Last Train from Cuernavaca (33 page)

Rico knew better than to ride into the middle of what probably would be the biggest battle the state of Morelos had ever hosted. He could not risk traveling the main road to Cuernavaca, but the roundabout route the Mendozas mapped out took much longer than he expected. He also could have made his way along the main road after dark, even in the rain, but not this one. He would be of no use to Grace if he were lying dead at the bottom of a ravine, so he lost more precious time huddled all night in a shallow cave.

As the second day dawned, then the third and the fourth, Rico came to dread every meander and switchback. He cursed each rockfall and downed tree that blocked the way between him and Grace.

The isolation of the back country also made the war seem so remote Rico could almost dare to hope that peace had broken out. Then the high limestone walls of the defile ended abruptly. The world opened up in front of him. He looked out at a soaring dome of blue sky, a scarred valley ringed by pale purple mountains, and hundreds of vultures circling over Cuernavaca in flames. He spurred Mendoza's horse down the slope and into a trot across the valley floor.

The road led straight into the worst of the inferno consuming the ramshackle houses on the outskirts of town. He turned aside and rode in search of a clear route. He found an area untouched by fire, but even there the heat was intense. He waded into a public fountain to soak his clothes and scooped up water in his hat to wet down the horse.

He guided his skittish mount toward the heart of the city, making his way around corpses and piles of rubble. Judging by the damage to almost every building, the artillery fire must have been intense. What disturbed Rico was that, other than sporadic rifle fire and the crackling of flames, the city was eerily quiet. The battle for Cuernavaca must have ended and he had little doubt as to who had won.

Where was Grace?

He found Colonel Rodriguez's body near the Governor's Palace. His lifeless hand still grasped his sword and half a dozen rebels lay dead around him. Rico made the sign of the cross as he passed his old comrade.

He was elated to see that the Colonial looked unharmed and the front gates were closed. As he rode toward them a shot ricocheted off the cobblestones in front of his horse. Judging from its directon and angle it must have come from atop the hotel. He shaded his eyes to look up at the uniformed figure standing on the edge of the roof with his rifle aimed at him.

“Juan!” He took off his hat so his friend could see his face.

“Rico?”

When Juan opened the gates he held a champagne bottle in one hand and his rifle cradled on the other arm. Rico looked beyond the entryway and saw Grullo pulling at banana leaves in the courtyard. When Rico embraced Juan he smelled the alcohol on his breath.

Rico didn't have to ask how Juan had gotten in. All the young officers had used a thick fig vine to climb to a rear balcony after Leobardo locked the Colonial's doors for the night.

“I decided to keep looters away until you arrived.” Juan waved the champagne. “Judging by the empty bottles in the cantina, the Colonial's guests must have had a magnificent going-away party.”

“How did you know I would come here?”

“Your old friend, Lieutenant Angel, told me you went to the capital in search of your sweetheart. I knew when you discovered that
Señora
Knight was in Cuernavaca, you'd come back. People always come back to the Colonial.” He glanced at Grullo. “I persuaded Angel to sell your horse so I could return him to you. Angel drives a hard bargain.”

“Thank you.” Rico wondered if Juan knew that he himself had proposed marriage to Lieutenant Angel at Tres Marías more than once. However, now was not the time to discuss it.

“Of course, I will expect half of what ever he earns racing,” said Juan.

“Where is Grace?”

“I don't know.” Juan waved the bottle at the deserted corridors. “Maybe she's gone with the others.”

“Where did the others go?”

“What's left of the army and Cuernavaca's citizens are on their way to Toluca.”

“Where are the
Zapatistas
?” Rico began to get an excoriating sense that fate wasn't through harassing him yet.

“They've ridden into the mountains to ambush the army and the citizens. You know how exposed the Toluca road is to ambushes. Shooting people there will be like swatting flies on a mule's rump.”

 

Grace felt exposed riding across the valley floor and vulnerable to attack. The burnt sugarcane and refineries, the destroyed haciendas, and abandoned villages added to her melancholy. At least the mountains provided cover and places to hide. She gave a sigh of relief when she reached the far edge of the fields. The terrain became more broken. Trees closed in around her.

Jake rode at the head of the little caravan and he must not have shared her optimism. He loosened his Sharps hunting rifle in its saddle boot and set his pistols at half-cock. Lyda followed Jake, with Annie in front of her on Duke. Grace and María were each mounted on one of Jake's mules ahead of the two pack animals. Socrates and the shotgun brought up the rear on the Colonial's mule.

Many of the families who had spent the night in the Colonial followed Grace's convoy through Cuernavaca's deserted streets before dawn this morning. Maybe they noticed that the army had decamped and so had most of the city's inhabitants. Maybe they thought the gringos' guns and special status would protect them. They traveled on foot, though, and fell farther and farther behind.

The road snaked sharply upward, but at the first wide place with a view, Grace reined the mule around. She stood in the stirrups and looked back across the valley. Cuernavaca continued to burn.

When the rain started, Grace hoped that it would move across the sunny valley and quench the fires, but it formed a visible wall, gray on one side, bright on the other, between her and the city. The squall line seemed content to stay where it was, drenching all of them and making the ground even more treacherous. Grace pulled her hat lower to keep it off her face.

She was about to continue on when she saw two bands of horse men converge on the ragged line of refugees. They rounded them up like cattle and began driving them back toward the city.

“Lyda, Jake,” Grace shouted. “Look what they're doing.”

“Bound to happen,” said Jake.

“We have to help them.”

“There's nothing we can do for them, Gracie.” Lyda flipped the reins to get Duke moving forward again. “If they intended to kill them they would have shot them where they stood.”

Grace didn't find that consoling.

The road grew steeper and more slippery. The cobblestones in the paved stretches were missing or loose as often as not. Grace concentrated on letting the mule find his own way, but the temptation to pull on his reins and steer him away from the brink was almost more than she could resist. She had learned to trust Moses's instincts on such trails, but although this animal seemed sure-footed, he wasn't Moses.

The angles of the switchbacks grew more acute, and as Grace rounded each turn she could see others fleeing on the road above and ahead of her. Even a wagon bumped along, although its axles came dangerously close to the edge.

The surrounding ledges, outcrops, and overhangs provided perfect places for snipers to hide, but the overcast sky and steady drizzle made it impossible to spot the flash of rifle barrels. Grace ducked reflexively when a shot echoed through the canyon. One of the people toiling along two switchbacks above her fell. Grace watched, as with arms and legs outspread, he went over the edge. His anguished cry grew fainter as he plummeted out of sight.

The next shot hit Jake. He slumped forward to lie along his horse's neck with his arms dangling. Lyda screamed. She slid off Duke and ran to him. Grace was relieved to see him rouse enough to put an arm around her neck. With one hand Lyda helped him stay in the saddle while with the other she grasped the horse's halter to guide him. Annie rode into the lead position to keep an eye out for rock falls or cave-ins.

Grace would not have chosen this place to die, though she wondered what difference it would make if she did. No one and nothing waited for her at the end of this road. She could not bear the thought of her friends dying though.

She was glad to see the surface ahead broaden into a shelf fifty feet wide that ran along the base of a gentle upgrade covered with evergreens. There, the road had room to swerve away from the cliff's edge and everyone speeded their pace to reach it.

The over loaded wagon was already trundling along it when several shots rang out from the slope above. Bullets kicked up the gravel under the hooves of the two mules pulling it. They reared and bolted. The top-heavy cargo shifted, tilting the wagon until it was balanced on the two left wheels. The passenger leaped to safety as the saturated ground gave way under it. The driver was not so lucky.

The wagon rolled onto its side, teetered on the rim of the chasm, then slowly slid off, dragging the mules, secured in their harnesses, with it. The driver slid off the seat, which was now at a ninety-degree angle, and kept falling. Grace was so intent on watching the horrifying acrobatics of the wagon and mule team that she didn't notice the passenger.

Bullets continued to raise geysers around him as he put his head down and charged toward Annie and Duke. Annie screamed when he grabbed Duke's bridle and Grace realized that the man was General Rubio.

She kicked the mule into a trot that shook her hat off, and pulled up alongside Rubio. Socrates had been about to shoot Rubio, but now Grace was in the way.

Shouting at him to let Annie go, Grace beat him with her riding crop. She kept hitting him until he drew his service pistol and pointed it right between her eyes.

“Move away from him, Grace!”

Grace froze. That was Rico's voice.

Ignoring the gun, she turned her head and saw Rico's big gray stallion sliding almost on his rump down the slope above her. Time slowed as she tried to get a grip on this new reality.

Rico was leaning back in the saddle to keep from pitching forward over Grullo's head. He held his rifle in one hand and waved it, gesturing for her to move aside.

She turned back and saw the muzzle of Rubio's pistol inches from her face. Then it swiveled in Rico's direction.

Without conscious thought, Grace slid down from the mule's off-side and hit him on the rump as hard as she could with the riding crop. He bolted forward, knocking Rubio's gun aside. Grace didn't hear the shot that killed Rubio, but she saw the look on his greasy, porcine face as he fell sideways into the mud. A large chunk of wet clay broke off and slid down the face of the cliff. It took Rubio with it.

Rico leaped off Grullo before the horse slid to a stop, and hit the ground running. He lifted Grace and swung her around to safer ground. Oblivious to the steady rain, Grace put her arms around him, leaned against his shoulder, and sobbed. He laid his cheek against her hair and held her so close that they could not have detected where one stopped and the other started.

“I'm here, my heaven. Nothing will part us again.”

Neither of them were willing to separate long enough to look up. If they had, they would have seen Angel, Antonio, and José lift their rifles in salute. Antonio's was still warm from the shots he had fired to make Rubio dance, and then the one that killed him. The three of them reined their horses around and vanished over the ridgeline. Their men wheeled and followed. They had a long way to ride to join Lieutenant Angel's father, a general in Pancho Villa's army far to the north.

Two very real women, Rosa King and Angelina Jimenez, inspired the characters of Grace Knight and Angela Sanchez.

In 1905, newly widowed Englishwoman Rosa King came to Cuernavaca from Mexico City to open a tea shop catering to the city's foreign community. The governor convinced her to buy and restore the almost-four-centuries-old ruin of a hacienda's manor house in the heart of the city. Rosa named her hotel the Bella Vista. After the Revolution's decade of warfare, she wrote
Tempest over Mexico,
a compelling memoir of her experiences before, during, and after the fall of Cuernavaca. Little, Brown and Company published her book in 1935.

Angelina Jimenez, who became known as Lieutenant Angel, tells her story in a book called
Those Years of the Revolution: 1910–1920.
It's a collection, in English and in Spanish, of the memories of the Revolution's veterans who fled to California toward the end of the war. Edited by Esther R. Perez and James and Nina Kallas, the book was published in 1974. It contains a photograph of Lieutenant Angel at about age seventy-five.

Rosa King refused to leave her hotel until General Zapata's troops were storming the city. Her descriptions of the Cuernavacans' flight through the mountains are harrowing. She wrote that eight thousand people started out, but only two thousand made it to safety.

Rosa waited out the war as a refugee in Veracruz. She returned to Cuernavaca after hostilities ended with the eventual assassinations of many of the Revolution's leaders. She found her beloved hotel in ruins. She tried to make a new start, but conditions in the devastated city were so dire that even she, as determined as she was, could not manage it.

Lieutenant Angel's experiences were more amazing than Rosa's. After stealing weapons, blowing up a train, and rescuing comrades imprisoned on it, she rode north to join her father. She, her father, and other officers were captured, imprisoned, and sentenced to death when a former ally betrayed them. Angel's account of her perilous escape and flight to safety across the border to El Norte is also a page-turner.

Students of Mexican history may notice that in
Last Train from Cuernavaca
I have engineered the fall of Cuernavaca a year before it happened on August 13, 1914. The city did come under siege and attack by the rebel forces in the summer of 1913, but managed to revive and survive for another year.

Sadly, while dictators Porfirio Díaz and Victoriano Huerta lived in exile, revolutionary leaders Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, and Francisco Madero were murdered. Venustiano Carranza was killed in 1920 by followers of General Álvaro Obregón, who was subsequently elected president. Obregón was a pragmatist who said, “The days of revolutionary banditry have ended because I have brought all the bandits with me to the capital to keep them out of trouble.”

Today Cuernavaca is a bustling city built on top of and around those deep, lush ravines known as
barrancas
. A city bus route passes the concrete bridge and steep path to the village of San Anton, the inspiration for San Miguel. Now a suburb of Cuernavaca, San Anton is known to this day for the ancient style of pottery that Rosa King and Grace Knight bought there almost a hundred years ago. The village overlooks two spectacular waterfalls in the gorge below it and the openings to caves are visible in the face of the cliff.

The railroad station, built in 1899 during the regime of Porfirio Díaz, remains standing across the street from the depot where buses arrive from Mexico City, which lies about thirty miles across the ten-thousand-foot-high mountain range. The two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, keep watch over the valley.

The building that was Rosa King's Bella Vista Hotel still exists across the street from the city's main plaza. It now houses small businesses and doctors' offices, but the courtyard and wide corridors with their elegant arches are in place. The Victorian bandstand graces the zócalo and a band plays concerts there on Sundays.

Cuernavaca has two nicknames: the City of Eternal Spring and the City of Flowers. Even today it is easy to see why Rosa King and Grace Knight loved it.