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

by Clifford Irving

  I became distracted for a moment when the morning wind blew the curtains apart so that the sun burst into the room and turned her hair into fluttering gold. She had moved to share the ottoman with my feet, legs tucked beneath her black riding boots, one hand resting on the Indian carpet. I fished in my pocket for the makings of a cigarette.

  “Well, Tom. There you are,” she murmured. “Divided, although that needn’t be.”

  “Can I sew myself together, like a torn shirt?”

  “You can try.”

  “And what do I do while I’m here? Would you keep me on if I had Rosa in my bed?”

  “I don’t own you, either.”

  “My mama brought me up to have better manners, Elisa. I’m your guest.”

  “And my house is yours. I knew you’d come back, and I knew that Rosa would be here for you.” She beckoned to my hand, and I gave her a puff of my cigarette.

  “You’re aces on kings, Elisa. So tell me this. How would Rosa feel if I went off to your four-poster? Assuming, which I don’t, that I was invited.”

  “Ask her,” she said, a merry light flickering in her green eyes.

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Tom, you may try to play the happy-go-lucky cowboy, but it doesn’t wash. You’re a clever man. You know how to get what you want.”

  “Do I? No. Things just happen to me, and it seems I usually don’t have much choice.”

  “Nonsense,” Elisa laughed. “You always choose. I don’t know anyone, and never did, who makes things happen the way you do. That’s why I know you’ll be all right whatever you turn to—in this house, or anywhere.”

  She rose gracefully and began to pin her hair. “I’ve got to go. The mare’s in foal. She needs Aunt Elisa.”

  She left me there with something to think about. I strolled through the orchard and listened to the wind blow across the desert. But thinking was one thing. Coming to conclusions was another.

  After supper the three of us dropped comfortably into the leather chairs in front of the fireplace, sipping coffee and brandy. After a while we heard a tinkling of the gate bell… then, a minute or so later, a squeal from Francisca. I hoisted myself out of my chair and took my holstered pistol down from the peg by the mantelpiece.

  A man was chuckling softly in the garden. Francisca was giggling.

  I stepped outside into the cool air, and in the twilight I saw a broad shape I would have known anywhere. Setting Francisca aside, he thumped up to me.

  “Tomás!”

  “Candelario! What in hell are you doing here?”

  “Visiting the pleasant places of my youth. What else?” He gave me a hairy embrace, and I inhaled a week’s sweat. “And you, Tomás? The same?”

  “I went back to Pahuirachic, to the cave, but you were all gone. Some damned Carranzistas skinned my hide a few times with a machine gun, and I needed a hot bath. This was the nearest tub.”

  “And the water here is just the right temperature. You devil!”

  “Come inside, coño. Get warm. Say hello to the ladies.”

  “Tomás! Not a devil. The devil.”

  By then he was inside the front door. In the lamplight I saw how weary and thin he looked, black beard bushier than before and filled with gray dust. He took off his hat, smiling craftily at Elisa and then Rosa.

  “Buenas ñochas, señora y señorita. My warmest compliments. I have a great favor to ask of you … in a moment.” He turned back to me. “The chief is not doing well, Tomás. That’s why I came.”

  “Didn’t he go to Chihuahua City? I thought—”

  “We would never have made it to Chihuahua City. There were gringo soldiers around San Nicolás. We brought him here. He’s waiting outside the town.”

  While I gawked, he bowed again to Elisa. “Señora, I have a message from General Villa. He humbly requests the hospitality of your house and an introduction to the curandera at Atotonilco. If not, he will die or lose his leg. I beg you, for old times’ sake—if you’ve forgiven me for helping to cheat you out of your quarter horse—or just from the goodness of your heart, to let him stay.”

  “Of course,” Elisa said, and glanced meaningfully at me. My mouth still gaped open. Then it began to function.

  “Candelario,” I blabbered, “I told Patton—I told the cavalry—that the chief was coming here! To Parral! I didn’t know…”

  “And so he has,” Candelario said gloomily, after he had digested it, “which makes you a prophet. But now he’ll have to stay. Another night on the road, or in a cave, will kill him. Let me get Hipólito, and then we’ll all put our heads together and decide what to do about this. You know my opinion of you, Tomás. You’re a genius. You always think of something.”

  Pancho Villa didn’t arrive until midnight, when the city of Parral was asleep. Hipólito and three soldiers silently brought him in through the gate on his litter. He was exhausted, and they took him straight to bed. Candelario moved his gear in with me, and Elisa put up a cot for Hipólito in a spare room behind the stables.

  The rest of the escort, with Rodolfo Fierro in command, rode stealthily out of town for the little caves at Cuevecillas de Abajo, where we had camped last October before setting out for the Pulpito.

  At two o’clock in the morning I met with Elisa in the library.

  “Have you got an idea, Tom?”

  “Not a one. But it’ll come to me.”

  “You’ll let me know?”

  “Oh, you bet. First tell me about this curandera in Atotonilco.”

  “Her name is Doña Corazon. She’s more of a bruja, a witch, than acurandera. She’s very old, very difficult. I don’t think she’ll come here, even if it’s General Villa. We may have to take him there. Atotonilco’s a strange place—there’s an old church built on the ruins of a Toltec healing ground, with stone heads of the Toltec gods. People come from hundreds of miles and wear crowns of thorns. They whip themselves. Some come all the way on their knees.”

  “Do you believe in all this stuff, Elisa?”

  “What works, works. It will help a lot if Villa believes.”

  “Oh, he does.” I remembered the tale of the black chicken and the clap.

  “I’m very tired. Goodnight, my sweet.”

  I kissed her in a brotherly fashion and went off to my room. Among all the comings and goings, Rosa had slid off to bed too. She slept upstairs, in the same part of the house as Elisa. I collapsed into the cold sheets, while Candelario snored, and lay there in the dark trying to think of a plan. Sleep came first; inspiration was shy.

  At dawn I woke in a sweat, saddled Maximilian and rode northward out of town in the cool gray morning. I guessed that the flying column of the Thirteenth would arrive tomorrow at the latest, although Pershing had given orders not to hurry, and I knew now that Tompkins would happily stop en route to clean up any pockets of Villistas he heard were roaming the mountains.

  I didn’t see anyone except some half-naked Yaquis straggling along the trail and a toothless old campesino on a gray-bearded burro. I asked them all if they had heard of any cavalry coming this way, but they all shrugged.

  When I got back to Los Flores, Candelario and Hipólito had already ridden off to make the arrangements with Doña Corazon. Rosa met me in the garden and told me she had brought breakfast to Pancho Villa in his bed.

  “How is he?”

  “Bad, Tomás. He didn’t even try to pinch me.”

  “And how are you, cariña?”

  Rosa hesitated a minute. “Tomás, there is something you must know. Try not to be angry …” She lowered her eyes. “In Torreón, the last time, after I found you, I wanted to have a child by you. And I tried.” Then she looked up, boldly yet sadly. “I never protected myself. But I know now what I thought might be true when I was with my husband. I am barren. I wanted to tell you this before you decided anything.”

  As always, the way she spoke, the things she said, touched me to the core.

  “How can you be sure, Rosa?”

  �
��We did it so many times.” She chuckled. “I can be sure.”

  “Maybe it’s me.”

  Her eyes widened. “Impossible. You are too macho.”

  “But you’re too hembra. “ It meant female, as macho meant male. With her fingertips she touched my cheek. It was warmer than a kiss. Then she smiled, and I saw something of the old naughty sparkle in her eyes.

  “I know about you and my friend, Tomás.”

  “What friend?”

  “Señora Griensen. Our friend. Elisa.”

  “Oh? What do you know? And how do you know?”

  “She didn’t tell me. She would never do that. I have a good nose, like your chief. I know that when you were here you slept with her.”

  “Oh. You do, eh? Well, look, Rosa—”

  “I don’t mind. She owed nothing to me. She is a beautiful woman. If she were ugly or had a mean tongue, I would mind. You chose well. So did she. How could a man resist? Or, for that matter,” she laughed, “how could she?”

  I cleared my throat uncomfortably, although I was grateful beyond measure. “I didn’t sleep with her last night, Rosa, or the night before. Maybe you thought I did, because I didn’t come to you. What I mean is …”

  My voice trailed off.

  “You can if you wish,” she said. “She loves you, Tomás. And she wants you.”

  “Well … Jesus!” I snorted like a horse, waving my hands awkwardly in the air. “How about that? Thanks! Don’t you want me too?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then—”

  I couldn’t finish. These women were unmanning me with their kindness. What lay behind it? Something, I was sure, that I didn’t understand. But Elisa had said that a woman wasn’t a female man. And even if a man had made such an offer, I wouldn’t have been all that sure. Then I remembered something Elisa had told me long ago, when we first met, about her cousin who had once visited her from Germany.

  “Rosa, did anything happen between you and Elisa?”

  “Happen? I don’t understand, Tomás.”

  I stammered, searched and finally found the words to ask.

  Rosa smiled. “No, mi capitán. That never happened, although it could have. She loves me. And I may love her. I don’t really know. And it may be,” she said enigmatically, “that it doesn’t really matter.”

  I had carried the conversation to the limit of my understanding— then. I couldn’t ask any more questions, and I didn’t want to offer any more answers.

  “Rosa,” I said, “I have to go see the chief.”

  I tapped softly on his door. After looking at his leg, which was a mess—the skin blackened and the wound suppurating—I told him how I had so cleverly misled the cavalry in the direction of Parral. He was too sick to really understand.

  “These things happen,” he said weakly, “although you don’t seem to be as lucky as before. But neither am I. We’ll worry about it when they get here. I had to leave the cave … I knew it even before the Carranzistas showed up. Too much cave air thins the blood and gives you gout. There was a rain dwarf in there too. He was trying to kidnap my spirit. Remind me to tell that to Doña Corazon. When is she coming?

  “Later, chief.” I wondered if his mind was going too.

  When Candelario and Hipólito returned they brought bad news. Doña Corazon wouldn’t come. If the chief wanted to see her, he would have to journey to Atotonilco.

  They had arranged the visit for this evening.

  Villa sighed. “I have no choice. If I refuse now, she’ll put a hex on me.”

  All day we waited. I steered clear of Rosa and rode out again in the late afternoon on the trail to Pahuirachic. The Carranzista soldiers patrolled the hills, so I had to leave my rifle and cartridge belts behind; I put on a ragged shirt and baggy pants borrowed from Patricio. But there was no sign of Tompkins or his scouts.

  When it grew dark, Candelario and I lifted Villa onto his horse. Elisa came too, but Rosa stayed behind at Los Flores. We couldn’t carry the chief on the litter for five miles, and when we rode into the desert he began to cry again from the pain.

  The sun had set and the desert horizon was a dark rich blue, then a layer of soft rose shading to a band of cream. The Toltec heads of Atotonilco stared at us in the light of a full moon. Pilgrims camped outside the church on the stone terraces. In the ivory light I could see the crowns of thorns they had wound about their heads, the rope whips dangling from their belts, the bloody knees. There were hundreds of them and they made no sound, just watched us pass by. These were people whom the revolution barely touched; they believed in something else, not of this world.

  Elisa led us around the side of the church to an adobe hut. A young girl came out, carrying a candle. This was Doña Corazon’s granddaughter, and she beckoned us inside. Candelario lifted Villa off the horse and carried him again like a child, half-unconscious. Hipólito stood guard outside with the little girl, and the rest of us entered.

  The hut was only two rooms—the main one, and an alcove with an unmade bed—and as full of cigarette smoke and the pungent smell of marijuana as a Juárez cantina. There was hardly room to move around, and you had to stoop to avoid knocking into strings of garlic and other paraphernalia that hung from the wooden beams. I nearly banged my nose against a dried hummingbird before I settled next to Elisa on a wooden box. Bones hung on strings, scraps of meat rested in little birdcages. Shelves were crammed with dead toads, herbs in shoeboxes, snakeskins, hunks of hair, paper cutouts of angels and devils, buzzard feathers, dolls stuck with pins, bowls of withered flowers, playing cards and amulets against the evil eye. The room was lit by two flickering candles. A white, three-legged mongrel dog with no tail lay on the dirt floor, gnawing a huge bone that looked as if it came from the leg of an ox—or a man.

  Doña Corazon sat spreadlegged on a rumpled bed in one corner, her back propped against pillows, smoking a cigarette. She looked about seventy-five, with sweaty gray hair drawn into a pigtail, a beaked nose, dark eyes set in a bony Indian face. She wore copper earrings and a copper bracelet around one thin wrist. A wrinkled dress flowed down to her ankles over a swollen belly. She stroked an orange cat and fed it bits of meat. Another cat crouched on a shelf over her head, between a photograph of Francisco Madero and a wooden statue of Jesus Christ, staring down at us with mad eyes.

  A pudgy, greasy-looking man in the clothes of a campesino sat on the edge of the bed with an old violin balanced on his lap. Elisa whispered to me that this was Doña Corazon’s son. He stood up slowly as Candelario helped Villa across the dirt to the bed, and with a gasp of pain the chief sat down and faced the witch.

  “Doña Corazon … do you know who I am?”

  “You are Francisco Villa.”

  “Can you help me?”

  In a cracked voice she said, “If you want to be helped, anything’s possible. Why are you so afraid?”

  “I’m not afraid of you, señora,” Villa whispered sadly. “But I’m afraid I’m going to die.”

  “Then you will. I can’t help you if you’re afraid. Have you seen a snake, a mad dog, a charging bull or any other terrifying sight lately?”

  “No, señora, I haven’t.”

  “Have you stumbled and struck a rock that you might have offended?”

  “That’s possible.”

  Candelario crouched next to me now. “Tomás,” he whispered in my ear, “this woman knows everything. I’m sure the chief has offended a rock.”

  “In that case,” I whispered back, “I’m a dead man. I’ve bounced off a dozen of them lately. And I’ve seen a snake too.”

  Maybe that would account for all the troubles that were yet to befall me. In the light of what Doña Corazon did that night. I’ve always wondered.

  “There’s more,” Villa said to her unhappily. “I’ve been living in a cave. And a rain dwarf shared it with me. He may have attacked me in my sleep.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think I can help you.”

  “Please try, señora. I�
��ll give you anything you ask.”

  Doña Corazon gathered her skirts and got to her feet—the cat jumped off her lap and ran to a dark corner. Standing, she was tinier than I had realized. She began muttering to herself in a language I didn’t know.

  I looked quickly at Elisa, who murmured through clenched teeth: “Tzotzil. She’s a Tzotzil Indian. From the south.”

  Turning to Villa, the old woman spoke again in Spanish.

  “Do you know how I became a curandera?” Of course she would never identify herself as a bruja, a witch. “When I was seventeen I became ill. A mad dog crossed my path, and I couldn’t get well. My bones ached until I thought the dwarfs were sucking the marrow. I didn’t want to eat. One midnight I woke and found a bowl of dead flowers at the foot of my bed. Then a cock began to sing, and an old man covered with running sores came into the house. The dwarfs told me to lick him from head to toe. I did this disgusting thing, and in the morning I got out of my bed feeling hungry. After that, I got well. I soon started curing others. Do you believe that story?”

  Villa nodded vigorously.

  “Good. First I’ll try to end your fright. Then I’ll pull the cave air out of your body. If that works, curing your leg will be easy.”

  She waddled into the center of the room, so that I had to draw back my knees and lean against the damp wall. When she came close to me I smelled rotten eggs. The dog was in her way—she kicked it smartly in the side, and it slunk out of the hut. Her son handed her a knotted mesquite stick, and Doña Corazon began to beat the ground, raising up dust.

  Then she turned to each corner of the hut, and called out: “Come! Come to your house! Don’t be lazy! Don’t be frightened! Come directly to your house!”

  Candelario whispered, “She’s calling for the chief’s soul. His fear has driven it away.”

  When she was satisfied that her message had been heard, Doña Corazon picked up a bowl of water and dumped some dead flowers in it. She handed it to Pancho Villa.

  “Now shut your eyes, señor. You’re a general, aren’t you?”

  Villa, with his eyes closed, nodded.

  “You command many men?”