The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  It was a good show of coolness, but I wasn’t greatly impressed. Others before him had affected indifference when I came for them. But once they reached the moment of truth—once they arrived at the wall or looked down into their grave or heard the hammer draw back on my pistol—all of them, in one way or another, showed their fear. Some were despicable in their terror: they pissed their pants, they kissed my boots, they cried as hysterically as women. Some prayed to me to spare them, beseeching me as though I were a saint on a church wall. Even the bravest of them showed some sign of fear at the end—a tremor in the hands, a facial tic, jackrabbit eyes, something. I knew this one would too.

  His friends all began jabbering at once: “But why, why . . . ?” and “David, what will you do?” and “David, they cannot do this to you, they must present a warrant, you must demand a proper trial, you must demand that they—” I swung my attention to the one yammering about “demanding,” and he bit off the rest of his words and hastily dropped his eyes to the cappuccino cooling in front of him.

  Berlanga stood and carefully pushed his chair in against the table. He smiled at his companions and said, “Was it not Everyman who said, ‘O Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind’?” To see the careful way he adjusted his tie and set his hat on his head, you would have thought he was preparing to pay a call on a woman. “Well,” he said, “I’ve had him in mind ever since I saw him ride into town on his tall pale horse.” He turned to me, his eyes still cool and steady, and said, “After you, señor,” gesturing toward the door. I had to hand it to him: although I never thought it took exceptional courage for a man to put on a good show while his friends were looking on, it was a hell of a lot more than most could do.

  The execution wall was at the San Cosme barracks, only a few blocks away, so we walked. The street was uncrowded and bright with late morning sunlight. The fragrance of flowers melded with the spicy aromas of lunch grills. A pair of guitars were being strummed lazily in the open-doored darkness of a cantina. I had expected him to start talking as soon as we were outside and away from his friends, to offer me money, to tell me the names of all the important men he knew, to talk faster and faster about courtrooms and lawyers and judges, to resort to all those things these educated ones think are as real as earth and fire. But he didn’t. He strolled beside me with his hands in his pockets and his unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth, looking as casual as if he was with an old buddy on the way to have a plate of enchiladas and a couple of beers. He hopped over a pile of horse droppings on the sidewalk, and he smiled and tipped his hat to every young lady and dueña we passed.

  He didn’t say a word until we were almost to the wide double gate of the barracks courtyard. He paused under a tall cypress and said, “Excuse me, señor.”

  I stopped and turned, smiling, thinking that now it would begin, the pleading for his life. But he simply held up his cigar and asked, “Do you have a match?”

  The look on my face must have told him what I’d expected, and he seemed amused. The son of a bitch. For an instant I felt like knocking him down, kicking him in his smiling mouth and smashing his cool facade with a storm of pain. But the impulse passed as quickly as it came. He suddenly reminded me of Felipe Angeles. They probably could have been fast friends. They could have discussed art and philosophy over brandy and cigars in the mansions of wealthy acquaintances. Goddamn rich schoolboys. But it was hard not to admire those among them who had guts as well as a sense of style.

  I dug a match out of my vest pocket and handed it to him, and he made a busy ritual of lighting the cigar. Once he had it burning evenly, be said, “Thank you. The last one of the day has always been my most enjoyable.” He took a few deep puffs and we entered the courtyard.

  The boys were already there with their rifles, standing around telling jokes and smoking. They’d been at work since sunrise. When they caught sight of us, they threw away their cigarettes and fell into a loose line facing the wall. Without hesitation Berlanga went straight to the stained patch of ground in front of the pocked wall and turned toward the squad.

  “My last request,” he said to me, “is permission to finish my cigar.” He held it up and I saw that its ash was unbroken and more than a half-inch long. He took another long puff and exhaled luxuriously. His hand was steady as stone. He continued to smoke, watching me, smiling at me around the cigar. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the ash. We stood in silence while he puffed and regarded the sky, then the ground under his feet, then met my eyes again, still smiling, still puffing, the ash growing longer.

  Finally he said, “Ready?” and took his deepest draw yet, the burning tip flaring redly. He expelled a long, thin plume of smoke and brandished the cigar for my consideration: the ash was intact, cylindrical and nearly four inches long. I had seen dead men with less control of their hands.

  “I’m ready,” he said, and dropped the cigar and crushed it under his heel.

  A minute later they were dragging his corpse off to the burial pit.

  That evening I sat alone in a cantina, puffing the same sort of cigar he’d been smoking, but the ash always broke off at a shorter length than his had. The best I could do was a little less than three inches.

  I couldn’t figure out his trick. It had to have been a trick because there were only two other explanations possible, and I could accept neither of them. One was that he was crazy, someone properly belonging in a madhouse or a monastery. But I had studied Berlanga’s eyes carefully and there had been no madness there. I wished there had been, because insanity is not courage, and the only other explanation possible (other than a trick) was that he had been courageous, and that notion disturbed me.

  The power of men like me does not come solely from our ability to kill—which is no small talent in itself, true, but neither has it ever been as rare as gold. No, the true source of our power is so obvious it sometimes goes unnoticed for what it is: our power comes from other men’s lack of courage. There is even less courage in this world than there is talent for killing. Men like me rule because most men are faint of heart in the shadow of death. But a man brave enough to control his fear of being killed, control it so well that no tremor reaches his fingers and no sign shows in his eyes . . . well. Such a man cannot be ruled, he can only be killed. I refused to believe such fearlessness could exist in any man who, like Berlanga, was not himself a killer. I could no more accept such a notion than a priest could accept the idea of a godless universe.

  I knew Berlanga had used some trick—I just never figured out what it was.

  ELEVEN

  We stayed in the capital a month before moving out to drive encroaching Carrancistas from our northern territories. Our boys up there were running low on ammunition and supplies. We’d also got word that Obregón had received enormous shipments of arms and had recruited thousands of fresh troops, including many more Yaquis. He looked ready to move against Mexico City again. We left it to Zapata’s boys to hold the town—but as Angeles had predicted, as soon as we left they withdrew to Morelos, and toward the end of January Obregón retook the capital.

  We heard he came back in a flaming fury. He’d been humiliated by having to abandon the city in the first place, and he was outraged that so many of its citizens had accepted our occupation without resistance. So he turned his boys loose in the streets to do as they wished—and that’s when the people of Mexico City came to realize just how restrained our own boys had been during our stay.

  Our troops had committed a few random abuses while we were in town, I don’t deny that. Our boys did a little stealing and hurt some people they shouldn’t have and frightened damn near everybody. But Villa also kept a degree of order and policed our boys fairly well, all things considered. We respected the rights of honest citizens as much as possible under the circumstances, and we preserved at least a portion of the civil amenities. Under our occupation the capital had law, food, medicine, and reason to hope things would get better.
But still most of the capitalinos had complained bitterly about us and were happy to see us go.

  Then Obregón and his boys came back to town and taught them the true meaning of hard times. That garbanzo farmer was their worst green-eyed nightmare. He skinned the city to a bloody carcass.

  •

  In the following months things changed fast: Under the constant strain of conflicting ambitions, the convention alliance became a futile joke, and we broke from it and went our own way. So did most of the other convention armies, each one now fighting for no cause greater than its own survival. Thus the Division of the North was now a sovereign power, and as its commander, Villa answered to nobody. Pancho finally admitted how right Angeles had been about Zapata: that Morelense wouldn’t fight ­anywhere—or for anything—but his own goddamn bean fields. Some ally.

  We headed north to regroup and re-arm—and Obregón, feeling ready and cocky as hell, came after us. He’d looted the capital to its last centavo. He’d sacked the churches and forced the archdiocese to hand over a “contribution” of more than $100,000 in gold to “alleviate the suffering of the citizens”—though we heard it mostly went to alleviate the suffering of his own pockets. He’d imposed a heavy tax on every business still in operation—­including those owned by foreigners—and threatened to shoot anybody who didn’t pay up. He built up his store of medical supplies by cleaning out the hospitals of what remained of theirs. When he pulled out to come get us, he left the capital writhing with smallpox and typhus, dying of disease and starvation. They were said to be selling rat meat in the markets.

  Once Obregón’s army left town, the capital became no­man’s-land, now belonging to this army, now to that one, now to another, round and round and raped by everybody. They said the city stank of rot and ruin and total despair.

  •

  As Obregón drew nearer to us, Villa’s eyes narrowed and glinted with a keen anticipation of the fight. He had come to despise that bastard even more than he hated Carranza: “The whitebeard couldn’t stand if this Sonoran son of a bitch wasn’t holding him up!” Every day we received reports of how much nearer Obregón had advanced, and at each report Pancho would smile tightly and look off to the south and say, “Good, good. Keep coming, little Invicto. Come to me.”

  In early spring Obregón reached Celaya—and there he stopped.

  “He’s come all this way,” Villa said, “and now he’s so close, he’s afraid to get any closer.” He laughed without humor. “Well, it’s too bad and too late. Now we’ll give him the fight he came for.”

  Angeles argued for greater caution. He was on crutches with a broken ankle after his horse had recently been shot out from under him. “Be patient, my general,” he counseled. “Pull our units farther back and force him to put even more distance between himself and his supply sources. Then we’ll have the advantage of position, cover, reinforcement routes, supply lines, everything.”

  I thought Angeles was right again—damn him!—but Villa was beyond the reach of reason on the subject of El Invicto. He could smell Obregón’s nearness on the fine May breezes off the plains, and he couldn’t wait to destroy him in spectacular fashion, in the way he knew best—by attacking with everything he had, all at once, and crushing him completely with one tremendous blow.

  “Out there on those open fields,” he told Angeles, “it will be like rolling beer barrels over frogs in the street.” He dismissed all further argument.

  Maybe if we had known that Obregón had with him a handful of German army officers, including a certain Colonel Maximillian Kloss, Angeles could have argued more persuasively against Villa’s plan. He could have warned Pancho about Kloss’s style of warfare, could have told him that the German was fresh from the battlefields of the Great War taking place in Europe and was an expert in the tactics of trenches. It was a sort of fighting that had proved especially effective against cavalry attack, and the irrigation ditches of Celaya were perfect for it. Under Kloss’s guidance, Obregón would position his riflemen in the wide ditches fronted by rolls of barbed wire and flanked by coordinated machine gun emplacements. Obregón’s Yaquis would add a touch of their own to the trenches: long, wooden stakes sharpened to fine, tapering points and angled toward heaven.

  But we didn’t know about Kloss and the other Germans—and even if we had known, I doubt it would have influenced Villa in the least. He was determined to smash El Invicto then and there, and nothing could have swayed him from the attempt.

  And so we attacked.

  •

  And so we were slaughtered.

  In the shudder and abrupt tilts of the earth, under the rolling drifts of smoke and the deep tides of dust, I heard us dying by the thousands in the blasts and bursts of artillery, the incessant chatter of machine guns and the cracking of rifles, the rumble of hooves and the high shrilling of horses, the war cries, the screaming.

  Our foot soldiers got caught on the rolls of barbed wire and were annihilated by the machine guns. Our cavalry was gunned down as it searched for a break in the wire—and when we did find a break and got behind the wire and tried to jump the trenches, the horses were impaled on the wooden stakes. The animals’ screams melded with those of their riders, who were run through by Yaqui bayonets. The boys fell around me like fruit from a shaking tree. It was a wonder Villa himself wasn’t killed. He was everywhere, firing his big pistols and shouting encouragement: “At them, boys, at them! Up, up, little brothers! Kill the sons of bitches before they get us all!”

  I lost my beautiful Balazo in the ditches of Celaya. He died with a stake through his white belly, his hooves kicking against the trench boards like gunshots, and blood raging from his mouth in bright gouts. I shot every Yaqui son of a whore in that ditch, never feeling the bullets I took in the back and leg until after we’d made our retreat, all of us bloody, Villa in tears, weeping for his thousands of dead boys.

  “They killed us, Rudy!” He wiped at his eyes and streaked his face with blood. “Oh, Goddamn them, how they killed us!”

  Our hospital trains howled with the wounded, the crippled, the dying.

  Obregón captured hundreds of our boys. On his orders they were packed into goat pens and then machine-­gunned, all of them.

  •

  We’d been savaged but not broken, not yet. Villa repaired to Agauascalientes to regroup his forces. Angeles had missed the battle because of his bad leg, and he blanched when he heard how badly things had gone. Villa’s sorrow had transformed to rage: “I would rather have lost to a goddamn Chinaman than to that fucking Obregón!” He was sure we had traitors in our midst. When somebody pointed out that one of our infantry commanders had an uncle serving in Obregón’s army, Villa sent for him to be brought to the headquarters railcar. He took a close look into the man’s face and said, “It’s true—it’s in your eyes. You are a traitor.” He shot him before that fellow could say a word in his own defense. Others came under suspicion too, and also were executed.

  He made plans for another showdown with Obregón, this time in León, midway between Aguascalientes and Celaya. Again Angeles remonstrated, making the same argument he’d made before the horror at Celaya: Villa should dig in at Aguascalientes and let Obregón come to us. “Make him extend his supply line, my general. Make him run all the risks of an attack.”

  Villa gave him a look that was a cross between irritation and sorrow. “My general,” he said, “I have the greatest respect possible for your advice. You are without doubt the finest military mind in the world. But, my general, I am Francisco Villa, and I was born to attack. To attack! If I was beaten by attacking today, I will win once again by attacking tomorrow.” End of argument.

  •

  The battle at León lasted forty days and nights and its destruction was as biblical as its duration.

  This time we dug trenches too. And we introduced hand grenades to the war. And an airplane: Villa had recruited some wild-ass g
ringo pilot and his flying machine from God-knows-where and sent him to fly over Obregón’s position to scout for us. It was a brilliant idea—but on his first reconnaissance, the gringo flew too low and Obregón’s boys shot him down and that was the last we saw of that Yankee.

  We’d charge their trenches, then they’d charge ours. The summer heat was like hell’s own furnace. It drove men crazy. Every now and then, somebody—sometimes from our lines, sometimes from theirs—would jump out of a trench and run, screaming madly, into the open field between us and be gunned down.

  Every day saw a doubling of the dead men in the fields. The dusty stench was indescribable. The storm of flies could be heard a half mile away. The rats—a massive, squirming army of their own—feasted on the corpses in broad daylight.

  And once more we got our asses kicked raw.

  The only good thing that happened at León was that Obregón got half his right arm blown off by an artillery blast. It says everything to me about that man that he tried to kill himself to end his pain. He later admitted it: he claimed his agony had been so great he tried to shoot himself in the heart with his own pistol, right there on the battlefield. Think of it: we were trying to kill him, and he was trying to kill himself. How in hell did we ever lose to that candy-ass, to that hairless pussy! And damn the orderly who forgot to reload Obregón’s gun after cleaning it the night before!

  (I do like the tale they told of how Obregón’s arm was recovered from the field of carnage. It seems he had a reputation as something of a skinflint, so one of his aides went walking through the field of dead, holding out a ten peso gold piece—and as he passed by the arm, it flew up and grabbed at the coin. I heard that one of Obregón’s generals put the arm in a jar of alcohol and kept it for a souvenir. Good Christ. And years later, when he was campaigning for the presidency, Obregón would make the lack of an arm seem a virtue: he’d tell an interviewer that everyone knew all politicians were thieves, but the people would vote for him because he could only steal with one hand.)