Isle of Passion (15 page)

He did his growing up at the barracks and learned Spanish, reading, and writing. He also learned to play reveille, taps, and tattoo, and by the age of thirteen was made bugler. Perhaps because he grew up in a town that manufactured mandolins and drums, music and singing were easy for him. Everything else was more difficult. According to the reports of his superior officers, he was “refractory” to learning and a rebel in matters of discipline. But music was his gift. In his spare time he went from the bugle to the guitar, and from military calls to love songs. When he sang, he acquired poise, looked taller, lost his shyness. He distinguished himself.

Besides, he was handsome, and learned to control his hair in a decorous way, to trim his mustache, and to look half smiling, half sleepy-eyed, as if he actually did not see what he was looking at. He freed himself from misery and sadness, and discovered the advantages of his good voice and good looks. Those were the means he found to create a niche for himself. He became an adventurer and a ladies’ man, a smart aleck who played dumb, a carouser and a troublemaker.

At seventeen he was transferred to the Public Security Battalion in the city of Tuxtla Guitiérrez. He was almost a man, not an adolescent anymore, and he was not an illiterate Indian, but he was not white either. He had exchanged his John the Baptist’s tunic for a soldier’s uniform, he was bilingual, and he knew how to court Indian girls as well as mestizo señoritas. Besides, he knew how to spell, and had a firm handwriting and pompous style that allowed him to work as an amanuensis at the political headquarters in the same town where he served. He had become the Indian who spoke Spanish, who acted as intermediary between the local authorities and the indigenous ones. Secundino Angel Cardona did not belong with his own, and neither with the others. But he counted on his voice, his looks, the shrewdness of an outcast, and a practical intelligence sharpened by misfortune, which he hid from others in order to go through life without being committed to anything or anybody, expecting no reward and avoiding any punishment.

For better or for worse, he managed to make a military career. Private first class, sergeant second class, sergeant first class, and second lieutenant in the auxiliary infantry. He left afterward for the war in Yucatán against the Maya Indians, who had taken up arms against white domination. There he discovered that the days he had lived in poverty with his parents and later in the filthy military barracks were not, as he had believed, the ultimate rung on the poverty scale, and actually not even the next to last. It was in the First Battalion, in the army campaign through the jungles of Yucatán, that Secundino Angel and his comrades in arms reached the bottom rung of the human condition.

They had buried themselves in a labyrinth of swamps with no exit, defeated beforehand not only by their confusion but also by malaria, mountain leprosy, extreme heat, and snakes, while the enemy knew the jungle inside out and lay in wait, immune to venom and miasmas.

They were moving with the pachydermic heaviness of the regular army while their adversaries, using guerrilla tactics, attacked them from all sides. War for them was an accursed mission, a detestable duty, while the Mayas were fighting for themselves in a holy war, and they fought with the conviction of cornered beasts acutely aware that the question was to kill or be killed.

Sometimes the soldiers’ guts would burst after drinking from a well poisoned by the Indians. Sometimes they fell into traps full of spines that had been kept for a while inside the decomposing body of a fox, and which, upon sinking into the flesh, produced ulcers that would not heal. Other times their bodies were exploded by prehistoric grenades, made with raw bullhide and tied together with sisal fibers. It could also happen that they would be gunned down by the luminous blasts from modern Lee-Enfield rifles that the rebels had obtained from the English in Belize.

These soldiers of the Mexican Army were immersed in the last circle of hell, subject to bureaucratic orders from an absentee general, while the enemy, descendants of the Mayas, had gone to war by divine design and received their combat orders from the so-called Saint Talking Cross, whom they were fiercely guarding in a fortress-sanctuary. There was no way to defeat them.

Whether it was for some act of bravery not specified in his military records or perhaps simply for having survived his Yucatán ordeal, Lieutenant Second Class Cardona received from the governor of the state a medal of valor and merit. It was the only decoration he ever received.

Punishments, on the other hand, seemed to rain on him. After his return from Yucatán with the First Battalion, while stationed in Puebla, he suffered a bout of rebelliousness and defiance of discipline, and his stays in the army prison became a matter of routine. His record is specific in this, overloaded with warnings and sanctions: he spent fifteen days in the military prison at Santiago Tlatelolco for failing to report for duty for two days; he was arrested in the flag hall for marching in a parade without his pistol; later, another fifteen days for showing disrespect to an officer. Then he was jailed for fifteen days for insulting an officer and “forcing him into a fight.” For this incident he received a reprimand equivalent to the step previous to being discharged by the army. Cardona did not pay much attention.

He turned to alcohol. He got apocalyptically drunk, and he would then do everything he had not dared to do sober. He would hit his friends, embrace his enemies, disrespect his superiors, rape the wives of his inferiors, reduce his guitar to smithereens, vomit on his uniform, and curse his fate.

He would not allow anyone to tell him not to drink because as a child he had been nurtured with firewater. When his mother suffered from convulsions that made her body stiff, the medicine man made her drink to drive the sickness away. When his father made straw hats and sold them in the market, he would go afterward to a cantina in San Cristóbal and fill his belly with firewater. Soaked in drivel, oblivious of his body, he would go into an autistic and astral trip to faraway and better worlds. Four or five days later, he would be found, in a ditch alongside the road, wearing the ragged costume and beatific expression of a saint that has been knocked down from his niche.

Secundino himself, as a child, learned the bittersweet happiness of being drunk when the firewater gourd was passed around during the fiestas and a cap of monkey fur was placed on his head.

“Be happy, my child,” he was told, “enjoy the fiesta. Be happy and dance and jump like a monkey.”

At twenty-eight he was dishonorably discharged from the army. He was an adult but not mature; he was neither an Indian nor a white man; neither a country peon nor an urban weasel; an alien among civilians and a reject among the soldiers. There was no place for Cardona in this world.

The following year he applied to the Ministry of the Army and Navy, asking to be reassigned on probation. The answer was unequivocal: “Not apt,” for being abusive with those of lower rank and considering himself equal to his superiors; because “coming from the troops, he adopted their ways and cannot change.” And in case this was not clear enough, the reporting officer wrote at the bottom of the page: “Tell the person concerned not to insist.”

But Cardona did insist. For three years he tried his hand at various jobs: as an employee for Mr. Enrique Perret, owner of a printing press at 3 Espíritu Santo, Mexico D.F.; as a clerk for Mr. Steffan, owner of a stationery store at 14 Coliseo Viejo in the same city; as a collector for Roger Heymans; as a construction worker for Mr. Enrique Schultz. He asked for letters of reference from all of them, and attached them to a new application for rehitching with the army. The answer was again no.

Among Cardona’s gifts were the patience of a saint, the tenacity of a beggar, and the ability to jump rank in order to reach the top authorities directly. He devoted a whole year to collecting his references, but this time he exceeded himself. He obtained letters from the head of Cavalry, Guillermo Pontones; from the head of Infantry, Félix Manjarrez; from the inspector of Police, E. Castillo Corzo, who professed to know him as an honorable person. And a last letter, which must have been the decisive one, signed by General Enrique Mondragón, stating that “this gentleman has improved his behavior considerably and, therefore, deserves to be admitted again in the military.”

Finally, the Ministry of the Army and Navy, having run out of patience, or because of pressure from above, repealed the previous resolutions and authorized Cardona’s readmission to the army, to the Twenty-seventh Battalion operating in the Sonora campaign. He was sent to fight the Yaqui Indians and later he was assigned to the mines in Cananea. His old tricks made a comeback, and he was arrested again repeatedly: nine days at the flag hall for failing to pay attention to his superior; nine more days for going to a cantina in his uniform; fifteen for absenteeism; another twelve days for the same reason; ten days with no specified motive; ten for not working on the firewood-gathering detail and not responding to the calls at six, reveille, and retreat; a month in the military prison at Tokin for serious misdeeds against the bugler’s wife; another month because, being under arrest, he asked permission to pee and bolted; eight days for not being present at reveille; eight days for not attending instruction meetings; eight days for errors committed in the performance of duty; eight more for the same; thirty days for wounding a comrade; a month for manhandling another soldier’s wife; a month for public disturbances.

His superiors decided to stop arresting him, because it didn’t solve anything, and opted to send him on dangerous missions, like the campaign against the rebels in the state of Guerrero. Later he was promoted to lieutenant for his daring behavior during several shooting incidents, but as he continued drinking, he was relegated to undesirable assignments. First he ended up with a group of handicapped and ragtag men and lost souls who called themselves the “Irregulars” Battalion, and then he was literally put away, like fourth-class material, in the Officers and Chiefs Depot.

From this depot he was rescued to be sent to Clipperton Island. There he was promoted to captain second class. But Secundino Angel Cardona never got to know it.

I
N
D
ECEMBER OF
1911
El Demócrata
arrived again at Clipperton. People had been waiting for seven months under extremely hard conditions, but somehow during the previous two years the inhabitants of the isle came to the conclusion that the real periodical arrival of the ships was actually not every three months, but every six, approximately.

During this period a second child had been born to Ramón and Alicia. Since the firstborn had been a boy, he had been given his father’s name; this was a girl, and she received her mother’s name. She was growing up a happy and healthy child, as if beyond Clipperton there were nothing else, as if there were no better meal than a shark fillet, and no more enjoyable toys than seashells and crabs.

If Ramoncito was very close to his parents and overwhelmed with adult worries, Alicia, the younger one, was his total opposite. From the moment she learned to use her legs, at eleven months, she started running and organized her own world among the coral reefs, in the sand, in the mud puddles. It was an ordeal to put her to bed or to keep her contented inside the house.

As the years went by—a lot of them—this little girl became Alicia Arnaud, Mr. Loyo’s widow, the charming old lady in the Pensión Loyo, Orizaba, who, sitting at her kitchen table, pours milk into jars and enjoys her happy memories.

When
El Demócrata
arrived at last, there was a letter for Ramón from his mother, Doña Carlota. It was dated Orizaba, December 1910, so it had been delayed for a whole year. Before attending to anything else, Ramón locked himself up to read it.

It was unusually long and detailed, full of optimism and good humor. The mother was telling her son about the Centenary of Independence holidays, held in the capital in September 1910. Her invitation had come through some friends she still had in government. The centenary had coincided with General Porfirio Díaz’s birthday, and the old president, already in his eighties, decided on a grand celebration for the double occasion. The festivities were going to be the most lavish his poor country had ever seen. For a whole month there would be bread for everybody, and circus performances everywhere.

She wrote that there were people who tried to oust him through uprisings and revolts, but that he would take charge and demonstrate to all that he was still holding the reins, and quite securely. That some people said he was old and cracking, that anything made him cry like a babe in arms, that he was as deaf as a doorknob and had whims like a pregnant woman. That he was unbearable because he was such a sourpuss, and that his mind was gone and he could not even remember his second family name. Of course Porfirio Díaz would show them that his balls were still in the right place, whole and hale. All phonies and amateurs at taking over would learn who was the authentic “Patriot Nonpareil,” the “Prince of Peace,” the “World’s Statesman,” the “Creator of Wealth,” the “Father of His People.” They would find out.