Last Train From Cuernavaca

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  19

  The Fool-Swap

  Lyda once said that the best place to think, sleep, or make whoopee was on a train. Then she had to explain to Grace what whoopee meant. Grace had never made whoopee on a train, but she was thinking about it.

  The rhythmic clack of the iron wheels across the riveted joints in the rails provided a metronome for those thoughts. Maybe when the hotheads, soreheads, and knuckleheads in the capital sorted out their political differences, she and Federico could book a sleeping compartment on the night train to Veracruz and take in the sea air.

  Even though she staged séances for her guests, Grace never claimed to have psychic abilities. But now she could not shake a nagging concern for the safety of President Madero and his wife. The memory of the look in General Huerta’s eyes as he stepped into the victoria cab and headed for Cuernavaca’s train station haunted her.

  In spite of her uneasiness about the situation in the capital she felt guilty leaving Cuernavaca for even these few days. But if she were going to desert the Colonial, February was a good time. The flurry of Christmas pageants and 1913’s New Year’s celebrations had ended. Lyda, Socrates, María, and the rest of the staff could handle the hotel’s daily operation.

  Grace used the need for supplies as an excuse to go to Mexico City, but Lyda knew the real reason. Grace wanted to see Federico Martín at Tres Marías. If Lyda knew that Rico had been spending the late-night hours in Grace’s room, she never let on.

  Grace could have sent a telegram to tell Rico she was coming, but she knew that the telegraph machine sat on a table in the adjutant’s office. A major source of entertainment for Colonel Rubio and his staff was reading telegrams as they came in. Rico’s comrades-in-arms almost certainly would see any message before he did. Grace was acquainted with many of Rico’s comrades-in-arms so she paid a muleteer to deliver a letter instead.

  Now she wished she had hitched a ride with the mules, and to hell with her fear of the beasts. The most wayward mule could move faster than this train. Was it her imagination, or had the clacking, creaking, swaying, and rattling become more alarming since the last time she rode it?

  Mexicans never ceased to mystify Grace. They had blasted through mountains, spanned chasms, and cantilevered trackbeds out into very thin air to construct 19,000 miles of rails in unforgiving terrain. Maintaining their feat, however, seemed beyond them. She suspected their fatalistic attitude toward death had something to do with it. After all, what sort of people buy skulls made of spun sugar as treats for their children on All Souls’ Day?

  To be fair, the engine had cause to slow down. The pass at Tres Marías was ten thousand feet in the air. The train had left the valley and had passed through the villages of bougainvillea-covered huts scattered among the foothills. Now it was chugging up a grade that, in Grace’s opinion, put it in dereliction of the law of gravity. This was the part of the journey she dreaded. The railbed made sharp switchback turns and as the air grew thinner, her queasiness turned to nausea.

  She knew that fretting wouldn’t bring her to Rico any faster or make her feel better. The slant of the coach already had her tilted back. She laid her head against the threadbare velvet of the first-class seat and let her thoughts wander.

  This little narrow-gauge train with its balloon-shaped smokestack reminded Grace of Annie’s favorite story in the Kindergarten Review magazine. “The Pony Engine” was about a small locomotive that set out to haul a long line of freight cars over a steep hill after the bigger engines refused. When asked to do something, Annie usually gave the Pony Engine’s reply. “I think I can.”

  As this train strained to make it up the slope, Grace could hear the pistons chanting, “I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.”

  Kind, rambunctious Annie. By the time Grace met Annie the child had few artifacts from her former life. She had brought along the Kindergarten Review magazine when her father took a job with the American Smelting and Refining Company in Sonora, Mexico. A few months later he ran off with, as Lyda put in, the part-time stenographer and full-time tart in the company’s main office. He hadn’t been heard from since. When anyone was tactless enough to ask if she had received word from him, Lyda said she had not, probably because hell did not have telegraph service.

  Lyda and Annie had ended up in Cuernavaca, carried 1,200 miles on the fickle tide of choices and circumstances that arrange everyone’s fate. Lyda had walked into the Colonial fourteen months ago and asked Grace for a job. She was strong evidence for one of Grace’s favorite theories: some people must have been acquainted in a former life, because on first meeting they feel as if they always have known each other.

  Grace pushed up the bottom half of the soot-smeared window and leaned out into the resin-scented breeze. She narrowed her eyes against flying ash and cinders, but the fresh air and the view were worth it. She noticed more stumps among the tall pines though, cut for firewood to keep the train running.

  She saw Rico and Grullo waiting on an outcrop. She waved and he spurred the silver-gray stallion down the slope and alongside the tracks. The train labored along so slowly that Grullo easily kept pace. If any sight was more beautiful than Rico on that horse Grace couldn’t imagine it.

  When the train chugged to a stop in the tiny stone station, Rico was waiting to help her down the steps. She said, “Excuse me,” turned away, and threw up on the rail. Evidence alleged that she hadn’t been the first to do that.

  Rico had seen a lot of passengers do the same thing and he was prepared. He dampened his big linen handkerchief with the cold spring water in his canteen. He gave her the handkerchief and then the canteen to rinse the taste away. Finally he handed her a bottle of Coca-Cola, also chilled, probably in the same spring from which the water came. The makers of the beverage claimed it cured morphine addiction, dyspepsia, headaches, neurasthenia, and impotence. It should do to calm an unsettled stomach.

  Juan waved from the far end of the small platform. “Hola, Mamacita.” Then he went back to flirting with the prettiest of the young women who sold food and trinkets to the train’s passengers.

  While one worker lowered the spout on the water tank, others threw wood into the tender. Rico led Grace up a well-worn path to an overlook. Below them the valley spread out in a patchwork of fields, villages, sugar refineries, and haciendas. Cuernavaca’s roofs clustered in the middle of it with the two volcanoes standing watch.

  Rico pointed to a mosaic of fields fanned out around the rambling terra-cotta tile roof of a house, and the chimneys of a sugar refinery.

  “That’s my family’s hacienda. It’s called Las Delicias. The Delights.”

  Grace was impressed. Las Delicias was bigger than any of the estates surrounding it. And its fields were still green. Rico had to be relieved by that. Grace was surprised by how much of the valley’s area was charred. The rumors about the Zapatistas’ depredations must be true.

  Railroad workers weren’t noted for their speed or efficiency, but Grace was sure only a few minutes had passed before the train’s whistle blew.

  “The fool-swap is about to leave,” said Rico.

  “Fool-swap?”

  “One of your English poets wrote, “‘You enterprised a railroad, you blasted the rocks away…and now every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell can be in Buxton.’”

  “It doesn’t rhyme.”

  “Don’t blame me. I didn’t write it. But thanks to the railroad the chilangos, the fools, in the capital can easily reach Cuernavaca and vice versa.”

  Grace had received hardly any formal education and the breadth of Rico’s astounded her. “How do you know about British writers?”

  “A course in English literature.”

  “At Harvard?”

  “Yes.”

  “How broad-minded of the Yanks to include us in their curriculum.”

  “The Yanks have forgotten all about that tea party in Boston harbor.”

  “We haven’t.” Grace smiled
when she said it.

  Rico handed her back up the steps to the first-class coach. She told him where she would be in hopes he could take leave and join her. He waved from the platform as the train pulled away.

  The downhill leg of the journey was much faster, but more terrifying. Grace kept her eyes closed for most of it.

  She was never prepared for the clamor at Mexico City’s rail station. Passengers hung out the windows and called to their friends. Porters yelled. Hotel touts burst into the car, each trying to out-shout the other. Police whistles shrilled and horns blared in the streets beyond.

  Her late husband’s cousin, Calisto Mendoza, was waiting for her. He loaded her bags into his Nike roadster and headed out into the busy street as if his were the only car on it. As he wove in and out of traffic Grace gripped the door frame so tightly the blood drained from her knuckles. The number of vehicles seemed to have increased exponentially since her last visit, and every other one was a trolley or bus. Every inch of wall space not plastered with advertising posters was covered with admonitions not to post them.

  No wonder the Capital’s residents, the chilangos, had a reputation for being high-strung and irritable. Grace felt grateful again for the mountain range that encircled Cuernavaca. No matter what that English poet wrote about the railroad making it easier for fools to travel, the mountains kept the chilangos from creating this sort of bedlam in her beloved City of Eternal Spring.

  Calisto Mendoza drove past parks, monuments, and the magnificent opera house. Besides the big department store, El Centro Mercantil, there were German beer halls, English banks, Italian restaurants, French lingerie stores, and at least one Japanese curio shop. Once the car turned onto the tree-lined Paseo de la Reforma in the heart of the city Grace relaxed. The embassies and handsome homes that lined the boulevard had not changed. Nor had the Mendoza family’s three-story house that fronted on it.

  The drab façade gave no hint of the elegance waiting on the other side of the twelve-foot-high, carved oak doors. Calisto honked as he approached them, and the doors swung open to reveal a tropical paradise. Parrots and toucans flew among flowering trees and exotic plants. Vines almost hid the moss-covered stone walls and wrought-iron balconies of the house itself.

  Calisto eased the Nike into the roofed entryway, but he hit the brake halfway into the tree-shaded courtyard beyond. Grumbling about useless modern gadgets, he got out and moved a velocipede and at least a dozen roller skates scattered next to the Minerva touring car, which was painted bright red to match the Nike. Grace never did know how many people lived here, but from the number of skates she assumed more children had been added.

  The family was waiting for her in the parlor where a cheerful fire burned in the corner hearth. Tears stung Grace’s eyes as her husband’s kin embraced her. She and Carlos had been married only two years, yet they treated her as if she had always been a member of their family.

  Carlos had never said what positions his relatives held in Porfirio Díaz’s government, and Grace had not asked. In spite of the high regard that many of the Colonial’s foreign guests had for Díaz, Rico had educated her about the dark side of his regime. Grace liked the Mendozas. She did not want to learn anything about them that might affect her affection for them.

  Calisto translated as his family tried to tell Grace everything that had happened in the past six months. She learned that the newcomers in the house were distant relatives from Morelos. Zapata’s indios brutos, they said, had burned their hacienda.

  That night Grace shared a bed with the family’s aged aunt. The aunt snored, but Grace was so tired she heard only eight or ten of the honks and whiffles before she fell asleep. Grace intended to take Calisto’s wife, Rafaela, aside in the morning and tell her about Rico, but finding anyone alone in the Mendoza house was next to impossible.

  For the next two days, a chauffeur drove the Minerva so Grace, Rafaela, and two female relatives could shop. When Grace finished buying the supplies she needed for the Colonial, they made the rounds of Rafaela’s favorite stores. She insisted that Grace have the latest in French undergarments. She held it up by a strap for Grace’s inspection. She said it was called a brassiere and she and the cousins offered suggestions while Grace tried to figure out where the hooks and laces went.

  At dinner Saturday night, Calisto invited Grace to attend early Mass with the family at the cathedral on the city’s central plaza. After that they could rent boats in the floating gardens of Xochimilco, then attend the Sunday afternoon band concert in Chapultepec Park.

  It sounded like a perfect way to spend the day. Grace looked forward to relaxing on Sunday. On Monday she could visit President and Mrs. Madero and set her mind at ease about their welfare.

  February 1913

  No Mexican general could withstand a cannonball of 50,000 pesos.

  —President Álvaro Obregón

  Those bastards! The moment they sense an opportunity, they want to get their fingers in the pie, and off they go to where the sun shines brightest.

  —General Emiliano Zapata

  20

  Fiesta of Bullets

  When the women gathered in the courtyard Sunday morning, Grace wore the dress she had bought the day before. It was the latest fashion and looser and shorter than what she was used to. Even with lisle stockings and a long duster coat, she felt a draft on her ankles.

  Rafaela and the other young women had dressed in white with bright shawls around their shoulders and high tortoiseshell combs in their hair. Each had sleeked back her glossy black mane and pinned it in a knot at the base of her neck. As they gathered in the courtyard they reminded Grace of a flock of swans.

  The capital’s main plaza was not like most in Mexico. Although the cathedral fronted one side and a large fountain spouted water in the middle, it was not graced with trees, benches, or a bandstand. White-gloved policemen directed traffic that formed massive snarls in spite of their shrill whistles and energetic efforts.

  The Mendoza family occupied two of the cathedral’s hundreds of pews. Grace had not ever spent much time in church. She closed her eyes and let the music and the Latin liturgy wash over her.

  After the service, Grace and the Mendozas joined the hundreds of other worshipers fanning out across the plaza. Grace noticed the company of soldiers crossing the plaza toward the National Palace, but she thought nothing of it.

  The soldiers had hardly disappeared inside when the shooting started. One volley originated at the National Palace, but other shots came from the far side of the plaza. Caught in the crossfire, people screamed and ran. Someone knocked Grace sprawling, but he probably saved her life. He hadn’t gone far when machine-gun fire mowed him down.

  The smallest of the Mendoza children stood crying in the middle of it all. Grace scooped him up and ran to the fountain in the center of the plaza. Shielding him, she crouched against the fountain’s concrete side and peered over it, looking for the sources of the gunfire.

  At first she thought the rebels had managed to bring their fight into the capital itself. Then she saw that the combatants all wore the uniform of the Federal Army. It made no sense to her, but she hadn’t time to ponder politics.

  Once she saw which streets gunfire wasn’t coming from, she picked up the boy and raced for the nearest one. Just as she reached it, stray bullets hit the corner of the building close by, showering her with debris. She kept running, turning down one street then another until the crackling sound of the battle faded. She collapsed on a bench in a little park and realized she was lost. When she’d caught her breath, she took the child’s hand and set off walking, asking directions as she went.

  An hour later Grace and the boy made it to the Mendoza’s neighborhood. The last few blocks to their front gate were the most dangerous. She was back in the heart of the city, and bullets were flying from all directions. Grace had lived through one revolution. She knew what heavy artillery sounded like. Someone had brought in a big gun. When it went off she pulled the child into a doorw
ay.

  While the howitzer was being reloaded, she sprinted along the front wall of the Mendoza’s house, already pitted with bullet holes. Grace pounded on the door and shouted. After what seemed half an eternity Calisto let her in.

  Everyone had thought the child was dead and the women screamed with joy. The rest of the family had made it home safely. The men dragged all the mattresses into the center of the house as a defense against stray bullets. Grace helped them build ramparts of them, but she had little faith that they would stop cannonballs or artillery shells.

  The men gathered what few weapons they had—one musket, two rifles, three pistols of varying vintage, and a dozen machetes. All night the family huddled together, women and children in the center, while sporadic shooting continued. Grace thought the battle would stop the next morning, but it didn’t. By midday the faint odor of decay drifted over the wall.

  The adults held a conference and decided to flee to the hacienda of relatives in Xalpa, seven miles southeast of town. When night came they began loading the women and sleepy children into the Minerva. The Nike only had two seats, so one of the men rode as guard next to the driver.

  By tripling up, the Minerva could accommodate all the women and children, but with no room for personal belongings. The men would return for Calisto and those who remained.

  Rafaela beckoned to Grace to get into the car.

  “I’ll come later.”

  Rafaela tried to reason with her, but Grace kept shaking her head. She knew that as soon as Rico heard about the fighting he would come for her. When he did, she would be here. Still, fear sent a chill through her when the two cars drove away.

  Just after sunrise, Rico did arrive. He was hollow-eyed and unshaven. He had a long, bloody wound on his cheek, and a bullet hole in the upper sleeve of his uniform jacket. Grace started to sob and he put his arms around her.