Then, after the narrative previously cited, the article concludes with some repetition and a renewed bout of scolding, but it’s worth reproducing here in its entirety:
The Consul of Great Britain in Mexico, on taking cognizance of the event, presented himself at the precinct house requesting the corpse of Señor Etwart which will be surrendered to him of course.
(The “of course” is rather touching, as if in vehement denial of some offensive insinuation about the honor of the Mexican people, or of their police, who would never withhold the body of a gunshot victim.)
From the declarations of the hotel employees, it is deduced that Señor Etwart, at midnight on the last day of the year, on hearing the whistles and firecrackers announcing the advent of the new year, went to the balcony out of mere curiosity, that being the moment when a shot fired into the air by one of so many careless individuals was to cause him the lesion that must have deprived him of life almost instantaneously.
(Given that no hotel employee noticed the tragedy until noon of the following day, it’s not entirely clear why anything whatsoever “is deduced” from their declarations, which could only have been hypotheses, and the excessive or superfluous explanation that Ewart or Etwart looked out from the balcony “out of mere curiosity” is also surprising, as if he could have done so for some other reason.)
The English section of the newspaper Excélsior didn’t offer any additional information on the discovery of the body, but did relate the death to an accident that had happened to another guest of the ill-starred Hotel Isabel not far away and about an hour earlier: “A strange coincidence in the death of Mr. Ewart is the accident that befell Carlos Duems, representative of the Duems News Agency, who is a resident of the same hotel of the tragic death of the Englishman.”
In its implausible and macaronic English the article goes on to say that towards 11:00 p.m. on the night of December 31, the newspaper’s chief wire service editor, Salvador Pozos, found Mr. Duems seriously injured at the corner of Nuevo México and Revillagigedo, where he had been struck by “one of the many crazed Fords jam-packed with New Years’ revellers,” who had dragged him five yards along the road for greater revelry. Señor Pozos, who was personally acquainted with the victim, a representative of the news agency that bore his name, picked him up and carried him to his room in the Hotel Isabel, located on the same floor as the room occupied by Ewart. Clearly that fifth floor meant trouble, though all in all, Mr. Duems came out of it very well by simply managing to stay alive through those days in that place, for on January 3, just as the newspapers were collecting themselves and beginning to recover from these dreadful events, another British subject named George W. Steabben perished — accidentally, once again, we may suppose — in the crossfire of a fierce brawl that, according to Stephen Graham, erupted between two bands of Mexicans, both riding in cars and firing at each other with no qualms and in broad daylight, though most of them were government officials or congressmen, or perhaps for that very reason, which put all of them “above the law.” Sergio G.R. found the details in a collection of periodicals and, with my gratitude, has permitted me to reproduce them:
On January 3, General Leovigildo Avila and Lieutenant Colonel Constantino Lazcano came out to settle a dispute at the entrance to the Salón Phalerno on calle 16 de Septiembre; surrounded by their friends, they insulted one another and drew their weapons. The outcome of the fray was as follows: the policeman Zavala, wounded in the hand; General Avila, wounded in the arm; Colonel Lazcano, wounded in the shoulderblade and left cheek; Congressman Trillo, wounded in the hand; Pepete the bullfighter, who happened to be passing by, wounded in the right arm; the agent Sotero Reza, wounded in the leg. George W Steabben, who was proceeding to his offices, located across the street from that den of ill repute, received a gunshot direct to the forehead at 17:21 hours.
It does not appear that these celebrated gunslingers were motorized, which again casts suspicion on Graham, according to whose version the unfortunate subject of His Majesty was an honorable merchant walking down the street with his family when he was fired upon. It is a strikingly novelistic injustice that the only person to lose his life in this illustrious free-for-all was the complete outsider to it all, who got a hole in his forehead (that is, had no chance of survival), while the others came away with wounds in their limbs, including poor right-handed Pepete, who may have had to stay out of the bullring for a while, and the dignitaries themselves, the defiant Constantino and the injurious Leovigildo, though the former was left with a scar on his cheek. Sure shots indeed, that carried away, within three days, George Steabben and Wilfred Ewart. And the bullet that killed Ewart is so implausible that if it had occurred in a novel and not in life no one could give the slightest credence to the incredible fact that death entered him directly through his sightless eye, the eye no image had ever passed through, the eye that was never connected to the brain and was therefore independent of its control for thirty years, to become, at the end of all that time, the fatal conduit through which the bullet that lodged in the skull entered and finally connected them, eye and brain, but only in the moment of their cessation. As the Mexican newspapers of January 4 made it their business to trumpet, once they had learned the dead man’s story from Graham who issued a statement and identified the body, it was already “a cruel irony of fatal destiny” that the man who had lived through “more than a hundred battles” and had been “respected by the enemy bullets” and had “defied death on innumerable occasions” had been brought down unarmed in Mexico by some fool’s shot fired off at random when, out of mere curiosity, he went out onto the balcony of his room on a night of revelry (“Fate Brought Him to Mexico,” read one of the subtitles, with a certain punitive satisfaction). Yes, it was a strange fate or chance or whatever it is that we call it, and we speak of it less and less, this thing which generally occurs only in life, bad novels and good stories, in the first of these to an extreme degree. But to make fate or chance or destiny a little less strange, Ewart’s bullet could at least have gone into his forehead, as Steabben’s did, or his heart or his jugular or his mouth, or the other eye with which he did see and whose light had not yet been put out, not even for the first time. But it went straight into the blind eye, just beneath the eyebrow, shattering the lens of Ewart’s glasses without damaging the frame, I don’t know if he was still wearing the glasses when they found him. These chance events and coincidences don’t really matter; we might imagine that if the bullet (which couldn’t be seen by the unfortunate eye it found in the darkness) had gone toward the other eye it might have been eluded — but bullets are never seen, and only in old books are they heard to whistle, or so Jünger says — and we might also imagine that there was an element of mercy in the direction taken by the stray bullet among the infinity of possible courses, if the eye was thus spared the sight of what was coming to it. What does it matter, nothing is really that strange, and who would be interested, there are no hidden forces guiding anything or leading anyone to the place of his death, all possibilities are contained in the passage of time, that is, in the past and the future. There’s little sense in lament or astonishment, Graham’s, expressed in his books, or Gawsworth’s, or Conan Doyle’s, in far-off Mother England, or that of the Mexican journalists who aspired to a solemnity they didn’t know how to attain, as they brought their sentences to a close: “Sad was the end of this British officer, who after having risked his life many times in the most terrible combats history records, came to die in such a way.” What a pity to want to soar without knowing how, it happens to most of us.