At Campeche Captain Vargas discovered that the little punitive expedition would be no picnic for such as him and his command. The untrained recruits contemptuously despatched by provincial generals were to be sent up into the jungle to carry on a show of war, while the regulars remained at the bases for use, should it be expedient, against the federal government. Manuel endeavoured to pass himself off as a Spanish-trained officer, but without success; his complete ignorance of the military art on or off the parade ground was instantly exposed. Desertion no longer occurred to him. That he had only accepted a commission as an alternative to the firing squad should have been excuse enough for disappearing at the first opportunity. But he could not deny that it would be desertion, and the word carried such an association of disloyalty that it was prohibitive.
He and his sixty men were drafted into a battalion and marched off into the bush; all now had rifles, but he alone had boots. The platoon soon learned to hang together for the common defence—not against the enemy who were seldom seen, but against their comrades. His Chiapas Indians, born and bred among tropical vegetation, were quite docile in that horrible tangle of Yucatan and showed signs of intelligence so long as they were not compelled to preserve any discipline but their own. His smugglers, accustomed to carry under their shirts anything from a live iguana to a kilo of tobacco, stole artistically for the cooking pot. The rest of the battalion, men from the plateau who had seen little green but cactus and felt no heat but the direct impact of the sun, were quite unable to cope with these jungle rats. To get rid of them, the colonel banished Manuel to hold an advanced post a day’s march from the main body.
It was on a low ridge, overgrown with scrub, that formed a natural causeway across a string of marshes. They shared the dry land with the ibis that perched like white flowers on the bushes and the snakes that sunned themselves wherever the heat could find a path to earth. As far as the eye could stretch was the green carpet of swamp thickly dotted with cones and tumps and hemispheres of darker green, built up by the creepers that crawled over the dead bodies of trees and the choked mass of their predecessors. The plain looked like a solid field full of ivy-clad ruins, but there was no square yard of it that would bear the weight of a man. The southern end of the ridge led into the heart of the rebels’ country; thence the yucatecos delivered frequent and desultory raids, coming by day, for they knew their own country too well to waste their strength among the mists and insects of the swamp after nightfall. The northern end was Captain Vargas’s line of communication with the battalion. When it was open and the battalion commander remembered them, they got supplies; but the coincidence was rare.
There was nothing but war itself to save them from utter demoralisation. Their food was rice and bananas, producing a lassitude of body and spirit. Their flesh lost the power to heal itself, so that the scratching of a bite left a running sore and the mere sucking of a leech would dig out an ulcer. No bandages could keep out all the hungry and microscopic life that flew, and a wound held open pale lips until filled with a pullulating mass of grubs. They longed for death—when any movement hurt, it was heaven to imagine perfect stillness. Yet when death came near, they fought and organised instinctively like the blind soldiers of the white ants. Retreat was useless and escape impossible. The horror of that country was so great that their open space was home.
Manuel lived in a haze of pain and fever. Nothing mattered and nothing hurt him beyond bearing. He was resigned. He had given way to the life force of his own body which warned him not to struggle with circumstance lest he die. His conscious mind, or that part of it which could be expressed in words and action, still accomplished certain automatic tasks. His men drove him as the machines had driven him in Sota’s printing shop. They were dependent on him to feed them, heal them and keep open, when he could, the link with their fellows and their past lives.
They died slowly in twos and threes, for their position could not be taken so long as they were on their guard against surprise. But their casualties were unpleasant; the half-naked enemy used both muzzle-loaders and arrows. Manuel hated these winged sticks and cursed them impotently as the most barbarous weapon ever invented by man. It was murder to pull them out of a wound. The barbed head either came off and remained deep in the flesh, or dragged out with it two threads of human material. When his first batch of wounded reached divisional headquarters instructions were sent back to him that he should push an arrow through, if it could be done without obvious risk to a vital spot, and then break off the head so that the shaft could be withdrawn. It was he who had to decide whether there were obvious risk or not. He was not always successful.
After three months Manuel’s regiment was sent down to the coast. Fifteen of his men were left. In the whole battalion there were less than a hundred who could walk. None of them had shown any heroism, unless in the brute effort to keep alive. They had had few chances to attack and none to run away. Whether marching or road making or in action, each band of men had felt themselves to be gripped at the centre of an impassable maze of vegetation.
When he arrived at Campeche, Captain Vargas discovered that civil war was again merrily cantering over Mexico, and that his regimental loyalty was to de la Huerta, at the moment blockading Tampico. He was not disappointed. Any physical comfort at all was such paradise that he did not long for the greater and hypothetical comfort of peace. The three months had been a spiritual eternity, blotting out the manners and methods of his past life. He had no use for peace, since the military road to ambition seemed to him natural, nor for thought, since it led only to a consciousness of suffering.
Nothing was clear in the confused network of policies and intrigues except that Obregón and Calles had the backing of the United States; it was therefore reasonable to suppose that for the moment they represented the reactionary forces of foreign capital. Manuel, his sympathy for the Indian and mestizo proletariat increased by their common sufferings, was personally as well as regimentally on the side of the insurgents. Though hatred of Lara had been his fiercest private emotion in Yucatan, he now felt more kindly towards the general. De la Huerta, Maycotte, and the other rebel leaders were only names to him, whereas Lara’s character was calculable. A man of enterprise and education should be able to influence that magnificent and savage youth. Manuel renewed his ragged Spanish passport so that the frontier would be open to him at any time, and joined Lara at his headquarters in the Sierra Madre Oriental.
The general greeted El Camarero with amusement and surprise, and tickled his own sense of humour by appointing him to his staff in place of the late Colonel Montes—late, since Lara had no longer anything to fear from the colonel’s influential connections in Mexico City. The civil war was a much more enjoyable and romantic affair than the expedition to Yucatan. The caudilla rode with its baggage and women into the golden infinity of Mexico until contact with the enemy had been effected. Both sides then dismounted and blazed away at a safe distance until one or the other began to run out of ammunition. The vanquished, under cover of a last burst of rapid fire, ran crouching to their horses and scattered, leaving the victors in possession of the useless field. When a man was mortally wounded, his woman shot him. When a wound was curable, rest and the sun-drenched mountain air usually cured it. Manuel was reminded of the conventional battles of ancient Greece. After one such victory, full of looted champagne and irony, he persuaded Lara to erect a trophy of four field kitchens and a smashed machine gun to show that the day was his.
If the insurgents had only been successful in the field, the war might have gone on eternally; but they paralysed the whole commercial life of the country, cutting railways, telegraphs and pipe lines, until Mexico City, which had learned to look on revolution with a tolerant eye, was alarmed and gave solid support to Obregón and Calles. One by one the generals surrendered or escaped abroad. When the rebellion collapsed, Lara’s caudilla had been driven halfway across the country into the highlands southeast of Torreón.
The general was offered reinstatement in the federal army, but refused to surrender. He was delighted with his independence, and had no more desire for regular employment than a jaguar for the zoo. But for whom was he to fight? For what cause, asked his men, shall we give the vivas? Lara hit on an ingenious answer, and the caudilla, idealists all of them if an idea was primitive, greeted his orders enthusiastically. They gave their vivas for the Communist International. El Camarero, sympathetic but reserving judgment, decided to follow his leader. He merely contributed the suggestion that they should carry a red flag. They took him seriously and were delighted.
Based near the angle of three states, Coahuila, Durango and Zacatecas, the band terrorised officials, landowners and capitalists over fifty thousand square miles of the plateau. The villages, still waiting for the common lands stolen from them by Porfirio Díaz and only nominally restored by Carranza, treated them as liberators. The labour leaders in the towns talked of them as gallant comrades who would never sheathe the sword so long as the revolution was betrayed. The government hunted them half-heartedly, fearing that the capture and execution of Lara might provoke a general strike; they did not realise that in fact the relations between the caudillero and the unions were purely sentimental. Labour found him useful because his exploits impressed Moscow and could be used to loosen the purse strings. Lara on his part was quite ready to desert the cause of the people if he could find a more profitable label to cover his activities. Meanwhile he posed successfully as the avenger of peasants and workers, and, since he himself had been brought up in the perfect communism of an Indian village, knew for what he was fighting.
The caudillero was the absolute ruler of some two hundred and fifty men with their women and children—a nomadic and self-sufficient tribe living inconspicuously as ground squirrels among the yellow rocks and frequently changing their habitat according to the objective to be reached or the anticipation of pursuit. Their raids were delivered by small parties who could escape into the desert hills carrying with them so much water that any considerable body of pursuers would be forced to break off the chase and ride gasping to a familiar spring or river. Their attacks on the Norte de Mexico railway were neither as thorough nor as merciless as those of Hipolito Villa who during the civil war had cut all communication between Mexico City and the northern frontier; for Lara had no wish to provoke the federal government beyond bearing. He left the passenger traffic alone, but did his best to dislocate, cheaply and effectively, the movement of goods.
El Camarero was his secretary of state, mascot and licensed jester. Manuel found great beauty in their life, for it ran counter to none of the fundamental truths of human nature. The men were ascetic as a tribe of Arab saints. True, they had no lack of women; true, they drank themselves into insensibility when there was anything to drink; but comfort and discomfort were meaningless words to them. They were content with tortillas and charquí, simple meals of maize flour and dried goat’s meat. Their houses were the serapes wrapped around each man and woman, the thick wool protecting them luxuriously from sun, frost, wind and the hardness of barren ground. No material possessions but cartridges were of value to them, for they lacked nothing essential to life. Silver they enjoyed, but used it, like their Aztec ancestors, chiefly for the decoration of their persons and equipment. Ambitions they had none. Even Lara would have found it hard to say what more he wanted from life.
It was this pure and violent living that for half a year had blinded Manuel to the insincerity of his position. He had the action that his heart still craved, and a creed which partly sanctified it in his own eyes. He suppressed his doubts, but he was near to being forced to suppress them consciously and deliberately. The Calles government was swinging further to the left than anyone expected, showing a stern face to the Church and the United States, and a sympathetic to the peons and workers. Material, corrupt and treacherous though it was, it was carrying out the ideals of an Indian socialist republic more effectively than Lara.
As he sat between two dead bodies on the edge of the railway, his mind cleansed of its layers of pretence, Manuel weighed the eternal contradiction between the necessities of government and the true ideals of humanity. The Duke and Don Quixote. Stalin and Trotsky. Pilate and Christ. Calles and Lara. The parallel instantly struck him as ridiculous, for a less Christ-like figure than Lara it was hard to conceive; he was a very Ixtaccihuatl smelling with pleasure the burning bodies of the slain. Yet it seemed to him there was truth in his conception; he had ranged the romantics, the blessed simple, against the worldly. On the one side was the calculable conduct of individuals true to themselves; on the other the lies, the intrigues, the compromises of men caught in the complex net of civilisation, and ambitious to order that tangle into some system, however temporary.
Undoubtedly the latter were the more desirable citizens, but the romantics the better models for mankind. He remembered the cafés of Valladolid, and how his father’s friends might have been divided into the two types. There were some who would never allow the man from another town—the forastero —to pay for his own refreshment during his stay in Valladolid. There were others who lay in wait for the forastero in order that their own hunger and thirst might be satisfied at his expense; men of practical common sense, they were often the kindlier husbands, the better fathers, the more useful friends. But the others, though they might be cruel as Lara and fantastic as himself, were those who had given an aristocratic flavour to all that Spain touched and conquered.
II
THE FORTUNE
Manuel Vargas looked back upon a life that had been a long attempt to recapture the excitement of youth and to fulfil its promise. That period was at an end. He knew that the excitement could never be recaptured and that the promise had imperceptibly been fulfilled. He had neither wealth, power, nor any form of worldly success, but he was rich in wisdom and emptied of all false ambition; he had lived fully and to maturity. What the future would hold for this strange soul forged of love, suffering and violence did not disturb him. Whether he sold doughnuts in a back street of Mexico City or led the proletariat in a revolution to transform his Spain mattered little. One thing was clear to him—that he would be a law to himself. He would work with men; he would lead and obey and starve; but he would never accept a second-hand opinion or a second-hand thought. He would go his own way and leave his destiny to chance.
“What have you chosen, Camarero?” asked Lara, looking up at last from his systematic harvesting of arms and munitions. “Vamos, hombre! We can’t spend the night here!”
Manuel had given no thought at all to the choice of weapons that had been offered him.
“This!” he said on a careless impulse, pointing to the sword at the dead officer’s side.
Some of the men laughed. Three of the more cunning, who believed in El Camarero’s wisdom as superstitiously as Arthur’s knights in Merlin, examined the hilt to see if it were made of gold.
“To toast pigeons?” asked Lara. “Or will you be the Quixote of the revolution?”
“We are all Quixotes, and you most of all, my general—it’s in the race. I choose the sword. Bury him decently and leave it by his side!”
“Bury him, is it? Let the kites bury him!” declared Lara. “What does he care—the little señorito? He thinks he’s in hell, for he died without a priest!”
“Then the people shall give him absolution,” answered Manuel. “Think, my general, of his arrival before the gates of heaven! ‘Who gave you supreme unction?’ asks Peter. ‘A son of a bitch named Manuel Vargas,’ says he. ‘And who buried you?’ asks Peter. ‘General Lara,’ says he. ‘But why didn’t you go to a priest?’ ‘Where I come from there are more generals than priests,’ says he, ‘and as my own general was sitting on his bottom in Mexico City, I was handed my passport by General Lara.’ ‘Está bien!’ says Peter. ‘Pass, friend! From to-day we will accept all those who have been buried by generals!’”
“O
ne of these days I will cut the devils that possess you out of your tripes,” said Lara resignedly. “Let us bury him then! You have his papers?”
El Camarero felt in the inner pocket of the officer’s tunic and extracted a wallet of snakeskin which he handed to Lara. The general pocketed a five-peso note, which was all the money it contained, and returned the wallet and papers to Manuel.
“You know that all this paper stuff does not please me,” he said contemptuously—it was his invariable excuse when faced by the mysteries of the written word. “Read them, Camarero, and tell me if there is anything interesting.”
It was but a poor burial in that sun-baked ground. They sank the body six inches into the earth and scattered pebbles over it. Less than that, thought Manuel, had satisfied the personal rebellion of Antigone.
Overladen with arms and ammunition the raiding party toiled up the hillside, cursing their spurs and the broken ground, and dropped down into the dry valley where half a dozen of their comrades guarded the horses. The abrupt and empty slopes of the foothills and the distances of barren plain dwarfed and immobilised them; the very sight of their animals was a bodily relief. Once in the saddle they appeared and felt a far more formidable band. A compact body of forty mounted men with pack horses and remounts was the master of distance and its fate.
Lara led his men eastwards over the torrent bed of sand and pebbles which the hooves of occasional horses had beaten into a passable track. They rode without discipline, strung out along the arroyo like a herd of goats, in couples and close-packed groups connected by single riders dropping back or pressing forward to talk to companions. Manuel, riding near the tail of the column, pulled out the officer’s papers and began to read them. There were his commission, his documents, a half-written letter to a girl in Guadalajara, and an order from the Governor of Chihuahua, marked by the many dirty fingers of those who had admired it, stating that to the bearer, Don José-Maria López Manoja, Captain of the Tehuantepec Infantry, had been entrusted gold coin and bars to the value of 300,000 gold pesos for delivery to the Federal Treasury in Mexico City, and instructing his fellow citizens to give him any assistance of which he might stand in need. That, thought Manuel, I have done.
The Third Hour Page 4
