Century of the Wind Read online

  (53 and 453)

  1912: Quito

  Alfaro

  A tall woman, dressed all in black, curses President Alfaro as she plunges a dagger into his corpse. Then she raises, on the point of a stick, a flaming banner, the bloody rag of his shirt.

  Behind the woman in black march the avengers of Holy Mother Church. With ropes tied to his feet they drag away the nude body. Flowers rain from windows. Saint-eating, host-swallowing, gossipy old women cry “Long live religion!” The cobbled streets run with blood which the dogs can never lick away nor the rain wash off. The butchery ends in flames. A great bonfire is lit, and on it they throw what remains of old Alfaro. Then gunmen and thugs, hired by the landed gentry, stamp on his ashes.

  Eloy Alfaro had dared to expropriate the lands of the Church, owner of much of Ecuador, and used the rents to create schools and hospitals. A friend of God but not of the Pope, he had legalized divorce and freed Indians jailed for debt. No one was so hated by the surpliced, nor so feared by the frock-coated.

  Night falls. The air of Quito reeks of burned flesh. As on every Sunday, the military band plays waltzes and pasillos in the Grand Plaza bandstand.

  (12, 24, 265, and 332)

  Sad Verses from the Ecuadoran Songbook

  Don’t come near, anyone,

  Stand aside or go.

  My disease is contagious,

  I’m full of woe.

  I’m alone, born alone,

  Of a mother forlorn,

  All alone I stay,

  A feather in a storm.

  Why should a painted house

  Make a blind man sing?

  What are balconies to the street,

  If he can’t see a thing?

  (294)

  1912: Cantón Santa Ana

  Chronicle of the Customs of Manabí

  Eloy Alfaro was born on the coast of Ecuador, in the province of Manabí. In that hot land, region of insolence and violence, no one paid the least attention to his recent divorce law, pushed through against wind and tide. Here, it’s simpler to become a widower than to get caught up in red tape. On the bed where two go to sleep, sometimes only one wakes up. Manabís are famous for short tempers, no money, and big hearts.

  Martín Vera was a rare Manabí. His knife had rusted from remaining so long in its sheath. When the neighbors’ hog invaded his little garden and ate his manioc plants, Martín went to talk to them, the Rosados, and asked them nicely to shut the creature in. On the second occasion, Martín offered to repair the rickety walls of the Rosados’ pigsty for nothing. But the third time, as the hog romped about in his garden, Martín took a shot at it with his gun. Round as it was, the baneful animal fell flat. The Rosados hauled it back to their property to give it a porcine burial.

  The Veras and the Rosados stopped greeting each other. Some days later, the executioner of the hog was crossing the Calvo cliffs, holding on to the mane of his mule, when a bullet left him hanging from one stirrup. The mule dragged Martín Vera home, too late for any kneeling woman to help him to a decent death.

  The Rosados fled. When Martín’s children hunted them down in an empty convent near Colimas, they lit a fire around the place. The Rosados, thirty in all, had to choose death. Some expired by fire, burnt to a crisp; others by bullet, riddled like colanders.

  This happened a year ago. Now, the jungle has devoured the gardens of both families, leaving only a no-man’s-land.

  (226)

  1912: Pajeú de Flores

  Family Wars

  In the deserts of northeast Brazil the elite inherit land and hatred: sad land, land dying of thirst; and hatred, which relatives perpetuate from generation to generation, vengeance to vengeance, forever and a day. In Ceará there is eternal war between the Cunha family and the Pataca family, and the Monteses and the Faitosas practice mutual extermination. In Paraíba it is the Dantases and the Nóbregases who kill each other. In Pernambuco, in the Pajeú River region, every newly born Pereira receives from his parents and godparents the order to hunt down his Carvalho; and every Carvalho comes into the world prepared to liquidate his Pereira.

  Today, Virgulino da Silva Pereira, known as Lampião, fires his first shots at a Carvalho. Though still a child, he automatically becomes an outlaw, a cangaceiro. Life is not worth much around here, where the only hospital is the cemetery. If Lampião were the child of the rich, he would not have to kill on others’ account; he would have it done for him.

  (343)

  1912: Daiquirí

  Daily Life in the Caribbean: An Invasion

  The Platt Amendment, handiwork of Senator Platt of Connecticut, is the passkey that the United States uses to enter Cuba at any hour. The amendment, part of the Cuban Constitution, authorizes the United States to invade and stand fast, and gives it the power to decide who is or is not a proper president for Cuba.

  The current proper president, Mario García Menocal, who also presides over the Cuban American Sugar Company, applies the Platt Amendment, calling in the Marines to put unrest to rest. Too many blacks are in revolt, and none of them has a high enough opinion of private property. Two warships steam in and the Marines land on the beach at Daiquirí to protect the iron and copper mines of the Spanish American and Cuban Copper companies, threatened by black wrath, and the sugar mills all along the Guantánamo and Western Railroad tracks.

  (208 and 241)

  1912: Niquinohomo

  Daily Life in Central America: Another Invasion

  Nicaragua pays the United States a colossal indemnity for moral damages, inflicted by fallen president Zelaya when he committed the grave offense of trying to impose taxes on North American companies.

  As Nicaragua lacks funds, U.S. bankers lend the necessary monies to pay the indemnity, and since Nicaragua lacks guarantees, U.S. Secretary of State Philander Knox sends back the Marines to take charge of customs houses, national banks, and railroads.

  Benjamin Zeledón heads the resistance. The chief of the patriots has a fresh-looking face and startled eyes. The invaders cannot bribe him because Zeledón spits on money, so they defeat him by treachery.

  Augusto César Sandino, a no-account peon from a no-account village, sees Zeledón’s corpse pass by, dragged through the dust, hands and feet bound to the saddle of a drunken invader.

  (10 and 56)

  1912: Mexico City

  Huerta

  looks like a malignant corpse. His shiny dark glasses are all that seem alive in his face.

  Veteran bodyguard of Porfirio Díaz, Victoriano Huerta converted to democracy on the day the dictatorship fell. Now he is President Madero’s right-hand man, and has dedicated himself to hunting down revolutionaries. In the north he catches Pancho Villa, in the south Zapata’s lieutenant, Gildardo Magaña, and orders them shot. The firing squad are stroking their triggers when the presidential pardon interrupts the ceremony. “Death came for me,” sighs Villa, “but missed the appointment.”

  The resuscitated pair end up in the same cell in Tlatelolco prison. They pass days, months, chatting. Magaña talks of Zapata, of his plan for agrarian reform, and of Madero, who turns a deaf ear, so eager is he to offend neither campesinos nor landlords, riding two horses at once.

  A small blackboard and a few books arrive. Pancho Villa knows how to read people, but not letters. Magaña teaches him, and together they enter, word by word, sword-thrust by sword-thrust, the castles of The Three Musketeers. Then they start the journey through Don Quixote de la Mancha, crazy roads of old Spain; and Pancho Villa, fierce warrior of the desert, strokes the pages with the hand of a lover.

  Magaña tells him: “This book … You know? A jailbird wrote it. One of us.”

  (194 and 206)

  1913: Mexico City

  An Eighteen-Cent Rope

  President Madero imposes a tax, a tiny tax, on the heretofore untouched oil companies, and North American ambassador Henry Lane Wilson threatens invasion. Several warships are heading for the ports of Mexico, announces the ambassador, while General
Huerta rebels and his troops bombard the National Palace.

  The fate of Mexico is discussed in the smoking lounge of the U.S. embassy. It is decided to invoke the shot-while-trying-to-escape law, so they put Madero in a car, order him to get out of town, and riddle him with bullets when he tries to.

  General Huerta, the new president, attends a banquet at the Jockey Club. There he announces that he has a good remedy, an eighteen-cent rope, for Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa and the other enemies of order.

  (194 and 246)

  1913: Jonacatepec

  The Hordes Are Not Destroyed

  Huerta’s officers, old hands at massacring rebellious Indians, propose to clean up the southern areas—burning villages and hunting down campesinos. Anyone they meet falls dead or prisoner, for in the south, who is not with Zapata?

  Zapata’s forces are hungry and sick, frayed, but the leader of the landless knows what he wants, and his people believe in what he does; neither fire nor deceit can prevail against that. While the capital’s newspapers report that the Zapata hordes have been totally destroyed, Zapata blows up trains, surprises garrisons and annihilates them, occupies villages, attacks cities, and moves wherever he wants across impenetrable mountains, through impassable ravines, fighting and loving as though it’s all in a day’s work.

  Zapata sleeps where he likes with anyone he likes, but of them all he prefers two who are one.

  (468)

  Zapata and Those Two

  We were twins. We were both named Luz for the day of our baptism and Gregoria for the day we were born. They called her Luz and me Gregoria and there we were, two young girls in the house, when Zapata’s boys came along, and then their chief, trying to persuade my sister to go with him.

  “Look, come with me.”

  And precisely one September 15 he came by and took her.

  Afterward, in this continuous moving around, my sister died in Huautla of a disease that they call—what do they call it?—Saint Vitus, the Saint Vitus disease.

  Three days and three nights chief Zapata was there with us, not eating or drinking a thing. We had only just lit the candles for my sister when ay, ay, ay, he took me by force. He said I belonged to him, because my sister and I were one …

  (244)

  1913: The Plains of Chihuahua

  The North of Mexico Celebrates War and Fiesta

  The cocks crow whenever they feel like it. This land has caught fire, gone crazy. Everyone is in rebellion.

  “We’re off to the war, woman.”

  “But why me?”

  “Do you want me to die of starvation in the war? Who’ll make my tortillas?”

  Flocks of vultures follow the armed peons over plains and mountains. If life is worth nothing, what can death be worth? Men roll themselves like dice into the tumult, and find vengeance or oblivion, land to feed them or to cover them.

  “Here comes Pancho Villa!” the peons exult.

  “Here comes Pancho Villa!” cry the overseers, crossing themselves.

  “Where, where is he?” asks General Huerta.

  “In the north, south, east, and west, and also nowhere,” replies the Chihuahua garrison commander.

  Confronting the enemy, Pancho Villa is always the first to charge, right into the smoking jaws of the guns. When the battle gets hot, he just horse-laughs. His heart thumps like a fish out of water.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the general. He’s just a bit emotional,” his officers explain.

  And so he is. With a single shot, for pure fun, he has been known to disembowel the messenger who gallops up with good news from the front.

  (206 and 260)

  1913: Culiacán

  Bullets

  There are bullets with imagination, Martín Luis Guzmán discovers. Bullets which amuse themselves in afflicting the flesh. He has known serious bullets, which serve human fury, but not these bullets that play with human pain.

  For being a bad marksman with a good heart, the young novelist is assigned to direct one of Pancho Villa’s hospitals. The wounded pile up in the dirt with no recourse but to clench their teeth, if they have any.

  Checking the jammed wards, Guzmán confirms the improbable trajectories of these fanciful bullets, capable of emptying an eye-socket while leaving a body alive, or of sticking a piece of ear into the neck and a piece of neck into the foot. And he witnesses the sinister joy of bullets, which, having been ordered to kill a soldier, condemn him never again to sit down or never again to eat with his mouth.

  (216)

  1913: The Fields of Chihuahua

  One of These Mornings I Murdered Myself,

  on some dusty Mexican road, and the event left a deep impression on me.

  This wasn’t the first crime I committed. From the time I was born in Ohio seventy-one years ago and received the name Ambrose Bierce, until my recent death, I have played havoc with the lives of my parents and various relatives, friends, and colleagues. These touching episodes have splashed blood over my days—or my stories, which is all the same to me: the difference between the life I lived and the life I wrote is a matter for the jokers who execute human law, literary criticism, and the will of God in this world.

  To put an end to my days, I joined the troops of Pancho Villa and chose one of those many stray bullets zooming through the Mexican sky these days. This method proved more practical than hanging, cheaper than poison, more convenient than firing with my own finger, and more dignified than waiting for disease or old age.

  1914: Montevideo

  Batlle

  He writes articles slandering the saints and makes speeches attacking the company that sells real estate in the Great Beyond. When he assumed the presidency of Uruguay, he had no alternative but to swear before God and the Holy Evangels, but explained immediately that he didn’t believe in any of that.

  José Batlle y Ordonez governs in defiance of the powers of heaven and earth. The Church has promised him a nice place in hell; companies he nationalized, or forced to respect their workers’ unions and the eight-hour work day, will feed the fire; and the Devil will avenge his offenses against male-supremacists.

  “He is legalizing licentiousness,” say his enemies when he approves a law permitting women to sue for divorce.

  “He is dissolving the family,” they say, when he extends inheritance rights to illegitimate children.

  “The female brain is inferior,” they say, when he creates a women’s university and announces that women will soon have the vote so that Uruguayan democracy need not walk on just one leg, and so that women will not forever be children passing from the hands of the father to those of the husband.

  (35 and 271)

  1914: San Ignacio

  Quiroga

  From the Paraná River jungle where he lives in voluntary exile, Horacio Quiroga applauds Batlle’s reforms and that ardent faith in noble things.

  But Quiroga is indeed far from Uruguay. He left the country some years ago, fleeing the shadow of death. A curse has darkened his life since he killed his best friend while trying to defend him; or perhaps he was cursed from the beginning.

  In the jungle, a step away from the ruins of the Jesuit missions, Quiroga lives surrounded by bugs and palm trees. He writes stories without detours, just as he opens paths through the thicket with his machete. He works the word with the same rugged love as he does the soil, and wood, and iron.

  What Quiroga seeks he could never find away from here. Here, yes, though only very occasionally. In this house which his hands built by the river, Quiroga has at times the joy of hearing voices more powerful than the call of death: rare and fleeting certainties of life, which while they last are as absolute as the sun.

  (20, 357, 358, and 390)

  1914: Montevideo

  Delmira

  In this rented room she had an appointment with the man who had been her husband. Wanting to possess her, wanting to stay with her, he made love to her, killed her, then killed himself.

  The Uruguayan
papers publish a photo of the body lying beside the bed: Delmira struck down by two bullets, naked like her poems, all unclothed in red.

  Let’s go further in the night, let’s …

  Delmira Agustini wrote in a trance. She sang to the fevers of love without shame, and was condemned by those who punish women for what they applaud in men, because chastity is a feminine duty, and desire, like reason, a male privilege. In Uruguay the laws march ahead of the people, who still separate soul from body as if they were Beauty and the Beast. Before the corpse of Delmira flow tears and phrases about this irreplaceable loss to national letters, but deep down the mourners feel some relief: the woman is dead, and better so.

  But is she dead? Will not all the lovers burning in the nights of the world be the shadows of her voice and the echoes of her body? In the nights of the world won’t they make a small place where her unfettered voice can sing and her radiant feet can dance?

  (49 and 426)

  1914: Ciudad Jiménez

  Chronicler of Angry Peoples

  From shock to shock, from marvel to marvel, John Reed travels the roads of northern Mexico. He is looking for Pancho Villa and finds him at every step.

  Reed, chronicler of revolution, sleeps wherever night catches up with him. No one ever steals from him, or ever lets him pay for anything except dance music; and there’s always someone to offer him a piece of tortilla or a place on his horse.

  “Where do you come from?”

  “From New York.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything about New York, but I’ll bet you don’t see such fine cattle going through the streets as you see in the streets of Jiménez.”