Looking down from the yellowing ramparts into the shallow water, which stinks of algae and sewage, one can see the bottom, and sometimes spy the outlines of preying sharks, who guard this hateful prison-island at no expense to the Crown, excepting that incidental loss of labor when a local fisherman loses a leg or worse. They patrol the harbor like bluish-grey shadows. Never mind that the shore lies no great distance away! At church I learned that their voracious grins are set around their snouts for the express benefit of the King of Spain and his laws. All the same, the authorities of Veracruz keep other sentinels, whose swords and guns terrify the prisoners as effectively as sharks’ teeth. It was these who marched that batch of chained prisoners up the steep steps from the landing-place and across the broad low terrace of coral-stone blocks where everything was asymmetrical. The boy looked up. He saw a many-slitted phallic guard tower. The column continued to move, and so he stumbled. A soldier split open his back with two blows of the whip.
Before the commandant’s palace, which was the one square building in that considerable courtyard whose balconies shielded themselves with heavy wooden railings carved out in leaf-shapes and whose windows were latticed with drooping iron ribs, the criminals now got registered and divided up like scoops of grease flicked into so many bubbling pots, the pots being the cells. Wondering whether he might pass the remainder of his life without light, Agustín dared to look up a second time, and saw someone high above him, wearing shiny boots and a scarlet-velveted brigandine with the rivets glittering all down his chest. He wondered how he would feel to become this man, who appeared nearly as small as a seagull on the cathedral’s roof, or at least to look down from this parapet and watch the tiny figures marching through the courtyard. Before he had thought this for very long, they kicked and flogged him, in his string of six, down a long tunnel of arches, whose floor was round stones, and across the stone bridge over the brownish-green water to the polygon-island of huge dank-domed cells, where he left the light indeed. The chamber where they intended him to pass his next nine years had two narrow slits for windows, up high so that a man could not put his face to them. The interior resembled a crocodile’s toothy mouth, for it bore yellow-white stalactites and stalagmites of salt. Stinking rotting half-toothless men lay one upon the other, wheezing, spitting and cursing. The ones who could now sat up, scanning him as thoroughly as our priests will a marriage witness. That was how he was studied and then accepted by his new friend Rodrigo de la Concepción, octaroon, who had already served three years of an eighteen-year term for stealing an infantryman’s helmet. Soon they became very easy together, for in San Juan de Ulúa, as in any prison, life grows jollier and safer for wretches who double up to share secrets. For much the same reason that in Veracruz the birds flock more wildly at twilight than at noon, so in San Juan de Ulúa the convicts commence to crawl all over one another the moment that the sun descends beneath the sea. Accordingly, at dusk Rodrigo got to business. The fingers of his hand, now laid upon the boy’s belly, were as elegant as a crow’s black talons, shining as softly as if they were gloved in patent leather. He liked Agustín even better upon learning that he was a murderer’s brother; thus it came out that in addition to the affair of the infantryman’s helmet, Rodrigo deserved the credit of fitting his hands around a certain woman’s throat, for a cause that any man of style could understand:
Mestiza, goddess of the orient;
mestiza, queen of the sun,
so that you look decent,
remove that piece of bean
which covers your whole tooth!