Burnt Water

  “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.”

  “And what about me, Grandfather?”

  “I feel sorry for you, boy, here, hug me tight, son, I understand, I swear I understand … I’d give a lot to be young again and be with you! What hell we’d stir up, Plutarco, you and me together, ummmm, sonofabitch!”

  * * *

  I seldom spoke with my father the lawyer. I’ve already said that the three of us only got together for supper and the General had the leading role there. But occasionally my father would call me to his study to ask me how I was getting along in school, what grades I was getting, what career I intended to follow. If I’d told him I didn’t know, that I was spending my time reading novels, that I’d like to go to some
far-off world like Michel Strogoff’s Siberia or d’Artagnan’s France, that I would much rather know what I could never be than what I wanted to be, my father wouldn’t have reprimanded me, he wouldn’t even have been disappointed. He simply wouldn’t have understood. I knew all too well his perplexed look when I said something that completely escaped him. That pained me more than it did him.

  “I think I’ll study law, Father.”

  “That’s good, that’s a good choice. But then you should specialize in business. Would you like to go to Harvard Business School? It’s difficult to get in, but I can pull a few strings.”

  I didn’t disabuse him, and stood staring at the volumes in his library, all identically bound in red. There was nothing interesting there except a complete set of the Official Register, which always begins with announcements of foreign decorations, China’s Order of the Celestial Star; the medal of the Liberator, Simon Bolivar; the French Legion of Honor. Only when my father is away do I dare creep like a spy into his carpeted, paneled bedroom. There isn’t a single personal memento, not even a photograph of my mother. She died when I was five, and I don’t remember her. Once a year, on the tenth of May, the three of us go to the French Cemetery, where my grandmother Clotilde and my mother, Evangelina was her name, lie buried side by side. I was thirteen when one of my classmates at the Revolution High School showed me a photograph of a girl in a bathing suit. It was the first time I’d ever felt a twinge of excitement. Like Doña Clotilde in her photograph, I felt pleasure and shame at the same time. I blushed and my classmate, guffawing, said, Be my guest, it’s your mommy. A band of silk crosses the breast of the girl in the snapshot, tying at her hip. The legend reads “Queen of the Mazatlán Carnival.” “My father says your old lady was quite a piece,” my schoolmate said, bellowing with laughter.

  “What was my mother like, Grandfather?”

  “Beautiful, Plutarco. Too beautiful.”

  “Why aren’t there any pictures of her in the house?”

  “Too painful.”

  “I don’t want to be left out of the pain, Grandfather.”

  The General looked at me very strangely when I said that. How could I forget that look and my words that famous night when I was awakened by loud voices in a house where never a sound is heard once my father finishes his dinner and drives off in his Lincoln Continental, to return early the next morning, about six, to bathe and shave and breakfast in his pajamas, as if he’d spent the night in the house. Who was he fooling? Every once in a while I saw his picture in the society section of the paper, always in the company of a rich widow, fiftyish like him, but he could be seen with her. I never got any farther than a whorehouse on Saturday nights, alone, with no friends. I would have liked a relationship with a real lady, mature, like my father’s lover, not the “proper” girls you met at parties given by other families, filthy rich like us. Where was my Clotilde to rescue, to protect, to teach, to love me? What was Evangelina like? I dreamed about her in her white satin Jantzen bathing suit.

  I was dreaming about my mother when I was awakened by voices shattering the normal routine of the house. I sat up in bed and instinctively pulled on my socks so I could creep downstairs without making any noise. Of course, in my dream I’d heard Grandfather shuffling along the corridor, it hadn’t been a dream, it was real, no, I was the only one in this house who knew that dreams are real. That’s what I was thinking as I moved noiselessly toward the living room; the voices were coming from there. The Revolution wasn’t real, it was my grandfather’s dream, my mother wasn’t real, she was my dream, and that’s why they were true. Only my father never dreamed, that’s why he lived a lie.

  * * *

  Lies, lies, my grandfather was shouting. I stopped just outside the living room and hid behind the life-size reproduction of the Victory of Samothrace the decorator had placed there as a guardian goddess of our hearth—the living room that no one ever entered. It was for show; not a footprint, not a cigarette butt, not a single coffee stain. And now it was the scene of this midnight battle between my grandfather and my father, who were shouting at each other, my grandfather the General in a voice you can imagine ordering, Cut off his balls, and I mean yesterday, blast him, shoot him, first we’ll kill him and then we’ll make inquiries, Old General Balls himself; my father the lawyer in a voice I’d never heard before.

  I imagined that Grandfather, in spite of his anger, was enjoying the fact that his son was finally talking back to him. He was dressing him down the way he would a drunken corporal: had he had a whip in his hand, he’d have left a crossword puzzle on my father’s face, there’s nothing lower than a sonofabitch like you. And my father to the General: You’re an old bastard. And my grandfather: There’s only one bastard in this family, he’d turned over a solid, honest fortune to him, all he’d asked was for him to manage it with the help of the best lawyers and accountants, all he had to do was sign his name and collect the income, put a little in the bank and reinvest a little, what did he mean there was nothing left? Get off it, you old bastard, get off it, at least I won’t go to prison, I never signed anything, I was cagey as hell, I let the lawyers and the accountants sign everything for me, at least I can say that everything was done behind my back, though I’ll accept the responsibility for the debts, even though I was as much a victim of fraud as the men who lent me the money. Son of a fucking bitch, I handed over a sound, solid fortune to you, wealth that comes from the land is the only secure wealth, money’s not worth the paper it’s printed on unless it’s based on land, you gibbering jackass, diddling around with play money, who asked you to build an empire out of pure air, shadow shareholders, worthless stock, a hundred million pesos with nothing to back them up, who asked you to go around thinking the more debts you accumulated the safer you were? you little bastard. Don’t get in an uproar, General, I can assure you the lawsuit against the lawyers and accountants will proceed, they deceived me, too, I’ll stick to that. You’ll stick to it, your ass, you’ll have to give them the land, the property in Sinaloa, your fields of tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes! God, how my father laughed, I’d never heard him laugh like that. What a fool you are, General, tomatoes, do you think we constructed this house and bought our cars and lived the good life on tomatoes? do you think I’m a fishwife from La Merced? what do you think does better in Sinaloa, tomatoes or poppies? it’s all the same, red fields, from the air you can’t tell they’re not tomatoes, why should I keep it quiet any longer? do you want to know everything? if I have to turn over the land to pay the debts it will all come out. Then burn off the fields, fast, you fucker, plow it under and say that you were cleaned out by the blight, what are you waiting for? Do you think they’ll let me get away with that? you stupid old bastard, the gringos who buy the product and commercialize it, my … my associates in California where they sell the heroin, what about them? will they just sit there with their arms crossed? oh, sure, now tell me where I’m going to get a hundred million pesos to pay off my investors, tell me, between the house and the cars I can scratch up about ten million, and there’s a little more in the Swiss account. You poor devil, you couldn’t even milk anything off drugs, and those Yankees made a sucker out of you.

  Then the General grew silent and the lawyer made a drowning sound in his throat.

  “When you married a whore, you dishonored only yourself,” Grandfather said finally. “But now you’ve dishonored me.”

  That I didn’t want to hear. Don’t let them go on, I prayed in the shelter of the wings of the Victory. This was ridiculous, a scene from a bad Mexican film, a soap opera on the idiot box, me hiding behind a curtain listening to the grownups telling truths to each other, a classic scene between Libertad Lamarque and Arturo de Córdova. Grandfather stode from the living room, and I stepped out in front of him and clutched his arm. My father stared at us in stupefaction. I asked Grandfather, “Do you have any money on you?”

  General Vergara looked me straight in the eye and caressed his belt. It was his snakeskin belt filled
with hundred-peso gold coins. “Right. Let’s go.”

  We left, my arm around the old man, as my father screamed at us from the living room: “I’ll not give either of you the pleasure of seeing me defeated!”

  The General shoved the enormous cut-glass urn in the vestibule; it fell and shattered. We left behind us a trail of plastic calla lilies, and roared off in the red Thunderbird, I in my pajamas and socks, the General very circumspect in his light gabardine suit, his maroon tie secured below the knot with the pearl stickpin, still caressing the beltful of gold. Oh, it was great to roar along the ring road at one in the morning—no traffic, no scenery, the open road to eternity. That’s what Grandfather said. Hang on tight, General, I’m going to floor her to a hundred and twenty, I’ve ridden rougher broncs than this. Grandfather laughed. Let’s find someone to tell your stories to, let’s find someone who’ll listen, let’s blow all the gold pieces, let’s take her around again, Grandfather. You bet, boy, right from zero, again.

  In the Plaza Garibaldi, at one-fifteen in the morning: First things first, boy, we need some mariachis to follow us around all night, you don’t ask how much, just whether they know how to play “La Valentina” and “On the Road to Guanajuato,” okay, boys, strike up the bass guitar. Grandfather let out a yowl like a coyote: “Valentina, Valentina, listen to my plea,” let’s go to Tenampa and have a tequila or two, that’s what I have for breakfast, boys, see who can hold the most, that’s how I worked myself up to a pitch for the encounter in Celaya, when we Villistas sent our cavalry out to swamp Obregón, “One passion fires me, and that’s what I feel for you,” and before us stretched the enormous plain, and in the distance we could see the artillery and the motionless horses of the enemy, and here come banged-up trays loaded with beer, and we surged forward at a gallop, sure of victory, with the courage of wild tigers, and now the mariachis are looking at us with stony eyes, as if my grandfather and I didn’t exist, and then from invisible wolves’ dens on the plain there suddenly emerged a thousand bayonets, boys, Yaqui Indians faithful to Obregón had hidden in those holes, be careful, don’t spill that cold brew, and everyone was staring at us as if we were crazy, a loudmouthed old man and a kid in his pajamas, what’s with them? there they were, ramming their bayonets into the bellies of our horses, holding them firm until they ripped out the guts, those Yaquis with earrings in their ears and their heads tied in red kerchiefs soaked in the blood and guts and balls of our horses, another round? sure, the night is young, we were scared, sure, we were scared, who’d ever have imagined such a magnificent tactic from General Obregón, right then I began to respect him, I swear I did, when do you want us to sing? didn’t you hire us to sing, señor? the mariachis stared at us, thinking, I’ll bet they don’t have a red cent, we fell back, we attacked with cannon, but we’d already been defeated by the maneuver, Celaya was a field of smoke and blood and dying horses, smoke spiraled from Delicados, a bored mariachi poured salt and squeezed lemon on my grandfather’s closed fist, we blew off one of General Obregón’s arms, things were going so bad I said to myself right there, we’ll never make it against this guy, the mariachi shrugged his shoulders and poured salt on the mouthpiece of his trumpet and began to play, teasing out sad sounds, Villa is pure unleashed, undirected force, Obregón is intelligent force, he’s the king bastard of them all, I was ready to crouch down on the battlefield to follow the trail, to look for the arm we’d blasted off Obregón and hand it back to him and say, General, you’re the fucking end, here’s your arm back and I’m sorry, ah, sonofabitch, though I guess you know what happened? you don’t know? don’t you want to know? well, General Obregón flipped a gold coin in the air, like that, and the arm flew off the ground and the bloody fist snatched the coin in midair, like that, ah, sonofabitch, gotcha’, old buddy, now are you interested in my story? I gotcha’, the way Obregón got us and got his arm back at Celaya, “Well, if I’m to die tomorrow, it may as well be today,” I just want you to love me, boys, that’s all, and be faithful, even if it’s just for tonight.