“After our love for the Virgin and our hatred of the gringos, nothing binds us together more than a treacherous crime, I tell you, and all the people rose up against Victoriano Huerta for murdering Don Panchito Madero.”
And then Vicente Vergara, captain of the Dorados, Pancho Villa’s personal guard, his chest crisscrossed with cartridge belts, in a sombrero and white pants, eating a taco with Pancho Villa alongside a train billowing smoke, and then the constitutionalist Colonel Vergara, very young and proper in his Stetson and his khaki uniform, sheltered by the patriarchal and aloof figure of Venustiano Carranza, the principal leader of the Revolution, inscrutable behind smoked lenses and a beard that came to the buttons of his tunic, this snapshot looked almost like a family photograph, a just but severe father and a respectful and well-motivated son, not the same Vicente Vergara as the Obregonist colonel who in Agua Prieta took part in the pronunciamento against Carranza’s abuse of power, liberated now from the tutelage of the father figure riddled by gunfire as he slept in his bedroll in Tlax-calantongo.
“They all died so young! Madero never reached forty, and Villa was forty-five, Zapata thirty-nine, even Carranza, who seemed like an old man, was barely sixty-one, and General Obregón, forty-eight. What would have happened, tell me, boy, if I hadn’t survived out of sheer luck, what if it’d been my destiny to die young, it’s just chance that I’m not buried somewhere out there in some little town overgrown with buzzards and marigolds, and you, you’d never have been born.”
And this Colonel Vergara sitting between General Alvaro Obregón and the philosopher José Vasconcelos at a dinner, this Colonel Vergara with his Kaiser mustache and dark, high-collared uniform rich with military braid.
“A Catholic fanatic killed our General Obregón, my boy. Ahhhhh. I went to all their funerals, every one of ’em you see here, they all died a violent death, except I didn’t get to Zapata’s funeral, they buried him in secret so they could say he was still alive.”
And a different General Vicente Vergara, now dressed in civilian clothes, about to bid farewell to his youth, very neat, very spit-and-polish, in his light gabardine suit and pearl stickpin, very serious, very solemn, because only such a man could be offering his hand to the man with a granite face and the eyes of a jaguar, the Maximum Leader of the Revolution, Plutarco Elías Calles …
“That was a man, my boy, a humble schoolteacher who rose to be President. There wasn’t a man could look him in the eye, not one, not even men who’d survived the awful test of a fake firing squad, believing their hour had come and not blinking an eye, not even them. Your godfather, Plutarco. Yes, boy, your godfather. Look at him, and look at you there in his arms. There we all are, the day you were baptized, the day of national unity when General Calles returned from exile.”
“But why did he have me baptized? Didn’t he persecute the Church mercilessly?”
“What does one thing have to do with the other? Were we going to leave you nameless?”
“No, Grandfather, but you also say that the Virgin unites all us Mexicans, how can you explain that?”
“The Virgin of Guadalupe is a revolutionary Virgin; she appeared on Hidalgo’s banners during the War of Independence, and on Zapata’s in the Revolution, she’s the best bitchin’ Virgin ever.”
“But, Grandfather, it was because of you I didn’t go to parochial school.”
“The Church is good for only two things, to be born right and to die right, you understand? But between the cradle and the grave they don’t have any business sticking their noses in what doesn’t concern them, let them stick to baptizing brats and praying for souls.”
The three of us who lived in the big house in Pedregal only saw each other at supper, which was still whatever my grandfather the General wished. Soup, rice, fried beans, sugary rolls, and cocoa-flavored gruel. My father, the Honorable Don Agustín Vergara, got his own back for these ranch-style suppers by dining from three to five at the Jena or the Rivoli, where he could order steak Diane and crepes suzette. One revolting thing about the suppers was a peculiar habit of Grandfather’s. After we finished eating, the old man would remove his false teeth and drop them into a half glass of warm water. Then he would add a half glass of cold water. He’d wait a minute and pour half this glass into a third. Then again he’d add a portion of warm water to the first glass, pour half of it into the third, and fill the first with warm water from the second. Then he would remove the teeth from the first of the three turbid mixtures swimming with particles of stew and tortilla, steep them in the second and the third, and, having obtained the desired temperature, place the teeth in his mouth and clamp them shut the way you snap a padlock.
“Nice and warm,” he’d say, “sonofabitch, a set of teeth like a lion’s.”
“It’s disgusting,” my father the lawyer Agustín said one night, wiping his lips with his napkin and tossing it disdainfully on the tablecloth.
I looked at my father in astonishment. He’d never said a word all the years my grandfather had been performing the denture ceremony. The Honorable Agustín had to hold back the nausea the General’s patient alchemy aroused. As for me, my grandfather could do no wrong.
“You ought to be ashamed. That’s disgusting,” the lawyer repeated.
“Hoo, hoo, hoo!” The General looked at him with scorn. “Since when can’t I do what I bloody well please in my own house? My house, I said, not yours, Tín, nor that of any of those fancy-dancy friends of yours.”
“I’ll never be able to invite them here, at least not unless I hide you under lock and key.”
“So my teeth make you vomit, but not my dough? By the way, how’re things going…?”
“Bad, really really bad…” my father said, shaking his head with a melancholy we’d never seen in him before. He wasn’t a grave man, only a little pompous, even in his frivolities. This sadness, however, dissipated almost immediately, and he stared at Grandfather with icy defiance and a hint of mockery we couldn’t understand.
Later Grandfather and I avoided comment on all this when we went to his bedroom, which was so different from the rest of the house. My father, the Honorable Agustín, had entrusted the details of the decor to a professional decorator, who’d filled the big house with Chippendale furniture, giant chandeliers, and fake Rubenses, for which he’d charged us as if they were real. General Vergara said he didn’t give a fig for all that stuff, and he reserved the right to furnish his room with the things he and his dead Doña Clotilde had used when they built their first house in the Roma district back there in the twenties. The bed was brass, and although the room had a modern closet, the General closed it off by installing an ancient, heavy mahogany mirrored wardrobe in front of the closet door.
He gazed at his ancient wardrobe with affection. “When I open it, I still smell the smell of my Clotilde’s clothes, so hard-working, the sheets all ironed, everything stiff with starch.”
In that room, there are all kinds of things that no one ever uses any more, like a marble-topped washstand with a porcelain washbasin, and tall pitchers filled with water. A copper spittoon and a wicker rocking chair. The General has always bathed in the evening, and I guess, because of my father’s mysterious behavior, Grandfather asked me to come with him that night. The two of us went together to the bathroom, the General carrying his gourd dipper with its hand-painted flowers and ducklings and his castile soap, because he despised the perfumed soaps with unpronounceable names that everyone was using then; after all, he wasn’t a film star or a pansy. I helped him with his bathrobe, his pajamas, and his fleece-lined slippers. After lowering himself into the tub of warm water, he soaped up his fiber brush and began to scrub himself vigorously. He told me it was good for the circulation of the blood. I told him I preferred a shower, and he replied that showers were for horses. Then, without his even asking, I rinsed him with his gourd dipper, pouring water over his shoulders.