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stuff.”
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    I thought a lot about what he’d said. Pancho Villa truly loved his men; he couldn’t imagine that the soldiers didn’t feel the same about him. In his bedroom, General Vergara had a lot of yellowed snapshots, some just newspaper clippings. You could see him there with all the leaders of the Revolution, he’d been with them all, served them all, in turn. As the leaders changed, so did Vicente Vergara’s attire—peering through the crowd engulfing Don Panchito Madero the day of his famous entrance into the capital, the small and fragile and ingenuous and miraculous apostle of the Revolution who with a book had overthrown the all-powerful Don Porfirio in a land of illiterates, don’t tell me it wasn’t a miracle, and there was young “Chente” Vergara in his narrow-brimmed, ribbonless felt hat and his old-fashioned shirt without the stiff collar, one more downtrodden wretch, perched on the equestrian statue of Carlos IV, that day when even the earth trembled, as it had the day Our Lord Jesus Christ had died, as if the apotheosis of Madero were already his Calvary.
    â€œAfter our love for the Virgin and our hatred of the gringos, nothing binds us together more than a treacherous crime, I tell you, and all the people rose up against Victoriano Huerta for murdering Don Panchito Madero.”
    And then Vicente Vergara, captain of the Dorados, Pancho Villa’s personal guard, his chest crisscrossed with cartridge belts, in a sombrero and white pants, eating a taco with Pancho Villa alongside a train billowing smoke, and then the constitutionalist Colonel Vergara, very young and proper in his Stetson and his khaki uniform, sheltered by the patriarchal and aloof figure of Venustiano Carranza, the principal leader of the Revolution, inscrutable behind smoked lenses and a beard that came to the buttons of his tunic, this snapshot looked almost like a family photograph, a just but severe father and a respectful and well-motivated son, not the same Vicente Vergara as the Obregonist colonel who in Agua Prieta took part in the pronunciamento against Carranza’s abuse of power, liberated now from the tutelage of the father figure riddled by gunfire as he slept in his bedroll in Tlax-calantongo.
    â€œThey all died so young! Madero never reached forty, and Villa was forty-five, Zapata thirty-nine, even Carranza, who seemed like an old man, was barely sixty-one, and General Obregón, forty-eight. What would have happened, tell me, boy, if I hadn’t survived out of sheer luck, what if it’d been my destiny to die young, it’s just chance that I’m not buried somewhere out there in some little town overgrown with buzzards and marigolds, and you, you’d never have been born.”
    And this Colonel Vergara sitting between General Alvaro Obregón and the philosopher José Vasconcelos at a dinner, this Colonel Vergara with his Kaiser mustache and dark, high-collared uniform rich with military braid.
    â€œA Catholic fanatic killed our General Obregón, my boy. Ahhhhh. I went to all their funerals, every one of ’em you see here, they all died a violent death, except I didn’t get to Zapata’s funeral, they buried him in secret so they could say he was still alive.”
    And a different General Vicente Vergara, now dressed in civilian clothes, about to bid farewell to his youth, very neat, very spit-and-polish, in his light gabardine suit and pearl stickpin, very serious, very solemn, because only such a man could be offering his hand to the man with a granite face and the eyes of a jaguar, the Maximum Leader of the Revolution, Plutarco Elías Calles …
    â€œThat was a man, my boy, a humble schoolteacher who rose to be President. There wasn’t a man could look him in the eye, not one, not even men who’d survived the awful test of a fake firing squad, believing their hour had come and not blinking