The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  When Orozco heard about it, he was enraged. Villa had also been in favor of shooting Navarro, and he was swayed by Orozco’s fury. “That little shrimp don’t know shit about running an army,” Orozco told him. “I say we take over.”

  They went to Madero’s headquarters with a hundred armed men behind them. Orozco rushed through the door, grabbed Madero by the collar, and demanded his resignation at gunpoint. But Gustavo Madero, who had plenty of guts for a man with a glass eye, jumped on him and pulled him off his brother. Madero managed to push his way through the melee and get outside, then clambered up on the hood of a motorcar and started making a speech to Orozco’s men at the top of his little voice.

  The shouting Orozquistas gradually began to listen as he praised them for their victory over the federal army and the great blow they had struck for Mexican liberty. Orozco, he told them, was a fine man and a superior general who was simply feeling an excess of revolutionary spirit. “But you make the choice,’’ he said to the soldiers—and he stretched out his arms like Christ on the cross. “Kill me if you wish! You decide whether I or General ­Orozco shall be your president!”

  For a moment there was stunned silence. Then someone shouted, “Viva Madero!” In an instant the cry was taken up and chanted again and again, louder and louder. Madero smiled widely, then reached out his hand to Orozco.

  “Well hell,” Urbina said, “with his own men shouting ‘Viva Madero!’ all around him, what could Orozco do but put up his pistol and accept his hand? He sure as hell couldn’t match words with him. But he was plenty pissed off, you could see it in his face.”

  Villa, on the other hand, was moved to tears by Madero’s speech. He shoved through the crowd around the car and clutched at Madero’s sleeve with one hand and tried to give him his pistol with the other. “Shoot me—shoot me, señor!” he cried. “Punish me for my treachery!” Madero’s readiness to die right then and there for his revolutionary ideals had impressed Pancho more than anything he’d ever seen in his life.

  Madero smiled and patted him on the shoulder. “Kill you,” he said, “the most valiant of my good men? I would sooner cut out my own heart. No, Colonel Villa, there will be no killing among this band of brothers. We are all bound by loyalty to the Revolution. Go now, and prepare your brave boys to finish up our work.”

  From that day on, Urbina said, Villa regarded Madero as nothing less than one of heaven’s own saints. That was true. How many times in the next couple of years would I hear Pancho blab on and on about the infinite goodness of Señor Madero! Listen, I saw Madero in Monterrey, I heard him speak, and I never did understand the pipsqueak’s pull on people—though I never said so to Villa, not in so many words. I’d argue with Pancho about almost anything, but I never wasted my breath arguing with him about Madero. He couldn’t be reasonable on the subject, so why bother? As far as Pancho was concerned, Madero’s only imperfection was his tendency to trust untrustworthy men—like Orozco, whom Villa would hate forevermore for having gulled him into mutiny against the little saint.

  And like Victoriano Huerta, who blew Madero’ s brains out.

  •

  It had to happen. Madero had too many serious enemies right from the start—on both sides of him. The Díaz people of course hated him, but even some of his own supporters broke away from him pretty quickly when he didn’t change things fast enough to suit them. Like Emiliano Zapata down in Morelos, who wanted his people’s ancient lands returned to them and he meant right now.

  Madero had been president only a few months when Pascual Orozco rebelled. Orozco had the backing of the northern hacendados, who naturally detested Madero for his intention to confiscate their lands and distribute them to the peons. They made sure the Colorados were well armed and fully supplied. Orozco’s boys routed the federals in their first engagements and quickly got control of most of Chihuahua. Madero was desperate for a tough federal general to fight the rebels, so he turned to Huerta.

  He couldn’t have picked a tougher—or a more ­treacherous—son of a bitch. Huerta was a Huichol Indian with a bullet head. He wore smoky amber spectacles and drank brandy day and night, yet rarely seemed drunk. He’d made a name for himself killing Mayas in the Yucatán for Díaz. Of the many mistakes Madero made as president, the biggest was letting so many Díaz men like the bullethead continue in their government offices or their commands in the federal army. They all looked on Madero with contempt, and anybody with a grain of sense could have told him they would try to get rid of him the first chance they got. Actually, a lot of his friends did tell him, but he just waved off the warnings. He really believed the Porfiristas had accepted their defeat in the field and at the ballot box. Jesus.

  Villa once told me that life’s worst perversion was an educated man using his learning for unjust purpose. “Sure,” I said, “it’s almost as perverse as an educated man having no common sense.” Like Madero, I meant, and he knew it. He gave me one of those thin yellow looks that always scared the shit out of others—but I just gave him a look right back and we let the subject drop.

  Whatever else Huerta was, he was a damn good general. All summer long he beat the Colorados in one fight after another. He steadily pushed them north until he drove what was left of them—including Orozco himself—across the river and out of the country. When he got back to Mexico City, the newspapers were calling him a hero.

  Madero they were calling an incompetent fool. Every day he was ridiculed in editorials and cartoons. Even before Huerta ended the Colorado rebellion, the press was demanding that the little saint resign from office. The Porfiristas in the government were also pushing him to quit, but Madero absolutely refused. He said he was president by the will of the people and swore he wouldn’t leave office unless he was voted out or killed. I don’t think his enemies had too much trouble choosing which of those two ways they preferred to see him go.

  They got him that winter, and you have to take your hat off to how they did it. With the help of a few insiders, a couple of die-hard Porfirista generals broke out of their prison cells, retook command of their troops, and declared rebellion against Madero. The whole thing was actually part of a plot hatched by Huerta, who was still professing loyalty to the president. For the next ten days his troops made a phony defense of the Maderista government against a phony assault by the rebels. But the shells and bullets weren’t phony, and the two sides turned Mexico City into a slaughterhouse of civilian casualties without doing any real damage to each other. For a long time afterward the people of the capi­tal would talk in dark tones of horror about those ten tragic days. Artillery duels rocked the streets. Gunfire cracked and richocheted day and night. The dead bloated on the sidewalks until they were thrown in piles and burned. The city’s water and electricity were cut off. The only light at night was from the flames of the cremations and the burning buildings.

  Huerta knew exactly what he was doing. The carnage in the capital’s streets terrified the citizens so thoroughly they were willing to accept any resolution to put an end to it. Huerta’s resolution was to arrest Madero as the cause of all the trouble and offer him a choice: resign and go into exile, or else. Madero resigned. So did his vice president. By law, their resignations boosted the foreign minister—some nobody—to the presidency. President Nobody held office for barely half an hour—just long enough to appoint Huerta as the new minister—before he resigned too. The legal sham made Huerta the new president of Mexico.

  Three days later, as Madero was being transferred in the middle of the night from the National Palace to the city ­penitentiary—for his own safety, they said, which is pretty damn funny when you think about it—he was shot dead. His escort of rurales claimed they’d been attacked by gunmen intent on freeing Madero and he’d been killed in the shoot-out. What bullshit. Everybody knew it was assassination—and that no matter who had pulled the trigger, the turned-down thumb was Huerta’s.

  Madero’s brother Gustavo was killed
by Huerta’s thugs too. A mob of them got hold of him in the street and in their frenzy they tore him to pieces. Somebody took his glass eye as a trophy. They say there wasn’t enough left of him to bother burying.

  Huerta had the federal army and the rich on his side, plus the support of foreign business interests—plus Orozco and his bastard Colorados, who wasted no time joining sides with their former enemy. But the opposition to him was quick to form up too. The governor of Coahuila, a white-bearded old fox named Venustiano Carranza, refused to recognize the bullethead as president. He formed the Constitutionalist Party with himself as its “first chief.” He pledged to restore legal constitutional government to Mexico and he called for an army to fight against the usurper. All the Maderistas who’d fought against Díaz rushed to join him—including Villa, who was a prison escapee living in El Paso when he heard about the little saint’s murder.

  •

  Villa was lucky he’d gone to jail, considering that before he got locked up he’d been put up against a wall in front of a firing squad.

  During the Orozco rebellion, Pancho and his cavalry had been under Huerta’s command and did much of the hardest fighting, but the bullethead and his friends looked on Villa and his troops as ignorant, poorly disciplined trash. They liked to joke in Pancho’s presence about the raggedly comic look of his boys in contrast to their own nattily uniformed soldiers. When Huerta wasn’t insulting him he simply ignored him, except to order his cavalry to lead the toughest attacks on Colorado positions. Such orders are what led to Pancho’s real trouble with Huerta.

  The bullethead insisted that field officers follow his battlefield strategy exactly as planned, but Villa’s way was to improvise as a battle progressed, to change tactics to suit the moment. When he did that against the Colorados at Parral, Huerta was livid with him for deviating from the plan of attack. Villa couldn’t understand the reason for the bullethead’s anger. He’d won at Parral, hadn’t he? What was the problem?

  The problem was that Huerta hated him and wanted him gone. Two nights later Villa was in bed with a fever in a Jiménez hotel room when he was arrested on charges of insubordination. He was taken directly to headquarters, given a ten-minute trial, and sentenced to be shot at dawn.

  Next morning they stood him in front of a wall and he gave his pocketwatch and money to the soldiers assigned to shoot him. But when the rifles were raised, he dropped to his knees, cursing Huerta and weeping with outrage, loudly refusing to cooperate with what he called the injustice of his execution. The captain of the squad pleaded with him to get to his feet, but Pancho only flung dirt at him. Some have said he was not brave enough to die like a man. Believe what you will, but I know a few things about men’s fear of death, and I know Villa was no coward, ever. He would later explain to me that he had been playing for time. He knew a report of Huerta’s order had been telegraphed to the capital during the night, and he was certain Madero would countermand it. But when Huerta finally threatened to shoot him on his knees, Pancho got to his feet and put his back to the wall. The rifle sights were set on his heart when a telegrapher came running from headquarters, yelling that Madero’s order of reprieve had arrived. In the presence of so many witnesses, Huerta had to halt the execution and, as instructed by Madero’ s wire, remand Villa to prison to await an official trial.

  Villa was the only man I ever knew who’d stood in front of a firing squad and lived to tell the tale. “I looked the Mother of Bones right in the eyes,” he said when he told me about it. I asked him what he’d seen there and what it had felt like. “The biggest fucking desert you can imagine,” he said, “and like lips of ice on your throat.”

  His imprisonment in Mexico City wasn’t the roughest I ever heard of. He bought a comfortable bed for his cell and had his meals brought to him from the outside. He’d always been good at rope tricks, and now he practiced until he was a wizard. He got regular visits from a girl named Rosita, and whenever he spoke of her in later days it was always with misty affection. (I never ceased to be amazed by how well he could recall the smallest details about the women he’d made love to—from the light in their eyes to the smell of their hair to the way they kissed or laughed or cried. Me, I hardly ever remembered their names.)

  He learned to read and write from a Zapatista cellmate who had once been a schoolteacher in Morelos. The Zapatista’s primer was a ragged copy of Don Quixote, and Villa was tickled to learn that Cervantes had written his great book in prison. He was a champion of education for the rest of his life, and he built more schools in the next ten years than Don Porfirio ever did. But he could damn near bore a man to death whenever he got started on the subject. Urbina—who amused me with the perverse pride he took in his own illiteracy—always chuckled at Pancho’s high-toned pronouncements on the wonders of education. He once interrupted Villa’s discourse to remark that he himself had many times heard it said ignorance was bliss. “Yes, clearly, for some it must be,” Villa said, glaring at him. “It would certainly explain why you’re the happiest asshole in the world!” Tomás just laughed with delight and affected to shine his fingernails on his shirtfront. Nobody could bandy with Villa’s temper as expertly as Tomás, or get away with it so easily.

  Villa’s faith in Madero never wavered, not even after he’d been in prison six months without a trial. Then rumors began to snake through the penitentiary that Huerta and a gang of old Díaz generals were plotting against the little saint. Villa was sure the threat was more serious than Madero realized. His suspicions were confirmed when another prisoner, a former porfirista general, told him Madero would not be president much longer and advised Pancho to join the usurpers while he still had the chance. Pancho said he’d think it over, then immediately began to plan his escape. He talked a young prison clerk into slipping him a file and arranging for a disguise and a getaway car.

  On Christmas Day of 1912, Villa squeezed through the opening he’d cut in the bars of his cell and put on his disguise—a bowler hat, dark glasses, and a Spanish cape. The night before, he’d shaved off his mustache. Then he and the clerk walked out the front gate side by side, waving adios to the guards as Villa complained loudly about that bastard Madero and how the sooner he was gotten rid of the better for everyone.

  They went directly to a waiting car at the end of the street. The clerk drove like a madman through the night and all next day, until they reached the coast at Manzanillo. They took a boat to Mazatlán, then went by train to Nogales, then slipped across the border and borrowed a couple of horses from a poorly watched stable. In another few days they were in a hotel in El Paso.

  Villa sent word to Don Abraham Gonzalez, his old friend in Chihuahua, warning him about the plot against Madero and pledging his service against the conspirators. Gonzalez advised him to stay in Texas until he got further instructions. Villa busied himself rounding up the few friends he could find in El Paso and outfitting them with guns and horses. Other than that, all he could do was wait.

  Then came the report of Madero’s murder. They say Pancho cried like a child when he was told. He wept again a few days later when he got the news that Don Abraham had been arrested, put aboard a train, taken deep into the desert, and shoved under the moving wheels.

  The following day, with only eight men in his company, he crossed the river into Mexico, heading for war against Huerta.

  •

  Six months later, when I arrived in Jimenez with Urbina’s boys, he was General Francisco Villa, commander of the powerful Division of the North, and his might and reputation were growing greater by the day.

  THREE

  “I hear you’re a real killer.” That was the first thing Villa ever said to me. It wasn’t a question so I didn’t say anything back. Urbina had called me over to the railcar serving as division headquarters and introduced us.

  He was big-chested and tall for a Mexican, but I was taller—and handsomer, if the truth be told. Although he was affecting casualness, his e
yes were wary as a wolf’s. I accepted the cup of mescal Urbina poured. Villa was having none—he said he never drank. “Just imagine,” he said, “if Pancho Villa drank. Ay! What a terrible man he would be!” He smiled and shook his head as though amused by the idea that he might ever conduct himself as anything other than the amiable man of the moment. I already knew he was a tee-totaler, and that he rarely smoked, and that his only real vice was women—if a vice they can be called. They said he could outdance any man alive. But I’d also heard he had a temper that could slip its leash without warning like a crazy red dog.

  “A real killer,” he repeated looking me over carefully, “that’s what I hear.”

  “You should have seen the serious headache he gave Borunda!” Urbina said, holding a fist to the side of his head and flicking his fingers open wide to convey the effect of my bullet.

  Villa laughed. “Borunda? That bigmouth who liked to be called El Matador? Hell, that guy was scared shitless somebody was going to shoot him.”

  Urbina shrugged and said all he knew was that Borunda wasn’t scared of anything anymore.

  “Listen,” Villa said to me, “killing a guy like Borunda is nothing to brag about. Come with me.”

  I followed him outside and across the railyard, then around behind the depot, where a dozen federal officers sat listlessly under guard in a stock pen. When they caught sight of Villa, they jumped to their feet, their eyes suddenly wide and white. The roused smell of their fear carried to me like a thin spicy smoke.