Los de Abajo

In the dark heart of the sierra, a dog's frantic barking announces the arrival of the Federales. Demetrio Macías finishes his meal without haste, takes up his rifle, and tells his wife to hide. He is a tall, robust man of the earth, his face weathered red, and he melts into the impenetrable night just as the soldiers thunder into his small clearing, shouting for food and women. When they threaten his wife, a white silhouette fills the dark doorway. “Demetrio Macías!” the sergeant exclaims in terror. But Demetrio, with a quiet, contemptuous smile, lets them leave. He knows they will be back. “I have a feeling they'll all come together,” he says, urging his wife to flee to her father's house with their child. From high on the mountain, after hours of climbing, he turns to look back. In the canyon below, great flames lick the sky. His house is burning.

He is not alone for long. With a blast from a horn, his men emerge from the canyons - twenty-five souls, dark and weathered as old bronze, hungry for a fight. They are the dispossessed, the hunted, men like Anastasio Montañés who fear bullets no more than candy balls. Demetrio, now their chief, leads them to a narrow pass, a perfect trap for the Federales who hunt him. Crouched among the rocks, they wait. When the column of soldiers appears below, tiny figures on miniature horses, Demetrio gives the order. “¡Ahora!” The rifles crack in unison. Men tumble from their saddles, their skulls opened. The rebels, hidden and silent, are mercilessly efficient. “To those below… to those below!” Demetrio cries, his own rifle picking off soldiers trying to cross the river. The fight is a brutal game, a contest of marksmanship, until the tide turns and the Federales find their flank. A bullet burns through Demetrio's thigh. They retreat, leaving two comrades behind, their bodies later found hanging from a mesquite tree.

Carried on a makeshift stretcher, burning with fever, Demetrio is brought to a tiny settlement of huts where a young woman named Camila offers him a gourd of cool water. Her voice is gentle, and in his delirium, it is all he hears. It is here that his men capture a stranger, a well-dressed city boy named Luis Cervantes, a medical student and journalist who claims to be a revolutionary. Pancracio, his face impassive as stone, wants to execute him on the spot. “What cause do we defend?” Demetrio asks when Cervantes speaks of shared ideals. The student is stunned into silence. He cannot explain their fight to them. Yet Demetrio, in a moment of weary intuition, spares his life, sensing perhaps that this educated man, this *curro*, holds a key to something he does not yet understand.

Cervantes, at first disgusted by the filth and brutality of the rebels, soon sees the truth: the revolution, for all its chaos, is a hurricane that will sweep away the old world. He sees that Demetrio is more than a bandit; he is a natural leader, a force of nature. He begins to shape Demetrio's ambition, to give a name to his raw anger. “You do not yet understand your true, high, and most noble mission,” Cervantes tells him. “We are instruments of destiny for the vindication of the sacred rights of the people.” He urges Demetrio to join the larger forces of General Natera, to transform his small band into a brigade and claim a place in the coming victory. Demetrio, who only wanted to be left alone on his patch of earth, is swayed. He is named a colonel, and his men march toward the epic clash awaiting them at Zacatecas.

The Battle of Zacatecas is a whirlwind of fire, blood, and astonishing courage. As Natera's forces falter, Demetrio, without orders, spurs his horse up an impossible, sheer rock face. “¡Arriba, muchachos!” he screams, and his men follow, scrambling like deer over the stones, man and beast as one. They crash into the federal trenches, Demetrio roping machine guns as if they were wild bulls, turning the tide in a moment of pure, savage instinct. Victory is total, but it unleashes a darker chaos. The city is turned over to plunder. In the aftermath, Demetrio's band swells with new faces: the sadistic güero Margarito, who finds pleasure in torture, and the fierce camp follower, La Pintada, who claims Demetrio as her own. The revolution's ideals, so eloquently described by Cervantes, dissolve into a frenzy of looting, drunkenness, and casual murder. “What a spectacle, my friend,” a disillusioned officer tells Cervantes, “if we who came to offer our enthusiasm and our lives to overthrow a miserable assassin, turn out to be the builders of an enormous pedestal for a hundred or two hundred thousand monsters of the same kind.”

The great cause splinters. Villa against Carranza. The victors of yesterday turn on each other, and Demetrio's men are swept along, fighting now without purpose or understanding. “Look,” Demetrio tells Anastasio, “it seems to me this is happening to us like the peasant from Tepatitlán. He never stopped grumbling about his boss, but he never stopped working either. That's us: grumble and grumble, and kill and kill.” The war becomes a blur of scorched towns and meaningless skirmishes. The violence turns inward. La Pintada, in a fit of jealousy, stabs the gentle Camila, who had followed Demetrio, and is cast out. The men, once brothers, kill each other over card games. They are a force adrift, a plague upon the land they once sought to liberate.

After nearly two years, the winding path of war leads Demetrio back to his own canyon. His wife runs to meet him, aged by a decade of sorrow, their son hiding behind her skirts, afraid of this strange, hard-eyed man. “Demetrio, for God's sake, don't go away again!” she pleads. “My heart tells me something will happen to you now.” In the quiet of the sierra, she asks the question that hangs over the entire nation: “Why are you all still fighting, Demetrio?” He stares into the vast, silent canyon, his face a mask of stone. He picks up a pebble and tosses it over the edge. “Look at that stone,” he says, his voice heavy. “How it keeps going and never stops.”

The next morning, they ride into the canyon once more. The sierra is beautiful, washed clean by the night's rain, alive with the songs of birds. It is the same place where Demetrio won his first great victory, where he ambushed the Federales with only twenty men. But now, the enemy is everywhere, hidden among the rocks in their thousands. The trap is sprung against them. The air fills with the chatter of machine guns, and his men fall like wheat before the scythe. Anastasio slides from his horse without a sound. Soon, Demetrio is alone. He crawls behind a rock, his face streaked with tears of rage, and begins to fire. He does not miss. One shot, one kill. His famous aim fills him with a final, bitter joy. The cicadas drone their ageless, imperturbable song as the smoke curls into the sky. At the foot of a magnificent stone crevice, like the portico of an old cathedral, Demetrio Macías lies still, his eyes fixed forever, still aiming the barrel of his rifle into the distance.