Mexico

by James A. Michener

  But this time it was a much different Saturnino Gurza who visited Toledo. In the battles for Mexico City he had been soundly defeated by troops loyal to newly elected President Carranza, so he was running away to some safe hiding spot, not seeking danger as before. I was standing not twenty feet from where his train wheezed to a halt, and when he jumped off to talk with peóns he hoped would support him, one of the first he met was me. Rumpling my hair with his big hand, he bent over me, his huge sombrero almost smothering my face, the bullets in his crossed bandoleers bumping against me, and asked: “You, young fellow, will you be joining me on the train in a couple of years?” Engulfed by his huge mustache, I was too frightened to speak, for here was the devil himself, goading me, but Can-dad poked me, shoved me forward and answered on my behalf: “He’ll be with you, General, and he’ll be a good one.”

  “Can you shoot a gun?” he asked, and when Caridad assured him that I was a crack shot, he grabbed a gun from one of his men and handed it to me: “Practice, young fellow. We’ll be needing you.” In the meantime he would be needing food and medicine and whatever ammunition the city could supply. As his men fanned out to commandeer such supplies, he took a chair from a sidewalk café and cried in a loud voice as he sat in the middle of the street: “Doesn’t anyone have a beer for the savior of the city?” and admiring peóns scattered about to find him one.

  Having established a glancing acquaintance with me, he continued our conversation as he drank: “What’s your name, son?” and Caridad broke in hastily: “González, Victoriano González.”

  “Victoriano!” he shouted, rumpling my hair again. “An omen! In the north we’ll have a hundred more victories.” And he took me on his knee, as if he were my father. There I sat with the rifle he had given me across my lap and his bandoleers lending me a military posture.

  Aware that he could keep his train in Toledo only briefly, for Carranza’s troops in superior numbers were after him, he handed me back to Caridad and said: “Tenemos cosas que hacer en el norte” (We have things to do up north). When his foraging troops had stripped the stores of everything, he climbed aboard the old engine that had carried him to so many victories, ordered the engineer to sound the mournful whistle, and chugged slowly out of town, as if reluctant to meet the battles he knew lay ahead.

  Of course Father heard about our having been in Toledo when the brawling man he called “the murdering bandit” rode in, and he reprimanded his mother for having taken such a risk with me: “If Gurza had known he was a Palafox, he’d surely have shot him,” so neither Caridad nor I told him that Gurza had dandled me on his knee and invited me to join him as soon as I was old enough to carry a rifle, and there the matter rested, with me totally confused. Caridad did not tell him that Gurza had given me a rifle, which she had hidden.

  The one who took the news of Gurza’s arrival and departure with quivering dismay was Father López, who asked me repeatedly: “You mean, he brought his train right into the middle of town?” and when I nodded, he continued: “And he didn’t shoot anyone? His men didn’t go on murdering sprees?”

  “They were too busy looking for food.”

  “No fires set?”

  “I told you, they were busy.”

  In considerable agitation, Father López talked with Father and Mother about General Gurza and his effect upon Mexico, especially the Catholic Church: “The more nuns he slays, the more tenaciously our people cling to their faith.”

  “You have evidence of that?” Father asked, and the priest said: “When I visit the little villages, all the citizens, they know me as the man who helps them keep their faith alive.”

  “If Gurza’s men catch you, they’d put you up against the wall.”

  “Nothing new. If they catch you and find you’re a Palafox, the same thing.”

  “I don’t want you to take the boy on any more of your rounds. It’s too dangerous.”

  “I know, I wanted him to see the real Mexico, but once is enough.” I was listening to this conversation and saw that Father López wanted to speak further on this subject but decided not to.

  That night two men came to the Mineral with a horrible report, to which all of us listened with hearts thumping: “Men have come to Toledo with stories of what happened when Gurza’s men reached San Ildefonso, a small town north of Aguascalientes. Like what they say he did here in Toledo. The train came into town. No gunfire, no rape or murder. But there was stealing of food and emptying of stores. And this was only the beginning.”

  “What happened?” Father asked, and I was looking at Grandmother when the men from Aguas said: “Horrible. Some of our men in San Ildefonso, patriots and partisans of President Carranza, shot at Gurza but missed him and killed one of his colonels. That was the signal for the most violent gunfire you ever saw. Just blazing away. And then the rioting and the killing of all the priests and nuns they could find. Those of us who escaped decided to ride out to other towns to warn them. Gurza’s men are destroying the heart of the town.”

  On hearing this, Grandmother clasped her hands tightly, kept them in her lap, and said nothing, but Father López insisted on hearing the details repeated and pestered the Aguas men with questions: “How many priests did they find?” When he heard the number he flinched, and then asked: “And the nuns?”

  “Only three. Our people hid the others.”

  “Dead?”

  “Mutilated. Then killed.”

  In a quiet voice López said: “I think we should say a prayer for the martyrs,” and when we bowed our heads, Grandmother too, she clasped my hand and at the close of the impassioned lament whispered Amen with the rest of us.

  The next days were tense, for everyone in Toledo realized by what a narrow margin we had escaped the fate of San Ildefonso. This was emphasized by Father at dinner one night: “You see, Mother, what might have happened when you took Norman into town.” She retorted: “He left us in peace, didn’t he?”

  I could see that Father López was profoundly distressed by this new attack on nuns, for repeatedly he said: “The killing of men, if they fired against his troops, that I can understand, or maybe even to kill a nun if you came upon her suddenly in a mob, but to seek them out like dogs chasing a hare, that’s …” He never finished his sentence, for his vocabulary had no word adequate to describe that horror.

  Later, when he learned that General Gurza had kept his train at San Ildefonso, since the ravaged town was his to command, using it as a base from which he fanned out to punish government troops or drive the Americans out of Mexico, Father López felt that this was a challenge not to the men of San Ildefonso but to God himself: “It’s a sacrilege, a work of the Anti-Christ.” At supper, which he took with us, always returning from his expeditions at sunset, he repeatedly told my parents: “He really is the Anti-Christ, and God will punish him.” I think my parents grew weary of his fulminations because one day Father said: “But, Father Juan, if you are powerless to force God to exact punishment, why not forget the monster?” and López replied: “Maybe it’s because God wants us to do his work for him and punish Gurza.”

  When he saw that the Clays were beginning to regret having taken him under their protection, he became nervous, staying away overnight and remaining silent at the table when he was there. One morning when we had risen early and he was about to set forth on his missionary work, he took special care to bid me farewell, as if he were going on a long journey. I saw that he was unusually disturbed and that after leaving the Mineral he headed not to the villages on his normal rounds but to the northwest. I waited till he was gone, then went after him, remaining well behind him, but because he always checked the landscape when he went on his dangerous missions, he chanced to look behind him and saw me.

  Almost joyously he ran back to embrace me: “Norman, you’ve come to lend me courage,” and without explaining what that signified, he allowed me to walk with him in the morning sunlight as he hiked westward behind the pyramid. “Where are you going?” I asked as we approached th
e railroad tracks that led to Aguascalientes, and he replied: “To where God has called me.” And then he surprised me by revealing a wrapped package he’d been keeping under his cotton shirt: “You must forgive me, Norman, but I stole your gun,” and he showed me how he had taken it apart, keeping all the screws and bolts in a paper bag for reassembly. When he saw my reluctance to lose the gun he said benignly: “It’s an evil gun, Norman, his gun, the Anti-Christ’s, and it would bring you harm. Give it to me with your blessing,” and there beside the tracks where no one could see, I used a phrase Mother had taught me: “I, Norman, give thee, Juan, this my gun, and with it my blessing.”

  Embracing me and fighting back his tears, this dear, good priest whom it was not easy to love, for he was a difficult man of tedious disposition, embraced me ardently, kissed me on the forehead and whispered: “When you’re a man, Norman, never draw back from doing the right thing, that’s the mark of a man.” With that he turned me about, gave me a gentle push on the back and started me on my way home. I last saw him walking purposefully along the railroad tracks on his way north with the gun General Gurza had given me.

  Three days later the news flashed through Mexico, and the United States, too. A shoeless peasant residing in San Ildefonso, which General Gurza had ravaged the previous week, had whipped a gun from inside the white camisa that peóns wore and fired it directly at Gurza from a distance of only a few feet, killing him instantly. The dead general’s bodyguards were so infuriated that they and other soldiers beat the assassin to the point where his corpse was too mutilated to permit identification. But in the days that followed, President Carranza’s men, hoping to downgrade their dead enemy’s popular support, circulated the rumor that the gun used to commit the murder was one that had been issued to Gurza’s troops after the sack of an arms plant near Mexico City, which proved, they said, that the cruel revolutionary had been slain by one of his own men.

  Mother and Father deemed this an act of divine intervention, and they intended asking Father López about this. But my shrewd grandmother had another interpretation, which she confided to me privately: “Like an old woman knitting in the sun, General Gurza had used up his skein. He completed his job. He set Mexico free,” and then she led me to her tiny room, where, inside a small traveling bag, she had kept hidden a photograph that a man in Toledo had snapped the afternoon I met General Gurza. It showed me perched on his knee, his big face, mustache and huge sombrero close to me as he handed me the gun that I was supposed to use in his defense when I was fourteen. It was an excellent photo.

  “Protect it, Norman. Someday you’ll be proud you have it, for it could be the last photograph ever taken of our great leader,” and together we sang in muted voices the Ballad of Saturnino with its insolent marching rhythm:

  “Gallant Saturnino!

  He rode the train.

  Heroic Saturnino!

  He fought Black Jack.

  Stupendous Saturnino!

  He scorned Carranza.

  Immortal Saturnino!

  He brought us freedom.”

  The last five syllables were sung as a staccato chant, defying the world, and when they ended, as a kind of benediction to General Gurza, Grandmother took back the photo momentarily, studied it, kissed it and told me: “When I labored in the caverns I dreamed of such a man, but I thought he would come on a white horse, like Zapata. This one came on that rusty train.”

  The rest of my story about the Clays in Mexico can be quickly told. When Father López failed to return, my parents assumed he had been shot in one of the villages he served, and we said no more about him. In time Grandmother learned that the gun General Gurza had given me was missing, but never asked me about it. The mining engineers from Nevada returned to explore the mine twice more before giving up, and on their last visit their leader told Father: “We help American Petroleum now and then. They have the big oil fields at Tampico, and they told me the other day they’d like to find some responsible American …”

  “I’m only half American. Born a Mexican, keep that citizenship, too.”

  “They know. And they asked if I thought you might be interested in serving as their representative in this middle part of the country.”

  “What would I be expected to do?”

  “If I understand what they said, you’d help them find skilled labor, or young men who’ve had education in the States, maybe send some up to Texas and Oklahoma.”

  “No oil wells in Toledo. It seems a curious job.”

  “People are in Toledo. A.P. expects to be in Mexico for the rest of the century, the reserves are that big. They need someone like you as part of their team,” and when the shrewd men from American Petroleum came to Toledo to interview Father, they saw immediately that the good relations he’d established at the Mineral were what they needed to safeguard their holdings in Mexico.

  Our family did not have to leave Toledo for Father to do the work they wanted, and this allowed him time to write the book that made him famous and caused the statue, The Pyramid and the Cathedral, to be erected in his honor at the far corner of the plaza. From our front porch we could see both edifices, and their history was in our bloodstream. It was a noble book, still is, a glimpse into the heart of Mexico, and one of the passages I’ve cherished is his portrait of Jubal Clay with his Confederate brothers in his final years:

  Each year on the ninth of April those Confederate soldiers who had refused to live under the domination of the North and General Grant, finding refuge here in the salubrious climate of Toledo, would convene in fellowship to mark, not celebrate, the day on which Robert E. Lee surrendered to Butcher Grant at Appomattox Court House.

  Someone would propose a toast: “To the day the world ended!” and they would drink in silence, but always someone else proposed: “To the day Canada invades the North and we rush there to help her.” This toast they drank with cheers and cries of “We’ll be there!” At the first reunion after the election of Grant as president, Jubal proposed his own toast: “We can take heart from the election of Butcher Grant, because it proves there is a God in heaven. He’s giving those bastards what they deserve. Let’s watch how he messes up the nation as he did his army at Cold Harbor.”

  But as the years passed, and the exiles aged, Jubal noted a phenomenon: “Every man who recalled his battle experiences claimed he had fought with either Stonewall Jackson or Jeb Stuart or Massa Robert himself. Since not one of us admitted he had fought under a losing general, I often wondered how we had managed to lose the war.”

  As time went on, Father proved so invaluable to American Petroleum that the company offered him yearly bonuses in stock, until we became a family with a solid if not spectacular financial footing. As the president of the company once said when delivering the bonus at a staff gathering: “The best thing John Clay ever did for this company was write that book. It proved to the Mexicans that we were not only good people but also a cultured group who appreciated Mexican patterns of life. Clay is our resident Mexican, and we treasure him.”

  Under Father’s guidance mining affairs proved so profitable in central Mexico that American Petroleum decided to probe deeper into our Mineral to see if perhaps some major vein lay hidden far below what was now known as Caridad’s Cavern at the thirteen-hundred-foot mark. So the Nevada engineers who had probed in the 1930s returned with new equipment that enabled them to speed down below the nineteen-hundred-foot level, but they found nothing. However, Father’s other projects earned the company rich rewards.

  You can imagine his dismay when the radical liberal Lázaro Cárdenas became president in 1934 and began threatening to expropriate all foreign petroleum holdings. He told me in the letters he sent me at college—I was a graduate student in those years—that Mexico was plunging headlong into another revolution. That same year he sent me news that Grandmother Caridad had died, “a wonderful fighting woman to the end.” He said that she left a cryptic message for me: “Tell Norman to guard that photograph. Each year it becomes more valua
ble.” It was clear that as Mexico became more nationalistic, and more particularly because of its willingness to stand up to the United States on the oil business, Saturnino Gurza was being slowly but surely converted into one of the great national heroes. Those pusillanimous leaders who had opposed him, such as Carranza and Huerta and Obregón, were seen as men to be forgotten, while Gurza grew yearly in stature. Grandmother had been right in her assessment of Mexican history; Father López had been wrong.

  But Grandmother’s death posed a difficult problem for me, for with her gone I was the only person alive who knew that Father Juan had died a martyr’s death, and the knowledge of that truth hung heavily upon me. In those tumultuous days after the assassination of Gurza it was prudent to preserve the secret, for to reveal it might have caused danger not only to our family for having harbored the assassin but to the Catholic Church as a whole for having encouraged, it might seem, this blow against a revered leader. Now the burden of truth lay on me alone, and often as I looked at that remarkable photo, the last ever taken of Gurza, as Caridad had suspected, I watched it become transformed under my very eyes. General Gurza, the man holding me on his knee, had become the father of the new Mexico, and I resolved that sometime, when the occasion was proper, I would reveal both the photograph and the history of the rifle. In the meantime I had six excellent copies made and kept them in various places.

  In 1938 Cárdenas did expropriate the oil wells; American Petroleum was expelled from Mexico, its enormous wealth wiped out by a mere scratching of a presidential pen; and soon thereafter my father, author of the fine book about Mexico, left that country for good. My mother, always a loyal Palafox, refused to join him, but in due course I followed his example, even to the extent of leaving a Palafox wife behind me. Father wanted to bring my mother with us, but she refused to leave the ancestral home of the Palafoxes; an equally weighty consideration was her religion. At her marriage to my father, there had been a mutual understanding that she would remain Catholic but he would be free to elect at some future time whether he wanted to join her church or not. He delayed his decision, and neither he nor Grandmother Caridad applied any pressure on me to join any religion, Mother’s Catholicism or Father’s Protestantism. Caridad told me when I was eleven: “I’ve been a good Catholic like all before me, but the only thing it ever did for me was put me down in the mines.”