“Villa? Obregón? Carranza? What’s the difference? I love the revolution like a volcano in eruption; I love the volcano because it’s a volcano, the revolution because it’s the revolution! What do I care about the stones left above or below after the cataclysm? What are they to me?”
The book is subtitled “A Novel of the Mexican Revolution.” Richard Carranza and Alvaro Obregon were central figures in that revolution and Pancho Villa, of course, is Mexico’s revolutionary equivalent of George Washington or Vladimir Lenin. To dismiss these names from the story of revolution is like erasing the names Danton or Robespierre from the French Revolution. It is easy to get at what Valderrama is saying here, of course. It is the revolution itself that is the thing, right? The tumult, the change, the crushing of oppression and authority which let loose the dogs of freedom, wherever they may lead. But there is also a satisfactory answer to his final rhetorical question. Villa, Lenin, Danton and every revolutionary who ever fought to improve the conditions of life for citizens are the volcano. After all, an eruption occurs because there is a volcano, but how often has a revolution occurred without revolutionaries?
“The revolution benefits the poor, the ignorant, all those who have been slaves all their lives, all the unhappy people who do not even suspect they are poor because the rich who stand above them, the rich who rule them, change their sweat and blood and tears into gold.”
It has been many times observed that few leaders of revolutions come from the lowest economic levels of society. Most have been educated and belong firmly somewhere within the middle of the economic spectrum. Why? Because the poor have to spend their lives working hard enough just to eat and maintain shelter; there is no time for theorizing and all revolutions begin with theorizing. It is a trickle-down effect that is paradoxical in many ways. Those who would be expected to benefit the most from overthrowing an inequitable regime are often the last to join the case and in many cases never join at all, preferring even an awful status quo to the more awful state of uncertainty. Cervantes is a journalist who once pursued a career in medicine and he is the very iconic representative of the fundamental character of the typical revolutionary.
Suddenly, Demetrio finds himself alone. Bullets whiz past his ears like hail. He dismounts and crawls over the rocks, until he finds a parapet: he lays down a stone to protect his head and, lying flat on the ground, begins to shoot…
His famous marksmanship fills him with joy. Where he settles his glance, he settles a bullet. He loads his gun once more ... takes aim....
Demetrio Macias, his eyes leveled in an eternal glance, continues to point the barrel of his gun.
The final scene of the novel is quite haunting. It may bring to the mind of some readers the famous conclusion of the 1970 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Unaware they are just two men with a severely limited amount of ammunition, Butch and Sundance decide to make a run for it with guns blazing before their images settle permanently into a freeze-frame while the sounds practically the entire Bolivian army booms around then. The final line quoted here is the literary equivalent of a cinematic freeze-frame, portraying Macias simultaneously as hero and fool as he attempts to take on army all by himself just like Butch and the Kid. It is an ending both heartbreakingly romantic and painfully tragic.
