The General and the Jaguar (2 page)

The troops loaded up the goods and carried them outside. Maud snatched up her baby and followed them out just in time to see
her husband and his friend being led away. They were sitting on one of the pack mules and their hands were tied. She ran to
her husband’s side.

“They’re going to kill you,” she said.

He looked down at his young wife. “It’s cold out here,” he said. “Take the baby and go back inside.”

Ed had loved Maud from the moment they met, eight years earlier, in Oklahoma. Her parents had moved to New Mexico to keep
them apart, but he was an adventurous, determined man, and followed them there. Fifteen years older than Maud and an Englishman
by birth, Ed had arrived in the United States by stowing aboard a ship. One day, they decided to elope and traveled by horseback
and then by stagecoach to El Paso, Texas, where they were married on January 10, 1910, before a justice of the peace. The
next day they crossed the international bridge and entered the glittering promise of Mexico.

Maud returned to the house, watching in fascinated horror as the soldiers moved from the kitchen to the bedroom area, ripping
the linens from her bed, stuffing hairbrushes and combs and mirrors down their shirts. She was too agitated to remain inside
and when she went out again, Fernández ordered her to leave the child with the wife of the hired man, and swing up behind
him. When she resisted, he told her that he would kill her. Reluctantly, she mounted one of her own horses. Then, softening
his tone, Fernández explained that his troops were not Carrancistas at all.

Somos soldados de la División del Norte,
he said with slow pride.

The Division of the North was the army of peasants, small farmers, cowboys, and unemployed miners who had flocked to Pancho
Villa’s side during the revolution. The army had swelled to more than fifty thousand men at its zenith. But Villa had suffered
a string of military defeats the previous year and had also fallen out of favor with the United States. Surrounded suddenly
by the unmistakable odor of failure, lacking the money to feed and clothe his army or to buy ammunition or arms, he had watched
in mounting fury as his soldiers deserted him. Now the celebrated División del Norte had dwindled to a few hundred soldiers
and a fiercely loyal cadre of bodyguards known as the Dorados, or “Golden Ones.” These were Villa’s handpicked men, soldiers
who were bronzed and hardened by war and were willing to lay down their lives for their commander. Among this loyal group
of men, the U.S. Army would later write, Nicolás Fernández was one of the most devoted.

Before the revolution, Fernández had been the administrator of several sprawling haciendas belonging to Luis Terrazas, Chihuahua’s
wealthiest citizen and the owner of upwards of fifteen million acres of land. His grandfather’s brother had governed Chihuahua
in the 1880s. By virtue of his family ties and occupation, he was a solid member of the upper class, wrote one historian,
adding, “It’s not easy to understand why he took part in the revolution, and even less easy to explain why he joined Villa’s
forces.” Whatever his motives, Fernández’s loyalty to General Villa was so strong that U.S. Army officials would note that
he “preferred death to separation from his chief.” Like Villa, he was a harsh disciplinarian and shunned both tobacco and
alcohol.

Fernández picked up his reins and looked back at Maud. Seeing her distress, he reassured her that he only wanted the two American
men to help guide the troops out of the heavily patrolled Carrancista territory. Then they would be freed.

It was the evening of March 1, 1916.

IN THE BLUE-BLACK
darkness, the steaming breath of the men and the dust from the horses’ hooves swirled together, blotting out the nearby landmarks
and the distant stars. Maud groped for a rolled, dirty serape she had found on the back of her saddle. Though the serape was
worn and offered scant protection from the cold night air, she untied it and drew it down around her shoulders. She breathed
in the scent of her horse and watched the jostling troops, hoping to see the pack mule carrying her husband and Frank Hayden.
They would be easy to distinguish from the soldiers, many of whom were small and slender as young boys and sat the choppy
trot of their mounts with a supple ease.

At daybreak, they reached Cave Valley, a mile-long canyon some thirty miles north of the ranch with steep, heavily forested
walls and a stream that meandered along its shadowy bottom. There, they rendezvoused with two to three thousand other Villistas
who were camped on either side of the stream, their ponies staked randomly around smoky campfires. The animals stood in motionless
dejection, too exhausted even to nibble at the weeds.

Through the smoke, Maud suddenly saw her husband and Frank Hayden. They were still bound and sitting astride one of the mules.
She edged her horse closer so they could talk.

Her husband told her that they had been taken to Pancho Villa. “He says he’s not going to kill us,” Ed said.

“I’m not so sure,” she responded, looking bleakly around her.

In the brief moment they were together, they tried to come up with an escape plan but their wits failed them. All they could
agree upon was that whoever was freed first would return to the ranch for their little boy.

A guard named Castillo was assigned to Maud and together they rode parallel to and east of the main body of soldiers. From
her position she could see the entire column. Her husband and Frank Hayden were in the rear. She waved to them and then turned
to ask Castillo a question. When she glanced back again, she saw the two Americans being escorted around a hill by several
soldiers. They were visible one moment and the next they were gone. The same soldiers soon rejoined the column without the
two captives and Maud felt certain her husband and her friend had been killed. A huge grief began to rise up within her but
she pushed it back down. What she needed to survive was not the softness of grief but the hardness that comes from rage.

The column marched in crazy, drunken loops, traveling east, then west, but always north, toward the border. The soldiers wore
faded serapes and floppy sombreros plucked from the heads of their deceased compañeros on the battlefield. They were armed
with German-made Mausers, Winchester rifles, and old shotguns and pistols, and carried their ammunition in tremendous bandoliers
that crisscrossed their chests or in feed bags attached to their saddles. Several pack mules stumbled along at the rear of
the column, their backs weighed down with badly rusted machine guns, sacks of corn, jerked beef, and grain for the horses.

That evening they made their first prolonged stop at a small ranch whose owners long ago had fled the turbulent countryside.
Maud’s body ached with pain and her brain was clogged with fear. Her thoughts had slowed and drifted through her head with
no urgency at all. A new guard named Juan Ramón Ruiz, who spoke perfect English, was assigned to look after her. With a chivalry
that seemed out of place, he threatened to report any man who swore in her presence. Maud dismounted stiffly, kneading the
tight muscles at the small of her back as she looked around. The mountains wavered in the blue air, weightless as dropped
silk, and light slanted through the chamisa and sage. She listened to the watery sounds of nesting quail and experienced an
acute sense of dislocation. Her husband had been murdered. She had been kidnapped. She worried that she would never again
see her son. So how could the outer world still be so tranquil and beautiful?

Her reverie was broken by the sound of cattle being driven into camp. As the herd boiled toward them, the soldiers leaped
to their feet and formed a human corral around the animals. When the last cow was driven into their midst, the corral was
closed and an officer barked a sharp command. Dozens of lassos sizzled through the air and the cows suddenly found themselves
entangled by five or six different ropes. As they struggled to break free of the snares, a small man holding a long-bladed
knife appeared at the far end of the corral. He skipped through the churning dust, pausing in front of each animal long enough
to run his blade beneath its throat. Some of the cows squealed in surprise and dropped to their knees immediately; others
seemed not to know that they had been fatally wounded and continued to pitch and buck, flinging gouts of wet crimson from
their gaping throats, until finally they, too, subsided in dreamy bewilderment. Into the squirming knot of bleeding bodies
waded soldiers with their own dull knives. Many of the cows not yet dead kicked out desperately at their assailants. Soon
enough, though, they lay unmoving on the ground and the men deftly skinned the carcasses and scooped their hands into the
warm bellies to fish out the organs. They rammed the chunks onto sharpened sticks and held them out briefly over the campfires.
Too hungry to wait for the meat to cook properly, they gobbled it down while it was still raw. After they finished, they returned
to the carcasses once more, fingering out the flesh from the cavernous heads and the heavy thighbones and roasting it over
the fires.

Maud was stunned by the hunger. She had been slipping into a kind of stupor, but the ferocity of the killing, the squeals
of the terrified animals, and the iron smell of blood brought her back to the present. A soldier tossed her a black flour
tortilla and a piece of meat. The meat was burned on the outside, raw and bloody on the inside. Maud held it in her hands,
feeling the fire’s warmth, but could not put it in her mouth. She ate the tortilla and tied the meat onto the back of her
saddle.

On the second or third day of the march, she saw Pancho Villa for the first time. He was wearing a small round hat and riding
a mule. When he passed Maud, he bowed in her direction, smiled tightly, and rode on. He was much larger than the other soldiers,
with heavy slabs of muscle padding his shoulders and a thick, retracted neck that absorbed the gait of the mule and left his
massive head motionless, pointed into the wind like a ship’s prow. Although Villa chose the mule, he could have ridden any
one of his own horses, which carried no food, weapons, or men and pranced alongside the plodding column with coltish happiness.
Each night, his horses were fed, curried, and brushed and their hooves inspected for small stones. These animals had one function
only: to carry Villa into battle.

Those battles consisted of little more than skirmishes now. Villa had once been hailed in the United States as the “Man of
the Hour,” but by the time Maud saw him, much of his grandeur and prestige had vanished. Everything had been lost. His amigo,
Rodolfo Fierro, a man of “sinister beauty” who killed men just to watch death well up in their eyes, was dead himself, drowned
in quicksand, and his most trusted general, Felipe Ángeles, melancholy, incorruptible, and brilliant, had left for Texas,
where he was trying to eke out a living on a small ranch. Other high-ranking officers from Villa’s army had also fled to the
United States or gone over to Carranza’s side. Villa had let some of them go with his blessing, but others he had killed himself.
He could tolerate almost anything but betrayal.

Maud had lived in Mexico long enough to have heard the many stories recounting Villa’s military victories, his courage, his
appeal to women. The peasants who thronged to his side had many names for him:
gorra gacha
—slouch hat;
el centauro del norte
—the centaur of the north;
el jaguar indomado
—the untamed jaguar;
la fiera
—the wild beast. Maud sensed immediately the crouching, unpredictable energy from which the latter names were drawn. She had
four brothers and could swing an ax, handle a crosscut saw, and drive a team of mules as well as any man. But she found herself
afraid of this man, this Pancho Villa. The desultory banter among the troops ceased as he rode by and she realized that his
men feared him, too.

Maud worked the leather reins between her fingers, squeezing and releasing the pressure until she felt the animal drop its
head and come onto the bit. The horse, at least, was under her control. The column rode on.

THE ATTACK

F
OR THIRTY YEARS
, Porfirio Díaz had been Mexico’s benefactor and father, his grizzled head as timeless as the volcanoes that
ringed Mexico City. At the age of eighty he had a mountainous nose, a mustache that rushed from its base like two white rivers,
and mahogany skin that was still taut and smooth. He had been a firebrand and rebel himself once, sweeping the old guard from
power during a revolution that he had stoked and organized in Brownsville, Texas. From roughly 1876 until 1911, Díaz had ruled
Mexico, using his federal troops and rural police force to crush rebellions and strengthening his base of support by creating
alliances with the elite. He had a realistic, albeit cynical, view of his countrymen and maintained control over his clamorous
subjects by using both
pan y palo
—bread and bludgeon.

By the end of Díaz’s reign, Mexico had a population of fifteen million. The majority were mestizo—individuals of mixed blood—but
one-third were of pure Indian stock. Chihuahua and Sonora, two of the northern states that lay along the U.S. border, were
home to the Tarahumara and the Yaquis. The Cora, Huichol, and Tarascans lived along the Pacific coast and in the hills and
valleys west of Mexico City. The Mazahua, Nahuatl, and Otomí had settled in the central highlands. The Gulf state of Veracruz
was home to the Huastec and Totonac. The Zapotecs, Mixes, Zoque, Huave, and Mixtec, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Chontal, and Tzotzil
lived in the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas. And in the Yucatán peninsula, remnants of the ancient Maya had survived.

In 1521, Hernán Cortés conquered Tenochtitlán, the great center of the Aztec civilization and the site of what was to become
Mexico City. For the next three centuries, Mexico lived under Spain’s rule, which could be harsh, benign, or indifferent,
depending upon the financial needs of the mother country and the temperament of the monarch who happened to be in power at
the time. When Mexico finally gained its independence, in 1821, political chaos, internal revolts, and repeated clashes with
foreign powers ensued. Texas was lost in 1836 to English-speaking colonizers who had been encouraged by Spain to settle the
far reaches of its empire. A decade later, following a war with the United States, Mexico lost another huge chunk of territory
to its hungry neighbor—millions of acres that one day would become New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, as well
as parts of Colorado and Wyoming.