Century of the Wind Read online

  A woman carries a pitcher on her head. Another, squatting, suckles her baby. Another, on her knees, grinds corn. Enveloped in faded serapes, the men sit in a circle, drinking and smoking.

  “Listen, Juanito, why is it your people don’t like Mexicans? Why do they call us ‘greasers’?”

  Everyone has something to ask this thin, bespectacled, blond man who looks as if he were here by mistake.

  “Listen, Juanito, how do you say ‘mula’ in English?”

  “Goddamn stubborn—fathead mule …”

  (368)

  1914: Salt Lake City

  Songster of Angry Peoples

  They condemn him for singing red ballads that make fun of God, that wake up the worker, that curse money. The sentence doesn’t say that Joe Hill is a proletarian troubadour, or worse, a foreigner seeking to subvert the good order of business. The sentence speaks of assault and crime. There is no proof, the witnesses change their stories each time they testify, and the defense lawyers act as if they were the prosecutors. But these details lack importance for the judges and for all who make decisions in Salt Lake City. Joe Hill will be bound to a chair with a cardboard circle pinned over his heart as a target for the firing squad.

  Joe Hill came from Sweden. In the United States he wandered the roads. In the cities he cleaned spittoons and built walls; in the countryside he stacked wheat and picked fruit, dug copper in the mines, toted sacks on the piers, slept under bridges and in barns, sang anywhere at any hour, and never stopped singing. He bids his comrades farewell singing, now that he’s off to Mars to disturb its social peace.

  (167)

  1914: Torreón

  By Rail They March to Battle

  In the red car, which displays his name in big gilt letters, General Pancho Villa receives John Reed. He receives him in his underpants, pours him coffee, and studies him for a long moment. Deciding that this gringo deserves the truth, he begins to talk.

  “The chocolate politicians want to win without dirtying their hands. Those perfumed …”

  Then he takes him to visit the field hospital, a train with a surgery and doctors to heal their own men and others: and he shows him the cars that take corn, sugar, coffee, and tobacco to the front. He also shows him the platform on which traitors are shot.

  The railroads were the work of Porfirio Díaz, the key to peace and order, masterkey to the progress of a country without rivers or roads. They had been created not to transport an armed people but cheap raw materials, docile workers, and the executioners of rebellions. But General Villa makes war by train. From Camargo he turns loose a locomotive at full speed and smashes a trainful of soldiers. Villa’s men enter Ciudad Juárez crouching in innocent coal cars, and after firing a few shots occupy it, more out of fun than necessity. By train the Villista troops roll to the front lines of the war. The locomotive gasps, painfully climbing the bare northern slopes. From behind a plume of black smoke come creaking shaking cars filled with soldiers and horses. On their roofs sprout rifles, sombreros, and stoves. Up there, among soldiers singing mañanitas and shooting into the air, children bawl and women cook—the women, the soldaderas, dressed in bridal gowns and silk shoes from the last looting.

  (246 and 368)

  1914: The Fields of Morelos

  It’s Time to Get Moving and Fight,

  and the roars and rifle shots echo like mountain landslides. The army of Zapata—down with the haciendas, up with the villages—opens the way to Mexico City.

  Around chief Zapata, General Genovevo de la O meditates and cleans his rifle, his face like a mustachioed sun, while Otilio Montaño, anarchist, discusses a manifesto with Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, socialist.

  Among Zapata’s officers and advisers there is but one woman. Colonel Rosa Bobadilla, who won her rank in battle, commands a troop of cavalrymen and maintains a ban on drinking so much as a drop of tequila. They obey her, mysteriously, although they remain convinced that women are only good for adorning the world, making children, and cooking corn, chili, beans, or whatever God provides and permits.

  (296 and 468)

  1914: Mexico City

  Huerta Flees

  on the same ship that took Porfirio Díaz from Mexico.

  Rags are winning the war against lace. A campesino tide beats against the capital. Zapata, the Attila of Morelos, and Pancho Villa, the orangutan who eats raw meat and gnaws bones, attack from north and south, avenging wrongs. Just before Christmas, the front pages of Mexico City’s newspapers appear with black borders, mourning the arrival of the outlaws, barbarian violators of young ladies and locks.

  Turbulent years. Now nobody knows who is who. The city trembles in panic and sighs with nostalgia. Only yesterday at the hub of the world were the masters in their big houses with their lackeys and pianos, candelabra and Carrara marble baths; and all around, serfs, the poor of the barrios, dizzy with pulque, drowning in garbage, condemned to the wages or tips which barely bought some occasional watered milk or frijol coffee or burro meat.

  (194 and 246)

  1915: Mexico City

  Power Ungrasped

  A timid knock, somewhere between wanting and not wanting. A door that half opens. An uncovered head, enormous sombrero clutched in hands pleading, for the love of God, for water or tortillas. Zapata’s men, Indians in white pants, cartridge belts crossed on chests, wander the streets of the city that scorns and fears them. Nowhere are they invited in. In no time they run into Villa’s men, also foreigners lost, blind.

  Soft click of sandals, chas-ches, chas-ches, on the marble stairways, feet that are frightened by the pleasure of carpets, faces staring bewildered at themselves in the mirrors of waxed floors: Zapata’s and Villa’s men enter the National Palace as if begging pardon. Pancho Villa sits on the gilt armchair that was Porfirio Díaz’s throne to see how it feels, while at his side Zapata, in a very embroidered suit, with an expression of being there without being there, murmurs answers to the reporters’ questions.

  The campesino generals have triumphed, but they don’t know what to do with their victory: “This shack is pretty big for us.”

  Power is something for doctors, a threatening mystery that can only be deciphered by the cultured, those who understand the high art of politics, those who sleep on downy pillows.

  When night falls, Zapata goes to a seedy hotel just a step away from the railway that leads to his country, and Villa to a military train. After a few days, they bid farewell to Mexico City.

  The hacienda peons, the Indians of the communities, the pariahs of the countryside, have discovered the center of power and occupied it for a moment, as if on a visit, on tiptoe, anxious to end as soon as possible this trip to the moon. Strangers to the glory of victory, they end up going home to the lands where they know how to move around without getting lost.

  No better news could be imagined by Huerta’s successor, General Venustiano Carranza, whose battered troops are recovering with the aid of the United States.

  (47, 194, 246, and 260)

  1915: Tlaltizapán

  Agrarian Reform

  In an old mill in the village of Tlaltizapán, Zapata installs his headquarters. Here, in his native district, far from the sideburned lords and their feathered ladies, far from the flashy, deceitful city, the Morelos rebel chief liquidates the great estates, nationalizes sugar-mills and distilleries without paying a centavo, and restores to the communities lands stolen through the centuries. Free villages are reborn, the conscience and memory of Indian traditions, and with them local democracy. Here neither bureaucrats nor generals make the decisions, but the assembled community in open forum. Selling or renting land is forbidden. Covetousness is forbidden.

  In the shade of the laurels, in the village plaza, the talk is of more than fighting cocks, horses, and rain. Zapata’s army, a league of armed communities, watches over the recovered land; they oil their guns and reload them with old Mauser and .30-.30 cartridges.

  Young technicians are arriving in Morelos with tripods a
nd other strange instruments to help the agrarian reform. The campesinos receive these budding engineers from Cuernavaca with a rain of flowers; but the dogs bark at the mounted messengers who gallop in from the north with the grim news that Pancho Villa’s army is being wiped out.

  (468)

  1915: El Paso

  Azuela

  Exiled in Texas, a medic from Pancho Villa’s army treats the Mexican revolution as a pointless outburst. According to Mariano Azuela’s novel The Underdogs, this is a tale of drunken blind men who shoot without knowing why or against whom, who lash out like animals seeking things to steal or women to tumble on the ground in a land that stinks of gunpowder and frying grease.

  (33)

  1916: Tlaltizapán

  Carranza

  The clink of Villa’s horsemen’s spurs can still be heard in the mountains, but it is no longer an army. From trenches defended by barbed wire, machineguns have made a clean sweep in four long battles of Villa’s fiery cavalry, ground to dust in stubbornly repeated suicide charges.

  Venustiano Carranza, president in spite of Villa and Zapata, launches the war in the south: “This business of dividing up the land is crazy,” he says. One decree announces that lands distributed by Zapata will be returned to their old owners; another promises to shoot anyone who is, or looks like, a Zapatista.

  Shooting and burning with rifles and torches, government forces swoop down on the flourishing fields of Morelos. They kill five hundred people in Tlaltizapán, and many more elsewhere. The prisoners are sold in Yucatan as slave labor for the henequén plantations, as in the days of Porfirio Díaz; and crops, herds, all war booty is taken to the markets of the capital.

  In the mountains, Zapata resists. When the rainy season approaches, the revolution is suspended for planting; but later, stubbornly, incredibly, it goes on.

  (246, 260, and 468)

  1916: Buenos Aires

  Isadora

  Barefoot, naked, scantily draped in the Argentine flag, Isadora Duncan dances to the national anthem in a students’ café in Buenos Aires, and the next morning the whole world knows of it. The impresario breaks his contract, good families cancel their reservations at the Colón Theater, and the press demands the immediate expulsion of this disgraceful North American who has come to Argentina to sully patriotic symbols.

  Isadora cannot understand it. No Frenchman protested when she danced the Marseillaise in nothing but a red shawl. If one can dance an emotion, if one can dance an idea, why not an anthem?

  Liberty offends. This woman with shining eyes is the declared enemy of schools, matrimony, classical dance, and everything that cages the wind. She dances for the joy of dancing; dances what she wants, when she wants, how she wants; and orchestras hush before the music that is born of her body.

  (145)

  1916: New Orleans

  Jazz

  From the slaves comes the freest of all music, jazz, which flies without asking permission. Its grandparents are the blacks who sang at their work on their owners’ plantations in the southern United States, and its parents are the musicians of black New Orleans brothels. The whorehouse bands play all night without stopping, on balconies that keep them safe above the brawling in the street. From their improvisations is born the new music.

  With his savings from delivering newspapers, milk, and coal, a short, timid lad has just bought his own trumpet for ten dollars. He blows and the music stretches out, out, greeting the day. Louis Armstrong, like jazz, is the grandson of slaves, and has been raised, like jazz, in the whorehouse.

  (105)

  1916: Columbus

  Latin America Invades the United States

  Rain falls upward. Hen bites fox and hare shoots hunter. For the first and only time in history, Mexican soldiers invade the United States.

  With the tattered force remaining, five hundred men out of the many thousands he once had, Pancho Villa crosses the border and, crying Viva Mexico! showers bullets on the city of Columbus, Texas.

  (206 and 260)

  1916: León

  Darío

  In Nicaragua, occupied land, humiliated land, Rubén Darío dies.

  The doctor kills him, fatally puncturing his liver. The embalmer, the hairdresser, the makeup man, and the tailor torment his remains.

  A sumptuous funeral is inflicted upon him. The warm February air in the city of León smells of incense and myrrh. The most distinguished señoritas, festooned in lilies and heron feathers, serve as Canephoras and Virgins of Minerva strewing flowers along the route of the funeral procession.

  Surrounded by candles and admirers, the corpse of Darío wears a Greek tunic and laurel crown by day, by night a formal black frock coat and gloves to match. For a whole week, day and night, night and day, he is scourged with never-ending recitals of shoddy verses, and regaled with speeches proclaiming him Immortal Swan, Messiah of the Spanish Lyre, and Samson of the Metaphor.

  Guns roar. The government contributes to the martyrdom by piling War Ministry honors on the poet who preached peace. Bishops brandish crosses; steeple bells ring out. In the culminating moment of this flagellation, the poet who believed in divorce and lay education is dropped into the hole converted, a prince of the Church.

  (129, 229, and 454)

  1917: The Fields of Chihuahua and Durango

  Eagles into Hens

  A punitive expedition, ten thousand soldiers with plentiful artillery enter Mexico to make Pancho Villa pay for his impudent attack on the North American city of Columbus.

  “We’ll bring back that assassin in an iron cage,” proclaims General John Pershing, and the thunder of his guns echoes the words.

  Across the drought-stricken immensities of northern Mexico, General Pershing finds various graves—Here lies Pancho Villa—without a Villa in any of them. He finds snakes and lizards and silent stones, and campesinos who murmur false leads when beaten, threatened, or offered all the gold in the world.

  After some months, almost a year, Pershing returns to the United States. He brings back a long caravan of soldiers fed up with breathing dust, with the people throwing stones, with the lies in each little village in that gravelly desert. Two young lieutenants march at the head of the humbled procession. Both have had in Mexico their baptism of fire. For Dwight Eisenhower, newly graduated from West Point, it is an unlucky start on the road to military glory. George Patton spits as he leaves this ignorant and half-savage country.

  From the crest of a hill, Pancho Villa looks down and comments: “They came like eagles and they leave like wet hens.”

  (206 and 260)

  1918: Córdoba

  Moldy Scholars

  At the Argentine university of Cordoba degrees are no longer denied to those unable to prove their white lineage as was the case a few years ago, but Duties toward Servants is still a subject studied in the Philosophy of Law course, and students of medicine still graduate without having set eyes on a sick person.

  The professors, venerable specters, copy a Europe several centuries gone, a lost world of gentlemen and pious ladies, the sinister beauty of a colonial past. The merits of the parrot and the virtues of the monkey are rewarded with trimmings and tassels.

  The Córdoba students, fed up, explode with disgust. They go on strike against these jailers of the spirit, calling on students and workers throughout Latin America to fight for a culture of their own. From Mexico to Chile come mighty echoes.

  (164)

  1918: Córdoba

  “The Pains That Linger Are the Liberties We Lack,” Proclaims the Student Manifesto

  … We have resolved to call all things by their right names. Córdoba is redeeming itself. From today we count for our country one shame less and one freedom more. The pains that linger are the liberties we lack. We believe we are not wrong, the resonances of the heart tell us so: we are treading on the skirts of the revolution, we are living an American hour …

  The unversities have till now been a secular refuge for the mediocre, income of the ig
norant, secure hospital for the invalid, and—which is even worse—the place where all forms of tyranny and insensitivity have found a professor to teach them. The universities thus faithfully reflect those decadent societies which offer the sad spectacle of senile immobility. For that reason, science, confronting these mute and shut-in establishments, passes by in silence or enters into bureaucratic service, mutilated and grotesque …

  (164)

  1918: Ilopango

  Miguel at Thirteen

  He arrives at the Ilopango barracks driven by a hunger that has sunk his eyes into the depths of his head.

  In the barracks, in exchange for food, Miguel begins running errands and shining lieutenants’ boots. He learns fast to split coconuts with one blow of the machete as if they were necks, and to fire a carbine without wasting cartridges. Thus he becomes a soldier.

  At the end of a year of barracks life, the wretched boy gives out. After putting up for so long with drunken officers who beat him for no reason, Miguel escapes. And that night, the night of his flight, is the night of the Ilopango earthquake. Miguel hears it from far away.

  For a whole day and the next day too, the earth shakes El Salvador, this little country of warm people, until between tremor and tremor the real quake comes, the super-earthquake that bursts and shatters everything. It brings down the barracks to the last stone, crushing officers and soldiers alike—but not Miguel.

  And so occurs the third birth of Miguel Mármol, at thirteen years of age.

  (126)

  1918: The Mountains of Morelos

  Ravaged Land, Living Land

  The hogs, the cows, the chickens, are they Zapatistas? And the jugs, the pans, the stewpots, what of them? Government troops have exterminated half the population of Morelos in these years of stubborn peasant war, and taken away everything. Only stones and charred stalks remain in the fields; the wreckage of a house, a woman heaving a plow. Of the men, any not dead or exiled have become outlaws.