The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  She unleashed her hair from the silver ribbon, and its dark richness tumbled over her shoulders and into my face. She tied the ribbon around my cock and cooed over the scars on my stomach and legs and chest. She ran her fingers over them, her lips, her tongue. “Each is a kiss you received from Death herself,” she whispered as she traced a fingertip along a ropy cicatrix over my heart, “and still she has never won you away.” I had to laugh at her romantic lunacies. I hefted her by the hips, kissed the smooth swell of her belly, burrowed my face in her sex.

  She wanted stories of violent spectacle, of battles and blood and atrocity. I regaled her with such tales while we roamed each other’s flesh in the candlelit bed. When I told her of the 302 Colorados I’d executed in Juarez, her nipples puckered hard and she kissed me like she was trying to breathe my soul. (What is more fearsome than the secret source of a woman’s deepest thrills?) I’d never forget her (Conchita?), she who relished my tales of killing and whose flesh was such an insistent reminder of life’s immense sweetness (Caterina?). That one I would dream of every night forevermore.

  A few weeks later I nearly asked Urbina about her, but then I thought better of it and said nothing. He probably would have joked at my interest in one of his dairy maids, and I would have had to shoot him then and there.

  NINE

  In August the Carrancistas drove the last federals out of Mexico City. A couple of weeks later Alvaro Obregón proposed a meeting with Villa at our Chihuahua headquarters to try to smooth things out between Pancho and Carranza and reach some agreement on the future of the Revolution. Villa said fine.

  We gave Obregón a ceremonious greeting at the train station. He was everything we’d heard—diplomatic, cautious, cool-headed. He was built much like Villa, a little shorter but about as thick through the chest and shoulders, and he wore an almost identical style of mustache. But his features were sharper, and his green eyes reflected his Irish ancestry.

  The talks were surprisingly cordial. Contrary to our expectations, Obregón came across as a man with a mind of his own, not just another of the whitebeard’s bootlicks. Villa spoke frankly about his mistrust of Carranza, and was delighted when Obregón agreed that revolutionary unity was far more important than the whitebeard’s personal political aspirations. He also concurred with Villa that Carranza should serve only as interim president until a national election was held—an election which would exclude Carranza as a candidate. They included this suggestion among others in a joint memorandum to the whitebeard which Obregón promised to deliver personally.

  They then took a train to Juárez to mediate a squabble between some of our boys and a band of Carrancistas. After settling that matter, they accepted an invitation to meet with the gringo general John Pershing at the International Bridge and receive his congratulations for their success against Huerta. Obregón wore his uniform with all the polished gold buttons, while Villa looked like some kind of salesman in his Norfolk jacket and bow tie. Pershing called Pancho “my old friend” and patted him on the shoulder as if that were what he really was. A photograph was taken of the bunch of us, with Pershing and Obregón flanking Villa in the forefront. The only one of the three who smiled was Black Jack—a smile so big and false it looked as stiff as his starched tunic.

  When Pancho and Obregón said good-bye back at the Chihuahua depot, they called each other “brother,” and clutched in a warm abrazo like dear old friends.

  •

  A month later I was at the south end of the state, attending to various matters of train transport logistics, when Obregón once again showed up in Chihuahua for a talk with Villa. Carranza had by then rejected the Villa-Obregón suggestions for the new revolutionary government—particularly the one about disqualifying himself from the presidential elections—and Pancho had come to suspect that Obregón and Carranza were in cahoots and playing him for a fool. I thought so too. By the time I got back to headquarters, their meeting had degenerated into a Villa tirade. The first thing I heard when I stepped off the train was that Pancho was about to have Obregón shot.

  Urbina wore a grin as big as the moon. “El Invicto is about to become El Enterrado,” he said: the Invincible was about to become the Buried. “I can’t believe he was so goddamn stupid to walk right into our hands like this.”

  When I entered the conference room, Villa was raging about Carranza’s duplicity and lust for power and so on and so forth. He accused Obregón of conspiring with Carranza from the start, of showing us a false face while spying for the whitebeard. Obregón was cool, you had to give him that. He sat at the table, watching Pancho with a look damn close to open boredom. After another minute of Villa’s ranting, he abruptly stood up and said, “With your permission, General, I will retire to my quarters to await your arrangements for my return to the capital.” Without waiting for a reply, he strode briskly from the room.

  Villa was dumbstruck. For a long moment he stared at the door through which Obregón had exited. His eyes looked ready to explode from his head. On the advice of his doctor he had been eating less red meat in an effort to control his temper, but the prescription had had little effect. Just as he was about to bellow the order for Obregón to be dragged back into the room so he could shoot him until his pistol was empty, one of Obregón’s staff officers, a colonel named Serrano, blurted, “General Villa! If you please!” and Pancho turned his attention to him with eyes like little coal fires.

  Speaking calmly and carefully, Serrano said, “We came to meet in your headquarters, my general, in complete confidence that our safety was assured by you, personally. I need not remind you, sir, that the code of warriors prohibits doing harm to one’s guest. Though a man may be one’s military enemy, when he has been permitted under one’s roof he is entitled to safe conduct. It has always been thus among men of honor.”

  “Bullshit!” Urbina shouted. “Get that double-crossing son of a bitch back out here, Pancho, and let’s shoot him!”

  I agreed with Tomás. I could see what that slick Serrano was trying to do. Later on I’d come to find out he’d once been a singer and piano player in a fancy Mexico City whorehouse. It figured: all his bullshit about “honor” was a pretty smooth song and dance. By luck or shrewd insight he’d come up with the one argument that might sway Villa from executing Obregón. Urbina blamed this weakness on Madero: ever since Pancho had taken up the cross for the little saint, he’d been eager to prove he was just as honorable as any other man in a general’s uniform, as though most generals—and most everybody else, for that matter—weren’t a bunch of two-faced, double­-crossing, back-stabbing bastards. (Sometimes his notions of honor went beyond foolish to plain loony. Shortly after this business with Obregón, for example, he would send a wire to Carranza proposing that the two of them—Pancho and the whitebeard—meet somewhere and simultaneously commit suicide. He explained that this selfless act would remove Mexico’s greatest barrier to peace: their resolute hatred of each other. He concluded with “No long-winded answer is required, señor, only a simple yes or no.” Was he serious? With Villa you could never be sure—but I do believe he loved Mexico more than his life, so yes, I think he was serious. Carranza never sent a reply, which didn’t surprise me, but later we heard that when he read the proposal he turned white as his beard and said, “That man’s not only a barbarian, he’s a demented barbarian!” When he was told this, Villa sighed and said, “I guess that means no, eh?”)

  Now I could see Serrano’s desperate argument working in Villa’s head like a carpenter in a hurry. I rarely gave Pancho my opinion until he asked for it, but this time I thought I’d better speak up quick. “They’re trying to save their ass with talk,” I said. He gave me a narrow-eyed look. “These arrogant pricks came here to tell you how things are going to be. Now they know they fucked up. Obregón’s neck is in the noose and they’re trying to get it out again with a lot of talk. You got him, Pancho. What do you think the bastard would do if he had you? You think he
would want to talk about honor?”

  His eyes had turned to black ice. “Anything else, General?” he said. I shook my head and held his stare. Too bad if he didn’t like what I had to say.

  “Shoot the fuckers!” Urbina said. “All of them! Goddamn it, Pancho, Rudy’s right. Who the hell they think they are, coming here and telling us Carranza wants this, Carranza wants that? Man, we got that Obregón, we got him! This is our chance, brother. Shoot him and send his head back to the whitebeard on a stick!”

  The boys around Tomás shouted their agreement. Like him—like me, like Villa—they were from the desertlands, a world in which mercy was scarcer than tree shade. Where they came from, honor was a word of narrow meaning, a purely personal possession, something for a man to defend against insult, like his looks or his mother. Honor was not something to apply to the larger world, where those of property and education and political office defined it in ways that, like everything else, worked entirely to their own advantage. In our world you killed your enemy at the first opportunity, as you always expected him to do to you. And if he had his chance first and didn’t take it—for whatever reason, including his sense of “honor”—that was his mistake and in no way obligated you to make the same one.

  Unfortunately, we had more than a few in our ranks who believed in the larger concept of honor Serrano was talking about—and even more unfortunately, Villa had lately been listening to them. All our goddamn schoolboys joined in the argument against shooting Obregón—Felipe Angeles, Raul Madero, the Aguirre Benavides brothers, too damn many others. Angeles, naturally, did the smoothest talking. “Colonel Serrano speaks the truth, my general,” he said to Villa. “Honor forbids bringing harm to a guest, even if he is a military enemy. Indeed, honor demands that he be protected while he is in one’s house.”

  “Jesus Christ, we’re not in Pancho’s house!” Urbina yelled. “This is some goddamn building! Pancho’s house is on the other side of town!”

  Angeles was never one to let emotions interfere with his reason, but his contempt for Tomás was as obvious as his perfectly trimmed mustache. “You take my meaning too literally, General,” he said evenly. “The obligation holds under any shelter where the guest is received.”

  Urbina kicked a chair and sent it rolling across the floor. “Well, he’s not going to be in any fucking shelter—because we’re going to take him outside!”

  “Enough!” Villa commanded. Tomás saw the decision in his face and cursed under his breath. I’d known his mind was made up from the moment he asked if I had anything more to say. The appeal to his sense of honor had struck home. And so, although Obregón had not spoken a word on his own behalf, Pancho let him go.

  It was a terrible mistake.

  •

  War with the whitebeard began to draw closer by the day. My blood hummed with the certainty. Villa felt the same way: his eyes brightened and danced at the talk of it. But many of the other Constitutionalist factions wanted to avoid another civil war on the heels of the one they’d just fought against Huerta, and before things got any worse between us and the whitebeard, a convention of delegates from all the revolutionary parties was arranged in the town of Aguascalientes, to try to reconcile our differences and agree on a new government.

  The convention lasted for weeks, and in that time a lot of speakers let loose a lot of hot air. I suppose many of them truly meant well, genuinely wanted to bring peace to the country and so on, but I knew all the talk would come to nothing. The bitterness between Villa and Carranza was never going to be resolved with talk, and I was amused by those who acted as though they really believed it could be. Carranza himself did not attend, but he was supported by about half the delegates who did, including of course Obregón, who read aloud a letter from the whitebeard stipulating the conditions under which he would accept the convention’s resolutions. Among those conditions were that General Francisco Villa and General Emiliano Zapata would resign their military commands and, “like me,” retire to private life; they would pledge not to run for any political office, and, if the convention decided that Carranza should leave the country, would also exile themselves from Mexico. When Villa heard the conditions, he said they were fine by him. “Better still,” he said, “I think the convention should order both me and the whitebeard to be shot.” He was serious.

  Zapata’s delegates, however, were outraged by Carranza’s call for their leader to resign as head of the Army of the South, and some pretty good brawls broke out on the convention floor. If Carranza had been counting on a failure of accord among the delegates, he made a good bet. The Zapatistas had already angered a lot of the other representatives with their one-note argument about getting back their ancestral lands—like it was the only issue that mattered in the whole country. It was a high moment when their chief spokesman, an arrogant egghead named Soto y Gama, infuriated the whole hall during his address: he snatched up the specially designed convention flag on the podium and shook it in their faces, calling it a “rag” and saying all flags were “lies of history” and so on and so forth. He had earlier antagonized the Carrancista delegates by denouncing the whitebeard and insisting that the only truly revolutionary plan for Mexico was Zapata’s. Now nearly everybody in the hall was waving a pistol at him and cursing him (“You shithead savage!” ‘‘You barbarian bastard!”), demanding that he show respect for the flag. That loony loudmouth just stood up there on the stage with his arms folded over his chest and sneered at them. He came this close to getting his brains blown out. Lucky for him cooler heads prevailed and he managed to get out of the hall with his life. I admired the crazy bastard’s brass.

  Villa had insisted that we would show unity with the Zapatistas, and we did: our speaker followed Soto y Gama at the podium and told the assembly we agreed with the Zapatista priority of land reform.

  The convention voted in favor of the resignations of Villa and the whitebeard, but it put off a decision on the question of Zapata, and its deliberations on a choice for provisional president were full of factional rancor—the Carrancistas opposing all Villista candidates and vice-versa, and the Zapatistas opposing damn near everybody. They finally compromised on some harmless nobody named Gutierrez, then sent word to Carranza in Mexico City that his major conditions had been met and he was obliged to step aside.

  Carranza’s response was that the convention lacked the authority to elect a president and that it had in any case not met with all of his conditions. What’s more, he claimed he’d been persuaded by “many” state governors and military generals not to resign but, for the good of the country, to press ahead with his program of governmental reform. Lying cocksucker made me laugh out loud. When he refused to honor his side of the deal, the convention declared him in rebellion and all bets were off.

  And so the war was on. Us against the whitebeard, and the sides fanned up fast. Obregón stayed with Carranza, Zapata was with us.

  •

  Maclovio Herrera deserted us for the Carrancistas. He sent a note: “Forgive me, my chief, but I do not think you can win this war and I do not want to lose it.” It had been only a few short months since we’d been his family’s guests in Parral. They’d all given Villa great, back-patting abrazos and pledged eternal friendship. Maclovio had become his goddamn favorite, for Christ’s sake. Through his tears Pancho swore he’d make every man of the Herrera family pay for Maclovio’s treachery.

  It didn’t take us long to put the whitebeard on the run. With Zapata’s army hammering at the capital from the south and ours bearing down steadily from the north and west, Carranza had nowhere to run but the Gulf. He took his headquarters to Veracruz. His main strength, Obregón’s Army of the Northwest, was reported to have tons of weapons and supplies, but defections had reduced its ranks, and Obregón would have to recruit heavily to fill them again.

  The Division of the North was now the most powerful army in the country, and Villa the most powerful man. We rolled south
like thundering fate. But because they were closer to the capital to begin with, Zapata’s boys got there first. When our trains reached the northern outskirts of Mexico City, Villa ordered a halt. He did not want to enter the town without first meeting with Zapata himself.

  I wasn’t the only one opposed to such deference to Zapata. (In their usual sensationalistic fashion, the newspapers had taken to calling him the “Attila of the South,” a nickname that for some reason really rankled me.) Felipe Angeles also thought Pancho was making a wrong decision. He urged Villa not only to put a garrison of our troops in the city immediately, but also to send the main part of our army to Veracruz to crush Carranza now, while the opportunity was as ripe as it would ever be. “His forces are scattered between here and the sea, my general,” Angeles said. “They’re weak and disorganized. Now, now we should run him down and finish him.”

  Villa said no. Veracruz was in Zapata’s sphere of operations and the honor of finishing off the whitebeard rightfully belonged to the Army of the South.