“I’ve been thinking, Grandfather, about what you told me about Villa and his guard.”
“And I’ve been thinking about your answer, Plutarco. You may be right. God knows, there’re times we miss our friends. Mine have been dying off, all of them. And no one can take their place. When the friends you’ve lived with and fought with die, you’re all alone, flat out alone.”
“You remember times when there were real men, I never get tired of hearing about them.”
“Well, you’re my friend, aren’t you? But it isn’t the same.”
“Why not pretend I was with you in the Revolution, Grandfather? Pretend that I…”
I was overcome with a strange embarrassment, and the old man sitting in the tub, all soaped up a second time, lifted his sudsy eyebrows quizzically. Then he took my hand in his wet one and pressed it hard, before brusquely changing the subject.
“What’s your old man up to, Plutarco?”
“Who knows? He never tells me anything. You know that, Grandfather.”
“He’s never been one to be impudent. I tell you it pleased me how he talked back to me at supper.”
The General laughed and slapped the water. He told me my father had always been a lazy bastard who’d had everything served to him on a silver platter and who’d been lucky to find himself with a decent living when General Cardenas had swept Calles’s supporters out of government. As he washed his hair, Grandfather told how until then he’d lived off his salary as a government official. But Cardenas had forced him to look elsewhere for income, to make his living in business. The haciendas, the old agricultural estates, weren’t producing. The peasants had burned them down before going off to fight. He said that while Cardenas was reapportioning the land, someone had to produce. So Calles’s supporters had got together as small landowners and bought up the bits and pieces of the haciendas not affected by the land distribution.
“We sowed cane in Morelos, tomatoes in Sinaloa, and cotton in Coahuila. The country could eat and clothe itself while Cardenas was setting up communal land holdings, which never caught on because what every man wants is his own little plot of land, registered in his own name, see? I was the one that got things rolling, your father just took over the management as I got older. He’d do well to remember that when he gets feisty with me. But I swear I enjoyed it. He must be growing a little backbone. What’s he got on his mind?”
I shrugged. I’d never been interested in business or politics. Where was the risk and adventure there? Where a risk comparable to what my grandfather had lived through early in his life? Those were the things that interested me.
Compared to the jumble of photographs of revolutionary leaders, the picture of my grandmother Doña Clotilde is something apart. She has a whole wall to herself, and a table with a vase filled with daisies. I think if Grandfather were a believer he’d have put candles there, too. The frame is oval and the photograph is signed by the photographer, Gutierrez, 1915, Guanajuato. This ancient young woman who was my grandmother looks like a little doll. The photographer had tinted the photograph a pale rose, and only the lips and cheeks of Doña Clotilde glow in a mixture of shyness and sensuality. Did she really look like that?
“Like something out of a fairy tale,” the General says to me. “Her mother died when she was a baby, and Villa shot her father because he was a moneylender. Wherever he went, Villa canceled the debts of the poor. But he didn’t stop at that. He ordered the moneylenders shot, to teach them a lesson. I think the only one who learned the lesson was my poor Clotilde. I carried away an orphan who was happy to accept the first man who offered his protection. There were lots of orphan girls in that part of the country who to survive ended up as whores for the soldiers or, if they were lucky, vaudeville entertainers. Later she came to love me very much.”
“And did you always love her?”
Grandfather, deep in his bedcovers, nodded.
“You didn’t take advantage of her, just because she couldn’t protect herself?”
He glared at me and abruptly cut off the light. I felt ridiculous, sitting in the darkness, rocking in the wicker chair. For a while the only sound was the noise of the chair. Then I got up and started to tiptoe out without saying good night. But I was stopped by a single painful vision. I saw my grandfather lying there dead. One morning we’d wake up and he’d be dead, it was bound to happen, and I’d never be able to tell him I loved him, never again. He’d grow cold, and my words, too.
I ran to him in the darkness and said to him: “I love you very much, Grandfather.”
“That’s good, boy. The same goes for me.”
“Listen, I don’t want to have everything served to me on a silver platter like you say.”
“Can’t be helped. Everything’s in my name. Your father just manages it. When I die, I’m leaving everything to you.”
“I don’t want it, Grandfather; Grandfather, I want to begin from the beginning, the way you did…”
“Times are different, what do you think you could do now?”
I half smiled. “I wish I could have castrated someone, like you did.”
“Do they still tell that story? Well, yes, that’s the way it was. Except that I didn’t make that decision by myself, you know.”
“You gave the order, cut off his balls, and I mean yesterday!”
Grandfather patted me on the head and said no one knows how such decisions are made, they’re never made by one man alone. He remembered one night by the light of the bonfires, on the outskirts of Gómez Palacio before the battle of Torreón. The man who’d insulted him was a prisoner, and he was a traitor besides.
“He’d been one of us. He went over to the Federales and told them how many we were and what arms we had. My men would have killed him anyway. I just beat them to it. It was every man’s will. And then it became mine. He gave me the opportunity when he insulted me. Now they tell that colorful story, ah, what a bastard that General Vergara was, Old General Balls himself. Sí, señor. No, oh, no. It wasn’t that simple. They’d have killed him anyway, and rightly so, because he was a traitor. But he was a prisoner of war, too. And that’s a question of military honor as I see it, boy. No matter how bad the fellow was, he was still a prisoner of war. I kept my men from killing him. I think killing him would have dishonored them. But I wouldn’t have been able to stop them. And that would have dishonored me. My decision was theirs and theirs was mine. That’s the way things happen. There’s no way of telling where your will ends and your men’s begins.”
“I came back to tell you I wish I’d been born at the same time as you and could have ridden with you.”
“It wasn’t a pretty spectacle, oh no. That man bleeding to death till the dawn rose over the dust of the desert. Then the sun ate him up and the buzzards held his wake. We left that place knowing secretly that what we’d done we’d done together. But if they’d done it and not me, I wouldn’t be the leader and they wouldn’t feel easy going into battle. There’s nothing worse than looking a poor solitary bastard in the eye and killing him just before you kill a lot of faceless men whose eyes yours will never meet. But that’s the way it is.”
“Oh, Grandfather, how I wish…”
“Don’t get your hopes up. There’ll never be another revolution like that in Mexico! That kind only happens once.”