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.
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.