“Rubio is on a spree in Cuernavaca and Juan is telling convincing lies as to my whereabouts.”
“Juan is good at that.”
Rico could tell Grace was keeping a stiff upper lip, as she would put it. He wished she would cry rather than bottling up the horror of what she had seen this morning.
“Do you know what the original term for ‘bonfire’ was?” she asked.
“No.”
“It’s a contraction of ‘bone fire.’ The Celts used to burn animal bones to ward off evil spirits.” She paused. “Do you think the fires in the plaza will burn those poor people’s bones, too?”
“I doubt it.”
“I saw their faces as we passed them. Some of those bodies were women.”
“Try to sleep, querida.”
Rico put an arm around her so her head rested in the hollow below his shoulder. He wasn’t surprised that the train didn’t leave for another hour. Grace was asleep when it finally started to move. She looked peaceful. Rico prayed to God that nothing would disturb that peace on this journey.
He knew God hadn’t granted his request when the shriek of brakes woke him. The sudden stop threw him and Grace headfirst against the seats in front of them. That was fortuitous.
Whichever rebel fired the opening rounds knew that the officers rode in the first-class car. He was either an ace shot or very lucky. Two bullets broke the window. They whined past at head-height and two inches from the seat-back on which Rico and Grace had been leaning. They were the first lead snowflakes in a blizzard.
Rico threw Grace to the floor, which was none too clean. She landed on her back and he covered her with his body. Their faces were very close.
“Dab hand,” she said.
Rico could hardly hear her over the yelling and the gunfire reverberating inside the coach and out.
“What?”
“Dab,” she repeated. “Adept. Good shot. As in, ‘Dab,’ quoth Dawkins when he hit his wife in the arse with a pound of butter.”
It was a ridiculous thing to say. Maybe he should have wondered if she’d lost her mind, but he assumed she was just being Grace. He laughed and kissed her. Then he got to his knees and looked out the window.
The first grenade sailed past farther down the line and the shape of its container looked familiar. Rico realized he had seen similar ones in the Colonial’s gift shop. Clay pots were ubiquitous though. That one could have come from anywhere. Surely Grace’s friend José had nothing to do with any of this.
Rico knocked out the rest of the window glass with the butt of his rifle. He braced the barrel on the sill and began picking his targets. From overhead came the jaw-jarring pulse of machine-gun fire.
Rico had to admit that the colonel in charge of the troop train had more brains than the average field-grade officer. He had ordered two machine guns mounted onto the roofs and covered with canvas. Thanks to them, the rebels decided to retreat and allow the train to limp on to Tres Marías with its cargo intact. And they would keep the train safe for the rest of its run.
Rico wanted to go on to Cuernavaca with Grace, but he knew he shouldn’t. Not yet.
If Mexico City’s troubles headed for Cuernavaca the news would reach this telegraph office first. If rogue federal soldiers intended to take Cuernavaca, they would pass through here. All he had to do was tell Grace that she would have to leave without him. He gave her the news as they stood on the platform with the engine’s steam swirling around their legs.
“Juan says Cuernavaca is calm. Rubio is on his way here, but he left Colonel Rodriguez in charge of enough troops to keep peace in the city.”
“You’re staying in Tres Marías?” She blinked back tears.
“Rubio will arrive this afternoon. I’ll request to be assigned to Cuernavaca. If the situation has calmed in the capital, I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
If Rubio doesn’t grant the request, Rico thought, I’ll see you anyway.
Grace couldn’t sleep, but she wouldn’t want to if she could. Her dreams were populated with bodies enveloped in flames, and not all of them were dead. She turned on the lamp on the nightstand by her bed. Its steady glow made her appreciate an aspect of her electric light that hadn’t occurred to her before. It couldn’t be used to ignite anyone.
It illuminated the chubby clock whose hands registered almost two in the morning. Grace propped herself up on the pillows and looked around at the bedroom, parlor, and bath she called the Snuggery. Her rooms had an eclectic flair some might call bohemian. Wool rugs from Oaxaca adorned the wide-plank oak floor. A Persian rug hung on the wall.
Grace had found the slender-legged Queen Anne dressing table that had come from England at the Bank of Pity, the national pawnshop in Mexico City. One of los correctos must have fallen on hard times, a common enough occurrence in Porfirio Díaz’s regime. In a way, the pawned dressing table symbolized why Francisco Madero’s revolution had succeeded. It had not begun as a struggle to right the injustices done to Mexico’s poor. What started it was middle class discontent with rising prices, limited career options, and a stagnating economy.
Grace’s husband had been a diplomat. They had lived in official residences for most of their short time together. These three small rooms were the only real home Grace had ever known. She had thought them perfectly suited to her until Rico carried her through the door that night of tango. He added love and laughter. Without him even the furniture seemed dispirited.
Three gilt frames sat on her bureau. One held a daguerreotype of Grace’s mother and father in their stage costumes. It was the only likeness of them she had. The second was a portrait of Rico, with the blue of his dress uniform hand-tinted. From the third frame smiled Rico and Grace, arm-in-arm in front of the bandstand.
In a rosewood box Grace kept Rico’s letters, each in its envelope. Often, when he was gone and she couldn’t sleep, she read some of them. What she loved about them were the turns of phrase written in English but Mexican through and through. “Against love and fate there is no defense,” he wrote. And her favorite: “Love and a canteloupe cannot be hidden.”
She was reading one of his letters when she heard the faint notes of a trumpet. She put on her kimono and ran barefoot down the stairs and along the open corridor to the ballroom. A gas-lamp sconce illuminated the far corner where the piano stood. Rico sat sideways on its bench, his face in profile. He had put a mute in the bell of his trumpet and was playing “La Paloma.”
Of the infinite number of songs about love’s lethal effect, this had to be the saddest. Grace knew the words. Everyone in Mexico did, with the possible exception of the redoubtable Mrs. Fitz-Goring.
How he suffered for her.
Even after death he called to her.
They swear that the dove,
Is his very soul
Awaiting the return of his love.
Cucurrucucú, paloma, ya no llores.
Little dove, don’t cry anymore.
Rico rested his elbows on his knees, dangled the trumpet by two fingers hooked through the back loop of the tuning slide, and turned his head sideways to look up at her.
“Panchito is dead.” He said it softly, as if to avoid disturbing Francisco Madero’s eternal rest.
“Oh, that poor little man.” Grace wanted to ask if Huerta had killed him, but she couldn’t bring herself speak the man’s name. “And his wife?”
“They say she’s been spirited out of the country. Francisco’s brother and the vice president also have been shot. I don’t know any details.”
Grace sat next to him and he put an arm around her. She leaned against his shoulder. His face was dirty and his clothes were dusty. He had about him the earthy perfume of his horse’s sweat. His indifference to his appearance showed how deeply ran his distress.
“The Maderos were your friends,” he said. “I came to tell you myself. I didn’t want you to read it in the newspaper.”
Grace sensed there was more to his midnight ride from Tres Marías than that, but if so
he would tell her in time. They sat in silence for a while. When Rico finally spoke he recited a verse, written no doubt by one of those British poets he so admired.
God; I will pack and take a train,
And get me to England once again,
For England’s the one land I know
Where men of splendid hearts may go.
“There are men of splendid hearts in Mexico, too,” said Grace.
“And the women? What of one woman of splendid heart?”
“She will stay where her beloved is.”
So that was it. The fear that Grace would leave Mexico had brought Rico here in the middle of the night.
“Cuernavaca is my home. England holds nothing for me.” Grace kissed him on the cheek. “Come upstairs. I’ll run a bath for you.” The best features of Grace’s bathroom were the big tiled tub and the noisy, kerosene-fueled water heater.
“Mi cielo, what will become of my poor country?”
“What ever happens, my love, we will face it together.”
As they walked up the stairs Grace knew she would sleep peacefully in his arms tonight. Come hell or high water, as Lyda would say, they had each other. Swirl around them as it might, the storm could not hurt them.
23
The Carousel of Folly
Neither Angel, Antonio, nor the twenty men riding to Tepotzlan with them gave any thought to the ironies of Lent. The Catholic Church declared the six weeks before Easter Sunday a time of sacrifice and fasting, but what do people forgo when they have nothing? How do they fast when they’re hungry every day of the year?
On the other hand, Lent symbolized Christ’s forty solitary days in a desolate area the Jews called The Devastation. Angel and her comrades understood what that was like. As for the temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness, they were eager to yield to as many of those as possible in the next few days. Unavoidable privation was one thing, but what better reason for a spree than the prospect of priest-imposed abstinence?
Tepotzlan’s fiesta lasted through the four days leading up to Ash Wednesday. Everyone agreed it was the best celebration in the state of Morelos. The festivities offered a savory selection of temptations that included all seven of the sins the Catholic Church denounced as deadly—pride, covetousness, envy, anger, sloth, lust, and gluttony. Angel’s comrades favored lust and gluttony. The Church considered all seven sins deadly because they led to even worse behavior. The boys hoped the priests were right, and that lust would result in fornication.
Since gluttony included drunkeness, it was the sin most likely to lead to trouble. Alcohol was the all-purpose lubricant for any wild slide into iniquity. Angel’s comrades drank what ever they could afford, but they preferred mescal. Mescal, they agreed, was good for joy and sadness. They had had enough of sadness in the past months. They were primed for joy.
Before they left camp, Colonel Contreras’s adjutant had handed each of them sixty pesos. It was a full month’s pay, and they felt as wealthy as kings. They didn’t ask where Contreras got the money. Most of the jefes who raised their own companies of men were fairly well off. If Contreras had come to the bottom of his personal funds, he could persuade some rich landowner to support Zapata’s cause or have his cane fields burned.
Plinio waved a slender brown bottle and shouted. “Today I will get as drunk as four hundred rabbits.”
Antonio glanced at Angel and rolled his eyes toward heaven. He and Angel had no need to look beyond each other for lust. The question was, should they stay sober enough to come to the rescue when their compatriots got into trouble? For they surely would get into trouble.
Angel didn’t intend to stay sober or rescue anyone. She leaned closer so Antonio could hear her over the ambient clamor of the pilgrims’ burros and roosters, each proclaiming the road his exclusive domain.
“Better to get drunk than to have to deal with a drunk,” she said. Besides, Angel knew she could count on Antonio to keep his wits about him. He would rescue her should the need arise.
Angel had the devil-may-care nature found in good lieutenants. She was the cheerfully reckless sort whom men would follow into battle the way a puppy will chase a stick. Antonio, on the other hand, was colonel material. He thought beyond what ever skirmish had Angel’s blood up, and he tempered courage with caution.
Between swigs of mescal, the troop debated whether alcohol in a dead man’s veins caused his beard to grow. Manuel swore that after an old toper in his village died, his beard grew until it filled his coffin
“How do you know that?” Antonio called back over his shoulder. “Did you dig up the coffin and open it?”
The men crossed themselves at the very idea, and changed the subject. Conversation was becoming difficult anyway. The nearer they came to Tepotzlan the more crowded the road. Indians streamed down from the mountains as they had since long before festivals had anything to do with Christianity. Many of them had walked for days to get here, with their white wool jackets clutched close, ground fog swirling around their bare brown legs, and ribbons fluttering from their straw hats,
On their backs they toted sacks of corn, pottery precariously stacked, bundles of produce, rolls of straw mats, live chickens, and sheafs of sugarcane stalks. Penitents shouldered crosses of heavy timbers. Groups of musicians provided a discordant score on homemade guitars and harps, flutes, and drums. Woodcarvers carried painted statues, some almost life-sized. Most of the effigies were of St. Jude, patron of desperate causes.
Before the Church demanded forty days of self-denial from the faithful, it allowed them the most abundance they would see all year. Carnival was a mix of religious fervor and wild abandon. It featured saints that were Catholic in name, but pure bred Aztec under their halos. What Maxmilian’s wife, the Empress Carlota, said almost fifty years earlier still applied: “We are working to make this country Catholic,” she once wrote to a friend, “for it is not now, nor has it ever been so.”
One trait the Catholics and the Aztecs shared was a zest for pageantry and ritual. Tepotzlan had dressed for the occasion. Even the outlying streets flaunted paper streamers in bright colors. The closer Angel rode to the center of town the louder were the fireworks, firearms, church bells, music, whistles, and noisemakers. Hundreds of booths displayed a dizzying array of food. The maelstrom of color, noise, and aromas had a more intoxicating effect than mescal.
Angel and the others had existed on rations of beans and parched corn, and not much of those. For days she had thought about a tender hen cooked in spicy chocolate sauce. It was tasty, but she was impatient to finish it so she could try something else. She grinned at Antonio.
“By tonight I’ll be too drunk to stay on my horse. By tomorrow I’ll be too fat to climb into the saddle.”
Antonio sighed. Sometimes he felt as though Angel were a jaguar in a house cat’s skin. He didn’t want to try to tame her, but he was always wary of being scratched.
The fiesta crescendoed around the church. From several blocks away Angel heard the hypnotic music of the Chinelo dancers. Thirty men danced in a circle. They wore robes heavy with embroidery, and huge, plumed headresses festooned with strings of beads and baubles. Their masks featured thick eyebrows and pointed, up-tilted beards designed to ridicule the early Spanish conquerors.
The dance was simple. Each man took two shuffling steps, then leading with his shoulders, gave a hop to the left or to the right. They repeated the hypnotic pattern hour after hour.
When Angel and Antonio tired of it they headed for the main plaza. At its center stood the bandstand where the town’s orchestra was valiantly attempting a brassy version of Verdi’s opening march from Aida. Plinio and Manuel had settled down on one of the iron benches to drink mescal, wax philosophical, and enjoy the passing scene.
The younger men were testing the core Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Priests defined that as the transformation of bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ. For Angel’s comrades it meant turning intangible lust into fleshly pleasures
. The young women strolled arm-in-arm clockwise around the plaza just as their mothers, their grandmothers, and generations of great-grandmothers had done. The young men sauntered in a larger ring in the opposite direction.
Conversation between them was carried on in the language of glances. When a woman’s eyes sent an invitation, the man pivoted around and walked beside her. Somehow the species replenished itself as a result.
Plinio called it el tiovivo de tontería, the carousel of folly. And what, he asked, was more entertaining than watching people commit folly? He waved his bottle at the parade and winked at Angel. “Men and women, always going in opposite directions.”
Mezcal had turned the bulbous tip of Plinio’s long beak redder than usual. The men called him tomato nose, but he didn’t care. “I have a bird dog’s nose,” he would say. “I can smell trouble before you can see it.”
Angel was enjoying the music and her men’s attempts at love’s folly when Plinio’s nose sniffed trouble. He leapt up as though the iron bench had burned through the seat of his pants and hustled over to her.
“Gobierno,” he said.
He was right. The khaki uniforms were scattered through the crowd. They stood out among the white trousers and shirts of the indios.
“¡Mierda!” Angel muttered.
She and Antonio signaled their comrades. One by one they dropped out of the promenade and headed for the corral where they had left their horses. The men were grumpy as they rode away, but at least none of them had been drunk enough to refuse to leave.
When they stopped to water their horses at a public fountain, a young woman darted from behind a ruin of an adobe wall and sprinted to intercept Angel’s mare. She grabbed a stirrup and hung on. Angel pried off her fingers, but the woman clutched her wrist with both hands. She trotted to keep pace while Angel tried to shake her loose. Her grip was strong.
“Take me with you, Capitán. I will cook. I will warm you at night.”
Last Train From Cuernavaca Page 14