“If it were possible to have the original reports from El Demócrata and Frías’s letters, this would strengthen the investigation,” wrote Chihuahua’s governor in response to the president’s orders. The general of the military zone also insisted on proof to Díaz; he suggested searching El Demócrata’s printing press and editorial offices “in the hope of finding original manuscripts.”
But obviously Tomochic didn’t astound only the powerful. It held intense appeal for El Demócrata’s faithful readers, who were partisans and friends of the opposition in Mexico City. The fact that the events and their subsequent narration occurred almost simultaneously contributed to its mass appeal. Both the powers that be and the average reader of the day would tend to interpret a narrative like this literally, and believe it to be written by a flesh-and-blood eyewitness. A character like Miguel Mercado didn’t need realism nor was he taken for real. Events of the bloody military campaign precluded any accusation of implausibility, obviating the effort to give it a purely fictional interpretation. The facts had been established in the manuscript published by El Demócrata. This isn’t an incidental strategy but a tentative incursion into the modern novel itself, its treatment of an immediate, contemporary reality.
The chronicle’s author, by erasing himself from the map, excited more public interest than any other Mexican writer of the nineteenth century, whether or not he was working in the genre of the testimonial historical novel.
Clausell Declares
The author’s anonymity was the key to Tomochic’s existence.
The public never objected to the author’s decision to keep his identity secret, devouring the chronicle’s different editions throughout the 1890s—especially following the Díaz government’s last gasp at the dawning of the twentieth century. If, for readers less familiar with General Díaz’s modus operandi, the importance of Tomochic was that it related the essence of political truth of the moment, this is because literary conventions of the day had initiated even the most naive readers into pondering the dual faces of art and history in testimonial accounts. And as with countless other similar works, even in early editions Tomochic overflowed fiction’s borders. On the one hand, interpreting books written in this particular code as fiction had not been customary for several generations—writers themselves contributed to the blurring of poetry and history. On the other hand, an account of events written in a deliberately literary prose, which narrated the campaign of a professional army against a population of its same people—however remote and unknowable the north and the Sierra Tarahumara might seem—didn’t fall into the same category as the historical novels of Vicente Riva Palacio, Juan Antonio Mateos, and Manuel Payno. Despite its painstaking plot construction, from the outset Tomochic wasn’t received as fiction, or presented as a work produced exclusively from the imagination. This is why, from its very first printing in El Demócrata, its author’s name was omitted to emphasize the protagonist–witness Miguel Mercado.
Anonymity allowed Tomochic’s author to render a work that went beyond mere fiction, with or without a few elements added or played down. It is an account of events that is “carefully edited and embellished with historical details.” That it was first printed in a newspaper contributed to the meaning and honesty of the text. We can imagine the first readers’ reactions to detailed descriptions of the time spent by federal troops in Guerrero City’s “deserted plaza” (“the desolate plaza, resplendent with sun”), and to the spectacle of the military forces lazing around before departing for the rebellious town of Tomochic. Through the experiences of the apocryphal Miguel Mercado, the “young second lieutenant of the 9th Battalion,” readers had a chronicle they could trust. Moreover, the chronicle’s development over various installments would have alerted readers that this wasn’t just any eyewitness. Nor was the account’s exposition customary or expected. In the pages of this exposé of a state massacre, there was no room for abiding values or bravery.
Thus its anonymity separated the facts of the fiction from the fiction about the facts, allowing for the construction of an account, which, because of its painstaking attention to detail, seemed not only to distance itself from real emotions and common sense, but also conferred upon Díaz’s government a sense of unreality. Moreover, given the political and literary climate of the times, the eyewitness anonymity contributed to the narrative’s singular power while it protected the author’s physical integrity from the powers that be. Anonymity is an age-old strategy; here it introduces an uncomfortable truth under the rubric of the historical narrative, a genre the political classes of the nineteenth century were well acquainted with.
Identifying the author became a point of vital interest. General Díaz and his supporters couldn’t read Tomochic without an author. Subjective interpretation wasn’t enough, as it had been for the novel’s initial readership. They had to know, and to know beyond a shadow of a doubt. Toward this end, they employed several strategies.
One has already been mentioned. Lieutenant Heriberto Frías was arrested in Chihuahua and indicted on charges that he had violated various articles of the Military Justice Code. Once the lieutenant and his dwelling in the hamlet of Las Quintas had been searched on April 15, 1893, Díaz ordered that the disrespectful and treasonous officer be imprisoned and held incommunicado.2
His objective was to establish, with convincing proof, that the “eyewitness” was none other than Frías. To accomplish this, they harassed him with endless questions and the testimony of various witnesses. He continued to maintain that he had no communications with anybody in Chihuahua, that he lived far away from the city where he, at one time, casually spoke about the Tomochic campaign with “a few residents of insignificant standing.” Yes, he had contributed articles to several newspapers, such as El Combate and El Eco de Chihuahua, none of which could be interpreted the way his interrogators might wish. Also, he had written “some three letters” in January 1893 to his friend Joaquín Clausell, telling him of his promotion and submitting his poem “Gritos” to him for publication. In the opinion of the court this contradicted the testimony of one of the witnesses, a local journalist who not only said he heard Frías censure orders from superiors, but heard him comment that he maintained a correspondence with Clausell, whose Demócrata would publish a chronicle of the Tomochic campaign “rendering it in a similar style as French novelist Emile Zola’s La Débâcle.”
The lieutenant’s trial lasted four months. It was an unprecedented proceeding. How could a legal body hope to identify the author of a piece of writing whose strategy of attribution was to deny the author’s existence? In the end, nothing came out of the trial that could be used as proof against Frías.
But the mention of Clausell leads to one of the other routes by which General Díaz tried to identify the author of Tomochic. Above all he wanted to ascertain who, among his political enemies and adversaries, would plot against his growing political prestige by accusing him—by means of this narrative—of one of the most serious crimes carried out by state forces to date. The chronicle began to appear in the pages of the newspaper four and a half months after the massacre. Tomochic was of strategic importance to the Díaz administration because it was on the road over which treasures extracted from the mineral mines of western Chihuahua passed daily. Two or three days on horseback separated the fifty voters of Tomochic from Guerrero City, the district capital. The efficient train system connected this capital and the state capital by 300 kilometers of rails. Telegraph cables also connected Guerrero City to the state capital. But Guerrero City didn’t have sufficient resources to entertain petitions, calm fears, or flame the hopes of the 6,000 voters who comprised the impoverished district of Guerrero.
At the beginning of the 1890s, Chihuahua was experiencing a severe agricultural crisis that threatened to damage the social and political order of its capital. Guerrero City was about 200,000 kilometers from Clausell’s office in the political center of the country on 169 Avenida Oriente or 26 Calle 2 in San Lorenzo, accordi
ng to different designations. Neither distance nor communication problems dampened the new El Demócrata director’s interest in recording in exhaustive detail the events of the military campaign against Tomochic in a novelized account. In those days a common adage was that abuse of power leads to the strength of the opposition. It was because of one of those abuses that Clausell was arrested and held incommunicado three weeks before Frías in the municipal jailhouse of the Federal District. The motive: criminal judges of Mexico City initiated legal proceedings against El Demócrata.
When Frías’s trial in Chihuahua didn’t go anywhere—the second lieutenant continued to insist he was not the “eyewitness” to whom El Demócrata attributed the episodes of Tomochic! Episodios de campaña—federal authorities issued Clausell a court summons. Responding to two separate rogatory letters, Clausell declared that as newspaper director he conceived the idea of writing and publishing a novel, using the events of the Tomochic war and appropriating the style of Emile Zola’s La Débâcle. He claimed that the topical nature and the writing style would certainly draw an audience. Furthermore, he claimed to have carried out his objectives: he wrote the novel and then published it in several issues of El Demócrata. All the facts were culled from the news in the Mexican and American press as well as from private letters he had received from people in Chihuahua, among whom he remembered Señor Pedro Ortega, others from Leoncio Buenfil, and a Señor Sánchez.
To pointed questions Clausell responded that despite the novel’s title or subtitle, which referred to an eyewitness, no such witness existed. Designating one, he claimed, gave credibility to the events. He also affirmed that before beginning to write the novel he collected as many news items as possible and educated himself on the terrain and people of Tomochic. As to the original manuscript of Tomochic, Clausell indicated that he wrote all the episodes—by machine first, then by hand. Once the typesetting was finished, they were thrown away along with the reams of paper waste from the printing press and the editorial offices.
This inquiry resulted in a visit to the press and editorial offices as well as the deponent’s residence, in search of the original texts of the novel and letters. This search, carried out in Clausell’s presence as well as that of authorized court personnel, only brought to light a few notebooks, the list of subscribers in Chihuahua, and four letters from the same state. None mentioned events in Tomochic.
In one last rogatory letter, Clausell had to respond to a new set of more exact questions. Was he acquainted with Lieutenant Heriberto Frías of the 9th Battalion? If so, why and for how long? Did he receive letters from Frías? On what dates, and what did Frías recount in them? Had Frías given him facts on the operations carried out by federal forces in Tomochic? How? Had Lieutenant Frías sent him some verses and travel impressions for publication? Which ones?
Clausell declared that he had known Frías for seven or eight years. They had studied together in the National Preparatory School, and Frías had sent him some four or five letters in January, February, and March, 1893. He clearly remembered that in his first letter Frías mentioned hearing about the founding of El Demócrata and its publishing a novel about events in Tomochic. He asked for the corresponding issues to be mailed to him. In Frías’s second letter, he thanked Clausell for a gift subscription to the newspaper, and in the third—and the last to Clausell’s recollection—Frías complained that El Demócrata didn’t always arrive. Clausell also declared that Frías had not sent him any facts, directly or indirectly, about the operations carried out by military forces in the town of Tomochic. Frías didn’t send anything directly, Clausell insisted, since Clausell took the verses from the newspaper’s literary section published directly from El Eco de Chihuahua. Lieutenant Frías hadn’t sent him verses or travel impressions, or any other literary, scientific, or artistic work.
In the end, Clausell was asked who had supplied him with the facts on which he based the articles in El Demócrata relating to events in Tomochic. He reiterated that he obtained the facts from various newspapers published on the U.S. border—since little was mentioned in the Mexican press in the capital, Clausell added—from reports given to him by two previously mentioned persons in Chihuahua, but above all from Agustín Páez, a native of Parral and student at National Preparatory School who maintained many connections in Chihuahua. All this information was put into archives and sent to the Chihuahua courthouse to be used in the ongoing proceedings against Lieutenant Frías.
Beyond Dreams
To be alive in Emile Zola’s day, in the imagination of some Mexican writers, was to be lucky beyond belief. He had everything that was lacking in Mexico: an audience, recognition, and success. La Débâcle, the novel Zola published in 1892, sold more copies than any of his previous works and challenged the literary sophistication of more than just one reader.
The reigning imperious writer on wide-ranging topics, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, experienced the publication of La Débâcle as Mexican consul in Paris, the capital of Europe in the nineteenth century. His almost contemptuous indifference to the French narrative was countered by novelist Federico Gamboa’s enthusiasm. The latter cultivated his fame as an incurable and a decided admirer of Zola. The aspiring writer Joaquín Clausell, though more measured in his admiration than Santa’s author, from his position in the literature-friendly editorial offices of El Universal newspaper, was responsible for familiarizing Mexico City readers with the furious literary machine called Zola. Clausell worked on El Universal under Rafael Reyes Spíndola. The latter directed this powerful daily paper, which was later promoted and financed by the state in its attempt to commercially squash all who gave voice to the capital city’s political minority groups. At that time, however, El Universal was home to a heterogeneous mix of literary generations and temperaments as divergent as the last of the romantics and the first modernists.
In a note published anonymously in El Universal toward the end of October 1892—and which, given the tumult that greeted the publication of Tomochic some five months later, we have to attribute to Clausell’s pen—the writer produced an annotated commentary that was one of the most incisive works of criticism ever written on La Débâcle. According to the article that El Universal published in a front page column, Zola confessed to his friends that the importunate observations of one Captain Tanera, an officer of the German army’s general staff, had affected him more than all the other censorious attacks flung at his most recent novel: “I who have read La Débâcle,” added the anonymous and knowledgeable Mexican editor, “and have observed that my modest assessment of it coincides with that of several more or less worthy critics, even I hadn’t considered this work, nor had they, from the point of view of the German officer.”
The Mexican editor translated and cited the paragraphs in Tanera’s criticism where this informed military man pointed out that Zola might be overlooking the obvious since he had never actually been engaged in the thick of battle: “What the soldier is thinking about when he’s fighting and what he forgets.” Despite La Débâcle’s intense human interest, things are described that never happened, Tanera observed: “He adulterates facts and demonizes an army which has been disgraced, ineptly led, but has fought with valor at every turn and hasn’t lost its honor in defeat.”3
Zola tweaked a raw nerve when he narrated a sensitive event in France’s contemporary history in La Débâcle: the burial of Napoleon III’s Second Empire in the inferno of the 1871 commune, through the empire and Napoleon’s entanglement the preceding summer—three years after his daring Mexican venture had come to naught in a useless war against Prussia’s King William. After seven weeks and his humiliating defeat in the Sédan, a century and a half of arrogance in the French army was canceled out.
In addition, Zola made the coffers rattle. According to another article published in El Universal, Le Figaro made an unofficial accounting of how much money Zola made on the nineteen novels in the RougonMacquart series and came up with an astounding sum. Three novels had sold more than
100,000 copies: L’Assommoir, La Terre, and La Débâcle. To give some idea of the latter’s fantastic reception: Stacked one on top of the other, the 120,000 copies of La Débâcle—Le Figaro claimed— with their 2.7-centimeter width, would have formed eleven columns the height of the Eiffel Tower. (Inexplicably, only La faute de l’abbé Monret and Nana sold less than 20,000 copies.) But even these titles, in a professional career spanning several decades, earned their author nearly Fr 1.5 million.4
Therefore it seems almost natural—to the extent that anything in the arena of literary representations appears natural—that some Mexican authors would take to heart the anecdote about Zola or even assume his tactics in the rustic capital of the Díaz era, which thought itself modern, elegant, and rich but daily woke up beneath its poor man’s mantle.
Juan Antonio Mateos, according to rumors in the journalistic community of the capital, set out to see for himself. Between November 1892 and January 1893, various Mexico City newspapers claimed that this popular Parliament delegate, novelist, and playwright was working on the libretto for a play inspired by La Débâcle to be staged in the Arbeu Theater.5 It seems likely that news of Mateos’s play would appear in the editorial columns, along with the many other items of interest that made Díaz’s capital such a colorful place. An example in point would be the imaginative groupings of velocipedes making their way through colonial streets of fin-de-siècle modernity, the trolley transportation in the Federal District, the Melcocha collisions (the fashionable bus of the day), the new silver-gray mares of Ignacio de la Torre, Ivy Baldwin’s tour in the dirigible Mars, and the dances in some houses.6
The Battle of Tomochic Page 2