Last Train from Cuernavaca (15 page)

“The Maderos were your friends,” he said. “I came to tell you myself. I didn't want you to read it in the newspaper.”

Grace sensed there was more to his midnight ride from Tres Marías than that, but if so he would tell her in time. They sat in silence for a while. When Rico finally spoke he recited a verse, written no doubt by one of those British poets he so admired.

“There are men of splendid hearts in Mexico, too,” said Grace.

“And the women? What of one woman of splendid heart?”

“She will stay where her beloved is.”

So that was it. The fear that Grace would leave Mexico had brought Rico here in the middle of the night.

“Cuernavaca is my home. England holds nothing for me.” Grace kissed him on the cheek. “Come upstairs. I'll run a bath for you.” The best features of Grace's bathroom were the big tiled tub and the noisy, kerosene-fueled water heater.

“
Mi cielo,
what will become of my poor country?”

“What ever happens, my love, we will face it together.”

As they walked up the stairs Grace knew she would sleep peacefully in his arms tonight. Come hell or high water, as Lyda would say, they had each other. Swirl around them as it might, the storm could not hurt them.

Neither Angel, Antonio, nor the twenty men riding to Tepotzlan with them gave any thought to the ironies of Lent. The Catholic Church declared the six weeks before Easter Sunday a time of sacrifice and fasting, but what do people forgo when they have nothing? How do they fast when they're hungry every day of the year?

On the other hand, Lent symbolized Christ's forty solitary days in a desolate area the Jews called The Devastation. Angel and her comrades understood what that was like. As for the temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness, they were eager to yield to as many of those as possible in the next few days. Unavoidable privation was one thing, but what better reason for a spree than the prospect of priest-imposed abstinence?

Tepotzlan's fiesta lasted through the four days leading up to Ash Wednesday. Everyone agreed it was the best celebration in the state of Morelos. The festivities offered a savory selection of temptations that included all seven of the sins the Catholic Church denounced as deadly—pride, covetousness, envy, anger, sloth, lust, and gluttony. Angel's comrades favored lust and gluttony. The Church considered all seven sins deadly because they led to even worse behavior. The boys hoped the priests were right, and that lust would result in fornication.

Since gluttony included drunkeness, it was the sin most likely to lead to trouble. Alcohol was the all-purpose lubricant for any wild slide into iniquity. Angel's comrades drank what ever they could afford, but they preferred mescal. Mescal, they agreed, was good for joy and sadness. They had had enough of sadness in the past months. They were primed for joy.

Before they left camp, Colonel Contreras's adjutant had handed each of them sixty
pesos.
It was a full month's pay, and they felt as wealthy as kings. They didn't ask where Contreras got the money. Most of the
jefes
who raised their own companies of men were fairly well off. If Contreras had come to the bottom of his personal funds, he could persuade some rich landowner to support Zapata's cause or have his cane fields burned.

Plinio waved a slender brown bottle and shouted. “Today I will get as drunk as four hundred rabbits.”

Antonio glanced at Angel and rolled his eyes toward heaven. He and Angel had no need to look beyond each other for lust. The question was, should they stay sober enough to come to the rescue when their compatriots got into trouble? For they surely would get into trouble.

Angel didn't intend to stay sober or rescue anyone. She leaned closer so Antonio could hear her over the ambient clamor of the pilgrims' burros and roosters, each proclaiming the road his exclusive domain.

“Better to get drunk than to have to deal with a drunk,” she said. Besides, Angel knew she could count on Antonio to keep his wits about him. He would rescue her should the need arise.

Angel had the devil-may-care nature found in good lieutenants. She was the cheerfully reckless sort whom men would follow into battle the way a puppy will chase a stick. Antonio, on the other hand, was colonel material. He thought beyond what ever skirmish had Angel's blood up, and he tempered courage with caution.

Between swigs of mescal, the troop debated whether alcohol in a dead man's veins caused his beard to grow. Manuel swore that after an old toper in his village died, his beard grew until it filled his coffin

“How do you know that?” Antonio called back over his shoulder. “Did you dig up the coffin and open it?”

The men crossed themselves at the very idea, and changed the subject. Conversation was becoming difficult anyway. The nearer they came to Tepotzlan the more crowded the road. Indians streamed down from the mountains as they had since long before festivals had anything to do with Christianity. Many of them had walked for days to get here, with their white wool jackets clutched close, ground fog swirling around their bare brown legs, and ribbons fluttering from their straw hats,

On their backs they toted sacks of corn, pottery precariously stacked, bundles of produce, rolls of straw mats, live chickens, and sheafs of sugarcane stalks. Penitents shouldered crosses of heavy timbers. Groups of musicians provided a discordant score on homemade guitars and harps, flutes, and drums. Woodcarvers carried painted statues, some almost life-sized. Most of the effigies were of St. Jude, patron of desperate causes.

Before the Church demanded forty days of self-denial from the faithful, it allowed them the most abundance they would see all year. Carnival was a mix of religious fervor and wild abandon. It featured saints that were Catholic in name, but pure bred Aztec under their halos. What Maxmilian's wife, the Empress Carlota, said almost fifty years earlier still applied: “We are working to make this country Catholic,” she once wrote to a friend, “for it is not now, nor has it ever been so.”

One trait the Catholics and the Aztecs shared was a zest for pageantry and ritual. Tepotzlan had dressed for the occasion. Even the outlying streets flaunted paper streamers in bright colors. The closer Angel rode to the center of town the louder were the fireworks, firearms, church bells, music, whistles, and noisemakers. Hundreds of booths displayed a dizzying array of food. The maelstrom of color, noise, and aromas had a more intoxicating effect than mescal.

Angel and the others had existed on rations of beans and parched corn, and not much of those. For days she had thought about a tender hen cooked in spicy chocolate sauce. It was tasty, but she was impatient to finish it so she could try something else. She grinned at Antonio.

“By tonight I'll be too drunk to stay on my horse. By tomorrow I'll be too fat to climb into the saddle.”

Antonio sighed. Sometimes he felt as though Angel were a jaguar in a house cat's skin. He didn't want to try to tame her, but he was always wary of being scratched.

The fiesta crescendoed around the church. From several blocks away Angel heard the hypnotic music of the
Chinelo
dancers. Thirty men danced in a circle. They wore robes heavy with embroidery, and huge, plumed headresses festooned with strings of beads and baubles. Their masks featured thick eyebrows and pointed, up-tilted beards designed to ridicule the early Spanish conquerors.

The dance was simple. Each man took two shuffling steps, then leading with his shoulders, gave a hop to the left or to the right. They repeated the hypnotic pattern hour after hour.

When Angel and Antonio tired of it they headed for the main plaza. At its center stood the bandstand where the town's orchestra was valiantly attempting a brassy version of Verdi's opening march from
Aida
. Plinio and Manuel had settled down on one of the iron benches to drink mescal, wax philosophical, and enjoy the passing scene.

The younger men were testing the core Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Priests defined that as the transformation of bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ. For Angel's comrades it meant turning intangible lust into fleshly pleasures. The young women strolled arm-in-arm clockwise around the plaza just as their mothers, their grandmothers, and generations of great-grandmothers had done. The young men sauntered in a larger ring in the opposite direction.

Conversation between them was carried on in the language of glances. When a woman's eyes sent an invitation, the man pivoted around and walked beside her. Somehow the species replenished itself as a result.

Plinio called it
el tiovivo de tontería,
the carousel of folly. And what, he asked, was more entertaining than watching people commit folly? He waved his bottle at the parade and winked at Angel. “Men and women, always going in opposite directions.”

Mezcal had turned the bulbous tip of Plinio's long beak redder than usual. The men called him tomato nose, but he didn't care. “I have a bird dog's nose,” he would say. “I can smell trouble before you can see it.”

Angel was enjoying the music and her men's attempts at love's folly when Plinio's nose sniffed trouble. He leapt up as though the iron bench had burned through the seat of his pants and hustled over to her.

“Gobierno,”
he said.

He was right. The khaki uniforms were scattered through the crowd. They stood out among the white trousers and shirts of the
indios
.

“¡Mierda!”
Angel muttered.

She and Antonio signaled their comrades. One by one they dropped out of the promenade and headed for the corral where they had left their horses. The men were grumpy as they rode away, but at least none of them had been drunk enough to refuse to leave.

When they stopped to water their horses at a public fountain, a young woman darted from behind a ruin of an adobe wall and sprinted to intercept Angel's mare. She grabbed a stirrup and hung on. Angel pried off her fingers, but the woman clutched her wrist with both hands. She trotted to keep pace while Angel tried to shake her loose. Her grip was strong.

“Take me with you,
Capitán.
I will cook. I will warm you at night.”

“I'm not a captain.” Angel broke free and reined her mare in circles to avoid those desperate hands. “Go back to your village.”

“They burned my village,
Capitán
.” The woman was determined to promote Angel in rank. “They killed my parents. I have not eaten in two days.” The young woman sank to her knees in the dust and held her hands up in supplication. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Please take me with you.”

“Go with Manuel.” Angel nodded toward the former member of the
rurales
. “He has no one to warm his blankets, and he won't mistreat you.”

The woman didn't have to look higher than Angel's beautifully tooled saddle to see that the handsome young rebel was closer to aristocracy than anyone else. She must have assessed every traveler who stopped at the fountain. Angel wasn't flattered to have been selected.

“I want to be your woman,
Capitán
.”

“If Manuel accepts you, you may accompany us.”

“I don't want to go with him. I want to go with you.”

Plinio leaned forward in his saddle. “One who disdains a gift insults God, my daughter.”

Angel left the woman to work out an arrangement with Manuel. She reminded Angel of a younger version of her mother. Angel hadn't prayed since the day she found her father's workers dead in the dried up irrigation ditch. She prayed now that her mother would return from wherever
el gobierno
had sent her. She prayed that people had been kind to her, but she didn't think it likely.

Rico knew that Mexico City's main newspaper,
El Imparcial, The Impartial,
was laughably misnamed. Porfirio Díaz had backed
El Imparcial
for the thirty years he held power and it still occupied a comfortable position in the back pocket of big business. But Rico's grandfather had received it by courier every week and Rico had learned to read with it.

He wasn't surprised that
El Imparcial
claimed Victoriano Huerta had nothing to do with the deaths of Francisco Madero, his brother, and the vice president. The president himself had entrusted the general with quelling the coup attempt,
El Imparcial
said. And besides, General Huerta was visiting with the Dutch ambassador when President Madero was shot.

Rico wanted to believe that Victoriano Huerta hadn't ordered Francisco Madero's assassination. Almost everyone of influence seemed to believe him. When Huerta took over as president pro tem, diplomats of every embassy came calling to congratulate him. Foreign investors expressed their pleasure at having a forceful leader in control again. The military hierarchy hadn't protested. The only government leader who refused to recognize Huerta's authority was Venustiano Carranza, governor of the northern state of Coahuila. And he lived too far away to matter.

Rico had taken a weekend pass to the capital to see how it fared. The charred corpses had disappeared from the streets, along with the cartridge casings and unexploded artillery shells. Workmen were repairing the damage done to the buildings. Electricity had been restored.

Rico shouldn't have been surprised by how quickly his people seemed to have erased from their memories the image of the dead bodies of men, women, and children, slaughtered by their own government. Maybe their history of thousands of years of violence had habituated them to it.

Only in Mexico, Rico thought, could such a senseless bloodbath be nicknamed a Fiesta of Bullets.

Before Rico returned to duty at Tres Marías a week ago, he suggested that Grace throw a fiesta of her own to celebrate the coming of Lent. He figured it would cheer her up and take her mind off the uncertainty in the capital. He had not experienced one of Grace's full-throttle extravaganzas, so he could not have imagined she and her friends among the officers' wives would organize something like this. The crowd of officers gathered in front of Cuernavaca's elegant theater should have tipped him off.

When Rico and Juan entered the theater, a flock of young women surrounded them and jostled to break eggs on their heads. Fortunately María and the Colonial's kitchen maids had poked holes in each end of the eggs and had blown out the original contents, leaving only the shells. Unfortunately they had filled the shells with cheap cologne and bits of gold and silver paper.

Being pelted with eggs was customary at pre-Lent celebrations, so Rico and Juan had worn their oldest dress uniforms. They both bowed and moved away from the door to give the ladies a clear shot at the next guests.

Juan stopped to stare around the room.
“¡Que maravilloso!”
And Juan wasn't one to use words like “marvelous.”

The theater was another of Porfirio Díaz's monuments to progress and to himself. It would have looked at ease in Paris or Rome. Frescoes crusted its domed ceiling. Red velvet swags decorated the curved tiers of balconies and loge seats. It looked posh enough as it was, but Grace and her staff and her friends had turned it into a fairyland.

The seats formed a line against the walls to make room for dancing. A long buffet and smaller tables sat in a jungle of potted palms a-twinkle with small lights. A soft glow from Japanese lanterns illuminated the room. The parquet floor glittered with the gold and silver confetti that had fallen off the guests. Baskets contained brightly colored paper fans and parasols as gifts. Women were already using them to flirt with the men.

Luís, the Colonial's
cantinero,
presided at a bar set up in a side room. Rico was pleased to see him. The success of the surprise he had planned would depend on people drinking enough to lose their inhibitions.

Cuernavaca's social set was not large. Everyone knew each other so conversation was lively. They all wanted to forget, at least for tonight, the troubles in the capital. Besides, during Carnival they all had a duty to enjoy themselves.

Rico found Grace and whirled her around. He gave her a feather-down kiss that was more satisfying than a buss and a bear hug. It was a kiss of friendship and comfort. It was an optimistic kiss. It implied they would have the rest of their lives to enjoy more passionate embraces.

It also transferred confetti from Rico's lips to hers. He brushed it off with the tips of his fingers, then gathered her into his arms. She leaned against him as if coming home.

The band started with the usual Mexican
danzas
and two-steps. As the barrel in the bar filled with empty bottles, the laughter grew louder and the music livelier. By midnight Rico and Grace and all the other couples were dancing the tango. Rico gauged that the time had come for him to introduce his surprise.

He didn't doubt that people would like the Turkey Trot. The Vatican had denounced it with indignation. That alone would assure its popularity.

Rico had mailed a musical arrangement to the bandmaster a few days before. As the musicians launched into an exuberant rendition of “Stop-time Rag,” Rico grabbed Grace by the waist and pulled her close to demonstrate the “hugging” that had so offended the Pope.

Rico and Grace had danced together so often to the phonograph that she caught on quickly to the basic moves. Four alternating hops—left, right, left, right—with feet wide apart. Up on the ball of the foot, and landing on the heel. Once Grace had the rhythm, Rico added fast kicks between her legs and the sudden stops and turns that made the dance fun and alarming.

Before Rico and Grace finished the first circuit of the floor, the whole company took off at a gallop that was more free-for-all than dance. As Rico steered Grace through the happy mêlée, she threw her head back and laughed.

Rico wanted to believe that as long as they were dancing, nothing bad could happen. Tomorrow he would have to tell Grace he had been assigned to Veracruz for six weeks. Rumor had it that Huerta intended to install Rubio, a general now, as governor of Morelos. The good news was that Rubio liked Grace and would make sure nothing happened to the Colonial. But Rico wondered if Rubio was sending him away because he planned a campaign he knew Rico would protest.

Much as Rico disliked Rubio, he hated Emiliano Zapata more. He remembered the view from the high ridge at Tres Marías, the blight of black patches that once had been productive fields and lovely old houses. Rico knew the names of every one of those haciendas—El Rosario, Los Arboles, Santa Fe. He knew the families who had lived behind their vine-covered walls. Zapata had to be stopped before he destroyed not only Morelos's economy, but its history and tradition. Huerta was a brute, but maybe Mexico needed him.

Still, Rico couldn't shake the feeling that the country was holding its breath, waiting for the rest of the tempest to arrive with a roar.