George Washington's Ghost

“Why, Professor Altamirano!” This woman smiled, rising from her chair and coming around her desk to shake Rodrigo’s hand. She turned to the other, younger man and extending her hand again said: “Professor Icaza, it is a great honour to meet you at last.”

This rather disconcerted Arturo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena, a rather junior member of the faculty of the University of Cuernavaca. He was a stocky, and even today, a little unkempt, seemingly distracted man in his late thirties who rarely socialised, or played ‘the political game’ within the tight-knit academic community. To everybody’s surprise he had married a former student some ten years his junior eighteen months ago, who had already presented him with a baby daughter. His wife, a plump, bubbly presence had not made any attempt to ‘tidy up’ her new husband; presumably, on the grounds that she liked him just the way he was. He had turned up for his meeting with the President of the Republic in a jacket with leather patches over both the elbows.

The President was not alone when, a few minutes later the two academics entered his office, a cool, sparsely decorated large room with tall windows along its southern and western aspects.

General of the Army of New Spain, Felipe de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón, rose from an armchair as the two University of Cuernavaca men came in.

Santa Anna, the man who had used his position as Chief of Staff of the Mexican Armed Forces – the ‘Army of New Spain’ title was a meaningless honorific these days and had been for a century – to cement the hold of the National Democrats on power in the pre-de Soto era, was wearing a plain Army dress uniform with no badges of rank other than, on his left breast pocket a small tab which read: Gen. Santa Anna

.

It was a standing joke that all of Santa Anna’s predecessors had eventually expired of exhaustion under the weight of the multiplicity of the medals they wore, ‘all the time!’ But then, of course, unlike most of his predecessors, Santa Anna did not pretend to, or for a moment plan to be, the dictator of México.

He was a man of average height, fifty-six now, still trim with a relatively full head of hair, a man to whom a uniform seemed like a second skin. Only a lieutenant colonel at the time of the last war with the English, he had been the man whose troops had stemmed the rout and later, as revolution threatened, ordered the troops under his command to interpose themselves between the rioters in México City and the trigger-happy para-militaries of the old, sham-government coalition which had sent so many of the nation’s sons to their death untrained, under-armed and disgracefully badly led in the borderlands with New England.

Back in those days the country had been teetering on the verge of civil war and he

, Santa Anna, had stepped briefly onto the political stage and given the old regime a chance to peacefully step aside, to avoid a bloodbath. After that, his promotion to the top job had been axiomatic, and for the last nine years he had worked tirelessly to re-build and to re-equip, and to instil a wholly new esprit de corps in the Mexican Army, Air Force and to his enduring chagrin, only to a lesser extent, in the Navy, whose officer corps still doggedly fought to remain the preserve of the old, conquistador aristocracy. That said, he and Vice Admiral Count Carlos Federico Gravina y Vera Cruz, the Chief Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the Armada de Nuevo Granada, and he, generally ‘knocked along’ well enough, and Santa Anna was only too well aware that at sea, he was, well, all at sea…

Besides, all revolutions had their price.

That México’s most recent revolution had been largely peaceful, and that the country had reaped the rewards of that these last ten years as never before, was a price worth paying if its only cost, albeit a substantial one, was that the Navy had retained much of its former independence. Moreover, while Gravina rightly basked in the glory of being the High Admiral of the Fleets of the Triple Alliance, he – and more importantly, his quarrelsome admirals and captains – were going to be far too busy to meddle in the affairs of the state at home, or attempt to interfere with the able men entrusted with prosecuting the war in New England.

Arturo Ortiz Mena was staring wide-eyed at Santa Anna.

“We meet at last, Professor,” the soldier half-smiled, shaking the academic’s hand and making eye contact. He turned to the dishevelled younger man’s companion. “We meet again, old friend,” he said wryly, his grip dry, hard.

“The honour is all mine, General,” Rodrigo re-joined.

“Don Rodrigo commanded the rear guard in the retreat from the Rio Grande Country,” Santa Anna informed Ortiz Mena, “he and his men fought like lions. They saved what was left of the Army. But for Don Rodrigo there would have been no Army left to stop the Republic descending into another civil war.”