At the feet of my hero, at his ranch near Parral, Chihuahua
A large black-and-white photo
of Pancho Villa sits on my desk. He’s on horseback, riding straight toward the
camera, bandana around his neck, hat pushed back so strong light floods his
sweaty forehead and big black moustache. His horse is at a gallop, lathered
with sweat, and dust rises under its hooves. Behind them, horse-drawn caissons
rumble and a crowd of horse cavalry, guns and banners jutting, gathers in the
distance.
I am stunned by the drama of
this photograph. No matter how often I glance at it, or gaze, as I do many
times a day, an urgency and a terror grips me. This is war, the Mexican
Revolution of 1910. This man and those who followed him put their lives on the
line for an ideal: freedom.
For more than thirty years
I’ve traveled in Mexico, into the interior where the anguish of the Mexican
people is unvarnished by tourist trappings. It’s become clear to me that the
freedoms gained in the Revolution are being lost and that the desperate plight
of the poor remains. In many ways, the Conquest of the 1500s is on-going, with
the pillaging of land transferred from the Spaniards to multi-national
corporations and corrupt politicos.
Fiesta of Smoke was born out of these observations and ponderings.
How does social transformation occur?
What are its mechanisms, driving forces, psychology? Who are its leaders and
what motivates their incredible sacrifice? Does every age produce a Pancho
Villa, willing to ride through the night from one battle to the next, to live
lean and forego rest for an ideal? These questions began to congeal into
images. And thus the insurgent Javier Carteña entered, tracked by international
investigative reporter, Hill, who asks the same kinds of questions:
Staring up from the flap of the book’s dust jacket was Dr.
Javier Carteña. Hill bent over the small black and white photo like a
virologist discovering a new germ.
The
face that stared back at him was handsome in the way that fighting bulls
are--full-boned, brave and powerful. The eyes did, yes they did indeed,
smolder. The mouth was full-lipped and slightly drawn down in the corners, as
if at any moment he might bark an order that would carry no compassion but
strike one senseless like the stooping of a falcon. It was the face of a
monastic--solitary, disciplined, tortured down deep. Calypso had called him a
"warrior-priest," his wife and children notwithstanding. A head of
glossy black hair filled what was left of the photo.
He
buttoned the top button of his overcoat, gathered up the book. The first thing
to do, of course, was to call the publisher. He set off down the street
quickly, smiling to himself. Now he was in his element! Now, there was a scent
to follow.
Caught between
the two men is Calypso Searcy, a successful writer, whose adolescent love
affair with Javier Carteña has impacted her life for twenty-five years, and
whom Hill has just met:
Hill
fished some ten-franc pieces from his pocket and began to push back his chair
when his eye lit again on Pont St.-Louis. A woman stood there, mid-span, facing
the cathedral. She was wearing a yellow dress and the afternoon sun slanting
through it gave hints of a long and lithe body. But more remarkably, she had
one leg stretched out on the railing and was rhythmically lowering and raising
her torso to her extended knee, in long, balletic stretches. Intrigued, Hill
left a five-franc tip to propitiate the gods and threaded out through the metal
chairs.
A
red fox coat, heaped on a big oxblood-colored leather bag, glowed like a fire
at her feet; and she was humming the strains of Zum reinen Wasser: “Where streams of living water flow, He to green meadows
leadeth...”
Leaning
casually against the railing about four feet away, a distance he deemed
friendly but not overpowering, Hill ventured: “I love Bach, myself.”
“Truly,”
she said.
Thirty
years of savoir-faire melted and Hill was a fuzz-faced lout from Denver again,
all elbows and size-16 shoes. “One of his loveliest . . .” he managed to
stammer, “his finest cantatas.”
Time for pure out-West charm--ingenuous,
all-man, no horseshit.
“Listen,”
he said, “I know just from looking that you and I are as different as hog wire
and harp string. But if you’re not otherwise engaged, I’d be honored to take
you to an early supper.”
It
quickly becomes apparent to Hill that Calypso is in some kind of trouble, and
when she disappears, he sets out, using his investigative skills to track her,
first in Paris:
The room Hill entered was a perfect
exemplar of early seventeenth-century architecture, long and narrow, with a
high ceiling, windows at the end giving onto the street, and a marble mantle
framing a small fireplace. Orderly, it would have been a lovely room. The
degree of disruption alarmed him. Rugs were pulled up, sofa cushions slit and
books pulled from their shelves into splayed heaps. He bent and picked one up
at random. Ombre et Soleil, the poetry of Paul Eluard. It had been so badly manhandled that
the center pages fell out with a thunk.
“Oh
non, monsieur!” Madame
Pouillon shrieked. “You must touch nothing!”
“But,
what possible difference . . .” he broke off, gesturing at the incalculable
mess.
“Yes
. . . but no. You must not touch Mademoiselle’s things. On this I insist!” Hill
nodded, trying to keep down his frustration. He had to work fast, before she
insisted he leave altogether.
Then to California, New
Mexico and Arizona, following Calypso’s swiftly vanishing trail, and finally
arriving in southern Mexico. Meanwhile, Javier and Calypso recall their
youthful bonding in Berkeley in 1966:
Javier
would never forget the afternoon he brought Calypso home from the hospital, so
agonized she could barely breathe. He laid her on the bed and gingerly removed
her sweater and jeans. It was his first full view. Her entire body was a
patchwork of bruises and lacerations. Only her ankles and feet seemed to have
escaped unharmed. "My God, Caleepso! My God!" was all he could mutter.
He sat on the end of the bed and massaged her feet, the only part of her he
dared touch, until she fell asleep.
Her
general demeanor impressed him. She was calm, serene and patient with herself,
and grateful, although not servilely so, in her reliance on him.
"Caleepso,
I am impressed with you. You are very strong."
She
was sitting in her big armchair with a mug of steaming tea. Late afternoon sun
streamed obliquely, setting her long dark hair ablaze with red highlights.
"Something
happened to me, in there."
"Obviously
. . ." He waved a hand at her, as if to ask if she thought he was blind.
"No.
I mean something . . . wonderful. Something . . . sublime."
"Tell
me."
No
words for the ineffable, he thought, as he listened to the stammering account of
her experience after the rape. Had she been delirious? Dying? Mere language
could never convey the wonder he saw sweeping her face. Something profound had
happened to her. Who knew better than he what lovers pleasure and pain can be,
how intimate their dance and how seductive?
"I
see you, Caleepso," he said when she had lapsed into silence. "I see
your soul."
The
room was in cloistered darkness. They sat, with the hiss of the radiator and
the background roar of evening traffic, in silence. At that moment, they both
knew the truth: there would never be another human being as intimately,
inextricably bound to them as they were to one another.
Revolutionary
fervor heats up, then boils over:
She ran. Lights swept across the ground,
and in the strobe effect, Calypso saw running figures, then blackness, then
again, people running, pulling sleepy children behind them or carrying them in
their arms, and then again, blackness. A shot rang out. Then another. In one of
the sweeps of the lights she saw someone lying on the ground. Then another.
Suddenly
the selva rose before
her and she slammed into a wall of vegetation. A searchlight swept across the
foliage to her right, its arc about to encompass her. More shots. Calypso dove
to the ground. Pulling herself forward on her arms, she clawed beneath the
forest understory like an animal desperate for safety from the madness of
humankind. . . .
. . . Sleep evaded
Javier. He was cold. He suspected it was not just the wind that was making him
that way. A knife of ice had been inserted in his guts, the moment he stood on
the empty lakeshore. If anything should happen to Calypso, he would never be warm
again. But it was so careless of her to do this! She was causing him trouble
when he had enough already. She was risking the safety of the operation. When
she finally came wandering back, he’d send her packing. She had no business in
this place, where she didn’t have the slightest understanding of the
seriousness of things.
He
tried to make his anger heat him. It failed.
Sometime
in the darkest part of the night he finally must have dozed, because when he
jerked awake, Pedro was standing by the bed, ghostly through the mosquito
netting. “Boss! Wake up! There’s trouble! Get your boots on. We gotta go!”
Javier
threw aside the blanket and netting and was on his feet in an instant, reaching
for his shotgun. “What?”
“It’s
the village, Boss.”
“What
village?”
“The
one where Calypso is.”
“What
about it?”
“Come
on, Boss! It’s under attack!”
I
sit gazing at Pancho Villa. His eyes are inscrutable. There is no hint of what
drives a man so fiercely to risk his life in a cause that could just as easily
fail as succeed. As Fiesta of Smoke gestated
and grew, it became clear that love is a motive force the power of which is
incendiary and unfathomably profound. Fiesta of Smoke is a study in history and cultural transformation, yes.
But even more, it probes those vulnerable, wounded places haunted by Eros:
romance, sexuality, friendship, patriotism, and the passion for freedom at all
costs.
In
the thirty years it has taken to write this book, the love between Calypso and
Javier has demanded to be recorded, and so has their passion for social
justice. During those three decades, actual events in Mexico have demonstrated
that these two were not misguided: the people are rising up, acting out one of
the great dramas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, offering their lives to the dance that
is a fiesta of smoke.
