He learned the name of every man on the firing squad and offered one thousand pesos for each one’s head and had them all within a week. One Carrancista sergeant tried to collect for a battered head he swore belonged to a member of the squad but which proved to be that of a petty thief known to several of our boys. “You should not tell me lies to try to make money from the death of my friend,” Villa told the sergeant. He gave him the choice of a bullet in the head or cutting out his own tongue. The sergeant chose the razor and sliced up most of his mouth pretty good before he’d cut away enough tongue to satisfy Villa.
In Santa Rosalía de Camargo we overran the federal detachment but, as always, spared the soldiers’ women. But one of their soldaderas hit Villa with a horseapple as he rode by, then cursed him for a bastard son of a diseased whore and said he didn’t have the balls to fight her hand-to-hand. Pancho normally wouldn’t even slap a woman, no matter how much she deserved it, but he was in no frame of mind to take this kind of shit from anybody, and he rode his horse over her. When the rest of the bitches raged at him for it, he had them shot, all forty of them.
He was like that for weeks—until the day we blew up a train carrying a shipment of silver to the federal garrison in Chihuahua City. We killed all the soldiers on board, of course, and Villa himself shot the freight guards, calling them no-good shits for working for the Carrancistas. The train was also pulling two coaches full of civilian passengers, and while I saw to the unloading of the silver, Villa told the boys to rob the passengers down to the last penny. By the time I had the strongboxes loaded on the wagons, he’d made the civilians get out of the coaches and line up along the train, and I knew what he had in mind.
There were no rich among them, no government agents. They were farmers and small ranchers, a few shopkeepers, most of them accompanied by their families. A little brown-haired girl of about four held a doll in her arms protectively, in the same way her mother was holding her.
Pancho rode up to me, his eyes as furiously bloodshot as they’d been since Angeles’s death. “Whitebeard sympathizers,” he said. “All of them. Do it.”
“No,” I said.
He had started to ride away, then pulled back hard and reined around to look me in the face. “What?” he said.
“I said no. You want to, you do it.”
He looked ready to jump on me and bite my throat.
“Hey,” I said, “I kill all kinds of sons of bitches. I’ll kill any fucker who even looks at me cross-eyed. But these . . .” I gestured at the line of people and shook my head. “No.”
“Damn you,” Villa said. “This is still a war—a war!—and they belong to the other side.”
“This? Bullshit. This isn’t war. It’s not even fighting.’’
“They killed Felipe! They shot his guts out!”
“Not these people! Jesus Christ, just look at them! Listen, you think Felipe would do this?’’
I said it without thinking, but it stopped Villa cold. His face went slack, and for a long moment he simply stared at me, blinking slowly. Then he turned away toward the western sierras. When he looked at me again, his eyes had changed—and he was grinning. You never knew what to expect from him from one minute to the next, never.
“You’re some killer,” he said. “They say mothers use your name—your old name—to scare their children when they don’t behave themselves. I can see why you changed it. Ramón Contreras, that’s a good name for you now. It doesn’t mean anything and it doesn’t scare nobody.”
I had to smile. “And I know damn well why you changed your old name. It didn’t exactly freeze hearts with fear, did it? You’d say, ‘Hands up, I’m Doroteo the bandit,’ and they’d say, “Doroteo?” and start laughing like you told a joke.”
“They fucking died laughing, you bastard. You got no respect for anybody. That’s why you got no friends.”
“I’ve always been lucky,” I said.
He laughed again, then dismounted and went to the passengers and told them not to be afraid, he meant them no harm. He apologized for having frightened them, especially the women and children. Gently taking the little brown-haired girl from her mother, he cradled her in one arm and stroked her hair with his free hand. The murder of his dear friend Felipe Angeles, he told them, had made him insane with sorrow and driven him to intemperate acts of vengeance. The next thing you knew, he was telling them the story of his life, of killing the cruel landlord who violated his sister and thus being forced into a life of banditry, of the saintly Señor Madero who by his own example taught him the true spirit of the Revolution. He talked about his many dear friends who had been killed in the struggle to achieve the Revolution’s grand goals of liberty and justice for all.
By then he was sobbing and slurring his words. The little girl in his arms had been watching his face with rapt attention. Now she reached up and wiped at his tears with her stubby fingers—and Villa’s face brightened like the moon coming out from behind a dark cloud.
PART FOUR
. . . Or Until
We Die,
Whichever
Comes First
“Death revenges us against life, strips it of
all its vanities and pretensions and converts it
into what it really is: a few neat bones and a
dreadful grimace.”
—Octavio Paz
EIGHTEEN
The stomping we took at Juárez ended all possibility that we’d ever get rid of Carranza before the end of his presidential term. The simple truth was that he beat us bad, him and the goddamn gringos. But the man’s greed for power went deep into his bones, and three years of the presidency couldn’t satisfy it. The constitution prohibited reelection, but it permitted a president to name the man he wished to run as his successor. Popular opinion expected Carranza to name Pablo González, who had served him so well and who wanted the nomination badly—and who was sure he could win. When the whitebeard instead selected a little nobody named Ignacio Bonillas, everybody realized he wanted a president he could control from behind the scenes. Bonillas was ambassador to Washington and had spent so much of his life in the U.S. that he was widely and disparagingly known as “Meester” Bonillas. He could speak impeccable English, and rumor said he had even applied for U.S. citizenship. Carranza defended his choice with the bullshit argument that Bonillas would do much to improve Mexico’s relations with the U.S. “Shit,” Villa said, “if that’s the most important thing, why not elect Woodrow Wilson president of Mexico?”
González was furious at having been passed over and decided to run for the presidency on his own. That probably irked the whitebeard plenty, but González was a minor problem compared to Alvaro Obregón. A year before the elections were scheduled to take place, Obregón announced his candidacy and began campaigning hard. He railed long and often about the corruptions of the Carranza government. When reporters asked his opinion of Bonillas, he said the world was losing a superb bookkeeper and gaining one more worthless politician. It was a rough campaign full of dirty tricks on all sides—from tossing sneezing powder and setting off stink bombs at opponents’ rallies to making death threats against opponents’ supporters. But Obregón was clearly the most popular candidate. The whitebeard knew Bonillas didn’t stand a chance unless Alvaro One-arm was in one way or another removed from the running.
The way we heard the story, Obregón was summoned to the capital to testify in the trial of an army colonel accused of subversion. Some of his friends warned him that it could be a trap of some sort, but One-Arm refused to believe that Carranza would try to harm him. From the minute he arrived in town, however, he was under surveillance by government agents, and on the first day of the trial it became clear that the prosecutors were going to try to implicate him in a conspiracy to overthrow the government. That night, with the help of a few close friends, he gave the slip to the men who were shadowing him and escaped from the city on a f
reight train. The next day Carranza telegraphed orders to all state governors to arrest Obregón on sight and send him back under guard to stand trial as a conspirator to subversion. If he resisted arrest, he was to be shot on the spot. When a friend showed him the telegram, Obregón reportedly said, “We’ll see who kills who.”
In addition to the allegiance of powerful fellow Sonorans like Plutarco Elías Calles—the bastard called the Turk, who beat us at Agua Prieta with the help of the gringo searchlights—Obregón still had many friends and supporters all over the country, and he called on them to join him against the whitebeard. Within days, like rats leaving a fast-sinking ship, most of Carranza’s generals—including, of course, Pablo González—deserted him. Our old antagonist Francisco Murguía, Pancho the Noose, was one of the few who stuck with the whitebeard right to the end. I admired the bastard’s loyalty.
When Obregón declared against Carranza and called for allies, Villa immediately wired him of our readiness to join the rebels. In return for our services, Pancho wanted recognition of our military ranks—and title to a hacienda where he could retire once the whitebeard was gotten rid of. The response came from Calles. He said they would make the deal if Villa would accept a hacienda in western Sonora rather than in his stomping grounds of Chihuahua. “Here you will have no enemies to cause you trouble,” Calles said, “nor the sort of friends who might lead you into it.” Hell, they just wanted him out of the way, someplace where he couldn’t have much influence in politics and their boys could keep a close eye on him.
“They’re damn right I have no friends in Sonora,” Villa said bitterly, “but they’re lying through their teeth about no enemies. They’re in Sonora, aren’t they?”
So we didn’t join up with Obregón and Calles. We continued to give hell to any Carrancistas who ventured into our territory, of course, but otherwise we just sat back and waited to see how things turned out.
Pancho was fully fed up with our fugitive life. Miguel Trillo, that smart little jokester, was teaching him mathematics now, and introducing him to the Greek and Roman classics from his little collection of texts. Villa was awestruck by the Iliad. “Three thousand years ago,” he said, “and men were killing each other for the same reasons as they are now: for glory, for honor, for revenge, or just to get their hands on a beautiful woman—or just because they were ordered to fight and had no choice. Sweet Mary, it’s so old and still so true! It’s so wonderful!”
He was more enthusiastic than ever about learning for the sake of learning. Ever since that little girl had wiped away his tears, he’d been talking about how foolish we were to continue living in the mountains as if we were still at war.
“You were right, Rudy,” he said sadly, “this isn’t the Revolution, not anymore. There’s no honor in it anymore. Just a lot of greedy bastards fighting each other for whatever they can put in their pockets. All the good men are dead—and for what? Poor ignorant Mexico! All these years we’ve been fighting and killing so all Mexicans can have justice and their own land and the right to elect the leaders they want. So they can send their children to school. But how can they understand such things without education? I love them, Rudy, they’re my people, but they’re ignorant. And how the hell do we teach anybody anything about democracy by killing people?”
He paused and paced and gazed at the staggeringly beautiful panorama stretched out beyond the mountain rim we stood on—the lush narrow valleys and thickly wooded hills and snaking silver rivers; and, around it all, the high, dark sierras with their white peaks so bright in the sun.
When he spoke again, he voice was different, sounding suddenly farther away. “Do you ever think of how sweet it would be to live in peace, to live with a good woman, with a family of your own? If they gave us a hacienda, we could build a fine school on it, we could grow crops and raise good horses.”
It was hard to believe he had ever been so naive as to think we were fighting for the poor. Of all the reasons men die in this world, to die for a cause is the most foolish, and the poor are the most foolish cause of all. Never did I fight for the poor. I fought against the rich—which of course isn’t at all the same thing. In any case, the fighting was the point. You don’t fight to become free—to fight is to be free. A man with a gun and the will to use it can’t be mastered, he can only be killed. What other reason to fight does a man need?
Other than the pure pleasure of it, I mean.
Villa’s problem was that he’d gotten too chummy way back when with eggheads like Abraham González and Madero and Felipe Angeles. They’d given him a headful of idealism and fooled him into believing he was fighting to make the world a better place. Jesus. Now he saw that stupidly pathetic notion for what it was and wanted no more of it.
On the other hand, I thought all his talk of retiring and having a family and farming and building schools and so forth was pretty damn foolish too—for men like us, anyway. But I have to admit that, sometimes, listening to him talk about it was almost like hearing a sweet and distant music that tugged me gently toward it in a kind of soft half-sleep. . . .
•
The whitebeard tried to make a run for it to Veracruz, but before he left the capital he looted the National Palace as it had never been looted before. He cleaned out the treasury to the last penny, of course, but also took the mint’s dies, the currency printing presses, the national archives, every piece of furniture, every painting, all the carpets, even the light fixtures. It took twenty trains to carry it all—and another ten to carry the hordes of people who went with him. In addition to his remaining troops, thousands of friends and relatives joined the exodus, together with all their personal possessions. Carranza’s personal “Gold Train,” as it came to be called, led a rail convoy stretching more than twenty miles. Sweet Mary. If he’d been satisfied with grabbing up the treasury and taking only his family and his troops, he could have got out of there fast and made the coast quickly. But, as always, his greed got the better of him. It took days to load all those trains.
The back half of the convoy didn’t make it but a few miles past the outskirts of the capital before Pablo González’s troops overtook it. The forward trains that did escape found the going slow and rough. They had to stop every few miles to repair the tracks, and Murguia’s boys were constantly fighting off attacks by both rebels and bandits and taking heavy losses. Among those leading the attackers was Jesús María Guajardo, whom Carranza had rewarded so handsomely for his assassination of Zapata. We heard that Obregón sent a wire to the whitebeard offering him safe conduct to the coast if he would agree to exile himself from Mexico forever, but Carranza refused.
The convoy got smaller and smaller as it made its laborious way into the eastern sierras. Finally it could go no farther—the tracks had been destroyed for miles ahead. By then Veracruz had fallen to the rebels. Obregón’s boys were closing fast from behind, and more of González’s soldiers were coming at Carranza from the coast. The whitebeard and his remaining troops had to abandon the train and proceed on horseback, turning north, hoping to make it all the way to San Luis Potosí, where they planned to ask for help from the Yankee government. They took with them only their weapons, their bedding, and a few basic supplies packed on mules—and a portable typewriter, which the whitebeard no doubt thought necessary for composing official presidential papers even as he fled for his life. They left four million pesos in gold on the train.
They pushed on up into the rugged mountains, slogging through a driving rain that never let up. The rivers were swollen and booming with white water, and several men drowned at each crossing. The whitebeard now had fewer than a hundred men with him, including Murguía and his remaining troops.
Somewhere in the interior of that harsh country they met with Rodolfo Herrero and his boys. Herrero was a local bandit turned warlord who had earlier been granted amnesty and given the rank of general in exchange for keeping this part of the country free of anti-Carrancista rebels.
They say he greeted the first chief with a great show of affection and repeated avowals of loyalty to the death. He led the whitebeard and his party into a still wilder part of the sierra, where he assured him they would be safe from their pursuers. At a tiny deserted village called Tlaxcalantongo, they made camp for the night. Supposedly, when Herrero showed the whitebeard to the largest of the ramshackle huts, he said, “Tonight, Señor Presidente, this will be the National Palace.”
A few hours later, in the middle of the night, the darkness was abruptly shattered by blazing gunfire. Through the alarmed outcries and screaming of the wounded, Murguía’s boys were quick to fight back, though they weren’t sure of where the attack was coming from, and in the darkness and the din of confusion some of them shot each other. When it was all over, Carranza was found dead on his pallet with a half dozen bullets in him. In the morning light it was discovered that the assassins had stripped him of his money, his spectacles, his watch. They even took the little typewriter. Murguía was said to have muttered that the bastards had stolen the last bit of the Carranza government’s treasury.
Everybody knew Herrero had done the killing, although he denied it and insisted that the attackers had been unknown to him and his men. He swore he’d seen the whitebeard take a wound in the leg and then commit suicide to end his pain. But there was a story going around that Carrancistas had killed Herrera’s two bandit brothers a year or so before, and Herrero had sworn revenge on the whitebeard. Obregón ordered Herrero taken to the capital for questioning, but all that came of it was that he was stripped of his military rank and allowed to go back home. About a year later Obregón would give him back his generalship.
Herrero’s light punishment lent weight to the rumors that Obregón had given orders that the whitebeard not come out of those mountains alive. I’m sure he did. But who cared? Carranza was dead and that’s all that mattered. Nobody gave a good goddamn about the minor details of how he got that way.
The Friends of Pancho Villa Page 19
