Angeles persisted. The Zapatistas were fine guerrilla fighters, he said, but they couldn’t be counted on to crush the Carrancistas. He pointed out that the Army of the South had never won a battle on the scale of our victories at Torreón and Zacatecas, and that the Zapatistas rarely held on to any territory they did take. They were always in a rush to get back to their patria chica, their “little homeland” in Morelos.
“The fact of the matter, my general,” Angeles argued, “is that while you fight for the liberation of all of Mexico, General Zapata and his people fight solely for the sake of their own little corner of the country. If you entrust them to deliver the coup de grâce to Carranza, I do not believe it will be done. General Zapata’s hesitancy to venture beyond the borders of Morelos any farther than the capital will permit the whitebeard to escape from the vise in which we now have him.”
Even though Angeles usually struck me as something of a priss (He washed every day! He always ate with knife and fork, even around the campfires!), there was no question of his loyalty to Villa, or of his honesty and his courage. His explanations of tactics were invariably clear and precise. As long as he was talking about practical military matters rather than expounding on some philosophical crap (like his concept of “honor”), he was nearly always right. Which, yes, I suppose is another reason I didn’t like him. My objections to his arguments at staff meetings more often sprang from spite than from genuine disagreement. But this was no situation in which to indulge spite and I knew it. I told Villa I agreed with Angeles. “Let’s finish the whitebeard while we can,” I said. I no longer worried about an end to the war. I knew now that there would be war—some war, a war, enemies to fight—for years and years, no matter who we beat today, who we defeated tomorrow. The only thing that really mattered was not to be defeated.
Villa shook his head. His mind was made up and nothing was going to change it. There was nothing to do but shrug and shut up, and Angeles finally realized it too. Although Pancho was usually quick to follow Angeles’s suggestions on military strategy, he was less concerned with strategy this time than with honoring the territorial rights of a brother revolutionary whom he greatly respected. He not only refused to belittle the Zapatistas’ narrow revolutionary ambitions, he absolutely would not intrude into Zapatista turf without invitation, not even to finish off the whitebeard.
Another terrible mistake.
TEN
Our first meeting with Zapata was on his ground in Xochimilco, a pretty little town a few miles south of the capital, well known for its floating gardens. We were greeted by cheering villagers bearing bouquets. The street was covered with flowers, the air heavy with their sweetness. Brass bands blatted tunes of the Revolution. Zapata was waiting for us in the company of his advisors at the municipal schoolhouse. He wore a tight fancy outfit and was lean as a lariat. The ends of his large mustache drooped past the corners of his mouth.
The meeting started out stiffly, uncomfortably. Villa was at an uncharacteristic loss for words, smiling tightly at Zapata, who sat mutely and stared around at all of us with eyes like black fires in a stone face. The clamor of the crowd outside, the loud music, and the incessant barking of dogs poured in through the windows. At last somebody mentioned Carranza—and they both started talking at once about how much they hated that perfumed, chocolate-drinking, blue-spectacled, white-bearded son of a bitch. That’s all it took to loosen their tongues, and they conversed easily from then on.
They pledged an alliance against the Carrancistas and discussed plans for redistributing the land to the poor when the war was won. I got bored with the discussion pretty quickly: all their talk of how things would be after the war sounded a lot like the talk of priests on the way things will be after the end of the world. It all sounded silly and unreal. My ears didn’t prick up again until they started making deals for certain of each other’s prisoners, picking and choosing from among them the ones they wanted their own boys to kill.
To celebrate their pact, Zapata called for brandy. The glasses were brought and he handed one to Villa. “Thank you, little brother,” Villa said, “but I don’t drink.”
“Of course not,” Zapata said. “Neither do I.” It was the only time I ever saw him smile. He thought Pancho was joking. He held his glass out in a toast. “The Revolution!” he said, and took the drink in one swallow.
Villa gave his drink an uneasy look, then said, “The Revolution!” and tossed off the brandy as Zapata had done. Instantly he began coughing and choking. I quickly gestured for one of the boys to take him a cup of water. Villa accepted it with a grateful nod—but even then, still fighting for breath and with tears rolling down his face, he first held the cup toward Zapata and gasped, “Would you care for some, amigo?” Zapata shook his head, frantically waving away the offer, and Pancho gulped down the water like a drowning man, sloshing some down his chin and on his sweater.
Nobody was so stupid as to laugh, not at the time. (Later, whenever I wanted to get Villa tight and red in the face, all I had to do was recall the moment for him and chuckle about it.) And even though Zapata’s amazement was all over his face, he was sufficiently quickwitted—and well mannered—to divert attention from Pancho’s embarrassment by calling for the bands to play louder and for everyone to dance.
•
Two days later we paraded into Mexico City. Together with the Army of the South we were fifty thousand strong. Villa rode at the head of an endless column of cavalry and marching troops, Zapata on his right, me on his left, Urbina directly behind. All along our route, from the outskirts of the city to the National Palace, people were lined a dozen deep on both sides of the streets. We moved through a steady rain of flowers, a thunderous cheering that nearly drowned out the music of the bands and the clopping of the horses.
I thought Villa’s face would burst from the force of his grin. He looked at me and showed me his fist. I nodded and laughed. “Look at us!” Urbina said. “The kings of Mexico!”
Villa looked splendid in his dark blue uniform flashing with braiding and buttons of gold—but Zapata, that dandy, was spectacular in an enormous silver-studded sombrero and a charro suit of deerskin with golden thread. Urbina had encased himself in a stiffly starched, high-collared khaki uniform and a pith helmet he had appropriated from a German civil engineer in Durango. I myself looked wonderful in my new business suit from Chicago and a bright necktie of pure silk, my Texas hat cocked over one eye, my polished gold watch chain hanging just so from a coat pocket. Although the city’s cheers were chiefly for Villa and Zapata, I knew that the deepest yearnings of the women in the crowd were for me. I could feel the heat of their eyes on me as Balazo, the only white horse in sight, pranced majestically down the capital’s wide boulevards.
A few hours later we were in the National Palace, posing for photographs. One of the most famous taken on that occasion shows Villa sitting in the presidential chair, the gold eagle embossed on its high back blazing over his head like a pagan halo. At first he had insisted that Zapata sit in the chair—“You deserve the honor, little brother, not I”—but Zapata had absolutely refused, and so finally Pancho shrugged and eased himself into the chair slowly, like he thought it might be some kind of trap. The grin he gave then was his biggest of the day. In that picture, Urbina is seated on his right, Zapata on his left. I’m standing next to Zapata. Nearly two dozen people are packed around the presidential chair, forming a rough pyramid of faces behind the gold eagle over Pancho’s head. They’re bareheaded and in hats, in uniforms and suits and neckties, in bandoleers and bandanas and bandages, some staring defiantly and some grinning with delight. Directly behind Villa stands a woman all in black whom none of us later recognized (or even remembered seeing in the room) when we looked at the picture.
I do recall a woman in the room when the picture was taken—one of Zapata’s soldaderas, a dark beauty named Valentina who they said was one of his best fighters and was often put in charge of ex
ecuting prisoners. When the famous picture was taken, she was standing off to the photographer’s right, and it is her I’m looking at. She was looking back at me with a hard, small smile, her arms folded under her breasts and swelling them up for my pleasure. I’ll say it myself: I look like a handsome devil. Villa looks happy, relaxed, satisfied with the world. Zapata looks like a hawk on the hunt. Urbina, as always, looks drunk.
•
We arrested hundreds and hundreds in Mexico City. Grafting politicians and bureaucrats, profiteering shopkeepers, black marketeers, counterfeiters, thieves, rapists, bootleggers, imprudent newspapermen, loudmouth priests, everybody who even looked like a pimp. We jammed the jails with the corrupt, the crooked and the counterrevolutionary. Our military prisoners we kept in the penitentiary, and we handed over to Zapata’s boys any personal enemies they wished to execute in their own way. In return they gave us those prisoners of theirs we wanted to deal with ourselves.
Our firing squads were at work every day. Some of our boys went so far as to make occasional public examples of the condemned: one morning I spotted three dead federals hanging by their feet outside a police station, each with a small sign pinned to his chest. One sign read, ‘‘This man was shot for being a thief”; the next said, “This man was shot for making false money”; and the third said, “This man was shot by mistake.”
Villa chuckled when he heard about it. “It takes honesty and courage for a man to admit his blunder to the whole world like that,” he said. “The boys who did it are men of character, and I’m proud of them.”
The Zapatistas preferred less direct means of execution. They were inclined toward skinning knives, anthills, and slow fires. They crucified men on telephone poles. They sewed men up in wet hides and left them in the sun to be suffocated as the hides dried and constricted.
I watched them work on one fellow, a federal major who had once led an attack on a Morelos village inhabited only by women and children and very old men. They hung him upside down about a foot above a coal fire and slowly cooked his brain. The smell of his burning hair gave way to the odor of roasting flesh. He screamed till his voice was gone, but the cords in his neck continued to strain in silence as the crown of his head slowly darkened and crisped. Nearly three hours passed between his first scream and his last breath. The Zapatistas spit on his corpse and called him a pussy for dying so fast.
When I described the execution to Villa, he shook his head and looked sad. He said he’d seen men die in even worse ways than that. He did not favor torturing men to death. “It takes too damn long,” he said. “The time you spend torturing a man is time you could spend dancing and making love. Besides, it makes me feel like the kind of man I hate. No—even if some men don’t deserve to die like a man, I won’t let them keep me from killing like one.”
Our prisoners would beg us to stand them against the wall rather than turn them over to Zapata’s boys.
•
One evening I got together with the Zapatista girl named Valentina in a hotel room a few blocks from the Zócalo. She had lovely brown breasts with nipples like burnt-sugar candies, but she got morosely drunk very quickly and made love like it was a duty. I had expected fire and spice, not this sullen bitch. Even her talk about killing lacked zest—and killing was all she talked about. In less than an hour she’d lost all allure. When I thrust her clothes at her and shoved her into the hallway, she screeched like a cat and swore she was coming back to cut my throat in the night. I expected her to try but she didn’t. The next day I found out she’d picked a fight with two of our soldaderas in a joint down the street and they’d slashed her to death with their razors.
•
Villa tried hard to establish a democratic government in Mexico City, going so far as to permit, as Madero had, freedom of the press—for democracy, they say, cannot exist without free speech. I had given this concept much thought, and I agreed with it. I still do. A man should have the right to say any damn thing he pleases—anytime, anywhere, about anybody.
However. If what a man chooses to say should offend another man, the offended man then has the right—under the democratic principle of equal rights for everyone, another concept with which I agree—to respond to the offense. And because a true democracy (the only kind I believe in) permits a man freedom of choice, the offended man may rightfully choose to respond to the offense in some way other than speech. He may, for example, prefer to respond with a fist—or, in an instance of severe offense, perhaps with a bullet. Thus does a true democracy impose upon its citizens the obligation to be prudent in the exercise of their rights.
Villa felt the same way, and during our occupation of the capital we occasionally had to impress upon unmindful citizens the consequences of ignoring this basic obligation. Those civic assignments most often fell to me of course, and most were so routine I barely distinguished one from another. But I never forgot the business with David Berlanga.
The whole thing started one evening when a group of our officers had dinner at a fancy place called Silvain’s—owned by a Frenchman who thought he was something special because he had once been a chef for the czar of Russia (as though it takes great skill to cook a pot of beet soup). For some reason or other the boys got irked with the frog and refused to pay their bill. One of them wadded it up and tossed it across the room. But a fellow at another table got up and retrieved it and told the Frenchie—told him loudly, so that everybody in the place heard him—that he would pay it. When one of our boys asked him who the hell he thought he was, he answered, “A supporter of the Revolution who hates to see its principles dishonored by rabble like you.”
Naturally our boys wanted to deal with the insulting bastard on the spot, but they reminded each other of Villa’s order against abusing civilians in public disputes. Any complaints our boys had against a citizen were to be reported to headquarters—just as we’d instructed the local citizenry to do with any problems they had with our troops. We had recently executed one of our boys for killing an Avenida Juárez shopkeeper in an argument over the price of some bauble. Another man, a cavalary captain, had been stripped of his rank and reassigned to the gravediggers’ squad for making a loud proclamation of desire to a passing young lady of good family, who took offense. The boys knew Villa was serious about this.
“If only there hadn’t been so many witnesses,” one of the boys in the group told me privately. “Bigmouth made us look like assholes and we couldn’t do shit about it.”
The bigmouth was David Berlanga. He was a newspaperman who claimed allegiance to the Revolution, but in several recent articles he had criticized many of Villa’s government policies and strongly berated our troops for their public rowdiness. Villa had been shown the articles and had been irritated by them, but he’d managed to shrug off his displeasure with some halfhearted remark about the rights of a free press in a free society and blah blah blah. Because Villa’s moods were as variable and quick to change as a sierra wind, it had been Berlanga’s good luck that every time Pancho had seen one of the critical pieces he’d been in a mellow frame of mind.
But the report of the restaurant incident reached Villa on a morning when he was angry and confused about another matter: the night before he had been spurned by a beautiful woman he had spotted coming out of a church. The widow of a federal officer, she told him she would rather drink rat poison than permit him to touch her.
“How can it be?” he asked me a half-dozen times on the way to the staff meeting. “How can a woman say no to Francisco Villa? And the hatred in her eyes, Rudy, it was real.” He sat at the table with his head in his hands as an adjutant read through a list of matters to be dealt with. The last item on the list was the complaint about David Berlanga.
There was a momentary silence when the adjutant finished reading—and then Villa exploded: “That son of a bitch! I’ve had enough of that little dog and his constant yapping! All that shit he writes about me and my boys! Enough! I
want him shut up!”
“But, my general,” one of the advisors said, “the man is a journalist. What of his right to freedom of expression?” Before the Revolution the advisor had been a university professor, one of those guys who’s read hundreds of books full of big words and big ideas—but who can’t read the handwriting on the wall. “Only a few days ago we released an official proclamation permitting the free expression of any—”
“Yes, yes, yes!” Villa shouted. “I know! Everybody’s got a right to say whatever the fuck he wants—including me, goddamnit! Fierro!”
I stepped out of the shadows in the rear of the room. “Chief.”
“Under my right of freedom of speech, I freely say to you: go shut that fucker’s mouth!”
“Done, my chief.”
I found him at Silvain’s. He was sitting with friends and unwrapping a cigar as I approached the table. They all knew who I was—everybody in town knew who I was—and I smiled at the sudden fright on their faces. Only Berlanga did not look afraid. He stared at me with curiosity.
“You,” I said, “come with me.”
“May I ask why?” His voice was steady, his tone polite.
“Because you have been convicted as an enemy of the Revolution and sentenced to be shot, and it should be done in its proper place.” I always liked giving it to them like that, quick and direct, and watching their faces as the news raced around in their heads like a trapped rat.
The others at the table reacted with all the usual theater—gasps, widened eyes, horrified glances all around. But not Berlanga. His eyes simply went cold for a moment, then he shrugged and smiled. “Convicted, you say? So I must have been given a trial. Strange that I don’t recall it, especially since my lawyer so obviously did a poor job in my defense.” He looked around at the others. “Remind me to fire him, whoever he was.”
The Friends of Pancho Villa Page 10
