Angel Miguel Arnaud understood these rules and knew how to play the game. During his lifetime, his family enjoyed a comfortable life, up to the provincial splendor customary in Orizaba. As soon as he died, his widow, Doña Carlota Vignon — who was until then a happy and carefree matron, famous for preparing the best homemade mayonnaise in town — squandered all of his fortune according to some, or fell victim to a greedy executor according to others, but with the same result: total ruin.
Ramón, their oldest child — by then a half-French, half-Mexican teenager with large, dreamy eyes and long, doll-like eyelashes — was so perplexed by this adversity that he had no idea of what to do with his life. He had been raised to count on an inheritance, not to deal with bankruptcy.
For a while he was an apothecary’s apprentice. He memorized the formulas and names of all available medications, and he began providing first aid until the apothecary abandoned town, business, and all, and moved to the capital. After a chaotic period of doing nothing, Ramón opted for a military career.
If he could have afforded it, he would have paid for an officer’s career with training at a military academy, as any son of a white man was wont to do, and would have received medals, honors, and all sorts of creature comforts for himself. But since he had no money, he had to become, like average Mexicans, just beaten-up army fodder. He did obtain one privilege in recognition of his social status, and that was to join with the rank of first sergeant.
At the first bitter taste of life in the barracks, young Ramón Arnaud regretted his decision and tried to change the course of his life a little too late, making his biggest error, the one that marked him, for better or for worse, till the end of his days.
It happened one night in the barracks, behind the sacks of maize. He started thinking about his life and that it was better to suffer humiliation than to be repelled by it all and be bored to death. He ran away.
After deserting, he went into hiding in Mexico City like an outlaw, ashamed like a sinner. He spent a month wandering in the sordid streets of Tepito, hiding in the warehouses of La Merced market, trying to avoid being doused by the locals emptying their chamber pots out the window. He took refuge in the whores’ hovels in Calle del Organo, lived in the taverns together with suicidal bohemians and blind musicians, and vied for coins on street corners, like the fire-eaters, the poetry hawkers, and the cat hunters.
Then came his dark day, when he was found and jailed as an army deserter. On those humid and unbearable nights in Santiago Tlatelolco, while his crumbled honor tormented him even more than the cold in his cell or the lice on his head, he realized that he had made a terrible mistake, that it was better to be dead a hundred times than to suffer that humiliation just once.
In his feverish insomnia he thought of the worst possible forms of death: being consumed by fire, his body dismembered and roasted over a grill; trapped in miasmas, slowly sinking into a viscous and foul-smelling swamp; or being dumped into the ocean and menaced by the shadowy blue glimmers of a great black manta ray until finally drowning.
“Any of them,” he said in his delirium, “I’ll take any of those torments, anything but this dishonor.”
The day he was set free, already recovered from his fevers and again in possession of his mental faculties, he made a sacred pact with himself. Once out of jail and looking back at the blackened pre-Columbian stone walls of Santiago Tlatelolco, he solemnly swore, on the memory of his father and on his mother’s love, on the seven daggers that pierce the heart of Our Lady of Sorrows and on the love of his country, that never ever again, in his personal life or as an army man, would he go through the shame of another humiliation like this one.
Mexico City, 1907
COLONEL ABELARDO AVALOS of the engineering division, godfather and protector of the young junior officer Ramón Arnaud, made an appointment to speak with his godson in Mexico City.
“Ramón, you are going to Clipperton. With a detail of eleven soldiers under your command.”
He was told just like that, no preambles.
When Arnaud heard the word “Clipperton,” he felt a stab of pain behind his eyes. He knew all about that miserable atoll lost in the middle of the ocean because he had accompanied Colonel Avalos there a couple of times. While his guts froze, his face was burning; he wiped the sweat off with his hands, and onto his pants.
“Banished,” he murmured almost imperceptibly, aware that with a desertion on his record he had no moral authority to protest.
Slouched in his chair, belittled, already twenty-seven years old, big and hirsute, but only a second lieutenant. His protest came almost in a whisper: going to that island would be like starting all over again, and for the third time. This was too much, it asked too much of him. How come nobody recognized that he did not deserve such an ill fate? Why was he being subjected to this third ordeal by fire when he was passing his second one with honors?
After serving his sentence at Santiago Tlatelolco, Arnaud, with a mule’s obstinacy, had intended to go back, to retrace his path in order to show courage instead of fear, and to be decisive where before he had faltered. He would respect the solemn oath he had made to himself facing the blackened walls of the military prison, even at the cost of his life.
On December 16, 1902, he had rejoined the army, this time just as a recruit, in the Twenty-third Battalion in Veracruz. The conditions were tougher there than those that had broken him after his original enlistment as first sergeant, but in spite of this, he endured the second hitch. He endured it all with resignation and ate crow with a large spoon. In six months, he made corporal and, later, sergeant second class. Then he was again a first sergeant, just as before.
In July 1904, already a second lieutenant, he was transferred to the Tenth Battalion in Yucatán, with orders to quash an insurrection of the Maya Indians. It was an impossible objective. His mission was to do away with a cross that talked, someone known as Saint Talking Cross, who acted as the supreme commander of the Indians and incited them to rebellion. Arnaud tried to fulfill his duty. He demolished temple fortresses, and with his sword toppled many of those Talking Cross leaders, who were using their gift of speech not to call the Mayas to prayer but to encourage them to struggle. For each cross he struck down, another three new talking crosses sprang in place, and his mission turned into an inferno, an endless nightmare.
As a reward for his efforts, ineffectual though superhuman, he was given the medal of merit and courage, and his lost honor was restored.
If he had put his past behind him and was now in good standing with the army, distinguishing himself as a junior officer and even earning a medal, why then was he being forced to start all over again? Why was he being isolated in the remotest, most insignificant corner on the map?
“Besides, Godfather, I am getting married,” Arnaud desperately pleaded to Colonel Avalos.
His wedding had already been arranged; he could not break his word and didn’t want to. He had already asked for Alicia’s hand in marriage, he was in love, and she was waiting for him. How could he explain to his fiancée that he was calling off their wedding? How to justify another failure to the people in his hometown of Orizaba? Everybody knew about his impending marriage. “Please understand,” pleaded Arnaud, “please realize that this wedding cannot be postponed.”
This merely served to free the torrent of Colonel Avalos’s patriotic fervor. His words were gushing out in spurts. Ramón Arnaud could perceive only fragments, unconnected phrases that reached his ears slowly, as if deferred, moments after being uttered.