Chapter IV Symbols of Mexico
In the early dawn, when yet the low gray houses and the dusty trees were stiff with cold, we laid a bull-whip on the backs of our two mules and rattled down the uneven streets of Jimenez and out into the open country. A few soldiers, wrapped to the eyes in their serapes, dozed beside their lanterns. There was a drunken officer sleeping in the gutter.
We drove an ancient buggy, whose broken pole was mended with wire. The harness was made of bits of old iron, rawhide and rope. Antonio and I sat side by side upon the seat, and at our feet dozed a dark, serious-minded youth named Primitivo Aguilar. Primitivo had been hired to open and shut gates, to tie up the harness when it broke, and to keep watch over wagon and mules at night, because bandits were reported to infest the roads.
The country became a vast fertile plain, cut up by irrigating ditches which were overshadowed by long lines of great alamo trees, leafless and gray as ashes. Like a furnace door, the white-hot sun blazed upon us, and the far-stretched barren fields reeked a thin mist. A cloud of white dust moved with us and around us. By the church of the Hacienda San Pedro we stopped and dickered with an aged peon for a sack of corn and straw for the mules. Farther along was an exquisite low building of pink plaster, set back from the road in a grove of green willows. “That?” said Antonio. “Oh, that is nothing but a flour mill.” We had lunch in the long whitewashed, dirt-floored room of a peon’s house at another great hacienda, whose name I forget, but which I know had once belonged to Luis Terrazzas and was now the confiscated property of the Constitutionalist government. And that night we made camp beside an irrigation ditch miles from any house, in the middle of the bandit territory.
After a dinner of chopped-up meat and peppers, tortillas, beans and black coffee, Antonio and I gave Primitivo his instructions. He was to keep watch beside the fire with Antonio’s revolver and, if he heard anything, was to wake us. But on no account was he to go to sleep. If he did we would kill him. Primitivo said, “Si, señor,” very gravely, opened his eyes wide, and gripped the pistol. Antonio and I rolled up in our blankets by the fire.
I must have gone to sleep at once, because when I was wakened by Antonio’s rising, my watch showed only half an hour later. From the place where Primitivo had been placed on guard came a series of hearty snores. The lieutenant walked over to him.
“Primitivo!” he said.
No answer.
“Primitivo, you fool!” Our sentinel stirred in his sleep and turned over with noises indicative of comfort.
“Primitivo!” shouted Antonio, violently kicking him.
He gave absolutely no response.
Antonio drew back and launched a kick at his back that lifted him several feet into the air. With a start Primitivo woke. He started up alertly, waving the revolver.
“Quien vive?” cried Primitivo.
The next day took us out of the lowlands. We entered the desert, winding over a series of rolling plains, sandy and covered with black mesquite and here and there an occasional cactus. Now we began to see beside the road those sinister little wooden crosses that the country people erect on the spot where some man died a violent death. Around the horizon barren purple mountains hemmed us in. To the right, across a vast dry valley, a white and green and gray hacienda stood like a city. An hour later we passed the first of those great fortified square ranchos that one comes across once a day lost in the folds of this tremendous country. Night gathered straight above in the cloudless zenith, while all the skyline still was luminous with clear light, and then the day snuffed out, and stars burst out in the dome of heaven like a rocket. Antonio and Primitivo, in that queer harsh Mexican harmony which sounds like nothing so much as a fiddle with frazzled strings, sang “Esperanza” as we jogged along. It grew cold. For leagues and leagues around was a blasted land, a country of death. It was hours since we had passed a house.
Antonio claimed to know of a water-hole somewhere vaguely ahead. But toward midnight, which was black and without moon, we discovered that the road upon which we were traveling suddenly petered out in a dense mesquite thicket. Somewhere we had turned off the Camino Real. It was late and the mules were worn out. There seemed nothing for it but a “dry camp,” for so far as we knew there was no water anywhere near.
Now we had unharnessed the mules and fed them, and were lighting our fire, when somewhere in the dense thicket of chaparral stealthy footsteps sounded. They moved a space and then were still. Our little blaze of greasewood crackled fiercely, lighting up a leaping, glowing radius of about ten feet. Beyond that all was black. Primitivo made one backward leap into the shelter of the wagon; Antonio drew his revolver, and we froze beside the fire. The sound came again.
“Who lives?” said Antonio. There was a little shuffling noise out in the brush, and then a voice.
“What party are you?” it asked hesitantly.
“Maderistas,” answered Antonio. “Pass!”
“It is safe for pacificos?” queried the invisible one.
“On my word,” I cried. “Come out that we may see you.”
At that very moment two vague shapes materialized on the edge of the firelight glow, almost without a sound—two peons, we saw as soon as they came close, wrapped tightly in their torn blankets. One was an old, wrinkled, bent man wearing homemade sandals, his trousers hanging in rags upon his shrunken legs; the other a very tall, barefooted youth, with a face so pure and so simple as to almost verge upon idiocy. Friendly, warm as sunlight, eagerly curious as children, they came forward, holding out their hands. We shook hands with each of them in turn, greeting them with elaborate Mexican courtesy.
“Good evening, friend. How are you?”
“Very well, gracias. And you?”
“Well, gracias. And how are all your people?”
“Well, thanks. And yours?”
“Well, thanks. What have you of new here?”
“Nada. Nothing. And you?”
“Nothing. Sit down.”
“Oh, thanks, but I am well standing.”
“Sit down. Sit down.”
“A thousand thanks. Excuse us for a moment.”
They smiled and faded away once more into the thicket. In a minute they reappeared, with great armfuls of dried mesquite branches for our fire.
“We are rancheros,” said the elder, bowing. “We keep a few goats, and our houses are at your orders, and our corrals for your mules, and our small stock of corn. Our ranchitos are very near here in the mesquite. We are very poor men, but we hope you will do us the honor of accepting our hospitality.” It was an occasion for tact.
“A thousand times many thanks,” said Antonio politely, “but we are, unfortunately, in great haste and must leave early. We would not like to disturb your household at that hour.”
They protested that their families and their houses were entirely ours, to be used as we saw fit with the greatest delight on their part. I do not remember how we finally managed to evade the invitation without wounding them, but I do recall that it took half an hour of courteous talking. For we knew, in the first place, that we would be unable to leave for hours in the morning if we accepted, because Mexican manners are that haste to leave a house signifies dissatisfaction with the entertainment; and then, too, one could not pay for one’s lodging, but would have to bestow a handsome present upon the hosts—which we could none of us afford.
At first they politely refused our invitation to dine, but after much urging we finally persuaded them to accept a few tortillas and chile. It was ludicrous and pitiful to see how wretchedly hungry they were, and how they attempted to conceal it from us.
After dinner, when they had brought us a bucket of water out of sheer kindly thoughtfulness, they stood for a while by our fire, smoking our cigarettes and holding out their hands to the blaze. I remember how their serapes hung from their shoulders, open in front so the grateful warmth could reach their thin bodies—and how gnarled and ancient were the old man’s outstretched hands, and how the ruddy light glowed upon the other’s throat, and kindled fires in his big eyes. Around them stretched the desert, held off only by our fire, ready to spring in upon us when it should die. Above the great stars would not dim. Coyotes wailed somewhere out beyond the firelight like demons in pain. I suddenly conceived these two human beings as symbols of Mexico—courteous, loving, patient, poor, so long slaves, so full of dreams, so soon to be free.
“When we saw your wagon coming here,” said the old man, smiling, “our hearts sank within us. We thought you were soldiers, come, perhaps, to take away our last few goats. So many soldiers have come in the last few years—so many. It is mostly the Federals—the Maderistas do not come unless they are hungry themselves. Poor Maderistas!”
“Ay,” said the young man, “my brother that I loved very much died in the eleven days’ fighting around Torreon. Thousands have died in Mexico, and still more thousands shall fall. Three years—it is long for war in a land. Too long!” The old man murmured, “Valgame Dios!” and shook his head. “But, there shall come a day——”
“It is said,” remarked the old man quaveringly, “that the United States of the North covets our country—that Gringo soldiers will come and take away my goats in the end....”
“That is a lie,” exclaimed the other, animated. “It is the rich Americanos who want to rob us, just as the rich Mexicans want to rob us. It is the rich all over the world who want to rob the poor.”
The old man shivered and drew his wasted body nearer to the fire. “I have often wondered,” said he mildly, “why the rich, having so much, want so much. The poor, who have nothing, want so very little. Just a few goats....”
His compadre lifted his chin like a noble, smiling gently. “I have never been out of this little country here—not even to Jimenez,” he said. “But they tell me that there are many rich lands to the north and south and east. But this is my land and I love it. For the years of me, and my father and my grandfather, the rich men have gathered the corn and held it in their clenched fists before our mouths. And only blood will make them open their hands to their brothers.”
The fire died down. At his post slept the alert Primitivo. Antonio stared into the embers, a faint glorified smile upon his mouth, his eyes shining like stars.
“Adio!” he said suddenly, as one who sees a vision. “When we get into Mexico City what a baile shall be held! How drunk I shall get!...”