A Most Discreet Madness
The day was hot and the sun was high by the time Ulises found the Texan dying by the side of the road.
He was tall and blonde. A perfect Texas German. Of middle age and declining vitality. He was naked and bare of possessions, and the sun had scorched and peeled his pale gringo skin. He had been shot twice: once in the ribs and once in the stomach. Blood poured over his hands with each rattling breath.
Ulises halted his mule, studied the surrounding hills, and dismounted. He fetched his rifle and canteen and approached the Texan cautiously. The Texan looked up and smiled as if meeting a long-lost friend. Ulises knelt and inspected his wounds.
“You’re a long way from home,” Ulises said to him in Spanish.
“Don’t I know it,” croaked the Texan back in that same tongue.
Ulises uncorked his canteen and offered it up. The Texan shook his head and grunted.
“Don’t waste it,” he said. His pale blue eyes were dim. He nodded toward the road. “You don’t have to stay.”
“It’s the Christian thing to do.”
Ulises propped his rifle on the ground and leaned against it like a cane. He and the Texan were quiet for a time. Ulises took another sip from his canteen and again offered the Texan a drink. He once again refused. Vultures were circling above.
“Were you in the war?” the Texan said.
“Yes.” Ulises settled back on his haunches and produced a plug of tobacco from his pocket. He took a bite, chewed, and offered the rest to the Texan. He again just shook his head. Ulises shrugged and slipped it back in his pocket. “Were you?”
“I was at Monterrey.”
Ulises snorted and thumbed the brim of his hat.
“Me too.”
The Texan laughed. It was weak and hollow. He coughed. Blood ran from his lips.
“Life ain’t a thing but one big joke,” he said. “Hell, you and I probably took a couple shots at each other.”
“Things change.”
“They do and they don’t.”
Ulises rolled the tobacco over in his lip. He spat.
“What’re you doing here, blondie?”
“Going back to Monterrey.”
“What’s there for you now?”
“The past.”
Ulises nodded as if he understood.
“Many find their doom while searching for the past.”
The Texan was quiet. He watched the mule chomp at a patch of short yellow grass. More birds were circling. A few landed and watched from a nearby pile of rocks. Ulises picked up a rock, stood, and threw it at the birds. They scattered. He settled back on the ground and tongued his tobacco. The Texan’s eyes were closed. His breathing was more labored than before.
“Sure you don’t want water?”
The Texan nodded. He opened his eyes.
“Please listen to me,” he said. “I don’t have long.”
“Anything you need.”
The Texan took a breath and told Ulises all the little wisdom that his years on the earth had amounted to. He told him to be kind and honest, loyal to his friends, and suspicious of those in power. He told him then about his youth in Tennessee, and the trials his clan endured on their long journey south and west to Texas. Of his early years upon the plains and his service in the army. The invasion of ‘46 and the crimes he committed in the streets of Matamoros. Then the mountainous deserts of Nuevo Leon and the soaring cliffs of the Huasteca valley. The smoke-filled streets of Monterrey. The things he saw and did. The things that stayed with him. His life in Texas in the years after the war, and of the long pain he felt for what he left behind. The desertion of his wife and children and his hurried flight to Mexico. The thieves who stopped and shot him where he lay, and of their laughter as they tore away his clothes and rode off on his horse. Then at last the reason for his journey and the swallowing sense of doom that he would never see it through. The Texan felt a pain more ancient than words. A tale that could be told in any tongue. It was a tale of change. A tale of constants.
Ulises nodded as he listened. After a time the Texan finally stopped, took a breath, and met his eyes. He had just one request.
“Can you do that?” he said.
Ulises nodded again.
“I can.”
“Thank you.”
With that, the Texan took a final breath and died. Ulises made the sign of the cross and said a quiet prayer to himself. Then he stood, pulled the wad of tobacco from his mouth, and fetched the shovel hanging from his saddle. He had the Texan buried by dusk.
Ulises set out in the morning south to Monterrey. He hummed and chewed tobacco as he talked to himself, the mule, the rocks, and the trees. By noon he saw the massive jagged peaks of the Huasteca and at dusk he camped with a band of American miners chasing tales of silver in the hills. Ulises told them they were three hundred years too late. The following day he passed through the valleys leading into Monterrey and stared in awe at the impossible slopes of the mountains around him. Monks in open cells carved in the faces of the cliffs fifty feet off the ground watched him ride along the road with mad and feral eyes. The road was jammed with caravans of mules weighed down by heavy loads of American goods, whose drivers smoked in the shade of their hats as they hummed low corridos native to the faraway states of their birth. Then at last near dusk on that day Ulises came around the final bluff and out on the hills overlooking the city. There Monterrey sprawled out in the valley below, a neat and ordered grid of pale adobe buildings. A modern city in an ancient land.
He set up camp on the hills and watched thousands of cookfires flicker to life in the windows and doors and plazas of the city. He talked to his mule and thought about the war. Down in those neat pale streets not fifteen years before, he shot and killed four men when he himself was just a boy. Another with a bayonet, who begged for him to stop. He recalled the awful shattering crack of the American cannonade as they bombarded the city from the very ridge he now sat camped upon, turning those fine stone buildings — which themselves had once been built by conquerors — into heaps of rubble and dust. The rape and sack the invaders brought to the streets. Tall blonde heathen savages who wandered about with rifles in hand, shooting anyone they saw. Women and children gunned down as they ran for sanctuary in the churches. Dogs and horses shot for sport. The cries of the wounded. The cries of the animals. Ulises and his comrades, three days victorious, three days in possession of the city, sold out by cowards in the capital and forced to withdraw in shame. The cries of the people as the men who swore to protect them marched off intact and under arms. The cruel and vicious laughter of the blue-clad invaders.
Ulises did not sleep that night. He sat and watched the city until the cookfires faded and the moon slipped away and the sun came up again. Then he scattered the ashes of his fire, mounted his mule, and rode away from the city forever.