He publicly referred to Villa as a dedicated enemy of the Catholic Church, the murderer of William Benton, and a brigand who had tried to overthrow the apostle Madero by force of arms. Villa writhed but held his tongue. I think he truly hoped for peace.
Throughout the first month the delegates struggled to find a solution to the conflict. Green eyes glittering with catlike patience, Obregón played the role of peacemaker. Testing the waters, the convention adopted a halfhearted resolution proposing to remove Carranza, Villa and Zapata from their posts before they appointed an interim President of Mexico.
Marching onto the stage before the delegates, hair washed and mustache curried, Villa proclaimed, “You are going to hear sincere words spoken from the heart of an uneducated man. Francisco Villa will not be an embarrassment to those of good conscience. He seeks nothing for himself. I want the destiny of my country to be bright. I will go! Let history say who are Mexico’s true sons.”
Tiny Obregón, all smiles, reached up and hugged him. He must have thought that if everyone left, he would be president.
Now, in the political arena it became a matter of “After you, señor.”
Zapata, filing his spurs down in his mountain stronghold of Cuernavaca, never bothered to reply. Carranza continued to run the government from his hotel in the capital as if nothing had happened. He wanted the Northern Division to disband before he took the train to Veracruz.
“If I leave that scheming sonofabitch behind me in Mexico,” Villa muttered, “he’ll find some excuse to change his mind.”
So Villa went before the convention with a more forceful solution. Tears streaming from bloodshot eyes, he proposed that he and Don Venus face a firing squad together, thus effectively ending their dispute, at least in this world.
Predictably enough, Carranza announced that he would decline the honor. The idea was a sham, he said, and masked Pancho Villa’s true desire to rule Mexico. The next day the convention met and elected an interim President of Mexico—a bullnecked lawyer named Eulalio Gutiérrez who had been a dynamiter of trains for Obregón up in Sonora and finally occupied some government post under Carranza, although it was well known that the First Chief disliked his plodding sincerity.
Few had met the man, and therefore few had developed a reason to dislike him. That was his great advantage, which obviously couldn’t last for very long.
Sure enough, Carranza refused to recognize Gutiérrez as the legitimate President of Mexico. “I will continue,” Don Venus proclaimed, “to fight the enemies of Mexico.”
Like boys at a Sunday sandlot baseball game, it was time to choose up sides. Our generals met early one November afternoon in Villa’s hotel room. The air was hazed with smoke and thick with the smell of horses and old sweat. Everyone wore medals distributed by the convention, except Felipe Angeles, who came dressed in a brown sweater with leather elbow patches and his black riding boots.
Angeles, the most sophisticated among us, reflected not the enthusiasm of the revolution but its impotence. He assumed a forbidding air at the meeting and even spoke sharply to Villa.
“Why do you think no agreement has been reached here, Pancho? Have you wondered? I’ve come to a simple conclusion. Everyone in Aguascalientes struggles now for the fruits of victory. Each man aligns himself in a way most advantageous to his personal interests. Idealism is dead.”
“Not with us,” Villa said.
“So what do we do?” Urbina demanded. “Sit back and let these pantywaists parcel out everything we’ve fought for? Or do we fight them so that we can keep it?”
“Fight who?” Angeles asked. “Where’s the enemy? There’s no battlefield, no dictator. Huerta and Orozco are gone. Carranza has no army. What has Obregón done to us that we should fight him for?”
“Not to us,” Villa growled. “To the people. What he did in Mexico City is unforgivable.”
“Obregón wants to be President of Mexico,” I said. “Why not let him, chief? You always say you don’t want the job. What Obregón did in the capital may have been bad, but he’s still a revolutionist. He hasn’t taken sides since the convention started. If he forms a government with you behind him, President Wilson will recognize it the next day. You can have anything you want. You would stand at his right arm as a conscience, a protector of the people.”
“I’ve said a dozen times,” Villa replied, “that a military man shouldn’t be president.”
Angeles smiled thinly. “But it’s well known that Obregón’s only a chickpea farmer turned general.”
Rodolfo Fierro was there but he said nothing. Urbina thumped the table so hard that the ashtrays spilled. “If it comes to a fight with Obregón,” he yelled, “we’ll beat the shit out of him!”
“Zapata controls the south,” Villa said thoughtfully. “I control the north. If Obregón’s fool enough to ally himself with Carranza, whatever army they’ve got is wedged between us. Felipe, you’re the strategist—work out a plan to deal with it. If this fucking convention can’t make peace, I’ll meet with Zapata and we’ll do it ourselves.”
Peace? He didn’t mean peace. He meant war. Angeles looked at him bleakly.
Our meeting came to an end, and so did the glorious Revolutionary Convention of 1914.
General Murguia, who had defended Torreón against us, went over to Carranza with an entire Federal division that had been hiding out near Puebla. He hated Villa for defeating him; any enemy of Villa’s was automatically his friend. Then three of our own generals defected, with their brigades, in return for God knows what promises from Carranza. That blow penetrated even deeper when one of them trumpeted to the American reporters the true story of the Benton murder and his part in falsifying the execution orders.
Carranza’s staff packed up the treasury’s printing presses, carting them off in the direction of Veracruz. Enraged by the theft, President Gutiérrez conferred with Pancho Villa and appointed him Chief General of the Army of the Convention. We found out later that he bore a grudge against Obregón, who had once told him, “If you were as skillful a lawyer as you are a dynamiter of trains, all your clients must be serving life sentences.”
Obregón made his final decision, I suspect, in favor of what he considered the lesser of two evils. He had all the captured German equipment that had landed last May on Ypiranga—enough barbed wire, rifles and bullets to equip an army of fifty thousand men.
Abandoning Mexico City, he issued a manifesto calling for all of Mexico’s good sons to rise up with him and Carranza against that monster of treason and crime, Pancho Villa.
“Our native land implores us to resist evil!” Obregón cried. “To struggle until we conquer, or convert Mexico into a vast cemetery…”
Villa read these words with flinty eyes, and then, to those of us present, he said, “We’ll go south. The time has come to meet Emiliano Zapata.”
That afternoon I went alone to see Villa. I had promised Hannah and myself that I would leave when the revolution had triumphed, when we took Mexico City. The triumph seemed a hollow one, but now at last we were about to enter the capital. The end had come, and it was time to go. I wondered why I felt so dejected and empty of desire.
I held firm and told Villa my resolve. His yellow eyes glittered.
“I want your blessing,” I said. “Before I go.”
I hadn’t known I was going to say that. I hadn’t realized how important it was for me.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked sharply. “Do you think your luck’s run out? Do you think you’ll have your balls shot off on some battlefield?”
“That’s always possible,” I said. “But that’s not my reason. Hannah’s waiting for me in El Paso. I’m going to marry her. You always knew that. You always said it would happen.”
He looked at me oddly for a moment, as if he didn’t quite believe me. But then his eyes softened.
“Good, Tomás. I’m happy for you. Of course, you have my blessing. I owe you that and more. But I’ll miss you.”
A
bleak and puzzled look suddenly crossed his face. I realized then that nothing had worked out the way he had planned, either. He had thought that once he had whipped Orozco and sent Huerta fleeing, the revolution would be won. He had planned it perfectly, and he had succeeded. But something had gone awry. The rules of the game had been changed. Perhaps he was frightened. I saw something in his eyes that could have been fear, as if his imagination had faltered and events had raced beyond his control. I was moved by his sadness. I loved him as a man, and I wanted to see him prevail.
“You were right,” he murmured, breaking into my thoughts. “You argued that we should join forces with Obregón, let him be president. If not, we’d have to fight against him. And it’s so.” He looked at me shrewdly. “But it still makes no sense to you.”
“You could have made a deal with him, that’s all I meant. It would have saved a lot of lives and grief.”
“A deal? I’ll tell you what kind of deal it would have been. He would be president, and I would be marked for a bullet. Everything’s clear now. I have to smash him, have him shot by a firing squad. Carranza, too. And then I’ve got to find a man to rule this miserable country. It won’t be me—I’m a soldier, not a governor. But somewhere in Mexico there must be a man like the little Señor Madero, and I’ll find him. Then I won’t make the mistake I did before. I’ll guard his back.”
His words gave me heart. He was a man who needed clear objectives, and now once again he seemed to have them. I wished I could be there to see how it turned out. Life with Villa certainly was never dull.
“Is Zapata the man?” I asked.
“No,” he said thoughtfully, “I don’t think so. Zapata is like me. Born to fight, not rule.” He gave me a tired smile. “Do what you must, Tomás. I told you, you have my blessing.”
I made another decision then. I may simply again have smelled my destiny.
“I tell you what, chief. Let me come with you to Mexico City. I’ve never been there. They say it’s a great city. I want to meet Zapata. I’ve met everyone else who seems to matter, and I’m curious. After that, I’ll go.
Chapter 19
“ ‘Tis time to fear
when tyrants seem to kiss.”
On a fine December day, full of birdsong, Candelario and Julio and I strolled down the tree-lined Avenida Juárez in Mexico City, sightseeing. A squad of brown-skinned Zapatista soldiers in floppy white cotton trousers followed us at a distance, gazing up in awe at the tall buildings with their barred French windows.
We had just reached the stone plaza in front of the National Palace when a clanging of bells reached our ears. A brilliant red fire engine turned the corner, tires screeching on the slickly paved street. Firemen hung from both sides, wearing scarlet uniforms and peaked caps.
The Zapatistas behind us ducked for cover among the linden trees, raised their rifles to the hip and fired. One of the firemen bounced on the pavement, then began to crawl toward the shelter of a doorway.
Candelario ran to help him. Julio and I flung ourselves toward the little men crouched behind the trees, our pistols drawn.
“Don’t shoot him! For Christ’s sake, stop!”
The Zapatistas looked up slowly, their soft eyes bright with alarm. “But my colonel—those are Federals—”
“No, no,” Julio panted. “Firemen. They have red uniforms too. They put out fires. With water—see the hoses? Go help the man you’ve shot. Get him a doctor.”
When they were gone, we looked at each other. These were Villa’s potential allies.
“No wonder they never left Morelos,” Julio said. “They’re not soldiers. They’re backward children.”
Following Obregón’s flight to the east, the Zapatistas had come up from the south to occupy the capital. The citizens expected the occupation to be far worse than the systematic rape perpetrated that summer by the Obregonistas, for the mountain men of Morelos had been depicted as bloodthirsty savages who skinned fair-haired people alive and ate iguanas for breakfast.
But they arrived without bugles or drums and filed silently down the boulevards, never firing their guns in the air as the more exuberant warriors of the north were prone to do. They entered the glittering establishment of Sanborn’s on the Paseo de la Reforma, called the capped-and-gowned waitresses “Esteemed lady,” asked to be shown the proper way of holding the cutlery and then paid their bills with silver coins. Around their necks they wore silver crosses and jade amulets against the evil eye. They were polite to the more rowdy soldiers of the Northern Division and in exchange for a few extra cartridges would offer them bags of marijuana. The Zapatistas smoked it day and night, which may have accounted for their simplicity.
Following the shooting of the fireman—a fine example of Zapatista judgment—I saw a sight early one morning that typified Zapatista justice.
In the gray dawn light, propped against the Monument to Motherhood off Avenida Insurgentes, waiting for the garbage cart to come and haul them away, lay three blood-soaked bodies in big braided sombreros and the floppy white cotton clothing of Morelos. Centavo coins had been placed on the eyelids of the three corpses, and to avoid any mistaken speculation as to who was responsible, a hand-lettered cardboard sign was pinned to each Zapatista’s hat, signed by a Zapatista colonel.
The first sign said: “This man was shot because he was a traitor.”
The second said: “This man was shot for stealing.”
The third said: “This man was shot by mistake.”
Emiliano Zapata set up his headquarters in a modest hotel on the outskirts of the city. He told all journalists in the briefest possible words that he supported President Gutiérrez, hoped that land would be given to the people, and looked forward to meeting the great revolutionist of the north, Pancho Villa.
But the next day, as we approached the city, Zapata scurried back to the mountains of Cuernavaca like a frightened hare. The meeting didn’t take place until a week later.
During that week I played the role of tourist, and Pancho Villa that of unrequited lover. His second day in the city, at a bullfight, he was introduced to a twenty-year-old girl named Conchita del Hierro, a sloe-eyed orphan whose parents had died of typhus during the summer occupation of Obregón. Now penniless, she worked as a receptionist in the Hotel Palacio, and she was under the guardianship of her aunt, an imperious woman named Isabel del Hierro.
The girl was rather beautiful, I thought, and more refined than Villa’s usual choice of wife, although she had the powerful breasts and tawny features that he always admired. I was at the bullfight too, sitting between Villa and Conchita’s Aunt Isabel, and after the introduction, before the toreros appeared to circle the ring, the lady leaned toward me and stage-whispered in my ear, “What a marvelous man your general is! One hears so many tales of him, one hardly knows what to believe. But he is so masterful! So simple, yet so obviously complex. What a pity,” she sighed.
“What is a pity, señora?” I asked.
“That he’s married.”
“Why is that a pity?”
“Because, Major, I have made a study of the stars. General Villa is a Gemini, is he not? My niece Conchita is a Sagittarius. We think we control our own fate, but we are often in the hands of superior forces. Conchita and your general were destined to fall in love and marry.”
She must have known something. For three days Pancho Villa squired Conchita del Hierro about Mexico City, to parties and dances and little lunches in bowered hotel gardens. He even went riding with her through Chapultepec Park in the early morning to pick flowers, as if he were a botanist. I watched lazily from a distance, wondering if wedding bells would soon be ringing after a priest had faced the wrong end of a pistol.
On the fourth day I dropped by Villa’s house, a splendid three-story colonial mansion on Calle Liverpool that had been owned formerly by a Huertista banker, to find out when our meeting with Zapata would take place.
The chief welcomed me eagerly, then fell into a leather chair like a bull cleanly
killed. His eyes were bloodshot, and his cheeks, usually so ruddy, were pale.
“Tomás, I’m glad you haven’t gone yet. I must talk to someone. I have a terrible problem.”
“What’s Carranza done now?”
“Piss on Carranza—I can deal with that.”
The story then poured out like a waterfall. As he talked he kept lighting cigarettes, stubbing them out half-smoked on the arms of chairs and tabletops, so that by the time he had finished the floor was littered with butts and ashes and the carpet had been scorched in three or four places. He never noticed.
He was in love with Conchita del Hierro, and as far as he could tell, she returned his affections. He spent about five minutes describing to me how beautiful he found her, how intelligent, how sympathetic and sensitive. He had never met a girl like her. He was ready to die for her bones, as the Mexicans say. She was only twenty, but she had the wisdom of Cleopatra and Sheba combined, the courage of Joan of Arc, the queenly bearing of Victoria.
Naturally he had asked her to marry him. The result was not what he expected.
“She told me I was married already, and so the answer was no. I explained that Luz was like a sister to me, and the others—” He dismissed that gang with an upward movement of his hand. “But still she said no, and when I persisted, she began to leak tears. Tomás, I can’t stand it when women cry. Luz did a lot of that in the beginning, but not anymore. She’s learned. But when Conchita cried, my heart nearly broke in half. Naturally, I changed the subject. She could ask me to get down on all fours and moo like a cow, and I would do it.”
The next day, he continued, Aunt Isabel paid him a visit, and they lunched in the garden of the Hotel Palacio. Villa had bought a new dark green tweed suit and a polka-dotted bow tie, and he wore the shiny boots that gave him corns. With a man in love, I realized, anything is possible. Señora del Hierro arrived in a magnificent white lace dress that revealed as much as possible of her white bosom, probably intended to remind Villa that under Conchita’s blouse there dwelled the same splendors.
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