The Five Acts of Diego Leon Read online

  “Yes, sir. California,” Reynolds said. “Los Angeles and Hollywood. Why, it’s like paradise on earth. That’s where me and my wife and boy will end up. You bet.” He put his cigarette out. “Excuse me,” he said, pointing to a small wooden shed a few feet away. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  He left, and Diego was alone on the platform. Out there, in the fading darkness, something caught his attention. It scurried back and forth, darting between rocks and dry shrubs. Diego walked to the edge of the platform and tried to get a better look. He saw it again, a flash of silver. Then there was a tail and a long, pointed snout. It was a coyote. Its red eyes stared past him, its nostrils flaring. The creature turned and ran off just before Diego heard the galloping of an approaching horse.

  He saw them first, riding across the flat valley, each of them toting rifles. After a while, there came the sounds of gruff voices shouting terse and quick commands. Their dark mares circled the length of the train. They wore sashes over their chests emblazoned with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Queen of the Americas. The horses trotted, swift and steady, while the men continued circling and circling the train. Then came the pop of gunshots, then several shouts and screams, far off, from the very back of the train.

  Reynolds came out from behind the shed, fastening his trousers, and grabbed Diego by the arm. “Quick,” he whispered. “Hide.” He led him back behind the shed, the puddle of dark earth still damp from his urine.

  “What are they doing?” Diego asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  By now the men, at least fifteen of them, had stopped circling, and they sat atop their horses, lined up along the length of the train.

  “Their sashes,” Reynolds said. “The image of Guadalupe. You see?”

  “I do,” Diego said. “They’re Cristeros.” They were warriors of the church, former priests and clergy and devotees who had decided to fight back against the anti-clerics, against Calles and his atheism.

  Another man appeared wearing a pair of riding boots and a large hat. Across his chest was a cross carved of wood, tied to his neck by a thick piece of twine. They had sealed and locked all the train’s doors, trapping the people inside. They then watched another man go around with a tank, dousing each car, one by one. The smell of gasoline reached them just as the man shot a bullet, igniting the train cars, releasing heavy plumes of black smoke that blocked out the sun, which was bright and high in the sky by then. The troop galloped off, the sound of neighing horses mixing with the screams of the people inside.

  “Good God,” Reynolds shouted, and they ran out from behind the shed.

  They tried unlatching the doors and breaking the windows, but it was too hot, too dark to see a thing. A group of passengers had managed to shatter the glass, and they pushed and shoved each other out of the way, fighting to squeeze through the opening. The jagged edges cut their clothing and flesh as they leapt out and there was blood everywhere, and Diego saw them engulfed in flames, flailing their arms. Their bodies, from head to toe, burned, and they screamed, running, running, until the fires consumed them and there was nothing left but clumps of charred flesh clinging to bone.

  “What do we do?” Diego shouted, coughing.

  “I don’t know,” said Reynolds. “Dear God. I don’t know.”

  They just stood there and watched the train smolder, their backs to a vast cornfield with miles and miles of tall green stalks swaying in place as all those bodies, all those howling faces inside that train, simply fell away.

  He fought the urge to turn and look back at the plumes of black smoke, the ash from the charred wooden cars, his clothing and magazines, his cross and his mother’s picture, mixing with the remains of all those passengers. He could still hear the wailing, the thumping of fists against the graying glass, the hissing and popping of burning flesh.

  “Walk,” Reynolds said now, as if sensing Diego’s urge to turn around. “Walk with me, son. We’ll follow the track. There’s bound to be another station around here. Where are you going?”

  “I told you.”

  “Tell me again,” said Reynolds. “Just tell me again.”

  “Mexico,” he managed to stammer out. “Mexico City.”

  “That’s right. That’s right,” Reynolds said, breathing in deep. “Always wanted to go there. Always wanted to go there. Hey,” he said, putting a firm hand on Diego’s shoulder, “you concentrate on my voice now, you hear? I’ll keep talking until we’re far away from that, okay?”

  “Yes,” Diego said.

  “Now I’m from Chicago. Why it’s just about the best darn city in the entire world. Yes sir, it is. Big baseball town. You like baseball?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? Why, that’s a tale. Tell you what, my friend, I’ll give you my address and when you get good and settled there in Mexico City, you send me a letter and we’ll make plans and you can come on to Chicago and my wife and I and my boy, we’ll take you to see a ball game. Yes. Yes, sir.” He was talking fast. “Let’s keep walking,” Reynolds said. “Steady and away.”

  He whistled a tune, and the long grass rustled in the wind. But the shouts and screams kept ringing in Diego’s ears. “Let’s go, son.” Reynolds tugged on the sleeve of Diego’s jacket when he stopped and tried to look back. “Let’s go.”

  After a few hours, they came into a flat clearing. In the distance, Diego could see a cornfield. To one side of the cornfield there were telegraph poles strung together with cables that sagged. At the very edge of the cornfield was a single paved road, and they followed it. Up ahead, they saw the bodies. Though they saw them clearly, could make out what was hanging there from the poles that lined the road, they walked on, toward them, hoping their eyes were deceiving them. Diego wanted to climb up the poles and pull them down, shroud their bodies and lament for them, for himself, for the sad events that had led his country to this. Instead, he stood before the long line of wires, and the bodies of those unknown men rocked back and forth and they looked like marionettes, like those he remembered seeing in the marketplaces in Morelia when he first arrived. Their heads drooped down to one side, absurd and comical and frightening in their clumsiness. He didn’t want to see but found it difficult to turn away. One of them wore no trousers, his genitals shriveled and sagging between his legs, exposed, and Diego felt shame for this stranger, for his family, for his mother and father and their mothers and fathers. For how could one person do this to another? How could one country, one people, hate itself so much as to turn on itself? To kill and maim itself this way? He tried to find answers in the puzzled and distorted, the misshapen and bloated and cracked faces of those men. But they yielded none, for their eyes were swollen shut, their noses and fingers broken, their ears and tongues ripped out, their voices forever muted.

  Saying nothing to each other about the bodies, they walked on, soon arriving at a town. They sat down in a plaza where birds hopped along the trails and paths, collecting seeds and eating worms. Reynolds left to wire his bosses in the United States and when he returned, Diego asked him about the dead men.

  “Agraristas,” he replied. “One of them was wearing a badge. The kind the federal troops have. Cristeros killed them.”

  “Of course,” Diego said. “Agraristas against Cristeros.” Priests and religious zealots fighting against the Agraristas, who were the government-backed troops, who sought to control the power of the Catholic Church. He thought about Javier. Was that who he had become? An Agrarista? Was he capable of murder?

  Suddenly, there came shouts and screams in the distance followed by several gunshots. People on the streets scattered in all directions, some running inside shops and buildings to take shelter.

  “What’s happening?” Diego asked.

  Reynolds didn’t respond. When two men hurried past, he asked them what was going on.

  “Agraristas,” one of them said. “They captured a priest they say set a train on fire and ordered a troop to be executed.”

&nb
sp; “Where are they?” Reynolds asked.

  Both men pointed to the church.

  “They have the priest there,” the first man said. “They’re going to kill him.”

  The reporter ran off toward the church and Diego, not knowing what else to do, followed closely behind. They passed through the narrow streets of that town, past empty barrels and mounds of trash. A handful of weathered shacks, a row of old colonial buildings with moss-covered columns, and a stable were situated around a small courtyard with scraggly trees and a fountain at its center. Beyond a set of large iron gates, he could see a bell tower, a cross, the domed roof of a church with faded plaster. Scattered about the inner courtyard of the church were makeshift tables. Some displayed dried herbs bundled together with twine, bags of seeds and nuts, bolts of fabric, carved trinkets and masks adorned with glass jewels and feathers and strings of long yarn for hair. In the quiet rustle of canvas tarps draped over the tables, in the shifting and brushing of branches and twigs, they heard footsteps, the low chanting of words that sounded like someone was praying. Crouched behind an overturned table was a boy. He wore the clothing of a peasant—white trousers and shirt spun from the fibers of a cactus, leather sandals, and a piece of rope for a belt. The silence was interrupted with a round of gunfire coming from inside the church. The only cover around was next to the shivering boy behind the table, his arms over his head, his eyes shut. When a bullet hit a concrete column a few feet from where Diego and Reynolds stood, they ran over, crouching beside the frightened boy.

  “What’s happening?” Reynolds asked the boy.

  He told them, his voice trembling, that a group of eight men, including a priest, locked themselves up inside when they saw the government troops riding into town.

  “They have pistols,” the boy said.

  “Who?”

  “All of them.”

  The boy said that when the shooting started, everybody around the square ran and hid. He was selling sweets with his two sisters, who left with the rest of the people.

  “I was afraid to run,” he said. “So I stayed here.”

  There was more firing around them now; a bullet whizzed past Diego’s ear, so fast and high pitched that it left in its wake a ring that disoriented him. Then a second one hit a trunk where some wood carvings were displayed. The figurines and masks flew up into the sky where they remained suspended, like disembodied ghosts, for a brief moment before falling to the ground and shattering. The bullets continued inside the church, speeding past them over and over. Then there was a pause, and everything remained very quiet. The boy quickly turned and ran off across the courtyard just as the firing began anew.

  “Let’s go,” Diego pleaded with Reynolds.

  “No,” he said.

  He should have gone with the boy, Diego thought.

  “Look,” Reynolds said, pointing up to the church bell tower. “There are three men up there.”

  Diego turned and gazed upward. The crack of the gun startled a flock of gray doves feasting on the sunflower seeds trampled over when the panicked crowd fled. They flew up into the sky just as the father’s body began its descent. The priest seemed not to tumble, but to drift down, and the wide arms of his alb opened up like wings when the wind rushed through them, and his hair stood on its ends, and Diego watched the figure, terrifying and elegant, soaring down and down, and he looked up at the sky and wondered where exactly was the hand of God? Why didn’t it break through the film of clouds and reach down to catch him? When the priest hit the ground, his limbs like twisted vines, Diego could see a trail of blood, thin as a thread, coming out from his nose, the bullet hole on the side of his head, bone and tissue caught in the roots of his black hair.

  It was his face that Diego fixed his gaze upon, not the mangled body and the broken skull, but the father’s expression, how his eyes had remained open, unflinching, at that final hour of his life. The gun he’d held had tumbled down and fallen in a plot of roses, and his other hand had managed to clutch the cross around his neck. Was this faith, Diego thought as he looked upon that serene face, that simple and persistent and knowing gaze? Was this its essence, what they tried to capture in prayers and incantations, in ceremonies and customs? Was this it? This death? This broken body? These fingers holding a splintered cross?

  “This is him,” Reynolds said after a while. “The one who set our train on fire.” He pointed to the dead priest’s cross. “I remember that.”

  A few minutes later, they watched the Agraristas come out from the church, mount their horses, and gallop off.

  Diego felt stunned. His knees quivered, and his hands trembled. “I can’t …” he stammered. “I want to go. I want to leave.”

  “Very well,” Reynolds said now. “But there’s a story here. I need to stay and investigate.” He looked around the square. “Let’s find the train station. Let’s get you back to where you were headed.”

  Diego didn’t know what to do. Should he turn around and go back to Morelia or continue on to Mexico City? He couldn’t make up his mind. The rail station attendant told him the train to Mexico City had just left.

  “What do you have leaving now?” he asked the attendant.

  The man removed his hat, the brim small and shiny, and scratched his head. He took a slip of paper and studied it. “I have one departing to Morelia, another to Guadalajara, and another to Guanajuato.”

  He sighed, and the people behind him in line tapped their feet on the floor and cleared their throats. “What else?” he asked the attendant.

  “Well, where do you want to go?” The man put his hat back on and glared at Diego. “Tell me where you want to go, and I’ll tell you what I have.”

  “Anywhere,” he insisted. “Anywhere far.”

  The man picked up the slip of paper and looked again, this time his eyes scanning all the way toward the bottom of the sheet. “Juárez,” he said. “The border. Is that far enough?”

  The border. From there he could go to the United States. To California. He could escape. He could finally leave this behind. It was up to him to break the tradition, to stop allowing the whims and influences of unseen forces to dictate his life. His past had already been written, but his present and his future were another thing, Diego realized. They were still out there waiting for him. “Very well,” he said, reaching into his pocket for his money. “One.”

  When the train arrived and he handed his ticket to the conductor, the man looked around for Diego’s luggage.

  “Bag?” he asked.

  All his belongings—his clothes, his magazines, and his mother’s photograph—had been burned in the train, so he had nothing with him except for his money and his passport. “None,” he told the man.

  Arriving in Juárez, Diego was told he could not pass into the United States without first going through inspection at the Santa Fe disinfection plant. It was mandated by the United States Department of Health, a woman told him. A large group of passengers had exited the train station on the Juárez side and, not knowing what to do, he decided to follow them.

  “The Americans say we’re dirty,” said a man to Diego as they walked across the bridge, the waters of the Rio Grande spilling over jagged rocks below. The man wore a suit and bright blue spats over his shoes. “That we carry diseases. Now, the Department of Health inspects us before we enter. Tell me, do I look diseased?” He pointed to his suit and tie.

  An old man in a straw hat asked, “Is this your first time north?”

  “Yes,” Diego responded.

  The man in the suit chuckled. “Be careful. Some of them hate us. Won’t serve you in restaurants. Won’t rent rooms or houses out to you.”

  “No dogs or Mexicans allowed,” the old man responded. “That’s what the signs will say.” He coughed then spit into a rag stained with yellow spots.

  “Say you’re European,” said the first man. “Most of them can’t ever tell the difference.”

  “You’re fair-skinned,” responded the old man, placing the rag back
in his pocket. “Hair’s light enough. You’ll pass. Look at me.” He pointed a crooked finger at his face. “Me? I’m much too dark. Too indio.” He chuckled. But Diego didn’t want to have to lie about who he was, ever again. Still, what other choice did he have?

  The plant was in a brick building on the American side of the bridge. Inside, the men were separated from the women, and they were led into a giant room with tiled floors and warm wooden walls. They lined up along the wall and were told to hold up their passports, which were inspected. They were then told to undress and to leave everything behind. They would then take their clothing to the laundry where they would be washed and disinfected. Naked, the men were taken into a cavernous room with large drums full of white powder. One by one, they were asked to step forward. Guards with masks over their faces scooped the powder out with small trowels and doused their bodies.

  “Cover your mouth,” shouted a guard to Diego when it was his turn. “Make sure not to breathe any of this in,” he said. Another guard came around and ordered Diego to lift his arms, to turn around, to spread his legs. Diego closed his eyes and his mouth, yet the powder still burned his eyes and made him sneeze.

  Then they were led down a long, narrow hallway into a room with wooden stalls along either side where inspectors waited. They looked inside his mouth and behind his ears, and they raked his hair with a metal wand while they asked him a series of questions:

  How old are you?

  Where are you going?

  Have you ever had lice?

  It was humiliating, and his clothes smelled awful, and the powder dusted his skin, and he coughed and coughed until his eyes watered, until his chest hurt. He sat, catching his breath, and waited, relieved to be through with it, grateful that he was no longer standing in a crowded room full of naked men. Once outside a guard told him where to find the train station.

  Arriving now, he was informed that the train to Los Angeles would be arriving the next morning. He sat down, frustrated, tired, his skin dry and itchy, white powder still in his hair and eyelashes. What would he do? He rose and left the station and wandered around the city, down avenues lined with shoe stores, meat markets, and bars. Next to a small church, he came across a movie theater with a blinking marquee and a ticket booth. The movie playing was called It. The banner stretched over the theater’s entrance featured the black silhouette of a curvy woman and, written in big, bold lettering, Diego read: