Woes of the True Policeman

of killing. His final anointing occurred at the Monterrey bullring and, in 1928, in Mexico City, where he was acclaimed in the ring and feted on public thoroughfares. He was tall and slender—cadaverous, according to some—and always sharply dressed, whether in bullfighting attire or civilian clothes. The elegance with which he moved in the ring, though, became a mannered stride in everyday life, the strut of a preening gangster. Along with Federico Montero and other friends, he belonged to a bachelor’s club, The Cowboys of Death, which was officially gastronomic and harmless, though of terrible memory. Death, the real thing, came to him at the hands of a sixteen-year-old boy who for motives that remain unknown came looking for him at the cantina Los Primos Hermanos and with his old rifle put two bullets in his head before being shot in turn by the bullfighter’s comrades. The statue that stands guard over his mausoleum was erected at the initiative of Montero and other friends, who bore the full cost themselves. The sculptor was Pablo Mesones Sarabia (1891–1942), of the Potosí school of Maestro Garabito.

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    The sculpture group titled Victory of the Town of Santa Teresa over the French , situated in the Plaza del Norte one hundred feet from the statue of General Sepúlveda, hero of the Revolution, and created by Pedro Xavier Terrades (1899–1949) and Jacinto Prado Salamanca (1901–1975), both sculptors of the Potosí school of Maestro Garabito, presented a kind of inaccuracy or basic historical error. The work in itself was nothing to sneeze at: composed of five wrought-iron figures, it possessed the characteristic élan of the Potosí school, a quality of the sublime or of transfigurement, its frenzied figures contorted, one might say, by the breath of History. The life-size group included a Santa Teresa militiaman pointing southeast toward something that the spectator might guess were the retreating enemy troops. The face of the militiaman, lips clenched and features twisted in a scowl of pain or rage, is partly obscured by a too-big bandage around his head. In his left hand he carries a musket. Behind, at his feet on the ground, lies a dead Frenchman. The Frenchman’s arms are flung wide and his hands are gnarled as if by fire. His face, nevertheless, has the thing that artists of old called the repose of death. To one side, a soldier of the irregular forces dies in the arms of a girl no older than fifteen. The gaze of the soldier—eyes of a madman, eyes of a visionary—turns to the sky, while the eyes of the girl, part Madonna and part Goya Gypsy, remain gravely and piously shut. The left hand of the dying man clutches the girl’s right hand. And yet these are not two hands together; not at all. They are two hands that reach for each other in the dark, two hands that repel each other, two hands that recognize each other and flee in despair. Finally, there is an old man, half turned to the side, his head lowered as if he’d rather not see what’s happened, his lips puckered in an expression that might be of pain, but might also signify the act of whistling (and that’s what the children who play in the square call him: the Whistler). The old man is frozen, his right hand over his heart but not quite resting on his breast, the left hanging to one side, as if rendered useless. The sculpture group was commissioned in 1940 and finished in 1945. According to some critics, it is Terrades and Prado Salamanca’s masterpiece, and the last piece on which they worked together. Be that as it may, the work’s flaw is in its title. There was never a battle against the French for the simple reason that the men against whom the town of Santa Teresa fought under José Mariño and Amador Pérez Pesqueira weren’t French but Belgian. The campaign and subsequent battle, according to the well-documented book Benito Juárez vs. Maximilian: The Fall of Europe , by the Mexican historian Julio V. Anaya, proceeded like this: in August 1865 a battalion of four companies of one hundred men each, made up of volunteers from the Belgian Legion and led by Colonel Maurice Libbrecht, tried to take Santa Teresa, which at that time was undefended by Republican troops. The column came first to Villaviciosa, where it encountered no resistence. After revictualing, it set out from Villaviciosa, leaving behind a garrison of twenty men. An alert was raised and in Santa Teresa preparations for the defense of the city were rapidly made