The General and the Jaguar Read Online Free PDF Page A

his head. Sitting hunched over a newspaper, muttering the words under his
     breath, Villa seemed like an ordinary man, even a simple one, and such is what he often professed to be to journalists. But,
     in reality, he was extremely complex and his volatile personality was largely forged in the crucible of humiliation he had
     endured as a youth. In Porfirio Díaz’s class-conscious society, there was no place for smart, ambitious, and penniless boys,
     and the degradation and shame that Villa and his family endured had created a great, smoldering rage in him. A mocking question,
     the slightest whiff of condescension, could ignite the fire.
    The Spaniards, he believed, had exploited and enslaved the Mexican people; the Chinese were leeches who sent their profits
     back to China instead of investing in Mexico; and the Catholic priests were simply corrupt. “I believe in God but not in religion,”
     Villa once confided to a magazine journalist. “I have recognized the priests as hypocrites ever since when I was twenty I
     took part in a drunken orgy with a priest and two women he had ruined. They are all frauds, the priests, and their cloth,
     which is supposed to be a protection, they use to entice the innocent.”
    He loved canned asparagus and soda pop and sweets of all kinds, especially peanut brittle, which made his brown, ruined teeth
     flare with pain. He enjoyed ribald jokes, scratched his feet in public, loved to dance, and shunned intoxicating liquors—a
     fact that had endeared him to President Woodrow Wilson’s venerable secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, who had had
     the temerity to serve grape juice at a social function and had earned the undying contempt of the diplomatic corps. Villa
     suffered from rheumatism caused by years of sleeping on the cold, hard ground and his muscles had been shortened by years
     of horseback riding, which gave him a shallow stride halfway between a shuffle and a glide. But he was a superb horseman,
     full of energy and possessing a genuine charisma, and on the battlefield, amid the dust and smoke, his galloping figure would
     so inspire his men that they would hurl themselves willingly into the withering machine-gun fire of their enemies. He was
     also a man who kept his word and never forgot a favor.
    W RAPPED IN HIS serape, the yellow lantern light flickering, Abraham González described to Villa the inequities that had befallen the people
     of Mexico. González hardly seemed a revolutionary figure himself. Tall, portly, bespectacled, he was the impoverished son
     of a wealthy family and had the air of a bumbling but gentle college professor. The transition to violent revolutionary had
     been an arduous one and González was convinced that his life would be short.
“Yo muero en la raya”
—“I will die on the firing line,” he often told friends. His voice was absent of the condescension that Villa was keenly attuned
     to and by the time he was finished talking, Villa was no longer a bandit but a committed revolutionary:
    There I learned one night how my long struggle with the exploiters, the persecutors, the seducers, could be of benefit to
     others who were persecuted and humiliated as I had been. There I felt the anxiety and hate built up in my soul during years
     of struggle and suffering change into the belief that the evil could be ended, and this strengthened my determination to relieve
     our hardships at the price of life and blood if necessary. I understood without explanation—for nobody explains anything to
     the poor—how our country, which until then had been for me no more than fields, ravines, and mountains to hide in, could become
     the inspiration for our best actions and the object of our finest sentiments.
    From his exile in the United States, Madero instructed his followers to begin the uprising on November 20, 1910. The initial
     revolts, small and relatively mild, occurred in small villages and towns of Chihuahua. Eventually the rebellion