Last Train From Cuernavaca

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  If he intended to kick her or take a chunk out of her arm with those teeth, now was the time to find it out. Serafina had given her an old straw sombrero and a large red bandana to hold it in place. Grace folded the bandana diagonally and tied it around his neck. She adjusted it to hang the way the rebel soldiers wore theirs, then stepped back to admire him.

  “Don’t you look the swell, though.”

  The expression in Moses’s eyes could only have been adoration. He lifted his whiskery chin, expanded his bony chest, and affected a swagger.

  Lieutenant Angel’s band was on the move again. Serafina said lookouts had spotted a patrol of federales only a few miles from the camp.

  Antonio gave Grace an old pair of khaki trousers to wear under her skirt and a piece of twine to hold them up. She used Serafina’s knife to rip the skirt up the front as far as her knees so she could ride astraddle. The clumsy wooden saddle rubbed her in all the wrong places, but it was better than walking. She shared Moses’s broad back with Serafina.

  Grace didn’t recognize the villages they passed through, but that was to be expected. When she took the train across these mountains she had caught only glimpses of distant rooftops among the trees. The view from up close was unsettling. This was not the picturesque, tranquil Mexico she knew. Angel’s men usually sang to pass the hours as they rode, but not now.

  Houses and fields were burned or abandoned. The old people were left to starve in the ruins. Angel’s men shared with them what little food they had.

  Grace didn’t know where they had gotten any food at all since their own rations were scant. They probably had plundered it from haciendas. Grace should have disapproved of that, but she didn’t. The more she saw of the destruction, the more Lieutenant Angel and her comrades began to resemble Robin Hood and his men.

  Many of Morelos’s landed elite frequented the Colonial’s restaurant, cantina, and ballroom. Grace was friendly with them and enjoyed their company, but she was certain that if the army had commited these atrocities, the hacendados were the cause of it. She was relieved that Rico had been assigned to Veracruz. At least he could not have been involved.

  “Where are all the people?” Grace asked Serafina.

  “El gobierno is sending the indios far away.”

  “But why?” Grace asked.

  “God knows. I do not.”

  Then Grace noticed small yellow flags hanging on some of the doors. They reminded her of lithographs she had seen of English villages be-seiged by the plague. A body abandoned at the side of the road increased her sense of foreboding. It was wrapped like a tamale in a palm leaf mat with the bare feet sticking out. Serafina crossed herself and tied her bandana over her nose and mouth.

  “Tifus.” She whispered it, as though to avoid attracting the notice of the disease.

  “Tee’foos?” Grace asked.

  “Sí. Tifus.”

  Grace repeated it until the answer came to her. She had heard typhus called many names—“jail fever,” “famine fever,” “putrid fever,” “hospital fever,” “camp fever,” and “ship fever.” By any name it was lethal as often as not. She knew that lice spread it. The itching on her skin suddenly seemed more than merely bothersome.

  Angel, Antonio, and José rode stone-faced through the ravaged countryside. No one felt like singing today.

  “I am going to Cuernavaca,” José said. “I’ll meet you at Yautepec.”

  Angel didn’t argue with him. She knew he was worried about his daughter.

  “Take the gringa with you.”

  José shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “Fatso’s men have put up roadblocks everywhere. I will have to travel at night over dangerous trails. If los federales find her with me they might throw her in jail. Or worse.”

  From the rear of the column came Grace’s husky alto. She was singing the women’s favorite song from her reportoire. “The Dreadful Wind and Rain” was about subjects dear to their hearts—passion, betrayal, murder, and a ghost. Antonio had helped her translate it into a haunting mix of Spanish and Nahuatl.

  It told the story of the young woman drowned by her lover. A fiddler found her body and put it to good use. He made a bow of her long yellow hair and pegs of her finger bones. But the part the women loved best, and the men too, was this verse:

  And he made a little fiddle of her breast bone,

  Oh the wind and rain.

  The sound could melt a heart of stone,

  Cryin’, oh the dreadful wind and rain.

  The more popular Inglesa became, the less Angel liked her. But though she wouldn’t admit it, she liked that song. She was surprised that Inglesa made the effort to sing it in Spanish, much less Nahuatl. Most gringos, especially those who spoke English, believed communication was impossible in any language but their own. Americans were particularly convinced that if they spoke English loudly enough, foreigners would understand them.

  Inglesa, however, was a prime mimic. Every day she added to her stock of Spanish and Nahuatl words, what she called “Kitchen-Injun.” And her accent was almost perfect. She had learned the words and the harmony to “Valentina” and other favorites.

  “You have to admit,” said José, “that Mamacita has spiced up our little corner of the revolution”

  “The women like her,” added Antonio.

  “No they don’t,” muttered Angel. “Everyone’s afraid that if they annoy her she’ll curse them with warts or a pig’s snout. They’re afraid she’ll make the women barren and the men impotent.”

  Angel was right about that. Socorro had told her father about the séances at the Colonial and Grace’s heart-to-soul talk with La Llorona, the Weeping Woman on the second floor. News of Inglesa speaking with the dead could hardly be kept secret.

  Angel turned in the saddle and scowled back at Moses and Grace, leading the flock of women and children.

  “Nahualli,” she muttered. “Witch.”

  30

  On the Brink

  In daylight, even the most sympathetic observer would feel obliged to call the rebel camp squalid. Misshapen shelters of rags, brush, and flattened oil cans blighted the landscape. The daily debris of people on the move lay scattered among the spring flowers.

  Nightfall, however, transformed it into something magical, as if fairies, or angels, had moved in and redecorated. As twilight deepened, candles flickered in the dozens of altar niches the women had dug into the dirt walls of the arroyo. Each one contained family portraits, images of saints, and bouquets of wildflowers in clay pots. The portraits were the most poignant since many of the faces were of loved ones dead or missing.

  The candlelight shimmered in ribbons along the curves of the bowed heads and shoulders of those who prayed in front of them. Grace was touched by the fact that their faith needed no church nor pulpit, no pews nor priest. They carried God with them, along with the pots and pans and grinding stones, the bedding, rifles, children, dogs, and chickens.

  While the women prepared the evening meal Grace walked away from camp. She had stuffed her skirt, blouse, and patent-leather shoes into a hempen bag of the sort the rebel soldiers carried. At night she used it as a pillow.

  The khaki shirt, trousers, and straw sandals she now had on made riding Moses easier, and also this daily pilgrimage. The night’s storm clouds were gathering in the north, but she started out anyway. At each new campsite she climbed to the highest point she could reach, in hopes of seeing the roofs of Cuernavaca somewhere in the distance.

  Here, as from her other perches, all she saw were ranks of mountains one behind another. The setting sun told her where west was, but she didn’t know her position in relation to it. Was she to the west of Cuernavaca or east of it, to the north or the south? She searched for the glint of sunlight on the iron rails of train tracks. She tried to find puffs of smoke from the engine’s stack, but only saw wisps of clouds curling around the outcrops.

  Grace had admired the distant, misty majesty of these mountains from he
r balcony. Up close, they were a sky-high heap of jagged, wind-whipped boulders interlaced with a labyrinth of chasms, clefts, and narrow passages skirting sheer canyon walls a mile deep.

  Could she and the band of rebels have left Morelos altogether? That was possible. Ancient volcanic upheavals had formed the mountains called Sierra Madre Occidental. Northward they stretched to the border with the United States. South of Morelos they blended into the Sierra Madre del Sur.

  The two ranges formed a towering rampart a hundred miles wide and fifteen hundred miles long. Grace shouldn’t have been surprised that she was lost in the middle of it. She felt lost in other ways, too. At twilight the longing for home and for Rico became so intense that she wanted to start crying and not stop.

  A murmur of voices and muted laughter from below caused the hair at the nape of her neck to stir. In the past three weeks on the run she had come to realize that this war consisted of skirmishes between army patrols and roving bands like Lieutenant Angel’s. It was a metal-cold minuet of advance and retreat, bow and dissemble, snipe and run.

  So, who was trying to sneak up on them? Grace lay on her stomach at the edge of the overlook and peered down at the tangle of bushes along the river below. On the ground the thicket looked impenetrable, but from her aerie Grace could see a clearing in the center of it and a striped blanket spread out there. In the pale light of day’s end she saw Antonio lying on his back with Angel half on top of him, right arm thrown across him, right cheek resting on his chest. The second blanket was draped so carelessly over them that Grace could see they were naked.

  She wriggled back from the edge, stood up, and brushed the dirt off her. She was surprised, but not shocked. She had stumbled over unconventional pairings in the dark back hallways and cluttered dressing rooms of London’s theaters. But even though three weeks ago she had glimpsed Antonio and Angel kissing, she couldn’t believe José’s son would engage in buggery.

  Angel did have something of the feminine about him, but not Antonio. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with features that looked as though they had been chiseled from the reddish-brown rock of these mountains. His penetrating black eyes brought the word “inscrutable” to mind.

  Grace had decided back then that she must have been mistaken about the kissing thing. Now it appeared that she wasn’t. Come to think of it, she had never seen Angel or Antonio flirt with any of the young women in camp.

  She wondered if José knew about it, then realized she hadn’t seen José for a day or two. She would ask Serafina where he had gone, but she didn’t expect a reliable answer.

  Usually Rico and Juan set their canvas camp chairs on the rim of a cloud-shrouded cliff not far from the army’s adobe barracks at Tres Marías. Other than the spectacular view of Cuernavaca’s valley, they couldn’t have said why they liked to lounge on the lip of the abyss. Maybe they did it to provoke fate, as if fate hadn’t enough tricks up its sleeves. But today was different. Today Juan sat and Rico paced along the edge of the cliff.

  Juan poured a drink from one of the five bottles of Marqués de Riscals claret standing like an attentive honor guard next to his chair. He held the glass up so the first rays of the morning sun shone through it, scattering into flashes of ruby, amethyst, and gold. He would have been glad to see Rico even if he hadn’t brought a case of fine wine from the port city of Veracruz, but he was worried about his friend. Rico was a warrior, not a pacer.

  When Rico reached the northern end of his circuit he paused for several minutes to stare at the train tracks snaking down from the high pass. Then he resumed ranging along the edge of the precipice. He avoided looking at the valley below for two reasons. The burned cane fields, sugar refineries, and hacienda houses left ragged black holes in the tapestry of the countryside.

  Cuernavaca’s distant rooftops glowed golden in the dawn’s light. The conflict had not touched them, but the sight of them compounded Rico’s misery. Grace should have been sleeping under one of those roofs. He should have been able to ride Grullo down the mountain, across the valley floor, and along the broad highway from the train station into the heart of the city where the Colonial stood, solid, ancient, elegant, and welcoming. He should have been dancing with Grace to ragtime on the gramophone. He should have been laughing with her, making love with her. Not knowing where she was or what was happening to her was driving him to the brink of insanity.

  The night’s rainstorm had passed. The sleek needles of the pines were freshly washed and glistening. Juan glanced at the flame-colored clouds outlining the mountain peaks. The air smelled like incense.

  “The sun has just awakened, my brother. The train isn’t scheduled to arrive for four more hours. Wearing a ditch into the ground with your big feet won’t cause it to get here any earlier.”

  “That damned engineer is probably dallying with one of his women.”

  “Even if Hanibal foreswears love and leaves the capital on time, we still have to wait four hours.”

  Rico wanted to saddle Grullo and ride off by himself in search of the rebels. When he asked Rubio for command of a company of men to hunt them he had forgotten how bureaucracies worked, or didn’t. Two interminable weeks and a blizzard of telegrams passed before Rico received his orders and the recruits he needed. When the men finally assembled, Rico learned they had nothing to load into their rifles. Now he was waiting for ammunition to arrive on the train from Mexico City.

  “Maybe bullets are cached in Cuernavaca and Rubio didn’t mention them,” said Juan.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “To make success more difficult for you.” Juan held out the bottle of claret, one quarter full. Rico returned it empty

  “Rubio doesn’t like you.” Juan opened another bottle.

  “Rubio doesn’t like anyone. Except Grace.” Rico ventured a glance at Cuernavaca’s red-tiled roofs. The sharp pain of angst in his chest made him regret it immediately. “Everyone likes Grace.”

  “Rubio hates you in particular.”

  This was news to Rico. “Why?”

  “You’re everything he’s not. You’re passably good-looking, although not as handsome as I. You’re rich, fearless, rich, fairly intelligent. Did I mention that you’re rich? And worst of all…” Juan paused for a swig of claret. “…you don’t have to pay women to have sex with you.”

  “My grandfather is rich. I’m not.”

  “For a peasant like Rubio that is a distinction too fine to detect with mira-lejos, binoculars.” Juan patted the wooden arm of the canvas chair next to him. “Sit, my brother. Take a siesta. You haven’t slept more than an hour or two a night for the past two weeks. I’ll wake you when I see the train’s smoke.”

  “I don’t trust you to wake me. You once slept through an earthquake.”

  But Rico sat. When he did, his eyelids felt as heavy as twenty-peso pieces.

  “Why this one?” Juan sounded to Rico as if he were speaking under water.

  “Which one?” Rico’s lips and tongue felt swollen and sluggish as he tried to form the words.

  “La Inglesa.”

  “I love her.”

  “You’ve loved many women.”

  “Not like this.”

  “How can you tell this love from the other kind?”

  Rico was too exhausted to hear the wistfulness in Juan’s voice. He might not have recognized it if he had. Wistfulness had never been part of Juan’s nature.

  Rico started to say true love meant being willing to die for the other person, but that sounded too melodramatic. Besides, he knew for a certainty that Juan would lay down his life for him. Caring about his welfare, however, was another matter. If Juan were concerned about Rico’s well-being he wouldn’t have taken advantage of his friend’s distraction to win a month’s pay at whist. Rico didn’t blame him though. Death was serious. Cards were a lark. Rico would have done the same.

  So, well-being was the key concept here. His words came out slurred, as though he were drunk on exhaustion.

  “When you
care about a woman’s happiness more than your own, that is true love.”

  Rico fell asleep so quickly that if Juan had anything more to say on the subject, he didn’t hear it.

  He woke with a start when Juan shook him. He jumped up so fast he overturned the canvas chair. Juan grabbed a handful of his tunic to keep him from pitching over the edge of the cliff and hauled him to safety.

  “Has the train come?” Rico righted the chair and looked toward the station below.

  “Not yet, but this fellow claims to have information.”

  The peasant standing at attention wore a khaki uniform tunic, but that didn’t identify him as friend or foe. Federal soldiers and rebels alike put on what ever clothing they could buy from the living or scavenge from the dead.

  “My name is Ambrozio Nuñez, esteemed sirs. I can tell you where a notorious band of rebels has camped.”

  “If this is a trick…” Juan was all amiability and menace “…we will tie you down, cut you open, and invite the wild beasts to feast on your intestines.”

  “It is not a trick, I swear on the beard of St. Jude. The band that follows Lieutenant Angel is camped at the head of a canyon not far from here.” With a stick he drew them a map in the dirt, pointing out the visible landmarks. “They plan to stay there for at least two more days.”

  “Why are you telling us?” asked Juan.

  “At the train station they say the fair-haired captain is looking for that same band of rebels. They also say he has money to spare. I am in need of ten pesos to pay the curandero to heal my sainted mother.” He began the account of his mother’s maladies, rehearsed and obviously bogus.

  Rico held up a hand to stop him. “Do these rebels have a foreign woman with them?”

  Ambrozio paused, choosing his words. A slip of the tongue could get him skewered on the end of the captain’s sword like a chunk of mutton. “I have heard that they did.”

  “What do you mean, ‘They did’?” For a heartbeat Rico allowed himself to believe they had released her.