The Battle of Tomochic_The Battle of Tomochic Memoirs of a Second Lieutenant

by Heriberto Frías

  The novelized chronicle was a source for protagonists and a text for history in literature’s glass decanter. In the gesture that confers the past’s future on the word, impotence in the face of power is gleaned. As we know, the past has a future only in so far as the word that preserves it does.

  Memory was at the center of numerous writings that authors sent walking down the tightrope of letters: remembered stories, rescued, invented. This explains the indifference to literary formulas among authors of some of these writings. To preserve before recreating and constructing meaning was the watchword in hundreds of historical/testimonial pages that only loosely fit within the category of novels. Even when the greatest took up their pens to write within this form divided between document and the literature, they considered themselves first preservers, then creators. These are works that retain the instinctive emotion of the witness, chock-full of external facts, sources for the theatrical and the true. Apparently Vicente Riva Palacio commented favorably that one could find information in the works of Juan Antonio Mateos unavailable in Mexican history books.24 It was different for strictly literary works; in them, when real adventures occur, the writers of the nineteenth century rarely used anything from the history of their moving and dangerous present.

  The influence of Zola and the La Débâcle imprint on Tomochic, revealed so lucidly by Clausell, instilled the new work with exceptional qualities. Not only did it reveal that Zola was the model, but that Tomochic was more literature than history, although both had brought it into being. More often than not, reality with all its imperfections inspired our writers to imagine scenarios that were distinct from their surroundings and improved them. The three-month run of El Demócrata is emblematic of such optimism. Back then, the reality of being a public figure familiarized writers with a disenchantment that became a stimulus: total marginalization. Notwithstanding the knowledge, enthusiasm, and culture of the literary youth at the end of the century, their access to a public forum was negligible. They spent their early years in the usual artistic stupor of their projects and hangouts. Art for art’s sake was less artistic credo than it was social alibi. With the fractiousness of Mexican society during the century, especially its last decade, the intelligentsia’s activities were perceived as superfluous. Then there was illiteracy, indifference. Intellectual property rights didn’t exist. There was no marketplace of books, no readers, no readings. As José Antonio Tablada pointed out, in Mexico, as in Russia, “France mitigated much crudeness and softened the blows of many barbaric acts.”25 What’s more, in the case of Tomochic, this influence allowed barbarism to be named, known, and interpreted.

  The Other Side and the Plot

  Military officials involved in the interrogation that kept Lieutenant Heriberto Frías, a member of the 9th Infantry Battalion, locked up and isolated for more than four months, were confident that exposing the identity of the writer of Tomochic would be easy. Joaquín Clausell resolved the matter of the anonymous authorship that had initiated the legal proceedings when he assumed responsibility for writing Tomochic at the first interrogation. Clausell’s answers exonerated the imprisoned Lieutenant and pointed to the case’s resolution.

  Nothing could have been easier for Clausell than explaining the origins of this up-to-the-minute novelized chronicle. One thing was Tomochic in the mountains, the hamlet that federal shrapnel almost decimated, and another was the Tomochic in the unexpected literary representation in the newspaper El Demócrata. Clausell not only expressed himself forthrightly behind Belem bars as many times as he was called on to testify, but showed the investigators his hand in the creation of Tomochic by referring to Zola’s narrative model.

  Once the debt to Zola was acknowledged, the investigator with sufficient patience to compare the two stories—in the pages of Diario del Hogar and El Demócrata—wouldn’t have found a direct correlation with La Débâcle in Tomochic’s installments.

  At first glance, this investigator would have determined that Clausell’s answers contradicted themselves. To attempt a parallel reading of both writings would have made the case for the individual features of each. Abundant unique details point to a clear distinction between the two. In the first place, what could a three-volume novel of 400 pages each in the Diario del Hogar have in common with the account in twenty-four installments in El Demócrata?26 The investigator would have noted immediately the difference in the tens of thousands of soldiers mobilized in the war between France and Germany and the tens of hundreds of federal soldiers deployed in the war against Tomochic. These differences were readily available in the two works, emblematic of the imbalance in military might of the two countries. Without a doubt, the latter would have also brought to mind the unexpected Mexican military victory over the French several decades earlier.

  The heart of the military episodes is so similar that that the modest investigator wouldn’t have been surprised at finding echoes in Tomochic of the judgments and descriptions of the unpreparedness and disaffection of the mobilized forces in La Débâcle. If Zola proclaimed that “the all-pervasive demoralization finalized the job of converting this army into an undisciplined mob that didn’t believe in anything, carried along haphazardly to the slaughterhouse,” in Tomochic one read that “the greatest anguish of that terrible situation—more than the atrocious uncertainty about the enemy’s position, force and number—was the lack of guidance, orientation, and orders from above.” It’s worth wondering if the investigator would perceive the similarities between the scene in chapter 5, where the soldier Maurice Levasseur, posted to guard duty in “a night black as ink,” waits much as Lieutenant Miguel Mercado does in the middle of the account, stiff from fear, the arrival of an enemy column that turns out to be from his own company.

  A parallel reading of the two stories might have put the two narrative modalities in Tomochic into relief; one corresponding to a fraternal voice, “full of indulgent affection” (Zola) toward all the soldiers of the federal army involved in this campaign (the same tone of the two poems Frías wrote in the military camp), and the other tonality, a voice more critical toward the acts described and revealed. For example, in one of the first encounters, we read, “The smoke of the gunpowder, clamor of gunshot, whistling of bullets and the ferocious cries of the enemy surrounding him on all sides made that corner of the mountain a vertiginous country, a disaster zone.”

  The merit of the twenty-four installments, if one concedes they have merit, was to make a consistent whole from disperse and contradictory information. The example of La Débâcle, to which Juan Antonio Mateos had already succumbed in his musical Sédan, helped interpret the news and war dispatches that came from Tomochic.

  The force of verisimilitude in Tomochic is taken for granted. But one must remember that in the eyes of military officers involved in this judicial knot and held up to the critical view of the rest of society, this didn’t just work against the prestige of the military but went against the version told by official war records. As reported in El Monitor Republicano, toward the end of May 1893, a colonel and a second captain from the special forces of general staff left for Chihuahua together to draw up maps of Tomochic and Temósachic.27 The fictional mountains in Tomochic—as these emissaries must have discovered if they found out why they were drawing the maps—not only didn’t correspond with some of the details given by military chiefs about the battles against the rebels, but they didn’t even coincide with the geography of the scene. Of course, accuracy would have been expected were Frías the eyewitness alluded to in El Demócrata—indeed the author of Tomochic, as the investigators wanted to prove. When they reread, reevaluated, and reinterpreted a past episode in the light of pressing current concerns, these two emissaries from general staff were doing precisely what historians do. What’s more, a hundred years after the emissaries’ cartographic mission, historian Fernand Braudel reminds us that scenery and topography are more than simple present realities; they are remnants from the past: “We constantly redraw and re-create yesterday�
�s lost horizons; the earth, just like our skin, is condemned to bear the scars of ancient wounds.”28

  At a century’s remove from this chronicle written by an “eyewitness” in the pages of El Demócrata, how can we explain the discrepancies between the minutely detailed descriptions of certain scenes and the topographical evidence? The discrepancies between reality and the description should have been so numerous as to be apparent to the eyes of the general staff emissaries. The colorful, woody disorder of the mountains is not apparent today in the Cordón de Lino foothills where the first column succumbed to the Tomochic fighters. Maybe we should see its aridity today not as an error of the account but rather a scar over an old wound, to follow Braudel. But how do we explain that in the description of so decisive a moment as the assault on the so-called Cerro de la Cueva—where Pedro Chaparro and his forces kept the federal forces at bay—it is said that the church tower at a certain point disappeared “behind the first hills of the mountain … entering into the blind spot of the line of fire,” when those hills don’t exist. And it was from that same tower that the Tomochic fighters could have opened fire freely on the troops of the daring Captain Eduardo Molino in their ascent, since the blind spot didn’t exist. How to explain this error if Frías, who not only camped several days in Tomochic but participated in the capture of Cerro de Cueva on Tuesday, October 25, 1892, was really the anonymous witness?

  This situation can perhaps be explained by considering the possibility that someone like Clausell, different from the eyewitness Frías, completed the account somewhere else, far from Chihuahua and the mountains. Clausell’s words were the key. And that is how it has remained ever since.

  The literary re-creation of the military campaign gave the geography of the terrain an important role in the text. The details of the setting were more relevant in El Demócrata than in any official report. Besides sometimes contradicting the territorial realities, the novelized geographical descriptions sought to exercise an explicit function that operated outside the factual evidence: to represent the historicity of the nineteenth-century moment in a form that could attain the prestige of art. The historian’s faithfulness couldn’t compete with the novelist’s, no matter how naturally or realistically the former laid out his cards. The cultural prestige of literature went beyond the could-be of history.

  With Clausell’s admissions, the legal inquiry made little sense. According to Clausell’s confession, the eyewitness, initially introduced as the author in El Demócrata, was part of the fiction. How to prove to Clausell that Tomochic hadn’t come from his pen? Literature re-creates with authority without the obligation of looking at things the way they really happened. Clausell’s sources were verifiable—it was enough to take a glance at the press in the capital. What’s to be done, Frías’s military investigators would have asked themselves, when even the official Chihuahua State paper published a war dispatch signed by General Rosendo Márquez? The references to Zola must have meant little to the law, but that didn’t make Clausell’s idea any less plausible. In terms of material evidence the first inquiry at El Demócrata, as well as at Clausell’s house, only delivered up a pair of typewritten fragments of the Tomochic campaign, plus four letters from Chihuahua—one signed by Francisco Montes de Oca, perhaps the newspaper’s anonymous correspondent, that related the news of the uprising led by Simón Amaya. The letters written by the people cited by Clausell—Pedro Ortega and Leoncio Buenfield—never surfaced, nor did the whereabouts of these two informants.

  Finally, the inquiry tacitly recognized Clausell as the author of Tomochic since there were no grounds to insist on Frías’s responsibility. Given the subsequent history of the novel and the discrepancies already mentioned between the campaign scenes and the written version that fixed it in memory, it’s practically impossible to overlook the close collaboration between Clausell and Frías in the creation of Tomochic, the young classic of Mexican literature.

  The Novel and the Shadows

  Gradually Heriberto Frías’s shadow fell across the pages of the novelized chronicle of the campaign. The author of the first commentary on Tomochic, in the newspaper El Tiempo (1894), reflected on the calculating, singular silence of anonymity. He also indicated that it was “an almost disgraceful edition (since it’s from Río Grande City), and very humble.” He went on to say, “Because Tomochic is really an unpolished gem, a work of art that lacks perfection in the details, however it is not beyond repair.” What a pity, said this anonymous critic, that the author won’t reveal his name.

  Shortly thereafter, José Juan Tablada commented on the book’s author. He’s a young man, he claimed, “given to the linguistic improprieties suggestive of Zola, which sometimes undermines his syntax; nevertheless he doesn’t enter competitions, nor does he spy on the workings of other people’s brains, nor is he the furtive recorder of long-winded conversations. And he doesn’t thread into the intrigues in his writing the phrases that fall from the lips of friends.” Indeed, feeling, boldness, and originality place this author in the first rung “of young literary voices who have recently written novels,” Tablada claimed. Inevitably dated by El Universal’s novel-writing competition, for readers unaware of the journalistic secret of the day, Tablada’s comments helped color in a picture of Tomochic’s author. José Ferrel wrote a less useful commentary that was published on February 16, 1895. It was also published in the new El Demócrata, as were Tablada’s comments. After a year and four months of prison time, Ferrel was released from Belem on a Monday in 1894, along with Antonio Rivera and Jésus Huelgas y Campos. Shortly thereafter, he announced his intention of returning to the editorship of the paper at the behest of Clausell.29 Using the pseudonym Fidias, Ferrel posited four possible authors for Tomochic: Emilio Rabasa, Rafael Delgado, Emile Zola, and Alphonse Daudet.

  The Texas edition of Tomochic did little more than stir the waters in which the trial to resolve the identity of its author floated. For many years the author remained anonymous, despite the fact that the new El Demócrata’s editors permitted themselves the indiscretion of suggesting that Frías was its author. First the paper reproduced various chapters from the book, affixing the ex-lieutenant’s name at the bottom between question marks. Then when publishing installments of Naufragio, the long novel Frías wrote in Belem, the newspaper accompanied the heading with a notice to entice readers by identifying it as a work by the author of Tomochic.30

  The novel reappeared on the turn-of-the-century literary scene when Rubén M. Campos dedicated ten long articles to authors and works of Mexican realism. Published in El Nacional beginning on the first Sunday of April 1897, these notes compiled a list of realistic authors as seen through the eyes of a peer and set forth an interpretation of realism in light of the death of Mexican romanticism.

  The great Romantic concepts such as love, duty, charity, sacrifice, abnegation were swept away in the Realist hurricane and banished from the reflections and analysis of the combative young generation. Only evil, vice, poverty, death and nothingness remained.

  Humanity’s great consolations disappeared: the great ideals of the sane and the insane, the glad and the unfortunate, the good and the bad among men, all were reduced to cinders. The last vestiges of hope were ripped from hearts, misfortunes were deprived of the last glimmers of their dreamlike clarity, perfection, and redemption. At last even love of life was banished from reality!

  The cases under scrutiny were monstrous, terrible. The characters who entered into action were all criminals and corrupt, forged by perversion or illness. The women prostituted themselves and the men were traitors. The children begged alms for vice. Old people succumbed throwing their cynical futility at life.

  What was the rationale behind the new school? To patent human misery?31

  The articles by Campos attempted to respond to this query. He looked at the works of Ciro B. Ceballos, Alberto Leduc, Amado Nervo, José Ferrel, Federico Gamboa, Luis G. Urbina, Manuel Larrañaga Portugal, Rafael Delgado, and, of course, Heriberto Frías.
The latter had just published his novel El último duelo—Frías’s version of the scandal that shook the Diaz capital when Francisco Romero and José Verástegui fought a duel in 1894. He kept the eighty-eight installments of Naufragio, published between June and November, under wraps. Frías’s confreres knew about his work, as well as the information that was first made public in Campos’s third article of the series on April 15 commenting on Tomochic:

  The novelist’s first creative flurry was spontaneous, unexpected, impassioned, and explosive. It went off like a grenade and Tomochic’s dazzling, brilliant, breathless stanza-chapters burst out over the inhuman strategies of warfare like the crumbling cliffs of the Tarahumara Mountains. Its overpowering and honest narration exalted the courage of an obscure town where William Tell could have been born.

  It was a merciless war of extermination, to the death; it was a hot-house where the novelist’s early flowering and his eagerness for terrible events was tested. He made of the tragic episode a Homeric feat in which the burning of Tomochic is reminiscent of Troy.

  Aeneas escaped from Troy with his father Anchises on his shoulders and his son Ascanius in arms. From this humble, razed, and plague-stricken Mexican village not one of its heroes escaped alive.

  Campos’s comments are more or less correct in terms of Tomochic. The few survivors wandered through Díaz’s country like ghosts or maybe at some point they returned to their little valley. Those who had taken up arms died in combat or were shot. The town was destroyed and the female victims of the catastrophe were incarcerated. Even worse, and Campos didn’t say this, toward the end of 1895—a crucial year for the disinherited nationals who were incorporated into the slave market through a Díaz administration initiative—the transfer of petty thieves and vagrants to Tomochic to repopulate and work the lands of this valley of death came up.