by Norman Lock
“Huamantla will be remembered as an incident, if it’s remembered at all.”
Vacantly, he stared—his name was Pearson—at the broken glass, the charred walls, the bits and bobs that had, like the clay roof tiles, fallen helter-skelter into the now-deserted street. There was a foulness in the air, such as flies love, and the stench of burning wood persisted in the scorched timbers. In my fancy, I could smell the spilled blood of Mexicans seeping into the dust. The blood was dark, like them. Suddenly, my guts knotted, my eyes stung, and my sight went momentarily black, as it will in strong sunlight.
Lieutenant Pearson was eloquent on the subject of mitigating circumstances. “What do you expect when the greasers sneak into our garrisons and knife us in our sleep?” He took off his cap and mopped his glistening skull. His bald head was unpleasantly moist, his cap rank with sweat. “Stinking Mexicans are almost as bad as the Indians, the Chinks, and the niggers.”
I had joined the Anti-Slavery Society while in Amherst, and the lieutenant’s bigotry, which had been given emphasis by a gob of brown tobacco spit, made me uneasy. I hadn’t the courage to rebuke him or even to frown in disapproval.
Pearson was a rough sort of man, flinty, irascible, and gloomy. He had the sunburned, weather-beaten face of the rancher he’d been until he lost his wife and children to typhus. He had enlisted in time for the Second Seminole War, with every intention of making an end—brave or ignoble, it didn’t matter—to a disappointing life. Instead, he killed enough Indians and fugitive slaves to earn a battlefield commission.
He put his cap back on and returned the damp bandanna to his pocket.
“Let’s get out of the damned sun,” he said.
The dry season had come early to the Central Mexican Highlands, and the sun beat down unmercifully on all who dwelled below.
We left the glaring street and went inside a cantina that had survived the pillaging. It was a dirty, flyblown place, but its thick adobe walls allayed the noonday heat. We sat at a table decorated with a sugar skull from a previous Day of the Dead. In Catholic Mexico, I felt like one of the Canterbury martyrs, sent to the stake by Bloody Mary for his faith.
“Whiskey and cerveza!” Pearson shouted to a man dressed in the white cotton blouse and pantaloons of a Mexican peasant. Like soldiers everywhere, he knew enough words in the native tongue to ensure that his appetites could be satisfied.
The Mexican paused in his war against the flies, waged with a rolled-up newspaper. He put two glasses and a jar of pulque on the table beside the sugar skull. Then he returned to his makeshift bar to prepare the corn-brewed beer called “tesgüino” by the natives.
“¿Y el otro hombre?” he asked, whisking into froth an amber-colored concoction.
“Sí, sí. Whiskey y cerveza para mi amigo también,” said the lieutenant while the camarero poured each of us a glass of the milky fermentation of the sap of the maguey plant, plentiful in the high country of Tlaxcala. “A whiskey will do more good for your soul than prayer, Padre.”
I’d managed to keep my pledge of temperance, a difficult moral victory for a man in the army, but I didn’t want to give the lieutenant cause to heckle me. A shepherd should appear to be no better than his sheep if he is to bring them to Jesus. Subtle reasoning worthy of a Jesuit! By the second glass of that most ardent of spirits, each chased by tesgüino, I was extolling my Christian virtues to the lieutenant, who seemed not to hear me.
“Anybody who can drink this piss isn’t human!” he growled, sniffing at his cup as you would a sour dishrag and then setting it aside with an expression of disgust.
Rare among women, Emily, you aren’t shocked by the vernacular, which, you once told me, is “the language Adam and Eve spoke carelessly in Eden before the world grew strict.”
“Mexicans are human beings!” I shouted, loudly enough to scatter flies that had been milling about on the sticky table. The native whiskey had penetrated the rusted works of my Christian principles like a lubricating oil.
“Mexicans are no better than dogs,” snarled the lieutenant.
“I like dogs,” I replied stupidly.
“You’re lucky, Winter, to have only the soul to worry about.” He clenched his teeth, as though he feared his might escape its noxious prison.
You once said that I had a surname fit for an allegory. Remember, Emily? “Mr. Winter, his heart, a cinder.” You wondered what Hawthorne could make of such a name. Since the war—I mean the latest in our sanguinary history, hardly more civilized than that of the Aztecs—I seem to have grown as cold as a snowman, and as ridiculous. But I’m afraid that my faith has never been more than lukewarm.
In a tongue thickened by pulque and prejudice, the lieutenant railed against martial law declared by General Scott at Tampico. Intended to safeguard Mexican property, the order was disliked by the army and by Secretary of War Marcy, who considered it a weakness.
“At Jalapa, they hanged a private in the Eighth Infantry for killing a Mex squaw,” said Pearson with a scowl.
I was transfixed by a bright shimmer of oak leaves outside the cantina window and, for the moment, could not break the thread of my stare. I was unused to strong drink. I recall a fierce yearning to be once again in Amherst, where the leaves would be starting on their slow and spectacular end. I pictured you in your front yard, collecting them to press into the pages of a book.
Such a slight young woman! I had thought then.
You’re said to be plain, but I saw a pleasing arrangement of features, a tidy figure, and a fair complexion. You may have possessed none of the so-called feminine graces, but I thought you agreeable, even comely, when you unconsciously struck a pose that did you justice. On that golden, luminous afternoon, your hair shone with a liveliness found, at all wakeful hours, in your amber eyes. There was that about you, Emily: the lambency, archness, and intelligence of your sherry-colored eyes. And when I heard you speak—well, all else was beside the point.
“With what art does nature embalm its corpses!” you said about the autumn leaves.
The point in the fall of 1847, however, was Mexico and our hatred for its swarthy inhabitants.
“We were sent here to kill Mexicans,” the lieutenant said with a grimace that revealed chaw-stained teeth. “Polk wants it, Marcy wants it, the people want it, I want it, and so, Parson, do you.”
He said that or something like it. I was having trouble distinguishing his words because of the flies droning in my head and the sound of your voice, Emily. You had just said something important to me back in Amherst, and I was desperately trying to make it out.
“What is it? I didn’t hear you.”
You flitted among the leaves, a demure little bird.
Abruptly, Lieutenant Pearson rose, staggered, and knocked over the wooden chair, which had been gaily painted blue. It was then I discovered that my head had come to rest on the table, next to the sugar skull—a memento mori, which Mexicans give their children to eat.
You see how impossible it was. A people who could make light of death and its dread mysteries. A people who believe in Extreme Unction and the sugar skull. Death is unreal there, though the corpses lying in streets and fields from Veracruz to Santa Barbara must have been real enough even for them.
Impossible to make an annual holiday of death! To give children sugar skulls and toy skeletons to celebrate their macabre festival!
The lieutenant threw his empty glass at a lithograph of the Sacred Heart hanging on the whitewashed wall. The noise of its splintering on the stone floor of the cantina rudely woke me from my reverie.
“What is it?” I cried out.
In my stupor, I’d imagined that General Rea had stepped out of the roaring sunlight and into the dusky cantina to avenge Huamantla. I wanted to protect you from the general, Emily, but my legs were not working the way they should. Besides, you were fading, and then suddenly you were gone—back to your father’s house no doubt.
“See this?” said Pearson, his voice rising on the last syllable, to f
inish with an expression of bewildered inquiry.
I gave him what attention I was able while the somnolent Mexican ceased momentarily his campaign against the flies in order to witness the latest idiocy of the gringos. Unsteady on his feet, Pearson unbuttoned his tunic and removed it, as though by sleight of hand, so that I was left wondering how the crumpled garment had gotten from his naked torso to the sawdust-strewn and spittled floor.
“Look! ¡Míralo!” he commanded in the languages of the conqueror and the conquered both. The Mexican leaning against the bar seemed unaware of his defeated status. Instead, he smiled at me from under his bandit’s mustache, as if to say that the lieutenant was loco—crazy borracho.
Pearson’s back was a parchment scribbled over by a rawhide lash for his having violated Scott’s declaration of martial law. Only by the perjury of the captain under whom he served had Pearson kept his commission. He was too good an officer and too skillful with the musket and the knife to reduce to the ranks.
“I was flogged for stealing a crucifix! It was a pretty thing,” he said wistfully. “Not plain like ours.”
I had been inside la Catedral Metropolitana in Mexico City, which had been built on a sacred precinct of the Aztecs. It was extravagant, richly appointed and furnished; its decoration bombastic beyond reason and propriety. Standing in the nave, among the Tuscan columns, I’d felt strangely light-headed; I was uneasy in the presence of such pomp. I admit also to having been envious and ashamed. I would have gone to the altar and asked for forgiveness had it been in a decent Protestant church. I was confused, as if I had been standing in a brothel, although I’d had no experience of low haunts of any sort. I’d been tempted to trespass like other men, so that I might better understand them. Besides, a virtuous character is strengthened by temptation, and in a world where all is good, there can be no good men. (I was beginning to excel in specious reasoning.) If I had not spent my days among rough soldiers, I might be a different kind of minister and a different sort of man. I’m unused to nice manners, elegant suppers, banter over port and cigars, and the sweetness and tempering influence of ladies in parlors and ballrooms. Grace, for me, is theological.
Later, on the afternoon of the Día de los Muertos, I watched a priest kneeling before a gaudy crucifix. Dressed in lace and finery, he looked more like a court dandy than a divine, and I despised him. I was more impressed by the ofrenda in an arcade across the street. On that makeshift altar were flores para los muertos, flowers for the dead, tall white candles, childlike paintings, rough-hewn crosses, rosaries, a Blessed Virgin, and an el Señor pointing to His red valentine of a heart. Miniature skeletons grinned beneath tiny sombreros. Pineapples, tortillas, gourds, apples, tamales, strings of red and green peppers, jars of atole, and clay bowls brimming with mescal or pulque had been set out for the refreshment of the ghostly visitors.
I watched young women, faces painted in imitation of calaveras, skulls, perform the dance of death. Each became la Calavera Catrina for the day, the Lady of the Dead, descended from Mictecacihuatl, custodian of bones. The bread, pan de los muertos, was decorated with bones made of frosting. Everywhere on the hot white streets fell the lengthy, almost palpable shadow of the underworld.
In the cantina in Huamantla, the lieutenant had gone red in the face. He took a step toward me, as though to issue a challenge or an invitation—to dance, perhaps, the Mexican waltz. Then he fell across the table, upsetting the empty pulque jar and the sugar skull, which rolled across the floor toward the door like a living thing wanting to get out.
I was stricken with what might have been the sickness unto death. It comes to each of us from time to time in advance of the harvester of souls—a grim reminder of our common end.
Although its jaws were clenched, the sugar skull spoke in a language I understood. “I was killed by an American soldier. I was only a boy. Maybe he got tired of shooting dogs.”
I could think of nothing to say to the dead boy.
Then a voice like Lieutenant Pearson’s began a recitation of Mexican atrocities against Americans, “the Dawson Massacre, Goliad Massacre, Crabb Massacre . . .”
The sugar skull answered in kind. “. . . the bombardment of Veracruz, the martyrs of Chapultepec, the slaughter at the rancho of Guadalupe by Los Diablos . . .”
For a time that could have existed only in my febrile imagination, the two voices wove a gristly counterpoint, whose themes were murder and revenge.
“What do you expect from people whose ancestors worshipped Mictlantecuhtli?” asked the lieutenant, although he was lying unconscious on the dirty floor.
The Mexican barkeep spoke from under his sombrero, “Mictlantecuhtli is a blood-soaked skeleton; his bony jaws and bared teeth are ready to rip the dead to pieces or to swallow stars as they vanish from the night sky. His tongue is lewd, shameless, and expectant—an organ for the satisfaction of base appetites. The god adorns himself with a necklace of human eyes; his ear spools are fashioned of human bones; his skull is dressed with owl feathers. I do not see his heart.”
The man had spoken in English, or else my scant Spanish had improved while I’d been inside the cantina. Strange, I thought, that he seemed to be taking a siesta, lying on top of the crudely built bar painted blue like the chairs and decorated with golden moons and stars. He spoke again, in a faraway voice—unless the voice was mine. I was fascinated by the lurid mythology of the country and had come to know it by my readings in The True History of the Conquest of Mexico, a sobering account of Christ Militant’s “terrible swift sword.”
“The god’s earthly priests send him souls to judge and govern,” said the Mexican from within a profound inertia, which could easily have been mistaken for a trance. “There are five priests in all—four to lay hold of the sacrifice, the fifth to open the abdomen and extract the heart. All six bear the death sentence on their clothes, written by a scarlet jet of blood.”
He’d spoken as if he had been witnessing the brutal spectacle with his own eyes, which remained hidden beneath the straw disk of his sweat-stained sombrero.
I wonder what thoughts passed through the minds of thousands of ecstatic worshippers, some of whom had shed blood of their own in a delirious imitation of the ritual by amputating their limbs and sexual organs, in order that the land would be nourished and Divinity appeased. When eviscerated corpses were flung down the temple stairs to the apetlatl, a terrace at the foot of the Pyramid of the Moon, constructed to receive them, when the severed heads had been placed on the rack of skulls, when the viscera had been fed to zoo animals—did the spectators shiver in delicious terror of what might one day befall them, high above the plaza, when the fifth priest offered up their savories to their sanguinary god?
I pictured myself as a sixth priest, my gory hands around the sacred heart of Jesus. Do you wonder at such blasphemies? The river of blood has many tributaries.
By the end of my service in Mexico, my imagination had grown extravagant, even ghoulish. I’ve always suspected that the pulque was at fault, or else the mescal I drank for the pain after receiving my wound at Galaxara Pass. That was in November 1847. Our wagons had been traveling through the ravine under General Lane’s command when two hundred of Rea’s lancers swept down on us. I remember a red rag tied to each sharpened point. A lance caught me in the thigh; I tumbled from the wagon and managed to scrabble into a ditch partly hidden by sagebrush. By God’s mercy or a momentary oversight on His part, a Louisiana dragoon leaned from his saddle and swung me up behind him, like a hawk forking up a rabbit in its talons. If the dragoon had stopped to ask which of the two I would rather he saved—my skin or my soul—I would have chosen the former with little hesitation. I had looked death more or less in the face and found that, where courage was concerned, I was a rabbit.
Awake, the Mexican had taken up his newspaper and was once more swatting at flies. For no good reason, I hated him.
I rushed from the cantina into the blinding street and was sick. Lying in the dust, I wished that la Calavera Cat
rina would take me in a bony embrace or that a Mexican bandit would come and beat me without mercy, so that my hatred could find justification in a brutal nature too great for an ordinary man to forgive—even one pledged to turn the other cheek. I felt unequal to both my commission and my ordination and wished for a life free of the obligations they imposed.
At the foot of the Malinche volcano, Mexico had become unbearable.
–2–
ON THE BOAT FROM VERACRUZ, I could not help imagining our reunion. I had been given a hickory stick at the field hospital to use while my wound healed. In Boston, before boarding the coach to Amherst, I stopped at George Simmons’s haberdashery and purchased a fancy gold-topped stick to lean on manfully. It was a showy thing, and I wielded it with panache. I hoped that my picturesque invalidism would excite a tender solicitude. I wanted to impress you and could not have known how much even then you despised flummery.
Do you remember what you said after you’d floated into the parlor and settled your skirts in the visitor’s chair, as if to insist, however quietly, on your own transience?
“You’ve arrived in time for skating; the boys have swept the ice clean of snow.”
I could feel my face flush, as if with windburn on a raw winter’s afternoon. Like a child who is ignored, I kicked over the tapestried footstool.
“Your leg, Robert?” you said in the interrogative tone you frequently assumed.
“Graced by a Mexican bullet,” I replied, hoping a clever pun would please you.
You compressed your thin lips into the barest of smiles.
I had lied, of course; it seemed heroic to have suffered a wound from a musket ball rather than one such as a pig might receive from a boy with a pointed stick.
“Does it pain you?”
I took heart in your voice and face, which now seemed satisfactorily pitying.
