Gloria’s. Then remembered the deaths at Patria Chica the year before and added, No disrespect to Louis. I know that, Edward said. After pinning the victor’s medal on the cavalry major, Diaz congratulated Captain Wolfe on his fine showing and asked him to come see him the next day. The interview lasted half an hour and concluded with Juan Sotero’s acceptance of Diaz’s offer to join his squad of personal guards. He’s an engineer and likes it, Diaz told Edward, but he’s a good man who puts duty first. Edward wasn’t sure an engineer was a good choice for a bodyguard, but then the military guards were mostly for show, while the president’s real protectors were plainclothes secret policemen under Edward’s authority. Two months later, at the annual dinner Diaz hosted for the Rurales in the best restaurant in the capital, a drunk Rurales colonel walked up to Diaz’s table saying, My president, I have something for you—and reached for a pistol on his hip. Edward’s agents had their guns only halfway drawn before Juan Sotero materialized like a magic trick between the colonel and the president’s table with his saber brandished and its tip at the colonel’s throat. The colonel froze, white-eyed, as Juan Sotero relieved him of a pearl- handled Peacemaker. It turned out the colonel had taken the gun from a bandit chief and simply wanted to give it to the president as a gift. Diaz thanked him for it and everyone had a good laugh and the party resumed. And Diaz looked sidelong at Edward and said, Some engineer, and Edward smiled and nodded.
Now six years since, Juan Sotero Wolfe is a colonel and has been commander of the president’s military bodyguards for the past three years. His wife of two years, Ester Leticia Hernandez, is a striking Creole poet with eyes as black as her hair, and her charged romantic verse has been published in the capital’s most distinguished literary journal—to the chagrin of her straitlaced parents. The young Wolfe couple resides in a fine house near the south end of Avenida Reforma. Their first child, Juan Roman Wolfe Hernandez, was born in July. Their second, Carlos Sebastian, will be born next March.
The month-long celebration of the centennial of Mexican independence includes sumptuous dinner parties at the National Palace and lavish balls at Chapultepec Castle. Parades upon parades. The celebration is no less a tribute to Porfirio Diaz, whose presidency has now encompassed thirty of the past thirty-four years and in which time he and Mexico have become inseparable concepts. The festivities are attended by international dignitaries bearing gifts and declaiming encomia. The consensus of civilized opinion is that Mexico’s ascendancy to the ranks of the world’s rich and orderly nations could not have come to pass but for Porfirio Diaz. Leo Tolstoy has declared him a “prodigy of nature.” Theodore Roosevelt has extolled him as the greatest statesman of his time, a man who “has done for his country what no other living man has done for any country.” Andrew Carnegie has deemed him “the Moses and Joshua of his people.” U.S. senator and former Secretary of State Elihu Root has called him one of the great men of the world and said he should “be held up to the hero-worship of mankind.” Britain has made him a member of the Order of the Bath. Indeed, his very complexion now differs little from that of the European leaders who lionize him, extensive medical treatment having made his face and hands as pale as any Spaniard’s. His house on the Calle Cadena is decorated entirely in European fashion and staffed exclusively with Caucasian servants. The Man of Stone, his countrymen call him, the Strong Man—though in private many have nicknamed him El Lloron for his easy shed of tears on a variety of occasions. A rendition of the national anthem. A student recitation of a patriotic poem. A funeral for a fellow soldier. A futile personal plea from a mother to spare her son from the firing squad.
As a man grows older, Diaz more than once said to Edward Little, he may or may not become any wiser but he damn sure better become more careful.
But even a sly and careful old man can make a bad mistake, and Diaz had made his in an interview for an American magazine early in 1908 when he said he welcomed the formation of an opposition party to replace him in the next election. He claimed he had no desire to continue as president and that at the age of seventy-seven he was satisfied. The truth was that he did and he wasn’t. Perhaps his assertions were intended only to persuade the magazine’s American readers of his democratic outlook and his tolerance for divergent political opinion. But how could he not have foreseen the repercussions? The interview was reprinted all over Mexico and set off a frenzy of maneuvering by a number of presidential aspirants.
Chief among them was Francisco Madero, who came from a wealthy Coahuila family. Barely five feet tall and high-pitched of voice, Madero had been educated in Europe and the United States and had become an apostle of democracy. In 1909 he published a book advocating an orderly transition from the Porfiriato to a truly democratic republic. The two central principles of his newly formed Anti-Reelection Party were no reelection—obviously—and effective suffrage.
As Madero gave speeches throughout the country, Diaz was at first amused by him and referred to him as El Loquito, sometimes El Enano. But by the time the two men met in person in the early spring of 1910, Madero’s following had grown impressively, and Diaz was no longer laughing about the Little Lunatic. He had supposed Madero just another power-hungry hacendado, but in their meeting he perceived the ardent sincerity of his views. Listen, Diaz told him, a man needs a lot more than honesty to govern Mexico, don’t you know that? He afterward told Edward Little it was unfair of God to force him to deal with more than one troublesome dwarf in his lifetime. First that fucking Indian Juarez and now this half-pint hidalgo son of a bitch.
The following month Halley’s Comet blazed across the Mexican sky and the fearful peon populace saw it as an omen of imminent catastrophe.
By June of 1910, Diaz had had enough of Madero’s public agitations and ordered him arrested on charges of inciting rebellion and insulting the president. Madero was still in jail when the election took place in July. It was officially declared that Diaz had won ninety-nine percent of the vote. After the election Madero was permitted to post bail to get out from behind bars but was kept under house arrest. He escaped in October and fled to El Paso.
He called for a revolution to begin on the twentieth of November—he who knew nothing of leadership, nothing of warfare, who had no personal experience with violence. But his egalitarian ideals attracted a motley multitude of followers, among them a swelling horde of bitter impoverished illiterates who were ignorant about the workings of democracy and of government but who knew a very great deal about violence. And who were burning with hatred. A hatred bred by the legally sanctioned thefts of their ancestral lands. By unjust imprisonments and brutal whippings. By violations to their women and countless humiliations endured in the witnessing eyes of their sons. A hatred that for the first time since the great uprising of Padre Hidalgo was set loose to exact its retribution in blood.
By early spring the Revolution was in flaming riot. More and more men with nothing to lose but their lives flocked to the insurgents, turning their machetes against the bosses, the Rurales, the army, against anybody wearing a uniform or a suit. Sacking haciendas. Plundering towns. Breaking open prisons. Wrecking trains. And too, more and more bandits pillaging under the sanction of The Revolution and crying of liberty. Liberty from the law. From every restraint.
It’s the
He tries very hard not to expect it. To keep from thinking it even likely. Barely able to breathe for the effort of his restraint. . . .
CATALINA
Many years later Catalina would tell her children that their great-great-grandfather had been feared by many men who never even met him and by every man who ever did. Except for Don Porfirio, I suppose, she would say. But then, your great-great-grandfather was probably the only man in Mexico not afraid of Don Porfirio.
To say she had always been Edward Little’s favorite would be misleading in its implication that he was simply fonder of her than of his own children and other grandchildren. In fact, she was the only one whose company he
