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Lucia's next novel is set during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917. Last Train from Cuernavaca is due to be released in April of 2010.
Last Train from Cuernavaca
In the Christmas season of 1913, Grace Knight’s elegant old hotel on Cuernavaca’s main plaza is the place to see and be seen. Mexico’s landed elite, members of the foreign community, young army officers and their wives, and wealthy tourists flock to the Colonial. They arrive by train and in horse drawn carriages and horseless ones. Under the ballroom’s hundreds of twinkling electric lights, they dance to old Spanish tunes and to the new rhythm of ragtime. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Brat and Ugly Not until the sun was hovering above the horizon did Angela come down from the tree. As if to delay doing what she had to, she folded her skirt and blouse and put them and her shoes into her satchel. She rolled up her pants legs so they wouldn’t get soaked with blood. She picked up the biggest stick she could find to beat off the vultures, and led the mare to the ditch. The bodies sprawled in heaps above the muddy water. Somewhere under them lay Antonio and Arquímedes. Angela crossed herself before she slid down the steep sides of the trench. Flies, crows, and buzzards rose in a raucous black cloud when she hit the bottom. Ignoring the thunder claps of their wings, Angela grasped arms and feet and started hauling the corpses off the pile. When three of them proved too heavy for her, she took the rope used to dislodge tree stumps and tied it to an ankle. She climbed up the embankment, looped the other end around the saddle pommel, and led the mare along the rim, dragging the body away. She repeated the operation for the second and third. She uncovered Arquímedes lying face up in the shallow water. His lightless eyes stared at heaven. She knew he was dead, but she knelt next to him and put her ear to his heart anyway. He groaned. “¡Ay, Diós!” She jumped back and realized that Arquímedes had not made the sound. Antonio had. “Dream with the angels, colli.” Angela made the sign of the cross over Arquímedes and rolled him away. Antonio lay on his side underneath, his body almost hidden by black sludge. His head was cradled on his arm as if asleep on his straw mat at home. It kept his nose barely above water. Angela sat in the mud, lifted his head into her lap, put her arms around him, and sobbed. She was making God extravagant promises in exchange for Antonio’s survival when he opened his eyes. “Where did the bullet go in, Ugly?” she asked. “I don’t know, Brat.” “Where do you hurt?” “Everywhere. What about the others?” “They are with God.” “The old man too?” “Yes.” “The devil take the sons of whores.” “Why did they do it?” “They wanted us to tell them where the men went.” “The ones who ran into the hills to join Zapata?” “Yes. We told the sons of bitches to look in hell.” He stared up at her face, covered with mud and blood. “Angelita, you are the most beautiful woman in the world.” His eyes closed. Angela shook him. “Do not die, my love.” She had done with haggling with God. She looked up at a sunset sky so glorious that God must surely live there. “Do not let him die, or I will curse you. From the flames of damnation I will curse your name! Do you hear me?” “We hear you, doña Angela.” Angela looked around at a line of women standing along the ditch’s rim, their faces shadowed by shawls. When they saw the bodies of their men, they pulled their shawls over their eyes and wailed. Angela should have been more understanding, but everyone had died and left her in charge. She hadn’t time for her own grief much less anyone else’s. The carnage was too horrific for her to absorb anyway. Her mind shut out emotions so she could do what had to be done. “They are all dead but Antonio. We have to get him out of here. ” The women slid down the slope and helped her carry him back up it. They laid him on his back in the grass and Angela began scraping off the mud, trying to find the source of the flow of blood. When Angela probed Antonio’s shoulder he winced. Most of the women started wailing again, but one of them said, “El gobierno took your mother. No one knows what became of your father.” Angela knew anyone in uniform was el gobierno to them. She didn’t bother to ask why the army of the revolution had turned on its own people. They wore the federal uniform now. They had become el gobierno. And anyway, men willing to murder were as easy to recruit as fleas. One of the women ripped a strip of cloth from the bottom of her skirt so Angela could bind it around Antonio’s shoulder. Antonio struggled to his feet and swayed. “Careful, Ugly.” Angela put an arm around his waist to steady him. She and the women helped him into the mare’s saddle and Angela mounted behind him. The women had brought a donkey cart to carry the bodies home. Angela gave the oldest of them the few pesos she had. “Gracias, doña Angela.” “God go with you, mamacita. Ma xipatinemi. May you be well.” Angela put her arms around Antonio and took up the reins. The mare headed for her feed trough, but stopped short at the charred, smoking rubble of the stable. The corncrib, blacksmith shop, and sugar press building had also been set on fire. With her pulse pounding in her ears, Angela rode through the big doors now standing open. No chickens wandered the courtyard that looked as if a bomb had gone off in it. It was littered with upturned flagstones and pitted with holes the soldiers had dug in search of silver the family might have buried. Angela left Antonio by the cistern and ran through the house, calling for her father and Plinio, the family’s mayordomo. Furniture lay overturned and smashed. Debris covered the floor, but the soldiers had taken everything of value that they could carry. Angela went to her father’s study and waded through the scattered books. El gobierno had not considered them worth stealing. She put a stool on a chair and set the chair on a big chest. She climbed onto the stool and pushed aside a panel in the ceiling. She stood on tiptoe and felt around until she found her father’s Winchester 30-30 carbine, the 1894 model, and the box of ammunition for it. She knew how to use it. Riding and shooting were the only activities her father shared with her. She had practiced throwing knives and rocks on her own. She replaced the panel and put the stool and chair back where she had found them. She pressed one of the carved wooden medallions at the edge of an ornate cupboard and slid out a narrow vertical drawer, invisible when closed. Inside was a wallet containing forty of the big silver pesos called bolas. She put them into the bag around her neck and picked up the rifle and ammunition. She found a couple old shirts and two pair of her father’s trousers that the soldiers had missed. She figured she could replace her filthy clothes with one set and give the other to Antonio. She returned to the cistern, and in the last of the day’s light she sluiced buckets of water over Antonio and herself until she’d rinsed off the worst of the dirt and blood. She took the skirt from her satchel and tore off material to change the bandage on Antonio’s wound and made a sling for his arm. “Where do you want to go?” she asked. “Wherever you’re going.” Shadowy figures darker than the gathering night slipped through the gate. Angela shoved a shell into the Winchester, levered the action, and rested the barrel on the rim of the cistern with the muzzle aimed at them. “Who are you?” she called out. “I am Plinio, princess.” The family’s mayordomo had always called her cihuapilli, princess. “The women told us you had come here.” Plinio and five of Don Sanchez’s employees lined up in front of her as if for military inspection. They had armed themselves with hoes, machetes, knives, and a few ancient rifles. They carried their belongings in satchels with the straps running diagonally across their chests. “Do you know where my father is?” “No, but we want to go with you to fight in General Zapata’s army.” Angela hadn’t yet decided where she would go, but now she realized that the choice was inevitable. “How do you know what I’m going to do?” It was too dark to see the wry smile on Plinio’s doleful, wrinkled face. “Muchacha, how many years have I known you?” “All my life.” “Well then….” Angela wore her hair in a braid that reached the small of her back. “Cut this off.” She held it away from her body. “Hurry. The sons of dogs could return.” Plinio knew from experience that arguing with Don Miguel’s daughter was a waste of time. He could barely see the braid, so he measured it with his hand before he sawed through it with his machete. Angela shook her head to let her hair fall in a parentheses around her face. She ran her hand through it, disoriented when her fingers came to the ends so soon. She took a deep breath. She was glad night had come so her father’s men could not see how frightened and distraught she was. She did not know where Zapata was and the mountainous countryside was perilous even in daylight. Antonio must have guessed what she was thinking. “I know a cave nearby where we can spend the night. Tomorrow, we can go to San Miguel. My family will know where to hide us.” Angela mounted her mare with Antonio behind her. The men rode double on the three mules they had been able to muster. Angela raised her father’s rifle over her head and started for the main gate. “Vámanos, muchachos,” she said. “The devil himself cannot frighten us.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ A writer friend asked Lucia how she does re-writes. Here's what she told him: Re-writes: I print out the rough draft as I finish each chapter and I stack them up. Then as I find more info or get a better idea I clip the note card or scrap of paper onto that chapter. Sometimes I just throw them on top if I don't know where to put them. By the end of the first run-through I might have a couple hundred cards in no order piled on top of the ms. When it's time to make the second pass I lay out all the chapters on the floor and try to put each card or scrap of paper where it belongs. For this book, I took the cards that were left over, divided them by subject and characters, labeled each packet and laid them on the floor too. So when I have a scene from a certain character's point of view I can mine those cards to help get a feel for them. I also have thousands of note cards, organized by subject, in the file drawers. They're in reserve for when I need additional info. For the re-writes I go back through the ms, listing each chapter on a legal pad by number, scene, month and year of the events, and chapter title (like "Picnicking on the Precipice," "Souvenirs and Incendiaries," "All's Fair in War and Tango") along with a brief description and whose P.O.V. the scene is from. Otherwise I would forget what was happening when and to whom. (When one's memory is as bad as mine organization is the key to survival). While I'm trying to improve the general quality of the prose I also adjust the chronology (Which can get really screwed up when writing about the Mexican Revolutions... there seem to have been several running serially and overlapping, and the major players changed sides more often than they changed their underwear). I try to fill in gaps in the plot, add pertinent info, make the characters more interesting, correct inconsistencies and errors, and generally make myself crazy. For however many months it takes, I have various drafts of chapters, piles of out-takes, note cards, paper scraps, books, internet print-outs, and legal pad sheets spread out on two desks, the office floor, the dining room table and on the trunk by the couch. I keep a legal pad by the bed for scribbling things down in the middle of the night, and a notebook in the car for when I'm stuck at traffic lights. It's like trying to ride a really large motorcycle. I never feel like I'm in control of the process. Although at least on a motorcycle I get where I'm going faster. Of course, with re-writes I'm not as likely to end up in traction. I don't know how other writers make sense of thousands of factoids and fiction bits, but this is what works, sort of, for me.
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email Lucia directly: looshr@aol.com ©Lucia St. Clair Robson 2001 - 2009
Website by: www.Sky-Bolt.com |
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While
you're waiting, here's an image of a soldier of the Revolution, plus 