Chapter IV The Human Side
Villa has two wives, one a patient, simple woman who was with him during all his years of outlawry, who lives in El Paso, and the other a cat-like, slender young girl, who is the mistress of his house in Chihuahua. He is perfectly open about it, though lately the educated, conventional Mexicans who have been gathering about him in ever-increasing numbers have tried to hush up the fact. Among the peons it is not only not unusual but customary to have more than one mate.
One hears a great many stories of Villa’s violating women. I asked him if that were true. He pulled his mustache and stared at me for a minute with an inscrutable expression. “I never take the trouble to deny such stories,” he said. “They say I am a bandit, too. Well, you know my history. But tell me; have you ever met a husband, father or brother of any woman that I have violated?” He paused: “Or even a witness?”
It is fascinating to watch him discover new ideas. Remember that he is absolutely ignorant of the troubles and confusions and readjustments of modern civilization. “Socialism,” he said once, when I wanted to know what he thought of it: “Socialism—is it a thing? I only see it in books, and I do not read much.” Once I asked him if women would vote in the new Republic. He was sprawled out on his bed, with his coat unbuttoned. “Why, I don’t think so,” he said, startled, suddenly sitting up. “What do you mean—vote? Do you mean elect a government and make laws?” I said I did and that women already were doing it in the United States. “Well,” he said, scratching his head: “if they do it up there I don’t see that they shouldn’t do it down here.” The idea seemed to amuse him enormously. He rolled it over and over in his mind, looking at me and away again. “It may be as you say,” he said; “but I have never thought about it. Women seem to me to be things to protect, to love. They have no sternness of mind. They can’t consider anything for its right or wrong. They are full of pity and softness. Why,” he said, “a woman would not give an order to execute a traitor.”
“I am not so sure of that, mi General,” I said. “Women can be crueller and harder than men.”
He stared at me, pulling his mustache. And then he began to grin. He looked slowly to where his wife was setting the table for lunch. “Oiga,” he said, “come here. Listen. Last night I caught three traitors crossing the river to blow up the railroad. What shall I do with them? Shall I shoot them or not?”
Embarrassed, she seized his hand and kissed it. “Oh, I don’t know anything about that,” she said. “You know best.”
“No,” said Villa. “I leave it entirely to you. Those men were going to try to cut our communications between Juarez and Chihuahua. They were traitors—Federals. What shall I do? Shall I shoot them or not?”
“Oh, well, shoot them,” said Mrs. Villa.
Villa chuckled delightedly. “There is something in what you say,” he remarked, and for days afterward went around asking the cook and the chambermaids whom they would like to have for President of Mexico.
He never missed a bull-fight, and every afternoon at four o’clock he was to be found at the cock-pit, where he fought his own birds with the happy enthusiasm of a small boy. In the evening he played faro in some gambling hall. Sometimes in the late morning he would send a fast courier after Luis Leon, the bull-fighter, and telephone personally to the slaughter-house, asking if they had any fierce bulls in the pen. They almost always did have, and we would all get on horseback and gallop through the streets about a mile to the big adobe corrals. Twenty cowboys cut the bull out of the herd, threw and tied him and cut off his sharp horns, and then Villa and Luis Leon and anybody else who wanted to would take the professional red capes and go down into the ring; Luis Leon with professional caution, Villa as stubborn and clumsy as the bull, slow on his feet, but swift as an animal with his body and arms. Villa would walk right up to the pawing, infuriated animal, and, with his double cape, slap him insolently across the face, and, for half an hour, would follow the greatest sport I ever saw. Sometimes the sawed-off horns of the bull would catch Villa in the seat of the trousers and propel him violently across the ring; then he would turn and grab the bull by the head and wrestle with him with the sweat streaming down his face until five or six compañeros seized the bull’s tail and hauled him plowing and bellowing back.
Villa never drinks nor smokes, but he will outdance the most ardent novio in Mexico. When the order was given for the army to advance upon Torreon, Villa stopped off at Camargo to be best man at the wedding of one of his old compadres. He danced steadily without stopping, they said, all Monday night, all Tuesday, and all Tuesday night, arriving at the front on Wednesday morning with blood-shot eyes and an air of extreme lassitude.