“As he walked along the crowded streets, he almost wished for the old days, and carelessly wondered how many men he had killed there. His leather pants legs showed he wore the traditional tight-fitting costume of the Mexican charro. The other two thirds of his body was encased in a huge mackinaw […] Although he was not an inordinately large man, the mackinaw and the sombrero made him dwarf the people around him.”

This first description of Juan Rubio sets him apart from the people around him in Juarez. His association with the city’s bloody past both connects him intimately to the city and alienates him from it. His distinctive clothing, seeming to make him larger than the other citizens, marks him out as someone with a distinctive and heroic relationship to this place.

“Juan Rubio said nothing, and suddenly the lieutenant said excitedly, ‘Wait! You cannot possibly be Juan Manuel Rubio? The Colonel Rubio?’ ‘The ex-Colonel Rubio, but at your service never the less, Teniente. You know of me?’”

The events of the first few pages have a cinematic quality. The weathered Colonel walks anonymously into town, shoots a man in a bar, sleeps with a young prostitute, gets apprehended, and is at last dramatically recognized. Here, the initial sense is that this mysterious charro is more than he seems—and his identity means he can literally get away with murder. There’s a sense that this is a world of distinctly masculine codes of power and conduct.

“He was suddenly filled with such hopelessness that he was inarticulate. His beloved general was to die—perhaps already he was dead! And all the dead in the struggle had died for nothing, and the living who had followed him would live also for nothing. But, no! He could not allow himself to believe such a thing! Such a monstrous thing should not be even thought by him!”

This passage is a good example of free indirect speech—words that, while not directly attributed to a character, nevertheless appear in their voice. The crusty Juan Rubio’s inner voice is surprisingly passionate and emotive: Though his outside behavior is steely and cruel, he has a lively heart. It seems that his patriotism and his loyalty to his comrades-in-arms are his profoundest feelings.