Chapter IV La Tropa on the March
And so I got inside the coach, with Rafaelito, Pablo Seañes, and his mistress. She was a strange creature. Young, slender, and beautiful, she was poison and a stone to everybody but Pablo. I never saw her smile and never heard her say a gentle word. Sometimes she treated us with dull ferocity; sometimes with bestial indifference. But Pablo she cradled like a baby. When he lay across the seat with his head in her lap, she would hug it fiercely to her breast, making noises like a tigress with her young.
Patricio handed down his guitar from the box, where he kept it, and to Rafael’s accompaniment the Lieutenant-Colonel sang love-ballads in a cracked voice. Every Mexican knows hundreds of these. They are not written down, but often composed extemporaneously, and handed along by word of mouth. Some of them are very beautiful, some grotesque, and others as satirical as any French popular song. He sang:
“Exiled I wandered through the world—
Exiled by the government.
I came back at the end of the year,
Drawn by the fondness of love.
I went away with the purpose
Of staying away forever.
And the love of a woman was the only thing
That made me come back.”
And then “Los Hijos de la Noche”:
“I am of the children of the night
Who wander aimlessly in the darkness.
The beautiful moon with its golden rays
Is the companion of my sorrows.
“I am going to lose myself from thee,
Exhausted with weeping;
I am going sailing, sailing,
By the shores of the sea.
“You will see at the time of our parting
I will not allow you to love another.
For if so it should be, I would ruin your face.
And many blows we would give one another.
“So I am going to become an American.
Go with God, Antonia.
Say farewell to my friends.
O may the Americans allow me to pass
And open a saloon
On the other side of the River!”
The Hacienda of El Centro turned out to give us lunch. And there Fidencio offered me his horse to ride for the afternoon.
The Tropa had already ridden on ahead, and I could see them, strung out for half a mile in the black mesquite brush, the tiny red-white-and-green flag bobbing at their head. The mountains had withdrawn somewhere beyond the horizon, and we rode in the midst of a great bowl of desert, rolling up at the edges to meet the furnace-blue of the Mexican sky. Now that I was out of the coach, a great silence, and a peace beyond anything I ever felt, wrapped me around. It is almost impossible to get objective about the desert; you sink into it,—become a part of it. Galloping along, I soon caught up with the Tropa.
“Aye, meester!” they shouted. “Here comes meester on a horse! Que tal, meester? How goes it? Are you going to fight with us?”
But Captain Fernando at the head of the column turned and roared: “Come here, meester!” The big man was grinning with delight. “You shall ride with me,” he shouted, clapping me on the back. “Drink, now,” and he produced a bottle of sotol about half full. “Drink it all. Show you’re a man.” “It’s too much,” I laughed. “Drink it,” yelled the chorus as the Tropa crowded up to see. I drank it. A howl of laughter and applause went up. Fernando leaned over and gripped my hand. “Good for you, compañero!” he bellowed, rolling with mirth. The men crowded around, amused and interested. Was I going to fight with them? Where did I come from? What was I doing? Most of them had never heard of reporters, and one hazarded the opinion darkly that I was a Gringo and a Porfirista, and ought to be shot.
The rest, however, were entirely opposed to this view. No Porfirista would possibly drink that much sotol at a gulp. Isidro Amayo declared that he had been in a brigade in the first Revolution which was accompanied by a reporter, and that he was called Corresponsal de Guerra. Did I like Mexico? I said: “I am very fond of Mexico. I like Mexicans too. And I like sotol, aguardiente, mescal, tequila, pulque, and other Mexican customs!” They shouted with laughter.
Captain Fernando leaned over and patted my arm. “Now you are with the men (los hombres.) When we win the Revolucion it will be a government by the men,—not by the rich. We are riding over the lands of the men. They used to belong to the rich, but now they belong to me and to the compañeros.”
“And you will be the army?” I asked.
“When the Revolucion is won,” was the astonishing reply, “there will be no more army. The men are sick of armies. It is by armies that Don Porfirio robbed us.”
“But if the United States should invade Mexico?”
A perfect storm broke everywhere. “We are more valiente than the Americanos—The cursed Gringos would get no further south than Juarez—Let’s see them try it—We’d drive them back over the Border on the run, and burn their capital the next day...!”
“No,” said Fernando, “you have more money and more soldiers. But the men would protect us. We need no army. The men would be fighting for their houses and their women.”
“What are you fighting for?” I asked. Juan Sanchez, the color-bearer, looked at me curiously. “Why, it is good, fighting. You don’t have to work in the mines...!”
Manuel Paredes said: “We are fighting to restore Francisco I. Madero to the Presidency.” This extraordinary statement is printed in the program of the Revolution. And everywhere the Constitutionalist soldiers are known as “Maderistas.” “I knew him,” continued Manuel, slowly. “He was always laughing, always.”
“Yes,” said another, “whenever there was any trouble with a man, and all the rest wanted to fight him or put him in prison, Pancho Madero said: ‘Just let me talk to him a few minutes. I can bring him around.’”
“He loved bailes,” an Indian said. “Many a time I’ve seen him dance all night, and all the next day, and the next night. He used to come to the great Haciendas and make speeches. When he began the peons hated him; when he ended they were crying....”
Here a man broke out into a droning, irregular tune, such as always accompanies the popular ballads that spring up in thousands on every occasion:
“In Nineteen hundred and ten
Madero was imprisoned
In the National Palace
The eighteenth of February
“Four days he was imprisoned
In the Hall of the Intendancy
Because he did not wish
To renounce the Presidency
“Then Blanquet and Felix Diaz
Martyred him there
They were the hangmen
Feeding on his hate.
“They crushed....
Until he fainted
With play of cruelty
To make him resign.
“Then with hot irons
They burned him without mercy
And only unconsciousness
Calmed the awful flames.
“But it was all in vain
Because his mighty courage
Preferred rather to die
His was a great heart!
“This was the end of the life
Of him who was the redeemer
Of the Indian Republic
And of all the poor.
“They took him out of the Palace
And tell us he was killed in an assault
What a cynicism!
What a shameless lie!
“O Street of Lecumberri
Your cheerfulness has ended forever
For through you passed Madero
To the Penitentiary.
“That twenty-second of February
Will always be remembered in the Indian Republic.
God has pardoned him
And the Virgin of Guadelupe.
“Good-bye Beautiful Mexico
Where our leader died
Good-bye to the palace
Whence he issued a living corpse
“Señores, there is nothing eternal
Nor anything sincere in life
See what happened to Don Francisco I. Madero!’
By the time he was half-way through, the entire Tropa was humming the tune, and when he finished there was a moment of jingling silence.
“We are fighting,” said Isidro Amayo, “for Libertad.”
“What do you mean by Libertad?”
“Libertad is when I can do what I want!”
“But suppose it hurts somebody else?”
He shot back at me Benito Juarez’ great sentence:
“Peace is the respect for the rights of others!”
I wasn’t prepared for that. It startled me, this barefooted meztizo’s conception of Liberty. I submit that it is the only correct definition of Liberty—to do what I want to! Americans quote it to me triumphantly as an instance of Mexican irresponsibility. But I think it is a better definition than ours—Liberty is the right to do what the Courts want. Every Mexican schoolboy knows the definition of peace and seems to understand pretty well what it means, too. But, they say, Mexicans don’t want peace. That is a lie, and a foolish one. Let Americans take the trouble to go through the Maderista army, asking whether they want peace or not! The people are sick of war.
But, just to be square, I’ll have to report Juan Sanchez’ remark:
“Is there war in the United States now?” he asked.
“No,” I said untruthfully.
“No war at all?” He meditated for a moment. “How do you pass the time, then...?”
Just about then somebody saw a coyote sneaking through the brush, and the entire Tropa gave chase with a whoop. They scattered rollicking over the desert, the late sun flashing from cartridge-belts and spurs, the ends of their bright serapes flying out behind. Beyond them, the scorched world sloped gently up, and a range of far lilac mountains jumped in the heat waves like a bucking horse. By here, if tradition is right, passed the steel-armored Spaniards in their search for gold, a blaze of crimson and silver that has left the desert cold and dull ever since. And, topping a rise, we came upon the first sight of the Hacienda of La Mimbrera, a walled enclosure of houses strong enough to stand a siege, stretching steeply down a hill, with the magnificent Casa Grande at the top.
In front of this house, which had been sacked and burned by Orozco’s General, Che Che Campa, two years before, the coach was drawn up. A huge fire had been kindled, and ten compañeros were slaughtering sheep. Into the red glare of the firelight they staggered, with the struggling, squealing sheep in their arms, its blood fountaining upon the ground, shining in the fierce light like something phosphorescent.
The officers and I dined in the house of the administrador Don Jesus, the most beautiful specimen of manhood I have ever seen. He was much over six feet tall, slender, white-skinned—a pure Spanish type of the highest breed. At one end of his dining-room, I remember, hung a placard embroidered in red, white and green: “Viva Mexico!” and at the other, a second, which read: “Viva Jesus!”
It was after dinner, as I stood at the fire, wondering where I was to sleep, that Captain Fernando touched me on the arm.
“Will you sleep with the compañeros?”
We walked across the great open square, in the furious light of the desert stars, to a stone store-house set apart. Inside, a few candles stuck against the wall illumined the rifles stacked in the corners, the saddles on the floor, and the blanket-rolled compañeros with their heads on them. One or two were awake, talking and smoking. In a corner, three sat muffled in their serapes, playing cards. Five or six had voices and a guitar. They were singing “Pascual Orozco,” beginning:
“They say that Pascual Orozco has turned his coat
Because Don Terrazzas seduced him;
They gave him many millions and they bought him
And sent him to overthrow the government.
“Orozco believed it
And to the war he went;
But the Maderista cannon
Was his calamity.
“If to thy window shall come Porfirio Diaz,
Give him for charity some cold tortillas;
If to thy window shall come General Huerta,
Spit in his face and slam the door.
“If to thy window shall come Inez Salazar,
Lock your trunk so that he can’t steal;
If to thy window shall come Maclovio Herrera,
Give him dinner and put the cloth on the table.”
They didn’t distinguish me at first, but soon one of the card-players said: “Here comes Meester!” At that the others roused, and woke the rest. “That’s right—it’s good to sleep with the hombres—take this place, amigo—here’s my saddle—here there is no crookedness—here a man goes straight....”
“May you pass a happy night, compañero,” they said. “Till morning, then.”
Pretty soon somebody shut the door. The room became full of smoke and fetid with human breath. What little silence was left from the chorus of snoring was entirely obliterated by the singing, which kept up, I guess, until dawn. The compañeros had fleas....
But I rolled up in my blankets and lay down upon the concrete floor very happily. And I slept better than I had before in Mexico.
At dawn we were in the saddle, larking up a steep roll of barren desert to get warm. It was bitter cold. The Tropa were wrapped in serapes up to their eyes, so that they looked like colored toadstools under their great sombreros. The level rays of the sun, burning as they fell upon my face, caught them unaware, glorifying the serapes to more brilliant colors than they possessed. Isidro Amayo’s was of deep blue and yellow spirals; Juan Sanchez had one brick red, Captain Fernando’s was green and cerise; against them flashed a purple and black zigzag pattern....
We looked back to see the coach pulled to a stop, and Patricio waving to us. Two of the mules had given out, raw from the traces, and tottering with the fatigue of the last two days. The Tropa scattered to look for mules. Soon they came back, driving two great beautiful animals that had never seen harness. No sooner had they smelled the coach than they made a desperate break for freedom. And now the Tropa instantly went back to their native profession—they became vaqueros. It was a pretty sight, the rope-coils swinging in the air, the sudden snake-like shoot of the loops, the little horses bracing themselves against the shock of the running mule. Those mules were demons. Time after time they broke the riatas; twice they overturned horse and rider. Pablo came to the rescue. He got on Sabas’s horse, drove in the spurs, and went after one mule. In three minutes he had roped him by the leg, thrown him, and tied him. Then he took the second with equal dispatch. It was not for nothing that Pablo was Lieutenant-Colonel at twenty-six. Not only could he fight better than his men, but he could ride better, rope better, shoot better, chop wood better, and dance better.
The mules’ legs were tied, and they were dragged with ropes to the coach, where the harness was slipped on them in spite of their frantic struggles. When all was ready, Patricio got on the box, seized the whip, and told us to cut away. The wild animals scrambled to their feet, bucking and squealing. Above the uproar came the crack of the heavy whip, and Patricio’s bellow: “Andale! Ujos de la Gran’ Ch——!” and they jerked forward, running, the big coach taking the arroyos like an express train. Soon it vanished behind its own pall of dust, and appeared hours afterward, crawling up the side of a great hill, miles away....
Panchito was eleven years old, already a trooper with a rifle too heavy for him, and a horse that they had to lift him on. His compadre was Victoriano, a veteran of fourteen. Seven others of the Tropa were under seventeen. And there was a sullen, Indian-faced woman, riding side-saddle, who wore two cartridge-belts. She rode with the hombres—slept with them in the cuartels.
“Why are you fighting?” I asked her.
She jerked her head toward the fierce figure of Julian Reyes.
“Because he is,” she answered. “He who stands under a good tree is sheltered by a good shade.”
“A good rooster will crow in any chicken-coop,” capped Isidro.
“A parrot is green all over,” chimed in someone else.
“Faces we see, but hearts we do not comprehend,” said José, sentimentally.
At noon we roped a steer, and cut his throat. And because there was no time to build a fire, we ripped the meat from the carcase and ate it raw.
“Oiga, meester,” shouted José. “Do the United States soldiers eat raw meat?”
I said I didn’t think they did.
“It is good for the hombres. In the campaign we have no time for anything but carne crudo. It makes us brave.”
By late afternoon we had caught up with the coach, and galloped with it down through the dry arroyo and up through the other side, past the great ribota court that flanks the Hacienda of La Zarca. Unlike La Mimbrera, the Casa Grande here stands on a level place, with the peons’ houses in long rows at its flanks, and a flat desert barren of chaparral for twenty miles in front. Che Che Campa also paid a visit to La Zarca. The big house is a black and gaping ruin.