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the big house with Chippendale furniture, giant chandeliers, and fake Rubenses, for which he’d charged us as if they were real. General Vergara said he didn’t give a fig for all that stuff, and he reserved the right to furnish his room with the things he and his dead Doña Clotilde had used when they built their first house in the Roma district back there in the twenties. The bed was brass, and although the room had a modern closet, the General closed it off by installing an ancient, heavy mahogany mirrored wardrobe in front of the closet door.
    He gazed at his ancient wardrobe with affection. “When I open it, I still smell the smell of my Clotilde’s clothes, so hard-working, the sheets all ironed, everything stiff with starch.”
    In that room, there are all kinds of things that no one ever uses any more, like a marble-topped washstand with a porcelain washbasin, and tall pitchers filled with water. A copper spittoon and a wicker rocking chair. The General has always bathed in the evening, and I guess, because of my father’s mysterious behavior, Grandfather asked me to come with him that night. The two of us went together to the bathroom, the General carrying his gourd dipper with its hand-painted flowers and ducklings and his castile soap, because he despised the perfumed soaps with unpronounceable names that everyone was using then; after all, he wasn’t a film star or a pansy. I helped him with his bathrobe, his pajamas, and his fleece-lined slippers. After lowering himself into the tub of warm water, he soaped up his fiber brush and began to scrub himself vigorously. He told me it was good for the circulation of the blood. I told him I preferred a shower, and he replied that showers were for horses. Then, without his even asking, I rinsed him with his gourd dipper, pouring water over his shoulders.
    â€œI’ve been thinking, Grandfather, about what you told me about Villa and his guard.”
    â€œAnd I’ve been thinking about your answer, Plutarco. You may be right. God knows, there’re times we miss our friends. Mine have been dying off, all of them. And no one can take their place. When the friends you’ve lived with and fought with die, you’re all alone, flat out alone.”
    â€œYou remember times when there were real men, I never get tired of hearing about them.”
    â€œWell, you’re my friend, aren’t you? But it isn’t the same.”
    â€œWhy not pretend I was with you in the Revolution, Grandfather? Pretend that I…”
    I was overcome with a strange embarrassment, and the old man sitting in the tub, all soaped up a second time, lifted his sudsy eyebrows quizzically. Then he took my hand in his wet one and pressed it hard, before brusquely changing the subject.
    â€œWhat’s your old man up to, Plutarco?”
    â€œWho knows? He never tells me anything. You know that, Grandfather.”
    â€œHe’s never been one to be impudent. I tell you it pleased me how he talked back to me at supper.”
    The General laughed and slapped the water. He told me my father had always been a lazy bastard who’d had everything served to him on a silver platter and who’d been lucky to find himself with a decent living when General Cardenas had swept Calles’s supporters out of government. As he washed his hair, Grandfather told how until then he’d lived off his salary as a government official. But Cardenas had forced him to look elsewhere for income, to make his living in business. The haciendas, the old agricultural estates, weren’t producing. The peasants had burned them down before going off to fight. He said that while Cardenas was reapportioning the land, someone had to produce. So Calles’s supporters had got together as small landowners and bought up the bits and pieces of the haciendas not affected by the land distribution.
    â€œWe sowed cane in Morelos, tomatoes in Sinaloa, and cotton in