The Old Gringo

Fuentes builds the novel from the real, unresolved disappearance of Ambrose Bierce, the American writer and Civil War veteran who crossed into Mexico in 1913, at the height of the Revolution, and was never seen again. Fuentes's fictional old gringo goes looking for exactly the death Bierce's own late journalism seemed to court, riding with General Tomás Arroyo's forces less out of political conviction than a wish to be killed usefully, on someone else's terms, rather than fade out unnoticed in the United States he's spent decades savaging in print. Arroyo, in turn, is fighting a war that is intensely personal underneath its revolutionary banner: he is the hacienda owner's illegitimate son, and the land documents he burns in a symbolic bonfire are the very papers that once defined his own people, and his own birth, as property rather than citizens.

Harriet Winslow, an American governess who arrives at the same hacienda to tutor children who no longer exist, completes a triangle in which each character projects onto Mexico a different fantasy: the gringo wants his death to mean something, Arroyo wants his birthright acknowledged by force, and Harriet wants a version of moral order she can still recognize as her own. Fuentes uses their mutual incomprehension to dramatize what he frames as the deeper condition running under a century of United States and Mexican relations, two countries bound together by proximity and history that keep fatally misreading what the other one actually wants.

Fuentes threads the real Bierce's reputation for mordant, unsentimental war writing, most famously An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, directly into the fictional old gringo's own voice and outlook, so that the novel reads at points like a dialogue between Fuentes's prose and Bierce's remembered style rather than a straightforward historical pastiche. The device lets Fuentes treat the old gringo's disappearance not just as an unsolved historical mystery but as a kind of authorial afterlife, a real writer's persona surviving into a fiction that finally gives his vanishing an ending, even if an invented one, that his actual biography never provided.