Chapter IX The Last Night
The days at La Cadena were full of color. In the cold dawn, when the river pools were filmed with ice, a trooper would gallop into the great square with a plunging steer at the end of his rope. Fifty or sixty ragged soldiers, only their eyes showing between serapes and big sombreros, would begin an amateur bull-fight, to the roaring delight of the rest of the compañeros. They waved their blankets, shouting the correct bull-fight cries. One would twist the infuriated animal’s tail. Another, more impatient, beat him with the flat of a sword. Instead of banderillas, they stuck daggers into his shoulder—his hot blood spattering them as he charged. And when at last he was down and the merciful knife in his brain, a mob fell upon the carcase, cutting and ripping, and bearing off chunks of raw meat to their cuartels. Then the white, burning sun would rise suddenly behind the Puerta, stinging your hands and face. And the pools of blood, the faded patterns of the serapes, the far reaches of umber desert glowed and became vivid....
Don Petronilo had confiscated several coaches in the campaign. We borrowed them for many an excursion—the five of us. Once it was a trip to San Pedro del Gallo to see a cock-fight, appropriately enough. Another time ‘Gino Güereca and I went to see the fabulously rich lost mines of the Spaniards, which he knew. But we never got past Bruquilla—just lounged in the shade of the trees and ate cheese all day.
Late in the afternoon the Puerta guard trotted out to their post, the late sun soft on their rifles and cartridge-belts; and long after dark the detachment relieved came jingling in out of the mysterious dark.
The four peddlers whom I had seen in Santo Domingo arrived that night. They had four burro loads of macuche to sell the soldiers.
“It’s meester!” they cried, when I came down to their little fire. “Que tal, meester? How goes it? Aren’t you afraid of the colorados?”
“How is business?” I asked, accepting the heaped-up handful of macuche they gave me.
They laughed uproariously at this.
“Business! Far better for us if we had stayed in Santo Domingo! This Tropa couldn’t buy one cigarro if they clubbed their money!...”
One of them began to sing that extraordinary ballad, “The Morning Song to Francisco Villa.” He sang one verse, and then the next man sang a verse, and so on around, each man composing a dramatic account of the deeds of the Great Captain. For half an hour I lay there, watching them, as they squatted between their knees, serapes draped loosely from their shoulders, the firelight red on their simple, dark faces. While one man sang the others stared upon the ground, wrapt in composition.
“Here is Francisco Villa
With his chiefs and his officers,
Who come to saddle the short-horns
Of the Federal Army.
“Get ready now, colorados,
Who have been talking so loud,
For Villa and his soldiers
Will soon take off your hides!
“To-day has come your tamer,
The Father of Rooster Tamers,
To run you out of Torreon—
To the devil with your skins!
“The rich with all their money
Have already got their lashing,
As the soldiers of Urbina
Can tell, and those of Maclovio Herrera.
“Fly, fly away, little dove,
Fly over all the prairies,
And say that Villa has come
To drive them all out forever.
“Ambition will ruin itself,
And justice will be the winner,
For Villa has reached Torreon
To punish the avaricious.”
“Fly away, Royal Eagle,
These laurels carry to Villa,
For he has come to conquer
Bravo and all his colonels.
“Now you sons of the Mosquito,
Your pride will come to an end.
If Villa has come to Torreon,
It is because he could do it!
“Viva Villa and his soldiers!
Viva Herrera and his gente!
You have seen, wicked people,
What a brave man can do.
“With this now I say good-bye;
By the Rose of Castile,
Here is the end of my rhyme
To the great General Villa!”
After a while I slipped away, and I doubt if they even saw me go. They sang around their fire for more than three hours.
But in our cuartel there was other entertainment. The room was full of smoke from the fire on the floor. Through it I dimly made out some thirty or forty troopers squatting or sprawled at full length—perfectly silent as Silveyra read aloud a proclamation from the Governor of Durango forever condemning the lands of the great haciendas to be divided among the poor.
He read:
“Considering: that the principal cause of discontent among the people in our State, which forced them to spring to arms in the year 1910, was the absolute lack of individual property; and that the rural classes have no means of subsistence in the present, nor any hope for the future, except to serve as peons on the haciendas of the great land owners, who have monopolized the soil of the State;
“Considering: that the principal branch of our national riches is agriculture, and that there can be no true progress in agriculture without that the majority of farmers have a personal interest in making the earth produce....
“Considering, finally: that the rural towns have been reduced to the deepest misery, because the common lands which they once owned have gone to augment the property of the nearest hacienda, especially under the Dictatorship of Diaz; with which the inhabitants of the State lost their economic, political, and social independence, then passed from the rank of citizens to that of slaves, without the Government being able to lift the moral level through education, because the hacienda where they lived is private property....
“Therefore, the Government of the State of Durango declares it a public necessity that the inhabitants of the towns and villages be the owners of agricultural lands....”
When the paymaster had painfully waded through all the provisions that followed, telling how the land was to be applied for, etc., there was a silence.
“That,” said Martinez, “is the Mexican Revolucion.”
“It’s just what Villa’s doing in Chihuahua,” I said. “It’s great. All you fellows can have a farm now.”
An amused chuckle ran around the circle. Then a little, bald-headed man, with yellow, stained whiskers, sat up and spoke.
“Not us,” he said, “not the soldiers. After a Revolucion is done it wants no more soldiers. It is the pacificos who will get the land—those who did not fight. And the next generation....” He paused and spread his torn sleeves to the fire. “I was a school teacher,” he explained, “so I know that Revolucions, like Republics, are ungrateful. I have fought three years. At the end of the first Revolucion that great man, Father Madero, invited his soldiers to the Capital. He gave us clothes, and food, and bull-fights. We returned to our homes and found the greedy again in power.”
“I ended the war with forty-five pesos,” said a man.
“You were lucky,” continued the schoolmaster. “No, it is not the troopers, the starved, unfed, common soldiers who profit by the Revolucion. Officers, yes—some—for they get fat on the blood of the Patria. But we—no.”
“What on earth are you fighting for?” I cried.
“I have two little sons,” he answered. “And they will get their land. And they will have other little sons. They, too, will never want for food....” The little man grinned. “We have a proverb in Guadalajara: ‘Do not wear a shirt of eleven yards, for he who wants to be a Redeemer will be crucified.’”
“I’ve got no little son,” said fourteen-year-old Gil Tomas, amid shouts of laughter. “I’m fighting so I can get a thirty-thirty rifle from some dead Federal, and a good horse that belonged to a millionaire.”
Just for fun I asked a trooper with a photo button of Madero pinned to his coat who that was.
“Pues, quien sabe, señor?” he replied. “My captain told me he was a great saint. I fight because it is not so hard as to work.”
“How often are you fellows paid?”
“We were paid three pesos just nine months ago tonight,” said the schoolmaster, and they all nodded. “We are the real volunteers. The gente of Villa are professionals.”
Then Luis Martinez got a guitar and sang a beautiful little love song, which he said a prostitute had made up one night in a bordel.
The last thing I remember of that memorable night was ‘Gino Güereca lying near me in the dark, talking.
“To-morrow,” he said, “I shall take you to the lost gold-mines of the Spaniards. They are hidden in a cañon in the Western mountains. Only the Indians know of them—and I. The Indians go there sometimes with knives and dig the raw gold out of the ground. We’ll be rich....”