The Battle of Tomochic
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It’s difficult to know whether the play was good or not, since Mateos’s librettos still need to be compiled. But even without seeing it on stage, to those in the know its title, Sédan, signaled its main intent.7 Nevertheless, it seemed improper to Mateos to acknowledge his debt to Zola’s work (as well as Zola himself), or he must have considered that the polite gesture would distance himself completely from it. It’s hard to understand why the sixty-year-old Mateos would want to erase all traces of his relationship to Zola. His public clarifications were only vaguely literary in nature, and were largely indifferent to the complexities of the literary text. They ended up minimizing the enigma of author identity by dismissing the literary reality that went beyond authors who were exalted, profaned, or copied through parody or plagiarism. The fragile idea of authorship can be gleaned as we attempt to explain to ourselves Mateos’s attitude toward Zola.
What’s this? The “author” isn’t only a manner, style, or tone but a condition, a mood—part critical habit and part anguish. The author is usually the sum of these two incomplete pieces: that which he believes to be or identifies as the nerve of his unique temperament, on the one hand, and on the other, something to do with courage, enthusiasm, commitment, and the intelligence to live a vocation. Authoring alone shouldn’t be an important property; it’s having an avid readership that makes it a fortunate state. It’s an effrontery to pity an author who toils without gain without first wondering if he has an affinity for certain authors or just bad habits. Reading’s cultural weight is a nineteenth-century inheritance that can stun us if we’re aware of the “brilliant things” (as Stendahl called them) that the nineteenth century bequeathed us: decency and hypocrisy. Writers’ values have weight. Their opinions are taken seriously and their words assign rank.
It was because of Zola and particularly La Débâcle, which arrived in the Mexico City bookstores in a Spanish edition toward the middle of 1892 and was translated in the Diario del Hogar literary supplement, that the military campaign against Tomochic entered history. As always, the written word bestowed an urgent importance on the facts.
Authorship is a mask. To get behind it, one has to try and see from the other side of the polished surface of the mirror.
El Demócrata
While Lieutenant Heriberto Frías organized his own defense in Chihuahua, out of touch in a jail cell, the case against him gained strength through the secrecy of its proceedings.
Porfirio Díaz ordered these measures in an attempt to undermine the young lieutenant’s version, break the silence, expose his fraud in a military court, and resolve the question of the anonymous witness of the Tomochic campaign. A rogatory letter was discreetly dispatched to the first judge of Mexico City, giving him the authority to order a “scrupulous search” in the printing plant as well as the editorial offices of the newspaper El Demócrata “or at the home of its writers or editors” with the objective of collecting the original pages of the published material that appeared in its columns under the title of Tomochic “as well as all the manuscripts and letters that referred to the military operations in this town.” With the aid of military justice, the judge would be able to question the editorial staff of El Demócrata and subpoena all pertinent material. As already mentioned, the newspaper’s director was the first to appear in court.
Only a few people had any idea who the guy testifying behind bars was. And if the respondent appeared at his appointment in a timely fashion, it was for the simple reason that he found himself isolated in the dank cells of Belem, in one of fourteen isolated cells on the second floor of the special wing of the prison. Joaquín Clausell had been living in the capital city since the beginning of the 1880s. In the beginning, he eked out an existence as a dishwasher in a pharmacy. This was how he paid for his weakness for politics and the effrontery of having confronted the governor and strongman of Campeche, where he was born on June 16, 1866, the son of the merchant José Clausell and Marcelina Troconi.
Life in the capital provided Clausell with a broad community of young people, with and without funds, with liberal ideas and radical ways, and more or less tenuously affiliated with existing political organizations. Some of the less fortunate made their living in printing presses and type-setting shops. Others, young educated people from every corner of the country—apprentices in everything and masters of nothing, as Clausell was—lived from day to day contributing for brief periods to the magazines and newspapers of the hour. Nobody had a steady job; the only stable occupation was studying. Clausell entered the Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros and then left for law school, where he met up with Frías the schoolmate who would make him take an irrevocable step. In those classrooms he finished up the course of studies he’d carried out in the streets of the capital, from the conversion to nickel coins in 1883 to the popular forums against the judgment on the conversion of the English debt presented to congress by the Treasury Commission. He was an impassioned orator. According to what he told his friends, he later received a silver medal in the Teatro Arbeu that a group of ladies bestowed on the most eloquent street orators. The Treasury Commission prize was suspended after a brutal confrontation between students and police. There was Clausell, just another student in worn clothes who taught classes, jotted down notes in the cafés, took on insignificant jobs in the library, cabinet, and courthouse. Mutual help functioned between friends; housing costs were shared, and it wasn’t so difficult to get used to eating once a day, and whatever else it took to survive.8 The anti-reelection cause became a crusade for these young people, a way to confront General Díaz and his supporters in the 1888 presidential elections.
Clausell made the rounds with Alberto García Granados, Diódoro Batalla, Jesús Rábago, Enrique María de los Ríos, and Gabriel González Mier. Living together as a group, they shared similar worries, passions, hopes, and convictions. Politics seduced them. The death of ex-president Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada in New York in April 1889, and above all the arrival in Mexico of his remains, stirred the political mood of these anti-reelection youths. They transformed the dubiously exquisite corpse into a cruel mirror that they held up to General Díaz, the same military man who years before led the rebellion which defeated and exiled Lerdo by sabotaging the insincere official ceremony in his memory. This daring deed put Clausell behind bars in the Belem prison for six months, and when he emerged again he took up a career in journalism. Juan Pérez was one of his first pseudonyms. He dreamed of directing a publication of his own; the name La soberanía de los Estados was as far as he got. But he began by reporting for El Monitor Republicano and El Universal.
With a bit of boasting and a lot of modesty, Clausell exhibited his bachelorhood and his admiration for the poets Salvador Díaz Mirón and Gaspar Nuñez de Arce. Sporting their badge of anti-reelectionism, the opposition got together to talk at all hours on street corners, in cafés, in the rooms of guest houses, and at school. Despite his various careers, Clausell managed to finish his law studies.
All this activity didn’t unseat Díaz. And after the 1892 presidential elections, which reaffirmed his power, Clausell and his supporters started up a newspaper in February 1893 and called it El Demócrata.9 Its publication was announced on posters all over the capital. The young director availed himself of talented new writers for the four pages of the newspaper and favored investigative pieces.10
According to Clausell, a journalist was a public man who pledged himself to his country, truth, and justice. Thus he thought it strange that in Mexico the press had only minor importance. He reproached the lack of honor in the press, its inclination for lying, calumny, illicit speculation. Moreover, he claimed that the press didn’t influence opinion. In those days the press sold itself for any tidbit and belonged to a few clever characters who functioned like bureaucrats. That’s the way they were, if we believe the description in El cuarto poder by Emilio Rabasa. The press as a whole played to the tune of the editorial and gossip columns, short items, clippings from other publications, filler.
&n
bsp; Clausell set out in El Demócrata what he considered to be the plagues besetting the nation: tax stamp revenue, typhus, gambling houses, beggars, the semiofficial daily papers, the municipal council, psychology, postal service, coachmen, velocipede riders. His idea of journalism was ascetic.11 “I judge the press to be a formidable machine which can forge either the monstrous or the sublime,” said Clausell. Putting his strong convictions to work, he conceived of an unprecedented project that he voiced in the newspaper’s second edition. El Demócrata sent reporters to collect particulars for a detailed account of the Tomochic campaign, “an event shrouded in silence,” that had been given some coverage in the newspapers of the City of Palaces ever since October 1892.12
But before publishing the first campaign installment March 14, Clausell unleashed a short-lived crusade against the gambling houses of the capital.13 This resulted in a lawsuit and robbed him of his liberty. A few days before the newspaper completed its second month in circulation, on March 29, at eleven o’clock in the morning, the director and owner of El Demócrata—Clausell and Francisco R. Blanco—gave themselves up voluntarily to the Third Correctional Court.
The Mexican police had been looking for him since March 24, the eve of Palm Sunday. Saturday afternoon, the chief of police reserves apprehended one of the two directors and, hours later, one of the editors in the editorial offices of the paper. Mexico City’s criminal judges filed a formal lawsuit against Clausell’s newspaper, citing a series of articles that appeared injurious to them and gratuitously accused ten judges, the same who then signed the lawsuit. El Demócrata criticized the gambling houses but above all governmental tolerance of them. The magistrates’ lawsuit demanded reparations that would soothe the wounds and erase the wrongs done them. First, they demanded that their adversaries prove and justify their claims. The petition covered not only the author of the damning articles, Querido Moheno, but the author of the series “A General and Political View of the Ministers,” and the editor and director (or the editor in chief) of El Demócrata.14
The Good Soldier
From the outset, the Tomochic military campaign mobilized a column of tens of soldiers from the troops of Porfirio Díaz against a population of 300 souls. Heriberto Frías, born May 15, 1870, in Querétaro, participated in “the campaign against the mountain rebels of Chihuahua State during the month of October 1892, where he engaged in the combats unleashed from the 20th to the 29th of the same month in the town of Tomochic,” according to his service record.15
This was the only warfare the good soldier Frías knew. His tour of duty in Tomochic was the only period when Frías submitted to military discipline—a truce he maintained with his enemy, the army, for a brief stint.
The soldier’s literary inclinations, or rather the debauched inclinations that sparked his idea of a literary vocation, got him into constant trouble with military discipline from the moment he was promoted to second lieutenant of the infantry on January 24, 1889. Frías was one of the few writers from the Military College who decided to join the army. He wrote poems in the romantic style of his ardent era, rhetorical, always shaken by moral crises that some writers of the day felt were akin to what brought about the demise of the classical world. His military conduct left a lot to be desired.16
In four years of service Frías worked at developing a very poor reputation. In May 1889, after just five years of service, the Honor Committee admonished Second Lieutenant Frías for poor grooming and for “disrespecting his military garments and accoutrements.” He was imprisoned for inadequacies of service for twenty-nine days in the Santiago Tlatelolco Prison.17 This prison, on the outskirts of the capital, wrote Concepción Lombardo de Miramón in his Memorías, had previously served as a seminary for Franciscan friars: “After Independence the friars emigrated and the government converted the cloisters to house troops or prisoners of the state.”18 This call to attention improved the second lieutenant’s comportment. He won a place on the honor roll during the following three months. But the turn of events was ephemeral. From then on, Frías atoned for his lack of discipline with extended guard duty and Sunday stays—he was lax in bed making, fell asleep during guard duty, arrived late for roll call, left his cape lying around, was poorly groomed, was absent from gym activities and the ranks of his unit. In other ways, his abilities were average.19
Toward mid-1891, two years after his experience in Santiago Tlatelolco, Frías was accused of the crime of inflicting injuries, the most serious charges against the second lieutenant yet. He served his sentence from July to September. What injuries could this twenty-one-year-old boy have inflicted? He hadn’t even served in one military camp; his mettle was still to be tried. His service record registers the fact that his trial fell into the hands of civil authorities. But musician, poet, literary critic, and historian Rubén M. Campos—his friend, contemporary, and colleague—wrote in an article that Frías was charged with “splitting open someone’s head with a saber blow while defending his sword.” We don’t know whether this would have had a favorable impact on college officers who were familiar with the poor poet’s military disaster; however, it did link him to a hobby of the day: the spurious refinement (excessive refinement) of dueling.20
One triumph of Frías’s military career was to escape with his life in the Tomochic campaign. When his battalion took the strategically vital Cerro de la Cueva, their triumph was assured. Consequently he was promoted to infantry lieutenant and awarded a monthly salary of sixty pesos beginning on Día de los Muertos, 1892.21 Tomochic also meant Frías’s last arrest in the army. Two days after El Demócrata published the last of the anonymous episodes of a novel about the campaign of federal troops against its population he was taken into custody.
His buddies kept guard over him, all quartered together in the remote capital of Chihuahua State. General Díaz suspected Frías of authoring the novel published in El Demócrata and gave leave to the civilian and military command in Chihuahua to prosecute the second lieutenant. If the president was right, the young creative officer had violated several articles of the new Military Justice Code put into effect in January 1893 related to the duties of respect, silence, and loyalty. Colonel Miguel Ahumada, governor of Chihuahua, and José María Rangel, chief of the military zone, descended on the remote hamlet of Las Quintas, the home of Lieutenant Frías.
It could be said that the military campaign invited mythifying. And it wasn’t a single author but a literary genre—the novel—that got Díaz and his supporters up in arms.
And this was not just any novel, as we have seen. This was a Mexican novel with a strong French influence that countered Ignacio Manuel Altamirano’s writings. He questioned the benefits of the influence of French literature on Mexican literature.
In Spain as well as in Spanish America, the French novel introduced certain French flourishes into the conversation and affected writing style. Many peninsular as well as Spanish American critics have protested this despicable state of affairs. Although we may not desire a static language, closing the door on all the locutions that can enrich it (even though they derive from extraneous languages), we do want to guard against corrupting its character. We don’t want our lovely national language to degenerate into a dialect of foreign tongues … The second problem with reading foreign novels, French ones in particular, is that our people are so drawn to the history and geography of other countries that they have disdained their own.22
In light of the evidence of the novel, the military campaign against Tomochic alerted Joaquín Clausell primarily because it was the first hot news item of the administration newly elected to another four-year term. Second, a friend and confrere was mobilized to Tomochic in October 1892: Frías, who had opted for a career in the army after graduating from preparatory school in 1888. For anyone familiar with Zola, warfare’s literary potential was obvious.
Writer José Juan Tablado was the first to point out that Tomochic was a war novel, although he couldn’t have realized what for us today is fundamental: To
mochic was the first novel of its kind written by an author of his generation. In his comments of 1895, he mentioned the first edition of Tomochic in book form, published a year earlier in Rio Grande City, Texas. “Let the battle begin. It’s mystical, unbelievable, epic.”
“War has been studied from every possible perspective,” wrote Amado Nervo in an 1898 column for La Semana. “Economic, political, philosophical, etc.… But apparently nobody thought of it as literary potential.” France’s example served to illustrate the obvious. Since the battle of Sédan in 1870, Nervo wrote, war “has contributed its quota to a huge library, even counting only the wealth of novels, poems, and stories inspired by the epochal conjunction of Frederick the Great’s descendants.” He added, “Without counting La Débâcle, El Año terrible, and Napoleón el pequeño, along with all the other books as fervent as those which have enjoyed the high privilege of becoming universal, there is an entire literature which is fever-inducing, picturesque, suggestive, and at times tendentious as well. It emerged out of the great European conflagration the way the opulent transparency of glass emerges from powerful flames.”
Written the year preceding Maucci’s inaugural edition of Tomochic, Nervo’s comments went to the heart of the matter when he pointed out “that those who set their criteria by the facts have written exquisite truths.” Going even further, he writes, “War is a great source of divine and horrible tragedies, admirable poetry, grand events: a red factory of episodes that are always new and thrilling.”23