Last Train From Cuernavaca

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Rico understood how the maids could mistake Grace for a spirit. The night he had seen her gliding along in a nimbus of pale silk was the most memorable of his life. Or it had been, until this night.

  Still asleep, she sighed and turned toward him. He slipped an arm under her until the nape of her neck fit perfectly into the cradle of his elbow. Her hand rested on his waist and when he drew closer, it slid down to the small of his back and cupped into the hollow at the base of his spine. He put his other arm around her and gently pulled her against him.

  She stirred, and with eyes still closed she murmured, “Federico Martín, I will love you always.”

  “My heaven, I have waited my whole life for you.” He kissed her mouth, her eyes, the hollows at the base of her ears, her throat, the valley between her breasts.

  Rico finally understood the lyrics of every maudlin ballad he had sung under countless balconies. When he was much younger they had meant nothing at all to him. Then he had wondered if he would recognize love should it happen along. A few years later he worried that it never would happen. And until six weeks ago, he had resigned himself to the probability that he would settle for something masquerading as love.

  Now, here it was, serene and soft, lovely, tough, and talented in his arms. Love’s warm breath tickled his throat. The beat of love’s heart resonated against his chest.

  Rico’s nightmare became just another ghost. He could not imagine a better Christmas.

  The maids’ rebellion did not meet the standards of a mutiny. It was more of a sit-down strike or a group sulk.

  When Grace left her room she found them sitting at the bottom of the stairway. She thought they had assembled to congratulate her, and a blush spread like sunrise across her cheeks. Congratulations were in order though.

  Rico had waked her a couple hours earlier for an encore of the night’s performance. Grace had still been floating blissfully between two ceiling beams when he kissed her on the forehead and slipped out into the dark hallway with his boots in his hand.

  Grace danced down the stairs, singing softly.

  A most intense young man,

  A soulful-eyed young man,

  An ultra-poetical, super-aesthetical,

  Out-of-the-way young man.

  Had Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Sullivan met Federico Martín?

  There sat the maids on the steps, waiting for her. They had enlisted María in their cause. The maids were shy. María wasn’t, and she wasn’t sitting down.

  She planted her feet a shoulders’ width apart, and María had broad shoulders. She rested her hands on her formidable hips.

  “Señora Knight, tiene que echar la fantasma.”

  Grace’s brain, still entwined with Rico, tried to back up and turn around. Did they want her to evict a ghost?

  “¿Como? What?”

  “La Llorona, allá arriba.” María pointed up the stairs behind her.

  “Good morning, Grace.” Annie arrived with Socorro close behind her. Socorro had filled her in on the crisis. “They want you to exorcize the haunt who lives upstairs. Or hire someone to do it. They call her la Llorona, the One Who Weeps. Socorro has heard her crying.”

  The maids gave a collective sigh of relief. The cavalry had arrived and she spoke English.

  “They want you to get rid of the ghost before susto turns into espanto.”

  “Susto? Espanto?”

  “Susto means fright. Espanto means terror. María knows a witch who can perform a limpieza, a cleaning.”

  “I see.”

  But Annie wasn’t sure she did. “Susto and espanto are serious. They can frighten the soul out of a body and cause it to wander off.”

  Grace had heard whispers about the cold spot in the rear upstairs hallway. She had felt it herself, but she blamed a draft from an airshaft in the ceiling.

  She sorted through the options. An exorcism by a local witch would amuse the guests, but Grace could imagine them commenting in loud whispers during the ritual. The maids considered this serious and Grace had to do the same.

  “Do they have any idea who the Weeper might be?”

  Annie and the maids put their heads together. After much discussion Annie reported. “They say that one of Hernán Cortés’s men got an Indian woman with child. When the baby was born the mother brought him here to ask the gachupin, the Spaniard, to give her money to buy food. He grabbed the baby’s feet and dashed its head against a column. The mother ran away, but he chased her and ran his sword through her.”

  “Good lord!”

  “She’s been crying for her child ever since.”

  “All right.” Grace turned and headed upstairs. Fortunately, the back corridor was where the army officers stayed and they had left early.

  Annie followed. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll have a talk with her.”

  Grace retrieved a stool from her room and the Bible she had never read. She placed the stool under the air vent and sat on it. The Bible was a prop to impress the maids, so she opened it at random and laid it on her lap. Behind her she could hear the women rustling like mice, jostling for a view from where the stairs made a turn at the first landing.

  Grace cleared her throat and for want of anything better, she said, “Good morning.” That wasn’t the Weeper’s language, but if the maids wanted this done in Nahuatl they would have to do it themselves.

  A faint moaning came from overhead. Grace knew it was the wind blowing across the air vent on the roof, but the hair stirred on her arms anyway. She glanced down at the Bible. The first words she saw were in 1 Samuel, verse one. “I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit.”

  Maybe the line was coincidence or maybe not, but Grace realized that nothing she could say about Satan or demons or evil spirits would be appropriate. She took a deep breath and began a heart-to-heart talk, as if the grieving young mother were sitting in front of her. When she finished she made an awkward sign of the cross and said, “Go in peace, dear girl. Your child waits for you in Heaven.”

  She returned the stool and the Bible to her room. She would ask Socrates to block up the vent on the roof immediately. The maids made way for her to pass, then closed in behind her, laughing and chatting, happy that the matter had been settled. When they reached the ground floor they scampered off down the wide corridor, playing tag on their way to the linen pantry.

  One of her guests watched them go with disapproval stamped all over her. She was one of those English dowagers who would travel halfway around the world, only to demand that everything be exactly as she had left it in Kensington. Her idea of exotic cuisine was roast beef with a hint of pink in the middle.

  She had a new complaint this morning. “Mrs. Knight, why does the chambermaid insist on turning my shoes upside down?”

  “Some Mexicans believe that leaving shoes upside down overnight empties out the day’s accumulation of evil. It also relieves pain in the feet and legs.” Grace didn’t mention that she stored her own shoes upside down to keep insects, spiders, and scorpions from setting up house in them.

  “What rubbish! That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I’ll instruct them to leave your shoes with soles on the floor in the future. But please do bear in mind, Mrs. Fitz-Goring, that they believed they were helping you.”

  Grace found Socrates and told him about the vent. She was headed for breakfast in the courtyard when Leobardo, the night watchman, appeared with his hat in his hand. He launched into his request, talking so fast that Grace called Lyda to help with the translation.

  “Word spreads fast,” said Lyda. “He claims his wife hired a nagual, a witch, to tie a knot in the drawstrings of his unmentionables so he wouldn’t, you know…”

  “Wouldn’t what? Use the toilet?”

  “No, Gracie, so he wouldn’t fool around with other women.”

  Grace maintained a poker face. “Tell him I don’t exorcise underwear.”

  Lyda managed to keep from smiling while she explained that
to Leobardo. After he headed, crestfallen, for his hammock in the rear courtyard she said, “I should ask him for the name of that witch. Jake is going to Chihuahua on business for a month. I should engage someone to tie a knot in his nappies.”

  “Well, I’m not qualified.”

  Grace was glad Rico hadn’t witnessed all this. She was pretty sure he would tease her. On the other hand, only a couple hours had passed since she saw him and already his absence was causing an ache in the vicinity of her heart.

  After breakfast she climbed the stairs from the second floor to the Colonial’s flat roof. Her excuse was to make sure the cisterns of rainwater were clean and to see if Socrates had closed off the air vent. She knew there was no need. Socrates always kept the cisterns clean and he had taken care of the vent immediately. She had another reason for going.

  Grace was proud of the roof. Three years ago she had had workmen cover it with the latest in building material, something called tar-paper. She had not been up here since it was first installed, and it stretched around her like a desert of black lava.

  She walked to the northeast corner. On her right rose the two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, the one called Sleeping Lady. To the left of the volcanoes were the three peaks known as Tres Marías. They rose only a little above the mountain chain. The three peaks and the range that encircled the valley reminded Grace of a tiara. Puffs of white smoke rose in a line above the dense stand of trees on the steep slope leading up to them.

  The puffs of smoke were what she had come up here to see. Rico and his men were on that train. They were headed for the small railroad depot in the village of Tres Marías at the pass. When Rico left her this morning he told her that his company would be joining General Huerta. It was a routine patrol, he said, to make sure no troublemakers interfered with the operation of the railroad, but he might be gone for a week or more.

  Why would the army’s commander-in-chief come to Morelos for a routine patrol?

  For all his scapegracery, honor counted with Rico. Grace could imagine him lying to her for only one reason, to protect her from an unpleasant truth. She stared at the smoke unreeling as the train chugged up the slope, and she wondered what the truth was.

  17

  Summoned

  Angel believed she would not live to see the sun set. She wondered if there was anything she could say to make peace with the God she had taunted and spurned all her life. She decided to trust that if He were as all-knowing as everyone claimed, He would have a sense of humor where she was concerned.

  She and the rest of Zapata’s army had found what cover they could, but General Huerta’s troops had them surrounded and outnumbered three to one. The train that brought the federales soldiers from Mexico City to Tres Marías had also carried a battery of 75-millimeter artillery lashed to flatcars.

  Angel tried not to flinch when the big guns boomed and shells exploded in front of her, splintering trees and throwing up dirt and fragments. She had smelled burning powder from rifles before, but the odor that permeated this little valley was acrid and ominous.

  Plinio glanced over at her and smiled sadly. “You are not a soldier until you have smelled cannon fire.”

  When the lull came Angel knew what it meant. General Huerta’s mangy curs were preparing a final assault. From the rocks and trees around her she heard men screaming in pain. She could see one of the fallen, her company’s young lieutenant. She had butted heads with him on a daily basis, but the sight of him, lightless brown eyes staring at infinity, made her as sad as if he had been her beloved brother.

  She was almost out of ammunition and she knew her comrades must be, too. They usually only had enough for tiroteos, skirmishes with patrols. Even if Zapata could raise enough money to buy munitions from El Norte, the United States, he would have to find a way to transport it 1,500 miles from the border, mostly on the backs of mules.

  Angel stood in her stirrups and shouted to the men she had always thought of as hers. “If we are to go to hell today anyway, let’s take these chingados with us.”

  She didn’t expect them to agree with her, much less follow her, but she didn’t care. She faced the mare toward the wall of rocks that hid the nearest artillery battery and prepared to charge it by herself.

  “Wait, Brat.” Antonio rode to where the lieutenant’s body had fallen in a sitting position with his back against a rock. He made the sign of the cross over him and took the company’s guidon from the dead man’s hand.

  When he held it out to Angel she hesitated. To carry the flag into battle was an honor she didn’t think she deserved. Besides, she couldn’t shoot her rifle and hold on to the flag, too. And she really wanted to shoot someone. There was also the fact that the federales always tried to kill the standard-bearer first.

  “‘De la suerte y de la muerte no hay huída,’” Plinio said. “‘From fate and death there is no flight.’ Carry it, chamaco, and we will follow you.”

  “Then I will arrive in hell first,” Angel muttered. She took the reins in one hand and held the flag’s staff high with the other. “Come, muchachos, let’s make ghosts of el gobierno.”

  She urged the mare into a gallop across ground pitted with craters. She didn’t have to look back. She heard the sound of hoofbeats behind her.

  They had to dismount, leave their horses at the base of the escarpment, and labor up the steep slope to the battery emplacement. Angel expected an artillery shell to take her head off at any moment, but silence prevailed. The stillness frightened her more than gunfire. What were they waiting for?

  Shouting at full volume, Angel and her men reached the rocks the artillerymen had piled up as a breastwork and scrambled over them. She wedged the flagstaff upright between two stones so her hands would be free to use her knife, but the emplacement was empty. She stared at the scuffed, scoured ground, the tracks of the artillery carriage wheels plainly visible in the dirt.

  A cloud of dust rose in the distance. As best Angel could make out with her binoculars, it was raised by retreating cavalry, infantry, and the gun carriages bumping along behind the artillery mules. Angel’s men cheered, shouted insults, and fired a few shots after them.

  “Save your bullets,” she said.

  As she watched the dust cloud grow smaller she felt a churning in the pit of her stomach. What could have summoned General Victoriano Huerta away? From what she had heard about Huerta, he would not retreat from a sure victory. She tried to guess what evil he had planned for them.

  Angel led her men at a brisk walk up the dusty main street of another village perched among boulders and outcrops. She came to the plaza, shaded by palms and banana trees and dismounted in front of the small, whitewashed church. The members of the welcoming committee looked as if they had been dug up from the local cemetery, but Angel wasn’t surprised to find only old folks. The younger men had either fled or were hiding to avoid execution, exile, or conscription into the federal army.

  With their frayed trousers and torn shirts, their knives, machetes, bandoleers, and pistols, Angel’s band looked menacing. Only their rifles distinguished them from bandits, and these days, a lot of bandits carried those. But as far as the villagers were concerned, anyone in either Zapata’s army or Huerta’s was el gobierno.

  Angel didn’t blame them for thinking so. It was often difficult to tell them apart. Two of the men in her group still wore federal uniforms. They and a lot of others had surrendered to Zapata after Huerta pulled out. The deserters were conscripts from the north, as ragged and hungry as the rebels. Angel’s men claimed that their enemy’s abrupt withdrawal was a miracle. Angel wished that God, while in the miracle mood, had persuaded the federales to leave all their guns and rations behind. Especially the rations.

  Any group of armed men sent village women and children into hiding. Children indicated mothers, and both sides had a habit of stealing women to provide certain services for their troops. The difference was the rebels usually borrowed them at night and returned them in the morning. If
the federales took them, they disappeared forever.

  A barefoot antique with an armful of flowers approached Angel. Her black skirt, blouse, and shawl had faded to gray from half a lifetime spent in mourning. Her deformed spine bent her double at the waist. She held out the flowers and swiveled her chin sideways to peer up at Angel.

  “For you, my son.”

  Angel thanked her in Nahuatl. She stuck a dahlia into her hatband beside the medallion of the brown-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe, and passed the rest along. People had mistaken her for a young man everywhere she went, which was what she wanted.

  The mountain folk may not have recognized that Angel was a woman, but they sensed who was in charge. That was partly because she rode a fine mare, but something more elusive was at work. Angel’s Castilian ancestors had passed to her an unspoken aura of command. In centuries of Spanish domination, los indios had become adept at recognizing it.

  The village women distributed tortillas and beans and Angel’s men wolfed them down. An old man handed her the lead line with a gaunt mule on the other end. His clothes were ragged. He wore no badge of office, but he had the bearing of a jefe, a leader.

  “Colli, grandfather, do you know any young men willing to join us? We fight for land and liberty alongside General Zapata.”

  No front teeth impeded the mayordomo’s smile. He crossed himself, an indication that Zapata had gained admittance to the pantheon of Catholic saints, along with some much more ancient ones of whom the priests wouldn’t approve. He turned toward the small adobe jail and beckoned.

  The carved oak door creaked open and two men eased out. One kept his rifle. The other threw his weapon to one side, raised his hands above his head, and approached slowly. He wore the gray uniform of the local police, the rurales.