Once again I was beset by the same uneasiness I felt every morning, the anguish of a cornered rat, the feeling that seized me every time I saw General Vergara purposelessly wandering the rooms and halls and corridors that Nicomedes and Engracia scrubbed on their knees, rooms that at this hour of the morning smelled of soapy scrub brushes. The servants refused to use electric appliances. They said no with great humility and dignity, in the hope that it would be noticed. Grandfather thought they were right; he loved the smell of soapy scrub brushes, and that’s why, every morning, Nicomedes and Engracia scrubbed meters and meters of Zacatecan marble, Mexican marble, even if the honorable Agustín Vergara, my father, did say, with his finger to his lips, that it had been imported from Carrara — don’t tell anyone, it’s against the law, they’ll hit me with an ad valorem, you can’t even give a decent party any more, if you do, you end up on the society page and then you pay for it, nowadays a man has to live the austere life, even feel ashamed to have worked hard all his life to give his family the things …
I ran out of the house, shrugging into my Eisenhower jacket. In the garage I climbed into my red Thunderbird and started the motor, the door rising automatically at the sound, and gunned out blindly. Something, a flicker of caution, told me that Nicomedes might be there on the driveway between the garage and the massive door in the wall surrounding our property, moving the garden hose, manicuring the artificial-seeming grass between the flagstones. I imagined the gardener flying skyward, torn apart by the impact of the car, and I accelerated. The cedar entrance door, faded by summer rains, swollen and creaking, also opened automatically as the Thunderbird passed the twin electric eyes embedded in the rock and zoomed out; the tires squealed as I swerved to the right. I thought I saw the snowy peak of Popocatepetl, but it was a mirage. I accelerated. It was a cold morning, and the natural fog of the high plateau was rising to meet the blanket of smog imprisoned by the ring of mountains and the pressure of the high cold air.
I kept accelerating until I reached the access to the ring road around the city. I breathed deeply, and drove calmly now. There was nothing to worry about: I could circle the city once, twice, a hundred times, as many times as I wanted, driving thousands of kilometers with a sensation of never moving, of being simultaneously at the point of departure and the destination, seeing the same cement horizon, the same beer ads, billboards for the electric vacuum cleaners Nicomedes and Engracia detested, for soaps and television sets; the same squat, greenish, miserable buildings, barred windows, protective steel curtains, the same paint shops, repair shops, small refreshment stands with the box at the entrance filled with ice and carbonated drinks, corrugated tin roofs, and, occasionally, the dome of a colonial church lost among a thousand rooftop water-storage tanks, a smiling, stellar cast of prosperous characters, rosy and freshly painted, Santa Claus, the Blond Queen of Beers, Coca-Cola’s little white-haired elf with his bottle-cap crown, Donald Duck, and, below, a cast of millions, extras, vendors of balloons and gum and lottery tickets, young men in T-shirts and short-sleeved shirts gathered around jukeboxes, chewing, smoking, loafing, smart-assing; building-supply trucks, armadas of Volkswagens, a collision at the exit to Fray Servando, motorcycle policemen in cinnamon-colored uniforms, putting on the bite, one-upping, horns, insults. Again I burned rubber, feeling free, the second trip identical, the same run, the water tanks, Plutarco, gas trucks, milk trucks, squealing brakes, milk cans tipping over, rolling, bursting on the asphalt, against the safety barriers, on the red Thunderbird, a sea of milk. Plutarco’s white windshield. Plutarco in the fog. Plutarco blinded by limitless whiteness, the blinding liquid invisible to him, making him invisible, milk bath, sour milk, watered milk, your mother’s milk, Plutarco.
Sure, my name lent itself to jokes, what would you expect from a name that sounded like Prick? In school I’d heard all that — Whaaaa? Did I hear…? Say that again? Two, four, six, eight, there’s a Verga t’appreciate, Verga, Verga, rah, rah, rah! And when they called the roll, there was always some joker waiting to answer, Vergara, Plutarco, present and primed, or present but spent, or Pee-Wee Vergara here. Then there’d be blows at recess. And when I began reading novels, at fifteen, I discovered there was an Italian author named Giovanni Verga, almost like my name, but that would never make any impression on a gang of ruffians like those shits at the National Prep. I hadn’t gone to parochial school — first, because Grandfather had said never, what did we think the Revolution had been about, and then my old man, the lawyer, agreed, there were too damn many people who were fiercely anti-clerical in public but good little Catholics at home, better for the image. But I wished I could have been like my grandfather Don Vicente, when someone’d made a joke about his name he’d had the joker castrated. You’re all smoke and no fire, no lead in your pencil, no powder in your cannon, the prisoner had said, and General Vergara cut off his balls, and I mean yesterday! From that time on, they’d called him General Balls, Old Balls and Guts, when he’s around hang on to your nuts, and similar refrains had circulated all during Pancho Villa’s long campaign against the Federales, when Vicente Vergara, still a young man but already forged in the fire of battle, had fought alongside the Centaur of the North, before going over to the ranks of Obregón when he saw the cause was lost in Celaya.
“I know what they say. Beat the shit out of anyone who tells you your grandfather was a turncoat.”
“But no one’s ever said that to me.”
“Listen to me, boy, it was one thing when Villa came out of nothing, out of the Durango mountains, when he alone banded together all the malcontents and organized the Northern Division, which polished off the dictatorship of that drunk Huerta and his Federales. But when he set himself against Carranza and decent law-abiding folk, that was another thing altogether. He wanted to keep on fighting, anything that came along, because he’d gone past the point where he could stop. After Obregón defeated him at Celaya, Villa’s army evaporated and all his men went back to their corn patches and their woods. Villa went and searched them out, one by one, to convince them they had to keep fighting, and they said no, look, General, they’d come back home, they were back with their women and kids again. Then the poor bastards would hear shots, turn around and see their houses up in flames and their families dead. ‘You don’t have any house or woman or kids now,’ Villa would say. ‘You may as well come along with me.’”
“Maybe he truly loved his men, Grandfather.”
“Don’t ever let anyone tell you I was a turncoat.”
“No one says that. Everyone’s forgotten all that stuff.”
* * *
I thought a lot about what he’d said. Pancho Villa truly loved his men; he couldn’t imagine that the soldiers didn’t feel the same about him. In his bedroom, General Vergara had a lot of yellowed snapshots, some just newspaper clippings. You could see him there with all the leaders of the Revolution, he’d been with them all, served them all, in turn. As the leaders changed, so did Vicente Vergara’s attire — peering through the crowd engulfing Don Panchito Madero the day of his famous entrance into the capital, the small and fragile and ingenuous and miraculous apostle of the Revolution who with a book had overthrown the all-powerful Don Porfirio in a land of illiterates, don’t tell me it wasn’t a miracle, and there was young “Chente” Vergara in his narrow-brimmed, ribbonless felt hat and his old-fashioned shirt without the stiff collar, one more downtrodden wretch, perched on the equestrian statue of Carlos IV, that day when even the earth trembled, as it had the day Our Lord Jesus Christ had died, as if the apotheosis of Madero were already his Calvary.