The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  Having known that kind of freedom, how could we now return to any sort of subservience to weak little perfumed fools? How could we again submit to brutish labor for the enrichment of someone else? If the country now gave itself over to the rule of law books, what were we to do? A few among us would likely find a place for themselves as enforcers of the laws. But most of us would either be denied that chance or reject it out of hand. We would go on living as freely as the Revolution had allowed us—and the new laws of the land would put a price on our heads until it was collected.

  In that long moment of staring at the naked girl standing at the window, I understood more clearly than ever that the line between a noble revolutionary and a low-down bandit was the line between war and peace. The girl turned from the window and let her hands fall from her breasts, her face bright. But then she saw my face and quit smiling.

  •

  I was chilly with sweat as I shoved through the raucous throngs in the street, making my way to headquarters. Dozens of others were already there, and the smoky room was a clamor of voices.

  “The whitebeard wants to be president so bad you can smell it through his goddamned perfume!” somebody shouted.

  “He can’t be the president!” someone else hollered. “Not that cocksucker!”

  “You, Pancho! You will be the president!”

  Villa was sitting at the head of the table, his chin on his fist, his eyes moving slowly over every face in the room. When he saw me, he held his stare for a moment without expression. I looked hard at him: What now? But his face showed me nothing before he cut his eyes away.

  “Yes, Pancho—you must now be the president!” cried a voice from the rear of the room.

  “No,” Villa said. “Don’t be foolish. The president must be an educated man, not somebody so ignorant as me. But he must also insist on justice for everybody in Mexico, even the peon without a handful of dirt to call his own—and that leaves out Señor Carranza, for damn sure. It will not be easy, boys, but we must find for Mexico another Madero.”

  I liked the sound of things. In my panic of moments earlier I had forgotten about Carranza. Since his argument with Villa over the telegraph wires, the tensions between them had intensified to the breaking point—and following our victory at Zacatecas, the whitebeard’s fear of Pancho was greater than ever. He was now diverting to other units the arms and coal shipments meant for us, claiming their need for them was more urgent than our own. I don’t know who he expected to believe that bullshit. We weren’t the only ones he was afraid of, either. The word from the southern state of Morelos was that Emiliano Zapata and his boys would never accept Carranza as president. The whitebeard’s worst nightmare must have been that the Zapatistas would unite with us against him.

  Villa already had that idea in mind. Even though he had never met Zapata, he admired him immensely, both as a guerrilla leader whose fierce army of peons had repeatedly beaten the federals in the fighting down south, and as a true revolutionary fighting for the return of his people’s ancient lands, stolen from them over the years by the rich hacendados. “It is natural for him to fight against Carranza,” Villa had said to me. “He knows the whitebeard will never return land to the peons.” When I’d reminded him that Zapata had also broken with Madero because of the little saint’s slow progress toward restoring Indian land, Pancho’s mouth tightened for a moment; then he shrugged and said Zapata must have been misled by bad advisors. He persisted in thinking the best of him. “Did you hear what he said?” he once asked me. “‘It is better to die on our feet than to live on our knees.’ What a wonderful thing to say! I think he must be a very good man!” I said I thought it was far more wonderful to live on your feet and make the other bastard die on his knees—or on his feet or his ass or his horse or his whore or anything else he might happen to be on at the moment. Villa didn’t laugh; he just made a sour face and said I had no sense of poetry. “Maybe not,” I told him, “but at least I still have a sense of humor.” Christ, he could be a pain in the ass when he got into his Noble Revolutionary mood.

  “That Carranza’s nothing but a goat-fucking politician!” Urbina said. He was hot-faced with tequila. “He even looks like a billygoat. I bet his mother was one and that’s how he learned to fuck them.”

  Villa smiled. “Since when do you object to the pleasures of goats, eh, Tomasito?”

  Urbina grinned at the laughter and said, “At least I don’t pay the animal. That Carranza, he tries to buy the goat’s vote even as he robs it of its virtue.”

  Most of the boys were beginning to feel much better—and why not? It looked after all like there was no real danger of peace, not soon. Not while Carranza yearned for the president’s chair—which he would for as long as he could breathe—and not while Villa was opposed to the whitebeard becoming president, as he always would be.

  Then a Dorado captain said, “What about Obregón?”

  Alvaro Obregón. Carranza’s most able general, the commander of the powerful Army of the Northwest. We had heard much about him. It was said he had an Irish ancestor named Michael O’Brien who changed his name to Miguel Obregón and served as a bodyguard to the last Spanish viceroy in Mexico before marrying a Mexican woman and settling in Sonora. There were a few Sonorans among us who had met Alvaro Obregón. They said he had done well for himself as a garbanzo farmer and had been elected mayor of some small Sonoran town. They said he had strange green eyes and a natural gift for using a great many words to say very little. (“He can make a half-hour speech just to tell you it looks like rain.”) He was reputed to have a memory so phenomenal he could recall the exact order of every playing card in a deck after having been shown the cards but once. “Never do you want to gamble with this man,” one Sonoran said. When Orozco rebelled against Madero, Obregón had organized a small army and joined the fight against the Colorados. He quickly earned a reputation as a superb field commander. They said he was calculating, cautious, almost excessively methodical—but there was no denying his battlefield success. He was now known as El Invicto—the ­Invincible—and his Army of the Northwest was almost as famous as our own. His ranks were thick with Mayo and Yaqui Indians, both tribes renown for their ferocity.

  “If General Obregón is as wise as they say,” Villa said, “he will see the folly of continuing to support Señor Carranza.”

  ‘‘What if he’s not that wise?” somebody yelled.

  “Then it’s possible we would have to teach him some wisdom,” Pancho said.

  “Goddamn right!” Urbina shouted. “Piss on Obregón! He’s a fucking farmer, for Christ’s sake! Carrancistas, Ob­regonistas—we’ll kick all their asses!”

  “Easy, Tomasito, easy,” Villa said with a small smile. ‘‘We don’t want war with our revolutionary brothers if we can avoid it.”

  Revolutionary brothers? I took a look around: he was talking like there were reporters present. When I spotted Angeles across the room, I knew it was for his good regard that Villa was sounding so damned diplomatic.

  “For now,” Villa said, “we just want to make three things clear to everybody: that all we want is what is best for Mexico, that I myself have no ambition to be the president, and that under no conditions will we agree to Señor Carranza as the president, as that would not be best for Mexico.”

  ‘‘Very nice words, compadre,” Urbina said, looking sly, “but what if the whitebeard says that is unacceptable? What if he tells us to go to hell?”

  Yes, Pancho, I thought, watching him intently, what then?

  Villa looked around slowly. Then shrugged. Then flashed a huge grin. “In such a sad case,” he said, “we would have no choice but to assist him in accepting the unacceptable.”

  Urbina gave an ear-piercing victory cry as he brought his fist down on the table so hard the bottles jumped. The room exploded with cries of “Viva Villa! Viva la revolución!” The cheers rolled out the windows and into the celebrating cro
wd. They were taken up by the boys in the street and carried across town, echoing loudly: “Viva Villa! Viva la revolución!”

  I caught the momentary mournful looks on the faces of some of the boys—the fellows whose families prayed every night for an end to the war, the boys with sweethearts waiting for them back home. I saw the sad, quick glances they exchanged, then their crooked smiles and shrugs of resignation. Too bad for them, yes. But for us! I grinned at Villa. He winked at me. Urbina yelped like a happy pup. “Viva Villa!” the boys yelled, “Viva la revolución!” Yes, yes, yes! Viva! Viva! VIVA!

  •

  While Obregón advanced toward Mexico City to claim the capital for Carranza from the few die-hard federals who still occupied it, we continued to build our strength. We raised money by expropriating cattle from hacendado ranches and selling the animals to gringo drovers at the border. Through our agents in El Paso we then worked deals for arms, ammunition, dynamite, and coal.

  The rains of early summer had been uncommonly heavy, and by late July the countryside bordering Chihuahua and Durango states was even more beautiful than usual. The high grass of the hills was richly yellow, the trees densely green. The fields were bursting with flowers of red and gold. The air seemed softer than I’d ever felt it before, and sweeter, and the rivers ran fast and cold and clear.

  Near the end of that magnificent summer, Urbina invited Villa and me to his hacienda in Durango, to attend the christening of his newborn daughter. We set out from Chihuahua with fifty Dorados and a big band of musicians—and even took a priest, since Tomás had shot or scared off every priest in Durango. (His wife had made him promise to spare whichever cleric presided over their daughter’s service.) Maclovio Herrera invited us to visit his home in Parral en route to Durango, and we spent two fine days there, celebrating with his parents and neighbors before pushing on to Urbina’s hacienda.

  Tomás had expropriated the place—called Las Nieves because of the year-round snowcaps on the looming sierras—from some rich Spaniard. It covered more than a million acres of mostly lush pastureland on which Urbina grazed cattle, horses, and of course goats, the beloved stock of the true peon. The main house was magnificently furnished with Tomás’s spoils of war. When I entered it for the first time and beheld its splendor, I glanced at Urbina and thought of a donkey stabled in a ballroom. He was happily drunk and swollen with pride in his beautiful home and new infant daughter. Like all of us, he’d fathered children everywhere, but with his wife (and unlike Villa, he had only one) he’d previously sired only boys, five of them, and he was genuinely happy to add a daughter to the family. “She will be the queen of Mexico one day, you’ll see,” he said.

  Pancho cradled the baby in his arms and crooned softly to her. I myself was never comfortable with children, especially infants, but Villa was a fool for children of every age. In every town, they came to him in droves, and he never failed to stop and chat and make a big fuss over them and buy them treats.

  It was a damned swell fiesta. The sky was brightly blue and cloudless, and the sun gleamed off the mountains’ snowy peaks. There was music and singing and dancing, joking and dicing, laughter and fistfights. The bands played without pause. There were horse races and cockfights and roping contests. The shooting contest that drew the biggest crowd was of course the one between me and Villa: we shot at gold pieces lined along a wall, then at cigars clenched in the teeth of brave compañeros, and finally at the heads of live chickens flung into the air. He beat me by one chicken head. He was the only man I ever knew who could outshoot me.

  Whole pigs and goats and sides of beef roasted on slow­turning spits, and the boys gorged themselves at patio tables loaded with heaping platters of pork, beef, kid, and chicken, with turkey in chile gravy, with tamales and enchiladas of every variety, with steaming bowls of beans and chiles, and piles of tortillas. They drank rivers of beer and tequila. They sang corrido after ­corrido—country ballads of unpredictable love and certain death, of doomed heroism, of Mexican history as the same bloody tale told again and again.

  At one point Urbina unsteadily stood on a table and called to Villa: “Panchito, look! Look at me! Don’t I look just like a fucking Spanish don?” He struck a pose in his glittering black charro outfit studded with polished silver conchos: his hand thrust into the front of his jacket, his upthrust face a stern imitation of aristocratic arrogance. Everyone laughed but me. He joked too often about the might of the Spanish lords, too often mimicked their manners: I suspected he was secretly enraged that he could never steal enough gold—not even if he robbed heaven itself—to buy such blue blood for his own veins. The rest of us hated the Spanish for the good and simple reason that they had for so long oppressed our people; but I was sure Urbina’s hatred of them was at least partly fired by his fury that he could never be one of them. I liked Tomás for his daring and his ready laughter in the face of hard odds—but I despised him for his secret hatred of himself and his own kind.

  Later in the day he was taking a few of us for a tour of the big house when his mother—a tiny woman in a wheelchair, still wearing black eighteen years after her husband had been hanged as a horse thief—came rolling into the room and chided him for some filial transgression. Snarling an obscenity, Tomás drew his pistol and fired at her, missing by less than six inches and shattering a crystal bowl on the table beside her. In the next instant he was on his knees and hugging her lap, beseeching her forgiveness. For a few moments she wept along with him, loudly lamenting her lack of a properly respectful son. Then she relented and patted his head and gently suggested he go sleep it off. “Yes, mamacita, yes,” Tomás said, kissing her hands, “as you command.”

  After he staggered away, she announced, “He loves me so very much, my little Tomasito. It makes him crazy that he cannot adequately express his love for me, so he shoots.” She excused herself and left the room.

  A maid informed us that it was not the first time Tomás had shot at his mother. Nor, obviously, was it the first time he had missed. Someone murmured that Tomás had to be drunker than usual, since he was normally an excellent shot even when full of tequila. A couple of the boys took immediate exception to this explanation. Candelario claimed it was a scientific fact that a man was incapable of doing physical violence to his mother, no matter how much she might deserve it or how much he wanted to in his heart. He had learned this scientific fact from a whorehouse madam who had read it in a magazine article written by a French doctor of the mind. Calixto agreed with this view because his own mother had told him the same thing. In the lively discussion that followed, the only sure fact to emerge was that none of us had ever known a man who had deliberately killed his own mother. Somebody else’s mother, yes, but not his own.

  Two hours later Urbina was back at the head table in the main patio, swapping stories with Villa about their bandit days. Pancho looked more relaxed than he had in months. His laughter boomed over the blaring of the band. Except for brief respites at the table to eat and reminisce a little with Tomás, he spent most of his time on the dance floor, whirling tirelessly to the raucous ranchero tunes, twirling the girls, jangling the spurs on his stomping heels. Every now and then he’d withdraw into the house with a giggling girl on his arm like a happy bird.

  The fiesta abounded with pretty girls. In addition to those who lived and worked at Las Nieves, Urbina had rounded up dozens more from Durango City, and still others from the neighboring villages. Many of the peasant girls were virgins, but they couldn’t pass up the offer of a week of luxury at Las Nieves. It was a rare chance for them to escape the dull grind of their usual lives, if only for a week—an opportunity for which they were quite ready to surrender their virtue. Tomás had given each girl’s father a small sack of gold to assuage the man’s shame and outrage. One of them flung the gold back in Urbina’s face, bloodying his mouth, and Tomás shot him. To the widow he then gave two sacks of gold.

  Although many of the village girls were nervous and
clumsy, all of them were hot-eyed with excitement and eager to please. It was clear that the city women among them—some of whom were Durango’s most talented prostitutes—had taught them a few things in the days preceding the fiesta. Of course I indulged myself. They were all a pleasure—all thrillingly different, yet all wonderfully the same. They came to my room and closed the door behind them, let their dresses fall and stepped boldly into my embrace, moist mouths open. Their hips were urgent as engines, their laughter low in their throats. They all knew who I was, and the knowledge seemed to inflame their desire.

  On the second evening of the fiesta, as I was about to go in my room with a Papago girl off the dance floor, I spotted a particularly pretty thing watching me from under a torch-lit tree. She wore a simple shift of white cotton and a silver ribbon in her blue-black hair. Her stare was too intense to ignore. “Hey, boldeyes,” I said, and beckoned her as I pushed away the Papago. The fiesta lasted another two days, and we spent nearly every hour of it in bed.

  She was from a little pueblo south of Parral and had several months ago come to Las Nieves with her sweetheart Rafael, who had come to join the Division of the North. Except for the Dorados, who had to travel fast and live without encumbrance, Villa permitted our boys to take their women with them wherever we went, and the roofs of our trains were always packed with soldaderas. The accompaniment of women was an excellent morale booster which most army commanders allowed. But Rafael had forbidden this lovely girl (Carlotta?) to go with him when his unit was ordered to join our main force. “He said he would be the soldier in the family,” she told me. “He said the soldaderas forget how to be women, and he did not want such a thing to happen to me.” So she’d stayed behind at Las Nieves when his train pulled out. Not long afterward came the news that he’d been killed at Zacatecas.

  Rather than return to her little town—where she wouldn’t have been welcomed anyway, not after defying her father’s prohibition against leaving with Rafael—she’d stayed at Las Nieves, working in Urbina’s dairy. The memory of Rafael had lingered like a sickness in her heart, and she’d endured a lot of teasing from the other girls, who told her she was destined for spinsterhood if she didn’t forget the dead lover and take up with one who was still breathing. She had intended to stay away from the fiesta despite Urbina’s orders that all the unmarried women of the hacienda must attend, but when she saw me come riding through the big gates of the main patio she changed her mind. “I wanted to know the man who rides the brute white horse,” she said, referring to my great stallion, Balazo, “the man whose eyes the other men fear.” She talked like that. She told me she had fought off the gropes and denied the entreaties of dozens of men while she maneuvered to catch my attention. Her manner of speech was constantly breathless. Her eyes were never still.