TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (51 page)

She lay back on the sofa, smoking a cigarette. I watched the blue smoke swirl in front of the crackling fire.

“My first marriage,” Elisa went on, “to Zambrano, wasn’t a very good one. He was
muy mucho, muy Mexicano.
You know what I mean. I didn’t cope too well. I could now, but not then. My only excuse is that I was young. He went haring off after the ladies, and I got back at him by having affairs with men. With a woman too, but only once. She was a girl from Berlin, my cousin, who came to visit. I’d always adored her, a schoolgirl crush, and it came to fruition. It ended, she went back, but I’ve never regretted it—I did it with a whole heart. And I see you’re shocked.”

I wasn’t. I don’t think anything she had done could shock me, because she wasn’t the least bit ashamed and she made it sound natural. It was just something beyond my comprehension, and I said so. She smiled.

When Zambrano’s appendix burst, as she had already told us, she married again and lost her second husband to one of Huerta’s firing squads. “That hurt,” she said succinctly. “He was a good man—much older than I and far wiser. And then I went through what the English call ‘a bad patch.’ I didn’t want anything to do with men, but they came round, as they always do to a woman on her own. Bringing me God’s gift in a pair of tight trousers.” She laughed merrily. “I turned them all away. I’d learned a long time ago that promiscuity wasn’t the answer—not for me. I needed someone, and I was willing to be chosen, but I wanted the right to choose too. There’s more than one revolution, you see. So I had to do a bit of kicking and scratching, which isn’t my style. I think I achieved a reputation in Parral as a tough
hombre.
The buck nun of Los Flores.” She chuckled again. “And I loved it as much as I hated it. What I hated was the loneliness, although I’ve discovered that human beings are constructed in such a way that they’ll get used to anything, no matter how /«human. Like war,” she said carelessly. “But never mind that. Getting back to me, what I grew to love was my bloody independence. And
that’s
a trap too. Believe me. The ego soars. You grow a little arm-weary patting yourself on the back. It’s so damned silly and so damned necessary. It’s the key to your life, but it’s a bore to make it a
way
of life. But I did. And still do. Can’t help it. I warn you.”

She fell silent awhile, but I knew she wasn’t waiting for me to speak. She was mulling something over in her mind. I liked to watch that process of thought: I liked the changing shadows in her green eyes and the tightening of little muscles around her lips.

Then she said quickly, “I want you to know something else. No illusions, no serious mistakes—isn’t that what I said? But still.” Again she hesitated before she spoke. “That time, when I wore the nun’s habit— I’m not speaking of the dead past. It’s lasted right up to now … that is, until the night after the
charreada.
You’re the first, Tom, in two years. Long years, I might add. Good years, but not the easiest ones.”

I believed her instantly. She flattered me, but it wasn’t her intent. She wanted me to understand her and to be a shade more careful than I might have been otherwise. She was as vulnerable as I.

“But why
me,
Elisa?”

“Because you didn’t take me for granted,” she said. “Not before bed, not during, not after. You have some style, Tom, not just with Chihuahua longhorns and German staff captains. I like almost everything about you … so far,” she said, warier now, pulling back, but with a little smile.

“You don’t know me yet,” I answered.

“I have a good sense of smell. Age and experience, my sweet, have to provide some benefits.”

No one had ever called me “my sweet” before Elisa, and nothing can move a man to lay out the raw truths of his life more than a woman who beats him to the punch. She hadn’t been shy; neither was I. I told her my story, what little there was. I didn’t leave out my courtship of Hannah or my living with Rosa and my visit to Tomochic. I didn’t leave out the corral in Torreón. I must have spoken for hours—not at one time, but over the course of our days and nights and even in the pearl light of dawn after we had wakened and made love. Elisa always listened. She was a woman of substance, and I knew she could help me.

“Oh, Tom!” she burst out. “These past years, you’ve
lived.
You’re learning! What good does it do to keep on torturing yourself? It’s not what you do that counts, it’s how you do it. With what spirit! Don’t you think, sometimes, that this life is a kind of game? Unlike any other, I mean, with rules that you have to make up for yourself. You play to win, but you sure as hell better enjoy playing or it makes no sense.”

I reflected on that for a while. We were sitting in the library, with snifters of brandy. A good hickory fire blazed in the grate, fragrant and warm.

“I suppose you’re like me,” she said. “You were brought up to be good, and truthful, and faithful. Isn’t that so? But to what? To other people’s idea of goodness, and truth, and fidelity, and heaven knows what else.” She tossed some stray yellow hairs from her forehead and spoke soothingly. “In the end, Tom, I think there’s only one judge of your life on this earth. That’s the man standing in your boots. He stands alone, and he’s usually damned lonely. No one else can see his vision. No one else has the right. Certainly not the knowledge.”

“I suppose if you put it that way,” I said, “no one can judge Rodolfo Fierro. But I don’t care. I judge him. He’s a murderer. And I don’t think those men in the corral at Torreón thought much of the game
they
had to play.” I sighed; I never seemed to stray far from that memory. “And what about the
campesinos,
the ones who live in places like La Perla? You can’t tell a starving man that life is a game. You can’t tell a mother of fifteen Indian kids that it’s a game and she’s a fool if she doesn’t enjoy it. I mean, you can—but if there’s a rock handy, you’d better duck.”

“I don’t mean that, Tom.”

“I see. You mean for people like you and me.”

“For anyone who can crawl out of the rut they were born into. Damn it, it’s not easy! But some people do it. They don’t spend their lives acting out a morality that they don’t believe in. They don’t inherit— they create! And you know I don’t mean they have the right to be cruel, or to cheat for the sake of gain. Unless,” she said, grinning, “it’s for a good quarter horse…”

“But why not?” I said, trying to follow her thinking. “If I believe in that, if those are my rules, if that pleases me, why in hell shouldn’t I?”

“But you
don’t
believe in it.”

“No,” I sighed, “I don’t. Except for a quarter horse.”

“And you surely have the right to take pleasure when it’s offered to you with no strings attached. And give it in kind. I do what I please, Tom. I take the consequences, and I can live with that. If I make a mistake, no one pays but me.”

“But what do I do now, Elisa? With you, I mean. Can’t you see? I’m falling in love with you.”

It was a simple confession of simple fact, and she took it that way, without comment or fluttering of eyelashes. I suppose she had known without my having to say it.

“Stay here with me,” she said, “until Captain von Papen gets back from Juárez. And then do what pleases you, whatever it may be. Just make sure it’s because you truly want to, and not because you feel obliged. Don’t do anything for that reason.”

“I feel obliged to Pancho Villa,” I said, changing the focus. “Does that make it wrong to keep on fighting for him?”

“You believe in his revolution, don’t you? Doesn’t it make you feel you can look yourself in the eye without flinching?”

“You put it well.”

“If your obligations are the same as your desires, you’re a lucky man. You can be whole.”

I tried to see how that applied to my being torn between Hannah and Rosa in the past, and now so suddenly involved with her, but I got all muddled up. I told her so.

“Ah, you’re young,” she said gently. “But that’s no crime. It’s something we all have to pass through, like Tristram Shandy kicking from the womb. Don’t think about it too much. The answers will come to you when you’re not thinking. Trust them when they come. Meanwhile, finish your wine. Come to bed.”

Elisa Griensen wanted to sing again. I would oblige, and I had the desire to match the obligation.

So I felt whole. Not terribly enlightened, but certainly lucky. The pleasure was unsullied by guilt or longings in any other direction. I tried not to think about Rosa. She was there, somewhere in Mexico and somewhere in the core of my mind and heart, but she wasn’t here. And I was. Elisa was a calm island bounded by warm waters in the midst of a turbulent sea. The revolution didn’t touch me during that week. I had a taste of what peace might be like, and it suited me as much as the other. So I was torn that way too but didn’t know it.

We would talk out by the stables, working on the horses, or riding through the desert, and then sometimes in the bedroom before we lit the candles on the bedside tables and crawled under the perfumed sheets to romp in the shadows. Elisa was a full-grown woman in ways I realized I wasn’t yet a man, and the twelve years she had on me made a difference as wide as the Rio Bravo. But we met in the middle of the river and swam with the current. She was just steadier, more sure of herself, and content to let things happen without yanking too hard on the rudder. Many an hour we spent in the library, I deep in
Tristram Shandy
or dipping into some other book she thought I might like, and she sipping her brandy.

Sometimes she read aloud to me, a long passage of a poem that she liked, and one evening, her cool cheek pressed against mine, we read that scene from
Romeo and Juliet
where they wind up killing themselves from the pain of lost love. There were tears glistening in Elisa’s green eyes when we had finished. She was a fine woman, hard on the outside and hard in the core, but with plenty of softness in between.

The next morning we were riding Maximilian and the Appaloosa in the hot haze of the desert, and we reined up in the shade of some cottonwood trees to let the horses cool down.

“Elisa, I’ve been thinking. You know me now. Am I the right sort of man to ever get married?”

“I may know you, but I can’t answer that for you.”

“I don’t think I really know anymore what the word
love
means,” I said. The confession cost me something. “A man says he loves fried chicken, or his folks, or his offspring—and that’s clear enough. Simple desire. Not so simple habit. But loving a woman is something different. It’s a kind of crazy feeling … it hardly ever makes you feel peaceful, or easy inside your own skin.”

“Is that what you want from love? To feel peaceful and easy?”

“I sure don’t want to feel crazy.”

“Do you think real love has to make you feel a little crazy?” Laughing, I said, “It tends to, doesn’t it?”

“No law says so.”

“If you were younger, Elisa—” I stopped there, wishing I could bite back the words. She looked quickly away for a moment at the rippling horizon and the blast furnace of the sky, and I couldn’t see her face. But when she swung it back to me, she was at ease again.

“If horses had wings,” she said lightly, “we’d fly to the moon. If I were younger, Tom, I’d still be married. And even if that weren’t so, I’d be a different person. You might not feel the same way about me. We all change. Sometimes things happen, and the happening makes the moment right. So don’t fret about if and maybe. Think about what you’ve got, what you’re doing, and hang on to it or do it with a whole heart … or move along. Life is short,” she said, echoing Candelario, only with a touch of bitterness in her voice I had never heard before. “Too short to play the fool. Too short to …” She clamped her mouth shut a moment. “Well, just too short. You’ll find out. Look!”

She pointed over my shoulder.

A horseman came bobbing out of the heat haze, black against the white glare of the desert, sun flashing off his spurs. It was Candelario on the Morgan, coming up at a brisk canter. I let go the stock of my rifle.

Captain von Papen was back, he said, and waiting for us at the hacienda.

Our talk took longer than it should have because, as usual, Von Papen sowed a big crop of words before he got round to what I was waiting for: the list of supplies that the German government was willing to provide Pancho Villa. He had it typed in Spanish on some plain white paper, folded into a plain white envelope, and it was unsigned, but as soon as I read it I knew it would serve the purpose. The list included everything from new 7.62-mm Mauser rifles and gas-boosted light machine guns to 88-mm field artillery and Mercedes-Benz trucks—in enough quantities to equip an army of fifty thousand men.

I had only one idea in my head: that there might be a way to get the arms without invading Texas.

“I’ll give this to him, Captain. How should General Villa contact you when he’s made up his mind?”

“I’ll find him,” Von Papen said.

He didn’t waste any time after that but took his leave as soon as he had clicked his heels and exchanged salutes with me, and then he fogged out of there in another dust cloud toward Chihuahua City. I doubted I would ever see him again, but I was wrong.

It was my turn then to leave. I could have stayed on at the Hacienda de Los Flores for another week, or even longer, and been more content than a bee in a clover patch, but I knew that Pancho Villa would be somewhere around Irapuato fretting for the news, as well as the gold for Conchita. Still, I told Candelario we wouldn’t pull stakes until dawn.

So I had one more night to curl up against Elisa and drink her honey. I woke in the first fuzzy gray streak of day feeling worn out as a fresh-branded calf. Elisa was already in the kitchen frying a skilletful of eggs and brewing a pot of black coffee. Long goodbyes, I realized, wouldn’t be her style.

Candelario and I had decided to skip Chihuahua City and a run-in with Urbina, who might still be nursing the lump on his skull and a feeling for us that wasn’t exactly motherly love, and head southeast for Torreón where we could pick up the southbound train.

The revolution and human nature being what they were, Maximilian was too fine a horse to leave behind in some Torreón livery stable, so I told Elisa we would ride the nags we had come on. They had been well grazed and had put on some weight in the ten days we had been lazying around. I asked her to keep Maximilian for me until I came back. A little smile crinkled her tanned cheeks so that her dimples flashed.