UNITED STATES—The second half of the 20th century had now been ravished by the turning of the calendar. The schoolteacher was succeeded by his vice president, one of the young officers who had purged the old regime. Born in Quetzaltenango in 1913 when Allied Fruit was already a monstrously large enterprise, Gascón had a Franco-German father. The child had eyes of unrelenting blue whose hypnotic spell cannot be overemphasized among the brown-eyed crowd. The light shade of brown hair, just like his fathers, warranted him the coveted adjective blonde. To be sure, Augusto Jacobo stuck out in the shoe-polish brown crowds of Quetzaltenango. Very handsome.
“You look like an angel,” he was flattered by the household help that combed his hair. Being born on the 14th of September, of a Virgo bent, the flattery went to the head and later was rejected. His father had great similarity with Graydon Miller’s, not only the German blood, more than a soupcon, and after marrying an ivory-complected Criolla in Quetzaltenango, they settled in the outskirts of the mountainous city and opened a drug store. Otto Jakob was a licensed pharmacist, a man of prescriptions and containers filled with potions. He got high on his own supply, he became addicted first to one kind of pill, then to several kinds; that forced him to devise an intricate daily cocktail that ultimately bound him to narcotics in general.
Narcotics filled his days with euphorias, shadows of the trees, barnacled hills in the distance, faces in the market—everything became profound, a manifestation of the divine spirit. He made poor decisions while under the opiate influence. Otto Jakob gave away what he should have kept, and kept what he should have given away. To his son, Augusto Jacobo, he was a good man broken on the wheel of Moneyism. (which made men into monkeys for $$$). Then the drugs stopped working, or rather, they started working in a terrible new way. Where there had been angels, before, now goblins and devils were revealed. turned moody, depressed. No one could talk to him.
“One fine day,” as Augusto Jacobo recounted. “He went into the back room of his apothecary and shot himself in the head.” And then he got up and meticulously cleaned all the blood and squid-like smithereens of a brain. Filled his mouth with water so it would explode like a cantaloupe when the second projectile pierced his skull.
The Gascón family lived a gypsy life after the father’s self-slaughter. Augusto Jacobo still had not reached the age of shaving, moved from house to house, uncle to uncle. He grew silent and sad. He radiated not just sadness, but melancholy, of that very special kind which connotes a deepness of spirit, a maturity beyond years. Augusto Jacobo was blond as his dad. When he was fourteen, his mom sent him off to military school, and there he discovered a sense of belonging. He was comforted by order and rules, things that had been lacking in the peripatetic family’s life.
“Goodbye,” he cried, shedding tears.
“Goodbye my son,” Mom said and his three siblings, all girls.
He loved knowing who was above him and who was below him. He had found his place, and went on to Guatemala’s Escuela Politecnica, the nation’s highest military academy which was founded on September 1, 1873, where his scholastic achievements placed him at the highest level in the school’s history.
He was a man when he graduated, with highest honors, tall and convivial with the classmates, ready to drink, gamble and play the field. He had no ideology, under the mask of conviviality, only the conviction that his father had been weak and a victim of the system. The perceived weakness Augusto Jacobo could do nothing about. But the system…In this case the system was Allied Fruit.
The deep ideas later expressed in speeches and rants came from his wife Angelica Maria Villalpando Saenz who recognized in the young officer a perfect chalice for her visions.
They went out, on several closely chaperoned outings, and at the first occasion when they were left alone in the grounds of the family’s country house, she confided in him. Angélica Maria grew up, the daughter of a rich coffee grower who banned her from his library, but she read in secret. She was cast in the murky zone of children who have disappointed their fathers.
“My fathers blamed everything on reading Steinbeck, Karl Marx, and Sor Juana,” she said.
Jacobo looked dumbly and inspected his cuticles long and hard. He didn’t know about reading, had no passion for it. Augusto Jacobo was more hands-on experiential, with convictions derived more from what he’d seen and felt in the flesh. You didn’t need a book to tell you about injustice, just stand outside the electrified fence and see their gorgeous enclave with golf course, green-gold in the tropic sin, its swimming pool and tiny little houses painted primary colors and see what was outside the fence to understand inequality.
Yet he could romanticize it, too, deducing, “That soul-numbing poverty outside the fence at least inures one to desire,” thought Gascón, “At least you’re in a state of inertia, but once you get that coin jingle in your pocket or those bread crusts in your belly, then comes alive to serpent, More More MORE! There is never enough.”
To Be Continued…
