TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border

by Clifford Irving

  When I finished with a more detailed description he gave a small, pained grunt, and he was silent for a while. Then he spoke quietly. “Tomorrow I’ll find out for myself if you were telling the truth . There’s only one way to do that. Meanwhile, I believe you. And I’m proud of you. You didn’t disgrace the army of Pancho Villa.”

  Satisfied, he slumped back into his saddle and closed his eyes. Soon he began to snore. Hipólito sighed into the darkness, too weary to talk.

  I gazed up at the stars, glittering with such cold majesty, thinking that at least for now, this moment, the chestnut jogging comfortably under my drained loins, life was sweet. Not noble, but surely sweet. It was one more crooked and fleshly detour on the road to true love … but where in this dark world, under what far star, was the one to show me the straight and holy path?

  Where indeed? I would find her sooner than I ever dreamed, but it would take me years to know her. And then it would be too late. If we had the power to see our future in advance, as in a witch’s crystal ball, we might be wiser men for it—but no happier, no better. It often occurred to me that we might even choose not to go on living.

  A few minutes before noon of the next day I showed up at the Commercial Hotel to give Felix Sommerfeld a final count of the herd. The little lobby was pleasantly cool, and a pretty girl was sitting in one of the red plush chairs near the mahogany staircase. My first impression was one of lustrous brown hair, a high pale forehead, lively blue eyes, a beguiling smile. Then she got gracefully to her feet, gathered her rustling pink skirt and planted herself in my path. No, she wasn’t pretty. Up close she was the loveliest creature I had ever seen.

  That was wonderful enough, but when she spoke my name I thought my heart would break right through its rib cage. It gave a heave that happens only once or twice in a lifetime.

  “Is it Mr. Mix?”

  “Miss …?”

  “Mr. Thomas Mix?”

  “Yes, miss.” With one hand I grabbed my sombrero off my head, and with the other I began scratching my chest. I didn’t itch, but I didn’t know what else to do with my hand. I tried to remember everything I knew about etiquette. Did you bow? Shake hands? Before she had opened her mouth to speak, I realized that in all my life I’d never met anyone who measured up to this girl.

  “You’re here to meet my father,” she said. “I’m Hannah Sommerfeld.”

  This was hard to believe, after my assumption about the unfortunate evils of heredity, but there was no way to debate it with the young lady, and I was only grateful for the fact that I knew her father at all. The only parts of Felix Sommerfeld I could see reflected in her face were her ivory skin and her blue eyes; the rest came from a provident creator.

  Her brown hair, with a few strands curling above her tiny ears, was neatly coiled above a forehead that didn’t own a blemish. Her nose was gently curved—you might even say beaked if you were in the mood to criticize, which I wasn’t—and under it, her mouth was small and friendly. Her chin would have been almost too firm if it hadn’t suggested to me the proud princess of a fairy tale. Her eyes shimmered like water in sunlight. She wasn’t tall, wasn’t short, she was just right. She looked to be about nineteen or twenty. And her breath smelled of mint and rose water.

  “My father will be late, Mr. Mix, and offers his apology. Can you bear the thought of entertaining me on the hotel veranda until he gets here?”

  I could bear the thought, and with a strangled grunt I said so.

  We walked toward the veranda, her pink dress swirling like tall grass in a high wind. I had to catch my breath.

  “How do you find Columbus, Mr. Mix?”

  “Oh, it’s fine. Just fine.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “No, no, I haven’t. I haven’t been here, not ever. But it… it seems like a nice little town.”

  “It’s ugly, Mr. Mix. That’s the price of progress.”

  “Yes. That’s so, Miss Sommerfeld. I guess … it certainly is.”

  I felt like a child—an idiot child. I had nothing to say that was any better. The color rose to my cheeks; I wasn’t embarrassed, just overwhelmed. By then we had walked out the side door of the hotel to the veranda, where we had some privacy and could still observe the street. A few horses and buggies moved through the dust, and a big red Locomobile sputtered by in the opposite direction. Hannah Sommerfeld chose a wicker chair with some shade, and I stood uncertainly in a slanting bar of sunlight, shifting my weight, then leaned back against the white painted railing.

  “My father told me we had a friend in common. And of course,” she said, “I know with whom you’re associated. I find it fascinating.”

  “A friend?” I had developed this awful habit of repeating her words. “We have a friend in common?”

  She beamed a sunny smile at me. “Ricardo Flores Magón. Didn’t you mention that you knew him?”

  I had done it again. Opened my mouth—or in this case, as I recalled, nodded agreement, which came to the same thing—and stuffed my boot in it. I had told a lie. A small lie, and mostly from an urge toward politeness; but a lie’s a lie, and now I had been caught out.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Sommerfeld … I believe I must have misunderstood. You know how it is with Mexican names. Ricardo Flores Magón? Who might he be?”

  She wasn’t annoyed. If anything, she seemed pleased, because it gave her the chance to explain it all to me. And it pleased me too, because she had a warm, cultured voice that I could have listened to all afternoon.

  Ricardo Flores Magón, she said, was one of the early revolutionists who had opposed Diaz, but he had done it generally from a distance, making fiery speeches and publishing a newspaper in Texas, then in California. Hannah Sommerfeld, at first, had helped his organization smuggle copies of the paper to Mexico in Sears Roebuck catalogs, where the forces of Madero grabbed them up and read them to the campesinos.

  “How—I mean, why did you do that, Miss Sommerfeld? Wasn’t it dangerous?”

  “Dangerous?” She flashed her dimples at me. “I’m not a man, so it was all I could do. What you’re doing is dangerous, Mr. Mix, and I can’t tell you how much I admire you for it.”

  Trading cattle for guns? I cleared my throat.”

  “Please tell me about this fellow Magón,” I said.

  A spot of color, the heart of a rose on a bed of snow, flushed her cheeks as she quoted one of her champion’s speeches. She spoke in flawless Spanish, cadences rising and falling as if she were an actress on the stage. I hardly heard a word; I just watched her eyes and her pretty cupid’s-bow mouth.

  “‘Workers, listen! Revolution is the logical consequence of the thousand crimes of a despotism! It has to come, unfailingly, with the punctuality of the sun banishing sorrowful night! By blood and fire it will come to the den where the jackals who have been devouring you for forty years are holding their last feast. Go to it, not like cattle to the slaughterhouse, but as men conscious of all their rights. Break your chains on the heads of your executioners!’ Isn’t that splendid?” she asked me.

  “It’s wonderful, Miss Sommerfeld.”

  “A little flowery,” she said, “but he’s appealing to a simple people. I can forgive him his excesses. At least his heart is in the right place.” And she smiled at me gently, as if we were conspirators.

  Magón, she told me, had set forth the basic principles of the uprising to which all the leading revolutionists agreed. “He was the first one to cry, ‘Land and liberty!’ He is for the protection of the Indians, the end of peonage and forced military service, freedom of the press, and the granting of rights to illegitimate children.”

  She then related how she and her parents had visited Mexico City three years ago, on the occasion of the centennial of the war for independence against Spain. “We saw things that almost made me ashamed to be an American. While we and other foreign guests ate off solid gold plates at the receptions, the poor in the streets couldn’t find corn for their children. William Randolph Hearst,
as you probably know, owns a part of Mexico that is actually larger than some countries in Europe. That’s capitalism with a vengeance. Don’t you agree, Mr. Mix?”

  I said fervently that I agreed.

  “I really didn’t have to ask. If you didn’t believe it, you wouldn’t have volunteered yourself in the cause of liberty.” Her eyes glowed forcefully into mine. “Are you a student of Karl Marx, Mr. Mix?”

  I decided that if I was going to get anywhere I wanted to go with this girl, I would have to stop telling tall tales. “No, Miss Sommerfeld. Your father asked me about that too. The plain truth is that I’m just a cowhand and rodeo rider, and it’s a long story how I got myself hooked up with Pancho Villa.”

  “I would be delighted to hear it.”

  “I think it would bore you to the point of tears.” I remembered Fierro blowing out Wentworth’s brains. “Kind of gruesome.”

  “I’m not a fool, Mr. Mix. I was educated in Philadelphia, but I’ve been born and brought up on the border. If I may use a cliché, I know you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

  It was no cliché to me. Then I remembered something that had been mentioned yesterday in Peache’s Lunch Room. “Your father said you got into trouble over in Juárez, Miss Sommerfeld, doing something for Flores Magón. He wouldn’t say what it was, and he thought you might be shy about telling it, but I’d really like to know.”

  “Why would you like to know?” she asked.

  “Because,” I said, trying to match her bluntness, “everything about you interests me.”

  That was a clear statement and she fielded it cleanly, without comment or blush. I liked that. Then she told me that a little over a year ago the forces of Flores Magón ran into trouble distributing Regeneración in northern Mexico. Diaz had decided that its message was a bit more than pesky and had begun to check the bulk mails flowing across the border. So Hannah Sommerfeld had come up with an idea. More than that, she had put the idea into practice, a second step which is always significantly more difficult than the first. She and a group of Magonistas had donned Salvation Army uniforms, then crossed from El Paso to Juárez with the usual drums, trumpets and bags of literature. But in this instance, folded inside every copy of the pamphlets exhorting the sinful souls to Jesus, there was a page or two of Regeneración.

  It worked perfectly the first Sunday it was tried, so Hannah and her group made the mistake of trying it the following week, but by then the rurales had been tipped to the deception, and they arrested the little group of gringo counterfeit soul savers and threw them into the Juárez jail for a night. The next morning, after listening to Hannah’s threats and yells from dusk to dawn, the rurales let them go.

  Bedraggled and lice-ridden, the gringos, led by Hannah, walked back across the border to El Paso.

  “Daddy was furious. Still, I think he respected me for what I had done. But he forbade me to do it again, and since I respect his rights as a father, I’ve not been back to Juárez since.”

  I had never met anyone before who could be described as a pure idealist, but I think the term fit Hannah Sommerfeld. It didn’t fit me; I was an adventurer. I had to know more about this girl and thought it wise not to tell her too much about myself. I saw a light in her eyes, as she looked up into mine on that hotel veranda, that I knew would fade if I unmasked my own motives.

  So instead I asked her questions about life in Philadelphia, and didn’t she find it dull on the border, in the main, after she’d had a taste of civilization?

  Yes, she admitted, it was a quiet life, unruly at times, but she had an aunt back East who sent her books to read, and she was herself a subscriber to McClure’s Magazine, which serialized Booth Tarkington. She had read all the best-selling books by Mary Johnston, George Barr McCutcheon and Robert W. Chambers.

  I had to admit, a little shamefacedly, that I hadn’t had the time lately to keep up with their works.

  “Well, who knows how much you’ve really missed,” she said, correcting her own enthusiasm. “The judgment of the future is always in doubt. In literature as well as politics. Or, as it’s been better said—’What’s past, and what’s to come, is strewed with husks and formless ruins of oblivion.’” She blushed. “Troilus and Cressida…”

  I looked at her for a moment in silence. It had occurred to me, even in the height of my intoxication, that I was being swept off my feet by a pretty face, by the shining vitality of her youth and by the fact that she was there. But now I knew better.

  “Yes,” I replied. “ ‘And the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.’ From Twelfth Night. “

  Now it was Hannah’s turn to be surprised, and she made no attempt to hide it.

  I was delighted. Progress was being made.

  Then Mr. Sommerfeld appeared on the veranda, gave me a firm handshake and Hannah a fatherly peck on the cheek, struck a match to another Murad and suggested we head over to Peache’s for lunch. “I think our talk might tax you a bit, Hannah, but you’re welcome to join us.” He had an extremely self-satisfied expression, and when I took a moment to look him over, having feasted on his daughter’s face for the last half hour, he wasn’t as ugly as I’d thought the day before.

  “Mr. Mix is anything but taxing,” Hannah said softly.

  Despite the noonday heat, I shivered.

  Her father took me by the arm as we marched along the boardwalk toward the restaurant. “Be warned, my young friend. She’s already broken the hearts of half the junior officers at Bliss.” Deep in his throat, as though he were gargling, he chuckled.

  But at lunch we kept the talk pretty much on track, sticking to the subject of arms and cattle and the future of the budding revolution. Still he could see I’d taken to his daughter like honeysuckle to a front porch, and for reasons I couldn’t fathom, he didn’t appear to object. This afternoon, he said, he was going to ride out with his foreman in a buggy to inspect the herd. “But you stay here if you like. I’m sure Hannah would be pleased to show you around our metropolis of Columbus, what little there is of it.”

  “Oh!” I cried. “That’s very kind of you. Columbus must be a fascinating place! I’d love to see Columbus!”

  Those nonsensical exclamations told both him and Hannah everything there was to tell about how I felt.

  We had crossed the border to the U. S. meaning to get in and out fast. Mexico was where the action was, where Pancho Villa was supposedly creating an army and would soon create a revolution. I wanted to be part of it all.

  But that wasn’t to be, at least not yet. Ravel and Sommerfeld took three days to pull the gun consignment together. Hannah Sommerfeld could have gone back to her home in El Paso anytime she wanted to, but she hung around in Columbus with her father. I saw a great deal of her, and not much of Candelario, who passed most of his evenings up on the Deming road. He and Hipólito had divided the remaining spending money, and Candelario had sworn off scotch whiskey and taken to drinking the heady wine of France. Hipólito went straight to the gambling casino, where he lost his share in three hours of stud poker, and I began to wonder if I wanted him as my business partner. From then on he stayed at the camp with the vaqueros, except for one evening when he and Candelario went to the movies in town. The admission was twenty cents, but Candelario, because he had only one eye, insisted he would pay only a dime. He wasn’t the kind of man you argued with too long, and so he got to gawk at Mabel Normand for half-price.

  Meanwhile I was falling in love.

  That’s not quite correct; the truth is I had fallen in love at first sight, and the time that I spent now with Hannah Sommerfeld, walking up and down the hotel veranda, riding in the desert or listening to her explain the keener points of Karl Marx, was just plunging me deeper into that state Shakespeare had likened to lunacy. Love is merely a madness, he said, and deserves a dark house and a whip as madmen do: and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.

  I had never understood that pa
ssage. I do now.

  And yet the Bard was our common meeting ground. To the soft accompaniment of squeaking saddle leather and the tinkle of bridle chains, we quoted back and forth to each other from the passages we knew and loved best. I told her I had once played the part of Fortinbras, and she said that back in Philadelphia, at school, she had been Portia in The Merchant of Venice. For a brief moment her eyes seemed about to film with tears.

  “It was humiliating, Tom. I didn’t want to do it, but I was afraid to say no for fear I’d make it worse. They already thought I was oversensitive on that score.”

  “Because of Shylock?”

  “I hated him, and myself for feeling that way. You know it’s Portia who has to stop him from taking his pound of flesh. I still remember the line—’Thou shalt have nothing but the forfeiture, to be so taken at thy peril, Jew.’ I nearly choked on it.”

  “Is it hard for you, Hannah? Still?”

  “You should ask my father. But he would say no. He would praise America, because he comes from a poor German immigrant family that had nothing. And now, here on the border, I would say no as well. I’ve been made fun of in the past, when I was a child, and even at school. But no more.”

  I could understand that. Her beauty overrode all distinctions. Added to that were her intelligence, a kindness and sympathy that revealed itself to me more and more each hour, and her dedication to the downtrodden on the other side of the Rio Grande. She was a suffragist too—she didn’t wear trouserettes, but she went regularly to emancipation teas—and I respected her for it. She was no flamboyant Ziegfeld girl—she was a princess. No, not a princess, but the princess, the one I had conjured up as a boy by the campfire.

  She poured out her heart to me and I emptied mine to her, told her of my past and how I had seemed to fail or give up in everything I tried, and she said, “But now, Tom, that’s all over. You’re on the right track. And I have total faith in you.”