don’t come out to the gate,” I said. I kissed them each quickly, gently, on the lips. “I have a good enough memory already. I’ll be back soon.”

  “Just come back,” Elisa said.

  We rode out of the gate as the sun rose, and I felt as if I were leaving my home. That’s what it had become. And after all these years and all the houses, all the diamond-studded spurs, all the wives and all the goings, I still miss it. I’ve never had a better one.

  Chapter 35

  “Hoist with his own petard.”

  from THE SCHOOLTEACHER’S JOURNAL

  Casas Grandes, Chihuahua

  June 14, 1916

  The United States Army has been in Chihuahua since March, more than three months. The Punitive Expedition is a failure. Trucks break down constantly on the roads, automobiles boil over in the heat, horses suffer from distemper. Eight planes of the Aero Squadron have crash-landed because of mechanical difficulties. With rare exceptions, we cannot find any Villistas. Last month a thousand men were sent east to El Sauz and west to La Bufa. They heard rumors which seemed to confirm Mix’s reports, but they came back empty-handed. “It looks like we’ve got Pancho Villa surrounded,” General Pershing remarked, “on one side.”