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

by Clifford Irving

  Candelario and Julio came up often with the French whores, although Julio still behaved toward them like a monk, and Rosa and I were like a young married couple having friends to lunch and dinner. Candelario was always able to liberate a wandering chicken or suckling pig, and Rosa would kill it in the backyard and barbecue it.

  I had bought a schoolbook for her the last time I was in El Paso. Every afternoon I gave her a reading or writing lesson, and sometimes in the evening, when we were alone, we listened to the rain drip from the leaves in the garden, and we spoke in English.

  “The weather is nice today, Thomas, was it not?”

  “Yes, Rosa, it was fine. How about tomorrow? Do you think it will rain tomorrow?”

  “Yes, it is rain tomorrow. It is rain tomorrow and past tomorrow.”

  “It will rain tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow.”

  “I think so too,” she said, kissing me.

  She was quick. I was proud of her and proud of myself, and the waiting for what would happen or not happen in Mexico City wasn’t bad at all because we had each other on the hill of La Sierpe. I began to see the magic that can spring to life between a pupil and teacher, and how each becomes dependent on the other if the teaching is from the heart and the learning penetrates. I wondered if Pancho Villa, in his way, had become linked with me through that process, as I was being linked now with Rosa.

  I remembered my Greek history: she was Galatea to my Pygmalion. She was sixteen now. Once she had been a waif, a burden; then a child concubine, a sewer of buttons. That seemed so long.

  Hannah was far away, and not just in uncrossable miles. There was no way I could write to her, for the mails to the border were restricted to military dispatches. And even if I could have used my position to slip a letter into the daily pouch, what would I have said that wasn’t a lie? I didn’t miss her at all; that was a terrible thing to realize. Did I need her the way a man needs the woman he’s going to marry? Hannah fed my imagination and my wispy dreams of the future.

  But living the life of a revolutionist in Mexico, nothing was left to imagination. And I had no future now, not there on La Sierpe. I was a soldier with his woman, a soldier between battles, living only in the present.

  Rosa and I went out every Sunday to the bullfight, and sometimes in the morning, before it grew too hot, we would walk through the parks of the city and sip a lemonade in the shade of an oak tree. At night there was a cantina we liked, where guitarists came from all over the city to play until dawn, and one night a violinist, who had played with the national orchestra but now was a revolutionist like the rest of us, wandered in and began fiddling Beethoven sonatas, so that the bar fell silent and tears sprang to every listener’s eyes.

  Not far from town we discovered an abandoned mineral spring, and when we tired of the guitarists we would ride out there and bathe naked in the starlight, letting the hot, sulfurous water soothe our bones. Those nights I slept like a baby and awoke like a satyr.

  The one sin that didn’t come naturally to me was gluttony. I needed no more than what I had. And so we waited in Zacatecas for the coal, while the rains beat down.

  Early one morning in July, I woke to the rapid pounding of hoofs on dirt. In the quiet, soft air, I heard my name shouted. Candelario and Julio pounded on the timbered door—the beams of the roof shook with the urgency of their fists. I struggled out of bed, where Rosa and I had just greeted sunrise in the proper amatory fashion. I threw on some clothes and opened the door.

  Despite the cool morning, Candelario and Julio were sweating. Their horses were ground-tied, flanks heaving. Candelario flung his great arms around me, and the strength of his embrace made me gasp.

  “Tomás! It’s over!”

  “Hombre …” I managed to shove him away. “Calm down. What are you talking about?”

  “The revolution is over! We’ve won! Do you understand? Huerta’s quit! He got drunk with Orozco … sailed from Veracruz on some German battleship…”

  He was out of breath; his face streamed with sweat. Julio shook his fists into the air with glee.

  Villa had been right after all. Zacatecas had fallen. Huerta, staring into a glass of cognac, had glimpsed his destiny.

  And I could go home now, home to Hannah and my real life. Major Thomas H. Mix, Retired …

  Yes, it is rain tomorrow, mi capitán.

  I stirred from my reverie. They were waiting for me to whoop with joy, to break out the tequila and share their exultation.

  “Amigo, that’s the best news I’ve ever heard.” I tried to sound convincing. “Tell me more. Who’s taken over in the capital?”

  “Some little politician,” said Julio, not quite so joyously. “I can’t even remember his name. But he’s Carranza’s man—naturally, a real pantywaist. No cojones. The Federal Army is disbanding. Orozco’s quit as well. Obregón’s moving south from Guadalajara. So is González, west from Tampico.”

  “And we?”

  “Ah, we!” Candelario’s laugh boomed in the morning stillness. “Angeles just found out that the railroad tracks are torn up for a hundred miles to the south. And even if that weren’t so, you can be sure that fucking Don Venus won’t let the coal get through to us. He’s going to bottle us up here so that he, the deliverer, can ride into Mexico City on a big white horse, all alone. A Spanish conquistador! Fuck his mother! His grandmother too! He’s publicly called the chief a murderer … the Benton thing again, and something to do with some officers who were shot for lunchtime sport after we took Zacatecas.”

  Candelario’s good eye gleamed. “But the chief didn’t care. Listen, Tomás! There’s going to be a big revolutionary convention in Aguascalientes. A fiesta to end all fiestas, beginning next month, after Carranza’s had his day. Everyone will be there. All the generals and politicians—Zapata, Obregón, González, Carranza. Everybody! What a time we’ll have! The girls will make a fortune. That’s where they’ll decide everything—the land, the vote, the new president.”

  “And who will be that new president?” I asked.

  “Not the chief,” said Julio. “But not Carranza, either.”

  I should have been more elated. I think, in that moment, I had been briefly granted the vision of a clairvoyant, not that much clairvoyance was necessary. You had only to understand the natures of the men involved to glimpse the outcome.

  I went inside the house and told Rosa. I told her quickly, gave her a big hug and then went outside again, because I didn’t want her to ask me the one question I couldn’t yet answer.

  That night we all went to town and got drunk. Gangs of our cheering soldiers passed by us on the gas-lit streets. Arms linked together, weaving down the wet cobblestones, they sang a raucous verse to the tune of “La Cucaracha.” It went like this:

  With the whiskers of Carranza—

  I’ll make a new toquilla!

  For the sombrero

  Of my general, Pancho Villa!

  Their exuberance was to be expected. Everything that Villa promised had come true. He had rallied the people, armed them and led them to victory. He had taken Torreón, then the railroad line, then Juárez, Chihuahua City and Zacatecas. Even more quickly than he had predicted, Mexico City had fallen.

  Along the way he had made more than his share of mistakes, but in the end it didn’t seem to matter. He had won. Now, I knew, he wanted to carve up the big haciendas, distribute land to the poor, build schools for the kids—and then he would retire, surround himself with his wives and learn to read.

  And I? I had survived nearly two years of fighting and hardly been scratched. Rodolfo Fierro had once promised to kill me, but now he would never have the chance. There was that fellow Miguel Bosques in El Paso, but I had a hunch he would stay there only as long as his friend Lieutenant Patton remained at Fort Bliss, and I knew that young officers moved from post to post almost as often as cowhands from pasture to range. Bosques would have to learn to live with the pain of his memories … and so would I.

  It was over. I
had become a man. Not quite the man I had dreamed of being, but something more substantial, at least, than the youth who had banged into the Juárez cantina on that March day of 1913 to find Julio Cárdenas.

  That’s what I thought, in idle bursts, as we drank our way through the cantinas of Zacatecas during the next weeks and prepared to go with Pancho Villa to the historic Revolutionary Convention at Aguascalientes. I wouldn’t quit before that. I had told Hannah I would leave when Mexico City fell, but I had thought it would fall to the Northern Division, and I had to be in at the end to see how it all worked out. That was the actor in me. I couldn’t exit before the final curtain. I had to hear the bravos and witness the bows.

  We also heard, during that time, that down in Morelos the little brown-skinned Zapatista soldiers were singing a verse of their own to the music of “La Cucaracha.” It went this way:

  With the whiskers of Carranza—

  I’ll braid a great reata!

  To lasso a horse

  For my general, Zapata!

  I wondered what the soldiers of Obregón were singing, and the soldiers of González, and if Carranza himself were humming anything into his long white beard.

  But I didn’t really care. When we weren’t out celebrating, I sat up on the hill of La Sierpe with Rosa, in the shade of some grapevines with a breeze whispering through the eucalyptus tree, quietly making my plans. There was a certain bittersweet felicity to that season. Day by day, Rosa’s English improved, and it gave pleasure to us both.

  I put off telling her that I was leaving; I had decided that could wait until after we finished up at Aguascalientes. Who really knew how long the convention might take, or that there might not be an unforeseen aftermath? I must have sensed then what I know now: that nothing works out as planned, and there are no happy endings in life. There are no endings at all, except death. There are only pauses, the ends of acts and scenes … and then the wheel begins to turn again.

  I didn’t reckon with Rosa. I may have thought of her as a child, but she knew she was a woman. A woman with a right to a life, and a right to know where that life was going.

  One evening, after yet another wild celebration in town, we came back to La Sierpe, and the night air was so cool and vibrant, so fresh after the rains, that I suggested we sit outside on the stone terrace and drink one last tequila. I may have been a little drunk. Rosa poured a glass for me but none for herself. She rarely drank. In the bars, while Candelario and the others popped the cork on one bottle after another, she sipped sweet soda pop. She was only sixteen.

  Scudding clouds moved across the face of the moon, then left it whitely bare, then masked it again, and I was reminded of the night I had nearly been shot by Juan Dozal.

  And suddenly Rosa spoke. “Tomás, what will you do now? Will you go back to Texas to marry? Or will you stay with me? I need to know.”

  She had spoken quietly, but in the silence of the night I heard every word. She hadn’t equivocated. She hadn’t spoken shyly, either. She had spoken deliberately, as a woman who needed to know.

  I let the breath slide from my lungs. I hadn’t meant to groan, but it was indeed a groan that escaped my lips into the night air. She had always needed to know, and I hadn’t seen it. I had played the fool, and fools are cruel when they don’t understand the depth of their foolishness. Did I once believe that I was innocent of the sin of gluttony? There on La Sierpe, scathed by her quiet words, I knew better. And now honesty was somehow no longer easy or simple.

  “Yes, Rosa. When the convention’s finished in Aguascalientes, when there’s peace, I’ll go back to Texas. I’ll marry Hannah. That’s her name.”

  I remembered her refusal to tell me her dead husband’s name, because his shadow might fall between us. For the same reason, I had never told her Hannah’s name. But now she knew. The shadow had fallen.

  “I’ll stay with you until then,” I said, “if that’s what you want.”

  “What I want,” she answered, “is for you to stay with me. Not until then. Forever.”

  The moon popped out again and cast a cool light on her face. I hadn’t lied to her; I hadn’t tried to be clever or apologetic or patronizing. I had tried to match her simplicity and to be honest. I hadn’t known how she would respond, but I had assumed she would either accept my declaration in some kind of stoical Indian way, or else cry. What I hadn’t bargained for was a forthright declaration of her own desires. And I hadn’t glimpsed the full truth of those desires. I had been blind.

  “Rosa, I told you in Ascensión…”

  “I know what you told me in Ascensión,” she said, “and since then. I remember well. But I had thought, Tomás, that you might have changed in your feelings. I thought—”

  Her voice broke in mid-sentence. She didn’t go on. Her head tilted away so that I might not see, but her effort failed; the moonlight struck fully now on one cheek, and I saw the single glistening tear sliding down from the corner of her eye toward the bare brown shoulder above her blouse. She didn’t bother to wipe it away. That would have been a theatrical gesture of which Rosa was not capable. She kept her hands tightly together in her lap. She was sitting on a small webbed cane stool, legs tucked neatly beneath her long skirt.

  I knew what she thought. She thought it had been good between us, that it couldn’t possibly be any better between me and anyone else. We were lovers and friends, we were as intimate as brother and sister, we were as linked as teacher and pupil. And in her eyes we were man and woman, mated.

  I wondered how it was possible to look at it any differently, except for the fact of Hannah and my allegiance that had existed before I had met a child by a lake, and that was cemented now by what had happened in Hipólito’s house and the subsequent promises. My promises had all been to Hannah. I had made none to Rosa. She had never asked for any … except that I not banish her to Tomochic unless she displeased me.

  Had she ever displeased me? I couldn’t remember a single instance. I was starting to detest myself.

  “I love you, Rosa,” I said, and wasn’t surprised to hear my own voice break too. “You know that. You’re a bountiful woman. There is no one else in the world like you. You’ve made me happy. I tried to do the same for you, but … I didn’t succeed.”

  I saw her mouth start to open, to protest, so I plunged on. “No, don’t say it. I know I succeeded. I know you were happy with me. I don’t mean that. I mean I can’t make you happy now, and I always knew this day, this night, would come when I would have to tell you and have to say goodbye. So in that sense I didn’t succeed. I may have cheated you. I don’t really know. I tried not to. But now, with Hannah—”

  “I don’t want to hear of her,” Rosa said, speaking firmly, breaking into my hopeless speech. “I hear from your voice that you mean what you say. I cannot argue with you. I cannot beg. It would only make me cry, and it would achieve nothing. I never thought I could want a man who did not want me, but that seems now to be the case. Still—”

  “Rosa, that’s not so.”

  “I am sad. I know you want me, but I also know that you want someone else, and want her more than me. You never lied to me about that. I am not angry with you.” She lowered her head. “I am just sad.”

  Then, with swift grace, she stood up.

  “I am going to bed, Tomás. I am very tired. In the morning, I will leave.”

  My heart ached; it felt as if there were a bruise deep in my chest, spreading from behind the ribs to all parts of my body. I didn’t want to hurt her anymore. I didn’t rise to stop her, or embrace her, or do anything that would make it worse for her—or for me.

  “Where will you go, Rosa?”

  “To Tomochic. I will take the mare and the saddle, unless you need them.”

  “They’re yours. Now listen to me.” I spoke from a sudden darkness, into a darkness, for the moon had vanished again behind a long, lumbering gray cloud, and the starlight was dim. “The gold in Tomochic is yours. The gold you buried for Candelario and me. Half of it, m
y half, is yours. It’s a gift, Rosa, from me to you. Please take it.”

  “But the gold belongs to the revolution,” she said, puzzled. “You told me that before I buried it.”

  “I lied. I didn’t know you that well then, and besides, half of it was Candelario’s. He knew you even less. It was a gift from Villa to me. I want you to have it. It was taken from Mexicans. It belongs to Mexico. I want to give it back to Mexico. For me, Rosa, you’re Mexico. Take it.”

  “I can’t do that. You fought for it.”

  “I fought for Villa, not for gold. I didn’t want it then and I don’t want it now. Listen to me. You can buy land with it, or horses, or both. You can do whatever you want with it. You can go to school. You can become someone. You can become independent. You can be whatever you want to be in life.”

  I caught the flicker of a smile. “No, Tomás,” she said softly. “I can’t be what I want to be. I want to be your wife.”

  I winced, but I didn’t reply to that. “Take the gold, Rosa. I’m not paying you off. I’m giving you something with all my heart.”

  “I will never touch it,” she answered. “It will stay buried in the corral. It will rot there, if gold can rot. If you want it, you will have to come for it. You know where it is buried.”

  “For God’s sake—!”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. You mean well, Tomás. You are a kind man. You gave me many gifts. I know you’re not paying me. But I don’t want it. I vow before the Virgin that I will never touch it.” She crossed herself. “And now I am going to bed.”

  I couldn’t have stopped her and didn’t try. I sat in the moonlight for an hour, alone, until the bottle of tequila was empty … as empty as my heart. I slung the bottle into the darkness and heard it shatter on the mountainside. An owl hooted, annoyed. Then I went inside and crawled into the bed behind her but didn’t touch her, just as the morning after the fiesta in Ascensión, after Fierro had told me that one day he would kill me, and after I had made my first speech to Rosa about fidelity to Hannah. So much for fidelity. So much for Rosa. So much for becoming a better man. I listened for Rosa’s quiet breathing. She was asleep, I realized. She wasn’t at peace, but she was a child, and she could sleep.