The old gringo, p.1
The Old Gringo, page 1
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Praise for The Old Gringo
Copyright
To William Styron
whose father included me in
his dreams of the American Civil War
But who knows the fate of his bones
or how often he is to be buried?
Sir Thomas Browne
What they call dying
is merely the last pain.
Ambrose Bierce
1
Now she sits alone and remembers.
She sees, over and over, the specters of Tomás Arroyo and the moon-faced woman and the old gringo cross her window. But they are not ghosts. They have simply mobilized their old pasts, hoping that she would do the same and join them.
But for her it took a long time.
First, she had to stop hating Tomás Arroyo for showing her what she could be and then forbidding her to ever be what she might be.
And he knew that she could never be that, and in spite of knowing it, he let her see it.
He always knew that she would return home.
But he let her see what would become of her if she remained.
She had to purge herself of this hatred. It took her many years to do so. The old gringo was no longer there to help her. Arroyo was not there. Tom Brook. He might have given her a child by that name. She had no right to think this. The moon-faced woman had taken him with her toward their nameless destiny. Tomás Arroyo was over.
So the only moment she had left was when she crossed the border and looked back at the two men, the soldier Inocencio and the boy Pedrito. Behind them, she now thought she saw the dust marshaling itself into some kind of silent chronology that told her to remember; she had come back to her land without memory, and Mexico was no longer available, Mexico had disappeared forever, but across that bridge, on the other side of the river, a memorious dust insisted on marshaling itself for her, on crossing the frontier and sweeping over the shrub and the wheat fields, the plains and the smoky mountains, the long deep green rivers that the old man had pined for, right up to her walk-up apartment in Washington, D.C., on the shores of the Potomac, the Atlantic, the center of the world.
The dust blew and told her that she was alone.
She remembers.
Alone.
2
“The old gringo came to Mexico to die.”
Colonel Frutos García ordered the lanterns placed in a circle around the mound. Sweating soldiers, naked to the waist, with sweaty necks, grabbed their shovels and began to dig in earnest, driving their spades into the mesquite.
Old gringo: that’s what they called the man the Colonel was remembering now as young Pedro followed every move of the men laboring in the desert night; again, the boy saw a bullet piercing a silver peso in midair.
“It was pure chance that we met that morning in Chihuahua. He never told us, but we all knew why he’d come. He wanted us to kill him, us Mexicans. That’s why he was here. That’s why he’d crossed the frontier, back in the days when very few of us ever left the place where we were born.”
The spadefuls of dirt were like red clouds strayed from the sky: too low, too near the lantern light. They did, said Colonel García, yes, the gringos did. They spent their lives crossing frontiers, theirs and those that belonged to others, and now the old man had crossed to the south because he didn’t have any frontiers left to cross in his own country.
“Easy there.”
“And the frontier in here?” the North American woman had asked, tapping her forehead. “And the frontier in here?” General Arroyo had responded, touching his heart. “There’s one frontier we only dare to cross at night,” the old gringo said. “The frontier of our differences with others, of our battles with ourselves.”
“The old gringo died in Mexico. And all because he crossed the frontier. Wasn’t that reason enough?” asked Colonel Frutos García.
“Do you remember how he trembled if he cut his face shaving?” asked Inocencio Mansalvo, his narrow green eyes no more than slits.
“Or how afraid he was of mad dogs?” added the Colonel.
“That isn’t true,” said young Pedro. “He was brave.”
“Well, I always thought he was a saint,” said La Garduña, laughing.
“No, all he ever wanted was to be always remembered as he was,” said Harriet Winslow.
“Easy, easy there.”
“Much later, when little by little we were able to piece together the bits of his life, we understood why the old gringo had come to Mexico. He did the right thing, I suppose. As soon as he came, he let everyone know he was tired, that things just weren’t the same anymore, but we respected him because we never saw him tired here, and he proved himself as brave as any man. You’re right, boy. Too brave for his own good.”
“Easy.”
The spades struck wood and the soldiers paused for a minute, wiping the sweat from their foreheads.
The old gringo used to joke: “I want to go see if those Mexicans can shoot straight. My work is finished, and so am I.” I like the game, he’d said, I like the fighting; I want to see it.
“Yes sir, you could see ‘farewell’ in his eyes.”
“He didn’t have any family.”
“He retired and then wandered through the lands of his youth—California, where he’d worked as a journalist; the southern United States, where he’d fought during the Civil War; New Orleans, where he liked to drink and womanize and feel he was the devil himself.”
“Ah, our know-it-all colonel.”
“Watch it with our colonel; he makes you think he’s dead drunk but he’s really listening.”
“And now Mexico: a family memory. His father had been here, too, as a soldier, when they invaded us more than a half century ago.”
“He was a soldier, he fought against naked savages and followed his country’s flag to the capital of a civilized race far to the south.”
The old gringo joked: I want to see whether those Mexicans can shoot straight. “My work is finished, and so am I.”
“This is something we didn’t understand because what we saw was an erect old man, stiff as a ramrod, with hands steady as a rock. Yes, if he joined General Arroyo’s troops it was because you yourself, Pedrito, gave him the chance and he earned it with a Colt .44.”
The men knelt around the open grave and scrabbled at the corners of the pine box.
“But he also said that to be stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags was a pretty good way to depart this life. He used to smile and say: ‘It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.’”
The Colonel was silent for a moment: he had the distinct impression that he’d heard a raindrop falling in the middle of the desert. He looked at the clear sky. The ocean sound faded away.
“We never knew his real name,” he added, looking at Inocencio Mansalvo, half naked and sweating, on his knees before the heavy coffin tenaciously clinging to the desert, as if in such a short time it had taken root. “We have trouble with gringo names, just like gringo faces, they all look alike; their language sounds like Chinese.”
La Garduña, who wouldn’t miss a burial for anything in this world, to say nothing of an exhumation, bellowed her laughter. “Their blurred faces are Chinese to us, all exactly alike.”
Inocencio Mansalvo ripped a half-rotten plank from the coffin and they saw the face of the old gringo, devoured more by night than by death: devoured, thought Colonel Frutos García, by nature. The weather-beaten, greenish face was strangely smiling; the rictus of death exposed gums and long teeth—the teeth of a gringo or a horse—forming an eternally sardonic grimace.
Everyone stood for a minute looking at what the night lights revealed, the twin lights of the sunken but open eyes of the corpse. What caught the boy’s attention was that the gringo’s hair, in death, seemed neatly combed, every white strand in place, as if down there a tiny devil in charge of hair were responsible for a trim that would look as neat as a new-mown field when dead men found themselves face to face with the Grim Reaper.
“Grim Reaper!” guffawed the woman called La Garduña.
“Hurry it up, hurry now,” ordered Frutos García. “Let’s get him out of there. By tomorrow morning early, we’re supposed to have the old bastard in Camargo.” His voice was strained. “Hurry now; we have a long dusty road ahead of us, and if a wind comes up, the old gringo’ll be gone forever…”
The truth is, it almost happened that way, wind blowing across saline, bogg y wasteland, this land of unconquered Indians and renegade Spanish, bold cattle rustlers and mines abandoned to the dark floods of hell. The truth is, the corpse of the old gringo almost faded into the desert wind, as if the frontier he had crossed one day had been air, not earth, and had encompassed all the times everyone could remember, suspended there, with an exhumed body in their arms: La Garduña brushing the dirt from the old gringo’s body, moaning, hurrying; the boy, not daring to touch the dead man; the others blindly remembering the long spans and vast spaces on both sides of the wound that to the north opened like the Rio Grande itself rushing down from steep canyons, as far up as the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, islands in the deserts of the north, ancient lands of the Pueblos, the Navajos and Apaches, hunters and peasants only half subdued by Spain’s adventures in the New World, they, from the lands of Chihuahua and the Rio Grande, both seemed to die here, on this high plain where a group of soldiers for a few seconds held the pose of the Pietà, dazed by what they’d done and by an accompanying compassion, until the Colonel broke the spell: Hurry, boys, we have to get the gringo back to his own country; those are our General’s orders.
And then he saw the sunken blue eyes of the dead man and he was afraid, because for an instant they lacked the distance men want death to have. And because they seemed still alive, he spoke to those eyes: “Haven’t you ever thought, you gringos, that all this land was once ours? Ah, our resentment and our memory go hand in hand.”
Inocencio Mansalvo stared at his colonel and put on his dirt-covered Stetson. He walked to his horse, spraying dirt from his hat, and then everything speeded up, actions, orders, movements: a single scene, farther and farther in the distance, fading until the group receded from view: Colonel Frutos García and young Pedro, the guffawing Garduña and the exhausted Inocencio Mansalvo, the soldiers and the rigid corpse of the old gringo wrapped in a blanket and strapped to the sled of the desert, a litter of ocote and leather thongs, dragged by two blindfolded horses.
“‘To be a gringo in Mexico.’” The Colonel smiled. “‘Ah, that is euthanasia.’ That’s what the old gringo said.”
3
As soon as he crossed the Rio Grande, he heard the explosion and turned to see the bridge in flames.
He got off the train in El Paso, carrying his folding black suitcase, what they called a Gladstone then, and dressed all in black except for the white expanse of cuffs and shirtfront. He’d told himself he wasn’t going to need much luggage on this trip. He walked a few blocks through the border town; he’d imagined it drearier and duller and older than it actually was, and sick, as well, of the Revolution, of the rage from across the river. Instead, it was a town of bright new automobiles, five-and-ten-cent stores, and young people, so young they could hardly have been born in the nineteenth century. In vain, he searched for his idea of the American frontier. It wasn’t going to be easy to buy a horse without having to fend off inopportune questions about the horseman’s destination.
He could cross the frontier and buy a horse in Mexico. But the old man wanted to make life difficult for himself. Besides, he’d got it in his head that he needed an American horse. If they opened his suitcase at customs, all they’d find would be a few ham sandwiches, a safety razor, a toothbrush, a couple of his own books, a copy of Don Quixote, a clean shirt, and a Colt .44 wrapped in his underclothes. He didn’t want to explain why he was traveling with such a light, if precise, array of provisions.
“I intend to be a good-looking corpse.”
“And the books, señor?”
“They’re mine.”
“No one suggested you’d stolen them.”
Resigned, the old man would offer no further explanations. “All my life I’ve wanted to read the Quixote. I’d like to do it before I die. I’ve given up writing forever.”
He imagined this scene, and told the man who sold him the horse that he was going to look north of the city for land to develop; a horse was still more useful in the sagebrush than one of those infernal machines. The dealer said that was true; he wished everyone thought like him, because no one was buying horses these days except agents for the Mexican rebels. But that’s why the price was a little steep; there was a revolution on the other side of the border, and revolutions are good for business.
“Yes, there’s still a place for a good horse,” said the old man, and rode off on a white mare that would be visible at night and would make life difficult for her owner when he wanted his life to be difficult.
Now he had to keep his sense of direction, because although the frontier was traced broad and clear by the river dividing El Paso from Ciudad Juárez, beyond the Mexican town there was no demarcation but the line in the distance where sky joined dry, dirty plain.
That horizon kept receding as the old man rode on, his long legs dangling beneath the mare’s belly, his black suitcase cradled in his lap. Some twenty kilometers west of El Paso, he forded the river at its narrowest point while everyone’s attention was diverted by the explosion on the bridge. At that instant, in the old man’s clear eyes were fused all the cities of gold, the expeditions that never returned, the lost priests, the nomadic and moribund tribes of Tobosos and Laguneros that had survived the epidemics of the Europeans and then fled the Spanish towns to master the horse, the bow, and later the rifle, in an endless ebb and flow of beginnings and dissolutions, mining bonanzas and depression, genocides as vast as the land itself and as forgotten as the accumulated bitterness of its men.
Rebellion and suppression, plague and famine—the old man knew he was entering the restless lands of Chihuahua and the Rio Grande, leaving behind the refuge of El Paso, founded with a hundred and thirty settlers and seven thousand head of cattle. He was abandoning the sacred refuge of fugitives from the north and from the south: a flimsy, precarious haven in harsh desert lands: one main street, a hotel and a pianola, soda fountains and hiccuping Fords, and the answer of the invading north to the mirages of the desert: an iron suspension bridge, a railroad station, a blue haze imported from Chicago and Philadelphia.
He himself was now a voluntary fugitive, as much a fugitive as the ancient survivors of the attacks of Conchos and Apaches whom cruel necessity, sickness, injustice, and disillusion had once again driven to wandering: all this was etched in the old gringo’s head as he crossed the frontier between Mexico and the United States. No wonder they had all tired of continual flight and for over a hundred years remained entangled in the thorns of the hacienda system.
But maybe he was carrying a different fear, one he voiced as he crossed the frontier: “I’m afraid that each of us carries the real frontier inside.”
The bridge exploded in the distance and he headed to the right and to the south, feeling sure of his bearings (he was already in Mexico, that was enough) when about dusk he smelled warm tortillas and beans.
He approached the small gray adobe hut and asked, in his accented Spanish, whether they could offer him a meal and a blanket to sleep on. The fat owners of the smoky house said yes, ésta es su casa, señor.
He knew the ritual phrase of Mexican courtesy but suspected that after having offered him the house, his host would feel free to subject his guest to all manner of whims and insults, especially any arising from jealous suspicion. But he curbed his desire to stir up a fight; not yet, he told himself, not yet. That night, drowsing on the straw mat in his black clothes, listening to the heavy breathing of his hosts and their dogs, smelling the heavy odors of the couple, different from his because they ate differently and thought and loved and feared differently, it pleased him that they’d offered him their house. What had he lost, in four successive and irreparable blows, but that? In the end, what other reason had he, he admitted, countering his own sleepy but malicious wink, for trotting off toward the south, the only frontier left to him after exhausting in his seventy-one years the other three boundaries of the North American continent, even the black frontier the Confederates had tried to establish in ’61? Now all that was left was the open south, the only door open to his encounter with the fifth, blind, murderous blow of fate.
Dawn rose over the edge of the mountain.
“Is this the way to Chihuahua?” he asked his fat host.
The Mexican nodded and in turn asked with a jealous glance toward the closed door of his house: “And what takes you to Chihuahua, mister?”
