“I remember all this because after everything happened, our mother kept retelling these stories to us, over and over, for years. Whenever she spoke of our father, she took out of her treasure chest a long necklace of gray pearls that he had brought her from Japan and allowed us to touch it.
“But none of this is important, you know, they are small, blurred memories, not good enough for you to write a book about. If you can afford the time, it would be better for you to come with me to the hacienda, only twenty minutes by car, and I’ll take you to see my father.”
In the outskirts of Orizaba, the two rancher sons of Señora Alicia Loyo, née Alicia Arnaud, are talking and resting on the porch of the hacienda after the day’s work. They are eating nopal tacos with chiles and drinking expensive brandy with bottled water from Tehuacán. Facing them there is an expanse of land, all paved, where sheep, pigs, and hens surround a circular trough set right in the center. Señora Arnaud is pointing in its direction. At the center of the animals’ drinking place, on top of a metal cask and accompanied by the chatter of his progeny and the din of the domestic animals, there is a bronze bust of Captain Ramón Nonato Arnaud Vignon, with a spiky Prussian helmet on his head.
Santiago Tlatelolco Prison, Mexico City, 1902
Given name: Ramón Nonato
Family names: Arnaud Vignon
Date of birth: August 31, 1879
Place: Orizaba
Father: Angel Miguel Arnaud (French citizen)
Mother: Carlota Vignon (French citizen)
Height: 5' 7"
Color of hair: brown
Complexion: white
Forehead: ample
Mouth: regular, thin lips
Nose: chiseled
Distinctive markings: small scar in the middle of his forehead
THAT WAS RAMÓN ARNAUD’S personal description, July 8, 1901, as recorded in the enlistment papers of his troubled military career, when he was twenty-two years old. He started as a first sergeant in the Seventh Regiment cavalry of the Mexican Army. It is recorded in the archives of the National Defense Ministry.
His dossier even includes anthropometric notations, which indicate he was a man of medium height (67 inches), of small, almost feminine feet (left foot, 9.75 inches), normal-sized head, and small hands (his left hand, up to the tip of his middle finger, was 4.75 inches long).
Exactly a year after this dossier was recorded, on July 8, 1902, his rosy white skin had become mousy gray, his brown hair was jumping with lice, and the small scar on the waxen texture of his ample forehead stood out like a cross carved by fingernails. Lying on a cot in his cell in the Santiago Tlatelolco military prison, he left his ration of refried beans untouched on its pewter plate, and cried out of rage and humiliation.
A court-martial had dictated his sentence. Five and a half months of imprisonment for being an army deserter, and he had been stripped of rank, degraded to enlisted man. On the night of May 20 just seven weeks before, he had been waiting in a cold sweat for the right time to escape from the barracks, crouching behind some sacks of maize and anticipating with horror the moment that the news would reach his hometown, Orizaba: “Ramón Arnaud is an army deserter.”
But he, poor devil, was incapable of enduring what his comrades in arms in the Seventh Regiment could easily bear. Those hungry, barefoot Indians were able to overcome the inhuman discipline, the kick in the ass, the filth, and the dire poverty that being an army trooper meant. But not he. And neither could he tolerate his comrades: he considered them backward, smelly, half naked in the rags they wore as uniforms, adrift in alcohol and marijuana.
While he, an Arnaud Vignon, a well-educated white man whose family influence had expeditiously advanced him to first sergeant, was more of a shit than all of that shit. And this would be the prized gossip in Orizaba — whispers at the church portico, on the alameda boulevards, during the afternoon hot chocolate.
The town of Orizaba had a French gazebo in the center of the plaza, an Art Nouveau train station, a municipal palace with a wrought-iron facade designed by Eiffel himself — the man made famous by his tower — which had been brought disassembled, screw by screw, from France. The Orizaba families had a Gallic air and were industrious and prosperous. They had more faith in the progress achieved through violent force by their president, Don Porfirio Díaz, than in the heretical, nationalistic ideals of the Indian Benito Juárez. There were such families as the Legrands, who manufactured percale, piqués, calicos, blankets, and French linen in their Cocolapan Woven Goods Factory. And the Suberbies, whose fortune rose like the foam of their Moctezuma beer; Monsieur Chabrand, who sold fine silks and haberdashery in his store, which he had named The Factories of France. The society ladies wore silk shantung dresses embroidered with soutache to stroll down the alameda, and then had to lift their skirts and underskirts a bit to avoid soiling them in human excrement when crossing any of the other streets, used as public latrines by Orizaba’s poor.
A few years earlier, Napoleon’s invading troops had almost turned the city into their permanent headquarters, and the local gentlemen devoted themselves to the pastime of identifying their more exotic army uniforms. They could recognize the Vincennes hunters for their dark blue woolen jackets; the Zouaves, with their red britches, so wide they resembled skirts, and their yellow leather walking boots; the Algerian Zouaves, with their dark skin and white turbans; the Spanish soldiers under General Prim, for their light uniforms and straw hats, and their officers, who wore jaunty little caps they called “leopoldines.”
Orizaba the Damned was condemned by the rest of the nation for its recent docility in the face of European domination and its fascination with the extravagant and phantasmagorical reign of Archduke Maximilian, who served as Emperor of Mexico for three years and seven days, until the Indian Juárez had him killed in the Cerro de las Campanas to prove that no blond-bearded Austrian would rule over the free men of his Aztec homeland. And to make sure this was completely understood, after he was shot, his body was returned to Europe in a rosewood coffin, properly embalmed, and having, instead of his own, the glass eyes from an image of Saint Ursula.
Ramón’s French father, Angel Miguel Arnaud, had crossed the ocean and settled in Orizaba. He loved his new land more than his old one, toiled tirelessly, and managed to accumulate a sizable fortune. He took advantage of a transportation subsidy given to him by the Porfirio Díaz administration to build the local railroad. He became the owner of a hacienda and of a home on Calle Real. He was named Orizaba postmaster, and that was how he had turned into one of the thousands of bureaucrats supported by Don Porfirio in fulfillment of his political slogan, “Let’s feed the donkey.”
In spite of that slogan, life was not easy for these bureaucrats. Their salaries were usually not paid for months, and they were kept in a state of alert for fear of losing their posts at the slightest suspicion of disloyalty to the government. For self-preservation, they had to belong to the appropriate political club, contribute large sums for official holiday celebrations, buy presents for their superior’s mistress, and march in all the parades.