The Armed Family

When General Marcelino Miles marched into the Guerrero Mountains, he knew very well what ground he was walking on. He was in command of the Fifth Infantry Battalion, and his mission was clear: to finish off the so-called Vicente Guerrero Popular Army, named in honor of the last guerrilla of the Revolution for Independence, shot in 1831. "His lesson was ours," General Miles muttered at the head of the column struggling up the slopes of the Sierra Madre del Sur.

He had to persuade himself under all circ.u.mstances that the army obeyed, that it did not revolt. For over seventy years this standard had established the difference between Mexico and the rest of Latin America: The armed forces obeyed civilian authority, the president of the republic. That was clear as day.

But this morning the general felt that his mission was clouded: At the head of the rebel group was his own son, Andres Miles, in armed rebellion following Mexico's great democratic disillusionment. From the time he was very young, Andres had fought for leftist causes, within the law and in the hope that political action would achieve the people's goals.

"A country of one hundred million inhabitants. Half of them living in dire poverty."

It was Andres's mantra at supper, and his brother, Roberto, gently took the opposing view. Social peace had to be maintained at any cost. Beginning with peace in the family.

"At the price of one delay after another?" Andres protested, sitting on his father's left, naturally.

"Democracy makes slow progress. Authoritarianism is faster. It's better to settle for a slow democracy," Roberto said with an air of smugness.

"Fastest of all is revolution, brother," Andres said irritably. "If democracy doesn't resolve matters by peaceful means, the left will be forced to take to the mountains again."

General Miles, the mediator between his sons, had a longer memory than they did. He remembered the history of uprisings and bloodshed in Mexico, and his grat.i.tude for seventy years of one party and peaceful successions that in 2000 had allowed it to achieve a democratic alternation.

"Alternation, yes. Transition, no," Andres said energetically, refraining from banging the teaspoon against his cup of coffee as he turned toward his brother. "Don't close the doors on us. Don't badger us with legal trickery. Don't underestimate us in your arrogance. Don't send us back to the mountains."

Andres was in the mountains now, at the head of an army of shadows that attacked only at dawn and at sunset, vanishing at night into the sierra and disappearing during the day among the men in the mountain villages. Impossible to pick out a rebel leader from a hundred identical campesinos. Andres Miles knew very well that to city eyes, all peasants were the same, as indistinguishable as one Chinese from another.

That was why they had treacherously chosen him, General Miles. He would be able to recognize the leader. Because the leader was his own son. And there is no mimetic power in the gray, th.o.r.n.y, steep, trackless, overgrown tracts of land-the great umbrella of the insurrection-that could disguise a son in an encounter with his father.

Under his breath, General Marcelino Miles cursed the stupidity of the right-wing government that had closed, one after the other, the doors of legitimate action to the left, persecuting its leaders, stripping them of immunity on the basis of legalistic deceptions, encouraging press campaigns against them, until they had the leftists cornered with no option except armed insurrection.

So many years of openness and conciliation ruined at one stroke by an incompetent right, drowning in a well of pride and vanity. The growing corruption of the regime broke the chain at its weakest link, and Andres declared to his father: "We have no recourse but violence."

"Be patient, son."

"I'm only one step ahead of you," Andres said with prophetic simplicity. "At the end of the day, when we've run out of political options, you generals will have no choice but to take power and put an end to the pa.s.sive frivolity of the government."

"And along the way I'll have to shoot you," the father said with severity.

"So be it," Andres said and bowed his head.

Marcelino Miles was thinking of this as they climbed the foothills of the Sierra Madre del Sur. He would do his duty, but it was against his will. As the troops advanced, using machetes to cut their way through lianas in the impenetrable shadow of amates and ficuses intertwined with papelillo trees and embraced by climbing vines, in his mind, love for his son and military duty similarly fought and were entwined. Perhaps Andres was right, and once again, the sacrifice of the rebel would be the price of peace.

Except what peace? General Miles thought (since one had to think about everything or nothing to triumph over the arduous ascent of an unconquerable mountain, watchword and symbol of a country as wrinkled as parchment) that Mexico didn't fit into the closed fist of a mountain. When it opened its hand, out of the wounded skin poured thorns and quagmires, the green teeth of nopal, the yellow teeth of puma, streaked rock and dried s.h.i.t, acrid odors of animals lost in or habituated to the sierras of Coatepec, La Cuchilla, and La Tentacion. At each step, always within reach, they sought the intangible-the revolutionary army-and what they found was something concrete: the excessive, aggressive evidence of a nature that rejects us because it is unaware of us.

How could Roberto Miles not oppose his brother, Andres? The general had brought up his sons in modest comfort. They never lacked for anything. They didn't have an abundance of anything, either. The general wanted to prove that at least in the army, the national pastime of corruption had no place. He was a Spartan from the south of Mexico, where the difficulties of life and the immensity of nature are the salvation or perdition of human beings. The person who maintains a minimum of values that the forest, the mountains, the tropics cannot subdue, is saved.

Marcelino Miles was one of those men. But from the moment his superiors transferred him from Chilpancingo to Mexico City, his sons' tendencies were revealed outside the rules (his pact with nature) the father had imposed.

The forest and the mountain were the ironic allies of Division Commander Miles. He fulfilled his duty by climbing the sierra with the help of machetes. He fled his obligation by thinking that guerrillas never engage in formal combat. They attack the army in its barracks or ambush it in the wild. Then they vanish like hallucinations, clouded mirrors in the terrifying, impenetrable magic of the forest.

They attacked and disappeared. It wasn't possible to foresee the attack. The lessons of the past had been learned. Today Zapata wouldn't fall into the government's trap, believing in good faith that the enemy had come over to his side and would meet with him in Chinameca to seal the double betrayal. The feigned betrayal by the government army of its leader, Carranza. A clear prediction of the certain betrayal of each Zapata.

Betrayal was the name of the final battle.

Now there was a deficit of ingenuousness, just as yesterday there had been an excess of trust. Marcelino Miles thought this bitterly, because if he, Marcelino Miles, offered amnesty to his son Andres in exchange for his surrender, the son would see a trick in the father's generosity. The son would not trust the father. The son knew the father was obliged to capture and shoot him.

Two calculations presented themselves to General Marcelino Miles's mind as he led his troops through the mountains. One, that the populations of the mountains and the plain offered their loyalty to the insurgents. Not because they had identified with the cause. They didn't support them out of necessity or conviction. They were loyal to them because the guerrillas were their brothers, their husbands, their fathers, their friends. They were themselves themselves in other activities as normal as sowing and harvesting, cooking and dancing, selling and buying: bullets, adobe bricks, corn, roof tiles, huapango dances, guitars, jugs, more bullets . . . It was the familial link that strengthened the guerrillas, sheltered them, hid them, fed them. in other activities as normal as sowing and harvesting, cooking and dancing, selling and buying: bullets, adobe bricks, corn, roof tiles, huapango dances, guitars, jugs, more bullets . . . It was the familial link that strengthened the guerrillas, sheltered them, hid them, fed them.

The general's other calculation, on this night of droning macaques and clouds so low they seemed about to sing, covering the column and driving it mad as if the real siren song came from the air itself and not from the distant, atavistic sea, was that sooner or later, the countryside would grow weary of the war and abandon the rebels. He prayed that moment would come soon: He wouldn't have to capture and try his own son.

He was fooling himself, he thought immediately. Even if the villages abandoned him, Andres Miles wasn't one of those who surrendered easily. He was one of those who went on fighting, even if only six guerrillas were left, or two, or only one: himself. Andres Miles with his tanned face and melancholy eyes, his shock of hair prematurely grayed at the age of thirty, his slim, nervous, impatient, crouched body, always ready to leap like a mountain animal. Obviously, he didn't belong to the pavements, he wasn't a creature of the sidewalk. The wild called to him, nostalgic for him. Since his childhood in Guerrero, he would occasionally get lost when he climbed the mountain and not be heard from for an entire day. Then he would come back home but never admit he had been lost. An admirably stubborn pride had distinguished him from the time he was very little.

Was his brother better? Roberto was clever, Andres intelligent. Roberto calculating, Andres spontaneous. Roberto the actor in a smiling deception, Andres the protagonist in a drama of sincerity. Both victims, the father suspected with sorrow. As an adolescent, Andres had committed to the leftist struggle. He didn't marry. Politics, he said, was his legitimate wife. His lover was his adolescent sweetheart in Chilpancingo. At times he visited her. Other times she came to the capital. Andres lived in the house of his father, the general, but he didn't bring the girl home. Not because of bourgeois convention but because he wanted her all to himself and didn't care to have anyone judge her, not even himself.

On the other hand, Roberto, at the age of twenty-eight, had been married and divorced twice. He changed wives according to his own idea of social prestige. He began in a high-technology company, decided to start his own electromagnetic equipment business, but his ambition was to be a software magnate. Things were not going too well for him now, which was why he returned, a divorced man, to his father's house, following the "Italian" law-today universal-of living at home for as long as possible and in this way saving on rent, food, and domestic help. He always had women, since he was good-looking-"cute," his father said to himself-but he didn't bring them home or mention them.

One woman united father and sons, the mother, Peregrina Valdes, dead of colic before the boys reached adolescence.

"Take care of them for me, Marcelino. I know your discipline, but also give them the love you gave to me."

Roberto was very different from his brother. Lighter-skinned, with a green-eyed gaze walled in by suspicion. He shaved twice a day as if to file down all the rough spots on a face that demanded trust without ever receiving it completely.

The warm memories of his family did not prevent the general from acknowledging the discouragement of his troops. Every day, inch by inch, they explored the Guerrero Mountains. The general was methodical. n.o.body could accuse of him of negligence in his mission, which was to seek out the rebels in every corner of the sierra. Miles knew his effort was useless. First, because the rebel band was small and the mountains immense. The revolutionaries knew it and hid easily, constantly changing their position. They were the needles in a gigantic haystack. The general explored the sierra from the air and could not make out a single road, much less a village. In the vast extension of the mountains, not even a solitary wisp of smoke betrayed life. The dense growth admitted no s.p.a.ce other than its own compact green nature.

And second, because the troops under his command knew that he knew. Each day they resumed the trek, aware they would never find the enemy. No one dared to say aloud what he was thinking: that this useless campaign of General Miles saved them from confronting the rebels. Until now they had fired only at rabbits and turkey buzzards. The first were fast and offered an exciting game of marksmanship. The second devoured the dead rabbits, stealing them from the soldiers.

The pact of deception between the commander and the troops allowed Marcelino Miles to enjoy the grat.i.tude of his men and avoid recriminations from headquarters. Let them ask any soldier if the general had or had not carried out the order to search for the rebels in the sierra. Let them just ask. The commander's well-being was also that of the troops.

They had spent six weeks on this ghostly campaign when something happened that the general hadn't expected and the troops never would have imagined.

Quartered in Chilpancingo after three weeks of exploring the wild, Marcelino Miles and his soldiers had an air of duty fulfilled that authorized a couple of peaceful days for them. Though the general understood that the troops knew as well as he did that the guerrillas were not in the mountains, the physical effort of climbing and exploring redeemed them from all blame: What if now, right now, the rebels slipped up to the top and now, right now, the general and his people captured them there?

If this double play pa.s.sed through the minds of Miles and the soldiers, all of them concealed it without difficulty. The general commanded, the troops obeyed. The general was carrying out to the letter his duty to explore the sierra. And the troops were doing theirs, covering every inch of the steep, solitary, overgrown terrain. Who could accuse them of shirking their duty?

Roberto Miles. He could. The general's younger son, Roberto Miles, dressed in a guayabera and holding an insolent, phallic cigar between his teeth. Roberto Miles sitting at a table on the hotel terrace with a sweet roll and a small espresso growing cold as he waited for his father to appear and not show-because it wasn't his nature-any surprise at all.

Marcelino sat down calmly next to Roberto, ordered another coffee, and asked him nothing. They didn't even look at each other. The father's severity was a mute reproach. What was his son doing here? How did he dare interrupt a professional campaign with his presence, not merely useless but inopportune as well? His presence was impertinent, disrespectful. Didn't he know his father was pursuing his older brother through the sierra?

"Don't look for him anymore in the sierra, Father," Roberto said as he sipped the coffee with voluntary slowness. "You're not going to find him there."

The general turned to look coldly at his son. He asked nothing. He wasn't going to compromise-or frustrate, he admitted to himself-his intimate project of not finding not finding the rebel, of deceiving headquarters without incurring any blame at all. the rebel, of deceiving headquarters without incurring any blame at all.

Let Roberto talk. The general would not say anything. A profound intuition ordered this conduct. Not to look. Not to speak.

When he looked at himself in the mirror the next morning, the general thought his slender little mustache, as thin as a pencil line, was ridiculous, and with a couple of strokes of the Gillette, he shaved it off, seeing himself suddenly free of the past, of habits, of useless presumptions. He looked like a defeated commander. His undershirt was loose, and his trousers hung on him unwillingly.

He reacted. He tightened his belt, rinsed his sweaty armpits, and put on his tunic b.u.t.toned with conflictive anger and disinclination.

Andres Miles was now in prison. He smiled at his father when they arrested him in the house of his sweetheart, Esperanza Abarca.

"There's no better disguise than invisibility," the older son said with a smile when he was detained. "I mean, you have to know how to look at the obvious."

He placed a small Dominican banana in his mouth and surrendered without resistance. He had only to see the equally sad faces of his father and the troops to realize that what they did, they did against their wills. It was almost as if the father as well as the soldiers had lost in one stroke the reason for this campaign aimed at what had happened now-the capture of the rebel leader, Andres Miles-and reached an unwanted conclusion that brought all of them face-to-face with a fatal decision. Eliminating the rebel.

"Just don't apply the fugitive law to me," Andres said with a smile when they tied his hands.

"Son . . ." the father dared to murmur.

"General, sir," his son answered with steel in his voice.

And so Marcelino Miles spent the whole night debating with himself. Should he try his son according to the summary procedure dictated by the military code? How comfortable it was for the political authorities to shoot the rebel and leave no trace . . . make him disappear, provoke a pa.s.sing protest, and a.s.sure the eventual triumph of forgetting. How complicated to bring the rebel before judges who would determine the proper punishment for insurgency and uprising. How destructive to paternal morale to attend the son's trial and oblige himself to present the infamous evidence: His brother had betrayed him. Wouldn't it be better for Roberto to stay out of the case, for the father to a.s.sume complete responsibility?

"I captured him in the sierra. My men will testify to that. Mission accomplished. Let justice be done."

He remembered Roberto's face when he betrayed his brother.

"It's as clear as two and two make four." Roberto dared to be ironic. "Don't tell me, Father, that it never occurred to you the rebel might be hiding like a coward behind the skirts of his old lady here in Chilpancingo?" He laughed. "And you lost in the sierra, just think . . ."

"Why, Roberto?"

The ironic mask shattered. "Did you calculate, Father, the cost of having a brother who appears day after day in the papers as an insurgent fugitive? Have you thought of the very serious damage all of this does to my business? Do you believe that people, people, General, sir, the government, businessmen, gringo partners, all of them, do you believe they'll have confidence in me with a guerrilla brother? For G.o.d's sake, Papa, think about me, I'm twenty-eight years old, things haven't gone well for me in business, give me a chance, plea-"

"Capturing him was only a question of time. You had no patience with me," Marcelino Miles said, making a great effort to be conciliatory.

"Naaaaa," his younger son mocked him openly. "Nonsense! You were acting like a fool, to put it kindly, you-"

The general stood, hit his son Roberto in the face with his whip, and headed for the prison.

"Let him go," he told the captain of the guard. "Tell him that this time he should really disappear, because the second time will be the end."

"But General, sir . . . If headquarters finds out, you'll-"

Miles interrupted him brutally. "Who's going to tell what happened?" he asked in a voice as hard as basalt.

"I don't know . . ." stammered the captain. "The soldiers . . ."

"They're loyal to me," the brigadier general answered without any doubts. "None of them wanted to capture my son. You can testify to that."

"Then, General, sir, your other son." The captain's firm tone returned. "The one who turned him in, the one-"

"Do you mean Judas, Captain?"

"Well, I-"

"My son Cain, Captain?"

"It's your-"

"What do you think of the fugitive law, Captain?"

The captain swallowed hard. "Well, sometimes there's nothing else-"

"And what do you think is worse, Captain, rebellion or betrayal? I repeat: Which one stains the honor of the military more? A rebel or an informer?"

"The honor of the army?"

"Or of the family, if you prefer."

"There's no question, General, sir." Now Captain Alvarado blinked. "The traitor is despicable, the rebel is respectable."

n.o.body knows who shot Roberto Miles in the back as he was going into the hotel La Gloria in Chilpancingo. He fell dead on the street, surrounded by an equally instantaneous flow of thick blood that ran with sinister brilliance from the snow-white guayabera.

General Marcelino Miles communicated to headquarters that the rebel Andres Miles had succeeded in escaping military detention.

"I know, Mr. Secretary, that this family drama is very painful. You must understand that it was very difficult for me to capture my own son after six weeks of combing the mountains looking for him. I couldn't imagine that my other son, Roberto Miles, would put a pistol to the head of the upstanding Captain Alvarado and force him to allow his brother, Andres, to escape."

"And who killed Roberto, General?"

"Captain Alvarado himself, Mr. Secretary. A valiant soldier, I a.s.sure you. He wasn't going to allow my son Roberto to stain the honor of an officer."

"It's murder."

"That's how Captain Alvarado understands it."

"He thinks so? Or he knows so? He only thinks so?" the secretary of national defense said with controlled pa.s.sion.

"General, Captain Alvarado has joined the rebels of the Vicente Guerrero Popular Army in the Sierra Madre del Sur."

"Well, it's better for him to join the guerrillas than the narcos."

"That's true, General. You see that four out of ten leave us to go with the narcos."

"Well, you know your duty, General Miles. Continue looking for them," said the secretary with a smile of long irony in which General Marcelino Miles could detect the announcement of a not very desirable future.

Marcelino Miles returns with pleasure to the sierra in Guerrero. He loves the plants and birds of the mountains. Nothing gives him greater pleasure than identifying a tropical almond from a distance, the tall lookout of the forests, catching fire each autumn to strip itself bare and be renewed immediately: flowers that are stars, perfume that summons b.u.mblebees, yellow fleshy fruits. And also, close up, he likes to surprise the black iguana-the garrobo-looking for the burning rock of the mountain. He counts the five petals of the basket tulip; he's amazed that the flower exists outside a courtyard and has made its way into the dense growth. He looks up and surprises the noisy flight of the white-faced magpie with its black crests, the long throat of the social flycatcher and its spotted crown, the needle beak of the cinnamon-colored hummingbird. The clock-bird marks the hours with its dark beak, conversing with the cuckoo-squirrel with its undulating flight . . . This is the greatest pleasure of Marcelino Miles. Identifying trees. Admiring birds. That is why he loves the mountains in Guerrero. He doesn't search for Andres. He has forgotten Roberto. He is in the army because of his pa.s.sion for nature.

Chorus of the Suffering Children

why did we run away?

because my papa wouldn't let me be with other children n.o.body could come to play with me I couldn't go anywhere because my father hit us both my mama and me because my mother was afraid and so was I because locked in my room I hear the insults the blows because I have nightmares because I don't sleep because my father doesn't respect my mother and if he doesn't respect her he can't respect me because my papa makes me take a freezing-cold shower so I'll behave because my papa makes me watch p.o.r.n movies with him on TV because if my papa insults my mama why can't I?