No heretical will, no atheistic indifference, no lay prejudice, could stand between their crusading and the deathbed. They would clear paths by swinging their umbrellas, Capitolina snorting, Farnesia fainting, both advancing with their priest toward the bed where, more often than not, the Misses Fagoaga were accepted with a sigh of resignation or with saving praise by the dying person, who thus found in them a pretext to admit he was a closet Catholic and so to arrange his affairs — just in case — with the Other World.
This crusade by the Fagoaga sisters to save souls was put to the test by the staunchest agnostic among their relatives (by marriage), General Don Rigoberto Palomar, father of the deceased inventor Diego Palomar, husband of Isabella Fagoaga and my father Angel’s grandfather. General Palomar, whose life ran neck and neck with that of the century, had been a bugle boy in Don Venustiano Carranza’s Constitutionalist Army, and at the age of eighteen became the youngest general in the Mexican Revolution. His merit consisted in retrieving the arm of General Alvaro Obregón when the future President lost it in an artillery barrage during the battle of Celaya against Pancho Villa. Some say, maliciously, that the severed member of the valiant and canny division leader from Sonora was recovered when General Obregón himself tossed a centennial gold coin up in the air and the lost arm tremulously rose up from among the cadavers and, with immutable greed, snatched at the money.
The modest truth is that the bugle boy, Rigoberto Palomar, accompanied by his faithful mascot, a retriever named Moses, found the arm, which the dog sniffed and took up in his jaws. Rigo kept the dog from gnawing the bone. Alvaro Obregón’s white flesh and blond hair made the famous arm stand out; the bugle boy delivered it personally to Obregón; he was instantly promoted to general. Out of gratitude, the brand-new boy brigadier shot Moses dead so no witnesses would remain — not even a mute one — to the fact that a dog was about to dine on the limb, which, as everyone knows, was preserved in a bottle of formaldehyde and buried along with the general, who, on July 28, 1928, a few days after his election, was treacherously murdered by a religious fanatic during a banquet held in a restaurant called the Lightbulb. Only General Palomar kept the secret of the President-elect’s last words: Obregón, as he died, dragged his one remaining hand over the tablecloth, his blue eyes fading and his voice imploring, “More corn muffins, more corn muffins,” before his inert body collapsed. Today, a monument to his memory stands on Avenida de los Insurgentes, in the very place where he died. Sweethearts meet there by day and marijuana smokers by night.
The guardian of all these scenes, both public and secret, General Rigoberto Palomar, was a national treasure: the last survivor of the Revolution in a political system excessively eager for legitimacy. All of which contributed to making Don Rigo — who was sane on all other matters — insane on the subject of the Mexican Revolution. He simultaneously held two contradictory beliefs: (1) The Revolution was not over; and (2) the Revolution had triumphed and carried out all its promises.
Steadfast between these pillars, Don Rigo, who grew up in the anticlerical cyclone of the Agua Prieta government, fiercely upheld secularism. Let no priest come near him: then Don Rigo showed that the Revolution was indeed on the march by committing some undescribable atrocity or other, from stripping a priest, mounting him on a burro, and leading him through town, to summoning a firing squad to the patio of his house on Calle Génova and pretending to go through a formal execution.
On afternoons, accompanied by his wife Doña Susana Rentería, Grandfather Palomar would climb up to the crest of a ridge with a stone in his hand. He would then toss the stone down the ravine and say to his wife: “Look at that stone, the way it goes on and on.”
This madness of General Palomar made him part of the national patrimony: the government named him Eponymous Hero of the Republic and the PRI gave orders that he never be touched or bothered in any way, an indispensable requirement in a regime where unwritten law, as always, was the personal whim of the man in power. The fact is that my great-grandfather lived a quiet life: he dedicated himself to administering wisely the goods and chattels he’d acquired honestly and lived out his life in perfect sanity, except as regards this matter of his revolutionary madness and his strange love for Doña Susana, who was left to him in the will of a landowner from Jalisco who had supported the Cristero revolt. His name was Páramo and he’d been arrested and murdered by General Palomar’s troops. His last wish was that Don Rigo take his daughter Susana Rentería under his protection, that he symbolically marry her, that he bring her up, and that he consummate their marriage when the girl turned sixteen. The girl, Susana Rentería, was only five years old when her landowning Cristero father was killed, but Don Rigo respected the idea of a last wish, above all that of an enemy, and accepted Pedro Páramo’s inheritance.
He brought Susy (as he came to call her) to his house in Mexico City, where he took care of her, dressing her as if she were a doll, in old-fashioned shifts and velvet slippers. When she was sixteen, he married her. There was a twenty-year difference in age between them, so that when Susy married Rigo, he was about thirty-six years old, and Cárdenas had just forced the Maximum Chief Plutarco Elías Calles out of Mexico.
None of the people who knew them had ever met a couple more in love, more considerate of each other, or more tender. Susy learned very quickly that her husband was an extraordinarily reasonable man in all matters except the Revolution, and she learned over the years to humor him and to say yes, Rigo, you’re right, there isn’t a single priest left alive in Mexico, not a single piece of land that hasn’t been returned to the peasants, not a single parcel of communal land that isn’t a success, not a single archbishop who doesn’t walk about dressed in mufti, not a single nun wearing a habit, not a single gringo company that hasn’t been nationalized, not a single worker who hasn’t been unionized. Elections are free, the Congress calls the President to account, the press is independent and responsible, democracy blazes forth, the national wealth is justly distributed, but there is corruption, Rigo, there is corruption, and it is a revolutionary obligation to wipe it out. The general turned the artillery of his revolution, simultaneously triumphant and permanent, against corruption, Rome, and Washington. Imagine, my tumultuous and elective genes, my Great-grandfather Rigoberto’s dismay when no one could hide from him the fact that the Holy Father, the Vicar of Christ, the Pope himself (and Polish into the bargain!) was in Mexico, dressed as a pontiff and not as an office worker, walking with all due pomp through the streets, welcomed by millions and millions of citizens of the Republic, celebrating Mass and giving blessings right out in public. Don Rigoberto collapsed, took to his bed, howling against the betrayal. He preferred to die rather than admit that Article 3 of the Constitution had been violated: why had all those men died fighting the Cristeros? Why did you have to die on us, General Obregón? Where are you when we need you most, General Calles? You may fire when ready, General Cruz!
Susy called the doctors and advised the family — including Capitolina and Farnesia, who saw a golden opportunity: charity begins at home. They dragged along with them the priest from the Holy Family and my poor twelve-year-old father, so he would experience the hard reality of life. They walked in scattering incense and holy water, calling for the salvation of wayward General Palomar’s soul and warning my young dad not to be surprised that, if Rigoberto did not repent of his sins, horns popped out of his head right then and there and Satan in person might appear to drag him by the heels to hell.