TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (40 page)

“Viva Pancho Villa!”

We saw a bit of the last battle for Torreón, but on the screen it looked oddly tame … a few puffs of smoke from the cannon behind some cactus; a few officers staring straight at the camera, waving gleefully; then long panoramas of the white desert with horsemen straggling through the dust. A scene of some wounded and exhausted men lying against an adobe wall brought a common sigh, like a breath of wind, from the audience. There were no
vivas.
Too many friends had died in too many battles.

After that the movie concentrated on Venustiano Carranza. It showed him riding into Nogales on a white horse. Then he rode into Chihuahua on a black horse. It showed him under a mesquite tree, supposedly signing the Plan of Guadalupe, then at six different desks signing six different proclamations. He visited hospitals and schools. He patted little children on the head and talked to bewildered Indian women who surely wouldn’t have understood a word he was saying. It went on for twenty minutes and through a change of reels.

“Let’s go,” Candelario muttered, digging his elbow in my ribs. The audience began to stamp their feet again, then hiss.

“Enough! No more Don Venus!”

“Viva Francisco Villa!”

The booing rose to an uproar as yet another picture of the First Chief filled the screen, prancing into Mexico City on a horse that had been decorated with plumes like a circus animal. He waved in triumph to the wretched crowds. Candelario kept muttering, but that was mild compared to what happened on the other side of the screen. I never found out who, but some outraged officer in the front part of the theater—clearly not a Carranzista—yanked out his pistol. He fired two shots.

I don’t know what part of the First Chiefs image they hit, but the bullets ripped through the screen, flew about six inches above my head and slammed into the back wall of the stage, knocking off plaster.

“Jesus Christ
…” I didn’t need an invitation; I fogged out of that chair like a turpentined cat. Crawling along the wooden boards, followed closely by an outraged Candelario supporting a stumbling Julio, as if we were in battle and pinned down by a well-fortified enemy, we reached the stage door.

Once we were safe in the street. I took a deep gulp of the cool night air. It tasted sweet. It always did when you knew you were lucky to be alive.

“That was some brilliant idea,” Julio gasped, when he had his breath back.

Candelario turned on me, shaking a fist.

“Do you realize,” he yelled, “that if Carranza had entered Mexico City on foot, we would be dead?”

“But if he’d entered Mexico City on foot,” I said, trying to calm them down, “he wouldn’t have been Carranza.”

Comical? A farce? Yes, but so was the whole convention. From the time that it had been announced in July it took six weeks to get it going, and then it lasted well into November of 1914. Zapata and Carranza never showed up, although they each sent plenty of delegates to shout and glare at each other. Zapata never gave a reason for his absence, and Carranza offered such a bagful of reasons that you never knew what he really meant. He sent a stream of formal messages to Aguascalientes, one of which began: “If Pancho Villa could write, or if he could read what others write…”

He publicly referred to Villa as a dedicated enemy of the Catholic Church, the murderer of William Benton, and a brigand who had tried to overthrow the apostle Madero by force of arms. Villa writhed but held his tongue. I think he truly hoped for peace.

Throughout the first month the delegates struggled to find a solution to the conflict. Green eyes glittering with catlike patience, Obregón played the role of peacemaker. Testing the waters, the convention adopted a halfhearted resolution proposing to remove Carranza, Villa and Zapata from their posts before they appointed an interim President of Mexico.

Marching onto the stage before the delegates, hair washed and mustache curried, Villa proclaimed, “You are going to hear sincere words spoken from the heart of an uneducated man. Francisco Villa will not be an embarrassment to those of good conscience. He seeks nothing for himself. I want the destiny of my country to be bright.
I will go!
Let history say who are Mexico’s true sons.”

Tiny Obregón, all smiles, reached up and hugged him. He must have thought that if everyone left, he would be president.

Now, in the political arena it became a matter of “After you, señor.”

Zapata, filing his spurs down in his mountain stronghold of Cuernavaca, never bothered to reply. Carranza continued to run the government from his hotel in the capital as if nothing had happened. He wanted the Northern Division to disband before he took the train to Veracruz.

“If I leave that scheming sonofabitch behind me in Mexico,” Villa muttered, “he’ll find some excuse to change his mind.”

So Villa went before the convention with a more forceful solution. Tears streaming from bloodshot eyes, he proposed that he and Don Venus face a firing squad together, thus effectively ending their dispute, at least in this world.

Predictably enough, Carranza announced that he would decline the honor. The idea was a sham, he said, and masked Pancho Villa’s true desire to rule Mexico. The next day the convention met and elected an interim President of Mexico—a bullnecked lawyer named Eulalio Gutiérrez who had been a dynamiter of trains for Obregón up in Sonora and finally occupied some government post under Carranza, although it was well known that the First Chief disliked his plodding sincerity.

Few had met the man, and therefore few had developed a reason to dislike him. That was his great advantage, which obviously couldn’t last for very long.

Sure enough, Carranza refused to recognize Gutiérrez as the legitimate President of Mexico. “I will continue,” Don Venus proclaimed, “to fight the enemies of Mexico.”

Like boys at a Sunday sandlot baseball game, it was time to choose up sides. Our generals met early one November afternoon in Villa’s hotel room. The air was hazed with smoke and thick with the smell of horses and old sweat. Everyone wore medals distributed by the convention, except Felipe Angeles, who came dressed in a brown sweater with leather elbow patches and his black riding boots.

Angeles, the most sophisticated among us, reflected not the enthusiasm of the revolution but its impotence. He assumed a forbidding air at the meeting and even spoke sharply to Villa.

“Why do you think no agreement has been reached here, Pancho? Have you wondered? I’ve come to a simple conclusion. Everyone in Aguascalientes struggles now for the fruits of victory. Each man aligns himself in a way most advantageous to his personal interests. Idealism is dead.”

“Not with us,” Villa said.

“So what do we do?” Urbina demanded. “Sit back and let these pantywaists parcel out everything we’ve fought for? Or do we fight them so that we can keep it?”

“Fight who?” Angeles asked. “Where’s the enemy? There’s no battlefield, no dictator. Huerta and Orozco are gone. Carranza has no army. What has Obregón done to us that we should fight him for?”

“Not to us,” Villa growled. “To the people. What he did in Mexico City is unforgivable.”

“Obregón wants to be President of Mexico,” I said. “Why not let him, chief? You always say you don’t want the job. What Obregón did in the capital may have been bad, but he’s still a revolutionist. He hasn’t taken sides since the convention started. If he forms a government with you behind him, President Wilson will recognize it the next day. You can have anything you want. You would stand at his right arm as a conscience, a protector of the people.”

“I’ve said a dozen times,” Villa replied, “that a military man shouldn’t be president.”

Angeles smiled thinly. “But it’s well known that Obregón’s only a chickpea farmer turned general.”

Rodolfo Fierro was there but he said nothing. Urbina thumped the table so hard that the ashtrays spilled. “If it comes to a fight with Obregón,” he yelled, “we’ll beat the shit out of him!”

“Zapata controls the south,” Villa said thoughtfully. “I control the north. If Obregón’s fool enough to ally himself with Carranza, whatever army they’ve got is wedged between us. Felipe, you’re the strategist—work out a plan to deal with it. If this fucking convention can’t make peace, I’ll meet with Zapata and we’ll do it ourselves.”

Peace? He didn’t mean peace. He meant war. Angeles looked at him bleakly.

Our meeting came to an end, and so did the glorious Revolutionary Convention of 1914.

General Murguia, who had defended Torreón against us, went over to Carranza with an entire Federal division that had been hiding out near Puebla. He hated Villa for defeating him; any enemy of Villa’s was automatically his friend. Then three of our own generals defected, with their brigades, in return for God knows what promises from Carranza. That blow penetrated even deeper when one of them trumpeted to the American reporters the true story of the Benton murder and his part in falsifying the execution orders.

Carranza’s staff packed up the treasury’s printing presses, carting them off in the direction of Veracruz. Enraged by the theft, President Gutiérrez conferred with Pancho Villa and appointed him Chief General of the Army of the Convention. We found out later that he bore a grudge against Obregón, who had once told him, “If you were as skillful a lawyer as you are a dynamiter of trains, all your clients must be serving life sentences.”

Obregón made his final decision, I suspect, in favor of what he considered the lesser of two evils. He had all the captured German equipment that had landed last May on
Ypiranga
—enough barbed wire, rifles and bullets to equip an army of fifty thousand men.

Abandoning Mexico City, he issued a manifesto calling for all of Mexico’s good sons to rise up with him and Carranza against that monster of treason and crime, Pancho Villa.

“Our native land implores us to resist evil!” Obregón cried. “To struggle until we conquer, or convert Mexico into a vast cemetery…”

Villa read these words with flinty eyes, and then, to those of us present, he said, “We’ll go south. The time has come to meet Emiliano Zapata.”

That afternoon I went alone to see Villa. I had promised Hannah and myself that I would leave when the revolution had triumphed, when we took Mexico City. The triumph seemed a hollow one, but now at last we were about to enter the capital. The end had come, and it was time to go. I wondered why I felt so dejected and empty of desire.

I held firm and told Villa my resolve. His yellow eyes glittered.

“I want your blessing,” I said. “Before I go.”

I hadn’t known I was going to say that. I hadn’t realized how important it was for me.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked sharply. “Do you think your luck’s run out? Do you think you’ll have your balls shot off on some battlefield?”

“That’s always possible,” I said. “But that’s not my reason. Hannah’s waiting for me in El Paso. I’m going to marry her. You always knew that. You always said it would happen.”

He looked at me oddly for a moment, as if he didn’t quite believe me. But then his eyes softened.

“Good, Tomás. I’m happy for you. Of course, you have my blessing. I owe you that and more. But I’ll miss you.”

A bleak and puzzled look suddenly crossed his face. I realized then that nothing had worked out the way he had planned, either. He had thought that once he had whipped Orozco and sent Huerta fleeing, the revolution would be won. He had planned it perfectly, and he had succeeded. But something had gone awry. The rules of the game had been changed. Perhaps he was frightened. I saw something in his eyes that could have been fear, as if his imagination had faltered and events had raced beyond his control. I was moved by his sadness. I loved him as a man, and I wanted to see him prevail.

“You were right,” he murmured, breaking into my thoughts. “You argued that we should join forces with Obregón, let him be president. If not, we’d have to fight against him. And it’s so.” He looked at me shrewdly. “But it still makes no sense to you.”

“You could have made a deal with him, that’s all I meant. It would have saved a lot of lives and grief.”

“A deal? I’ll tell you what kind of deal it would have been. He would be president, and I would be marked for a bullet. Everything’s clear now. I have to smash him, have him shot by a firing squad. Carranza, too. And then I’ve got to find a man to rule this miserable country. It won’t be me—I’m a soldier, not a governor. But somewhere in Mexico there must be a man like the little Señor Madero, and I’ll find him. Then I won’t make the mistake I did before. I’ll guard his back.”

His words gave me heart. He was a man who needed clear objectives, and now once again he seemed to have them. I wished I could be there to see how it turned out. Life with Villa certainly was never dull.

“Is Zapata the man?” I asked.

“No,” he said thoughtfully, “I don’t think so. Zapata is like me. Born to fight, not rule.” He gave me a tired smile. “Do what you must, Tomás. I told you, you have my blessing.”

I made another decision then. I may simply again have smelled my destiny.

“I tell you what, chief. Let me come with you to Mexico City. I’ve never been there. They say it’s a great city. I want to meet Zapata. I’ve met everyone else who seems to matter, and I’m curious. After that, I’ll go.

“ ‘Tis time to fear

when tyrants seem to kiss.”

On a fine December day, full of birdsong, Candelario and Julio and I strolled down the tree-lined Avenida Juárez in Mexico City, sightseeing. A squad of brown-skinned Zapatista soldiers in floppy white cotton trousers followed us at a distance, gazing up in awe at the tall buildings with their barred French windows.

We had just reached the stone plaza in front of the National Palace when a clanging of bells reached our ears. A brilliant red fire engine turned the corner, tires screeching on the slickly paved street. Firemen hung from both sides, wearing scarlet uniforms and peaked caps.

The Zapatistas behind us ducked for cover among the linden trees, raised their rifles to the hip and fired. One of the firemen bounced on the pavement, then began to crawl toward the shelter of a doorway.