The shadow of the strong.., p.28
The Shadow of the Strongman, page 28
“I know,” he replied. “But what the devil did you have to talk about that it took you four whole hours?”
And he scrutinized my eyes as though he were trying to read my thoughts.
Obregón’s Debut in Chick-peas
In reality Obregón had nothing interesting to tell me. But he is such a character! It is so agreeable to sit and listen hours and hours to his {242} animated, lively and picturesque conversation, which is more Spanish than Mexican.
He had selected the table near the orchestra so that he could give orders to the musicians. He was anxious to show me that he was not an ignorant soldier and that he loved music—Mexican music, of course, for other kinds of music mean little to him. And while the orchestra played the “Jarabe,” the “Cielito” and the “Mañanitas”—Mexican national airs—Obregón talked and talked, swallowing meanwhile pieces of food that he had an attendant cut for him, as he can use only one hand. The General is invincible in conversation. I can talk a great deal myself, but I was forced to withdraw before his onslaught, as thoroughly defeated as Pancho Villa himself. I listened.
He told me the story of his youth. He is sure that he was born to be the first everywhere. He does not say so himself, but he helps you to suspect it with modest insinuations. In Sonora he was a trader in garbanzos—chick-peas—and although he made rather small profits, he is sure that he would have become eventually the first merchant in Mexico—a great millionaire.
“You see, the revolution spoiled all that for me. I then became a soldier and I rose to be a General.”
What he neglected to add was that, in spite of his General’s commission, he remained in business just the same, and his enemies affirm that he has realized his ambition to become a millionaire. He has a monopoly at present of all the chick-pea trade in Mexico. The peas are exported to Spain, where garbanzos, as they are called, are an article of common consumption. The same enemies assert that all the farmers in Mexico are obliged to sell their garbanzos to Obregón, at a price which he himself fixes. That is the advantage of being a hero and of losing an arm in defense of the Constitution.
“All of Us Thieves, More or Less”
However, I shall not dwell on what Obregón’s enemies say about him. The General went on talking about himself. He has a line of risqué stories which he tells with a brutal frankness smacking of the camp and the bivouac. They helped me to understand the popularity of the man. He talks that way with everybody, with the women of the street, with the workingmen he meets, with the peasants in the country, and those simple people swell with pride at being treated with such familiarity and at hearing such amusing stories from a national hero, the conqueror of Celaya, a former Minister of War, and a man who has only one arm!
{243} “They have probably told you that I am a bit of a thief.”
Taken somewhat aback, I looked around in surprise to make sure it was really Obregón who had said that, and that he had said it to me. I hesitated, not knowing really what answer to make.
“Yes,” he insisted. “You have heard that story without a doubt. All of us are thieves, more or less, down here.”
“Why, General,” I said, with a gesture of protest, “I never pay any attention to gossip! All lies, I am sure.”
But Obregón ignored what I was saying, and continued:
“The point is, however, I have only one hand, while the others have two. That’s why people prefer me. I can’t steal so much or so fast.”
A burst of laughter! Obregón saluted his own witticism with the reserved hilarity of a cynical boy, while his two friends who were with us paid tribute to the hero’s jest with endless boisterousness.
Joke of the Itching Palm
This oratorical success made the General still more talkative. He insisted on treating me to more stories, perhaps to show me that he held the gossip about him in contempt, perhaps to enjoy the pleasure of surprising and embarrassing me by the spectacle of a man depreciating himself.
“You probably don’t know how they found the hand I lost!”
In reality, I did know, just as, for that matter, I had already heard the joke about his being more honest than the others because he had only one hand. But in order not to spoil the General’s delight in his own brilliancy I assured him I did not know the story.
“You know I lost my arm in battle. It was carried off by a shell which exploded near me while I was talking with my staff. After giving me the first treatments, my men set out to find my arm on the ground. They looked about in all directions, but couldn’t find it anywhere. Where could the hand and its fragment of arm have gone to?
“‘I’ll find it for you,’ said one of my aides, an old friend of mine. ‘It will come back by itself. Watch me!’
“He took out of his purse a ten-dollar gold piece, an aztec, as we call it, and raised it above his head. At once a sort of bird, with five wings, rose from the ground. It was my missing hand, which had not been able to resist the temptation to fly from its hiding place and seize a gold coin.”
A second ovation from the guests! And the man with the one arm exploded with laughter at the naughty prank of his missing hand, and, not to be discourteous to its former owner, I laughed as well.
{244} The Ambassador’s Missing Watch
“And you never heard how the Spanish Ambassador lost his watch?”
I could see what Obregón was driving at. This story was to be not at his own expense, but against “that other fellow,” his enemy and persecutor. However, I pretended to be quite innocent, so that the General could have the pleasure of telling the story.
“A new Minister from Spain had just presented his credentials, and President Carranza was anxious to welcome him with a great official banquet. The thing had to be done well. Spain had been the first European nation to recognize Don Venustiano’s Government after the revolution.”
As I listened to the hero I thought of the grand dining hall of the palace at Chapultepec, which recalls the tragic days of Maximilian, the Austrian Emperor of Mexico. I could see Don Venustiano in evening dress, with his white beard and red-white-and-green nose, seated opposite the Spanish Ambassador, and beside the latter, Obregón, Minister of War; Cándido Aguilar, Minister of Foreign Relations; the elegant Barragán, in a new uniform bought for the occasion, and all the other dignitaries created by the First Chief.
“Suddenly,” continued Obregón, “the Spanish diplomat raised his hand to his vest, and grew pale. ‘Caramba!’ he exclaimed. ‘My watch is gone!’ It was an antique timepiece, gold and inset with diamonds, an heirloom in the Ambassador’s family.
“Complete silence! First he looks at me, for I am sitting next to him. But I have an arm missing, and, as it happens, on the side nearest the Ambassador. I cannot have taken his watch! Then he looks at Cándido Aguilar, Don Venustiano’s son-in-law, who is sitting on the other side. Aguilar still has both his arms, but one of his hands, and by chance the one next to the Ambassador, is almost paralyzed. Neither can he be the pick-pocket! Convinced that he must say good-by forever to his lost jewelry, the Spanish Minister sat out the rest of the meal cursing desperately under his breath.
“‘They have stolen my watch. This is not a Government. This is a den of thieves!’
“When they got up from the table Don Venustiano, with his usual dignified and venerable bearing, stepped up to the Ambassador and whispered, ‘Here you are, but say nothing more about it.’
“The diplomat could not contain his astonishment and admiration! ‘It was not the man on my right! It was not the man on my left! It was the man across the table in front of me! Oh, my dear Mr. President, quite rightly do they call you the First Chief.’”
{245} If the laughter at a joke on Obregón had been noisy, that for a joke on Carranza resembled a cannonade.
There is no doubt about it. Obregón is an excellent table companion. His amusing chatter is inexhaustible.
Leaving his stories, he went on to the subject of his election campaign. He is as proud of his speeches as he is of his triumphant battles. The General is a born orator, and like all self-educated men who take up reading late in life, he noticeably prefers the sonorous, theatrical sentence which never says anything.
He invited me to attend one of his election meetings to hear him speak to a crowd. At the moment he had on his mind a great parade which the laborers of the capital were preparing in his honor. It was to be headed by 1,500 Mexican women—all the dressmakers in the city. The women of Mexico feel a purely spiritual inclination toward this plain-speaking soldier, who treats every one as his equal.
He expounded his platform to me volubly: democracy—enforcement of the law—realization of the promises made by the revolution, and which the “old chief” had forgotten—distribution of lands to the poor. The real reason for his candidacy, the argument that has greatest weight with him, he never mentioned, but I could read it in his eyes.
“Besides,” Obregón undoubtedly says to himself, “besides, I made Don Venustiano President. I took him in triumph from Veracruz to the Presidential chair in Mexico City. He became President through my efforts. Now it is my turn. Isn’t that fair?”
He Is an Author, Too
Since the General had already forgotten his jokes and stories and had now to speak with the seriousness befitting a Chief Executive, he gradually and imperceptibly passed from oratory to literature. The General became a “colleague” of mine, a man of letters. He has written a book telling the story of his campaigns. That has been the custom of all victorious warriors since the time of Julius Caesar. Why should he not also indulge in a set of “Commentaries”?
He promised to send me a copy of his book. But to forestall the chance that his difficulties with Carranza might prevent him from keeping the promise, he went on to give me an idea of the book in advance.
He said that he expressed himself simply and with modesty. Of course his battles could not be compared with those of the European war. . . . “I also realize that I am only an amateur in the military business, a civilian {246} forced to take up arms—Citizen Obregón promoted to be a General: and doubtless I had strokes of sheer luck!”
I was listening to Obregón with real affection. I was regarding him as the most attractive and most able man among all the Mexican Generals made by the national upheaval. But suddenly the wind changed. Men never get really to know each other. Obregón began to twirl his sharp-pointed, upturning mustache, and smiling in pride at his own modesty, he lay back on his divan.
“When I was Minister of War, at a banquet at the President’s house one day, the Dutch representative, who was a military man, came up to me and said, ‘General, from what branch of the service did you come—artillery, cavalry?’ In view of my victories he thought I must be a professional soldier. Imagine his astonishment when I told him I had been a chick-pea dealer in Sonora! He refused to believe it.”
More About His Great Book
The General stopped a moment to enjoy the impression his words were making on us.
“Another time the German Minister came to see me. You doubtless know him by reputation, Mr. Ibañez.”
“Very well indeed,” I replied. “He was the fellow who during the late war suggested to the Mexican Government the possibility of recovering California and Arizona. He used to appear at public ceremonies in a great Prussian uniform with decorations, to receive the applause of a paid claque or an ignorant crowd which was always hissing the plain black evening dress of the diplomatic representative of the United States.”
“Well,” said Obregón, “the German came to see me, and in his short abrupt accent said to me: ‘General, I have read your book, and I need two copies of it, one for my Emperor and the other for the archives of the German General Staff. The people back in Berlin are much interested in you. They are astounded that a plain civilian, without military training, has been able to conduct such noteworthy and original campaigns.’”
“I suppose you gave him the books?”
“No, I don’t care for honors like that. I told him he could find them in the bookstores if he wanted them. And I suppose he bought them and sent them on home.”
What a farceur that shrewd German was!
The hero doubtless remembered my hatred of German militarism, so to emphasize his impartiality he jumped to the Far East.
{247} “The Japanese Minister also asked my permission to translate the book into Japanese. My campaigns seem to have aroused a good deal of interest over there.”
“Has the translation appeared yet?” I inquired.
“I don’t know. I don’t bother about such matters.”
Popular Appeal of a “Bad Man”
A long silence. I sat looking somewhat disconcertedly at this man, so complex for all of his primitive simplicity, who alarms you at one moment by his craftiness and at the next astonishes you by his complete ingenuousness.
Nevertheless, he is the most popular and the most feared man in Mexico, the man everywhere most talked about. Some people love him to the extent that they would die for him. Others hate him and would like to kill him, as they remember the barbarous outrages he ordered in the early days of the triumphant revolution, actuated by some perverse whim of his very original character.
He appeals to the multitude for his somewhat rustic frankness, his good-natured wickedness and his rather brutal gayety. He has, besides, the prestige of a courage which no one questions, and of an aggressiveness, in a pinch, like that of a wild boar at bay. To cap the climax, he has lost an arm.
My readers must pardon me for emphasizing this latter point. In Mexico such things are more important than elsewhere. The people in Mexico, who are ready to take up guns and kill each other at a moment’s notice and most of the time without knowing why, are very sentimental and easily moved to tears. Mexicans give up their lives with the greatest indifference and for anybody at all. At the same time they will weep at the slightest annoyance occasioned to one of their loved heroes. The Mexican populace descends from the Aztecs, those magnificent gardeners who lovingly cultivated flowers and, at the same time, tore the hearts out of a thousand living prisoners at each of their religious festivals. Poetry and blood, sentimentality and death! It is a pity that Obregón’s lost arm did not actually leave its hiding place to seize the gold “aztec” which the General’s aide held out to it, in the story! It would have been worshiped by the people with national honors.
Value of an Amputated Leg
There are precedents for this. General Santa Anna was an Obregón in his day. Though the latter has never been President yet, the former {248} reached the Presidency several times through uprisings or manipulated elections. The Mexican people hated Santa Anna after his unsuccessful campaign against the secessionists, who had established a republic in Texas. The Texans defeated his army and made him prisoner. However, at that moment, it occurred to the French Government of Louis Philippe to send a military expedition into Mexico to enforce some diplomatic demands, and French soldiers disembarked in Veracruz. Santa Anna rushed to oppose them, and the last shot the invaders fired hit him in the leg, and the surgeons had to amputate it.
Never did a popularity rise to such pure and exalted heights. Santa Anna’s leg, properly pickled, was taken from Veracruz to Mexico City with a great guard of honor. The Government bestowed on the amputated limb the honors of a Captain General killed in battle, and in the midst of triumphal pageantry, the booming of cannon and the music of bands, it was buried in the center of the city under a great monument.
However, reversals of opinion and sudden waves of anger must be looked for in sentimental peoples. Years later Santa Anna went to war with the United States over the Texas affair. The campaign went against him and the Americans took Mexico City. The people needed to vent its wrath on somebody, and since it could not get its hands on Santa Anna, it tore down the monument to his heroic leg, paraded the unfortunate bone through the streets of the city and finally threw it into a dung heap.
His Threats Not “Celestial Music”
Obregón spoke to me about a friend of his, a newspaper man, some of whose articles were worthy of admiration. “He is ill,” said the General, “and practically dying. He has been in bed for several months. He would be delighted if you would pay him a visit.”
The General and I agreed to go together. “I am going to see the silver mines at Pachuca to-morrow,” I said. “I shall be away two days.”
“When you come back I shall still be here,” said the General. “All that talk about the old man’s prosecuting me and putting me in jail is just celestial music (Mexican for ‘hot air’). We shall see each other. I’ll give you my book and we’ll go and see my friend.”
When I got back the General had disappeared. He had fled from the city not to return till just now, when he comes back as a conqueror.
Obregón did well to get away when he did. The threats of “the old man” were not music. A few hours later Carranza would have had him locked up.
Carranza told me so himself the last time I saw him.
1. Beals, Carleton. “Mexican Militarism.” Foreign Literature reviews, The Saturday Review of Literature 6, no. 33 (March 8, 1930): 802.
2. Blasco Ibáñez, Vicente, “III. Citizen Obregón,” in Mexico in Revolution. Translated by Arthur Livingston and José Padin (New York: E. O. Dutton, 1920), 49–73.
Martín Luis Guzmán, The Shadow of the Strongman
