And he had. When I lowered my eyes from the mountain, I saw him stepping down from the Pullman’s back vestibule, still done up in riding clothes, carrying his crop. Director’s note to Fritz Mensinger: Get rid of the riding crop if you want your performance to win the trust of a bandito. Mensinger, though, seemed, even from this distance, serenely confident, unthreatened. Good. All the Krüger stuff—if Mensinger was ever aware of it—had been left behind. I took a drag on my cigarette, lifted my eyes again to the volcano but didn’t see it. I could see at the lower edge of my vision Mensinger pause, adjust to the thin air, turn this way, take a step and another.
And a voice beside me said, “Guten Tag.”
Mensinger would be within listening distance in moments.
I turned to the voice. It was the elderly man with the Porfirio Díaz mustache who had been sitting for hours beside me on the train utterly silent but for his one, almost whispered Olé.
I looked into his rheumy dark eyes and I could sense that this reserved man had been working up the initiative all morning to speak. I could not be faking German when Mensinger passed by. I said to him in Spanish, “Good afternoon.” I cut back on the preciseness of my natural Spanish pronunciation but I skipped the German accent. It was better the old man be confused than Mensinger pick up on anything familiar or odd when he passed by. I said, “Would you mind that I speak Spanish with you? I must practice.”
“Not at all,” he said. “You’re doing very well. Much better than before.” He was looking surprised but not disbelieving.
“When I am angry,” I said, “I have trouble speaking properly.”
He nodded. “Of course. The captain was an ass.”
“He was doing his duty,” I said.
“I don’t really speak much . . .”
“Sorry,” I said, cutting him off, as I was afraid he was about to say “German” and I sensed Mensinger drawing near. I put my cigarette in my mouth and reached for the pack inside my jacket. “I am very rude. Would you like to smoke?”
Mensinger passed us, moving briskly now.
“No,” the old man said. “Thank you.” He continued to say words but I was not hearing them, even though he would have sworn I was looking him full in the face with great attention.
Mensinger turned, quite near us. He smelled of starch and gun oil. Then he was out of my sight and I heard him going down the steps.
“. . . only a few words,” the old man was saying.
“I understand,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “I once had a reading knowledge was all. In the university.”
“I see.”
I turned my head briefly away, looked at Mensinger’s receding figure, passing by the women vendors, heading for the restaurant.
“I am Doctor Manuel Agusto Tejeda Llosa.”
I looked back to him as he began giving his name, “Doctor Tejeda Llosa,” I said, shaking his offered hand. “I am Gerhard Vogel.”
“Herr Vogel.”
“Do you have a practice in Vera Cruz?” I asked.
“Ah, no,” he said. “I am not a medical doctor. I am a doctor of philosophy. From the University of . . . from abroad.” His eyes shifted away.
It was easy to read him: His degree was from an American university. Which meant he probably spoke excellent English. And he knew America and Americans. Which meant sitting next to me all the way to Mexico City wanting to talk, this man would be an ongoing danger. At least he would exhaust me from the effort to keep up my role. And he could easily get around to grilling me about my life in Germany, my job in Mexico. He seemed a nice old man and I regretted it, but as soon as his eyes returned to mine, I narrowed my own. He knew why.
I let the German accent slide lightly back into my Spanish. I was only a little angry at him. But it would be enough to make the rest of the trip silent. “I suspect your American English is much better than your German,” I said. I clicked my heels and said, “It was a pleasure to meet you, Doctor.” And I walked away.
I headed down the platform, toward the rear of the train.
There was nothing to be gained from following Mensinger into the restaurant. And this walking away was just the gesture of a German ass. The logical move. I had to protect my Gerhard from exposure. I finished my cigarette and paused and stubbed it out on the platform. I half turned. I pulled out my Elgin. I glanced back up the platform. The old man was gone.
I thought now to go to the Pullman car and find Mensinger’s berth and his bag and go through them. If I could look at the “Papiere” he was bringing to Pancho Villa, I might find enough confirmation to file a legitimate story.
And I had sense enough to stop myself. It was Gerhard who was making me consider this. I was too much Gerhard Vogel now, American secret agent. But I was not Gerhard Vogel. I was Christopher Cobb playing the part of Gerhard Vogel in a melodrama entitled Christopher Cobb, War Correspondent. No. That was wrong. In that melodrama I was Christopher Cobb playing the part of Christopher Cobb faking the surface identity of Gerhard Vogel. I would not do what Vogel did. In life and in any little drama I played inside it, I was still who I was behind the mask. I was a war correspondent. A newspaper reporter. A real one. Not a yellow-journalist hack who’d buy or steal or invent whatever he needed. Nor was I a spy. Neither in my life nor in the snatches of theater in my life was felonious breaking and entering a legitimate action of a newspaper reporter. I was a reporter. Not a spy. Even though it was true that something larger seemed to be at stake here. Something that had to do with my country.
I wavered again. Wars always had something larger at stake. I hadn’t faced this dilemma before because the major wars I’d covered had never directly involved my own country. In Nicaragua, faction against faction. In the Balkans, Bulgarians against Servians and Greeks and Rumanians. I am an American, but I am an American reporter, a war correspondent, standing apart, telling things as they are. And an American does his job with the integrity the job calls for. Other Americans do their own American jobs. Soldiers. Secret agents. I am not those other Americans. This is what I told myself.
Besides. There had to be a train guard to keep the second-class hoi polloi out of the Pullman. The chances of getting into Mensinger’s berth unobserved and finding his documents and discovering the Germans’ ultimate goal with Villa were a good deal less than the chances of queering the whole story by getting caught.
I turned my back on the Pullman, the volcano, the restaurant where Mensinger was eating a meaningless lunch, and I strolled along the platform, keeping tightly bound inside my head for a time, thinking there was a very long way to go before La Mancha. I needed to stay patient.
And now I was nearing the boxcar at the back of the train. The dozen or so Federales who were supposed to protect us had emerged. Boys mostly, a few men, a motley group of rurales and impressed farm boys with a couple of weathered noncoms to lead them, the ragged, unmotivated loose ends of Huerta’s army on dangerous, thankless duty. And they were watching the women. Half a dozen women, the wives—official or unofficial—of the half dozen actual men among the soldiers. Women typically traveled with Mexican armies—governmental and rebel alike—to forage for their men and cook for them and service their bodies and tend their wounds and hold their hands as they died and even bury them. Soldaderas. Along the platform these women were crouched over an improvised fire, cooking some unidentifiable meat for their men’s tortillas.
I turned away from them. Faced the volcano. Began to walk back toward it. When Bunky asked me what my plan was, I gave him the only answer I knew. Which was vague to say the least. I had this role, for now, of Gerhard Vogel, but I was wrong a few minutes ago thinking of this as a play with fixed personalities in a structured melodrama. This was all new. It was all improvised. I didn’t know what my lines were, what my future actions were. La Mancha was a very small place. How did I follow Men
singer unobserved? And then what? But I couldn’t think about any of that yet. To improvise, you must stay in this moment and then the next and the next.
And in this particular next moment, a small thing in the landscape presented itself to me. A wooden shack a hundred yards up the train track. The telegraph office. Once again I was tempted to tell this story as I now had it. But I’d been so absorbed by my journalistic scruples, I’d overlooked a far more immediate problem, which trumped all the rest: If I tried to file the story from any of these public railway telegraph stations, there was a serious chance it would never even arrive in America. A telegraph operator who knew enough English to get a sense of what he was sending—and the operators tended to know pretty good chunks of the languages they frequently worked with—such a man would tell the authorities and then I’d be grabbed off the train and not only would the story die but the event itself might then be drastically altered in ways I would never be privy to. Hell. Forget the translation. Given the Mexicans’ feelings for Americans right now, a telegraph about anything that was written in English and bound for the United States would go nowhere except into my arrest file.
I had no choice. I had to follow this thing all the way to Villa. And then somehow improvise myself across the border.
32
When the train was moving again and I turned my face to the long, flat run of the Central Plateau that would take us to Mexico City, I found the women in the car at the back of the train lingering in my head. And I thought of Luisa. If she had gone off to do what I suspected she had, she was a soldadera of quite a different sort. I wondered who she actually went to. Zapata in the south? He just didn’t seem much motivated to campaign outside his own state. Or Carranza the alleged thinker? Obregón the tactician? Most likely Pancho Villa. She would be drawn to him for the same reasons I suspected Mensinger and the Germans were drawn to him. He was the boldest rebel of them all, clearly the strongest of them at this point, the one most likely to make a radical change in favor of the vast majority of Mexicans, the poor and disenfranchised. She would go to him.
I realized I was in danger of violating what I’d resolved about staying in the moment, about not looking ahead. Even though this matter of Luisa Morales was simple curiosity; even though I had objectively, analytically assessed her next moves, not mine; even though I had not, in that analysis, ever actually summoned up a full-fledged image of her in my mind; even though I was convinced all of this about what I’d been doing was true, now that I’d come to a conclusion and was ready to set her aside, Luisa Morales slipped quietly into me in quite a different way, as if from the shadows beyond the lamplight in a dark street. She appeared vividly, in the flesh, and she was unarmed and her hair was tumbled about on her shoulders, and she looked me in the eyes, and her eyes were as dark as the barrel of a gun. And then she vanished. And so I found myself refusing to operate in this present moment, on this train between Vera Cruz and Mexico City, and instead I was looking far ahead, to the possibility that Luisa, as well, might be waiting at the end of this trail with Mensinger. And the consequent hot twist in my chest made me feel like an incurable damn fool.
I needed to rid myself of all this. Right now. When Dr. Tejeda Llosa sat down beside me after the lunch stop in Esperanza, he rolled his shoulders a little to silently declare that there was nothing more to be said between us. Which was what I’d hoped to accomplish with my bit of willful rudeness. But at the moment I even considered turning to him and engaging him in conversation. Tell me about your time in America. I am a German with a banker uncle in Torreón and I do something or other and I am from somewhere or other.
I glanced in the old man’s direction. He was dozing, his head nodding forward and then jerking up and then nodding forward again. Dr. Tejeda Llosa. Doctor. Dr. The last little bit of the puzzle of Mensinger’s notes. I’d been assuming that ENP ~ Dr. involved a medical doctor. Of course not. If it was Wilson who had no balls in the notes, then this might be Wilson as well. The first President of the United States with a PhD. From Johns Hopkins University, in history and political science. Dr. Woodrow Wilson. And it was the PhD part of him that Mensinger wanted to stress to Villa. Villa who was utterly uneducated but was known both to deeply regret the fact and to dream of teaching every Mexican child to read.
So what was Mensinger’s point with the tilde? What was similar to Wilson’s PhD? What was ENP? And a phrase returned to my mind that slipped through a short time ago, in connection with Luisa’s choice of rebels: Carranza, the alleged thinker. And I remembered talking with Gerhard about him. And I was pissed at Gerhard for treating me like a naïf. So when he cited, in English, the “National Preparatory School” as part of Carranza’s intellectual resume, I tweaked him by repeating the name of the school in the correct Spanish: Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. ENP.
Mensinger couldn’t be sincerely suggesting that the two things were, in fact, similar. The ENP was a high school. The most exclusive in the country, but a high school. He could, however, expect it to represent, in Villa’s mind, all that he was not. The antithesis of Villa’s upbringing. Mensinger wouldn’t be rubbing Villa’s face in that. But if he was trying to induce an attack on American forces, he’d want to convince Villa that Wilson would never support his larger ambitions. ENP ~ Dr. Villa might believe that Woodrow Wilson feels an intellectual affinity with Carranza. That Wilson would be scornful of Villa’s lack of education. The note Mensinger made was to indicate Wilson’s point of view, the ultimate message being that the United States would never back Pancho Villa as leader of Mexico. Carranza was Wilson’s man. So there was nothing to lose for Villa to stand up to America by attacking Wilson’s invading army. Though he could be self-deprecating about his lack of education, Pancho Villa was a vain and self-aggrandizing man. The thought of Wilson’s scorn would infuriate him. And with the present Mexican outpouring of hatred for the United States, Villa could become an even greater hero. He could unify the rebellion behind him.
And I was simply getting angry. Angry at Mensinger and the Germans, angry at Villa and the Mexicans. I was angry at Wilson already, but once again I was struck by how my anger at him was of a completely different sort, like being angry at a smart but goofy uncle from Virginia, or at your mother, or at the Cubs. Family anger.
I took my hat off the hook by the window and put it on and pulled it down over my eyes and I settled back to make myself sleep. I was still weary enough from the short night. I could sleep if I just put my mind to it. No. I could sleep if I turned my mind off.
And I slept. I knew I’d slept because I pushed the hat up off my eyes and the sun was low, and passing outside was the pulque district just east of the capital, vast fields of maguey in dense, even rows of spiky, gray-green leaves as tall as a man with a tip that could cut deep as the bone and sap that could blister the skin, a plant that could produce the wretched pulque and the estimable blue agave with the effective mezcal in between. A complex thing indeed.
We were not far from the city now. Those of us going north would change trains in Mexico City. So I needed to avoid sitting next to him again and he was likely to disembark at the capital anyway, but even if I knew I’d be sitting beside him for another long trip, I would do this anyway: I turned to Dr. Tejeda Llosa. He was reading a book. The Meditaciones of Marcus Aurelius. I knew a few words from Aurelius. I remembered my mother quoting him to me when I’d finally calmed down after an early-teenage raging tantrum over something or other. She quietly let the fit run its course. And though in medias res I scornfully recognized her portrayal of suffering patience from her role of Marguerite Gautier in The Lady of the Camellias, I eventually calmed down and awaited her rebuke. But putting her hand gently and sadly on my shoulder and acting as if I would instantly understand his authority, she said, “The great emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius once wrote, ‘Anger is always honest.’” And that was that. She patiently turned my fault into a kind of virtue, thus letting me fill in for my
self the fault of it, and I think, as a result, I never overtly lost my temper with her again.
Dr. Tejeda Llosa read on, as I was stuck—though sweetly—on my mother. But now in my head I prepared a Spanish translation of the Aurelius quotation and I said to him, “Forgive me, Doctor Tejeda Llosa.”
He lifted his face from his book and turned to me. He had a look of suffering patience on his face.
I said, “I am sorry to interrupt and sorry for much more than that.”
He closed his book.
Putting just a trace of German into my Spanish pronunciation, I gave him a shot of his Marcus Aurelius. I said, “El enojo es siempre honesto.”
He smiled faintly and nodded. “Quite all right,” he said.
“That’s from Aurelius,” I said.
He lifted his eyebrows.
“But anger isn’t always smart,” I said.
“No offense was taken,” he said.
I said, “The place where you earned your doctorate degree…” But I interrupted myself. I glanced quickly around the car, making sure no one was paying attention to us.
He nodded again, pushing up his lower lip and wrinkling his brow at me as if to say, “You were right to be discreet, señor; at this moment in history, they would not understand either.” Before I could continue, he finished my sentence in a very low voice, barely able to reach me over the clack of the wheels beneath us. “The University of Pennsylvania.”
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