Mexico: A Novel Part 36

When Grandmother caught him talking with me she would drag me away: "Never believe a priest when he talks about anything but Jesus Christ. Everything else, he looks out only for his Church. And it's the priests that threw us into the shaft."

As the discussions continued I saw that Father was listening attentively to both sides, trying to understand what forced Lopez and Grandmother to see recent events in Mexico so differently. One afternoon as we had lunch outdoors at a spot from which we could see the beautiful aqueduct that one of the bishops Palafox had caused to be built almost two hundred years before, he said slowly, as if each word came separately to his mind: "How lovely they are, the old stone arches of our aqueduct. Carrying life-giving water from the pyramid to the cathedral-from you, Mother, to you, Father Lopez," and for a moment he held the two disputants by their hands. It was in that quiet instant, I can see now, that die idea for his powerful book was born-The Pyramid and the Cathedral, the two forces that had accounted for Mexican history up to this point: the ancient religion and the new; the Indian heritage and the importation from Europe.

I think it must have been about three weeks that we remained there among the ruins of the Mineral, for the images of those quiet days live with me still: the tall smokestacks of the smelter breathing no more, the building in which the ore had been crushed silent forever, the great brooding pyramid, the arches of the aqueduct and in the distance the faint outlines of Toledo. It was the landscape of a fairy tale, just before the ogre comes thundering onto the scene to disrupt the dream.

If I am correct in a.s.suming that Father conceived the idea for his book during those three weeks in 1918, he certainly had a lot to work on, for after Father Lopez and Grandmother had argued vigorously, Mother would suddenly remind them that it had been the Palafoxes who had brought civilization and Christianity to Toledo: "They found the Mother Lode and built the Mineral. One of them built the aqueduct. All the buildings you see on the horizon-they built them, too, the schools, the churches. Without them, Toledo would still be a collection of adobe huts." Then she added an afterthought: "And we built the bullring, too, and the ranch where the Palafox bulls are raised," and I could see that she considered the weight of that contribution equal to that of the cathedral.

The desire of the adults to convince me of their arguments never abated, and in the fourth week this tug-of-war led to a dramatic experience, which I remember as if it happened yesterday. It occurred when Father Lopez invited me to accompany him on one of his secret visits to believing Catholics in one of the villages north of the pyramid. We had a long walk in the hot sun, so that when we reached the village we were tired, hungry and thirsty, and I saw how the villagers, so poor they had almost nothing for themselves, scurried about to find food for us. Then Father Lopez suggested that they might like to join him in a reading of the Ma.s.s. When they said: 'That's why we hoped you'd come," there in the center of the village, with armed men on watch to flash a signal if soldiers who hated the Church approached unexpectedly, this little fellow, wearing no robes to distinguish him and with no cathedral behind him to lend him dignity, took out a little book that could have caused his death had the revolutionaries found it on him. He read the words I knew almost by heart; I had heard them so often with Mother. They meant nothing to me, but to the huddled Indians they meant everything, for when he finished, they cl.u.s.tered about to kiss his hand and place their own hands on the missal. It was an act of faith whose intensity I had never before seen, and when he indicated that the rude service was over, the men and women lingered with us to talk of the bewildering events of recent days.

"Will the Mineral be reopened?"

"His father says no."

"Who is the boy?"

"He's one of us. His grandmother is Caridad, you know her." Indeed they did, and favorably, for they asked: "Will she stay at the Mineral?" and Father Lopez replied: "In these days, who knows anything?"

"I know something," a man in white peasant garb said. "I was in Aguascalientes and the talk was that General Gurza, losing battles against the norteamericanos up on the border, is going to retreat back to Aguas and make his headquarters there."

"May G.o.d spare Aguascalientes if he arrives," a woman cried, and several men crossed themselves, but Father Lopez drew the informant to him: "Who said General Gurza would be bringing his trains south?" and the man replied: "Men from the north who had drifted down to Aguas to escape his soldiers, they rob and kill, you've seen."

Not wishing to walk back to the mine in late afternoon, when military patrols might be operating, we waited till sunset, and as I moved about the village I saw boys who were not much older than me carrying rifles, and any house that I entered at the invitation of the owners gave the impression of a little fortress. "We love Jesus," one of the women told me, "and we'll die rather than allow Gurza's men to destroy our village and our church."

"Why wasn't the Ma.s.s held in the church?" I asked and they explained: "It's been nailed shut by the soldiers to keep us out, but we sneak in and say our prayers. But to conduct Ma.s.s there with all of us together at one time is too dangerous." When I started to ask why, a woman drew close, stared into my eyes, and asked: "Didn't you people at the Mineral hear what they did at San Cristobal?" When I shook my head, she said: "Gurza's troops rushed in, caught people saying Ma.s.s, barred the doors and burned the place to ashes."

"The people, too?" I asked, and the woman nodded, as did the others.

In the darkness Father Lopez and I walked back toward the pyramid, then cut to the east to find the Mineral, where my anxious family demanded to know where I had been. When I said: "Saying Ma.s.s with Father Lopez at San Isidro," my mother cried: "Irresponsible, subjecting a boy to such risk," and Grandmother said to Father Lopez: "Serve you right if they'd caught you. A priest showing off to a small boy," but when the excitement. Died, my father told me quietly: "You did right. You ought to see everything. It's your country, too, but I wouldn't do it often. There are people out there who hate priests."

This melancholy time in our lives was dramatically interrupted by the arrival of a high-powered team of mining experts from Nevada who wanted to explore the lower levels of the Mineral to ascertain whether renewed mining would prove practical. Bringing in their own cage, great spools of lightweight wire cable and a surprisingly effective little donkey engine, they set up what they called a jury rig over the shaft and descended in twos and threes to inspect the caverns. Their activity excited Grandmother so much that she camped by the jury rig to watch the fall and ascent of the cage. On the fourth day she grabbed me by the hand: "They said we could go down," and into the improvised system we climbed, listened to the whistle and started the swift plunge to the depths.

I had been in the lower caverns only once, when it was crowded with Indians and donkeys, and to see it now in its vast emptiness was eerie. 'This is where the men slept who never went up the steps," Caridad explained. "This is where I stayed when I was too tired. We kept the donkeys over there." When she was finished with her story, I had a clear understanding of what life had been like in the caverns, but during a quiet spell, while the Nevada men were probing the spots where work had ceased with the dynamiting of the shaft, Grandmother made plans with the engineers whereby she and I would climb to the older cavern above us and wait there for the cage to pick us up at the end of the workday.

"I want you to know what it was like, Norman. Especially the stairs," and with her climbing the rock-hewn steps she had known so intimately, and holding my hand, we started up. I kept my left shoulder pressed against the smooth rocky wall of the shaft and my feet as close to the left as I could. It was a terrifying experience for a boy of ten, and as fear began to grip me Caridad comforted me: "Don't look up. One foot at a time. Shoulder to the wall," but I could not obey her, for the speck of light was so far above and the treads of the steps so small that I panicked, wedged myself against the wall and whispered: "I can't." When she turned back to encourage me, she saw that I really was unable to move, so great was the terror that gripped me.

She did not attempt to move down to my level; the tread where I stood was too small for that, but she did manipulate her own feet so that she could reach back and a.s.sist me. "We'll take it one at a time," she said, in a voice so comforting that I felt I had been saved, but when she wanted to pull me up, I cried: "I want to go down," and her hold on my arm tightened. With an almost fierce determination she said: "Climbing up is easier. Going down I'd not be in front to help."

Paralyzed by fear of the darkness below and the frail wisp of light from above as it bounced off irregularities in the rocky walls of the shaft, I was unable to climb either up or down, but then came the rea.s.suring voice of the old woman who had done it a thousand times, with a heavy load balanced on her head: "Norman, it was always easier for me to climb up than down," and with her steady hand guiding me I resumed my upward movement, one cautious step at a time, while my heart pounded furiously.

In that way we reached the s.p.a.cious safety of a middle cavern, where we left the stairs and I rejoiced at the freedom of movement I now had. Eager to prove that I had lost my childish fear, I almost leaped here and there, even going to the edge of the shaft to inspect the dreadful stairs I had just climbed. As I stood there, my grandmother said an amazing thing: "When I'm dead they'll tell you about the time an evil man plunged down from the spot where you're standing. They'll say they always thought I had pushed him." She paused, took my hand and said: "I did," and in a rush of words she added: 'There are times when you must. When evil men will not listen."

"Must do what?" I asked, and she said: "Whatever has to be done."

Since it would be more than an hour before the Nevada men would be signaling for the cage to haul them back to the surface, we had ample time to explore the cavern that had been the princ.i.p.al center in Caridad's early days, and when we finally rested on a pile of rocks she said: "You hear Father Lopez and your mother talk about how they tried to help the Indians. This is how," she said as she pointed at the cavern bathed in pale light. Grimly she added: 'This is how we lived, Norman, and if anybody asks you, you tell them."

She spoke for some minutes without interruption about the plight of the Indians, and then she surprised me by saying with vehemence: "It's all wrong, you know, for us to speak of me as an Indian and of Father Lopez as a Mexican, and you and your father as norteamericanos. We're all mestizos, half and half, and we should recognize that."

When I asked her what she meant, she explained: "When Spaniards came, who came? Men and women and children? No, only men. Are they going to live alone all their lives? No, no! They marry Indian women, like your Grandfather Jubal marry me. So from the beginning, all mixed, all half and half. I'm not pure Indian. I doubt I ever saw a pure Indian in all my life. All mixed." I said: "Mother tells me her Palafoxes married only other people from n.o.ble families in Spain. She says she's pure Spanish."

"She like to believe it, but book says: 'All big Palafoxes in church marry Indian girls.' I think so."

"Why are you so angry with Father Lopez?" I asked and she replied: "Not him. He good man I think. But it was other priests put us Indians here in the caverns. They tell us it's our duty." Suddenly she stopped, shivered, and looked at the shaft with all the fear I'd displayed only fifty minutes before: "When a woman with a basket fell from broken steps up there, she start to scream, we run to where you are, and see her face as she falls past us. We see her eyes, her terror, sometimes two a week. If she have no one who wants her, they bury her back of empty caves this level."

We sat in silence and then her keen ear detected movement below; the Nevada miners were sending signals upward to inform us they wanted to remain below, probably for more exploration, and when Caridad heard this she seemed to accept it as a fortunate respite, for she took my hand as we sat near the gaping hole and said in her musical Spanish: "Norman, you mustn't believe what they say about General Gurza. Yes, he does kill people sometimes. Yes, he does burn hateful buildings. But he is a good man. Trust me, Norman, he's a good man."

Since this was too ridiculous to accept, I said: "Father, Mother and Father Lopez, they all say he's a monster. I hate him."

Tugging on my arrr she reprimanded me: "Don't listen to them. Make up your own mind," and she continued: "Mestizos, people like me, we all cheer for him. He does our work for us-- punishes the rich, drives out the priests, helps the poor. When the norteamericanos try to catch him, he makes fools of them. He is our hero, Norman, and you will never understand your Mexico if you accept rich men's lies that he's a bad man."

For half an hour she told me of life in the Indian villages, of the misery of peon families who tried to grow a little corn. She explained how the arrival of Gurza's train in an area gave the little people hope and they prayed for his successes.

"You're against the priest, the cathedrals, and now you say you're praying."

"We pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe, not the priest who asks us for money in the cathedral."

The nice distinctions she was making were too confusing for a ten-year-old boy to untangle but what I do remember was her quiet insistence that General Gurza was a friend of the real Mexico, a point that she hammered home some days later when she privately learned from her Indian friends that Gurza's train was heading for Toledo and might arrive within the next days. To my mystification the women said that he was coming not from the north, as usual, but from the southeast. That night at supper Father said: "I hear that monster Gurza tried an attack on Mexico City but has been driven off. If he retreats this way, he'll be in an ugly mood," and he warned us to beware.

The next day government scouts reported that Gurza was approaching the city, and my parents started boarding up our home and hiding anything of value, but Grandmother was behaving like her usual calm self. While the others were occupied with protecting our property she took me by the hand and started walking along a footpath by the aqueduct into the part of Toledo occupied by the poor people. There for the first time in my life I saw the miserable little houses shared by several families, the grown children with no shoes, the dirty pump from which everyone took drinking water, and the misery of the poor in a nation at war. But as we talked with women that Caridad knew, I got the overpowering feeling that they were hoping that General Gurza would come roaring into their city, for then their lot would be improved. He was their hero, and as I moved among them I could hear them singing the latest ballad composed in his honor: "Brave General Gurza!

He takes his train everywhere.

Good General Gurza!

He fights our battle for us.

Kind General Gurza!

He gives money to the poor.

Brave General Gurza!

He don't fear n.o.body."

Then, as the rough words with the awkward rhymes increased in volume, I heard a rumbling noise from the southeast corner of the city and men came running to inform us: "General Gurza is coming! His train is at the bend!" and before my grandmother could take me out of danger, the battered train, survivor of a dozen attacks by government troops, Mexican and American, was chugging into the very area where Caridad and I were trapped by the milling peons, and I was terrified.

But this time it was a much different Saturnino Gurza who visited Toledo. In the batdes for Mexico City he had been soundly defeated by troops loyal to newly elected President Carranza, so he was running away to some safe hiding spot, not seeking danger as before. I was standing not twenty feet from where his train wheezed to a halt, and when he jumped off to talk with peons he hoped would support him, one of the first he met was me. Rumpling my hair with his big hand, he bent over me, his huge sombrero almost smothering my face, the bullets in his crossed bandoleers b.u.mping against me, and asked: "You, young fellow, will you be joining me on the train in a couple of years?" Engulfed by his huge mustache, I was too frightened to speak, for here was the devil himself, goading me, but Caridad poked me, shoved me forward and answered on my behalf: "He'll be with you, General, and he'll be a good one."

"Can you shoot a gun?" he asked, and when Caridad a.s.sured him that I was a crack shot, he grabbed a gun from one of his men and handed it to me: "Practice, young fellow. We'll be needing you." In the meantime he would be needing food and medicine and whatever ammunition the city could supply. As his men fanned out to commandeer such supplies, he took a chair from a sidewalk cafe and cried in a loud voice as he sat in the middle of the street: "Doesn't anyone have a beer for the savior of the city?" and admiring peons scattered about to find him one.

Having established a glancing acquaintance with me, he continued our conversation as he drank: "What's your name, son?" and Caridad broke in hastily: "Gonzdlez, Victoriano Gonzdlez."

"Victoriano!" he shouted, rumpling my hair again. "An omen! In the north we'll have a hundred more victories." And he took me on his knee, as if he were my father. There I sat with the rifle he had given me across my lap and his bandoleers lending me a military posture.

Aware that he could keep his train in Toledo only briefly, for Carranza's troops in superior numbers were after him, he handed me back to Caridad and said: "Tenemos cosas que hacer en el norte" (We have things to do up north). When his foraging troops had stripped the stores of everything, he climbed aboard the old engine that had carried him to so many victories, ordered the engineer to sound the mournful whistle, and chugged slowly out of town, as if reluctant to meet the battles he knew lay ahead.

Of course Father heard about our having been in Toledo when the brawling man he called "the murdering bandit" rode in, and he reprimanded his mother for having taken such a risk with me: "If Gurza had known he was a Palafox, he'd surely have shot him," so neither Caridad nor I told him that Gurza had dandled me on his knee and invited me to join him as soon as I was old enough to carry a rifle, and there the matter rested, with me totally confused. Caridad did not tell him that Gurza had given me a rifle, which she had hidden.

The one who took the news of Gurza's arrival and departure with quivering dismay was Father Lopez, who asked me repeatedly: "You mean, he brought his train right into the middle of town?" and when I nodded, he continued: "And he didn't shoot anyone? His men didn't go on murdering sprees?"

"They were too busy looking for food."

"No fires set?"

"I told you, they were busy."

In considerable agitation, Father Lopez talked with Father and Mother about General Gurza and his effect upon Mexico, especially the Catholic Church: 'The more nuns he slays, the more tenaciously our people cling to their faith."

"You have evidence of that?" Father asked, and the priest said: "When I visit the little villages, all the citizens, they know me as the man who helps them keep their faith alive."

"If Gurza's men catch you, they'd put you up against the wall."

"Nothing new. If they catch you and find you're a Palafox, the same thing."

"I don't want you to take the boy on any more of your rounds. It's too dangerous."

"I know, I wanted him to see the real Mexico, but once is enough." I was listening to this conversation and saw that Father Lopez wanted to speak further on this subject but decided not to.

That night two men came to the Mineral with a horrible report, to which all of us listened with hearts thumping: "Men have come to Toledo with stories of what happened when Gurza's men reached San Ildefonso, a small town north of Aguascalientes. Like what they say he did here in Toledo. The train came into town. No gunfire, no rape or murder. But there was stealing of food and emptying of stores. And this was only the beginning."

"What happened?" Father asked, and I was looking at Grandmother when the men from Aguas said: "Horrible. Some of our men in San Ildefonso, patriots and partisans of President Carranza, shot at Gurza but missed him and killed one of his colonels. That was the signal for the most violent gunfire you ever saw. Just blazing away. And then the rioting and the killing of all the priests and nuns they could find. Those of us who escaped decided to ride out to other towns to warn them. Gurza's men are destroying the heart of the town."

On hearing this, Grandmother clasped her hantfs tightly, kept them in her lap, and said nothing, but Father Lopez insisted on hearing the details repeated and pestered the Aguas men with questions: "How many priests did they find?" When he heard the number he flinched, and then asked: "And the nuns?"

"Only three. Our people hid the others."

"Dead?"

"Mutilated. Then killed."

In a quiet voice Lopez said: "I think we should say a prayer for the martyrs," and when we bowed our heads, Grandmother too, she clasped my hand and at the close of the impa.s.sioned lament whispered Amen with the rest of us.

The next days were tense, for everyone in Toledo realized by what a narrow margin we had escaped the fate of San Ildefonso. This was emphasized by Father at dinner one night: "You see, Mother, what might have happened when you took Norman into town." She retorted: "He left us in peace, didn't he?"

I could see that Father Lopez was profoundly distressed by this new attack on nuns, for repeatedly he said: 'The killing of men, if they fired against his troops, that I can understand, or maybe even to kill a nun if you came upon her suddenly in a mob, but to seek them out like dogs chasing a hare, that's . .." He never finished his sentence, for his vocabulary had no word adequate to describe that horror.

Later, when he learned that General Gurza had kept his train at San Ildefonso, since the ravaged town was his to command, using it as a base from which he fanned out to punish government troops or drive the Americans out of Mexico, Father Lopez felt that this was a challenge not to the men of San Ildefonso but to G.o.d himself: "It's a sacrilege, a work of the Anti-Christ." At supper, which he took with us, always returning from his expeditions at sunset, he repeatedly told my parents: "He really is the Anti-Christ, and G.o.d will punish him." I think my parents grew weary of his fulminations because one day Father said: "But, Father Juan, if you are powerless to force G.o.d to exact punishment, why not forget the monster?" and Lopez replied: "Maybe it's because G.o.d wants us to do his work for him and punish Gurza."

When he saw that the Clays were beginning to regret having taken him under their protection, he became nervous, staying away overnight and remaining silent at the table when he was there. One morning when we had risen early and he was about to set forth on his missionary work, he took special care to bid me farewell, as if he were going on a long journey. I saw that he was unusually disturbed and that after leaving the Mineral he headed not to the villages on his normal rounds but to the northwest. I waited till he was gone, then went after him, remaining well behind him, but because he always checked the landscape when he went on his dangerous missions, he chanced to look behind him and saw me.

Almost joyously he ran back to embrace me: "Norman, you've come to lend me courage," and without explaining what that signified, he allowed me to walk with him in the morning sunlight as he hiked westward behind the pyramid. "Where are you going?" I asked as we approached the railroad tracks that led to Aguascalientes, and he replied: 'To where G.o.d has called me ." And then he surprised me by revealing a wrapped package he'd been keeping under his cotton shirt: "You must forgive me, Norman, but I stole your gun," and he showed me how he had taken it apart, keeping all the screws and bolts in a paper bag for rea.s.sembly. When he saw my reluctance to lose the gun he said benignly: "It's an evil gun, Norman, his gun, the Anti-Christ's, and it would bring you harm. Give it to me with your blessing," and there beside the tracks where no one could see, I used a phrase Mother had taught me: "I, Norman, give thee, Juan, this my gun, and with it my blessing."

Embracing me and fighting back his tears, this dear, good priest whom it was not easy to love, for he was a difficult man of tedious disposition, embraced me ardently, kissed me on the forehead and whispered: "When you're a man, Norman, never draw back from doing the right thing, that's the mark of a man." With that he turned me about, gave me a gentle push on the back and started me on my way home. I last saw him walking purposefully along the railroad tracks on his way north with the gun General Gurza had given me.

Three days later the news flashed through Mexico, and the United States, too. A shoeless peasant residing in San Ildefonso, which General Gurza had ravaged the previous week, had whipped a gun from inside the white camisa that peons wore and fired it directiy at Gurza from a distance of only a few feet, killing him instantly. The dead general's bodyguards were so infuriated that they and other soldiers beat the a.s.sa.s.sin to the point where his corpse was too mutilated to permit identification. But in the days that followed, President Carranza's men, hoping to downgrade their dead enemy's popular support, circulated the rumor that the gun used to commit the murder was one that had been issued to Gurza's troops after the sack of an arms plant near Mexico City, which proved, they said, that the cruel revolutionary had been slain by one of his own men.

Mother and Father deemed this an act of divine intervention, and they intended asking Father Lopez about this. But my shrewd grandmother had another interpretation, which she confided to me privately: "Like an old woman knitting in the sun, General Gurza had used up his skein. He completed his job.' He set Mexico free," and then she led me to her tiny room, where, inside a small traveling bag, she had kept hidden a photograph that a man in Toledo had snapped the afternoon I met General Gurza. It showed me perched on his knee, his big face, mustache and huge sombrero close to me as he handed me the gun that I was supposed to use in his defense when I was fourteen. It was an excellent photo.

"Protect it, Norman. Someday you'll be proud you have it, for it could be the last photograph ever taken of our great leader," and together we sang in muted voices the Ballad of Saturnino with its insolent marching rhythm: "Gallant Saturnino!

He rode the train.

Heroic Saturnino!

He fought Black Jack.

Stupendous Saturnino!

He scorned Carranza.

Immortal Saturnino!

He brought us freedom."

The last five syllables were sung as a staccato chant, defying the world, and when they ended, as a kind of benediction to General Gurza, Grandmother took back the photo momentarily, studied it, kissed it and told me: "When I labored in the caverns I dreamed of such a man, but I thought he would come on a white horse, like Zapata. This one came on that rusty train."

The rest of my story about the Clays in Mexico can be quickly told. When Father Lopez failed to return, my parents a.s.sumed he had been shot in one of the villages he served, and we said no more about him. In time Grandmother learned that the gun General Gurza had given me was missing, but never asked me about it. The mining engineers from Nevada returned to explore the mine twice more before giving up, and on their last visit their leader told Father: "We help American Petroleum now and then. They have the big oil fields at Tampico, and they told me the other day they'd like to find some responsible American ..."

"I'm only half American. Born a Mexican, keep that citizenship, too."

'They know. And they asked if I thought you might be interested in serving as their representative in this middle part of the country."

"What would I be expected to do?" "If I understand what they said, you'd help them find skilled labor, or young men who've had education in the States, maybe send some up to Texas and Oklahoma." "No oil wells in Toledo. It seems a curious job." "People are in Toledo. A. P. expects to be in Mexico for the rest of the century, the reserves are that big. They need someone like you as part of their team," and when the shrewd men from American Petroleum came to Toledo to interview Father, they saw immediately that the good relations he'd established at the Mineral were what they needed to safeguard their holdings in Mexico.

Our family did not have to leave Toledo for Father to do the work they wanted, and this allowed him time to write the book that made him famous and caused the statue, The Pyramid and the Cathedral, to be erected in his honor at the far corner of the plaza. From our front porch we could see both edifices, and their history was in our bloodstream. It was a n.o.ble book, still is, a glimpse into the heart of Mexico, and one of the pa.s.sages I've cherished is his portrait of Jubal Clay with his Confederate brothers in his final years: Each year on the ninth of April those Confederate soldiers who had refused to live under the domination of the North and General Grant, finding refuge here in the salubrious climate of Toledo, would convene in fellowship to mark, not celebrate, the day on which Robert E. Lee surrendered to Butcher Grant at Appomattox Court House.

Someone would propose a toast: "To the day the world ended!" and they would drink in silence, but always someone else proposed: "To the day Canada invades the North and we rush there to help her." This toast they drank with cheers and cries of "We'll be there!" At the first reunion after the election of Grant as president, Jubal proposed his own toast: "We can take heart from the election of Butcher Grant, because it proves there is a G.o.d in heaven. He's giving those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds what they deserve. Let's watch how he messes up the nation as he did his army at Cold Harbor."

But as the years pa.s.sed, and the exiles aged, Jubal noted a phenomenon: "Every man who recalled his battle experiences claimed he had fought with either Stonewall Jackson or Jeb Stuart or Ma.s.sa Robert himself. Since not one of us admitted he had fought under a losing general, I often wondered how we had managed to lose the war."

As time went on, Father proved so invaluable to American Petroleum that the company offered him yearly bonuses in stock, until we became a family with a solid if not spectacular financial footing. As the president of the company once said when delivering the bonus at a staff gathering: "The best thing John Clay ever did for this company was write that book. It proved to the Mexicans that we were not only good people but also a cultured group who appreciated Mexican patterns of life. Clay is our resident Mexican, and we treasure him."

Under Father's guidance mining affairs proved so profitable in central Mexico that American Petroleum decided to probe deeper into our Mineral to see if perhaps some major vein lay hidden far below what was now known as Caridad's Cavern at the thirteen-hundred-foot mark. So the Nevada engineers who had probed in the 1930s returned with new equipment that enabled them to speed down below the nineteen-hundred-foot level, but they found nothing. However, Father's other projects earned the company rich rewards.

You can imagine his dismay when the radical liberal Lazaro Cardenas became president in 1934 and began threatening to expropriate all foreign petroleum holdings. He told me in the letters he sent me at college-I was a graduate student in those years-that Mexico was plunging headlong into another revolution. That same year he sent me news that Grandmother Caridad had died, "a wonderful fighting woman to the end." He said that she left a cryptic message for me: "Tell Norman to guard that photograph. Each year it becomes more valuable." It was clear that as Mexico became more nationalistic, and more particularly because of its willingness to stand up to the United States on the oil business, Saturnino Gurza was being slowly but surely converted into one of the great national heroes. Those pusillanimous leaders who had opposed him, such as Carranza and Huerta and Obregon, were seen as men to be forgotten, while Gurza grew yearly in stature. Grandmother had been right in her a.s.sessment of Mexican history; Father Lopez had been wrong.

But Grandmother's death posed a difficult problem for me, for with her gone I was the only person alive who knew that Father Juan had died a martyr's death, and the knowledge of that truth hung heavily upon me. In those tumultuous days after the a.s.sa.s.sination of Gurza it was prudent to preserve the secret, for to reveal it might have caused danger not only to our family for having harbored the a.s.sa.s.sin but to the Catholic Church as a whole for having encouraged, it might seem, this blow against a revered leader. Now the burden of truth lay on me alone, and often as I looked at that remarkable photo, the last ever taken of Gurza, as Caridad had suspected, I watched it become transformed under my very eyes. General Gurza, the man holding me on his knee, had become the father of the new Mexico, and I resolved that sometime, when the occasion was proper, I would reveal both the photograph and the history of the rifle. In the meantime I had six excellent copies made and kept them in various places.

In 1938 Cardenas did expropriate the oil wells; American Petroleum was expelled from Mexico, its enormous wealth wiped out by a mere scratching of a presidential pen; and soon thereafter my father, author of the fine book about Mexico, left that country for good. My mother, always a loyal Palafox, refused to join him, but in due course I followed his example, even to the extent of leaving a Palafox wife behind me. Father wanted to bring my mother with us, but she refused to leave the ancestral home of the Palafoxes; an equally weighty consideration was her religion. At her marriage to my father, there had been a mutual understanding that she would remain Catholic but he would be free to elect at some future time whether he wanted to join her church or not. He delayed his decision, and neither he nor Grandmother Caridad applied any pressure on me to join any religion, Mother's Catholicism or Father's Protestantism. Caridad told me when I was eleven: "I've been a good Catholic like all before me, but the only thing it ever did for me was put me down in the mines."

There was no bitterness in our departure, that is, personally. Mother and Father had regard for each other, but Father said he simply could not live in a nation that stole private property with inadequate compensation, and Mother said it was unthinkable that she could ever live in a country like the United States that had stolen not property but the entire northern state of Mexico. When I asked what this meant she said: "I mean the parts you call Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Stole them all and someday we'll march north to gain them back."

Father was not alone in these days of anguished decisions about future lives. I had married a lovely Palafox girl, from the Spanish branch, and she too found it incomprehensible that she would accept exile in America, abandoning all that had made Toledo such a splendid home, with the advantages that accrued to the name Palafox. She refused to join me, so that when Father and I left Toledo for a new home in Alabama, all of us knew that reconciliations were improbable. In those days a man decided where his family should live, so there was not one moment's consideration of the fact that I might want to stay with Mother in Toledo.

Father had chosen Montgomery because it was a fine Southern city populated by reliable people who still believed that the South should have won the War Between the States, as they called it, since they viewed the war as having been fought between two equal national ent.i.ties-one pro-slavery, one anti. "There was no rebellion, young man," a distant cousin lectured me when I arrived: "It was a war between equals, except that we had all the education and moral training, they had the railroads and the factories."

I was happy in Alabama until I found out that another reason Father had wanted to settle there was that he would be close to Mexico when war started. He was convinced that President Roosevelt would soon march south of the border to take back the oil wells and he wanted to be in on the kill. When it was apparent that the crippled president was indeed planning a war, not against Mexico but against Germany, he told the members of his Confederate Club: "My G.o.d! He's fighting the wrong war!" and once more Clay felt betrayed by Northern leadership.

In Montgomery he suffered many regrets, not because of his treatment there, but because he felt it was indecent for him to live on his pension and stock from American Petroleum when he had failed them so signally: 'They hired me to help them maintain good relations with the Mexican government, and I had to sit by in impotence when Cardenas stole our entire operation and hundreds of years of oil reserves. I'm a total failure." And when his New York publishers wanted him to write a foreword for a special edition of The Pyramid and the Cathedral, explaining the new Mexico, he told them: "The new Mexico can go to h.e.l.l." They replied with an urgent letter: "Don't say that in public," and he didn't.