The years have not lessened Don César’s admiration of the natural beauty of this estate set on the border between the states of Durango and Chihuahua, a beauty the more remarkable for being at the southern edge of a vast desertland that includes a portion of the Bolson de Mapimí, perhaps the meanest desert of the earth’s western side. The hacienda’s beauty is as remarkable as the fact of its having survived the rage of the Revolution.
The bastard Revolution! A year before its outbreak, Don César had been a thirty-five-year-old captain in command of a company of Guardia Rural—the fearsome national mounted police of President Porfirio Díaz—and he had earned the lasting personal gratitude of Don Porfirio for his company’s heroic rescue of the president’s niece and her party of travelers besieged at a desolate Durango outpost by a band of Yaqui marauders. Captain Calveras and his men had killed a dozen of the savages and captured ten, including their chief. But one of the travelers had received a fatal wound and a pregnant woman among them had miscarried. Hence, rather than send the captives to the henequen plantations in the Yucatán as was customary, Captain Calveras hanged them in the nearest village square—all but the chief, whom he executed by tying one of the Indian’s legs to one horse and the other leg to another and then lashing the horses into a sprint in opposite directions. He telegraphed his report to the headquarters office at Hermosillo and by day’s end he received notice of Don Porfirio’s appreciation and of an immediate promotion to the rank of comandante.
Two months later, in still another battle with still other Yaquis, Comandante Calveras took an arrow through a thigh and up into the hip. It was three days before he could present himself to a surgeon and by then the infection was so deeply rooted that the surgeon spoke of amputation of the entire leg. The comandante rejected that procedure with a promise that if he should awaken from the surgery without his leg he would hang the doctor. He survived the operation with the leg intact but the hip was in permanent ruin. He would evermore walk with a limp and he could no longer sit a horse for more than a few minutes before the pain became excruciating. He was offered the command of a regional rurales headquarters but he disdained desk jobs and instead chose to retire. Though the decision delighted his wife and children, it was a difficult one, for he had been in the rurales since the age of sixteen, when he had turned his back on his father’s patrimony—a hacienda and vast cattle ranch in Zacatecas state—and enlisted in the national police.
On the day of his retirement he was received in the National Palace by Don Porfirio himself, who presented him with an unexpected prize—the title to La Hacienda de Las Cadenas, an estate which until recently had belonged to a political rival of the Porfiriato. The president slid the ornately embossed paper across the polished desktop and told Comandante Calveras to consider it a spoil of war, the sweetest of life’s possessions. But a man with title to a hacienda, Don Porfirio said, should of course have the means to maintain the place, and so he also awarded the comandante a trunk filled with silver specie, a prize of such weight that it required three strong men to load it onto the transport wagon. Comandante Calveras had by then already amassed a considerable sum of money by means of the rurales’ right to confiscate the assets of fugitives and of killed or convicted criminals—a sum which, together with el presidente’s cash award, now amounted to a small fortune.
But eight months after Don César’s retirement, there came the Revolution—and before another year passed, Porfirio Díaz was exiled in Paris, never to return.
The memory of the Revolution taints Don César’s tongue with the taste of blood. The name of “Revolution” was entirely undeserved by that lunatic decade of national riot and rampage by misbegotten Indian brutes and primitive bastard half-castes. The shit-blooded whoresons had razed his father’s hacienda and crucified the man on the front door of the casa grande before setting the house aflame. A few months afterward they murdered Don César’s own family as well. By means of an exorbitant bribe, Don César had secured passage for his wife and three children (his angelic trio of blond daughters!) aboard a federal troop-and-munitions train bound for Juárez, from where his beloveds were to cross the river to refuge in El Paso. But just south of Samalayuca, a bare forty miles from the border, the track under the train was dynamited.
The handful of survivors told of the slew and crash and tumble of the railcars one upon the other, the hellish screams, the great screeching and sparkings of iron, the explosions of the munitions that the rebels had desired for themselves but in their incompetence destroyed along with the train. (“Viva Villa!” they shouted—“Viva Villa!”—even as they looted the wreckage and the dead and robbed the survivors.) Don César had traveled to Samalayuca and was able to identify his daughters’ remains by their diminutive forms and take them back for burial at Las Cadenas, but his wife was unrecognizable among the array of charred and mutilated corpses and she was interred with the others in a mass grave.
In the years to follow he had endured the loss of his family as he endured the abuses and indignations of one raiding pack of mongrels after another, each calling itself an army of the Revolution and each claiming the sanctioning ideal of liberty—a word not one in every hundred of them owned the literacy to recognize in print. He had withstood the sudden emptiness in his life as he had withstood the degradations to his estate, his great house, his fields, his person, the spit in his face, the ridicule of his crippled leg. He endured their insults, their laughter, the ceaseless threats to shoot him, hang him, quarter him, burn him alive, endured it all with indifference. How could their threats of death make him afraid? Only a man with desire to live could be made afraid of death.
But one of them had perceived the truth of his lack of fear—the leader of one of the first gangs of invaders to arrive at Las Cadenas, the one they called El Carnicero and whose revolver muzzle had pressed to Don César’s forehead as the man asked if he had a last word. A large man whom he would hear described by some as handsome in spite of his dusky mestizo hide, his face hard but smooth-featured, his eyes black as open graves and untouched by his mustached smile. Don César stared hard into those eyes and waited for the blast to end his misery. But then the brute laughed and took the gun from his head.
You’re not afraid, the man said. You’re only miserable. You want to die, don’t you, patrón? Why is that, I wonder.
The man put a hand on Don César’s shoulder and leaned close to him in the fashion of a commiserating intimate. They tell me you were a comandante of rurales, patrón. Is that how your leg came to be maimed? Ay, what a hard life that must have been, the rurales. Tell me, patrón, has life been cruel to you? Have you been robbed of your possessions, of your comforts? Have you lost loved ones? Does your fine hidalgo mind hold memories too horrible to bear? Ay, don’t tell me, patrón…have you suffered injustice?
Some among the mob of onlooking peons snickered and some laughed outright and some called out to El Carnicero to shoot the gachupín son of a bitch. They who an hour before would have cowered in Don César’s presence, who would have obeyed his every command without hesitation and were ever in fear of displeasing him, they now laughed at him oh so bravely. How they had hastened to show their whip and branding scars—as if they hadn’t deserved them!—to this murderer, this notorious executioner and infamous right hand of Pancho Villa the bandit, Villa the mad dog, the king of all half-caste whoresons. Yet some few of the spectators wept in their witness of Don César’s ordeal.