The Underdogs

M >> Mariano Azuela >> The Underdogs

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"Here you may witness the blessings of the revolution
caught in a single tear."
Then he continued to talk like a madman, but like a
madman whose vast prophetic madness encompassed all
about him, the dusty weeds, the tumbled kiosk, the gray
houses, the lovely hills, and the immeasurable sky.

IV

Juchipila rose in the distance, white, bathed in sun-
light, 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 to-
ward 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 veter-
ans, exhausted in a hundred battles, now incapacitated
for work, the veterans who had set out as simple pri-
vates, were still simple privates. The few remaining offi-
cers 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 com-
plained 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 Deme-
trio'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 disap-
peared 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, reminis-
cent 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, Aguasca-
lientes 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 lunch-
room was open; at once they filled it. No beans, no tor-
tillas, 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.

VI

Demetrio Macias' wife, mad with joy, rushed
along the trail to meet him, leading a child by the hand.
An absence of almost two years!

They embraced each other and stood speechless. She
wept, sobbed. Demetrio stared in astonishment at his
wife who seemed to have aged ten or twenty years.
Then he looked at the child who gazed up at him in sur-
prise. His heart leaped to his mouth as he saw in the
child's features his own steel features and fiery eyes ex-
actly reproduced. He wanted to hold him in his arms, but
the frightened child took refuge in his mother's skirts.

"It's your own father, baby! It's your daddy!"

The child hid his face within the folds of his mother's
skirt, still hostile.

Demetrio handed the reins of his horse to his orderly
and walked slowly along the steep trail with his wife
and son.

"Blessed be the Virgin Mary, Praise be to God! Now
you'll never leave us any more, will you? Never . . .
never. . . . You'll stay with us always?"

Demetrio's face grew dark. Both remained silent, lost
in anguish. Demetrio suppressed a sigh. Memories
crowded and buzzed through his brain like bees about a
hive.

A black cloud rose behind the sierra and a deafening
roar of thunder resounded. The rain began to fall in
heavy drops; they sought refuge in a rocky hut.

The rain came pelting down, shattering the white Saint
John roses clustered like sheaves of stars clinging to tree,
rock, bush, and pitaya over the entire mountainside.

Below in the depths of the canyon, through the gauze
of the rain they could see the tall, sheer palms shaking
in the wind, opening out like fans before the tempest.
Everywhere mountains, heaving hills, and beyond more
hills, locked amid mountains, more mountains encircled
in the wall of the sierra whose loftiest peaks vanished in
the sapphire of the sky.

"Demetrio, please. For God's sake, don't go away! My
heart tells me something will happen to you this time."

Again she was wracked with sobs. The child, fright-
ened, cried and screamed. To calm him, she controlled
her own great grief.

Gradually the rain stopped, a swallow, with silver
breast and wings describing luminous charming curves,
fluttered obliquely across the silver threads of the rain,
gleaming suddenly in the afternoon sunshine.

"Why do you keep on fighting, Demetrio?"

Demetrio frowned deeply. Picking up a stone absent-
mindedly, he threw it to the bottom of the canyon. Then
he stared pensively into the abyss, watching the arch of
its flight.

"Look at that stone; how it keeps on going. . . ."

VII

It was a heavenly morning. It had rained all night,
the sky awakened covered with white clouds. Young wild
colts trotted on the summit of the sierra, with tense
manes and waving hair, proud as the peaks lifting their
heads to the clouds.

The soldiers stepped among the huge rocks, buoyed
up by the happiness of the morning. None for a moment
dreamed of the treacherous bullet that might be awaiting
him ahead; the unforeseen provides man with his greatest
joy. The soldiers sang, laughed, and chattered away.
The spirit of nomadic tribes stirred their souls. What mat-
ters it whether you go and whence you come? All that
matters is to walk, to walk endlessly, without ever stop-
ping; to possess the valley, the heights of the sierra, far
as the eye can read.

Trees, brush, and cactus shone fresh after rain. Heavy
drops of limpid water fell from rocks, ocher in hue as
rusty armor.

Demetrio Macias' men grew silent for a moment.
They believed they heard the familiar rumor of firing in
the distance. A few minutes elapsed but the sound was
not repeated.

"In this same sierra," Demetrio said, "with but twenty
men I killed five hundred Federals. Remember, Anasta-
sio?"

As Demetrio began to tell that famous exploit, the
men realized the danger they were facing. What if the
enemy, instead of being two days away, was hiding some-
where among the underbrush on the terrible hill through
whose gorge they now advanced? None dared show the
slightest fear. Not one of Demetrio Macias' men dared
say, "I shall not move another inch!"

So, when firing began in the distance where the van-
guard was marching, no one felt surprised. The recruits
turned back hurriedly, retreating in shameful flight,
searching for a way out of the canyon.
A curse broke from Demetrio's parched lips.
"Fire at 'em. Shoot any man who runs away!"
"Storm the hill!" he thundered like a wild beast.
But the enemy, lying in ambush by the thousand,
opened up its machine-gun fire. Demetrio's men fell like
wheat under the sickle.

Tears of rage and pain rise to Demetrio's eyes as
Anastasio slowly slides from his horse without a sound,
and lies outstretched, motionless. Venancio falls close
beside him, his chest riddled with bullets. Meco hurtles
over the precipice, bounding from rock to rock.

Suddenly, Demetrio finds himself alone. Bullets whiz
past his ears like hail. He dismounts and crawls over the
rocks, until he finds a parapet: he lays down a stone to
protect his head and, lying flat on the ground, begins to
shoot.

The enemy scatter in all directions, pursuing the few
fugitives hiding in the brush. Demetrio aims; he does not
waste a single shot.

His famous marksmanship fills him with joy. Where
he settles his glance, he settles a bullet. He loads his gun
once more . . . takes aim. . . .

The smoke of the guns hangs thick in the air. Locusts
chant their mysterious, imperturbable song. Doves coo
lyrically in the crannies of the rocks. The cows graze
placidly.

The sierra is clad in gala colors. Over its inaccessible
peaks the opalescent fog settles like a snowy veil on the
forehead of a bride.

At the foot of a hollow, sumptuous and huge as the
portico of an old cathedral, Demetrio Macias, his eyes
leveled in an eternal glance, continues to point the barrel
of his gun.

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