Laura Restrepo - Isle of Passion

Secundino Angel was born on July 1, 1877, in Chiapas, Mexico, in the gutters of the city of San Cristóbal, a colonial enclave that exerted its domain over extensive indigenous territories. Its houses, all painted blue in honor of the Virgin Mary, were inhabited by white lawyers and clerics. In its stone-paved streets the Indians offered their wares, waited to be hired for jobs, and got drunk on alcohol or ether until they fell to the ground asleep, unconscious, or dead.

In the midst of the many Chamula Indians sitting in the dirt and filth of the plaza, Secundino was one more child, sickly, inveterately unclean, invisible, clinging to the dark woolen skirts of his mother, Gregoria Mayorga.

He was only one more child with adult resignation and burdens as he went up and down mountains carrying firewood behind his father, whose name was Rodolfo Cardona, and who was a Chamula Indian like any other: heavyset, hairy, with docile eyes. His only clothing was a short tunic that left his legs bare, a sheepskin over his shoulders, and a rolled white kerchief on his head. This was styled after the patron saint of the Chamulas, Saint John the Baptist, according to the biblical custom of these mountains, where tribal fashion was dictated by specific patron saints. The Chamulas were not the only ones in the world dressed in the style of a saint; the Pedranos wore capes, haversacks, and tunics in the style of Saint Peter; and the Huistecos had the mantles and the baggy pants of old, like the archangel Saint Michael.

Like his father, Rodolfo, and his mother, Gregoria, Secundino as a child was illiterate and did not even speak Spanish. However, by the age of twelve he could deal with hunger, withstand loneliness, and overcome fear, so he decided to abandon the land in which the life of an adult was worth nothing, and that of a child even less. It was not a willful decision, but the path he was following took him farther and farther away. He gradually left behind the mud huts, the sheep and the pigs, the land of the red earth. He went through the thick pine forests, and when he got to the blue mountains on the horizon, the ones he had seen from his home, he found himself at the barracks entrance. It was a National Guard battalion. The child dared to go in, and he stood in a corner at the horse stables, but since he spoke only Tzeltal, his Indian language, he did not say a word to anyone. He simply waited for hours, until somebody noticed him and signed him up as a volunteer.

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.