He would babble in his sleep, hallucinate, intermittently come half-awake and be given water and broth, more than once be thought to have died. And when he would at last regain his senses, among his first clear thoughts would be that he must send a telegram to his border kin to warn them of what was coming. Though by then it had already arrived.
When the end came it came fast. Madero’s forces took Ciudad Juarez on the tenth of May—one of the leaders of that major victory being a bandit-turned-revolutionary who called himself Pancho Villa. Then in quick order fell Durango, Hermosillo, Torreon, Saltillo, many smaller towns. As Emiliano Zapata and his Indians were taking Cuernavaca on the twenty-first of May, representatives of Diaz and Madero reached an accord on a peace pact in the desert outside of Juarez, signing the papers by the light of automobile headlamps. Among other provisions, the treaty called for Diaz’s resignation before the end of May. Three nights later—as the wind whipped stinging dust through the Mexico City streets and thunderheads were massing—Diaz sat before his drafted but yet unsigned letter of resignation. An ulcerated molar had been tormenting him for days and his jaw was now so swollen it was an effort even to speak. He could not believe only eight months had passed since international heads of state were lavishing him with gifts and admiration during Mexico’s commemorative centennial. The agony of yielding his presidency to that little lunatic dwarf, of surrendering to an army of ignorant peons, was hardly less than that of his jaw. Advisors had been coming and going all evening but Dona Carmen never left his side except when he conferred with Edward Little. Edward reported that all the arrangements had been made for his departure. You sign that damn thing and we get you to Veracruz and then you’re off to Europe and to hell with all this. Diaz said that nothing in his life had ever been harder than writing the resignation. Except signing it. Every time I pick up the pen to do it, he said, all I really want to do is ram it in Madero’s heart. You’d have to hunker way down to do that, Edward said —and Diaz laughed in spite of his pain. There was a rumor he would be resigning that very night, Edward told him, and the zocalo was packed with fools waiting to cheer the news. Diaz glanced at the door to be sure it was closed, then said, Well fuck them. For damn sure I won’t sign it tonight. And he didn’t. The zocalo multitude was by then chanting for his resignation and menacing the palace guards. Mounted police were sent out to disperse them, swinging clubs and trampling the fallen. The crowd fought back with stones and banner staves, but when they started pulling policemen off their mounts, the soldiers on the rooftops opened fire. And still the enraged mob fought on. At which point the looming storm at last detonated into thunderclaps and lightning bolts and loosed a torrent of slashing rain that sent the crowd running for cover off the open square, taking their dead and wounded with them. And the battle of the zocalo was done.
In the morning, Diaz resigned.
On the last day of May, Porfirio Diaz sails from Veracruz on the German ship
Then the Man of Stone is gone. He will travel throughout Europe and be royally received wherever he goes, then settle in Paris, the Champs Elysees evermore reminding him of the Avenida Reforma. On the second day of July of 1915, lying on silk sheets and listening to a raspy phonograph recording of ranchero music, he will remember the Mexico City night when he and Lalo, already old, were on their way to Las Lagrimas de Nuestras Madres and with their cane swords fought off a gang of rateros. And have his last laugh.
Eight days after Diaz’s departure from Mexico, Edward Little, eighty-one years old and uneasy in his bones, wakes to darkness but needs no clock to know it is his hour of rising. He has never had much use for sleep and in the past forty years has rarely retired before midnight or failed to rise before dawn. More recently he has come to regard a night’s sleep with a vague dread, as the surrender of one more of his remaining days, and so he has been waking earlier still. As if even in sleep he senses the waning of time and cannot abide being unconscious in its passing.
Madero is to arrive in the capital today but Edward plans to be gone by then. Yet there is time enough to indulge, in the single instance of his life, a brief lingering in bed. He will miss this city, though he knows he will be missing a place that no longer exists, that has already become someplace other. A truth of our lives, he thinks. All the places we have loved in the past have become someplace other. There is no place to go back to, not for any man. Nothing endures but the beauty of the natural world, and so he will retire to the beauty surrounding Patria Chica. It is a wonder the place was spared. So many rebel gangs in the region and yet none attacked it. No need after all to have sent the children to the border. But you make a decision and live with its consequences. Eduardo Luis dead. Sandra Rosario vanished. But Catalina alive—and what was of greater import? When he gets to Patria Chica he will send for her, first thing.
As he starts to get up he feels the bed quiver queerly. And then the entire house shudders violently and there is a great shattering downpour of glass in every room. The bed tilts and he falls back onto it. The house begins convulsing. The walls shedding scales of plaster, breaking open, falling. Ceiling beams cracking and buckling, sections of roof crashing down. There is a great groan from the earth below and the entire house sways and he is flung to the floor from which he cannot rise for the antic undulations of it. And then the floor itself gives way and he plunges into the roaring black maw of the rent world. And the ruins of his Mexican home follow after and bury him.
It is the worst earthquake in the capital since Mexico’s independence, lasting nearly fifteen minutes and killing several hundred and reducing much of the city to rubble. And still, only hours later, Francisco Madero enters the capital at the head of a long parade of blaring bands and rowdy celebrants. Bands blare and the crowds lining the broken streets weep and cheer in the joy of their deliverance, crying Viva Madero! again and again. Viva Madero! Whom a cabal of army generals led by Victoriano Huerta will assassinate in February of 1913. The ensuing civil war will be the most protracted and most savage in the country’s bloody history—and the onlooking nations of the civilized world will be appalled by Mexico’s brute regression from the pinnacle of the Porfiriato.
SINS OF THE FATHERS
On an early Saturday afternoon they ford the river a few miles west of town and then ride into Brownsville. Four red-eyed horsemen as gray with dust as their mounts, each man of them wearing pistol and knife, each horse hung with rifle and machete, one saddle horn with a stinking gray sack of black-stained bottom attended by a drone of flies. The fighting has made chaos of rail travel, but they managed to bribe their way onto a flatcar of one military transport train after another, moving northward stretch by stretch—to Jalapa, to Tampico, to Ciudad Victoria, where the northward rail line had been destroyed and they bought horses to carry them the last two hundred miles to the border.
Market day. The town abustle. Their horses bare their teeth at honking puttering automobiles amid the wagon traffic. None of the four men speak English but through casual queries of an assortment of Mexican locals they learn everything they need to know. Learn of the Wolfe properties and residences and that the twins are longtime constables of celebrated feats who in the course of doing their duty have killed many bad men. Of course
