The Spoils of Buenavista

There is a photograph of a boy named Robert MacBean, an officer in the rebel army in the Mexican Revolution. For years, I was half-ashamed of that photo's flamboyance, but half-proud also. The photograph could be an illustration from a Richard Harding Davis novel of Latin-American adventure, the hero a half-gringo captain of a troop of irregular cavalry. The likeness was taken in Tepic in the summer of 1914, by a hunchbacked photographer whose name, J. Medina, appears in flowing script in the lower-right-hand corner.

The subject stands in a pose of graceful menace, hard young face under a Texas hat, khaki military shirt, white trousers and high soft boots heavily spurred. A scarf is knotted at his throat and gauntlets held in his left hand, while his right rests with some precise gradation between ease and self-consciousness on the cartridge belt, which is of heavy leather carved and embossed, as is the holster, with its laced seams, which is cut down to the trigger of the revolver. That revolver's seven-inch barrel runs from chamber to muzzle with lines as graceful as those of a girl's leg. Its mechanism works together softly, silently, heavily, satisfyingly, the butt of ebony with arabesques of silver and mother-of-pearl and set with a ring. For a caliber as heavy as .44, it has an exceptionally long range.

The revolver was a part of the spoils of the Hacienda Buenavista. I possess it still. Recently, my grandson found me with it at my desk, where I had removed it from its concealment to clean, or perhaps merely to fondle it, and I felt as flustered and as short of breath as though some old shame had been discovered.

• • •

In the summer of 1914, the armies of the revolution were everywhere victorious, Pancho Villain the north, Obregón on the west coast and Zapata in the south, converging on the capital with the dictator's forces everywhere in sullen retreat. I served with Obregón in that movement south and east, through Sinaloa, Tepic and Jalisco, part of a swollen mob of undisciplined soldiery with their varieties of uniforms and weapons, with their horses, their "Adelitas," their children and scavenging dogs and their endless trains filled and covered with humanity moving south.

I remember scouting with the escuadrilla on the eastern flank of the Brigada Allende, coming upon evidence of a running fight between guerrillas and federales. Turkey buzzards wheeled over the dead horses and three of our compadres curled up on their wounds, very small in death, with faces terribly punished by the buzzards. Later we chased a squad of rurales, those most hated of the enemy, and killed all of them among the dry washes.

From time to time, we sighted haciendas across the fields of their estates, braced against us, their terror and loathing broadcast on the air as we ragged bands passed them, precursors of the slow, brutal armies of the revolution. We would not have presumed to attack one of these fortresses had we been allowed to pass unchallenged. But in one instance we were not, and I choose to tell the tale of it more formally than in my own person, for I, in my dotage now, am no longer the cruel, young Robert MacBean of that summer and that war.

• • •

Captain MacBean led the escuadrilla through a broad valley tinged with green in this less arid countryside. Ahead a low ridge was crowned with tan walls, the corners bulging with rifle-slotted towers. The place seemed to glare with a venomous hostility, and his first reaction to the Hacienda Buenavista was to ride quickly on by. There were corrals below it, a glitter of water through foliage where a river flowed. A higher hill behind was topped by a cross.

A sense of oppression and recognition was very heavy as the road drew closer to the walls. The escuadrilla rode in silence. Nicanor, the sergeant, was close behind MacBean, with his brother Fernando and Tertullio with the flag, the others clustering in groups of four or six, last of all Birdwell leading the mules that carried the two machine guns and the saddlebags of ammunition magazines.

The pile of masonry and adobe passed from sight for a time as the road wound down an arroyo, where only the distant blue of the sierra was visible against a dark-blue sky. Someone began to sing softly: Fernando. The song broke off as the hacienda hulked up again, a dun dreadnought aground in green fields, with the slots in the towers like slitted eyes.

"This place is very like Las Llagas, Roberto," Nicanor said.

The place was so like the Hacienda de las Llagas de Cristo of his youth that he could hardly breathe. It was as though his mother were watching him from one of those rifle ports, cursing him for his treason to her and to those who had ruled Mexico for so long, who were his own class and race.

Years after she died, when at prep school in the United States he had encountered Queen Elizabeth in Anglo-Saxon history books, he had known exactly what that first Elizabeth had been like, for his mother had been very regal, with red hair, eyes the color of brown pansies and skin so white she must never have let the sun upon it. She had always considered herself a Castilian in exile among half-breeds and Indians.

Perhaps once a year his father had appeared at the hacienda, bluff, hearty and freckled. He was reputed to be a very powerful gringo, a friend of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, and the child Robert MacBean understood that his mother and father had settled into this strange, once-a-year marriage because their natures were so strong that they could not endure each other's company for very long at a time.

At the Hacienda de las Llagas de Cristo, he would never forget Eufemio, the sergeant of rurales, in his beautiful dove-gray uniform and extravagant hat, who was a swaggerer, a braggart and a bully, and on whom the campesinos were forced to fawn because of the life-and-death power of his whim. Nor Féliz, his mother's major-domo, less a swaggerer than the rural, but more a sadist. Nor Padre Prudencio, the priest, whom the Las Llagas vaqueros had hanged when the revolution had exploded in Sonora. He had always considered that the revolution had been made more against these actual oppressors of the people than against the hacendados whose vassals they were. In many ways, his mother had been loved by her serfs. She lent them money at outrageous rates of interest, but always lent it, tended their ills from a medical book, gave them advice and concerned herself with their lives. They had been proud of their patrona for her hysterical rages, her favoritisms and petty jealousies and stubbornness, her pride of race and her absolute disdain for mixed blood.

But now, as the walls of this hacienda reared higher and nearer, and the escuadrilla obliquely approached its huge iron-studded gate, he was remembering a scene from his childhood. In search of his mother, he had run into her office, where a desk held her account books and a typewriter whose long-shanked keys resembled flowers in a bowl, and where there was a bulky safe with South Sea scenes painted on the doors. The rural was present, and Féliz the capataz, thumbs hooked into his cartridge belt, and Padre Prudencio in his black cassock, his suety face set in its severe and righteous frown. Kneeling before his mother was one of the peons. Her face jerked toward him as he burst in, and his shock at the bloody stripes on flesh, and the whip, was no greater than at the redness of her mouth in her yellow face.

• • •

He saw smoke drift from one of the rifle ports before he heard the shot. Instantly, there was smoke at the other slots, followed by a volley of sharp cracks. Nicanor shouted.

MacBean jerked around to see an empty saddle. There were cries of warning. Everyone headed at a gallop for the protection of the corrals as bullets snapped past. He glanced back again to see Nicanor's horse reined rearing above Fernando, who lay face down in the dust with his hat 15 feet away. Nicanor galloped forward, shouting, as bullets shrilled overhead, and the two of them raced after the rest of the escuadrilla, scattering white chickens behind the corral walls. Cattle were nosed to a trough and a terrified vaquero stood with his hat in his hands. All dismounted, MacBean starting toward Nicanor but halting as the big sergeant confronted the vaquero with his revolver drawn and his broad brown face contorted in a snarl of agony. The vaquero sank to his knees. Nicanor holstered his revolver. The men crowded around him, whose brother had been killed.

"Roberto!" Nicanor said in a loud, flat voice. "I think we must take this evil place that would not let us pass in peace!"

Already, Birdwell had unloaded one of the Benét-Merciés, carrying it cradled in his arms to a corner of the adobe wall. MacBean watched worriedly; yet what had happened here was why this war was being fought, against the ruthless arrogance that locked itself inside castles and savaged passers-by, that had killed Fernando, who a moment before had been singing; brother of Nicanor, the best man in the escuadrilla; the bravest, most competent and the humblest, who had never before this asked anything for himself.

A bullet kicked adobe dust from the wall where Birdwell was setting up the machine gun. He ducked away, wiping his eyes and cursing. Others were returning fire from the cover of the wall. Birdwell inserted one of the 30-round (continued on page 92)Spoils of Buenavista(continued from page 86) magazines in his gun and crouched, aiming it. The gun stuttered at a furious rate, the magazine emptied in what seemed an instant, flicks of dust climbing the wall to one rifle port and crossing to another. The silence was immense when the machine gun ceased.

Nicanor had remounted. Antonio handed up to him a gunny sack of bombs. Nicanor gripped a lighted cigarrillo between his teeth as he swung the sack over his shoulder. He grinned down at MacBean with a mouth like a scar.

"It is crazy, eh, Roberto? But what a bad thing they have done here!"

"Have caution, Nicanor," he said.

The Benét-Mercié began to clatter again. Promptly, it jammed, but Juan Herrera had set up the other and he fired on the smoke of the rifle ports while Birdwell fought to clear his gun.

"I will knock the gate down and then all will come, eh, Roberto?" Nicanor said. "While the gringo of the machine guns keeps these doomed ones occupied?"

MacBean nodded.

"I'll keep them plenty busy if I can just get this fucker unfucked," Birdwell said. Nicanor sat slumped with the sack on his shoulder until this was accomplished and MacBean and the rest had mounted. Then he spurred out of the corral, scattering the chickens again.

MacBean watched the dust kicking around the ports as the machine guns fired. Crouched low in the saddle, Nicanor galloped his big black toward the gate. Now there was the smoke of firing from ports on either side of the gate and MacBean yelled at Birdwell, who swung his gun to stitch bullets there.

Nicanor dumped his load of bombs, lit the fuse of one, dropped it onto the others and, machine guns chattering, spurred back down the road crouched on the off side of his horse.

With a dull crump, dust and smoke rose in a sluggish high blossom while the guns fell silent. The dust fell away, revealing one half of the gate torn from its hinges to lean against the other half, opening a tall black triangle. Already, Nicanor was racing back toward this. One of the machine guns began to yammer again and MacBean yelled, "Let's go!"

With Comanche yells, the escuadrilla burst out of the corral and up the short, steep road to the gate, through which Nicanor had disappeared on foot. MacBean had a sense of bullets tearing past him in the clamor of the Benét-Merciés. Then they were all milling before the opening, dismounting to squeeze through, MacBean with his revolver drawn and a fear he had never felt before in any of the escuadrilla's actions. With Antonio, he hurled himself into the sudden calm of a sunny space of green foliage, white walls, red tile, beds of red, orange and yellow flowers, a fall of purple bougainvillaea. Across from him, in the shadow of a cypress, Nicanor was reloading close by a flight of steps slanting to a flat roof where there was a clustering of sombreros, the gleam of a rifle barrel, a spit of fire. Antonio sprinted forward to hurl a tin-can bomb. There was a scream drowned in the bomb's explosion and instantly Nicanor was springing up the steps three at a time with Antonio behind him, others running to follow. There were shots on the roof and Nicanor reappeared, waving his hat. MacBean shouted to him to take his detachment to the left, where were the snipers who had first fired upon them, the rest to follow him. With a clatter of boots behind him, he trotted along the inside of the wall where huts lined a street paved with pebbles. The cross on the hill loomed against the sky.

Peasants were coming out of the huts, hats in hand, a woman nursing a baby bound to her breast with a rebozo, the men making placating sounds as MacBean and his detail hurried past them. Now with his griping of fear was a sense of knowing exactly where he was headed, and he rounded a corner to come upon the casa grande.

It might have been Las Llagas ten years ago, with its stucco walls, deep shadows, a sheen of window glass catching the sun, a red-tiled veranda with ferns in hanging pots. A man smashed a window with a rifle butt and MacBean felt in himself a like instinct to destroy. Revolver in hand, he strode into cool rooms through which he could have found his way blindfolded. There was the menacing familiarity of gold Cristos on pedestals, tapestried walls and heavy, dark, carved furniture, all the half-ascetic, half-exotic Gothic Castilian pride, that hidalgo small-nobility meanness of spirit, that desperate arrogance and contempt he realized had been sucked with his mother's milk and that had oppressed him as it had oppressed Mexico. It was so heavily present in this place that it was like carrying someone on his back as he trotted through the rooms followed by the sibilant comment, boot crack and spur jangle of his men, their noise echoing emptily. With a curse, Antonio flung a vase across a hallway to smash it, and MacBean understood the need to smash not merely the property of the hacendados but the library hush as well, though still he was shocked by the presumption. And now the men scattered through the different parts of the house looking for the patrons, and, without even thinking the thought, MacBean understood that they were to be killed.

Just as he knew by heart this floor plan, he knew there was a secret room. He jerked a tapestry from a wall, for it had been behind a tapestry that the tiny chapel at the Hacienda de las Llagas de Cristo had been concealed. The others took it up, tearing down the tapestries, slashing at the paintings with their bucolic scenes, indistinct landscapes and portraits: a fat, narrow-nosed boy dressed in a blue suit with silver buttons, a cardinal in a red cap, men and women in black. There was a shout of triumph and MacBean ran with the rest to where a door had been revealed, squat and low, made of heavy timbers with iron bracing and hinges. Antonio set his shoulder against it, grunting, and others joined him to no effect. Tertullio produced a grenade made of a two-inch section of pipe, with a fuse and wire-loop hanger.

MacBean suspended this at the side of the door opposite the hinges, lit the fuse and, jostling with the others, hurried around a corner. The grenade crunched in a billow of plaster dust, which whitened everything. The heavy door now stood ajar on a dark passageway. MacBean knew exactly how this passage turned after four or five steps, to open into a miniature chapel; there would be an altar with a gold cloth and candles and a white-skinned Christ crucified upon the wall. And, when he stepped through the doorway, it was just as he'd foreseen.

There were three people in the chapel, all in black. A fat priest with a gleaming bald head knelt on a cushion before the altar. Facing them as they entered were a stocky woman, veiled, and a tall, black-haired girl in riding habit. She leaned against a corner of the altar as the priest prayed aloud in Latin, her close-set dark eyes staring at MacBean out of her white face.

The older woman held a crucifix out before her as though to ward off Satan himself. The priest prayed more loudly as Antonio shouted in his hectoring voice, "iHola! Fat priest, you have eaten too well in this world; do you pray for less appetite in the next?" The laughter reverberated in the little room, drowning the prayers. The eyes of the girl in the riding habit never left MacBean. The knuckles of her hands clutching a riding crop against her waist were chalky white.

Antonio and Arturo Vargas hoisted the priest to his feet, swinging him around to face them. Fat and sweating, he determinedly held his hands clasped chin-high in prayer, eyes fixed on the Cristo, and he looked very much like Padre Prudencio of Las Llagas. The men of the escuadrilla hustled him outside, taunting him, laughing when he tripped, the voice of Antonio the priest hater the loudest.

The woman pushed her crucifix at MacBean, crying, "Please, señor officer, please do not let the soldiers hurt Padre Cipriano, oh, please, señor, you would not hurt a priest of the holy Church, señor, you must call to your soldiers and"--on and on in an echoing rush until MacBean shouted, "Silence! Get out of here, old woman!"

She fled, leaving Tertullio in his blue (continued on page 168)Spoils of Buenavista(continued from page 92) overalls looking ill at ease and grinning in a way MacBean did not understand. Suddenly, he vanished after the others.

The girl stood motionless, tall as he was, full-breasted, full-hipped, wearing black boots, a black, full skirt, a black jacket with a profusion of white ruching at the throat. Her nose was the nose of the boy in the blue uniform in the painting. Her shining hair was wound into a bun on the left side of her head, and now her left hand rose to touch it, while her right hand, holding the riding crop, fell to her side.

"We are at your mercy, Señor Capitán," she said in a low voice. "Will you abuse us?"

"Who is the patron here, señorita?"

"Don Pedro de Valdivia, my father, señor."

"And where is he, Señorita de Valdivia?"

Her pallid lips half-opened. She touched them with the pointed tip of her tongue and closed them again. "Here?" he asked, and she inclined her head. Now her left hand was at her throat and a crucifix had appeared in it.

MacBean said harshly, "My men were fired upon and one killed when we had offered you no abuse, señorita."

"What will your men do with Padre Cipriano?" she whispered.

"They will shoot him." They would shoot her father also, and probably shoot her unless he prevented it. He watched her lips work. Her eyes were so dark they seemed to be all pupil.

She said, "But you do not speak the truth, señor, when you say you offer us no harm. You have come to rob the decent and to violate the pure. We know of your doing, you see."

He was touched in spite of himself, nor could he help grinning. He had captured something very rare here, but so much a part of himself it was as though he had known her all his life. No doubt she was a stupid, arrogant woman like all her class, clad in those fanatic Spanish obsessions of honor and virtue and religion, like a coat of mail.

Now she slumped a little. "Please, señor," she said. "You do not seem to be one of these degenerate murderers--please, if you could help me to make my way to Guadalajara. There are friends there who will...."

Her voice faded to silence. She stood straighter, staring at him, and he was touched again by the fear in her great-pupiled eyes. He strolled past her, thumbs hooked into his cartridge belt. It pleased him to realize that she was in his power. Her request was simple enough to gratify. He would send her into Guadalajara with an escort and a note to General Justo. Possibly she would be grateful to him, but more probably she would accept his assistance as no more than her due. Outside there was a volley of rifle fire.

As he turned toward her, pain exploded in his face. He reeled away from her riding crop. He tripped on the pillow the priest had knelt on, stumbling to his knees, a hand raised to fend off the slashing whip. She had a revolver. Dropping her quirt, she aimed it at him with both hands. He flung himself aside. The blast seemed to burst his eardrums. He thought she had killed him, but he leaped at her with hot fluid pouring into his eyes, to twist the revolver away. He couldn't see: He heard the crack of her running heels. He swiped with his sleeve at the blood dripping into his eyes.

He caught her in the hall, jerked her around and slapped her with all his strength. She fell, bunching herself into a black-clad ball as he stood over her, panting. He reached down to catch the knot of hair and dragged her back along the hall over the polished tiles and into the chapel again. He released her hair, grasped her jacket and, hauling her to her feet, tore it off. She shrank against the altar while he stood spread-legged before her, swiping at the blood that ran into his eyes. The blood on his hands infuriated him. With another jerk, he tore her blouse away and wiped his face with it. She was murmuring; she was praying.

She faced him in her shift and skirt, a torn sleeve of her blouse still on one arm, arms folded over her breast. On her white cheek was the shape of his hand, part pink bruise, part bloodstain. Her hair hung loosely down one shoulder. He bent to pluck up the riding crop she had discarded for the revolver and, with a sudden vicious movement, slashed her arms.

She cried out. Her upper teeth showed in pain. They made flat grooves on her lower lip. Gently he brushed his forehead with her camellia-scented blouse and looked at his blood staining the cloth.

"Please, señor," she whispered. "Do not hit me anymore."

Holding the riding crop poised in his right hand, her blouse in his left, he slashed her yet again before she began to undress. He was cautious enough to place her revolver, a heavy .44, its butt opulently inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl, along with the encumbrances of his own revolver and cartridge belt, on a chair on the other side of the little chapel from the sobbing girl, the altar and the pillow before it.