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CH 4 How Julian met the Comandante
When I was nearly eight years-old I got my arm badly broken at the elbow after I fell from a monastery wall. Had I not been barefoot the crushed glass on top would not have cut my feet and I would not have fallen in. But then I would never have met the Comandante, so I guess it was God’s plan, or fate, whichever you want to believe.
On the weekends whenever my mother was rehearsing for a play in the city, she’d place me on a bus to Tenancingo in the mountains surrounding the city where her sister lived. She had been a nun in a convent but fell in love and married. She never had children and always thought it was God’s way of punishing her. Her penance was to leave her abusive husband to become the cook for a monastery of monks outside the village.
Every Saturday I visited she’d take me with her. I’d help her peel vegetables and set the table. When the food was ready, I had to leave before any of the brothers saw me.
Usually I’d walk up to the school fields with the village boys and play soccer. Then when someone kicked the ball in the river, we’d have to find something else to do. And that’s when I learned I could climb a tree like a monkey.
The Monastery was built hundreds of years ago in a depressed clearing on the side of a mountain along a rising ridge line. The only way to it was by car up a steep mountain pass covered with pine trees. It was a dirt road that became awful muddy in the rainy season, but there were plenty of mountain paths one could take to get to it by horse. That’s how many of the small farmers got to and from the market in Tenancingo to sell their fowl, pulque, vegetables and dairy.
Many of the villagers like my aunt had their livelihoods because of the Monastery. Her house stood closest to it. At night if there was a full moon, viewing it from her window was enchanting. Cold dew would form and envelope the monastery in a silver fog; with the moon shining on it the dome rose above its walls like a rock jutting out from the misty sea.
One of these mornings after I finished helping my aunt, I wasn’t in the mood for soccer so I waited outside the kitchen watching piglets wiggle in their pens. My friends came down and found me and we climbed the surrounding trees to peep behind the Monastery walls. Its insides were forbidden for anyone who was not a monk to see. It was rumored that naughty children were sometimes brought to the monastery at night and thrown into dirt cells built under the chapel vaults. We wanted to find out if that was true.
The long thick branch of a Jacaranda tree hung over the wall, the same tree the Fathers hung pinatas from at Christmas time for village children during a posada. Because I was the tallest I was chosen by the others to achieve this daring feat.
If I was careful, when I reached the middle point of the branch, I could hang down onto the wall. I shimmied up easy enough, but when it came time to walk out on the branch I felt safer if I balanced on my bare feet. I pulled off my shoes and threw them to the ground.
Even so when I hung down to the wall my toes were still a couple of inches away and I had to pull up on the branch then drop to touch down. When I finally did green shards of glass cemented into the top of the wall to keep out thieves cut into the souls of my feet. I tried pulling myself back up but then the branch snapped and I fell with it inside the monastery wall. My elbow hit the ground first and cracked. The pain of the cuts on my feet were nothing compared to that pain but I knew if I screamed they’d find me. To keep from yelling I nearly passed out.
A pair of sandaled feet appeared and a monk in his long robe picked me up and carried me through a door which led to a hall and then through another door into a room where another monk helped me onto a table. While one pulled the glass from my feet the other plastered my arm. Soon I was in a cast and the monks told me I would have to do all my eating and writing with the hand of the devil from now on. They asked me who I was, but I didn’t want to get my aunt in trouble so I wouldn’t speak. The two monks locked me in the room to fetch the Abbot who they said had ways of getting information out of bad children. I tried not to think about what dirty cell they might throw me into, so I counted the number of saints pinned up on the walls and crucifixes hung about the room. I was up to twenty-seven when the door opened and a mustached man in a white robe entered with a huge cross hung from his neck. He introduced himself as the Abbot, but said I could call him Comandante and that he’d been waiting for me to arrive for a long time.