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

by Clifford Irving

  Afterwards we all drove to Carranza’s new house, a splendid porticoed mansion on the edge of town, with a lovely flower garden and bubbling Moorish fountain. It had recently been proclaimed as Constitutionalist headquarters. But then we entered an uncomfortable sitting room dimmed into chilly darkness by the closed shutters. Carranza didn’t take off his glasses except to wipe his dripping eyes with a cream-colored silk handkerchief.

  The room smelled dank and sour. About six of Carranza’s advisers and secretaries sat behind him on carved French chairs. Villa sprawled in an easy chair in front of him, flanked by myself and Felipe Angeles on hard wooden benches.

  I had been introduced as the chief’s secretary, but that apparently didn’t rate a shake of the First Chief’s hand.

  “And now, General Villa,” Carranza said benignly, when we had settled ourselves, “tell me why you’ve come to Chihuahua. I’m at your service, as always, to answer questions and enlighten you in any way possible.”

  Villa took him at his word. Why, he wanted to know, hadn’t General González cut the railroad line and advanced on Velasco from the rear?

  “Ah, General Villa, you ask me a military question. I am a statesman, a lawyer, a former senator and governor of the state of Coahuila under President Madero. You, who correctly concern yourself with matters that you know best, such as fighting, should know the answer to your question far better than I.”

  “But I don’t, señor,” Villa said. “If I did, for Christ’s sake, I wouldn’t ask.”

  The First Chief dabbed at his eyes with the silk handkerchief. “There must have been some circumstances that did not permit it. I have the utmost faith and trust in General González. He is a man utterly loyal to the Constitutionalist aims, an educated man who understands the need for obedience.”

  Carranza sighed softly, as a teacher might with a backward pupil.

  Villa scratched his head; the dust flew.

  “And now,” he inquired, “why is this obedient General González marching in a lateral direction toward the port of Tampico, when our objective is supposed to be Mexico City?”

  Carranza in turn inquired of Villa if it wasn’t true that in the area of La Laguna the Northern Division had captured more than a hundred thousand bales of cotton.

  The chief looked puzzled. “Yes, that’s so, but I asked you why—”

  “And I answered you, although perhaps more subtly than you’re used to. We must have a port from which to ship that cotton abroad. Tampico, toward which González marches—at my orders—is that port.”

  “Señor!” Villa laughed. “We can send the cotton by train to the United States!”

  “I am not pleased with the attitude of the United States,” Don Venus proclaimed. “Are you not aware of what is happening at Veracruz?”

  We all knew something of it—rumors, anyway—and Carranza explained the rest. The first of the German ships dispatched from Hamburg, Ypiranga, was due to dock at Veracruz with a cargo of fifteen million cartridges and two hundred machine guns for Huerta’s army. A German cruiser hovered off the port, as did various American gunboats and three Yankee battleships. An incident had already occurred; one of the American gunboats had run out of fuel, and a German supplier on the Tampico canal had unaccountably offered to sell them what they needed. A party had been sent ashore.

  The Federals, nervously awaiting an attack from González to the north, promptly arrested the Yankee sailors, held them a few hours, then received orders to release them. But the American Admiral Mayo had demanded a formal apology in the way of a twenty-one-gun salute, which he promised to return.

  Huerta stamped his foot in Mexico City, saying that his men had even helped the sailors load their damned fuel—and in any case why should he salute the ship of a gringo government that didn’t recognize his authority and was openly supplying his enemies?

  “But this is the best thing that could happen,” Villa said warmly to Don Venus. “If Huerta doesn’t apologize, the gringos may take some action. That’ll put a firecracker up the ass of that bullet-headed drunk!”

  Carranza smiled. “Such a salute would violate our national sovereignty, General Villa, just as much as if I had allowed the Americans to inspect the grave of Mr. Benton, whose death caused us so much embarrassment. If you’ll study the history of our country, you’ll realize that for four hundred years Mexico has been the victim of foreign imperialism—the Spaniards, who took our whole country; the Americans, who stole half of it; and the French, who gave us the puppet emperor Maximilian. And now the Americans wish to interfere once again. History cannot be allowed to repeat itself. If they arrive and are made welcome, who knows that they’ll ever go? In this matter, I place the soul of Mexico before the revolution.”

  Villa squirmed in his seat. “Señor, nothing comes before the revolution. How do you explain the soul of Mexico to a peasant who hasn’t enough corn to feed his children?”

  “In time,” Carranza replied affably, “peasants will be taught such things. That is the purpose of our proposed Constitutionalist government.”

  He fended off any further comment by turning toward a bottle of chilled French rosé wine that stood in a silver bucket on the table. The blue-tinted spectacles still hid his eyes. He poured a small glass of wine for himself, then offered one to Pancho Villa.

  “Will you drink with me to the noble aims of my Plan of Guadalupe, General Villa?”

  “I don’t drink, señor. But if you have some hot coffee, I wouldn’t mind a cup. It’s cold as a witch’s tit in here.”

  Don Venus said, “I admire your abstinence, General. I deplore the effect of strong drink on the Mexican nation. It is my aim, during the short period that I will be interim chief of our country, to forbid the distillation of pulque, which I consider a curse on our national family life and productivity. I will encourage the people to replace the swilling of pulque with the moderate imbibing of chilled light wine.”

  Villa chuckled. “While you’re at it, you could also ask God to replace corn with caviar. And pray for snow in summer, so there’s ice to chill the wine.”

  The First Chief didn’t comment, just rubbed his hands together nervously. Then he picked at the skin of one thumb. Shortly after that, the interview ended with a limp handshake.

  Once we were in the Packard and on the road south, Villa threw his hands in the air. “Son of a whore!” He shook those hands as if he were throttling an invisible demon. “I didn’t understand half of what that man said! The words, yes … but the meaning? Válgame Dios! Before I met him, despite everything, I swear to you—I respected him. But when I hugged him at the palace, the feel of his body made my blood run cold. Shall I tell you what he is? A sluggish old man who lives in a dark, damp room and detests the light. Is this a statesman? No, it’s a half blind court clerk. Wine instead of pulque! Did you hear him? I’ll have to tell that one to Urbina. He may go over to fight for Huerta.”

  On the hot winding road to Torreón he sank into a lethargy. But then, after a while, he spoke again.

  “Felipe, I’m a peasant. But you’re an educated man, at least as much as he. You understand all his words. Tell me truthfully—do I do him an injustice?”

  I know Carranza well,” Angeles said. “He believes in intrigues. He surrounds himself with toadies and parasites and jackals. They have only to agree with all his pronouncements. That’s why he tolerates this oaf, General González, who failed to cut the railroad line. He despises you. That’s obvious. Have you never wondered why?”

  Villa nodded, apparently undisturbed; the question had already been answered. But his brows knitted. “Did you smell something in that room? Didn’t you sniff it?”

  “Just the dampness,” Angeles said. “The perfume on his handkerchief. The wine.”

  “There was more. Listen to me. I trust my nose. It’s saved my skin more than once. I smelled an odor in that beautiful house, in that fancy room. Even more, I smelled it in his manner, and he can’t hide it even behind his dark glasses, no
t from a peasant and a former bandit. What I smelled was the odor of ambition. A secret greed. Despite his repeating endlessly that he’s only ‘interim chief’ until we’re victorious, this man dreams to become President of Mexico … and more.” He grunted deep in his throat, like a hog. “He doesn’t see me as the general of an army that will help him win the revolution. Don Venus hopes to be another Porfirio Diaz, to rule alone and forever. And he sees me as the chief obstacle to that demonic dream.”

  Villa considered a moment and then said firmly: “In that, of course—by all that’s holy—he is not mistaken.”

  Chapter 16

  “Do you not know

  I am a woman?”

  Huerta refused to salute the American admiral at Tampico. President Wilson heard the news while he was preparing to tee off at the fourteenth hole of his golf course and immediately left to convene first his cabinet, and then Congress, in order to debate the gravity of the insult. As a result, if you can call it that, on April 21, 1914, the U.S. Marines landed in Veracruz and got a toehold on Mexican soil.

  Pancho Villa chuckled. “It’s Huerta’s bull that’s being gored, not mine.”

  But Huerta wasn’t unhappy. He must have thought it would distract the revolutionists and unite all of Mexico behind him in the hour of national humiliation. For a short time it looked that way: the American Club in Mexico City was burned to the ground, the new statue of George Washington in some plaza knocked off its pedestal and shattered. The German freighter, Ypiranga, off-loaded its bullets and barbed wire anyway, at a more southerly port.

  Carranza sent grave notes of protest in all directions, to Secretary of State Bryan and to the visiting German military attaché in Mexico City, Herr Franz von Papen.

  Villa met with a group of American reporters. “Mr. Wilson is my friend,” he said, “and one of my most trusted aides is a gringo. Your navy may have been foolish in attacking Veracruz, but listen to me, boys—it can stay there as long as it likes. It can bottle up the port so tightly that not even a drop of whiskey gets through to Huerta. And now that I think of it, that’s a sure way to make him surrender.”

  Carranza dithered and protested, and we attacked Zacatecas, the last obstacle before Mexico City.

  Under a brooding sky and in a warm June rain, the fortress city fell to the assault of the Northern Division. Zacatecas was the decisive battle that Angeles preached, but it lasted a week and there was none bloodier. I watched as the bodies of the dead were thrown into mine shafts or stacked on flatcars to be hauled into the desert. Others were soaked in gasoline and burned, and the stench stayed in the city for a week.

  The bodies, as the flames began to eat at them, flung themselves about as though some part of their souls still felt pain. Again, though I struggled against it, I remembered the men in the corral at Torreón …

  Villa, keeping to his vegetarian diet, recruited almost all of the living to our side. Then, the day after Zacatecas finally surrendered, we ate lunch under some mesquite trees at an outdoor restaurant. With us was Carranza’s newly arrived personal representative, the lawyer, Jesús Acuña, who had first visited us in Ascensión with Chao. He bore papers appointing him the new provincial governor. I could tell that Villa didn’t like the man, but he was polite to him throughout most of the meal. Acuña ate delicately, declining to pick up his chicken leg in his hand. He drank chilled white wine, which stirred memories.

  “There’s still good meat on those bones,” Villa pointed out. “Don’t be offended, but if you don’t want it, I do. There’s no disease I fear except clap, and you can’t get that from a chicken leg.”

  He was hungry after the long battle, and he attacked Acuña’s plate like a famished wolf. Dr. Rauschbaum had been banished; the meatless phase of Pancho Villa’s life was suddenly over.

  An avocado salad arrived, and so did a squad of our soldiers, escorting two dusty Federal officers who had somehow lost their boots. They had been hiding in a house nearby on the outskirts of town. A woman had betrayed them. The Villista soldiers, themselves former Federals, were unsure what to do with the captured officers.

  His teeth still grinding into the new governor’s chicken leg, Villa solved their problem without benefit of debate.

  “Shoot them.”

  Acuña sputtered and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “General Villa! Is that really necessary?”

  “Señor Acuña, I’ve spared all enlisted men. But your patron, Don Venus, has himself invoked the decree of Benito Juárez in 1857, that all captured enemy officers are to be executed, since they’re educated men who deliberately fight against the revolution. Would you have me refuse his orders? If I did that, we wouldn’t even be here in Zacatecas.”

  One of the Federal officers, a captain, a small fellow with a waxed mustache, stepped forward and looked Villa straight in the eye.

  “I have no objection,” he said calmly. “You may be sure that if we had won the battle and you were my prisoners, I would shoot you in the same way. And with special pleasure to you, Señor Villa, since I am a soldier doing my duty, and you, señor, are a bandit living on what you steal from the Mexican people.”

  That fellow had nerve. Perhaps he thought it would win a pardon for him. Benton had thought so, too.

  Villa kept on eating. He turned to Acuña. “You see? Here’s a brave man, although misguided. He’s going to die, but he speaks his mind. Why deprive him of believing that he dies for a good cause at the hands of a bandit?”

  Acuña paled. Then the second officer, a lieutenant, much bigger and fiercer-looking than his companion, fell to his knees in the dirt. “General Villa! It’s not right!” he cried. “They told us we were coming north to fight the gringos! If I had known it was your army attacking, I would never have fought! I swear it on the life of my mother!” He began to sob, and he pissed his pants.

  Villa’s nose wrinkled with disgust. I knew how he felt about such incontinence. “You’re a hell of an officer,” he said, and he turned again to the escort. “Carry out my orders.”

  The young soldiers exchanged uneasy glances.

  Acuña spoke up. “General Villa, must it be done here? We’re eating. We’re happy over our triumphs. For God’s sake, I beg you, spare us the sight of death at such a moment.”

  Then Villa’s eyes really blazed. Throwing his chicken leg in the dust, he jumped to his feet.

  “Death bothers you, señor? It bothers me too! I’ve just come from Zacatecas—from Torreón!—battlefields that stink of death, that are soaked with the blood of our own men. You chocolate-drinking politicians,” he shouted, “want to triumph without knowing how that triumph is achieved! But you must know, señor! And you must always remember!” He leveled a blunt finger at the soldiers. “Carry out the order!”

  The captain, the little brave one, said, “General Villa, it’s obvious to me that your men are reluctant. They won’t shoot straight. To that, I seriously object.”

  “You have reason,” Villa replied.

  He pulled his own pistol. The squad of soldiers quickly scattered. The officer on the ground staggered to his feet, and the smaller man closed his eyes. Villa fired twice at each, once while they stood, and then once while the fallen bodies twitched on the ground. Blood trickled down the slight incline of the earth toward the luncheon table.

  “Don’t touch the bodies,” he ordered, holstering the pistol. He thumped back into his iron chair. “Eat, señor,” he instructed Acuña, as he himself began to spear his avocado salad.

  The bodies lay there throughout the rest of the lunch.

  Acuña ate bravely, taking big mouthfuls to show his spirit, until at last the trickle of blood reached his feet. He moved the shiny toe of his black shoe slightly to the left, to avoid it. But the blood gently changed course, as if to search him out, as if it flowed at Villa’s orders, that Acuña might always remember. His toe retreated, and the blood of the two officers, mingled in one muddy river, stubbornly followed it. Acuña, in the midst of his caramel custard, turned g
ray in the face and excused himself. Behind a nearby tree, he was sick. Without another word, he left.

  That evening in the telegraph office—where we had our man, of course—he sent a wire to Carranza giving full details of the incident.

  The rains would never have stopped us from taking Mexico City. This time Villa was determined to fight in rain and mud or sleet and snow, for the Federals in the capital dared not retreat farther south into the waiting guns of Emiliano Zapata. But we needed coal, and we had captured none in Zacatecas. Ravel and Sommerfeld agreed to send us five hundred more carloads. It didn’t arrive, and no amount of angry telegrams to Hipólito could elicit more than the usual Mexican promise that it would be sent “ahorita, “ which meant, literally, right away. If he had said “tomorrow” or “next Tuesday” we would have had hope, but the bold “right away” had the unmistakable meaning of “Who knows when?”

  Everything was in short supply. The Northern Division had swelled to 22,000 men, with more than 15,000 horses, hundreds of cannon and machine guns—and the women and children had to be fed too. No longer a guerrilla army, it was a huge organization gobbling bullets and tortillas at a rate that alarmed any of us who stopped to consider it. Now that it was summer, the remuda could graze for miles throughout the blooming desert, but by October the land would be bare and the bushes would be following the dogs around. We had to store provisions as squirrels do nuts for winter.

  Carranza promised us coal. It would come from the docks in Tampico … ahorita.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Villa said to me. “Huerta knows we’re here. He knows what to expect. He won’t get a night’s sleep until he hears our cannon, and then it will be too late for him. Let him sweat. By September, if he can last that long, he’ll be a broken man. The waiting is always worse than the battle, especially for the army that knows it will lose.”

  The revolution made you as homeless as a poker chip. Rosa arrived at last from Torreón. Tired of hotel life, I quartered myself with her in a small abandoned house on the hill of La Sierpe, a thousand feet above the city. There the air was brisk and blue, the trees grew green under the deluge of afternoon rains and the summer winds blew gently. The house had crawling purple bougainvillea, leafy tomato bushes, eucalyptus and even a laden banana tree.