The City of Palaces

by Michael Nava

  These words faded and another line of script appeared. She read, “The second battalion leaves Chihuahua to fight the rebels.” The words died away to reveal a line of soldiers moving behind mounted officers across a desolate landscape. Visible in the background were the roofs of a small city. A horseman galloped toward the audience, growing larger and larger until he filled the sheet and it seemed that he was about to leap into the audience horse and all. There were screams and the clatter of overturned chairs as people threw themselves to the ground. José, who had remained riveted to his seat, felt his heart pounding in his throat.

  Then the horseman receded, the scene faded, and another sentence appeared on the screen. As members of the audience got up from the ground and dusted themselves off, his mother read, “Rebels led by Francisco Villa prepare to fight the army.”

  There appeared on the muslin screen another desert scene, also filled by a group of armed men. Unlike the straight rows of the federal soldiers, these men did not march in formation nor did they wear uniforms. They were clad in the dirty white trousers and torn zarapes of the poor. They tramped in a ragged line behind a small, unshaven man on horseback wearing a dusty suit and a bowler hat, his chest crisscrossed with bandoliers.

  José heard his uncle murmur, “There are so many of them.”

  In the back of the room, a man shouted, “Viva la revolución!” The pianist began to hammer out the presidential anthem, but other men in the audience took up the cry. His uncle glanced nervously around the room. On the white sheet, there was a single word.

  His mother read the word. “Attack!”

  A panoramic image filled the screen with the shapes of tiny men moving toward each other across a barren landscape fringed by distant mountains. The two lines of soldiers hurled themselves at one another across the desert scrub. Puffballs of smoke signified artillery shots, and men fell like puppets cut from their strings. Horses reared, tossing their riders, and galloped off toward the mountains. The audience was silent. Even the piano player had paused to watch the scene of slaughter that unfolded on the white cloth with the intimacy and the strangeness of a dream. José was transfixed. He felt as if the curtains of another world, a spirit world, had parted and offered itself to his gaze. It was a world so luminous and ephemeral he was afraid to breathe lest he dissolve it. And then the image faded, replaced by another mournful black box with another single word splashed across it.

  Squeezing his hand, his mother solemnly intoned, “The dead.”

  An invisible eye slowly moved its gaze among the ghastly open-eyed corpses of dead soldiers of both armies lying on the ground while vultures strutted in the background. The image faded quickly and mercifully, replaced by more words.

  “Madero in defeat.”

  Madero appeared in the field of dead soldiers, his face a study of sorrow. He was watching a man kneel at the side of a soldier, evidently trying to assist him. The man turned to speak to Madero and the camera recorded his face.

  “Papá!” José shouted. He ran toward the sheet. “Papá!”

  But, as he reached the front of the room, his arms open to embrace his father, the image faded, replaced by a final word: “Fin.”

  Sarmiento watched his wife disappear into the desert landscape. Beneath a gigantic sky, flat plains of broken, tawny earth covered by low-growing, gray-green scrub rolled like a low tide toward distant barren mountains. The monotonous vista was broken only by gigantic saguaro. They were startlingly alive, thick-scabbed limbs twisting upward as if in supplication. The winter sun turned the dust to gold. It swirled upward from the ground and sprayed itself against the train, fogging the windows, slipping in through cracks and crevices, covering every surface with a thin layer of dirt. This is not the landscape of beginnings, Sarmiento thought. He glanced down at his dusty trousers and shoes and, in a spasm of panic, wondered, “What have I done?”

  His misgivings were not allayed when he reached the American city of El Paso. It was separated from Ciudad Juárez by the muddy torrent of river the Americans called the Rio Grande and the Mexicans, the Rio Bravo. Luis’s last telegraph had instructed him to check into the Pickwick Hotel. Sarmiento found the place, a modest two-story building off the main street. He entered, registered, went up to his room, and waited. A day passed, two, then three. He left his room only to eat in the downstairs restaurant, sitting at a table that gave him a view of the lobby. The hotel clerk supplied him with American newspapers, which he searched for news of Madero’s progress. There were a few, brief reports of skirmishes and small uprisings, interspersed with official reassurances from Díaz’s government that all was well. “Was there a revolution?” he wondered with dismay. The panic he had felt on the train again gripped him. By the fourth day, he was planning his return to México. And then, as he sat at lunch, trying to force himself to take a few bites of inedible pot roast, he looked up and saw his cousin stroll into the hotel lobby, smoking a cigar. Sarmiento nearly wept with relief.

  By nightfall, he was back in México, drinking shots of whiskey with Luis at the table of a squalid cantina on a dirt backstreet of Ciudad Juárez, as his cousin recounted the story of the first days of the revolution. Luis had been among the small band of Madero’s followers when the little man had first slipped into México from Texas. Madero had expected to meet a volunteer army that would carry him in triumph to the capital. Instead, Luis told Sarmiento, they got lost and spent a miserable night wandering through the bitter cold. The following day, when they kept their rendezvous, Madero’s revolutionary army consisted of two dozen peasants armed with machetes and rocks.

  At that point, Luis said, many of Madero’s advisors—often, like Madero himself, the younger sons of wealthy families—tired of playing at rebellion and slunk home to their families.

  “Madero persisted,” Luis said. “We went from village to village all across the north, where he proclaimed the revolution, and, remarkably, Miguel, the revolution began.”

  “But where is it, Luis?” Sarmiento asked. He glanced around the room. A few rough-looking men sat at other tables, drinking and talking loudly above a band of musicians led by an accordionist playing a kind of harsh, country polka. “Is this it? A roomful of men getting drunk?”

  “Yes, Miguel,” Luis replied. “These men and men like them are the revolution. Common people with nothing to lose but their misery. They fight the same way they drink, hard and grim. They’re not like the toy soldiers Don Porfirio parades down the Reforma on Independence Day. We are a people’s army.”

  “When does it plan to start fighting?” he asked dryly. “There was almost nothing in the American newspapers about the rebellion.”

  Luis sneered. “The Americans think we are an inferior race, lazy, ignorant, and vicious. The prospect of Mexicans killing each other does not disturb them. Of course, they do not take Madero seriously. To them, he is simply another ‘greaser.’”

  “You didn’t answer me.”

  Luis signaled for another round. “When we started, we made the mistake of attacking the big towns where the federales are dug in. They destroyed us. We changed tactics, raiding isolated army outposts and haciendas and establishing ourselves in the villages where Madero is a hero. Now we control the countryside and the federales are squeezed into the cities. The time has come for us to bring the fight to them, here in Juárez. If we can take this town, the north will be ours.”

  “Are you a solider now, Luis?”

  “I am whatever Don Pancho needs me to be,” he replied with a smile. “Tonight, I am a spy.”

  “A spy?”

  “Together we will take in the sights of Ciudad Juárez.” Their drinks had arrived. He raised his glass and said, “To your first assignment in the people’s army, Miguel. Salud.”

  A few shots of whiskey later, they left Sarmiento’s bag with the barman—a friend of the revolution, Luis explained—and went out into the soft spring darkness. Unlike its American counterpart on the other side of the river, whose electric lights blazed into
the night, Ciudad Juárez was illuminated by gaslight or lanterns in those neighborhoods where there was any light at all. Luis led them to the western edge of the town, where from a shadowy distance they observed soldiers shoveling earth by lamplight.

  “If they detain us, act drunk,” Luis murmured.

  “That won’t be difficult,” Sarmiento replied, feeling the effects of the rotgut on his empty stomach. “What are they doing?”

  “Digging trenches,” Luis replied. “Defense lines. They’re digging them east and south of the city, as well.”

  “What about the north?”

  “The north is the river and ‘Uncle Sam,’” Luis remarked. “Natural barriers.”

  “How many are there? Federales?”

  “A thousand. Twelve hundred. We greatly outnumber them, but they have better weapons. Come.”

  Sarmiento followed his cousin through primitive streets where the mud houses could have been constructed in Sumeria and into the center of the town. The austere Gothic cathedral, with its two tall bell towers, faced the thick walls of the army garrison across the cobblestoned plaza. The heavy doors seemed impenetrable. After inspecting the garrison, they walked to the customs house at the edge of the river. Now and then, Luis murmured a comment about the number of soldiers in the streets, the placement of entrances on the public buildings, the presence or absence of street lamps, as if fixing these details in his mind. To Sarmiento, Juárez was nothing more than a dusty provincial town caught between the unforgiving desert and the outstretched talons of the American eagle. He was reminded of the one witticism of Don Porfirio that even his foes liked to repeat: “Poor México, so far from God, so close to the United States.” Sarmiento’s stomach growled.

  “When did you last eat?” Luis asked.

  “Not recently enough,” Sarmiento replied.

  “Our last stop is the railroad station. There should be some food there.”

  At the station, they ate greasy tacos, seasoned with the hottest salsa Sarmiento had ever tasted. They were filled with meat, the origins of which he preferred not to think about, although there was a noticeable absence of the feral dogs who ran in packs elsewhere in the city.

  “No soldiers,” Luis commented, as he spat out some gristle.

  “What?” Sarmiento said, his tongue blazing. Was it foolish, he wondered, to hope that the chilies incinerated any bacterium in the meat?

  “The station is unguarded. We’re done. Let’s go.”

  As they walked back to the cantina, Sarmiento asked, “Why is this town so important? It seems completely insignificant.”

  “Guns and money,” his cousin replied. “Guns from the garrison, money from the revenues at the customs house. Juárez is the biggest town on the border. If we take it, we have a base of operations in the north, where Díaz has never been popular. If we beat him here, the entire north will soon fall.”

  They returned to the cantina. The barman put them up in a tiny, filthy room with straw mats on the floor and a chamber pot that needed emptying. Exhausted, Sarmiento stretched out on the petate and reflected with amusement upon his first day of the revolution—bad liquor, worse food, and the droll company of his cousin—before sleep fell upon him like a wall.

  The National Palace of the Revolution was one of the fifteen adobe buildings that comprised the village of La Santisima, a short distance west of Ciudad Juárez. It was an evening in the last week of April 1911. Sarmiento sat at the long table where Madero’s staff was assembled for a dinner of stewed pork, beans, and tortillas. He glanced around at the improbable collection of revolutionaries—farmers and lawyers, university students and horse thieves, men with great names and men who could not spell their names. All of them were united by the slight, balding man at the head of the table who was saying to an American journalist, “I have been chosen by Providence. Neither poverty nor prison, nor even death frighten me.”

  “By Providence, sir?” the journalist asked skeptically.

  “Yes,” Madero replied calmly. “Like your own Abraham Lincoln.”

  “Quién es este Lincoln?” the man beside Sarmiento asked him. He was Pascual Orozco, formerly a muleteer, now a general. His ruthless fighting skills had been honed in a series of Don Porfirio’s prisons.

  Sarmiento looked into Orozco’s cold blue eyes and explained that Lincoln was the American president who had liberated the black slaves during the American civil war.

  Orozco asked, “You knew this Lincoln?”

  “No, he was killed before I was born. I read about him.”

  Orozco smiled contemptuously. “Someday, when the real work is done, you must teach me how to read.”

  Orozco’s disdain for Madero’s civilian advisors was shared by the other rough-hewn generals, like Francisco Villa, who had recruited the men who fought and died for Madero. They had no interest in the long, legalistic debates about how to conduct the revolution and the form the government should take after Díaz was deposed. They only wanted to exterminate Díaz’s army and to stick his head on a pike in the middle of the Zócalo. To the educated men, the peasant generals were ignorant, impulsive, and dangerous, useful as cannon fodder, but not to be entrusted with the future of México. Without Madero, the two factions would have been at each other’s throats, and, as it was, he controlled them only with the greatest of difficulty.

  “Do you really believe you can defeat President Díaz’s troops with your army?” the American journalist asked, not masking his incredulity.

  Madero replied, “There is less to Don Porfirio’s army than it seems. His soldiers are kidnapped off the streets and impressed into service. His generals are toothless old men who were promoted precisely because they are too incompetent to pose a military threat to his rule. The people have long since turned against him. Díaz is a head without a body. I tell you, sir,” he concluded confidently, “in three months, General Díaz will be on a boat to exile in Paris, and we will be eating our tortillas in the National Palace.”

  He had been speaking English to the journalist, but for this response Madero had switched back to Spanish and spoken loudly enough to silence the clatter of the table. When Madero shook himself out of his habitual, kindly vagueness and spoke in these passionate, commanding tones, Sarmiento would have followed him anywhere. Glancing around the table, he saw he was not alone in this sentiment. Madero’s peasant generals and frock-coated advisors alike listened with something like reverence, and when he finished, broke into a lusty round of Viva Madero! Viva la Revolución!

  Sarmiento missed his cousin, who, he imagined, would have responded to this enthusiasm sardonically. The steadiness of Luis’s allegiance to the revolution did not require such displays of emotionalism, which is why, Sarmiento thought, Madero had entrusted him with the confidential mission on which he had departed almost two weeks earlier.

  Dinner over, Sarmiento stood in twilight watching the army settle in for the night. Around dozens of tiny campfires, the soldaderas prepared meager meals for their men. Sarmiento had been startled at all the women who traveled with the soldiers, but he had come to understand that, without them, there would have been no army. The women scrounged for the food and water that kept the soldiers alive in the unforgiving desert, and, when necessary, took up arms and fought beside their men. Seeing them, he recalled with amusement how he had so confidently told Alicia war was no place for a woman, and then felt a pang of longing for her. Their separation gnawed softly at his heart day and night. He found relief only in sleep when she was united with him in his dreams.

  Three soldiers passed by. One wore overalls, another dirty white cottons, a third an ancient frock coat and tight vaquero trousers; all were barefoot. They were armed, respectively, with a machete, a rifle, and an enormous antique revolver. Not far away, someone playing a guitar began to sing a corrido about Madero’s escape across the border. These ballads were the newspapers of the illiterate soldiers recounting important events. There would be a skirmish in the morning and by nightfall, the soldiers
would be singing about it. As he listened, he wondered whether Homer’s great poem of war had had its beginnings in the campfire ballads of the Greek soldiers at the walls of Troy.

  Many of the soldiers were Indians who, like their generals, were suspicious of men like him. The soldiers called his ilk the “perfumados”—the scented ones, for the colognes and eaus they affected, even in the wilderness. Just a few days earlier, as he dug a bullet out of the thigh of an old Yaqui captain, the Indian told him, “If I die, Señor Doctor, my men will kill you.” As Sarmiento performed the painful excision of the bullet, the old man’s eyes remained trained on his face like a pair of pistols. Madero had promised the Yaquis he would return their homeland in Sonora to them. They fought for him with a ferocity so legendary that their mere appearance on a battlefield could cause opposing troops to take flight.

  He thought of Tomasa and then again of Alicia and sighed.

  “You sound so sad, Primo,” he heard the familiar voice say. “Cheer up. Imagine our triumphal entry into the capital.”

  He turned. “Luis!” he exclaimed, embracing his cousin. “When did you return?”

  “Just this minute,” he said, and looked it. The dust of the road clung to his clothes. “I cleaned out a pharmacy in El Paso to bring you medical supplies.”

  “I am grateful,” Sarmiento replied. “But you haven’t been gone for two weeks shopping for me.”

  Luis offered him a hand-rolled cigarette, took one himself, and languidly lit them, as if they were sitting at Luis’s favorite French restaurant in the capital over postprandial brandies.

  “No,” he said. “I had, as the Americans say, ‘bigger fish to fry.’ A mule pack is making its way through the desert from Arizona with five hundred Winchester rifles, a half-dozen Hotchkiss machine guns, and crates of ammunition.”