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

by Clifford Irving

  In January of 1917 the ten thousand troops of the Punitive Expedition began to withdraw toward the border. They had never found Pancho Villa, although twice, in Guerrero and then in Pahuirachic, they had come awfully close. I guess their Intelligence let them down on that score, and whenever I thought about that I was proud of what I had done. The chief would never have let them take him alive, and a lot of good men would have died trying.

  Rosa and I got married a month before that, in December, in a little church in Parral. I was a couple of months shy of my twenty-sixth birthday; Rosa had just turned eighteen, so she was officially a woman. Elisa bought her a white lace wedding dress that would have fit the fat lady at the circus, but Francisca, who had decided to go into business with us but still insisted on being a maid, took it in below the bosom, and Rosa looked lovely. After the ceremony we went back to the Hacienda de Los Flores and drank bottles of bubbling French champagne, which made everyone giggle.

  Elisa grabbed my hand and pulled me into the kitchen.

  “Tom, I’m happy for you,” she whispered, laughing and leaking tears at the same time. “I want you to know that. I love you both, as much as I’ve ever loved anyone in this world. And maybe more.”

  “I adore you too, Elisa. And so does Rosa. You know that.”

  “Am I still aces on kings?”

  “A straight flush. You’re the finest woman I’ve ever known. You’ve made all this possible. And you made me grow up.”

  “You can both stay forever,” she said. “Just be kind to old Aunt Elisa…”

  I hugged her, and then she cried as if her heart was breaking. But through it all, somehow, she kept giggling. From the corner of an eye I saw Rosa step through the kitchen door. She came up to us, and Elisa laid her head against Rosa, as Rosa had so often done against me. The wayward yellow hair tumbled down on Rosa’s bare shoulder.

  “It’s the champagne,” Elisa sniffed, between sobs and snorts of laughter. “The champagne always does it to me. And because I’m happy for you.”

  In February Rosa’s time came. She was so big that when we walked through the garden and let the lovebirds out of their cage, they could sit on her belly. She was a strong, healthy girl. No one seemed worried. The one-eyed midwife arrived at Los Flores around four o’clock in the afternoon, an hour or so after Rosa’s labor pains began. All the women gathered upstairs and kicked me out.

  Down in the library I poured myself a full snifter of brandy and read straight through The First Part of King Henry IV and then Othello. It took my mind off the yells I heard.

  Toward late evening Elisa appeared at the door, looking pale and as worn out as if she were the one giving birth.

  “There’s a problem, Tom.”

  The midwife had poked around and decided that the baby was lying feet down, which was the wrong direction.

  “Can’t it come out that way?”

  “Not easily. We may need your help.”

  The idea made me jittery, but of course I nodded. I had seen plenty of blood and more than enough anguish, but I didn’t want to see Rosa’s.

  “You can pull,” Elisa said, clenching her fists.

  “If there’s a choice—if it’s a question of Rosa or the baby—”

  “We know that.” Elisa seemed impatient with me. But I knew that wasn’t at the root of it; she was just feeling unhappy.

  Labor went on for a few more hours. Rosa’s screams increased in volume. Mexican women weren’t taught to be decorous in childbirth. I probably would have flitted into the orchard so that I didn’t have to listen, but Elisa had said they might need me. I stayed in the library, trying to read King Lear. Sometimes I became caught up in it, but most of the time I had an ear cocked for the next shriek. This was all wrong. Why should she suffer that much? Let me take the pain, and God, I prayed, let her be all right. I was no true believer, but like most men, in moments of helplessness I didn’t know who else to turn to.

  At midnight Francisca descended swiftly in bare feet and told me the señora wished me to come upstairs. I took the stairs two at a time and then slowed down to ease gently through the door into the bedroom. Oil lamps and sputtering candles cast a light in which the shadows overlapped and seemed confused. What I saw was awful. Rosa, on the bed, looked ashen. She was covered with clammy sweat. She was biting on a towel, but still her groans were load. Elisa gripped her bare shoulders. Her thighs were spread obscenely wide, and the baby’s legs dangled free up to the knees. The legs were chubby and purple, scarcely human. The midwife tugged at them. The sweat poured down her brown face so that in the lamplight she glistened as though she were standing in the rain. Words choked from my lips and made no sense.

  “Pull,” Elisa cried.

  The legs in my hands were soft boneless pieces of meat. The midwife told me to pull harder.

  “But—”

  “Harder, señor! Don’t be afraid!”

  I was ruining my child’s body. How could I know that it didn’t matter, that he was already dead? As soon as Rosa had forced the body free he began to breathe, but the head was deep inside where there was no air. He quickly suffocated.

  I thought only of Rosa.

  Later Elisa told me that Rosa’s pelvis was small. It had no relation to the fact that she was a wide-hipped young woman. It was something you couldn’t tell until it was too late. The baby’s head was jammed up behind the pelvic bone; it couldn’t get through. The labor was over. Her body wouldn’t work anymore. No amount of tugging would do it. Rosa was worn out, but she kept screaming.

  Finally the midwife shoved me aside and with a high-pitched cry of terror reached in with one bloody hand to crush the baby’s head and drag it through. I turned my head away … I couldn’t bear to see this. Rosa gave a great groan of relief and threw her head back on the pillow, soaked with her sweat. Then I was able to look. Her hand reached up to clutch at Elisa’s, and she even smiled.

  The midwife didn’t smile. She stared down, waiting. She must have known what would happen and dreaded it. She had thrust the dead baby to one side, not even bothering to cut the long, fat white cord. She didn’t care about the baby any longer.

  The blood gushed out between Rosa’s legs—bright red, as if pumped by a vengeful devil. The midwife snatched a handful of white cotton cloths and tried to force them in, to stem the surge. She was bloody up to the elbows. The baby’s head had ripped Rosa on both sides.

  Rosa never knew it—all she knew was that the pain had ended. She didn’t feel her life pouring out of her. But I felt and saw it. I understood. So did Elisa. She held Rosa’s hand while her face turned the color of paper. Then Rosa grew pale too, but still smiled with relief, even as she closed her eyes slowly … even as she died.

  I never truly understood it, no matter how many times it was explained to me about the small pelvic cavity and the way she felt no pain at the end. She was only eighteen. She was a big, strong, healthy girl. Her hair lay on the pillow in a wet black tangle, and her lips were slightly parted in that terrible smile of relief. I bent to kiss her, and the tears that fell from my eyes were warmer than her lips.

  Elisa rushed from the room and locked herself in the library. I heard the door slam and echo. Francisca, on her knees, began to tear her hair. The midwife crossed herself, marking her breast with Rosa’s blood, and said hoarsely, “God must have had a reason.”

  But what could it have been?

  That night in the garden I stretched out on the unyielding ground and wept until no more tears would come. I chewed mouthfuls of earth and spat them out. I stayed there until dawn. Later in the morning, it being a hot country, we buried Rosa and the baby in one grave that Patricio dug behind the corrals. There was no ceremony of any kind. The sun shone from a cloudless blue sky, mocking everything. You couldn’t have asked for more glorious weather.

  Patricio knocked together the coffin, and Elisa took care of putting the bodies in it. I didn’t help. I wasn’t able to do anything except sit around and stare up at the sky and l
isten to the birds trilling cheerfully in the garden. I hated being alive.

  When it came time for the coffin to be lowered into the hole, my hands trembled. Not that it was heavy. It wasn’t heavy at all. In death, Rosa seemed to weigh almost nothing. Elisa laid flowers on the pine planks. I placed some small stones there. My throat was twisted into a knot that nearly strangled me, and my eyes blurred again with tears. This was a death I would never accept.

  Rosa, I remember you by the lake, when you were a child, on your knees in the dust. I watched you grow to be a woman. I’ve known no finer sight. I remember it all …

  And you never displeased me.

  After that, for a while, I passed through the turning wheel of time in a kind of narcosis. I would wake up in the morning and whisper Rosa’s name, thinking that she was alive but had gone away for a while, and if I invoked her name often enough she would hear and return. My spirit was frozen in a twilight. Elisa’s grief was even more mute. There was no decent way to put things into words. We became strangers living in the same house and even, sometimes, the same bed. We couldn’t talk about Rosa. It was as if we didn’t dare admit she was dead. I wonder if we both didn’t feel, somehow, that she had been better than we were, and the fact of her going lessened us because it made no sense that we were alive and she wasn’t. To make love seemed wrong. It was a kind of betrayal. It hadn’t been like that before, when she was alive, but that was how it seemed now.

  But we did it sometimes to try and cheat our loneliness. It wasn’t very inspiring. Day by day, night by night, we drifted apart, and neither of us could stop it or talk about it. The shadow of Rosa lay between us like a canyon. For some stubborn reason Elisa wouldn’t get rid of the third pillow, and whenever I realized it was there I got gooseflesh and turned my head away. Elisa’s song was muted and sometimes, I thought, false.

  I worked around the corrals. I broke the mustangs from Camargo. Life went on. We had to pretend it was important to eat and sleep and work.

  Meanwhile, in that other world of people and events, Mr. Wilson got hold of a secret telegram from Berlin to the German ambassador in Washington, suggesting that Carranza be encouraged to go to war against the United States, in return for which Mexico would be given her lost territories. After some sinkings of American ships by German U-boats in the Atlantic, we declared war.

  Elisa bought a radio, and every evening she sat by the fire drinking brandy and listening to the news, and after a while I went off to the library and drifted off into a stupor with a bottle of wine. Pershing was going to lead an American Expeditionary Force to France—they were all agreed that he was the best choice because of his experience fighting in Mexico. No one thought the Punitive Expedition was a failure now. They saw it, with hindsight, as preparation for the war in Europe.

  One evening Elisa asked me if I would go too.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” I confessed. “I don’t believe that I will.”

  “But you’re an American.”

  “I know that, Elisa. And you’re a German. Would you fight if you were a man?”

  “I’m not a man. I can’t think that way.”

  “I’ve had enough of fighting. I’ve been shot at enough for one lifetime. And I don’t want to kill anyone—not ever again.”

  “What will you do then, Tom? I don’t think you want to stay here.” It was out in the open then, and I nodded. Too many good things had happened between us for me to lie.

  “I’ll just go back to Texas and be a cowhand. I can always change my name. They don’t draft cowhands. They’re too ornery. They can’t take orders, and they never learn to shoot straight.”

  A couple of days later I strewed a few flowers on the grave of Rosa and the baby. Yes, I thought, she never displeased me. And she ruined me for everyone else, even Elisa.

  I saddled my horse by the gate. Elisa had wanted to give me what was left of the gold, but I refused.

  “I’d just spend it on whiskey and wild women. You keep my share. Times might be hard after the war. I came here with nothing. I don’t want to leave with anything. That would be wrong.”

  “You mustn’t blame yourself. What happened wasn’t your fault.”

  That was the only time she ever referred to Rosa’s death. I just nodded. Maybe it was so. I would never know. I only knew how godawful I felt about it, how hollowed out and barren. I remembered what Bosques had written: that death was Mexico’s greatest crop. Villa was still fighting, I knew, somewhere in northern Chihuahua. How many had been killed in all these years? How many were yet to die? I had grieved for Julio and Candelario. I didn’t want to count, didn’t want to know. Only one death mattered now. I saw every flower and bush that way, as a branch of someone who slept beneath the dust. That was one of the reasons I had to go.

  “You’ll always be welcome here,” she said. “You know that.”

  “I do know it. Take care, Elisa. I never stopped loving you. I just stopped loving life. One day I’ll start again … but not soon enough for you.”

  “Go well, my sweet.”

  She kissed me on both cheeks. She looked old and tired. I didn’t thank her as I had done the first time I left the hacienda. She knew my gratitude, and I think she knew my heart was broken into pieces too small to be of much use to anyone who needed a whole heart. I hadn’t lied to her.

  She turned on her boot heel and strode back into the house, head high, shoulders square. She was never any good at goodbyes. She closed the door. In all my life since then—and I’ve done a lot—I never met another woman so proud.

  On the way north, on a sunny March day of 1917, somewhere above Bachinava and below Casas Grandes, in that part of Chihuahua I knew so well, a band of horsemen appeared out of the desert. They cut a wraithlike trail of dust along the horizon line; then the trail narrowed and thickened, and they came riding straight for me. I made sure that my pistol was loose in the holster and checked that I hadn’t forgotten to put a fresh clip in the Mauser. If this was trouble I wanted to be ready.

  The riders, about six or seven of them, wore big sombreros and carried full cartridge belts. The barrels of their uplifted rifles glittered like jewels in the sun. They rode straight up to me and wheeled their horses, tugging at the ring bit as hard as they could. That hadn’t changed. And their leader didn’t waste any words.

  “Who are you, señor? Where do you come from? Where are you going?”

  I remembered Candelario’s way. “Not so fast, friend. First, who are you?”

  The man who had addressed me couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, with a mahogany-brown face, eyes to match and a flowing black mustache. In my time I had seen a thousand like him. He showed his fine white teeth.

  “Captain Luis Zuñiga, of the Army of the Revolutionary Convention. At your orders, señor, perhaps. Now, who are you?”

  I had been away awhile, I realized. “Captain Zuñiga, help me out. Who runs the Army of the Convention these days?”

  “General Francisco Villa, señor. Do you come to join us, to fight for land and liberty?” He had his rifle pointed right at my chest.

  “I’ve done that already,” I said, “but I do want to see your chief. We’re old friends. My name is Colonel Tomás Mix.”

  Showing a wonderful sense of trust, he thrust his rifle back into the scabbard, bared his teeth again and threw his hand up to his sombrero in a salute. I gave it back to him.

  “And where might General Villa be these days?”

  “South of Casas Grandes, my colonel. We ride there. We would be honored if you would join us.”

  “A pleasure. Captain.”

  We rode off across the dusty plain. I had never meant to leave Mexico without saying goodbye to the man for whose sake I had first come. I had known he was somewhere around here, and I had been keeping an eye skinned. Casas Grandes suited me just fine.

  The new army was camped in the foothills of the mountains ten miles south of the city, which was held by the Carranzistas—about fifteen hundred men,
I judged, with the usual women and kids and assorted animals. We reached there well after dark, and Zuñiga went round the campfires to make some inquiries. After fifteen minutes he came back to tell me that General Villa wasn’t in the camp. He had gone off to sleep. No one knew where.

  “In which direction did he go, Captain?”

  He asked the last man he had spoken to, and the man pointed to the east. I knew Villa’s habits and didn’t think they had changed. I thanked Zuñiga and then spurred my horse off in the other direction, westward.

  It led me into some gently sloping hills dotted with saguaro cactus and maguey. A half moon lit the way, casting ivory shadows on the desert. I didn’t try to be quiet but thrashed my horse back and forth on the rocks and kept muttering to myself like an old man with many woes. I didn’t want to come on anyone by surprise. After an hour of this foolishness I had almost given up, but then at my back, in the black shadow of a hill, I heard the scrape of boot on rock. At first, when I turned in the saddle, I thought I had been mistaken and the green eyes that gleamed at me were those of an animal—a coyote, maybe an owl.

  But then the animal, a two-legged one, gave a guttural chuckle and stepped out of the hiding shadow, pistol held loosely in his hand. It was Pancho Villa.

  “I thought it might be you, Tomás. Anything’s possible in this life, I told myself. But I couldn’t be sure. You have a good nose to find me.”

  “But yours is better, chief. I’m glad you didn’t think it was Carranza.”

  “Carranza …” He spat into the darkness. “Get down off your horse, Tomás. Let me make sure you’re not a ghost.”

  I swung out of the saddle, and he stepped forward to embrace me. He smelled of meat and wood smoke. I think he may have meant what he’d said about making sure I was real; he hugged my ribs hard until I thought they would crack, and then he squeezed my shoulders. He was his paunchy old self, and there was a lot more soft flesh on his arms than I remembered. He must have had a good supply of peanut brittle.

  “You’re thinner,” he said. “I can’t see your face so I don’t know if you look older. But it’s logical that you would. How long has it been now?”