The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  •

  On the same day Carranza was buried in Dolores Cemetery in Mexico City, the legislature elected Sonora governor Adolfo de la Huerta as interim president to serve out the last six months of the whitebeard’ s term. His close friends Obregón and Calles—the three of them were known as the Sonora Triangle—pressed hard for his candidacy and he won the election handily over Pablo González and two other candidates. The first thing he did was schedule a national presidential election for September, when, as everybody knew, Obregón would surely be the overwhelming winner.

  Pablo González wasn’t happy about the way things had turned out and Obregón and Calles knew it, so they retired him from the army and told him to go home and stay out of politics if he knew what was good for him. No sooner did he get back to his home state of Nuevo Leon, however, than he and his old partner Jesús María Guajardo started planning a rebellion against the new government. The Sonora Triangle got wind of it and moved fast to arrest both of them in Monterrey. They say that federal troops broke in on Guajardo while he was mounted on his mistress. They stood by and watched until he spent his load, then let him put his pants on before taking him away. That was at six in the evening. At six the next morning he was stood against a wall and shot. They say he died with a cigar between his teeth, and his last words were that he would yearn for his mistress’s sweet ass in the grave.

  Pablo González they found hiding in the basement of his house. He was taken to a Monterrey theater and there tried for treason. When he was convicted and sentenced to death, he wept and begged for mercy. The lucky bastard got it. De la Huerta thought it would be unseemly to impose the death penalty on so recent a candidate for the Mexican presidency, so he granted clemency and let him go into exile in the United States.

  That’s the kind of man de la Huerta was. Some say that the six months of his presidency were the most enlightened in Mexican history, and they’re probably right. He granted amnesty to every Mexican living in exile and said they could come home whenever they wished, all was forgiven. He ordered the release of all political prisoners. One of them was Pancho the Noose, who’d been locked up since Carranza’s death—first as a suspected accomplice in the killing, then for refusing to renounce his loyalty to the whitebeard. (Two years later he would publicly accuse Obregón of murdering the whitebeard, call for an uprising against him, and for his efforts get put against the wall by Obregón’s boys.)

  De la Huerta even made peace with the Zapatistas. The men of Morelos had of course kept on fighting after Zapata’s assassination, but they’d lost much of their heart for it. The years of war had made an ash pit of their patria chica; all their women were dressed in black and their children were starving. When de la Huerta offered them title to all the hacienda land they’d taken since the start of the Revolution, the Zapatistas grabbed up the deal and laid down their arms. When he heard of their pact with the government, Villa said, “Good. They got what Emiliano always wanted, didn’t they? I don’t blame them for putting down their guns.”

  We knew de la Huerta wanted to make peace with us too. We were the only rebels left, and a compact with us would be his crowning achievement: he would go down in history as the man who pacified all of Mexico after ten bloody years. More important to us, we knew if we could forge a treaty with him, not even Obregón would dare to violate it and be the cause of another civil war.

  In early July Villa wrote a letter to de la Huerta from our secret camp in the sierras. We were ready to discuss terms of peace, he told him, if he and Obregón and Calles were ready to deal with us honorably. “If you are ashamed to be my friends,” Villa wrote, “then reject me. However, if you would deal with me as honorable men, send a letter saying so and we can begin to discuss the future well-being of the republic. As of now, I am suspending hostilities. I am a brother of your race who speaks from his heart.”

  Obregón tried to dissuade de la Huerta from making a deal with us, arguing that Villa couldn’t be trusted to hold to its terms; but the president wouldn’t be swayed, and old One-arm finally gave up and pledged to honor the terms of any treaty made with us. Calles made the same pledge—and then immediately ordered his troops to fan out all over Chihuahua, find us, and get rid of us before any deal could be made. They didn’t call him the Turk for nothing. Our emissary to de la Huerta was on the way back to us with a letter for Villa when he ran into a huge detachment of Calles’s troops and learned they were hunting for us. He thought he gave them the slip, but less than an hour after he reached us with the warning, we spied the distant dust clouds of a cavalry unit closing in from the west. Our scouts had already reported federal patrols advancing from the north and south.

  De la Huerta’s letter was full of cheer and good wishes for us. He wanted Villa to contact him directly so the two of them could work things out without interference from underlings. But he also warned Pancho to be careful: “As always, my general, there are powerful people among us who would do all they could to prevent the realization of peace. Some of them even call themselves my good friends—but God spare us from such friends!”

  De la Huerta’s frankness and sincerity warmed Villa to him at once. “Our little brother,” he called him.

  We needed a safe place from which to deal with de la Huerta, but we sure as hell weren’t going to find it in Chihuahua. Calles’s boys were coming hard and fast. There was no way to go but east, into the neighboring state of Coahuila, but to get there we had to cross the Balsón de Mapimí, the meanest of all Mexican deserts.

  We rode day and night, never resting, switching to fresher horses from our remuda as mounts foundered under us, until, 250 miles later and after losing fourteen horses and five men to the desert, we caught sight of Sabinas. To avoid being surprised by Calles’s troops, we blew up the railroad tracks at points five miles from town in both directions. We posted lookouts all along a ten-mile perimeter, then rode in and took the place over without firing a shot. The only person hurt when we entered the town was a drunk who stumbled into the street and had his foot broken when Calixto’s horse stepped on it.

  The next day, Villa made himself comfortable in the telegraph office and sent a wire to de la Huerta, notifying him where we were, explaining why we had been forced to take the town, and assuring him that the townspeople had suffered no harm. “I am ready, Señor Presidente,” Villa wired, “to continue the interrupted negotiations.”

  •

  By evening the deal was done. They gave Pancho a pension of 500,000 pesos and a hacienda called Canutillo—250,000 acres of lush pastureland and rich farming soil in northern Durango State, not far from the Chihuahua border but well removed from both state capitals. We all received amnesty, of course, and a full year’s pay. Villa was allowed to retain a personal escort of fifty men, but the rest of the boys were obligated to disarm and ­disband—though all of them were given the choice of joining the federal army under their present military rank. Villa’s side of the deal was his promise to stay out of politics and never again take up arms against the government.

  And then Pancho Villa’s army—such as we were—made its last ride together. We slowly made our way back through western Coahuila and into Chihuahua, stopping at every little village we came to, basking in the cheers of “Viva Villa!” and accepting the people’s warm hospitality.

  We were eating lunch at outdoor tables in one little pueblo when a white-haired, one-armed former revolutionary shouted, “Don’t stop sleeping with one eye open, Pancho! The bastards will never stop trying to kill you!” Villa flung his tin cup high in the air, drew his pistol, and shot the cup three times—making it jump farther each time—before it hit the ground. He grinned at the crippled old rebel and said, “Let them try.”

  In Parral we were met by General Eugenio Martínez, de la Huerta’s personal representative, who was to insure that all of the government’s guarantees were met to Villa’s satisfaction—and, of course, to insure that our boys either join
ed the army or turned over their weapons.

  The town was crawling with reporters and photographers eager to cover the historic occasion. Villa had his picture taken shaking hands with Martínez, both men grinning and with an arm around each other, the very image of amiable fraternity. An impromptu fiesta got started. Bands blared and spirits flowed freely, firearms banged and people danced in the street.

  That evening Pancho called his boys around him and said good-bye, wishing them long and happy lives. When they began chanting “Viva Villa! Viva Pancho Villa!” again and again, his eyes filled with tears and he hurried away.

  And in the morning, we mounted up with our last fifty Dorados and headed south for our new home.

  NINETEEN

  And so we became hacendados.

  Canutillo was a beautiful place suffering from years of neglect, but it didn’t take us long to restore it to its old splendor and productivity. Villa let the boys have two-thirds of the land to farm for themselves and bought the best machinery on the gringo market for them—tractors, threshers, harrows, everything. They grew corn, wheat, squash, and potatoes, and the surplus brought the hacienda a nice profit. Villa bought angus cattle too, and blooded horses, and we did good business in beef and thoroughbreds.

  He built a modern medic clinic on the place and staffed it with two doctors and a half dozen nurses, all of them American-trained. He put up a telegraph office and a general store, and permitted the small church alongside the residential housing area to hold daily mass. He was proudest, however, of the school he built for the children of the hacienda. On his orders, the schoolroom windows were set high in the walls so that the students could not be distracted from their studies. He liked to stop by every now and then and take part in the children’s instruction. He might ask them to recite what they’d learned about Benito Juárez or Francisco Madero or Abraham Lincoln, or to name the capital of Argentina or England, or to compute how many meters there are in a mile.

  He was disturbed, however, that so many of the kids were bastards. A lot of our boys had brought their sweethearts—­soldaderas, mainly—to live with them at Canutillo and had fathered children by them, but few of the couples had married. One evening Villa called all the boys to a meeting out by the main stable and told them that any woman worthy of living under the same roof with a man and bearing his children was a woman worth marrying. “No child should be made to suffer the indignity of having unmarried parents,” he said. “Remember, boys, we’re respectable now and we should live as respectable men.”

  A bunch of the women had been listening nearby, and at the end of Villa’s little speech they all applauded loudly.

  “Oh Christ, Chief,” Calixto muttered, “now look what you’ve done.” Calixto’s woman, Delia Ruíz—who had already borne him two children and was as tough a soldadera as I’d ever known—was at the forefront of the crowd of cheering women, jabbing her finger emphatically at Rosalío and mouthing the words “Pancho . . . means . . . you.”

  “Hell, boys,” Villa said, “marriage isn’t so bad, take it from me. I’ve done it a dozen times and it hasn’t hurt me yet.”

  A few days later he brought a judge out to the hacienda to conduct a mass wedding ceremony. Villa had told the boys to dress formally for the occasion and some of them were wearing neckties for the first time in their lives. Most looked like they had nooses around their necks. All the brides were pretty as doves in their white dresses, but mine was resplendent.

  Her name was Rosa Blanca Santiago. She’d been waiting tables in a Parral restaurant when I met her a few months before. Her reputation among the locals was of a stuck-up bitch who thought all the men in town were beneath her, and as soon as I met her I knew she was right. Her flowing black hair glistened like ink. She had fine, sleek haunches and quick, sure hands and the sharpest eyes I’d ever seen on a woman: they saw right to the truth of whatever they looked at. They couldn’t be fooled. She wasn’t brassy or loudly tough like so many of the soldaderas, but she took no shit either. It was common knowledge that she carried a razor and had once sliced a man’s face to pieces when he persisted in putting his hands on her after she’d told him to stop. She hadn’t had to use that razor since.

  Within days of the first time we laid eyes on each other, she was living with me on Canutillo, in the little house behind the casa grande. One morning when Villa and I were having a cup of tea in my parlor, he said he’d appreciate it if Rosa Blanca and I got married along with everybody else. I said sure, why not. He’d been expecting an argument and looked damned surprised.

  But Rosa Blanca said, “Not so fast, hombres—what about what I think?” She affected to study me hard and closely, propping one hand on her hip and thoughtfully stroking her chin with the other. She lightly kicked my wooden leg, then turned to Villa and said, “He’s missing some pieces, but what the hell—there’s still plenty of him left. I guess he’ll do.”

  Villa roared with laughter and punched me on the arm. She looked at me with a wicked smile, brushed my cheek with her fingers, and left us with a happy laugh.

  She had been a passionate lover from the start, but on our wedding night she was bolder and more ardent than ever. I mentioned it to Villa a few days later when we were overseeing the spring brandings, and he grinned brightly and said, ‘‘You see? You see what I’ve always said about marriage making a woman happier in bed? You and Tomás used to make fun of me, eh?—but now you see what a wise man Papa Pancho is, eh?”

  Our first child was a boy, and Rosa Blanca insisted he must be baptized, so of course I asked Pancho to be the godfather. When the priest asked the child’s name, just before dipping the holy water on the baby’s head, I said, “Doroteo. Doroteo Ramón Contreras Santiago.” Villa gaped at me. I grinned and put my hand on his shoulder. “If he strikes fear in any hearts,” I said, “he’ll have to do it on his own, with no help from his name.”

  His eyes brimming, Villa embraced me hard and whispered in my ear, “The kid’s going to hate your guts, you cruel fucker.”

  •

  Villa of course lived in the casa grande, which he renovated, from its red roof tiles to its massive mahogany doors to its colorful floor parquetry. With him lived Austroberta Rentería, his young bride from Jiménez. He called her Nana, because she was, he said, the nana—the caretaker—of his heart. She called him Panchito until they had their first child, then called him Poppy. They had two children in two years and adopted three others. She got him interested in gardening, and he planted and tended a lush rose garden behind the main house. He took up birdwatching too, and read books about ornithology. He built an aviary in the side patio and stocked it with parrots, canaries, and doves. But his favorite birds were a pair of cardinals—a blood-red male and a rust-colored female—that he’d raised from babies after a storm blew their nest out of a tree. Their home was a large white cage whose door was always open, and Austroberta laughed as delighted as a child every time Villa whistled for them and they flew out to feed from his hand.

  He raised fighting cocks too, which he kept roosted behind the main stable, where Austroberta wouldn’t have to see them whenever she took a stroll in the rear patio. But there was no way to keep her from hearing their crowing. She thought cockfighting was cruel, and had asked Pancho to please get rid of the bantams, but he had only patted her hand and kissed her forehead and said no. There’s only so much a man can do to please a woman, after all, no matter how much he loves her.

  Books filled his study, and his teak desk was as big as a billiard table. Every evening he studied for several hours under Trillo’s tutelage—history, economics, science, the stars; he was interested in everything. A portrait of Madero hung on one wall, and on the mantel across the room stood a bust of Felipe Angeles. Another wall was covered with framed photographs, including the one taken of Villa in the president’s chair on the December day in 1914 when we entered Mexico City with Emiliano Zapata at our side. There was a pictu
re of him and me and General Hugh Scott at the races in Juárez. Most of our old friends in the pictures were dead.

  He corresponded on imported stationery, his name embossed in the upper left corner, just above a small picture of Lady Justice with her sword and scales. “How do you like this?” he’d asked me when the stationery first arrived from London.

  I carefully examined the sheet he handed me and said, “I like the way her gown clings to her tits.” He snatched the paper from my hand and called me a hopeless brute—which of course made me laugh. It was fun to kick his hacendado pretensions in the ass every once in awhile.

  Because we so often had to go to Parral on business, a round-trip of a hundred miles, Pancho bought the Hotel Hidalgo for the boys to live in during our stays in town. He also bought a new Dodge motorcar to take us there, an open touring model, and he had the old road from the hacienda to Parral smoothed and graded. Rosalío loved the car so much—he took it on himself to wash it every day and clean off the seats and floorboards—that Pancho gave him driving lessons and then made him the official chauffeur.

  Business wasn’t the only thing Villa tended to on our trips to Parral. He’d bought a nice house on Zaragoza Street for Soledad, his wife from Villa Allende, whom Austroberta knew nothing about. If she’d known Villa was accommodating another wife, Austroberta was the sort who would have been deeply hurt, and Pancho would have done anything to keep from hurting her. Anything but give up Soledad. Every time we were in town, he spent his nights with her. Who could blame him for his arrangement? I’d lie in bed in the room directly beneath theirs and listen to the bedposts thumping against the wall with their furious ­lovemaking—always culminating with Soledad’s piercing yowl and Villa’s explosive gasp and heavy, bed-rattling collapse. I’d watch the shadows dancing on the walls while images of her nakedness slithered through my mind. I’d smell her perfume, her hair, her skin, even her sex, as keenly as if she were there in the room with me. At the breakfast table in the mornings, she’d glance at me with such wicked pleasure I’d feel like both grinning at her and crushing her insolent lips between my teeth.