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

by Clifford Irving

  Dogs showed their teeth in welcome. The village, a lusterless collection of huts, seemed somewhat cheered by the radiance of the rising sun, but at best it was a somber place in a dreary little valley. The revolution hadn’t penetrated to these mountain pueblos, except as sons and fathers might have gone off to fight and not returned. We were a martial pair, but our weapons were sheathed and I tried to nod in a friendly manner.

  The girls we passed looked dumpy and dull of eye, bowed at the shoulder from grinding corn and washing clothes. The walnut-brown Tarahumara women, wrinkled as burnt boots, wore tattered rebozos; the old men, frayed white cotton shirts that flapped in the breeze. With worried eyes, they watched us ride by.

  Tomochic was another of those places that had been only a name to me. Was this where I had banished her? Rosa had been born here, lived here, but she might as well have come from the far side of the moon. I understood now what it had meant for her to live in the Hotel Fermont and then in our hideaway up on La Sierpe.

  She had described the location of her mother’s house, and it was no trouble to find it—a hut much like the others, that couldn’t have contained more than a single room and a chimney. In that room a man and woman would live, make love, birth their children, grow older and die; and the children would follow suit. A pair of thin mustangs stood in the corral behind the hut, pawing the turf nervously. They smelled a gringo.

  When I dismounted a Tarahumara woman came to the rude, wooden-slatted door. I saw Rosa’s face in hers. She was a woman only in her late thirties, but already the dugs of her once robust breasts hung low and her hands were gnarled like those of a crone. Her rump and thighs were thick, her brown neck corded, her face puffy. She may have been handsome once. She may have been as pretty as Rosa.

  I tried to glance over her shoulder into the shadows of the hut, but I saw nothing.

  “Señora…”

  I introduced myself, and then, not knowing what else to say, I blurted, “Where is Rosa?”

  Her eyes betrayed no recognition of who I might be, and her voice showed no emotion. She spoke Spanish with difficulty.

  Rosa was not there, she said.

  “When will she be back, señora?”

  “She is gone.”

  “But where?”

  “Quién sabe?”

  I didn’t want to believe it. Not after I had come this far, with such longing and resolve. “But when? How long ago? Where did she go? To Chihuahua City, or just to some village? Please, señora, I’m her friend. Tell me all you know.”

  The woman shrugged her shoulders. A while ago, she said. She had come. After a while, she had gone. She had gone once before, for a long time, and come back only once, with a mule. A strange girl, Señor Colonel. She comes and goes. She is hardly of the village. It is not easy to say what she will do, or if she will ever be back.

  I wanted to rage at her easy acceptance of what to me was near tragedy, but what good would it do? She wasn’t responsible. She knew nothing more than what she had told me. Rosa had come. Rosa had gone.

  “Señora, please answer. Did she go alone?”

  “Always alone, Señor Colonel.”

  “Where should I try to find her?”

  She shrugged. She tried to smile, perhaps to comfort me, and I saw decayed brown teeth.

  I walked back to where Candelario waited by the horses, and for a moment I laid my cheek on the hard flank of the roan, needing to feel some heartbeat of life. When I looked up, Candelario was studying me intently.

  “She’s gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “To where?”

  “Her mother doesn’t know.”

  “Alone?”

  “That’s what I asked, too. Yes, alone.”

  Candelario coughed uncomfortably. “And did she take the gold with her?”

  “I didn’t ask.” I swung* into the saddle. “The gold is hers—she can do what she pleases with it. I don’t care if she took it or not.”

  “Half of it is mine,” Candelario reminded me. “I care. I told you, Tomás—”

  “Damn it,” I said, my voice rising, “what the hell do you want to do? Dig in the fucking corral, with the whole village watching? If it’s not there, there’s nothing you can do except cry. So let it be. Hope that it’s there,” I said cruelly. “Maybe that hope will get you safely through the rest of the revolution.”

  He looked at me angrily. He hadn’t deserved that outburst, but I didn’t care. I jammed a knee into my beast’s flank and turned him, snatched the bullwhip and flicked it over the mule’s laidback ears.

  I had left Hannah. Now I had lost Rosa.

  I wanted to get to Parral, do what had to be done and then go fight. The horse and mule surged ahead, back toward the sierra, struck by brilliant yellow bursts of the morning sun, with Candelario following in silence.

  Parral, in the cup of the valley southwest through the mountains, formed itself vaguely out of a cottony dawn mist. Not far from here, Pancho Villa had been born.

  Cold and hungry, I stopped a ragged peasant who was leading a mesquite-laden burro into the town and asked him how to get to the Hacienda de Los Flores on Calle Chorro, which is where Villa had told me the German spinster lived and where I would find Franz von Papen. Doffing his sombrero, the campesino scratched the lice in his gray hair. He offered his deepest apologies: he had been born near Parral and lived there for forty years, but it had never been necessary to learn the names of the streets. Who would bother? If we could perhaps trouble ourselves by describing the persons we sought and give their occupation, he would be honored to offer his services in guiding us there.

  A foreign woman named Griensen, I told him. What she did for a living, I couldn’t say.

  “Una gringa? Alta? Una güera, con ojos verdes? Con muchos caballos buenos?”

  All foreigners, unless they were heathen Chinese, were considered by the campesinos to be gringos, and I had no idea whether the old woman was tall or fair-complexioned with green eyes, or had many good horses; but I said yes, that was the one, figuring that even if it wasn’t she could still direct us to the right place.

  The man led us out a cobbled side street, and just as the sun appeared weakly over the mountains and the valley was flooded with pink light, we reached the flat, rose-colored facade of a house with a huge carved wooden door and a copper cowbell hanging from a length of rope. Like the faces of Mexicans themselves, the front of a Mexican house told you little about what lay behind the blank walls. Candelario gave our guide a few centavos; he saluted us and went on his way.

  I yanked on the cowbell, and it pealed richly in the thin morning air. In a few minutes a wooden slat opened and the dark brown, hooded-eyed face of an Indian porter peered out at us.

  “Is this the house of the Señora Griensen?”

  “ Cómo no?—why not? At your orders, señores.”

  “Colonels Mix and Cervantes would like to speak with the señora.”

  “Cómo no? When will they arrive?”

  I realized then that the last thing in the world we resembled were staff colonels in the Army of the Convention. Riding those bucketheaded nags four days from Chihuahua and Tomochic, wearing our black serapes and dusty trail rags, we could have been a pair of wandering pulque sellers or soldiers from any one of the dozen armies that ranged over Mexico. Candelario, who was in a fractious mood anyway, did the sensible thing. Slipping his rifle from its scabbard, he pointed it through the slot at the porter’s suspicious face.

  “Open the door, you fool, or I’ll blow your nose out of both your ears.”

  “Cómo no?” the man said, and did as instructed.

  We walked our sore-footed horses through the tall portal into the courtyard, the pack mule following. As soon as we were inside I realized why the place had been named Hacienda de Los Flores. Flower gardens meandered in all directions, with neat beds of white roses, orange dahlias, geraniums of all shades, spiderlilies and blood trumpets, and those blue morning glories that the Mexicans call �
�Mantle of the Virgin.” Purple bougainvillea climbed all over the stately house with its grilled windows and rough stone walls, and there were red coral trees and towering royal poinciana with orange butterflylike blossoms. The grass was as green as a carpet of emeralds, sparkling with early dew.

  Macaws and lovebirds sang in cages. I had never seen anything so lush, or smelled anything so fragrant, not even in Mexico City.

  A woman, carrying a Mauser rifle at her hip, appeared in the doorway under a trellis covered with grapevines, with a slim brown youth of about eighteen at her side. From the woodseller’s description she had to be Elisa Griensen, except that she didn’t fit Villa’s description—she wasn’t old at all. Candelario’s weary horse switched its tail and chose that moment to dump a load from its rear end onto one of the dahlia beds. The woman didn’t smile.

  She wore a white Indian blouse with embroidered flowers, a long brown leather riding skirt, trail boots and a flat black Spanish riding hat. She was tall—as tall, I guessed, as I was—probably in her mid-thirties, with fair but suntanned skin, high cheekbones, a handsome curved nose, very yellow hair and narrowed green eyes that raked us up and down as though we had just stumbled out of a Juárez cantina. Hostile as she looked, she was still a splendid sight for any traveler.

  “What do you want?” she said crisply, holding that Mauser steady on my belly button. Lately, people were doing that far too much for my liking.

  “With apologies, señora … is it possible that you’re Elisa Griensen?”

  “I am.”

  I adjusted my thoughts. What difference did it make if she were young rather than old?

  “Colonel Tomás Mix,” I said, “at your orders. And this is Colonel Cervantes. General Villa asked us to call on you. I’m sure you know why.”

  She still failed to greet us with any warmth, and I realized she probably thought we had come across the real colonels in the sierra and murdered them for whatever few pesos they carried.

  “Do you have any papers of identification?” Her voice was husky, flavored with a German accent.

  “In my saddlebags. With your permission?”

  Reaching into my neatly folded uniform, I extracted Villa’s letter.

  Elisa Griensen read it, looked us over again with that keen eye and kept frowning. Her eyes flicked to the uniform that now lay on the grass next to the pile of dung.

  “Is that yours?”

  “Yes, señora. The uniform, not the other.”

  That brought a flicker of a smile to her face, but the rifle didn’t come down. “Put it on,” she ordered. “Let’s see if it fits.”

  I slipped obediently out of the saddle, picked up the wrinkled jacket with the gold eagles and then the striped pants, but then I hesitated.

  “Where would you like me to change, señora?”

  “Right here, where I can keep an eye on you. Don’t worry. I’ve seen a man in his underwear before.”

  I didn’t doubt it for a moment. Candelario chuckled insolently behind me as I struggled out of my serape, then stripped off my cartridge belts, dirty brown shirt and Levi’s. When I sat down on the grass to work my feet out of my boots, I was embarrassed to see my big toe sticking out of one smelly sock. I stood up in my tattered vest and droopy gray underpants, teeth beginning to chatter in the morning cold, then quickly slipped into the pants and buttoned the jacket of the uniform. It occurred to me that the chief had been blessed with some shrewd foresight, and I was grateful to the little Polish tailor for making such a perfect fit, including that neat pocket on the left side that kept my privates snugly in place.

  “My, don’t you look splendid.”

  Elisa Griensen smiled, showing a set of white teeth.

  She lowered the rifle. “My apologies, Colonel. You looked a little young, that’s all. The uniform seems to fit you, so you must be the man we’re expecting.”

  “And my apologies, señora.” I gallantly waved a hand at the dahlia bed, where the horseshit steamed gently in the cold air.

  “It will make the flowers grow more quickly.” Her bell-like laugh chimed in our ears. “You all look as if you could use a bath, and then some breakfast … or the other way round, if you’re starving.” She wrinkled her sharp nose. “No, have the bath first, if you don’t mind. You smell like the hind end of a mule. Then we can eat and talk. I have a friend coming who wants to meet you. He’s late too, so it all worked out fine.”

  She ordered the young man to lead the horses to the stables. He was the son of the porter at the gate, Patricio, who hefted the trunk on his back and showed us to our quarters. He was all smiles now that Candelario hadn’t shot him.

  We were given two fine rooms at the rear of the house, with big beds and warm, handwoven Oaxacan counterpanes. There was a thick gray carpet in our room, with geometrical designs that I had seen once in a photography book about Mexican temples, flowered chintz curtains, and bunches of dahlias and red zinnias in Chinese vases. We had a bathroom too, and when a maid turned the big bronze tap in the shape of a horse’s head, hot water gushed out. Using a jug of kerosene, Patricio swiftly kindled a fire in the grate of the bedroom fireplace, then heaped on some mesquite logs.

  When Patricio and the maid had gone, Candelario turned to me, his one good eye gleaming. On the way down from Tomochic we had barely spoken, but now something had happened to take his mind off his sack of gold.

  “You like this, Tomás?”

  “It’s better than Doña Luisa’s Station Hotel.”

  “Don’t rush with our business, whatever it is. Let’s stay a few days. The mountain air agrees with me.”

  “How do you know she’s not married?”

  He crouched by the crackling fire, rubbing his hands together. “So much the better. The best soup is cooked in a well-used pot. If her husband were here, it was he who would have come to the door.”

  I laughed. “What makes you think she fancies you?”

  “Experience, Tomás. On the gate of every woman’s vulva, God has written the list of all those who may enter. And sometimes, through a magic I don’t pretend to understand, this list reflects itself in the eyes. In the garden, when you were busy dressing yourself in your beautiful uniform, I looked into her eyes and she into mine. I saw the shadow of my name.”

  “All right, but only if there’s time. The man I have to see has messages for the chief.”

  “Make sure you understand the message perfectly,” Candelario said, crouched by the fire. “Life is short, as I’ve told you before, and it’s a sin to miss the small pleasures that offer themselves on the path toward the grave. A man rarely regrets what he’s done, but what he could have done, and didn’t!—this is what torments him when his hair is white and his pecker rises only at dawn when he has to piss.” He spoke calmly, rubbing his hands near the flames to get them warm. “I’m older than you. Not smarter, of course, but I’ve faced death. When I was shot at Juárez, I felt a cold wind blow through my heart, which almost stopped beating. One never forgets that wind. So, talk slowly. For the sweetness of life and because I, your friend who saved your life in Chihuahua, and whom your foolishness may have cheated of his fortune, ask it of you. Did you notice the maid, by the way? Her name is Francisca. She is very pretty. She looked at you with great appreciation.”

  I nudged him away with one boot and bent to warm my own hands.

  “Take your bath, you fool. You have the mind of a goat, and she told you what you smell like. I’m sorry about the gold, although I’ll bet you fifty pesos it’s still behind the corral. And I’m also sorry,” I said gruffly, “that I yelled at you. I was upset. I’m still upset, but I’ll get over it. And one thing more.”

  I raised a warning finger. “This woman is German, and so is the other man I’ve yet to see. They don’t know I’m a gringo, and the chief doesn’t want them to know. This man may be a friend of the revolution … and right now, I suspect, we need every friend we can get. He may be able to help the chief beat Carranza. So watch your tongue.”


  “I’ll keep your secret, Tomás. It’s a bargain.” He grinned slyly, triumphantly. “What a pleasant stay we’ll have here!”

  Chapter 22

  “I will find you twenty lascivious turtles

  ere one chaste man.”

  Breakfast in the big sunstruck kitchen was flapjacks smothered in wild dandelion honey, rashers of sweet smoked bacon and a platterful of scrambled eggs so laced with chile they brought tears even to Candelario’s glass eye. Freshly shaved and shampooed. Candelario in his best rumpled khaki jacket and I in my uniform, we felt more like Villa’s colonels and less like foul-smelling fugitives from Urbina.

  Elisa Griensen didn’t do the cooking, but she told us that she had taught the art to Francisca, and we heaped compliments on our hostess while the pretty Indian girl heaped the flapjacks and bacon on our plates.

  I learned that Franz von Papen had been delayed but was due in a day or so—fortunate, given our own late appearance. Candelario stroked his curly black beard; it was so clean it squeaked.

  “How shall we pass the time until he arrives, señora?” he asked. “Can you suggest something? What is there to do in Parral?”

  “There’s an old church nearby in Atotonilco. Otherwise,” Elisa Griensen said, “not much. I can take you out riding, but I don’t expect this desert is any different from the desert you’ve been through.”

  “It would still be my pleasure to accompany you,” said Candelario, in his smoothest manner. “I love old churches, and the desert even more.”

  “You’ll come too, Colonel Mix?” she asked.

  “Tomás was brought up in the city of Juárez,” Candelario explained. “As a child he was thrown badly from a horse. Poor fellow, the memory lingers. He can’t stand the beasts except when it’s necessary to get from one place to another and there’s no railroad. He won’t want to come.”

  That didn’t sit too well with me, for I liked to think I could give Candelario a mustang and outride him bareback on a burro, but I held my peace.