Juchipila rose in the distance, white, bathed in sunlight, shining in
the midst of a thick forest at the foot of a proud, lofty mountain,
pleated like a turban.
Some of the soldiers, gazing at the spire of the church, sighed sadly.
They marched forward through the canyon, uncertain, unsteady, as blind
men walking without a hand to guide them. The bitterness of the exodus
pervaded them.
"Is that town Juchipila?" Valderrama asked.
In the first stage of his drunkenness, Valderrama had been counting the
crosses scattered along the road, along the trails, in the hollows near
the rocks, in the tortuous paths, and along the riverbanks. Crosses of
black timber newly varnished, makeshift crosses built out of two logs,
crosses of stones piled up and plastered together, crosses whitewashed
on crumbling walls, humble crosses drawn with charcoal on the surface
of whitish rocks. The traces of the first blood shed by the
revolutionists of 1910, murdered by the Government.
Before Juchipila was lost from sight, Valderrama got off his horse,
bent down, kneeled, and gravely kissed the ground.
The soldiers passed by without stopping. Some laughed at the crazy man,
others jested. Valderrama, deaf to all about him, breathed his unctuous
prayer:
"O Juchipila, cradle of the Revolution of 1910, O blessed land, land
steeped in the blood of martyrs, blood of dreamers, the only true men..."
"Because they had no time to be bad!" an ex-Federal officer interjected
as he rode.
Interrupting his prayer, Valderrama frowned, burst into stentorian
laughter, reechoed by the rocks, and ran toward the officer begging for
a swallow of tequila.
Soldiers minus an arm or leg, cripples, rheumatics, and consumptives
spoke bitterly of Demetrio. Young whippersnappers were given officers'
commissions and wore stripes on their hats without a day's service,
even before they knew how to handle a rifle, while the veterans,
exhausted in a hundred battles, now incapacitated for work, the
veterans who had set out as simple privates, were still simple
privates. The few remaining officers among Demetrio's friends also
grumbled, because his staff was made up of wealthy, dapper young men
who oiled their hair and used perfume.
"The worst part of it," Venancio said, "is that we're gettin'
overcrowded with Federals!"
Anastasio himself, who invariably found only praise for Demetrio's
conduct, now seemed to share the general discontent.
"See here, brothers," he said, "I spits out the truth when I sees
something. I always tell the boss that if these people stick to us very
long we'll be in a hell of a fix. Certainly! How can anyone think
otherwise? I've no hair on my tongue; and by the mother that bore me,
I'm going to tell Demetrio so myself."
Demetrio listened benevolently, and, when Anastasio had finished, he
replied:
"You're right, there's no gettin' around it, we're in a bad way. The
soldiers grumble about the officers, the officers grumble about us,
see? And we're damn well ready now to send both Villa and Carranza to
hell to have a good time all by themselves.... I guess we're in the
same fix as that peon from Tepatitlan who complained about his boss all
day long but worked on just the same. That's us. We kick and kick, but
we keep on killing and killing. But there's no use in saying anything
to them!"
"Why, Demetrio?"
"Hm, I don't know.... Because ... because ... do you see? ... What
we've got to do is to make the men toe the mark. I've got orders to
stop a band of men coming through Cuquio, see? In a few days we'll have
to fight the Carranzistas. It will be great to beat the hell out of
them."
Valderrama, the tramp, who had enlisted in Demetrio's army one day
without anyone remembering the time or the place, overheard some of
Demetrio's words. Fools do not eat fire. That very day Valderrama
disappeared mysteriously as he had come.
V
They entered the streets of Juchipila as the church bells rang, loud
and joyfully, with that peculiar tone that thrills every mountaineer.
"It makes me think we are back in the days when the revolution was just
beginning, when the bells rang like mad in every town we entered and
everybody came out with music, flags, cheers, and fireworks to welcome
us," said Anastasio Montanez.
"They don't like us no more," Demetrio returned.
"Of course. We're crawling back like a dog with its tail between its
legs," Quail remarked.
"It ain't that, I guess. They don't give a whoop for the other side
either."
"But why should they like us?"
They spoke no more.
Presently they reached the city square and stopped in front of an
octagonal, rough, massive church, reminiscent of the colonial period.
At one time the square must have been a garden, judging from the bare
stunted orange trees planted between iron and wooden benches. The
sonorous, joyful bells rang again. From within the church, the honeyed
voices of a female chorus rose melancholy and grave. To the strains of
a guitar, the young girls of the town sang the "Mysteries."
"What's the fiesta, lady?" Venancio asked of an old woman who was
running toward the church.
"The Sacred Heart of Jesus!" answered the pious woman, panting.
They remembered that one year ago they had captured Zacatecas. They
grew sadder still.
Juchipila, like the other towns they had passed through on their way
from Tepic, by way of Jalisco, Aguascalientes and Zacatecas, was in
ruins. The black trail of the incendiaries showed in the roofless
houses, in the burnt arcades. Almost all the houses were closed, yet,
here and there, those still open offered, in ironic contrast, portals
gaunt and bare as the white skeletons of horses scattered over the
roads. The terrible pangs of hunger seemed to speak from every face;
hunger on every dusty cheek, in their dusty countenances; in the hectic
flame of their eyes, which, when they met a soldier, blazed with
hatred. In vain the soldiers scoured the streets in search of food,
biting their lips in anger. A single lunchroom was open; at once they
filled it. No beans, no tortillas, only chili and tomato sauce. In vain
the officers showed their pocketbooks stuffed with bills or used
threats:
"Yea, you've got papers all right! That's all you've brought! Try and
eat them, will you?" said the owner, an insolent old shrew with an
enormous scar on her cheek, who told them she had already lain with a
dead man, "to cure her from ever feeling frightened again."
Despite the melancholy and desolation of the town, while the women sang
in the church, birds sang in the foliage, and the thrushes piped their
lyrical strain on the withered branches of the orange trees.