Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “A sus órdenes.” Frank went looking for an appropriate steam locomotive to modify and found a switching engine just done making up a freight train for the Parral line, and brought it to a siding where his crew were already waiting—a couple of old-timers from Casas Grandes who shared the Magonista faith in politics through chemistry and who knew where to put the bundled sticks and run the fuzing for the best effect, and the basic work was done in half an hour.

  They moved out ahead of another train carrying soldiers and accompanied by some cavalry, eight hundred troops in all, headed south, toward the Durango border. The sun hammered the barren badlands. About thirty miles down the line, between Corralitos and Rellano, they ran into an armored train full of federales, heading north. The train behind Frank braked to a stop, the riflemen got off, the cavalry deployed to left and right. Frank allowed his own locomotive to slow a little while he looked back and saw Salazar raise his sword and then bring it down in a great flash of white-gold desert light that could almost be heard. “Ándale, muchachos,” Frank hollered, pulling out some matches and commencing to light fuses. After throwing in the last of the coal and firewood, and checking the gauges, the rest of the crew jumped off.

  “You’re coming, Doctor Pancho?”

  “Be right with you,” said Frank. He opened the throttle all the way and the engine began to pick up speed. He swung down onto the step and was just about to jump when a peculiar thought occurred to him. Was this the “path” El Espinero had had in mind, this specific half mile of track, where suddenly the day had become extradimensional, the country shifted, was no longer the desert abstraction of a map but was speed, air rushing, the smell of smoke and steam, time whose substance grew more condensed as each tick came faster and faster, all perfectly inseparable from Frank’s certainty that jumping or not jumping was no longer the point, he belonged to what was happening, to the shriek from ahead as the engineer in the federal train leaned on his steam horn and Frank automatically responded with his own, the two combining in a single great chord that gathered in the entire moment, the brown-uniformed federales scattering from their train, the insane little engine shuddering in its frenzy, the governor valve no longer able to regulate anything, and from someplace a bug came in out of the blind velocity and went up Frank’s right nostril and brought him back to the day. “Shit,” he whispered, and let go, dropped, hit the ground, rolled with a desperate speed not his own, praying that he wouldn’t break his leg again.

  The explosion was terrific, shrapnel and parts of men and animals flew everywhere, superheated steam blasting through a million irregular flueways among the moving fragments, a huge ragged hemisphere of gray dust, gone pink with blood, rose and spread, and survivors staggered around in it blinded and coughing miserably. Some were shooting at nothing, others had forgotten where, or what, bolt-handles and triggers were. Later it was estimated that sixty federales had been killed instantly and the rest were at least demoralized. Even the vultures for days were too scared to approach. The Twentieth Battalion mutinied and shot two of their officers, retreat was sounded, and everybody hightailed it any way they could back to Torreón. General González, wounded and dishonored, committed suicide.

  Frank found a horse wandering in the Bolsón in only slightly better shape than he was, and came tottering back sometime in the middle of the night to find everybody at the Orozquista camp drunk, or asleep, or occupying some dream of victory that even Frank in his exhaustion could see was just loco. A couple of weeks later, three thousand of Orozco’s rebels went down to Pancho Villa’s headquarters at Parral to finish off the last of the Maderista loyalists in the region. Villa, greatly outnumbered, quite sensibly lit out of town before anybody got there, but this did not prevent them from sacking Parral, dynamiting homes, looting, killing. Frank missed out on the festivities, having found an empty freight car down at the yards and gone to sleep, half hoping that when he woke he’d be in some fresh part of the Republic, far from all of this.

  When news came that Madero, despite deep misgivings, had chosen Victoriano Huerta to lead the new effort against the Orozquistas, Frank, who was not often subject to feelings of dread, began to grow a little nervous, remembering his brief run-in with some of Huerta’s badmen in uniform seven or eight years before. Even with the life expectancy of a military bandit down here being comparable with a field rodent’s, this Huerta somehow kept showing up, as if enjoying the favor of some particularly cruel junta of ancient gods. When Huerta’s forces reached and occupied Torreón, Frank knew that Orozco’s insurgency was pretty much doomed. As the federales lingered on in Torreón, some in Jiménez began to grow hopeful again, but Torreón was the key to any advance south against the Capital, and without it there would be no rebel victory. Huerta had cannon, and Orozco did not.

  And sure enough, in the weeks ahead, as Huerta slowly moved north from Torreón, the Orozquista fortunes would begin to turn. Each time the rebels engaged, they would be defeated, desertions would increase, until finally at Bachimba the máquina loca tactic would fail, and with it all Orozco’s hopes. Huerta would return to the Capital triumphant.

  Long before this, if only Frank had been sane, he would have reckoned enough was enough, and gone back north and tried to leave Mexico to its fate. Nothing he could think of was keeping him here—Wren, whom the day did not provide nearly enough asskicking activities to allow him to forget entirely, was on the Other Side, as if beyond a frontier less political than created out of the unforgiving canyon cut by Time in its flow. Pascual Orozco, though Frank wished him well, including the Mexican miracle of somehow staying alive, was not a politician to whom Frank could pledge his life. But what was it worth, then, his life? Who or what could he see himself pledging it to?

  He had been spending more and more time down at the trainyard outside Jiménez, like some mindless drover, watching the trains, watching the empty tracks. One day he bought a one-way ticket to the Capital, got on the train and headed south. No cries of adios compañero, good luck Frank, nothing like that. Couple handfuls of beans per day for somebody else was all it came to.

  IN THE CAPITAL, at a dark, out-of-the-way restaurant near the train station, Frank ran into Günther von Quassel, whom he hadn’t seen since Tampico. Günther was drinking imported German beer in a stein. Frank ordered a bottle of the local Orizaba product.

  “Well, Günni, what in ’e hell you doin all the way up here, thought you ’s in Chiapas growing coffee and so forth.”

  “Here on business, now I can’t get back. Whenever there is trouble in Oaxaca, and lately that is fairly constant, the rail lines to Chiapas are cut. My overnight stay becomes unexpectedly prolonged. So I haunt the train stations hoping to slip through a loophole in the laws of chance.”

  Frank mumbled something about having been up north.

  “Ah. Lively times, I expect.”

  “Not lately. Just another unemployed Orozquista these days.”

  “There is a job open on the estate, if you’re interested. If we could ever get back there. We would pay you handsomely.”

  “Some kind of a plantation foreman, keepin ’em unruly native Indians in line? I get to carry a whip and so forth? Think not, Günni.”

  Günther laughed and waved his stein to and fro, splashing foam on Frank’s hat. “Of course, as a northamerican you must be nostalgic for the days of slavery, but in the highly competitive market which coffee has become, we cannot afford to linger in the past.” Günther explained that before a harvest left the cafetal, the coffee “cherries” had to have their pulpy red outer coatings removed, as well as a parchment layer under that, and finally what was called the “silver skin,” leaving at last the exportable seed. Once all done by hand, these jobs were nowadays more efficiently performed by various sorts of machine. The von Quassel plantation was in the process of being mechanized, and the machinery, including stationary engines, electrical generators, hydraulic pumps, and a small but growing fleet of motor vehicles, would all require regular maintenance.

/>   “Lot of work for one beat-up guerrillero,” it seemed to Frank.

  “You would train your own crew, natürlich. The more they learn, the less you work, everyone benefits.”

  “How about Zapatistas, any of them in the picture?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Approximately? Maybe you better tell me.”

  Considering the number of insurgencies against the Madero régime currently in progress all over the country, Chiapas so far, according to Günther, was quiet, violence there taking the more usual form of either family vendettas or what some called “banditry” and others “redistribution,” depending on which was doer and which done-to. Since late last year, however, there had been a serious rebellion going on close by in Oaxaca, growing out of a dispute between Che Gómez, the mayor and jefe político of Juchitán, about two hundred miles or so west of Günther’s plantation, and Benito Juárez Maza, the governor of Oaxaca, who last year had tried to replace Gómez by sending federal troops to Juchitán. The jefe resisted—in the fighting that followed, a federal relief detachment was wiped out, and finally it took federal cavalry and artillery to gain control of the town. Meantime the chegomista army controlled the rest of the region. Madero, who wasn’t that fond himself of the governor, had invited Gómez up to Mexico City, under a federal safe-conduct, to talk it over. But Gómez had got no more than a few miles up the railway across the Tehuantepec Isthmus before he was intercepted by Juárez Maza’s people, arrested, and shot to death.

  “This did not end the rebellion by any means. The federales are bottled up now in Juchitán and a couple of other towns, while several thousand unreconstructed chegomistas own the countryside, including, when they wish, the railway. Which is why at the moment Chiapas is cut off from the rest of the country.”

  THEY ATE IN A DINING-ROOM lit from above through an ancient skylight of wrought-iron trusswork and weathered panes. Older city hands, reporters and such, had gathered at smaller tables in alcoves and smoked cigarettes and drank madrileños. The light, initially golden, steadily darkened. Rain arrived about the same time as the soup, and dashed at the skylight.

  “I hesitate to ask favors unless things get desperate,” said Günther, “but the harvest is under way, my foreman, I am convinced, is a crypto-Zapatista, and I make myself insane every night imagining what everyone is up to.”

  “Is there a back way in?”

  “There is somebody I can talk to.” After coffee and cigars, when the rain had stopped, they walked through the wet streets, among crazed motorists racing up and down the avenues, mud-colored omnibuses and ten-centavo jitneys, armed irregulars in private carriages, troops of cadets on horseback, poulterers in from the Valley of Mexico driving flocks of turkeys with willow wands in and out of the traffic—entering at last the spiffy new Hotel Tezcatlipoca, where Günther’s acquaintance Adolfo “El Reparador” Ibargüengoitia—one of a population of newly-emerged entrepreneurs, working between the bullets, as they liked to put it, to solve problems created by revolution and re-revolution—kept a penthouse suite with a view out over Chapultepec Park and beyond. Anxious men in dark suits, apparently, like Günther, there in need of a repairman, wandered around in a fog of tobacco smoke. Ibargüengoitia by contrast wore a white tailor-made suit and crocodile shoes to match. Crying, “Wie geht’s, mein alter Kumpel!” he embraced Günther and waved him and Frank on in. A young woman got up vaguely as a parlormaid brought Champagne in an ice bucket, and Günther and Ibargüengoitia went off behind a mahogany door to confer.

  At one of the windows, Frank noticed a telescope on a tripod aimed, as it happened, west at the new Monument to National Independence, a tall granite pillar towering above Reforma, with a winged and gilded figure on top—supposedly Victory, though everybody called it “The Angel”—twenty-some feet high and at about the same level as Frank was at the moment. Frank went to squint through the eyepiece and found the field entirely occupied by the face of the Angel—looking directly at Frank, a face of beaten gold, taken into a realm proper more to ceremonial masks than specific human faces, and yet it was a face he recognized. With his other eye, Frank could see The Angel standing in the declining sunlight, vertiginous in its weight of bronze and gold, as if poised to fly unannounced and without mercy straight at him, while behind it a tall peak of cumulus drifted slowly upward. Frank felt as if he were being warned to prepare for something. The blank gold face looked into his, deeply, and though its lips didn’t move, he heard it speak in urgent Spanish ringing and distorted by tons of metal, the only words he could recognize being “máquina loca,” “muerte” and “tú.”

  “Señor?” When his eyes refocused, whoever had spoken had moved on. He had apparently been hunkered in a corner away from the window, breathing cigarette smoke and aware of little else. He stood up and saw Günther across the room in a farewell abrazo with the Repairman. “No guarantees some gang of local sinvergüencistas won’t decide to rob your stage, of course,” Ibargüengoitia was saying, “but . . . unpredictable times, ¿verdad?”

  In the elevator going down, Günther regarded Frank with something like amusement. “You have been watching that Angel,” he said finally. “Unwise policy, I have found.”

  As it turned out, Ibargüengoitia had arranged to slip them into Chiapas by way of a coaster out of Vera Cruz, down to Frontera, Tabasco, from there by diligencia to Villahermosa, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, and across the Sierra to the Pacific coast. They arrived at the cafetal a week later, on horseback, around midday, the foreman all but dragging Günther down out of the saddle going into a long list of crises, and Frank, before he knew it, was looking at a weirdly designed pulping machine whose operating manual was in German, and a couple of local folks in charge of it who did not seem to register that Frank had absolutely no idea what was even wrong, much less how to fix it.

  The stationary engine was just fine, the shafts, pulleys, belts, and clutches were worn but serviceable, the pipes from the tank where the coffee cherries were soaking in water were clear and the pump working, so it had to be either the confounded unit itself or the way somebody had connected it up. After a frustrating hour of disassembly and reassembly, Frank leaned close to the machine and whispered “Tu madre chingada puta,” looked around once or twice, and gave the ’sucker a theatrically furtive kick. As if abruptly coming to its senses, it shuddered, engaged, and the grater-cylinder at issue began to rotate. One of the Indians opened the valve from the tank and cherries began to flow through in a red stream about the texture of cook-tent beans, coming out as pulp mixed with seeds still in their so-called parchment, ready for the next stages of washing and stirring.

  There were of course separate difficulties with the machines that did the stirring, drying, rolling, rubbing, and winnowing, but over the next couple of weeks Frank systematically worked his way through the cams, gearing, and set-screw adjustments of this Machine-Age nightmare that Günther kept calling “the future of coffee,” even picking up a word or two of technical German. Somehow that year’s coffee crop was all brought in without incident, processed into burlap sacks and ready for the factors’ agents.

  Outside, the political storm raged along, and occasionally blew in through a window. Many of the migrant workers here on the estate were Juchitecos who drew inspiration from Zapata as well as the martyred Che Gómez. Late in the autumn, Chamula Indians fighting for San Cristóbal in its ill-fated rebellion against Tuxtla had begun showing up with their ears missing, the penalty exacted for losing the recent Battle of Chiapa de Corzo. Frank found a couple of these who actually enjoyed learning the work, and pretty soon they were running most of the technical chores, leaving Frank more time to go into town and relax, though he was never sure what happened when he wasn’t actually looking at them in the light, because peculiar as the Tarahumare had been, some of these Chiapas tribes made them look as humdrum as metallurgy professors. There were midgets and giants down here, and brujos who took the shapes of wildcats or raccoons or themselves multiplied by dozens. Frank had ob
served this, or thought he had.

  FOR THIS PARTICULAR STRETCH of Pacific slope, Tapachula was town—you wanted to relax or raise hell or both at the same time, you went in to Tapachula. Frank tended to spend time at a cantina called El Quetzal Dormido, drinking either maguey brandy from Comitán or the at first horrible but after a while sort of interesting local moonshine known as pox, and dancing with or lighting panatelas for a girl named Melpómene who’d drifted down from the ruins and fireflies of Palenque, first to Tuxtla Gutiérrez and then, with that boomtown certitude some young folks possess of knowing where the money is being spent least reflectively at any given season, to Tapachula, where there were cacao, coffee, rubber, and banana plantations all within an easy radius, so the town was always jumping with pickers, tree-shakers, nurserymen, bean-polishers, guayuleros, and centrifuge operators, none in a mood for moderation of any kind.

  Melpómene told Frank about the giant luminous beetles known as cucuji. Each night in the country around Palenque, illuminating the miles of ruins hidden among the jungle trees, you could see them by the millions, shining all over their bodies, so brightly that by the light of even one of them you could read the newspaper, and six would light up a city block. “Or so a tinterillo told me once,” grinning through the smoke of a Sin Rival. “I never learned to read, but I have a tree full of cucuji in my yard. Come on,” and she led him out the back and down a cobbled alley and into a dirt lane. All at once, ahead of them, above the tops of the trees, shone a greenish yellow light, pulsing off and on. “They feel me coming,” she said. They rounded a corner and there was a fig tree, with near as Frank could tell thousands of these big luminous beetles, flashing brightly and then going dark, over and over, all in perfect unison. He found if he stared too long into the tree, he tended to lose his sense of scale and it became almost like looking into a vast city, like Denver or the Mexican capital, at night. Shadows, depths . . .