"Valderrama," Demetrio called, looking away from the ring with tiredeyes, "come and sing me a song--sing 'The Undertaker.'"
But Valderrama did not hear him; he had no eyes for the fight; he wasreciting an impassioned soliloquy as he watched the sunset over thehills.
With solemn gestures and emphatic tones, he said:
"O Lord, Lord, pleasurable it is this thy land! I shall build me threetents: one for Thee, one for Moses, one for Elijah!"
"Valderrama," Demetrio shouted again. "Come and sing 'The Undertaker'song for me."
"Hey, crazy, the General is calling you," an officer shouted.
Valderrama with his eternally complacent smile went over to Demetrio'sseat and asked the musicians for a guitar.
"Silence," the gamesters cried. Valderrama finished tuning hisinstrument.
Quail and Meco let loose on the sand a pair of cocks armed with longsharp blades attached to their legs. One was light red; his feathersshone with beautiful obsidian glints. The other was sand-colored withfeathers like scales burned slowly to a fiery copper color.
The fight was swift and fierce as a duel between men. As though movedby springs, the roosters flew at each other. Their feathers stood up ontheir arched necks; their combs were erect, their legs taut. For aninstant they swung in the air without even touching the ground, theirfeathers, beaks, and claws lost in a dizzy whirlwind. The red roostersuddenly broke, tossed with his legs to heaven outside the chalk lines.His vermilion eyes closed slowly, revealing eyelids of pink coral; histangled feathers quivered and shook convulsively amid a pool of blood.
Valderrama, who could not repress a gesture of violent indignation,began to play. With the first melancholy strains of the tune, his angerdisappeared. His eyes gleamed with the light of madness. His glancestrayed over the square, the tumbled kiosk, the old adobe houses, overthe mountains in the background, and over the sky, burning like a roofafire. He began to sing. He put such feeling into his voice and suchexpression into the strings that, as he finished, Demetrio turned hishead aside to hide his tears.
But Valderrama fell upon him, embraced him warmly, and with afamiliarity he showed everyone at the appropriate moment, he whispered:
"Drink them! ... Those are beautiful tears."
Demetrio asked for the bottle, passed it to Valderrama. Greedily thepoet drank half its contents in one gulp; then, showing only the whitesof his eyes, he faced the spectators dramatically and, in a highlytheatrical voice, cried:
"Here you may witness the blessings of the revolution caught in asingle tear."
Then he continued to talk like a madman, but like a madman whose vastprophetic madness encompassed all about him, the dusty weeds, thetumbled kiosk, the gray houses, the lovely hills, and the immeasurablesky.
IV
Juchipila rose in the distance, white, bathed in sunlight, shining inthe midst of a thick forest at the foot of a proud, lofty mountain,pleated like a turban.
Some of the soldiers, gazing at the spire of the church, sighed sadly.They marched forward through the canyon, uncertain, unsteady, as blindmen walking without a hand to guide them. The bitterness of the exoduspervaded them.
"Is that town Juchipila?" Valderrama asked.
In the first stage of his drunkenness, Valderrama had been counting thecrosses scattered along the road, along the trails, in the hollows nearthe rocks, in the tortuous paths, and along the riverbanks. Crosses ofblack timber newly varnished, makeshift crosses built out of two logs,crosses of stones piled up and plastered together, crosses whitewashedon crumbling walls, humble crosses drawn with charcoal on the surfaceof whitish rocks. The traces of the first blood shed by therevolutionists of 1910, murdered by the Government.
Before Juchipila was lost from sight, Valderrama got off his horse,bent down, kneeled, and gravely kissed the ground.
The soldiers passed by without stopping. Some laughed at the crazy man,others jested. Valderrama, deaf to all about him, breathed his unctuousprayer:
"O Juchipila, cradle of the Revolution of 1910, O blessed land, landsteeped in the blood of martyrs, blood of dreamers, the only true men..."
"Because they had no time to be bad!" an ex-Federal officer interjectedas he rode.
Interrupting his prayer, Valderrama frowned, burst into stentorianlaughter, reechoed by the rocks, and ran toward the officer begging fora swallow of tequila.
Soldiers minus an arm or leg, cripples, rheumatics, and consumptivesspoke bitterly of Demetrio. Young whippersnappers were given officers'commissions and wore stripes on their hats without a day's service,even before they knew how to handle a rifle, while the veterans,exhausted in a hundred battles, now incapacitated for work, theveterans who had set out as simple privates, were still simpleprivates. The few remaining officers among Demetrio's friends alsogrumbled, because his staff was made up of wealthy, dapper young menwho oiled their hair and used perfume.
"The worst part of it," Venancio said, "is that we're gettin'overcrowded with Federals!"
Anastasio himself, who invariably found only praise for Demetrio'sconduct, now seemed to share the general discontent.
"See here, brothers," he said, "I spits out the truth when I seessomething. I always tell the boss that if these people stick to us verylong we'll be in a hell of a fix. Certainly! How can anyone thinkotherwise? I've no hair on my tongue; and by the mother that bore me,I'm going to tell Demetrio so myself."
Demetrio listened benevolently, and, when Anastasio had finished, hereplied:
"You're right, there's no gettin' around it, we're in a bad way. Thesoldiers grumble about the officers, the officers grumble about us,see? And we're damn well ready now to send both Villa and Carranza tohell to have a good time all by themselves.... I guess we're in thesame fix as that peon from Tepatitlan who complained about his boss allday long but worked on just the same. That's us. We kick and kick, butwe keep on killing and killing. But there's no use in saying anythingto them!"
"Why, Demetrio?"
"Hm, I don't know.... Because ... because ... do you see? ... Whatwe've got to do is to make the men toe the mark. I've got orders tostop a band of men coming through Cuquio, see? In a few days we'll haveto fight the Carranzistas. It will be great to beat the hell out ofthem."
Valderrama, the tramp, who had enlisted in Demetrio's army one daywithout anyone remembering the time or the place, overheard some ofDemetrio's words. Fools do not eat fire. That very day Valderramadisappeared mysteriously as he had come.
V
They entered the streets of Juchipila as the church bells rang, loudand joyfully, with that peculiar tone that thrills every mountaineer.
"It makes me think we are back in the days when the revolution was justbeginning, when the bells rang like mad in every town we entered andeverybody came out with music, flags, cheers, and fireworks to welcomeus," said Anastasio Montanez.
"They don't like us no more," Demetrio returned.
"Of course. We're crawling back like a dog with its tail between itslegs," Quail remarked.
"It ain't that, I guess. They don't give a whoop for the other sideeither."
"But why should they like us?"
They spoke no more.
Presently they reached the city square and stopped in front of anoctagonal, rough, massive church, reminiscent of the colonial period.At one time the square must have been a garden, judging from the barestunted orange trees planted between iron and wooden benches. Thesonorous, joyful bells rang again. From within the church, the honeyedvoices of a female chorus rose melancholy and grave. To the strains ofa guitar, the young girls of the town sang the "Mysteries."
"What's the fiesta, lady?" Venancio asked of an old woman who wasrunning toward the church.
"The Sacred Heart of Jesus!" answered the pious woman, panting.
They remembered that one year ago they had captured Zacatecas. Theygrew sadder still.
Juchipila, like the other towns they had passed through on their wayfrom Tepic, by way of Jalisco, Aguascalientes and Zacatecas,
was inruins. The black trail of the incendiaries showed in the rooflesshouses, in the burnt arcades. Almost all the houses were closed, yet,here and there, those still open offered, in ironic contrast, portalsgaunt and bare as the white skeletons of horses scattered over theroads. The terrible pangs of hunger seemed to speak from every face;hunger on every dusty cheek, in their dusty countenances; in the hecticflame of their eyes, which, when they met a soldier, blazed withhatred. In vain the soldiers scoured the streets in search of food,biting their lips in anger. A single lunchroom was open; at once theyfilled it. No beans, no tortillas, only chili and tomato sauce. In vainthe officers showed their pocketbooks stuffed with bills or usedthreats:
"Yea, you've got papers all right! That's all you've brought! Try andeat them, will you?" said the owner, an insolent old shrew with anenormous scar on her cheek, who told them she had already lain with adead man, "to cure her from ever feeling frightened again."
Despite the melancholy and desolation of the town, while the women sangin the church, birds sang in the foliage, and the thrushes piped theirlyrical strain on the withered branches of the orange trees.
VI
Demetrio Macias' wife, mad with joy, rushed along the trail to meethim, leading a child by the hand. An absence of almost two years!
They embraced each other and stood speechless. She wept, sobbed.Demetrio stared in astonishment at his wife who seemed to have aged tenor twenty years. Then he looked at the child who gazed up at him insurprise. His heart leaped to his mouth as he saw in the child'sfeatures his own steel features and fiery eyes exactly reproduced. Hewanted to hold him in his arms, but the frightened child took refuge inhis mother's skirts.
"It's your own father, baby! It's your daddy!"
The child hid his face within the folds of his mother's skirt, stillhostile.
Demetrio handed the reins of his horse to his orderly and walked slowlyalong the steep trail with his wife and son.
"Blessed be the Virgin Mary, Praise be to God! Now you'll never leaveus any more, will you? Never ... never.... You'll stay with us always?"
Demetrio's face grew dark. Both remained silent, lost in anguish.Demetrio suppressed a sigh. Memories crowded and buzzed through hisbrain like bees about a hive.
A black cloud rose behind the sierra and a deafening roar of thunderresounded. The rain began to fall in heavy drops; they sought refuge ina rocky hut.
The rain came pelting down, shattering the white Saint John rosesclustered like sheaves of stars clinging to tree, rock, bush, andpitaya over the entire mountainside.
Below in the depths of the canyon, through the gauze of the rain theycould see the tall, sheer palms shaking in the wind, opening out likefans before the tempest. Everywhere mountains, heaving hills, andbeyond more hills, locked amid mountains, more mountains encircled inthe wall of the sierra whose loftiest peaks vanished in the sapphire ofthe sky.
"Demetrio, please. For God's sake, don't go away! My heart tells mesomething will happen to you this time."
Again she was wracked with sobs. The child, frightened, cried andscreamed. To calm him, she controlled her own great grief.
Gradually the rain stopped, a swallow, with silver breast and wingsdescribing luminous charming curves, fluttered obliquely across thesilver threads of the rain, gleaming suddenly in the afternoon sunshine.
"Why do you keep on fighting, Demetrio?"
Demetrio frowned deeply. Picking up a stone absent-mindedly, he threwit to the bottom of the canyon. Then he stared pensively into theabyss, watching the arch of its flight.
"Look at that stone; how it keeps on going...."
VII
It was a heavenly morning. It had rained all night, the sky awakenedcovered with white clouds. Young wild colts trotted on the summit ofthe sierra, with tense manes and waving hair, proud as the peakslifting their heads to the clouds.
The soldiers stepped among the huge rocks, buoyed up by the happinessof the morning. None for a moment dreamed of the treacherous bulletthat might be awaiting him ahead; the unforeseen provides man with hisgreatest joy. The soldiers sang, laughed, and chattered away. Thespirit of nomadic tribes stirred their souls. What matters it whetheryou go and whence you come? All that matters is to walk, to walkendlessly, without ever stopping; to possess the valley, the heights ofthe sierra, far as the eye can read.
Trees, brush, and cactus shone fresh after rain. Heavy drops of limpidwater fell from rocks, ocher in hue as rusty armor.
Demetrio Macias' men grew silent for a moment. They believed they heardthe familiar rumor of firing in the distance. A few minutes elapsed butthe sound was not repeated.
"In this same sierra," Demetrio said, "with but twenty men I killedfive hundred Federals. Remember, Anastasio?"
As Demetrio began to tell that famous exploit, the men realized thedanger they were facing. What if the enemy, instead of being two daysaway, was hiding somewhere among the underbrush on the terrible hillthrough whose gorge they now advanced? None dared show the slightestfear. Not one of Demetrio Macias' men dared say, "I shall not moveanother inch!"
So, when firing began in the distance where the vanguard was marching,no one felt surprised. The recruits turned back hurriedly, retreatingin shameful flight, searching for a way out of the canyon.
A curse broke from Demetrio's parched lips.
"Fire at 'em. Shoot any man who runs away!"
"Storm the hill!" he thundered like a wild beast.
But the enemy, lying in ambush by the thousand, opened up itsmachine-gun fire. Demetrio's men fell like wheat under the sickle.
Tears of rage and pain rise to Demetrio's eyes as Anastasio slowlyslides from his horse without a sound, and lies outstretched,motionless. Venancio falls close beside him, his chest riddled withbullets. Meco hurtles over the precipice, bounding from rock to rock.
Suddenly, Demetrio finds himself alone. Bullets whiz past his ears likehail. He dismounts and crawls over the rocks, until he finds a parapet:he lays down a stone to protect his head and, lying flat on the ground,begins to shoot.
The enemy scatter in all directions, pursuing the few fugitives hidingin the brush. Demetrio aims; he does not waste a single shot.
His famous marksmanship fills him with joy. Where he settles hisglance, he settles a bullet. He loads his gun once more ... takesaim....
The smoke of the guns hangs thick in the air. Locusts chant theirmysterious, imperturbable song. Doves coo lyrically in the crannies ofthe rocks. The cows graze placidly.
The sierra is clad in gala colors. Over its inaccessible peaks theopalescent fog settles like a snowy veil on the forehead of a bride.
At the foot of a hollow, sumptuous and huge as the portico of an oldcathedral, Demetrio Macias, his eyes leveled in an eternal glance,continues to point the barrel of his gun.
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