Mexico (83 page)

When the time came to make colorful posters announcing the celebration, Jubal drew the sketch using the word "Festival," which is pronounced like "Mineral" with a heavy accent on the last syllable. But when the Palafoxes saw his proposal they protested: "There's no such word in Spanish. Fiesta, Festivo, but no Festival." When he asked others, they confirmed that he had used a word that did not exist at that time in formal Spanish, but he was stubborn: "It has a singing sound, and the foreigners who come to Toledo to watch will know what it means," and the name stuck.

My grandfather did not die happy. He was protected by a wonderful wife, his son was now grown and Mexico was at peace under the iron dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. But then, as if to signal that the good old days were ending, in the northern city of Monterrey an anarchist tried to assassinate Diaz but struck instead the carriage of Colonel Echeverria, killing him and his wife, Alicia. Within three months Diaz had abdicated and the infamous General Gurza was destroying north-central Mexico, with Emiliano Zapata doing the same to the south.

Jubal was distraught. He had thought of Alicia Palafox as a member of his family. At times she was that child of eight in the sacred China Poblana, again the delicately beautiful bride he had seen on his return to Toledo, at other times the gracious woman in the plaza who had caught him buying the doll, or the sensitive person who had sent him the dress and the note, both of which he still kept. I think it is fair to say that in some quiet way these two had loved each other, but maybe I'm searching for a new word. I do know that the memory of Alicia Palafox lives in our family's memory as vividly as on that dreadful day when she was killed and Mexico began to fall apart.

Since I was born in 1909 and left Mexico permanently in 1938, it is obvious that I witnessed the continuing Revolution that scarred the country during those years; however, this passage will be a story not about me but about my father, John Clay, who saw the tragedies not as a child but as a participating adult. It is also the account of how Toledo reacted to the fighting, for our family lived there throughout the wars. To bring some order to the confusion I shall identify the people who play recurring roles, and some of the stages on which they acted.

Dominant in the rebellion was General Saturnino Gurza, a butterball of a man six feet tall with an enormous belly that protruded from just below his rib cage, but faded away to almost nothing down to where he used a length of rope as a belt. Since he was proud of being a
Peon
, he wore the
Peon
's costume: sandals, unpressed loose white pants, no undershirt beneath his open-necked white shirt, a red bandanna and an enormous white straw sombrero.

He had a face to match his torso--big, round, hair in his eyes and a mustache that drooped below his chin line. On several occasions I heard him give orders, and I remember his coarse voice, which seemed always to end with a sardonic laugh, as if he enjoyed doing the terrible things he did.

Gurza had growrf up in poverty in one of the bleak northern Mexican states along the border with the United States, a country for which he developed an abiding hatred. As a boy he had terrorized his companions and at the age of nineteen declared himself to be a colonel, fighting for whoever paid him. By twenty he was a self-appointed general, in which capacity he demonstrated such mastery that he quickly converted himself into a real general. So from boyhood he had been fighting constantly, but against whom or for whom he seemed never to understand. He became famous as the general with two wide bandoleers laden with cartridges crisscrossing his chest, a huge rifle slung in his left hand and a sneer on his lips. When that burly figure stormed into a meeting, it commanded respect.

In his lawless activities Gurza always seemed able to win the support of an army of ragtag dissidents called los descamisados (those without shirts), who enjoyed serving under him when he raided the sites between the American border and Mexico City. He also had no trouble taking control of an apparently limitless supply of trains that had now penetrated most parts of Mexico's corners. Regardless of which railroad he stole them from, they all looked alike: a wheezing engine whose water tank could be easily punctured by enemy bullets, maybe one ordinary coach with windows, one baggage car with heavy bars protecting its windows, followed by a string of flatcars--occasionally one would have fencelike sides--and the inevitable caboose in which rode enthusiastic soldiers who found joy in firing at anyone the men on the forward flatbeds had missed. Since three railway lines now crossed in Toledo, one leading to the capital, one to Guadalajara and one to San Luis Potosi, it was inevitable that we would be seeing a lot of General Gurza, whose short name was easy to remember.

In fact, during my childhood the history of Toledo was so entangled with the exploits of this wild man that in my mind Gurza and Toledo have become fused as one entity. His excursions into town were inevitable, for he and his army lived on railroad freight cars, and that brought him to us constantly. I saw his troops in action on four terrifying occasions: in 1914, when the nuns were murdered; in 1916, when he killed five men of my family; in 1918, when he torched the town and murdered our priests; and in 1919, when he destroyed our mine. And there was that fifth excursion when he dandled me on his knee as if he were my loving uncle.

There were other visits, of course, for he was always on the move, but he came so often, either chasing or being chased, that specific events and their dates become a blur. What I can state for certain is that in my childhood he was an ogre, in my boyhood a terror, and in my later years a perplexity, the most remarkable Mexican I have known.

In our city the general had clearly identified enemies: the Palafoxes with their big homes and large tracts of land; Mother Anna Maria, the superior of the convent northwest of town, who had the bad luck to be known as a member of the Palafox family, thus incurring a double enmity; and Father Juan L
o
pez, an underweight, shifty-eyed village priest with a bad complexion and a burning desire to see his church sponsor and deliver justice to his Indians. In these years Father Lopez served as a minor functionary in the cathedral, which had a cadre of four other priests who discharged the traditional duty of catering to the well-to-do families in the region.

Each of these enemies of the general was associated with some building or buildings, so that whenever he rampaged through Toledo he had no problem finding targets on which to vent his spleen. Mother Anna Maria's convent was a late
-
eighteenth-century building erected by the Palafoxes of the day. Situated on a hill north of Toledo, it commanded perhaps the finest view in the district, for one could see not only the pyramid and the smokestacks of the Mineral but also the profile of the city and the rolling countryside. The convent itself was a thing of beauty with secluded cloisters and low towers, but its surroundings alone would have made it special.

Ineffectual Father Lopez worked in the cathedral and lived in meager quarters on its grounds. The Palafox holdings included the Mineral, the big houses behind adobe walls and the bull ranch. But it was the city itself, a kind of self-contained refuge in the vicinity of Mexico City but not contaminated by it, that constituted the major target for an assailant. Any marauding army able to invade Toledo sent a message of fear to the capital: "Might we be next?" so government forces sometimes tried to forestall such attacks by encircling Toledo to defend it, but such futile efforts merely made the conquering armies more vengeful when they marched in as victors.

It would be helpful if I could explain who was fighting whom in those chaotic years, but I was unable to keep such things straight then any more than I can now. In 1911 the dictator Porfirio Diaz was overthrown by the poetic dreamer Francisco Madero, who was soon murdered by more practical people. Then a man named Victoriano Huerto battled for supremacy with a man named Venustiano Carranza, whom my father did not like. When the three famous bandits--Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata and Saturnino Gurza--took control, hell broke loose across Mexico. At last Carranza was assassinated and Obregon resumed power, but he was assassinated, too, and in 1934, a black day in Mexican history so far as the Clay family was concerned, Lazaro Cardenas, a wild-eyed radical, became president, and our drift to exile began.

I hope you've been able to make sense of all this because, as I said before, I was never able to. What I knew was that General Gurza came and went, and when he came people died, and when he went they lamented their losses. Our first experience with him was in 1914, when I was five years old. One of his open trains approached Toledo from the north, and when a scout galloped into town with the terrifying news "Here comes General Gurza!" my father, who had become manager of the Mineral at my grandfather's death, put my mother and me in an inner room, saying: "No matter what happens, stay here," and he ran off to protect the mine.

Father did not have to worry about this incursion from the north, because the train came on a rickety track well to the west of the pyramid. This put the loaded cars close to the convent, and when our sparse government troops halted the train at the edge of the city, Gurza, in a rage at having been prevented from entering Toledo, led a charge on the undefended convent, broke down the fragile gates, rousted out all the nuns and shot seven. He would have especially liked to execute Mother Superior Anna Maria, since she was a Palafox, but he could not find her. Loyal nuns at the risk of their own lives had hidden her--they were the ones that Gurza shot.

I was, as I said, five at the time, and although I can remember the horror with which my family heard of this outrage, I did not understand the euphemisms with which Mother and Father discussed the tragedy. They used the Spanish violado las monjas (violated the nuns) to describe what had happened before the women were killed, and perhaps it was better that I did not understand, but by the next time Gurza came through I knew that the nuns had been victims of indecent games, rape, torture and shooting. There was much violating of women when Gurza's bullies ransacked a place.

In the aftermath of this obscene attack, Father bought two pistols and coached Mother and me: 'They're beasts. Shoot them if they ever come to this side of the pyramid and try to force their way into the house." Taking Mother aside to where they supposed I could not hear, he told her: "If they're about to capture you, use the gun on them. If they're too many, use it on yourself." At the age of six I learned how to load, care for and use a revolver. And at night I had visions of holding off General Gurza, whom I had not yet seen, with my revolver and shooting him dead when he attempted to violate Mother.

I did get to see the general some years later when his dreadful train came down again from the north, this time without opposition. Backing it into town so as to provide a quick getaway if troops from the capital moved in, he rounded up all the citizens, including those of us at the Mineral, and herded us into the plaza. There, on a sunny July day in excessive heat, we sweltered with Father whispering: "Say nothing. Do nothing. Attract no attention," and in abject silence we watched as Gurza's men, working from lists that the officers read, rounded up the landowners of the district, the big ones with more than two hundred thousand acres each, and hauled them into that part of the plaza facing the cathedral. There put them against the stone wall of one of the towers and shouted accusations against them in a voice so loud it terrified me: "Good people of Toledo! These men, you know them, they stole your lands, threw you off, turned you into slaves. Isn't that right?" and from the listeners came many voices: "Yes, yes!"

Then he cried to one of his officers: "Read the list!" and the man, with no insignia showing that he was an officer, read: "Aureliano Palafox, sixty thousand acres. Belisario Palafox, forty thousand acres. Tomas, twenty thousand acres," and the litany continued to those who owned only a few thousand acres. In later years I remembered those figures and wondered how the Palafoxes had acquired so much land. I was not aware that our acreage extended far into the countryside.

When the list was completed, Gurza cried to one of his men: "How did these thieves get their land?" and the man shouted: "They stole it!"

"From who?"

"From the
Peon
s."

"And what do we do with such thieves of honest people's land?"

"Shoot them!" The heat of the moment was so intense that many voices in the plaza screamed: "Shoot them!"

"My God," Father cried. "They're going to do it!" and he whispered to Mother: "Cover his eyes," and her hand came over my face, but a crack was left and with one eye I watched General Gurza, his bandoleers glistening in the sun, give the order to fire. I saw the muskets jump, the muzzles smoke, and the landowners fall as blood began to stain the foot of the cathedral tower.

Thinking the execution over, Mother dropped her hand, so I clearly saw that one of the owners had not been killed--in later years I would learn that this frequently happened in mass shootings--so now General Gurza whipped out his revolver, went to the wounded man and shot him through the head. Four Palafoxes had been executed--their careful amassing of land, usually with government approval, had signed their death warrants.

The bodies were left in the hot sun until evening, when Gurza gave the crowd permission to return home, but before we left the plaza I had a chance to look closely at the tower wall and saw that it was pockmarked with scars from bullets. In the decade ahead a thousand buildings would suffer similar marks.