Country of the Bad Wolfes (94 page)

He hid in the bush off the hacienda road and waited. And envisioned again and again the wanton slaughter. John Samuel's severed head. Rogelio Méndez hacked to pieces. He wept. He was there for half an hour before Juan Lobo and three others rode past at a canter. It was another hour more before the others came by, riding at a trot, singing and laughing, most of them drunk. Trailed by three mule-driven wagons creaking under their loads of booty. Bruno would never know it but two days hence the larger band of bandits would encounter a company of Rurales who would kill every man of them and divide the loot among themselves.

When he got back to the charred and smoking compound, corpses were being carted to the Santa Rosalba graveyard. A crowd gathered around him and he
was helped down from the horse. They brought him water and tended his wounds and an old woman kissed his hands and murmured a prayer to the Holy Mother. They told him John Samuel had been taken for burial in the village and begged his forgiveness for not waiting until the fire died out and then burying him in the casa grande graveyard. Bruno said it was all right. Then one among them, weeping, told him Lobo took the head with him in a sack. Bruno could think of nothing to say to that, did not know whether to nod or shake his head. They told him Lobo and three companions filled their saddlebags with all the money from one of the strongboxes and left the other two boxes to the gang. There was nothing else to tell him that he had not seen for himself.

Then someone asked, What will we do now, patrón?

Patrón
. Bruno Tomás Wolfe y Blanco, battered, and feeling very old, held the word in his mind for a moment. He looked about at the wreckage of Buenaventura. And said, Recover, what else? Then collapsed into a feverish unconsciousness from which he would not fully recover for two weeks.

He would babble in his sleep, hallucinate, intermittently come half-awake and be given water and broth, more than once be thought to have died. And when he would at last regain his senses, among his first clear thoughts would be that he must send a telegram to his border kin to warn them of what was coming. Though by then it had already arrived.

When the end came it came fast. Madero's forces took Ciudad Juárez on the tenth of May—one of the leaders of that major victory being a bandit-turned-revolutionary who called himself Pancho Villa. Then in quick order fell Durango, Hermosillo, Torreón, Saltillo, many smaller towns. As Emiliano Zapata and his Indians were taking Cuernavaca on the twenty-first of May, representatives of Díaz and Madero reached an accord on a peace pact in the desert outside of Juárez, signing the papers by the light of automobile headlamps. Among other provisions, the treaty called for Díaz's resignation before the end of May. Three nights later—as the wind whipped stinging dust through the Mexico City streets and thunderheads were massing—Díaz sat before his drafted but yet unsigned letter of resignation. An ulcerated molar had been tormenting him for days and his jaw was now so swollen it was an effort even to speak. He could not believe only eight months had passed since international heads of state were lavishing him with gifts and admiration during Mexico's commemorative centennial. The agony of yielding his presidency to that little lunatic dwarf, of surrendering to an army of ignorant peons, was hardly less than that of his jaw. Advisors had been coming and going all evening but Doña Carmen never left his side except when he conferred with Edward Little. Edward reported that all the arrangements had been made for his departure. You sign that damn thing and we get you to Veracruz and then you're off to Europe and to hell
with all this. Díaz said that nothing in his life had ever been harder than writing the resignation. Except signing it. Every time I pick up the pen to do it, he said, all I really want to do is ram it in Madero's heart. You'd have to hunker way down to do that, Edward said—and Díaz laughed in spite of his pain. There was a rumor he would be resigning that very night, Edward told him, and the zócalo was packed with fools waiting to cheer the news. Díaz glanced at the door to be sure it was closed, then said, Well fuck them. For damn sure I won't sign it tonight. And he didn't. The zócalo multitude was by then chanting for his resignation and menacing the palace guards. Mounted police were sent out to disperse them, swinging clubs and trampling the fallen. The crowd fought back with stones and banner staves, but when they started pulling policemen off their mounts, the soldiers on the rooftops opened fire. And still the enraged mob fought on. At which point the looming storm at last detonated into thunderclaps and lightning bolts and loosed a torrent of slashing rain that sent the crowd running for cover off the open square, taking their dead and wounded with them. And the battle of the zócalo was done.

In the morning, Díaz resigned.

On the last day of May, Porfirio Díaz sails from Veracruz on the German ship
Ypiranga
, accompanied by his family—his wife and daughter and wastrel of a son, an army officer via nepotism alone—and a cadre of guards under the command of Juan Sotero Wolfe. Juan Sotero's wife and two sons, baby Carlos Sebastián only two months old, will remain in Mexico City until his return on some uncertain date that will prove to be more than four years hence. Díaz has appointed Edward Little to attend to a few details that will keep him in the capital perhaps another week. After which, Edward means to return to Patria Chica for good. In his valediction to a group of reporters on the dock, Díaz says of Madero, He has let the tiger out of its cage, now let's see him tame it. He weeps when he and Edward hug hard at the foot of the gangplank. Two old men, friends of fifty years. It isn't death that defeats us, he whispers in Edward's ear, it's fucking
old age
! He wipes his tears and says, Come see me in Paris. We'll find another Lagrimas and dance with the girls all night. Edward tells him to plan on it.

Then the Man of Stone is gone. He will travel throughout Europe and be royally received wherever he goes, then settle in Paris, the Champs Élysées evermore reminding him of the Avenida Reforma. On the second day of July of 1915, lying on silk sheets and listening to a raspy phonograph recording of ranchero music, he will remember the Mexico City night when he and Lalo, already old, were on their way to Las Lagrimas de Nuestras Madres and with their cane swords fought off a gang of rateros. And have his last laugh.

Eight days after Díaz's departure from Mexico, Edward Little, eighty-one years old and uneasy in his bones, wakes to darkness but needs no clock to know it is his hour of rising. He has never had much use for sleep and in the past forty years has rarely retired before midnight or failed to rise before dawn. More recently he has come to regard a night's sleep with a vague dread, as the surrender of one more of his remaining days, and so he has been waking earlier still. As if even in sleep he senses the waning of time and cannot abide being unconscious in its passing.

Madero is to arrive in the capital today but Edward plans to be gone by then. Yet there is time enough to indulge, in the single instance of his life, a brief lingering in bed. He will miss this city, though he knows he will be missing a place that no longer exists, that has already become someplace other. A truth of our lives, he thinks. All the places we have loved in the past have become someplace other. There is no place to go back to, not for any man. Nothing endures but the beauty of the natural world, and so he will retire to the beauty surrounding Patria Chica. It is a wonder the place was spared. So many rebel gangs in the region and yet none attacked it. No need after all to have sent the children to the border. But you make a decision and live with its consequences. Eduardo Luis dead. Sandra Rosario vanished. But Catalina alive—and what was of greater import? When he gets to Patria Chica he will send for her, first thing.

As he starts to get up he feels the bed quiver queerly. And then the entire house shudders violently and there is a great shattering downpour of glass in every room. The bed tilts and he falls back onto it. The house begins convulsing. The walls shedding scales of plaster, breaking open, falling. Ceiling beams cracking and buckling, sections of roof crashing down. There is a great groan from the earth below and the entire house sways and he is flung to the floor from which he cannot rise for the antic undulations of it. And then the floor itself gives way and he plunges into the roaring black maw of the rent world. And the ruins of his Mexican home follow after and bury him.

It is the worst earthquake in the capital since Mexico's independence, lasting nearly fifteen minutes and killing several hundred and reducing much of the city to rubble. And still, only hours later, Francisco Madero enters the capital at the head of a long parade of blaring bands and rowdy celebrants. Bands blare and the crowds lining the broken streets weep and cheer in the joy of their deliverance, crying Viva Madero! again and again. Viva Madero! Whom a cabal of army generals led by Victoriano Huerta will assassinate in February of 1913. The ensuing civil war will be the most protracted and most savage in the country's bloody history—and the onlooking nations of the civilized world will be appalled by Mexico's brute regression from the pinnacle of the Porfiriato.