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

by Clifford Irving

  “My orders are that you will send your son to school, beginning tomorrow, or you will be shot.”

  “School?”

  “You know what that is, don’t you?”

  “Shot, señor?”

  “You know what that is, too.”

  The wretched man pleaded his case. “Señor General, if I sent him to school, who would help me in the store? I have no wife. My daughters work in a sausage factory. They give me nothing. Without the boy’s help, I can’t run my store. How will he eat?”

  “I know nothing about your store,” Villa shouted. “I care that your son goes to school! And I tell you that if you don’t send him tomorrow, you’ll be shot. If the greed of the rich deprived you of your schooling, as it did me, and you are so poor that you have only this ridiculous hole in the wall you call a store, thengo out and steal! Steal whatever it is you need to send your son to school! If you steal for that reason, you have my solemn word I won’t shoot you. But if by not stealing you force your son to remain a filthy street urchin who will be as miserable all his life as you are, and perhaps even turn to crime and drunkenness—for I smell pulque on your breath, señor, if you wish to know the truth—you have Francisco Villa’s solemn word that you’ll be shot.”

  The man turned pale and wrung his hands, and that’s when I butted in.

  By now I knew Villa’s temperament fairly well. He always meant what he said, and although he was capable of changing his mind on a whim, it was never something you could count on. The boy’s father was close to death, if not from a bullet, then from fear.

  The boy, however, remained remarkably serene, and more than anything that was what moved me. He had faith. I had to make sure it was not misplaced.

  “Chief,” I said quietly, “if you send this man out to steal so that this kid can go to school, he’s liable to be shot before anyone finds out you gave him permission. You’ve strung him on the horns of a dilemma that he can’t solve. You’ve given him a choice as to who will shoot him.”

  “I’ll give him a paper,” Villa proclaimed, “with my signature.”

  I wanted to laugh, but I knew that wouldn’t convince him. “How many of our men can read?” I asked. “And if they can, they’ll be reading it after he’s dead.”

  I decided to press him a little harder. “Listen, chief. You can’t cure an evil by curing the symptoms. If there’s a drought and the cattle are starving, you can fatten ‘em up with a load of grain—but they’ll go right back to starving unless you move ‘em to decent pasture. This man and his son aren’t your problem. The problem is they’re poor. If he steals, he might be better off for a while, but it’s going to make the man he steals from even poorer. Is that a solution? And what’s more, I’ll bet you a peso there’s no free school in this quarter. So what can the man do except die?”

  Villa had listened to me carefully, brow furrowed in a mixture of concentration and annoyance. But he didn’t blow up or reach for his pistol. He thought awhile, then turned to the wretched father.

  “Is that so? Is there no school in this quarter?”

  “None, Señor General. And the few schools in the other quarters are so full they turn their own children away. This is a fact. You can ask. You owe your officer a peso.”

  Villa didn’t remark on this boldness or bother to point out that he hadn’t taken the bet. “What is the name of this street?” he demanded.

  “Calle Aldama, señor.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll tear down a house here and build a school. Until then, we’ll use that shoe shop next door as a school. I’ll send a teacher. Tell the other fathers to have their children here at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Tomás?”

  “Yes, chief?”

  “Do you have any money with you? I gave this kid my last peso for his sugar cane.”

  I fished around in my pockets and came up with a five-peso note and a two-dollar bill.

  Villa took them and handed them to the man. “This is for your trouble, señor.”

  I left him then, but the next morning the chief sent for me again, and we rode once more through the streets of Chihuahua City to Calle Aldama. We halted in front of what had been a shoe shop. About fifteen children were crowded in there on wooden stools, including the boy with the sugar cane, and a young woman stood before a wobbly blackboard with a bit of chalk, scratching out the alphabet. Across the street twenty men from one of our brigades pounded with sledgehammers to destroy two old adobe houses.

  All over the city, Villa said, beginning today, gangs of soldiers under civilian engineers were tearing down such buildings, making way for forty new schools. Each of the children who attended were to be given ten pesos a week to bring home to their fathers.

  “Well, Tomás? Does Alvaro Obregón do this? Does the illustrious Señor Carranza, the First Chief? He declares new national holidays. Does he build schools? Does he pay the fathers of the children so that they accept the sacrifice? Can I hold my head high when I meet your General Pershing?”

  “Yes, chief,” I said. “You can do that.”

  He was an actor, no doubt of it, but it seemed he was more than Henry the Fifth. Come to think of it, Shakespeare would have had to write a whole new play to do him justice. I had a fresh rush of faith, almost equal to that of the boy with the cane.

  The only thing I wondered about was where all the money would come from to pay for this construction, but when I got back to the hotel Candelario enlightened me. Villa had already asked Carranza for five million pesos to finance the planned spring offensive toward Mexico City, but the First Chief protested that he didn’t have it. He was supporting two other divisions as well— Obregón’s in the northwest, General Pablo González’s in Coahuila. Villa confiscated the state printing presses in the basement of the old Governor’s Palace, put two local artists to work and began to print his own currency—three million pesos’ worth on the first run. There were eagles and swords and the usual olive branches, and one side carried twin portraits of President Madero and Abraham Gonzalez, the pro-revolutionary governor who had also been murdered by Huerta, so that the bills quickly got to be called dos caras, or “two-faces.” All the former government money was declared illegal and had to be traded for the two-faces.

  Then Villa promptly shipped the incoming supply of cash up to El Paso to pay for more coal and guns. A move, I reckoned, worthy of J. P. Morgan.

  The next day, again, the chief asked me to meet him in front of the Fermont, but this time he waved a hand at the Packard.

  “Get in, Tomás,” he said, and I stepped inside. Washed and waxed, gleaming like a jewel in the sun, the Packard had matching green leather cushions and a glass partition. I put my boots up on the jump seat.

  So this is what it was like to be rich. I could learn to like it.

  “We’ll go to my house,” he said. “This is a special day. The schools are open all over the city, and your inspiration helped it to come about. I invite you for lunch.”

  “What house?”

  “To meet my wife.”

  “I’ve met her. I mean I’ve met them.”

  “No, no. My real wife, Luz Corral. I’ve told you about her, haven’t I? She’s been hiding in the mountains, but now she’s here in Chihuahua, although I’m going to send her to Texas. This is still no place for her and the child, not until the revolution’s won.”

  “You have a child? And a house?”

  “I have plenty of children, without doubt, but this one bears my name. Tomás, you ask a lot of dumb questions. Luz cooks well. We’ll have a fine lunch.”

  I was too flabbergasted by the revelation of this domestic existence to go on bleating any longer. The house wasn’t far away, just outside the center of the city, and Villa told me that it was called Quinta Luz in honor of its owner.

  “I met her here in 1910,” he said, “just before the revolution began. It was love at first sight, which is the way I still am, as you know. But it took awhile to persuade her to marry me. She was much too level-headed. Finally
I promised to buy her this house, and that did the trick. Here we are.”

  From the outside the brown stone building didn’t appear very sumptuous, but inside it was enormous, with sagging armchairs, pictures of Villa and his wife on the walls, a Mexican flag, glass cases with cheap bric-a-brac, an old oak desk and several main rooms that led to a large courtyard of worn cobbles flanked on all sides with other rooms—forty in all, Villa claimed.

  “Who lives here?” I asked.

  “Luz and her family. Parents, cousins, aunts and uncles, cousins of cousins, orphans … I can’t keep track. She’ll take in anybody who has a hard-luck story. I pay for it. I want to keep her happy. If I don’t, she nags at me.”

  Luz Corral greeted us in the patio. She was a handsome woman in her early twenties, on the bosomy side, with light brown hair, calm gray eyes and a queenly bearing. She was so different from Pancho Villa’s other two wives that it was hard for me to believe that he had chosen her.

  “This is my güera, “ he said tenderly. “My chulita. “ Both were affectionate words for fair-haired one. He had told her all about me, he explained. His belly heaved with a low chuckle. “I didn’t say that you were my gringo, Tomás.”

  She had a kindly manner, and she said, “You take good care of my Pancho, don’t you? He claims all his officers do. He never has the time to take care of himself. And he always speaks well of you, Captain.”

  My Pancho? The general, who had led the charge into Torreón, just smiled.

  We ate lunch in the patio in the welcome shade of some lemon trees, surrounded by potted plants, clinging purple bougainvillea and little patches of sunflowers. A pair of bright green lovebirds screeched in a cage that hung from a branch of a lemon tree. Half a dozen small children galloped in and out of various doorways, playing games and calling shrilly to each other.

  “Teo, do you want me to bring out the child for Captain Mix?”

  Teo! I realized that had to be a private nickname for Doroteo, the name he had been born with in Durango, where as a youth he had sold wood from the back of a burro. I think if a man ever called him that, Villa wouldn’t bother to yell for Rodolfo Fierro, He would just shoot him on the spot.

  “Where’s my angelito?” Villa called, grinning.

  Out came his little angel, dressed neatly in a navy blue cotton skirt and white blouse. She must have been about three, a pretty child who looked like her mother, which was lucky. She didn’t have much to say, and after she buried her curly head in her father’s chest and he bussed her all over her cheeks and ears, so that she giggled and whispered, “It tickles, Papa,” she went dutifully to her mother, who patted everything back into place and then sent her off to play.

  Pancho Villa—the Lion of the North, the conqueror of Juárez— smiled his half-idiotic, pop-eyed smile. He might have been an accountant come home for lunch after a busy morning at the office. I was privy to a domesticity that I wouldn’t have thought possible, and if anyone else had described this scene I would have guffawed.

  When lunch was over, Luz Corral clapped her hands and said serenely, “I have a present for you, Teo.”

  A cunning smile spread over Villa’s features, and he winked at me. He said, “The last present she tried to give me, Tomás, was a knife in my belly.”

  “Ah, well!” Luz tapped her spoon on the tablecloth. “You know why,”

  “Because of Esperanza…”

  “Is that the one from Ascensión or the one from Torreón?”

  “Ascensión. The one from Torreón is called Juana.”

  “I did make a mistake. I should have put the knife in their bellies.”

  “They’re not to blame, chulita. They only do what they think is right for them. I lie to them, and they believe it. Why don’t you have them live here with you? The older one, Esperanza, sews very well.”

  “I have a seamstress already. You haven’t met her, because she’s too pretty. What does the other one do besides look at you adoringly, and the other thing?”

  “Not much,” Villa admitted, and looked uncomfortable. “Where is my present?”

  Luz swept out of the patio, trailing her long skirts like a young queen.

  Villa bent quickly toward me.

  “That went well. Naturally I brought it up on purpose, because she would have done so sooner or later, and this way it was easier. I’m glad you were here, Tomás. She doesn’t like to make scenes in front of my officers. What do you think of my güera?”

  “She’s a remarkable woman, chief.”

  “I think so too. She won’t like it when I send her away to Texas. But I’m going to rent a fine house for her and buy her a Dodge car. She wants to learn to drive. Can you imagine? A woman! But why shouldn’t she?”

  Luz Corral returned with something wrapped in tissue paper, and when she deftly peeled the paper aside it uncovered a tan pith helmet, the kind you see on African explorers going up the Nile after crocodiles. “What the hell is that?” Villa demanded.

  “If you can’t see what it is, I’ll give you spectacles as a present.” Luz frowned.

  “I have a hat,” he said grumpily.

  “A dirty sombrero. This is something special—I had Hipólito send it from El Paso, and before that it came all the way from Abercrombie & Fitch in New York. This is the kind of helmet that Colonel Roosevelt wore before he became President. He wore it at the battle of San Juan Hill. It will keep your head cool in the desert.”

  “Roosevelt wore one? Did he really?”

  “I’ve seen photographs.”

  Villa set it slowly on top of his head, and it fit well. With his curly mustache he looked like pictures I had seen of Englishmen in India, except that his cheeks were too brown.

  “Will you wear it?” Luz asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I’ll wear it.”

  “Captain, you heard him promise. Tell me if he doesn’t wear it.”

  We pushed our chairs deeper into the shade of the lemon tree. Luz Corral went away, and Villa turned the pith helmet over and over in his hands, as if it might bite. Luz returned with three small glasses and a bottle of Spanish anisette.

  “Do you like anisette, Captain, or would you rather have whiskey?”

  “Señora, I’ve never had anisette.”

  “It tastes of licorice. It’s strong, but excellent for the digestion.”

  Villa was going to drink too. When I realized that, I was startled. He caught my eye and winked again. Then he drained his glass in one swallow, coughed, turned slightly red, but quickly recovered himself.

  I drank the anisette and it was nicely warming in the belly, and then Luz Corral disappeared again, skirts trailing on the cobbles.

  “Say nothing to anyone about this,” Villa commanded, indicating the empty glass. “It helps me to fuck her, which I intend to do now that lunch is over. It’s been very helpful having you here, Tomás. When she gets back, make some excuse and leave. Tell Lopez to come back at seven o’clock sharp and say that I’m urgently wanted by one of my generals. Have you got that?”

  “Yes, chief.”

  “She’s a remarkable woman. That’s the word. I love her as much as I did on the day I first set eyes on her. Who else would give me a hat like this to wear in battle?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “If I had my life to live over again, I wouldn’t change a thing. Not many men can make that statement. This anisette goes straight to my balls. It makes my head swim.” He patted his stomach. “You know, I was crazy when I was younger. Luz helped calm me down. For that alone. I love her. A wife is essential in a man’s life, like an anchor for a boat. You can keep it coiled on the deck and throw it out whenever you find yourself drifting. Do you know that I’ve never seen the ocean? Not even the Gulf of Mexico. But someday I will.”

  He belched. His voice was lazy, his eyelids drooping, although the eyes themselves showed a certain impish sparkle. “Go now, Tomás … she may be a while. She’s probab
ly primping and getting ready for what she hopes will happen. And it will! I’ll make some excuse for you. Seven o’clock sharp—have you got that?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  Lopez drove me back to the Fermont, and I gave him his instructions.

  A few minutes before seven I looked out of my window to spot the Packard pulling away from the curb, on its way to rescue the commanding general of the Northern Division from the arms of his adoring wife.

  Chapter 12

  “Shall I be frightened

  when a madman stares?”

  On a softly warm January day of 1914, I met the train that brought Pancho Villa north for his historic meeting with Generals Scott and Pershing.

  We rode on horseback to the center of the new International Bridge between Juárez and El Paso. Villa dismounted, and General Hugh Scott, the commander at Fort Bliss, shook his hand firmly. Scott wore yellow gloves because two fingers of his right hand were missing; he was a thick-bodied Indian fighter with a white mustache and a face that resembled a walrus, and he massacred the Spanish language with the same vigor that he had applied to the Apache nation.

  Black Jack Pershing, the general who commanded the whole border area, hung back a little and was less hearty in his welcome, although he was always correct—a tall, graying, rawboned man in his fifties with squared-off shoulders and a steel ruler sewn into his shirt where his spine should have been. Both Americans and their gang of officers looked slick as paint, and the chief had spruced up for the occasion too, wearing a dark bow tie and a new butterscotch-colored tweed suit that almost fit.

  Obregón was also there—come over from Sonora as a military representative of Carranza—a short, barrel-chested man with penetrating green eyes, whose family had emigrated from Ireland a few generations ago and changed the surname from O’Brien. He wore a rumpled white-duck uniform, and he needed a shave. He had been doing well lately, winning several battles against superior Federal forces, so that he and Villa outdid each other to be friendly.

  “I bring you the compliments of the First Chief, compañero, and we both congratulate you on your great victories in Chihuahua.”