Mexico

by James A. Michener

  Jubal was distraught. He had thought of Alicia Palafox as a member of his family. At times she was that child of eight in the sacred China Poblana, again the delicately beautiful bride he had seen on his return to Toledo, at other times the gracious woman in the plaza who had caught him buying the doll, or the sensitive person who had sent him the dress and the note, both of which he still kept. I think it is fair to say that in some quiet way these two had loved each other, but maybe I’m searching for a new word. I do know that the memory of Alicia Palafox lives in our family’s memory as vividly as on that dreadful day when she was killed and Mexico began to fall apart.

  Since I was born in 1909 and left Mexico permanently in 1938, it is obvious that I witnessed the continuing Revolution that scarred the country during those years; however, this passage will be a story not about me but about my father, John Clay, who saw the tragedies not as a child but as a participating adult. It is also the account of how Toledo reacted to the fighting, for our family lived there throughout the wars. To bring some order to the confusion I shall identify the people who play recurring roles, and some of the stages on which they acted.

  Dominant in the rebellion was General Saturnino Gurza, a butterball of a man six feet tall with an enormous belly that protruded from just below his rib cage, but faded away to almost nothing down to where he used a length of rope as a belt. Since he was proud of being a peón, he wore the peón’s costume: sandals, unpressed loose white pants, no undershirt beneath his open-necked white shirt, a red bandanna and an enormous white straw sombrero.

  He had a face to match his torso—big, round, hair in his eyes and a mustache that drooped below his chin line. On several occasions I heard him give orders, and I remember his coarse voice, which seemed always to end with a sardonic laugh, as if he enjoyed doing the terrible things he did.

  Gurza had grown up in poverty in one of the bleak northern Mexican states along the border with the United States, a country for which he developed an abiding hatred. As a boy he had terrorized his companions and at the age of nineteen declared himself to be a colonel, fighting for whoever paid him. By twenty he was a self-appointed general, in which capacity he demonstrated such mastery that he quickly converted himself into a real general. So from boyhood he had been fighting constantly, but against whom or for whom he seemed never to understand. He became famous as the general with two wide bandoleers laden with cartridges crisscrossing his chest, a huge rifle slung in his left hand and a sneer on his lips. When that burly figure stormed into a meeting, it commanded respect.

  In his lawless activities Gurza always seemed able to win the support of an army of ragtag dissidents called los descamisados (those without shirts), who enjoyed serving under him when he raided the sites between the American border and Mexico City. He also had no trouble taking control of an apparently limitless supply of trains that had now penetrated most parts of Mexico’s corners. Regardless of which railroad he stole them from, they all looked alike: a wheezing engine whose water tank could be easily punctured by enemy bullets, maybe one ordinary coach with windows, one baggage car with heavy bars protecting its windows, followed by a string of flatcars—occasionally one would have fencelike sides—and the inevitable caboose in which rode enthusiastic soldiers who found joy in firing at anyone the men on the forward flatbeds had missed. Since three railway lines now crossed in Toledo, one leading to the capital, one to Guadalajara and one to San Luis Potosí, it was inevitable that we would be seeing a lot of General Gurza, whose short name was easy to remember.

  In fact, during my childhood the history of Toledo was so entangled with the exploits of this wild man that in my mind Gurza and Toledo have become fused as one entity. His excursions into town were inevitable, for he and his army lived on railroad freight cars, and that brought him to us constantly. I saw his troops in action on four terrifying occasions: in 1914, when the nuns were murdered; in 1916, when he killed five men of my family; in 1918, when he torched the town and murdered our priests; and in 1919, when he destroyed our mine. And there was that fifth excursion when he dandled me on his knee as if he were my loving uncle.

  There were other visits, of course, for he was always on the move, but he came so often, either chasing or being chased, that specific events and their dates become a blur. What I can state for certain is that in my childhood he was an ogre, in my boyhood a terror, and in my later years a perplexity, the most remarkable Mexican I have known.

  In our city the general had clearly identified enemies: the Palafoxes with their big homes and large tracts of land; Mother Anna María, the superior of the convent northwest of town, who had the bad luck to be known as a member of the Palafox family, thus incurring a double enmity; and Father Juan López, an underweight, shifty-eyed village priest with a bad complexion and a burning desire to see his church sponsor and deliver justice to his Indians. In these years Father López served as a minor functionary in the cathedral, which had a cadre of four other priests who discharged the traditional duty of catering to the well-to-do families in the region.

  Each of these enemies of the general was associated with some building or buildings, so that whenever he rampaged through Toledo he had no problem finding targets on which to vent his spleen. Mother Anna María’s convent was a lateeighteenth-century building erected by the Palafoxes of the day. Situated on a hill north of Toledo, it commanded perhaps the finest view in the district, for one could see not only the pyramid and the smokestacks of the Mineral but also the profile of the city and the rolling countryside. The convent itself was a thing of beauty with secluded cloisters and low towers, but its surroundings alone would have made it special.

  Ineffectual Father López worked in the cathedral and lived in meager quarters on its grounds. The Palafox holdings included the Mineral, the big houses behind adobe walls and the bull ranch. But it was the city itself, a kind of self-contained refuge in the vicinity of Mexico City but not contaminated by it, that constituted the major target for an assailant. Any marauding army able to invade Toledo sent a message of fear to the capital: “Might we be next?” so govermnent forces sometimes tried to forestall such attacks by encircling Toledo to defend it, but such futile efforts merely made the conquering armies more vengeful when they marched in as victors.

  It would be helpful if I could explain who was fighting whom in those chaotic years, but I was unable to keep such things straight then any more than I can now. In 1911 the dictator Porfirio Díaz was overthrown by the poetic dreamer Francisco Madero, who was soon murdered by more practical people. Then a man named Victoriano Huerto battled for supremacy with a man named Venustiano Carranza, whom my father did not like. When the three famous bandits—Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata and Saturnino Gurza—took control, hell broke loose across Mexico. At last Carranza was assassinated and Obregón resumed power, but he was assassinated, too, and in 1934, a black day in Mexican history so far as the Clay family was concerned, Lázaro Cárdenas, a wild-eyed radical, became president, and our drift to exile began.

  I hope you’ve been able to make sense of all this because, as I said before, I was never able to. What I knew was that General Gurza came and went, and when he came people died, and when he went they lamented their losses. Our first experience with him was in 1914, when I was five years old. One of his open trains approached Toledo from the north, and when a scout galloped into town with the terrifying news “Here comes General Gurza!” my father, who had become manager of the Mineral at my grandfather’s death, put my mother and me in an inner room, saying: “No matter what happens, stay here,” and he ran off to protect the mine.

  Father did not have to worry about this incursion from the north, because the train came on a rickety track well to the west of the pyramid. This put the loaded cars close to the convent, and when our sparse government troops halted the train at the edge of the city, Gurza, in a rage at having been prevented from entering Toledo, led a charge on the undefended convent, broke down the fragile gates, rousted out all the n
uns and shot seven. He would have especially liked to execute Mother Superior Anna María, since she was a Palafox, but he could not find her. Loyal nuns at the risk of their own lives had hidden her—they were the ones that Gurza shot.

  I was, as I said, five at the time, and although I can remember the horror with which my family heard of this outrage, I did not understand the euphemisms with which Mother and Father discussed the tragedy. They used the Spanish violado las monjas (violated the nuns) to describe what had happened before the women were killed, and perhaps it was better that I did not understand, but by the next time Gurza came through I knew that the nuns had been victims of indecent games, rape, torture and shooting. There was much violating of women when Gurza’s bullies ransacked a place.

  In the aftermath of this obscene attack, Father bought two pistols and coached Mother and me: “They’re beasts. Shoot them if they ever come to this side of the pyramid and try to force their way into the house.” Taking Mother aside to where they supposed I could not hear, he told her: “If they’re about to capture you, use the gun on them. If they’re too many, use it on yourself.” At the age of six I learned how to load, care for and use a revolver. And at night I had visions of holding off General Gurza, whom I had not yet seen, with my revolver and shooting him dead when he attempted to violate Mother.

  I did get to see the general some years later when his dreadful train came down again from the north, this time without opposition. Backing it into town so as to provide a quick getaway if troops from the capital moved in, he rounded up all the citizens, including those of us at the Mineral, and herded us into the plaza. There, on a sunny July day in excessive heat, we sweltered with Father whispering: “Say nothing. Do nothing. Attract no attention,” and in abject silence we watched as Gurza’s men, working from lists that the officers read, rounded up the landowners of the district, the big ones with more than two hundred thousand acres each, and hauled them into that part of the plaza facing the cathedral. There he put them against the stone wall of one of the towers and shouted accusations against them in a voice so loud it terrified me: “Good people of Toledo! These men, you know them, they stole your lands, threw you off, turned you into slaves. Isn’t that right?” and from the listeners came many voices: “Yes, yes!”

  Then he cried to one of his officers: “Read the list!” and the man, with no insignia showing that he was an officer, read: “Aureliano Palafox, sixty thousand acres. Belisario Palafox, forty thousand acres. Tómas, twenty thousand acres,” and the litany continued to those who owned only a few thousand acres. In later years I remembered those figures and wondered how the Palafoxes had acquired so much land. I was not aware that our acreage extended far into the countryside.

  When the list was completed, Gurza cried to one of his men: “How did these thieves get their land?” and the man shouted: “They stole it!”

  “From who?”

  “From the peóns.”

  “And what do we do with such thieves of honest people’s land?”

  “Shoot them!” The heat of the moment was so intense that many voices in the plaza screamed: “Shoot them!”

  “My God,” Father cried. “They’re going to do it!” and he whispered to Mother: “Cover his eyes,” and her hand came over my face, but a crack was left and with one eye I watched General Gurza, his bandoleers glistening in the sun, give the order to fire. I saw the muskets jump, the muzzles smoke, and the landowners fall as blood began to stain the foot of the cathedral tower.

  Thinking the execution over, Mother dropped her hand, so I clearly saw that one of the owners had not been killed—in later years I would learn that this frequently happened in mass shootings—so now General Gurza whipped out his revolver, went to the wounded man and shot him through the head. Four Palafoxes had been executed—their careful amassing of land, usually with government approval, had signed their death warrants.

  The bodies were left in the hot sun until evening, when Gurza gave the crowd permission to return home, but before we left the plaza I had a chance to look closely at the tower wall and saw that it was pockmarked with scars from bullets. In the decade ahead a thousand buildings would suffer similar marks.

  How did the public executions affect our family? A kind of numbness spread over us. Father refused to believe that he had seen what happened, for he was revolted by its calculated brutality. He could not eat that night: “I’m still nauseated,” he said. The effect on Mother was quite different—it was one of sullen rage. She was, after all, a Palafox, the daughter of Alicia Palafox, that beautiful woman whose China Poblano had so captivated my Grandfather Jubal. Having seen men related to her—one was an uncle—shot simply because they owned land had to be a warning that one day she too might be executed for a similar reason. She thought that perhaps we ought to leave the Mineral, since it was known as a Palafox holding, and she proposed this to Father and me, but we insisted on staying, for as he explained: “This is my job. It’s a decent one and I’ve treated our people fairly.” So we clung to our home and our occupation, but now we lived in apprehension, for if seven nuns and nine landowners could be shot without trial—the seven because they were religious, the nine because they owned land—anything could happen.

  By the time I was eight, that is, in 1917, I had invented a gruesome game that any child in those turbulent years could have played. From newspapers of the day and the numerous cheap magazines featuring stories about various aspects of the endless war, I began to follow the careers of individual officers whose records attracted my attention, and when the file on some individual officer was completed, I had a representative account not only of his extremely active life but of Mexico in its agony. I had nine such compilations, each a duplicate of the others; the one for a young lieutenant named Fermín Freg stands out in my memory as epitomizing the period:

  1910 newspaper. Brave Lieutenant Fermín Freg, who led the charge that defeated the rebellious enemies of our beloved protector of the nation, Porfirio Díaz.

  1911 magazine. Major Freg as loyal defender of Francisco Madero, who had driven the hated dictator Díaz from Mexico.

  1913 magazine. Lieutenant Colonel Freg in guard of honor for General Huerta, who ordered the murder of Madero.

  1913 small booklet. Colonel Freg, aide-de-camp to General Carranza, who has ousted General Huerta from power.

  1914 big book. Generals Prado, Gurza and Rubio signing The Pact of the Three Generals.

  1915 large booklet. Colonel Freg in command of the firing squad that executed General Prado.

  1916 very big book. General Freg taking salute after great victory at San Luis Potosí.

  1917 largest book. Full page in garish color, body of General Freg fusilladed by troops still loyal to General Prado.

  The biographies are monotonous in their predictability. The final photos of men like Madero, Carranza, Zapata and Obregón, each the recipient, for a few years, of enormous acclaim, show the men stained with their own blood, from a bullet fired by a onetime friend.

  I was assisted in this gruesome game by my grandmother, María de la Caridad, who was now a widow in her sixties, and as concerned as ever about the welfare of her family and her Indians, in that order. She lived with us in warm harmony and helped Mother raise me. Curiously, she spoke English better than Mother did and was determined that I learn it as well as Spanish. Thanks to her I grew up bilingual without a pronounced accent in either language.

  In this memoir I’ve said that the major characteristic of the Clays of Virginia was their ardent patriotism, but I myself had never witnessed this. I was relying upon family legend, but in 1917, while General Gurza was running wild in our part of Mexico, my father’s attention was diverted to Europe, where the kaiser was trying to remake the world. When an American expeditionary force was dispatched across the Atlantic to oppose the Germans, Father growled: “It’s about time,” and he met with men in Toledo to follow the progress of the war. One night he cried out at supper: “If they threaten your way of life, y
ou’ve got to do something!” and the next day he paid a hasty visit to the American embassy in Mexico City, where he learned that even though he was not an American citizen, he could volunteer for overseas service.

  “Could it be with the Virginia regiment?”

  “If you pay for the telegram, you’ll find out.”

  When permission was granted he hurried home to Toledo with news that startled us: “The military attaché at the embassy swore me in as an officer candidate. I’m to report immediately to Fort Dix.” Then he added, almost as an afterthought: “Graziela, you and Mother can mind the Mineral while I’m gone.”

  When my mother began to cry, he comforted her and told me: “Watch after her while I’m gone.” She sobbed: “You said you never wanted to see the United States again,” and he explained: “I’m not doing this for the U.S. I’m doing it for Virginia.” And he was off to the hellish ditches of northeastern France.

  In his absence our family purchased a map of the battle area and with pins and arrows followed his supposed exploits, and we were fairly accurate in our guesses as to where he was fighting. During the final drive on German positions, what we did not know was that he behaved with valor, winning commendations and medals.

  His bravery on the field had an unexpected consequence. As the general pinned the medal on Father’s tunic he said: “This makes you eligible for automatic American citizenship,” and on the sensible grounds that “in time of trouble, it’s better to have two passports than one,” he accepted the offer, so that when he returned to the Mineral he could boast: “I’m a Virginian at last.”

  He had been home only a few weeks in 1918 when Mexico’s permanent warfare engulfed him once more, for General Gurza launched his third attempt to capture Mexico City. Local patriots, goaded by a handful of federal troops, tried vainly to halt him north of the city, an act that so enraged him that he drove one of his trains right into the heart of Toledo, used troops from the other train to throw a cordon around the city and began what historians call the Sack of Toledo. He began with the cathedral, that gem of colonial architecture. Bringing up a small cannon, he fired numerous blasts at the eight majestic columns, destroying some completely, shattering portions of others. His men, with great effort, knocked the front doors off their hinges, then rushed inside and with their gun butts smashed decorations in the various chapels. Statuary was crushed, paintings slashed, and the altar area totally demolished in a frenzy of destruction. In less than an hour, one of the treasures of central Mexico was a shambles.