The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  A Mexico City newspaper published a cartoon in which one man asks another, “Who killed Pancho Villa?” and the other, with a finger to his lips, answers, “Calle . . . se, amigo” a response that starts out sounding like the name Calles, then quickly becomes the warning to “Shut up, my friend.” The joke became famous all over Mexico. A lot of people knew damn well that Calles—with Obregón’s blessing, naturally—had arranged for Villa’s killing. It was common knowledge that they’d had a falling out with their old friend Adolfo de la Huerta, who any day now was expected to announce his candidacy for president. Faced with that ­likelihood—and with Villa’s avowed devotion to his “little brother Fito”—they decided to make sure Pancho wouldn’t interfere with Calles’s presidential ambitions.

  That’s the way a lot of people saw it. Me too. I sure as hell couldn’t prove it but I knew that’s how it was. It was something they’d been wanting to do for a long time anyway. They had always been afraid of him. All they had to do was find a guy who would be sure not to splash any blood of suspicion on them.

  •

  The guy was Jesús Salas Barraza, a Durango state congressman. On the ninth of August, nearly three weeks after the killing, the capital newspapers announced that he was the man behind the assassination. By then I was recuperating in the house of Rosa Blanca’s sister in Santa Barbara, a pueblo a few miles south of Parral. Calixto and a couple of the boys had taken me there in a truck after I got word to them of where I was.

  Salas Barraza had surrendered to the federal police and confessed everything in a letter to president Obregón. Reporters were permitted to interview him in the penitentiary, where he was awaiting trial, and the man talked and talked. He said he had surrendered voluntarily in order to ‘‘protect the good name of the government” and prevent any further suspicions from falling on “certain guiltless public officials.”

  He claimed that his fiancée had been raped by Villa back in the early days of the Madero Revolution, and when he went to Villa’s headquarters to protest, Pancho had pistol-whipped him nearly to death. He called Pancho a “dog,” a ‘‘hyena,” a rabid animal who had deserved killing for a long time. He said that, over the years, he had become acquainted with many other men of property and social station whose wives or daughters or sweethearts had also been violated by Villa the Brute—or whose property had been stolen by him. When Pancho retired to Canutillo, Salas called some of these men together and offered to get rid of Villa if they would put up the money to pay for gunmen to help him and to buy military weapons and dumdum bullets. They agreed, and Salas hired a man in Parral who had his own good reasons for hating Villa. (Melitón Lozoya, of course!) That man in turn enlisted seven trusted friends into the plot.

  Salas said he and his hired killers spent several weeks in Parral, studying Villa’s habits and schedules, planning their ambush. They rented the house on Gabino Barrera Street and posted a lookout disguised as a vendor in front of the plaza. On the morning of 20 July 1923, when Villa and the unlucky friends with him drove down the Avenida Juárez, the lookout waved his hat and yelled ‘‘Viva Villa!”—a signal that Villa himself was in the car. When the Dodge entered the slow turn right in front of the building, the men inside were perfect targets.

  All told, the ambushers fired more than two hundred rounds. Salas said he himself gave Villa several coup shots in the head.

  That was true—I recognized his picture in the paper. He was one of the men I’d seen shooting Villa from point-blank range. He was the one who’d shot me.

  “I’m not a murderer,” Salas told the reporters. “I rid humanity of a monster.”

  •

  They locked him up in the Chihuahua State Penitentiary, and then, less than nine months later, gave him a pardon and a commission in the federal army. Not too long after that he was elected to Congress. The son of a bitch lived to a ripe old age. Just before he died in bed in 1951, he still insisted he alone was the “intellectual author” of the assassination. Lying bastard. I could have gone to him and killed him, of course, but what for? Revenge? That’s stupid. Revenge for what? For shooting Villa? For wounding me? Villa’s enemies had been trying to kill him all his life—it’s what enemies are supposed to do. Pancho knew that better than anybody, but he got careless. I was fair game because I was with him. Hell, Salas didn’t know me from Adam; he shot me because I damn sure would have killed him if that worthless .45 hadn’t jammed. They got the jump on us and they won. When they killed Villa, it was over. Revenge—bah! Only women and fools seek revenge for a lost fight.

  I do like to think that when Salas got to the gates of hell he found Villa waiting for him, with the devil’s permission to kill him again and again for all the rest of eternity. For damned sure, I’ll find out.

  EPILOGUE

  I dug up one of our gold caches in the sierras and bought a small ranch a few miles outside of Juárez. I would have preferred to live farther south, but Rosa Blanca had relatives in Juárez and in El Paso, and it pleased her to live near them. I hired wranglers and raised horses. I listened to Rosa Blanca’s happy gossip. I taught Doroteo to ride and shoot as soon as he was big enough to hold a gun in both hands. In the evenings I’d read from one or another of the books I’d taken from Villa’s library. My favorite is still Moby Dick.

  Rosa Blanca and I shared the same bed for the first few years, but she finally had enough of being awakened by my thrashing every night when the dreams came to me, and she moved to another bedroom. I’d dream of blood and fire and laughing skeletons—and sometimes, later on, of Villa’s decapitated body wandering through the windy desert night, searching vainly for its head. Three years after his death, somebody broke through his concrete tomb in the Parral graveyard, pried the lid off the coffin, and cut the head off the corpse. An American adventurer named Emil Holmdahl was arrested as the chief suspect. Rumor had it he’d been hired for the job by a powerful Mexican general who hated Villa and wanted to use his skull as a bowl in which to feed his dog. Or by a group of U.S. scientists who wanted to study Villa’s head to learn the source of his primitive genius. Or by a secret society of American rich men who collected the skulls of notorious killers. Or by . . . oh, hell, who knows? In any case, the evidence against Holmdahl was strong but circumstantial, and he had influential friends who interceded on his behalf, and so he was released. But the way the story goes, not long after leaving Parral he turned up at the Sheldon Hotel in El Paso and showed the head to a couple of friends before vanishing into the night with it. Maybe the story’s true, maybe not, but what happened to the head is still a mystery—except, of course, to those who know.

  •

  Obregón, that sly bastard, decided to run for president again when Calles’s term ran out. His buddies in Congress amended the constitution to allow for presidential reelection after at least one term out of office. While they were at it, they extended the presidential term from four to six years. It all looked like a cozy arrangement to have Old One-Arm and the Turk alternate the presidency between them for the rest of their lives.

  But they still had some serious enemies, among them the Catholics, whom Obregón had repressed mildly during his first term of office, and whom Calles, in his term, antagonized into a ferocious uprising. By the time Obregón was reelected, the Cristero Rebellion had been largely put down, but the Catholics’ hatred of him and Calles still burned hot as hellfire. Less than two weeks after his election, Obregón was being honored at a luncheon in a Mexico City restaurant when a Cristero fanatic pretending to be a sketch artist stepped up to his table and emptied a pistol in his face.

  Calles continued to be a political power behind the scenes until 1936, when President Lázaro Cárdenas, who’d once been his protégé, got fed up with his old mentor’s interference in the government and gave him a choice: live in safe exile in the U.S or die immediately in Mexico. It was a far more generous choice than he would have been offered by anyone else—especially yours
truly. The only choice he’d have got from me was whether to be shot in the head or the heart. But of course not everybody gets what he deserves, so Calles escaped killing.

  •

  About the time the Turk was thrown out of the country, Doroteo drowned in one of the ranch resacas. I’d always meant to have somebody teach him to swim, but Rosa Blanca always argued against it because she was afraid he would drown while learning. Her only fears in life concerned our son, and although those fears were often absurd, I doted on her too much to countermand them. And so the boy drowned when he was thrown from his horse in three feet of water and could not get his footing. And she, who was so strong in so many ways, lost all spirit. She wore black for the rest of her life—another ten months. She rarely slept. Her face aged years every week. She ate nothing and shrank to a bundle of sticks. Nothing I said to her made any difference. Her heart was beating against her will. My own heart withered with the realization that I was not enough reason for her to go on living. When the winter got into her bones, she caught pneumonia. She died on a dark day in February while a blue norther howled at the windows.

  •

  Now I’m old. Every morning I wake up in utter astonishment at my continued existence—and at how nothing changes but the flesh: the Olympic Games are to be held in Mexico City next week, but yesterday soldiers opened fire on a student demonstration in the Plaza of Three Cultures and killed hundreds.

  My gut hasn’t worked properly since taking that bullet at Parral. My ears never stop ringing. My joints ache constantly. It’s a bitch to piss. Life goes on until it no longer does, but I hope I die before I’m completely blind. The sunsets are the only thing I can still see without difficulty, although maybe the sunsets I see are mostly a mix of memory and imagination, I don’t know. There’s one other thing I still see clearly—the photograph taken of us in the National Palace on the glorious day we took possession of Mexico City. Sometimes I bend over it with a large magnifying glass, and sometimes I just shut my eyes and look at it in my head. Either way, I look hard and close at our faces, Pancho’s and mine, and I see everything in them but tragedy.