He again lamented his lack of clothes. “There’s nothing to fit me in Mexico City,” he said emphatically. He told them he had called at the British Club and asked permission to have his letters addressed there. But they had given him some funny looks and the secretary’s behavior had been offensive, “Yes, if—er—your war record’s all right,” he had said. Ewart was tempted to tell him that he had had the honor of—er—commanding a company of His Majesty’s Foot Guards for a while, but forebore. “However, I’ll not darken their threshold again,” he added pompously, referring to the British Club, so suspicious and discourteous. Ewart must have been the sort of man who expects to be recognized at first glance for what he is or feels himself to be, that is, a gentleman, and who thinks his life story is visible on his face. The club’s members later regretted not having given him a warmer welcome.
They spoke of literature a while then, he and the Grahams, but the author under discussion did not lend himself to disquistions worthy of the day that it was or turned out to be, said author being none other than my exuberant compatriot Blasco Ibáñez, who had made a great impression on Ewart with the vast scope of his narratives. Ewart summarized the plots of two of Blasco Ibáñez’s novels—and Graham doesn’t seem retrospectively recriminatory over this new form of abuse, either—in which the world or half the world was the scene of the drama. Even more than the novels, Ewart had liked the movies based on The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Blood and Sand, having recently seen the latter film in Santa Fe, with “the elegant Rudolf (Valentino, that is) in the role of the matador. This memory made him express the desire to go to a hundred bullfights in order to master all the subtleties of that art, though at the same time he didn’t see how he could ever go to another one, he had had such a bad time of it at his baptism in butchery.
He was delighted with his life as a writer. He could go where he liked in the world and live off his work, and there were a thousand places he wanted to go. He was to make only one more journey, as we know, an internal journey. That afternoon as they were returning to the center of the city they heard the crackle of rifle and revolver fire, the revelry was commencing.
They spent the evening at the Teatro Lírico, where they saw a revue of the year 1922, the year that was ending. They didn’t understand much, since the vignettes were full of local references, but they enjoyed the dancing and liked the scene in which a killer tried to seduce the widow of a hero until suddenly the coffin’s lid lifted and the dead man arose from the open grave to protest and forestall the crime.
Leaving the theatre they found the streets almost impenetrably crowded, overflowing with cars and trucks crammed with wide sombreros, dizzy with blaring horns and exploding fireworks and those arching, quavering, yipping cries. People carried paper flags in red, white and green, most of the men were festively brandishing shotguns or pistols—the sound of weapons going off had grown louder—and with cartridge belts slung across their chests they fired into the air from the streets and rooftops. The cafés were packed, orchestras were playing to further add to the pandemonium, the effect of pulque and other cactus-based liquors was making itself felt everywhere. The three English people felt rather tired, but still wanted supper, and they found a table in a place with music, the restaurant of the Hotel Cosmos. There they stayed for quite some time—more strawberries and cream—“and would no doubt have seen the Old Year out, the New Year in,” says Graham, “but an unkind Fate prompted otherwise.” He does not, however, explain exactly how this Fate—which doesn’t seem to have been particularly grim-faced or determined—operated, or why they were all in the street again around 11:30. He had half a mind to leave his wife at the hotel—she must have been the most exhausted of the three, having spent the whole day listening to Ewart hold forth on Blasco Ibáñez and Chihuahua dogs—and then go back to the Zócalo to contemplate the joyous midnight fusillade. But they were all done in and decided to retire to their respective hotels. Of their final discussion in the Hotel Cosmos, Graham notes only a ridiculous conversation about eggs, truly not an elevated subject for anyone’s final words, still less those of a writer who would have gone right to the top. It all started when a waiter asked the simple, innocent question, “How will you have your eggs?” which was all Ewart needed to summon forth his former expertise on poultry, perorate at length on the different classes of yolks and whites and sizes and shells, their virtues and defects, and brag of being able to state, within a 24-hour margin of error, the age of any egg—British or foreign, European or American or even African or Asiatic. “One thing I do pride myself on,” he said senselessly, “I could tell you almost to a day the age of an egg.” These can be said to have been his penultimate words. If he’d lived a day longer, he could have told whether a given egg dated from 1922 or 1923.
It seems unlikely that they spoke of nothing else throughout the entire dinner, for Ewart seems never to have been at a loss for a topic of conversation—he was a feckless chatterbox, at least on his final day, and he could always fall back on his notebook and read aloud—but strangely enough Graham does not record any other aspect of their talk. (Maybe he was dazed.) He only says that once out in the street, “we shook hands; we wished one another a happy New Year; we said good-bye. ‘A happy New Year, and may you soon get back that iron box,’ were my last words to him, referring to that box of regimental records whose safety must, I knew, be causing him anxiety.” And Ewart answered, “Happy New Year,” and they parted. Once again Stephen Graham’s wife gives the impression of not being present, not even for the goodbye that really was goodbye. At their hotel, the Iturbide, a certain degree of chaos had set in, Graham says, with the staff “in that menacing drunken state which comes after drinking much pulque.” At midnight the clamor burst out and “hundreds of thousands of revolvers and guns must have been discharged and discharged repeatedly.” It sounded like a great general outbreak of war. Graham leaned out the window and looked at the dark sky, “which told nothing of the myriads of bullets flying into it.” Perhaps Rose Savory Graham had gone to bed with unease and foreboding, and looked at his back in silence while he gazed outside, the invisible bullets.
One of them flew a little lower or was spent or grew cold too quickly and embedded itself in the blind left eye of another man, also standing on a balcony, either wearing pyjamas or still dressed in his brand-new Mexican shirt, either standing up or sitting in an armchair, still wearing his glasses and intending to shave before going to bed in a bed that was never unmade or even turned down, a man who had changed rooms twice until he ended up in that fifth-floor room and who had not moved from one hotel to another, as had been his intention since the previous afternoon, in order to be closer to his friends, who sometimes seemed to flee from him and at other times pursued him as if they were hot on the trail of a lover or an enemy. Nothing makes sense, nothing fits, and the thing that makes the least sense of all is that Ewart and the Grahams retired to get some rest in a city and at a time in which absolutely no one was going to be able to rest or sleep until dawn or thereafter. Perhaps his death was a belated intrusion of the all-out warfare that was sidestepped before his eyes one Christmas morning in a remote Flemish quagmire. Perhaps it was the counterpart of that truce of ten or twenty joyous and unified minutes out of the prolonged destruction of months; now it was his turn to be annihilated amid a great, peacetime revelry, as it had been the turn, seven years earlier, of a sergeant named Oliver to be struck down as a reminder of war—or was it war’s revenge—during the brief duration of the truce and not before or after, his poor, trusting figure much loved by his comrades-in-arms. “It makes no difference. It must be an accident,” wrote Ewart, and the ceasefire was not interrupted for that reason just as the boisterous festivities in Mexico City were not interrupted because he lay the whole night on the balcony or the floor of the room with a hole in his eye, his face not even covered by half a sandbag or a blanket, while Stephen Graham turned back to his wife and, after closing the window to mute the uproar of the gene
ral outbreak of war, walked to the bed, perhaps toward her arms reaching out to him, begging for protection, demanding love.
Laurence Sterne may have been right in Tristram Shandy which I translated into my language twenty years ago, when he had one of the characters recall that King William was of the opinion that everything was predestined for us in this world, and the King would often say to his soldiers that “every ball had its billet.” (Diderot later copied the phrase.) Perhaps that spent or cold bullet was predestined to be billeted in Wilfrid Ewart, and yet the idea is hard to accept, it’s so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what’s been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and envenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or to prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs its negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty, and everything is told figuratively.
They buried him two days later, on January 3. Graham and Hollands, the postal employee, identified the body at the desolate Hospital Juárez, which was also a prison; according to Graham, the expression on the dead face was “puzzled and annoyed.” An autopsy was performed, and Ewart was found, in hindsight, to have been in perfect health. Twenty-four people attended his burial in the British Cemetery, not far from the weeping cypress known as the Tree of the Sad Night—which was the night of July 1, 1520, and it was sad for Hernán Cortés—near the Tlacopán Causeway: the president and some members of the British Club, R.J. Fowler, the vice-consul, the Reverend Dean H. Dobson Peacock who officiated over the liturgy, the presidents of the Ex-Service Men’s Association and the British Society, Hollands, Graham and his wife. She was carrying white roses and dropped them onto the long coffin as it began its descent, this is almost the only time her husband mentions her in the entire book. Lilies grow in that place, or used to grow, because the cemetery “no longer exists,” as Rafael M.S. tells me in a recent letter. “It was razed almost twenty years ago to make way for a highway called the Circuito Interior. A very small chapel was put up, in memory of those who were buried there. Called the Capilla Británica, it stands at the corner of San Cosme and Melchor Ocampo and still has an inscription in English. When the bodies were exhumed, they were moved to the Nuevo Cementerio Británico on Calzada México Tacuba, which was built in 1926. A few were buried in individual, clearly marked graves (when it was still possible to locate their kinsmen). The others were buried in a common grave surrounding a chapel with stained glass windows. If his remains weren’t taken to England it’s very likely that Ewart’s bones are there (but it’s impossible to know for sure because the names have worn away). Both cemeteries are quite close to the Tree of the Sad Night, but neither can be said to be beside it. Not much is left of the Tree, and around it are only houses.”
Muñoz Saldaña also sent me a few other curious pieces of information, such as the list of belongings that Ewart “had with him”: “a gold watch and a chain of that same metal, eighty pesos in cash, a Bank of Montreal checkbook that showed a deposit of six hundred-odd pesos, and a few other objects.” There is no mention of any clothing or luggage, which seems to indicate that the list refers only to what he had on his person when his corpse was discovered, and not to the things that were scattered around the room. There’s no need to note that he couldn’t have been carrying all this in his pyjamas.
Ewart was not the only person in Mexico City to die that New Year’s Eve: nineteen other people also lost their lives violently over the course of those wild revels.
Neither Muñoz Saldaña nor González Rodríguez has been able to locate the photograph of Ewart’s corpse that some sources say was published by a Mexican newspaper (Hugh Cecil mentions it repeatedly in The Flower of Battle). Perhaps some mistake was made, by the sources or the newspapers. Muñoz Saldaña comments that in the first couple of weeks of 1923 the Mexican press did publish a photograph of a British subject killed by a bullet wound to the head. “The man is seen lying down, with a bandaged head, but it is not Ewart since the caption lists another name.” I wonder if the name might not be George W. Steabben, or that of a third party. Or perhaps the caption was mistaken, since it appears that there was indeed a photograph: on seeing it posted in the English Club, a member realized that the supposed “businessman” whom the press initially referred to as “Mr. Gore” was in fact none other than the famous and promising novelist Wilfrid Herbert Gore Ewart. In so incoherent a matter, it’s perfectly coherent that this photograph should be phantasmal.
In London, Ewart’s father learned of the death in the worst possible way, that is, from a journalist’s tactless phone call. The family had a requiem mass celebrated for him at St. Mary’s Bourne Street, and later put up an altar with a memorial by Goodhard-Rendel. What the family does not appear to have done, however, was move his remains from the British Cemetary on Calzada de la Verónica, and so it is possible that they now lie in a common grave whose names have worn off on Calzada México Tacuba.
The trail of tumbling foam he left in his wake was short-lived, though it churned a while longer in the thirties thanks to the efforts of John Gawsworth under one of his signatures, “G,” the tersest one; but I’ll speak of that later, perhaps.
In a 1989 letter Sergio G. R. pointed out that Stephen Graham, in his autobiography, apparently his last book, titled Part of the Wonderful Scene and published in 1964 when he was eighty years old, again devotes an entire chapter to Ewart’s death, which varied little from what he had written in the heat of the moment, four decades earlier. Nevertheless, he does add “some disconcerting lines”—in the words of my first Mexican correspondent: “He tells how, after the burial of his friend Wilfrid, he goes to his room at the Hotel Iturbide and feels Wilfrid’s spirit all around him. In his unsettled state, Graham speaks to the spirit and begs his pardon ‘for all that has happened,’ opens the window, and lets the spirit fly away home.”
In his article published the same year, González Rodríguez also described the way Ewart’s tragedy was, for a period, used as an enticement to tourists, so much so that other Mexico City hotels claimed it for their own. He cites Ronald G. Walker, author of Infernal Paradise, Mexico and the Modern English Novel, who relates the following episode: “[The Canadian poet Witter] Bynner and his friend [Willard] Johnson followed the Lawrences” (the David Herbert Lawrences, that is: the famous author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and his wife) “to Mexico City in March 1923 to find that Lawrence had secured lodging for them in the Hotel Monte Carlo. They were shocked to discover that by a strange coincidence their room had previously been tenanted by a friend of the foursome, an Englishman named Wilfred Ewart; shocked, because it was on that same balcony to which the bellboy pointed with the pride of an eyewitness, that Ewart had been killed by a stray bullet during a wild fiesta in the street below. News of Ewart’s fortuitous death a few months before had, in fact, elicited from Lawrence—before he had set foot in Mexico—the conviction that ‘it’s an evil country down there.’ ” “The bellboy,” the article adds, “was indulging in the Mexican pastime of frightening and deceiving foreigners: the Hotel Monte Carlo is around the corner from the Hotel Isabel, to one side of the Convento de San Agustín on calle de Uruguay, and in his tall tale he was mixing up Ewart’s case with that of George W. Steabben.” It was certainly neither risky nor implausible to lay claim to tragedies caused by firearms in the Mexican capital at that time: the article also recounts that in a newspaper dated that same New Year’s Day, a company named Balines Americanos (American Ball Bearings) placed an advertisement with the following jaunty slogan: “With gunfire, we salute you all with gunfi
re.” Pity Ewart’s family and friends didn’t get to see it.