The Hot Country

32

When the train was moving again and I turned my face to the long, flat run of the Central Plateau that would take us to Mexico City, I found the women in the car at the back of the train lingering in my head. And I thought of Luisa. If she had gone off to do what I suspected she had, she was a soldadera of quite a different sort. I wondered who she actually went to. Zapata in the south? He just didn’t seem much motivated to campaign outside his own state. Or Carranza the alleged thinker? Obregón the tactician? Most likely Pancho Villa. She would be drawn to him for the same reasons I suspected Mensinger and the Germans were drawn to him. He was the boldest rebel of them all, clearly the strongest of them at this point, the one most likely to make a radical change in favor of the vast majority of Mexicans, the poor and disenfranchised. She would go to him.

I realized I was in danger of violating what I’d resolved about staying in the moment, about not looking ahead. Even though this matter of Luisa Morales was simple curiosity; even though I had objectively, analytically assessed her next moves, not mine; even though I had not, in that analysis, ever actually summoned up a full-fledged image of her in my mind; even though I was convinced all of this about what I’d been doing was true, now that I’d come to a conclusion and was ready to set her aside, Luisa Morales slipped quietly into me in quite a different way, as if from the shadows beyond the lamplight in a dark street. She appeared vividly, in the flesh, and she was unarmed and her hair was tumbled about on her shoulders, and she looked me in the eyes, and her eyes were as dark as the barrel of a gun. And then she vanished. And so I found myself refusing to operate in this present moment, on this train between Vera Cruz and Mexico City, and instead I was looking far ahead, to the possibility that Luisa, as well, might be waiting at the end of this trail with Mensinger. And the consequent hot twist in my chest made me feel like an incurable damn fool.

I needed to rid myself of all this. Right now. When Dr. Tejeda Llosa sat down beside me after the lunch stop in Esperanza, he rolled his shoulders a little to silently declare that there was nothing more to be said between us. Which was what I’d hoped to accomplish with my bit of willful rudeness. But at the moment I even considered turning to him and engaging him in conversation. Tell me about your time in America. I am a German with a banker uncle in Torreón and I do something or other and I am from somewhere or other.

I glanced in the old man’s direction. He was dozing, his head nodding forward and then jerking up and then nodding forward again. Dr. Tejeda Llosa. Doctor. Dr. The last little bit of the puzzle of Mensinger’s notes. I’d been assuming that ENP ~ Dr. involved a medical doctor. Of course not. If it was Wilson who had no balls in the notes, then this might be Wilson as well. The first President of the United States with a PhD. From Johns Hopkins University, in history and political science. Dr. Woodrow Wilson. And it was the PhD part of him that Mensinger wanted to stress to Villa. Villa who was utterly uneducated but was known both to deeply regret the fact and to dream of teaching every Mexican child to read.

So what was Mensinger’s point with the tilde? What was similar to Wilson’s PhD? What was ENP? And a phrase returned to my mind that slipped through a short time ago, in connection with Luisa’s choice of rebels: Carranza, the alleged thinker. And I remembered talking with Gerhard about him. And I was pissed at Gerhard for treating me like a naïf. So when he cited, in English, the “National Preparatory School” as part of Carranza’s intellectual resume, I tweaked him by repeating the name of the school in the correct Spanish: Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. ENP.

Mensinger couldn’t be sincerely suggesting that the two things were, in fact, similar. The ENP was a high school. The most exclusive in the country, but a high school. He could, however, expect it to represent, in Villa’s mind, all that he was not. The antithesis of Villa’s upbringing. Mensinger wouldn’t be rubbing Villa’s face in that. But if he was trying to induce an attack on American forces, he’d want to convince Villa that Wilson would never support his larger ambitions. ENP ~ Dr. Villa might believe that Woodrow Wilson feels an intellectual affinity with Carranza. That Wilson would be scornful of Villa’s lack of education. The note Mensinger made was to indicate Wilson’s point of view, the ultimate message being that the United States would never back Pancho Villa as leader of Mexico. Carranza was Wilson’s man. So there was nothing to lose for Villa to stand up to America by attacking Wilson’s invading army. Though he could be self-deprecating about his lack of education, Pancho Villa was a vain and self-aggrandizing man. The thought of Wilson’s scorn would infuriate him. And with the present Mexican outpouring of hatred for the United States, Villa could become an even greater hero. He could unify the rebellion behind him.

And I was simply getting angry. Angry at Mensinger and the Germans, angry at Villa and the Mexicans. I was angry at Wilson already, but once again I was struck by how my anger at him was of a completely different sort, like being angry at a smart but goofy uncle from Virginia, or at your mother, or at the Cubs. Family anger.

I took my hat off the hook by the window and put it on and pulled it down over my eyes and I settled back to make myself sleep. I was still weary enough from the short night. I could sleep if I just put my mind to it. No. I could sleep if I turned my mind off.

And I slept. I knew I’d slept because I pushed the hat up off my eyes and the sun was low, and passing outside was the pulque district just east of the capital, vast fields of maguey in dense, even rows of spiky, gray-green leaves as tall as a man with a tip that could cut deep as the bone and sap that could blister the skin, a plant that could produce the wretched pulque and the estimable blue agave with the effective mezcal in between. A complex thing indeed.

We were not far from the city now. Those of us going north would change trains in Mexico City. So I needed to avoid sitting next to him again and he was likely to disembark at the capital anyway, but even if I knew I’d be sitting beside him for another long trip, I would do this anyway: I turned to Dr. Tejeda Llosa. He was reading a book. The Meditaciones of Marcus Aurelius. I knew a few words from Aurelius. I remembered my mother quoting him to me when I’d finally calmed down after an early-teenage raging tantrum over something or other. She quietly let the fit run its course. And though in medias res I scornfully recognized her portrayal of suffering patience from her role of Marguerite Gautier in The Lady of the Camellias, I eventually calmed down and awaited her rebuke. But putting her hand gently and sadly on my shoulder and acting as if I would instantly understand his authority, she said, “The great emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius once wrote, ‘Anger is always honest.’” And that was that. She patiently turned my fault into a kind of virtue, thus letting me fill in for myself the fault of it, and I think, as a result, I never overtly lost my temper with her again.

Dr. Tejeda Llosa read on, as I was stuck — though sweetly — on my mother. But now in my head I prepared a Spanish translation of the Aurelius quotation and I said to him, “Forgive me, Doctor Tejeda Llosa.”

He lifted his face from his book and turned to me. He had a look of suffering patience on his face.

I said, “I am sorry to interrupt and sorry for much more than that.”

He closed his book.

Putting just a trace of German into my Spanish pronunciation, I gave him a shot of his Marcus Aurelius. I said, “El enojo es siempre honesto.”

He smiled faintly and nodded. “Quite all right,” he said.

“That’s from Aurelius,” I said.

He lifted his eyebrows.

“But anger isn’t always smart,” I said.

“No offense was taken,” he said.

I said, “The place where you earned your doctorate degree…” But I interrupted myself. I glanced quickly around the car, making sure no one was paying attention to us.

He nodded again, pushing up his lower lip and wrinkling his brow at me as if to say, “You were right to be discreet, señor; at this moment in history, they would not understand either.” Before I could continue, he finished my sentence in a very low voice, barely able to reach me over the clack of the wheels beneath us. “The University of Pennsylvania.”

I spoke low as well. “Ah,” I said. “So. Good. That country you studied in, that is a good country, an admirable country.”

“In spite of this terrible thing they are doing, yes. It is,” he said.

“Created from the wish to be free,” I said. “We Germans are a nation with roots in a barbaric race. I regret my treatment of you on the platform in Esperanza.”

“I understand,” he said.

“I wish I were more like an American,” I said.

“Not at all,” he said. “You Germans are a fine race. But may I offer a respectful correction?”

“Of course,” I said.

“I seek his meditations on every trip and holding the book in my hands is a good thing, but I could probably recite all of Aurelius to you from memory. As I am an Aurelius scholar, he is my passion. The quotation you cite cannot be his. It is very much unlike him.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I knew the sudden stiffness of my voice sounded like my German arrogance reasserting itself, refusing to be corrected.

I turned my face to the window. It was best for the conversation to end anyway.

Of course she made it up. Improvised. Like the patience. Like the gentle hand on my shoulder. But it was the right line and the right gesture at the right moment in the little drama I’d cast her in. I could not be angry with her for that.