Chapter V White Nights at Zarca
Of course, I took up quarters at the cuartel. And right here I want to mention one fact. Americans had insisted that the Mexican was fundamentally dishonest—that I might expect to have my outfit stolen the first day out. Now for two weeks I lived with as rough a band of ex-outlaws as there was in the army. They were without discipline and without education. They were, many of them, Gringo-haters. They had not been paid a cent for six weeks, and some were so desperately poor that they couldn’t boast sandals or serapes. I was a stranger with a good outfit, unarmed. I had a hundred and fifty pesos, which I put conspicuously at the head of my bed when I slept. And I never lost a thing. But more than that, I was not permitted to pay for my food; and in a company where money was scarce and tobacco almost unknown, I was kept supplied with all I could smoke by the compañeros. Every suggestion from me that I should pay for it was an insult.
The only thing possible was to hire music for a baile. Long after Juan Sanchez and I rolled up in our blankets that night, we could hear the rhythm of the music, and the shouts of the dancers. It must have been midnight when somebody threw open the door and yelled: “Meester! Oiga, meester! Are you asleep? Come to the baile! Arriba! Andale!”
“Too sleepy!” I said. After some further argument the messenger departed, but in ten minutes back he came. “El Capitan Fernando orders you to come at once! Vamonos!” Now the others woke up. “Come to the baile, meester!” they shouted. Juan Sanchez sat up and began pulling on his shoes. “Now we’re off!” said he. “The meester is going to dance! Captain’s orders! Come on, meester!”
“I’ll go if all the Tropa does,” I said. They raised a yell at that, and the night was full of chuckling men pulling on their clothes.
Twenty of us reached the house in a body. The mob of peons blocking door and window opened to let us pass. “The meester!” they cried. “The meester’s going to dance!”
Capitan Fernando threw his arms about me, roaring: “Here he comes, the compañero! Dance now! Go to it! They’re going to dance the jota!”
“But I don’t know how to dance the jota!”
Patricio, flushed and panting, seized me by the arm. “Come on, it’s easy! I’ll introduce you to the best girl in the Zarca!”
There was nothing to do. The window was jammed with faces, and a hundred tried to crowd in at the door. It was an ordinary room in a peon’s house, whitewashed, with a humpy dirt floor. In the light of two candles sat the musicians. The music struck up “Puentes á Chihuahua.” A grinning silence fell. I gathered the young lady under my arm, and started the preliminary march around the room customary before the dance begins. We waltzed painfully for a moment or two, and suddenly they all began to yell: “Ora! Ora! Now!”
“What do you do now?”
“Vuelta! Vuelta! Loose her!” a perfect yell.
“But I don’t know how!”
“The fool doesn’t know how to dance,” cried one.
Another began the mocking song:
“The Gringos all are fools,
They’ve never been in Sonora,
And when they want to say: ‘Diez Reales,’
They call it ‘Dollar an’ a quarta’....”
But Patricio bounded into the middle of the floor, and Sabas after him; each seized a muchacha from the line of women sitting along one end of the room. And as I led my partner back to her seat, they “vuelta’d.” First a few waltz steps,—then the man whirled away from the girl, snapping his fingers, throwing one arm up to cover his face, while the girl put one hand on her hip and danced after him. They approached each other, receded, danced around each other. The girls were dumpy and dull, Indian-faced and awkward, bowed at the shoulder from much grinding of corn and washing of clothes. Some of the men had on heavy boots, some none; many wore pistols and cartridge-belts, and a few carried rifles slung from their shoulders.
The dance was always preceded by a grand march-around; then, after the couple had danced twice the circuit of the room, they walked again. There were two-steps, waltz and mazurka beside the jota. Each girl kept her eyes on the ground, never spoke, and stumbled heavily after you. Add to this a dirt floor full of arroyos, and you have a form of torture unequaled anywhere in the world. It seemed to me I danced for hours, spurred on by the chorus: “Dance, meester! No floje! Keep it up! Don’t quit!”
Later there was another jota, and here’s where I almost got into trouble. I danced this one successfully—with another girl. And, afterward, when I asked my original partner to two-step, she was furiously angry.
“You shamed me before them all,” said she. “You—you said you didn’t know how to dance the jota!” As we marched around the room, she appealed to her friends: “Domingo! Juan! Come out and take me away from this Gringo! He won’t dare to do anything!”
Half a dozen of them started onto the floor, and the rest looked on. It was a ticklish moment. But all at once the good Fernando glided in front, a revolver in his hand.
“The Americano is my friend!” said he. “Get back there and mind your business!...”
The horses were tired, so we rested a day in La Zarca. Behind the Casa Grande lay a ruined garden, full of gray alamo trees, figs, vines, and great barrel-cactuses. It was walled around by high adobe walls on three sides, over one of which the ancient white tower of the church floated in the blue sky. The fourth side opened upon a reservoir of yellow water, and beyond it stretched the western desert, miles upon miles of tawny desolation. Trooper Marin and I lay under a fig tree, watching the vultures sail over us on quiet wing. Suddenly the silence was broken by loud, swift music.
Pablo had found a pianola in the church, where it had escaped Che Che Campa’s notice the previous year; with it was one roll, the “Merry Widow Waltz.” Nothing would do but that we carry the instrument out into the ruined patio. We took turns playing the thing all day long; Rafaelito volunteering the information that the “Merry Widow” was Mexico’s most popular piece. A Mexican, he said, had composed it.
The finding of the pianola suggested that we give another baile that night, in the portico of the Casa Grande itself. Candles were stuck upon the pillars, the faint light flickering upon broken walls, burned and blackened doorways, the riot of wild vines that had twisted unchecked around the roof-beams. The entire patio was crowded with blanketed men, making holiday, even yet a little uncomfortable in the great house which they had never been allowed to enter. As soon as the orchestra had finished a dance, the pianola immediately took up the task. Dance followed dance, without any rest. A barrel of sotol further complicated things. As the evening wore on the assembly got more and more exhilarated. Sabas, who was Pablo’s orderly, led off with Pablo’s mistress. I followed. Immediately afterward Pablo hit her on the head with the butt end of his revolver, and said he’d shoot her if she danced with anyone else, and her partner too. After sitting some moments meditating, Sabas rose, pulled his revolver, and informed the harpist that he had played a wrong note. Then he shot at him. Other compañeros disarmed Sabas, who immediately went to sleep in the middle of the dance-floor.
The interest in Meester’s dancing soon shifted to other phenomena. I sat down beside Julian Reyes, he with the Christ and Virgin on the front of his sombrero. He was far gone in sotol—his eyes burned like a fanatic’s.
He turned on me suddenly:
“Are you going to fight with us?”
“No,” I said. “I am a correspondent. I am forbidden to fight.”
“It is a lie,” he cried. “You don’t fight because you are afraid to fight. In the face of God, our Cause is Just.”
“Yes, I know that. But my orders are not to fight.”
“What do I care for orders?” he shrieked. “We want no correspondents. We want no words printed in a book. We want rifles and killing, and if we die we shall be caught up among the saints! Coward! Huertista!...”
“That’s enough!” cried someone, and I looked up to see Longinos Güereca standing over me. “Julian Reyes, you know nothing. This compañero comes thousands of miles by the sea and the land to tell his countrymen the truth of the fight for Liberty. He goes into battle without arms, he’s braver than you are, because you have a rifle. Get out now, and don’t bother him any more!”
He sat down where Julian had been, smiled his homely, gentle smile, and took both my hands in his.
“We shall be compadres, eh?” said Longinos Güereca. “We shall sleep in the same blankets, and always be together. And when we get to the Cadena I shall take you to my home, and my father shall make you my brother.... I will show you the lost gold-mines of the Spaniards, the richest mines in the world.... We’ll work them together, eh?... We’ll be rich, eh?...”
And from that time on until the end, Longinos Güereca and I were always together.
But the baile grew wilder and wilder. Orchestra and pianola alternated without a break. Everybody was drunk now. Pablo was boasting horribly of killing defenseless prisoners. Occasionally, some insult would be passed, and there would be a snapping of rifle levers all over the place. Then perhaps the poor exhausted women would begin to go home; and what an ominous shout would go up: “No vaya! Don’t go! Stop! Come back here and dance! Come back here!” And the dejected procession would halt and straggle back. At four o’clock, when somebody started the report that a Gringo Huertista spy was among us, I decided to go to bed. But the baile kept up until seven....