Against the Day (193 page)

Long before this, if only Frank had
been sane, he would have reckoned enough was enough, and gone back north and
tried to leave Mexico to its fate. Nothing he could think of was keeping him
here—Wren, whom the day did not provide nearly enough asskicking activities
to allow him to forget entirely, was on the Other Side, as if beyond a frontier
less political than created out of the unforgiving canyon cut by Time in its
flow. Pascual Orozco, though Frank wished him well, including the Mexican
miracle of somehow staying alive, was not a politician to whom Frank could
pledge his life. But what was it worth, then, his life? Who or what could he
see himself pledging it to?

He had been spending more and more
time down at the trainyard outside Jiménez, like some mindless drover, watching
the trains, watching the empty tracks. One day he bought a oneway ticket to the
Capital, got on the train and headed south. No cries of
adiós compañero,
good
luck Frank, nothing like that. Couple handfuls of beans per day for somebody
else was all it came to.

In the Capital
, at a dark, outoftheway restaurant
near the train station, Frank ran into Günther von Quassel, whom he hadn’t seen
since Tampico. Günther was drinking imported German beer in a stein. Frank
ordered a bottle of the local Orizaba product.

“Well,
Günni, what in ’e hell you doin all the way up here, thought you ’s in Chiapas
growing coffee and so forth.”

“Here
on business, now I can’t get back. Whenever there is trouble in Oaxaca, and
lately that is fairly constant, the rail lines to Chiapas are cut. My overnight
stay becomes unexpectedly prolonged. So I haunt the train stations hoping to
slip through a loophole in the laws of chance.”

Frank mumbled something about having been up north.

   
“Ah.
Lively times, I expect.”

   
“Not
lately. Just another unemployed Orozquista these days.”

“There
is a job open on the estate, if you’re interested. If we could ever get back
there. We would pay you handsomely.”

“Some
kind of a plantation foreman, keepin ’em unruly native Indians in line? I get
to carry a whip and so forth? Think not, Günni.”

Günther
laughed and waved his stein to and fro, splashing foam on Frank’s hat. “Of
course, as a northamerican you must be
nostalgic for the days of slavery,
but
in the highly competitive market which coffee has become, we cannot afford to
linger in the past.” Günther explained that before a harvest left the
cafetal,
the coffee “cherries” had to have their pulpy red outer coatings removed,
as well as a parchment layer under that, and finally what was called the
“silver skin,” leaving at last the exportable seed. Once all done by hand,
these jobs were nowadays more efficiently performed by various sorts of
machine. The von Quassel plantation was in the process of being mechanized, and
the machinery, including stationary engines, electrical generators, hydraulic
pumps, and a small but growing fleet of motor vehicles, would all require
regular maintenance.

   
“Lot
of work for one beatup
guerrillero
,”
it seemed to Frank.

   
“You
would train your own crew,
natürlich.
The more they learn, the less you
work, everyone benefits.”

   
“How
about Zapatistas, any of them in the picture?”

   
“Not
exactly.”

   
“Approximately?
Maybe you better tell me.”

Considering
the number of insurgencies against the Madero regime currently in progress all
over the country, Chiapas so far, according to Günther, was quiet, violence
there taking the more usual form of either family vendettas or what some called
“banditry” and others “redistribution,” depending on which was doer and which
doneto. Since late last year, however, there had been a serious rebellion going
on close by in Oaxaca, growing out of a dispute between Che Gómez, the mayor
and
jefe político
of Juchitán, about two hundred miles or so west of
Günther’s plantation, and Benito Juárez Maza, the governor of Oaxaca, who last
year had tried to replace Gómez by sending federal troops to Juchitán. The
jefe
resisted—in the fighting that followed, a federal relief detachment
was wiped out, and finally it took federal

cavalry and artillery to gain control
of the town. Meantime the chegomista army controlled the rest of the region.
Madero, who wasn’t that fond himself of the governor, had invited Gómez up to
Mexico City, under a federal safeconduct, to talk it over. But Gómez had got no
more than a few miles up the railway across the Tehuantepec Isthmus before he
was intercepted by Juárez Maza’s people, arrested, and shot to death.

“This
did not end the rebellion by any means. The
federales
are bottled up now
in Juchitán and a couple of other towns, while several thousand unreconstructed
chegomistas own the countryside, including, when they wish, the railway. Which
is why at the moment Chiapas is cut off from the rest of the country.”

They ate in a
diningroom
lit from
above through an ancient skylight of wroughtiron trusswork and weathered panes.
Older city hands, reporters and such, had gathered at smaller tables in alcoves
and smoked cigarettes and drank madrileños. The light, initially golden,
steadily darkened. Rain arrived about the same time as the soup, and dashed at
the skylight.

“I
hesitate to ask favors unless things get desperate,” said Günther, “but the
harvest is under way, my foreman, I am convinced, is a cryptoZapatista, and I
make myself insane every night imagining what everyone is up to.”

   
“Is
there a back way in?”

“There
is somebody I can talk to.” After coffee and cigars, when the rain had stopped,
they walked through the wet streets, among crazed motorists racing up and down
the avenues, mudcolored omnibuses and tencentavo jitneys, armed irregulars in
private carriages, troops of cadets on horseback, poulterers in from the Valley
of Mexico driving flocks of turkeys with willow wands in and out of the
traffic—entering at last the spiffy new Hotel Tezcatlipoca, where Günther’s
acquaintance Adolfo “El Reparador” Ibargüengoitia—one of a population of
newlyemerged entrepreneurs, working between the bullets, as they liked to put
it, to solve problems created by revolution and rerevolution—kept a
penthouse suite with a view out over Chapultepec Park and beyond. Anxious men
in dark suits, apparently, like Günther, there in need of a repairman, wandered
around in a fog of tobacco smoke. Ibargüengoitia by contrast wore a white
tailormade suit and crocodile shoes to match. Crying,
“
Wie geht’s, mein alter Kumpel!
”
he embraced
Günther and waved him and Frank on in. A young woman got up vaguely as a
parlormaid brought Champagne in an ice bucket, and Günther and Ibargüengoitia
went off behind a mahogany door to confer.

At
one of the windows, Frank noticed a telescope on a tripod aimed, as it
happened, west at the new Monument to National Independence, a tall granite
pillar towering above Reforma, with a winged and gilded figure on
top—supposedly Victory, though everybody called it “The Angel”—twentysome
feet high and at about the same level as Frank was at the moment. Frank went to
squint through the eyepiece and found the field entirely occupied by the face
of the Angel—looking directly at Frank, a face of beaten gold, taken into
a realm proper more to ceremonial masks than specific human faces, and yet it
was
a face he recognized.
With his other eye, Frank could see The Angel
standing in the declining sunlight, vertiginous in its weight of bronze and
gold, as if poised to fly unannounced and without mercy straight at him, while
behind it a tall peak of cumulus drifted slowly upward. Frank felt as if he
were being warned to prepare for something. The blank gold face looked into
his, deeply, and though its lips didn’t move, he heard it speak in urgent
Spanish ringing and distorted by tons of metal, the only words he could
recognize being
“
máquina loca,
”
“
muerte
”
and
“
tú.
”

“Señor?”
When his eyes refocused, whoever had spoken had moved on. He had apparently
been hunkered in a corner away from the window, breathing cigarette smoke and
aware of little else. He stood up and saw Günther across the room in a farewell
abrazo
with the Repairman. “No guarantees some gang of local
sinvergüencistas
won’t decide to rob your stage, of course,” Ibargüengoitia was saying,
“but. . . unpredictable times,
¿verdad?
”

 
In the elevator going down, Günther regarded Frank with
something like amusement. “You have been watching that Angel,” he said finally.
“Unwise policy, I have found.”

As
it turned out, Ibargüengoitia had arranged to slip them into Chiapas by way of
a coaster out of Vera Cruz, down to Frontera, Tabasco, from there by
diligencia
to Villahermosa, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, and across the Sierra to the Pacific
coast. They arrived at the
cafetal
a week later, on horseback, around
midday, the foreman all but dragging Günther down out of the saddle going into
a long list of crises, and Frank, before he knew it, was looking at a weirdly
designed pulping machine whose operating manual was in German, and a couple of
local folks in charge of it who did not seem to register that Frank had
absolutely no idea what was even wrong, much less how to fix it.

The
stationary engine was just fine, the shafts, pulleys, belts, and clutches were
worn but serviceable, the pipes from the tank where the coffee cherries were
soaking in water were clear and the pump working, so it had to be either the
confounded unit itself or the way somebody had connected it up. After a
frustrating hour of disassembly and reassembly, Frank leaned close to the machine
and whispered
“
Tu madre chingada
puta
,”
looked around once

or twice, and gave the ’sucker a theatrically furtive kick.
As if abruptly coming to its senses, it shuddered, engaged, and the
gratercylinder at issue began to rotate. One of the Indians opened the valve
from the tank and cherries began to flow through in a red stream about the
texture of cooktent beans, coming out as pulp mixed with seeds still in their
socalled parchment, ready for the next stages of washing and stirring.

There
were of course separate difficulties with the machines that did the stirring,
drying, rolling, rubbing, and winnowing, but over the next couple of weeks
Frank systematically worked his way through the cams, gearing, and setscrew
adjustments of this MachineAge nightmare that Günther kept calling “the future
of coffee,” even picking up a word or two of technical German. Somehow that
year’s coffee crop was all brought in without incident, processed into burlap
sacks and ready for the factors’ agents.

Outside,
the political storm raged along, and occasionally blew in through |a window.
Many of the migrant workers here on the estate were Juchitecos who drew
inspiration from Zapata as well as the martyred Che Gómez. Late in the autumn,
Chamula Indians fighting for San Cristóbal in its illfated rebellion against
Tuxtla had begun showing up with their ears missing, the penalty exacted for
losing the recent Battle of Chiapa de Corzo. Frank found a couple of these who
actually enjoyed learning the work, and pretty soon they were running most of
the technical chores, leaving Frank more time to go into town and relax, though
he was never sure what happened when he wasn’t actually looking at them in the
light, because peculiar as the Tarahumare had been, some of these Chiapas tribes
made them look as humdrum as metallurgy professors. There were midgets and
giants down here, and
brujos
who took the shapes of wildcats or raccoons
or themselves multiplied by dozens. Frank had observed this, or thought he had.

For this
particular stretch
of
Pacific slope, Tapachula was town— you wanted to relax or raise hell or
both at the same time, you went in to Tapachula. Frank tended to spend time at
a cantina called El Quetzal Dormido, drinking either maguey brandy from Comitán
or the at first horrible but after a while sort of interesting local moonshine
known as
pox,
and dancing with or lighting panatelas for a girl named
Melpomene who’d drifted down from the ruins and fireflies of Palenque, first to
Tuxtla Gutiérrez and then, with that boomtown certitude some young folks
possess of knowing where the money is being spent least reflectively at any
given season, to Tapachula, where there were cacao, coffee, rubber, and banana
plantations all within an easy radius, so the town was always jumping with
pickers, tree

shakers, nurserymen, beanpolishers,
guayuleros,
and
centrifuge operators, none in a mood for moderation of any kind.

Melpomene
told Frank about the giant luminous beetles known as
cucuji.
Each night
in the country around Palenque, illuminating the miles of ruins hidden among
the jungle trees, you could see them by the millions, shining all over their
bodies, so brightly that by the light of even one of them you could read the
newspaper, and six would light up a city block. “Or so a
tinterillo
told
me once,” grinning through the smoke of a Sin Rival. “I never learned to read,
but I have a tree full of
cucuji
in my yard. Come on,” and she led him
out the back and down a cobbled alley and into a dirt lane. All at once, ahead
of them, above the tops of the trees, shone a greenish yellow light, pulsing
off and on. “They feel me coming,” she said. They rounded a corner and there
was a fig tree, with near as Frank could tell thousands of these big luminous
beetles, flashing brightly and then going dark, over and over, all in perfect
unison. He found if he stared too long into the tree, he tended to lose his
sense of scale and it became almost like looking into a vast city, like Denver
or the Mexican capital, at night. Shadows, depths . . .