“My husband marched in front with his rifle. I marched in back with the women, but he knew that I was there. I brought water when he needed. Some of us fought side by side with our husbands. At each day’s end we washed the wounds and helped bury the dead. It seems silly now, but we were fighting for our dignity, for justice, for a voice in our country. For a time when we would always have food on our tables. When the rich and powerful would not cheat us.

“We fought that way for three months. Then everything changed. Miguel was shot down in the countryside. The bullet went straight to the heart. The blood spattered everywhere. The rocks, the railroad tracks. The men around him. I saw it happen. I ran to where he fell, picked up his gun, and started shooting too.

“We dug a hole for him by the side of the rails. Darkness was coming and it was not safe. Our fighters wanted to leave. But I searched for two sticks, tied them into a cross, and stuck them into the dirt, even though I knew the wind would blow them away before the morning.”

She spoke without crying. Ram was frozen in his seat. How did she tell this story without a tear, without a whimper, as if it belonged to someone else?

“In that moment, God failed me. I do not tell this to mexicanos: sometimes I cannot believe in God. For how can such a thing happen if God were to exist? I kept Miguel’s gun close to me. I fought against the Federalists, but when one of our men tried to put his hands on me, I pointed it at him too.

“‘Señora, now I will be your man’ he said. When I did not go with him, he threatened to kill me. No one would have gone against him.” Adela’s voice quivered. Finally, he saw feeling in her dark eyes. An unfiltered despair, the acceptance of the cruelty of life on earth. She looked directly at Ram, as if challenging him to ask her more. He was quiet. He did not want to know more.

“The next day we rode through another village. It had been almost four months since I had left home with Miguel. But that was at a different time; now Villa had gone mad, raiding village after village, putting innocents to death. We heard that in one town, he had rounded up the women and tied them together and set them on fire in the middle of the square. One of them had dared to question him about the death of her husband.