The Devil’s Sentry Box
by Bev Jafek
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
In the city of old San Juan, Puerto Rico during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the island was governed by the Spanish colonial army and the city was surrounded by high stone walls of fortresses, a legend grew up in the southern fort, Castillo de San Cristobal, concerning a sentry box cut from stone on the highest wall of the fortress overlooking the Caribbean and beyond to the Atlantic Ocean. Soldiers assigned to this particular sentry box for the nightwatch from 11:00 pm to 4:00 a.m. often disappeared under mysterious circumstances and were believed to have been spirited away by the devil.
I visited San Juan and was intrigued to walk around in the San Cristobal fort and look out to sea from what has since been called the Devil’s Sentry Box. I was convinced that I would feel some intimation of what lay behind the garita’s legendary disappearances; and an eerie, haunting tale, slightly astringent with a green apple taste, would present itself, unannounced, to my mind. In this perfect certainty, I recognized my trained facility at allowing myself to become a child.
I had spent the day observing cannons, ramparts, dungeons, barracks and even the church in which the soldiers worshiped. My curiosity was piqued to see not a single representation of Christ but only a painting of the Virgin Mary in this shrine, and piqued again as I learned from the historical literature in vitrines that the garita legend began when the army was in the process of killing nearly all of the native Taino Indian population, outside of small isolated tribes deep in the island’s interior rainforests and misty, landslide-prone mountains.
A long, steep-walled corridor that had been dug into the sandy earth led to the sentry box, which was placed furthest away from the fort and therefore closest to the city. As I walked down the corridor, I noted that Indians and other enemies of the Spanish military government could easily hide themselves in the sand dunes above the sentry as he approached the garita, kill him and remove his body in the walled darkness, and then disappear with it into the city or dump it into the ocean, easily accessible over a shoulder of sand. A “disappearance,” of course, would invite less scrutiny and retribution than a visible murder.
Likewise, a soldier who wanted to defect would find it easiest to desert from this location, since it was farthest from the fort, closest to the city, and would allow unseen movement within the corridor. A few meters away from the corridor’s conjunction with the fort was particularly alluring street, Calle del Cristo; a steep, cobblestone vertical descent into the city that, enhanced by gravity, would allow a running soldier to achieve within minutes a wild, breathless freedom in the city’s beautiful heart. The frequent sight of this street could prove irresistible to any number of soldiers. There were several good explanations, then, for the disappearances; and yet my thoughts began to wind and waver as I approached the sentry box, yet...
The tropical heat was mesmerizing as I entered the sentry box and looked out the small tripartite stone window that displayed the turbulent waters of the Caribbean, roaring against the rocky cliffs that fell directly below and allowed a clear view of the ocean and sky far out to sea. I could see the immense cumulus clouds that massed themselves against the island and produced a daily tropical downpour; I saw the surf roiling against enormous black boulders that perpetual oceanic force had hurled against the sheer vertical drop of the fortress wall; I saw the unique color of the island’s waters when coral reefs are present — incandescent liquid blue topaz with a trembling thread of purple — that occurs nowhere but around such island reefs. I could see the beginning ascent of a palely silver full moon above the beginning flush of an ochre and cinnabar sunset that would paint the entire island within an hour.
After drinking these images as a visionary mead, my thoughts cartwheeled about in the eighteenth-century city I had traversed during the last few days: intimately narrow, cobblestone streets; delicate pastel stucco facades of houses from whose open doors the polished darkness of oak interiors richly glowed; iron lanterns that, at night, extended orange spheres of light like strange sea creatures hovering in the sultry lavender air. These touched and merged with the tropical heat and the sheer fall into raging turquoise waters below the garita window.
In these whirling images, I knew I had found a diminutive version of the world’s exquisite cities on water; those intricately voluptuous states of mind I have loved — Rio, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Denpasar, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Tangier — cites whose beauty is pure magnetism, inevitability: they exist because we must love them.
And, it could be said that the devil was whispering in my ear, for that is one word we use to describe the wonder, terror, thunder, infinite disruption, the loss of self hurling itself into the earth’s unutterable and unattainable beauty, like the surf below the garita; and then another consciousness in its place — a musical, iridescent, sumptuously shaped mystery — the universe rising from the turquoise sea up to the cumulous sky.
This is precisely when the story, in a rapid voice, almost an imprecation, grabbed my arm and told itself to me, as most of my stories do, as though nothing could matter more than this, a voice part devil, part angel, and entirely human. Three things converged at once, it said: the sentries’ disappearance, the mass-murder of the Taino Indians, and a burgeoning attendance at Sunday worship in the fortress church; a small space that could no longer hold them all, but left many worshipers sitting outside on the stone steps and promenades, unable to hear what was being said or sung yet silently knowing that no male deity would ever forgive their bloody, barbarous sins; no one but a woman, the virgin mother of Christ, the gender that provided them with such sympathetic, regular prostitutes.
The garrison’s Commander, General Juan Alonzo Tejadillo, became convinced that his men were defecting from their bloody work and escaping into the city, perhaps to secure passage back to Spain on one of the ships bringing more ammunition and supplies. The worst of them, he believed, might be joining the pirate ships that occasionally sailed into the harbor and wrought great violence and destruction to his men and their supply route.
He had once seen combat with the famed pirate leader, Roberto Cofresi, whose men used double-edged axes in the most horrifying hand-to-hand combat he had ever witnessed. Even some Indians, he knew, were now on these terrible pirate ships, creating more chaos and damage than the French and Dutch colonial fleets did to his governance and pride in domination.
Unknown to his men, General Tejadillo was terrified of pirates and had regular nightmares about them, yet found them mysteriously fascinating and even (he hated to even think the word), beautiful. Since his soldiers had begun disappearing, he more frequently fell prey to his most frightening pirate nightmare of all: a hairy, naked pirate with a midnight blue bandanna sodomized him throughout the night, causing him to awaken in a pool of his own semen.
Damn! The general shouted and pounded his fist on his desk: he needed a man to watch those night sentries and bring them back! He promptly summoned Sergeant Alejandro Gerardo Gonzalez, a native Castilian, into the plain room with an ocean view that functioned simultaneously as his barracks and office, and invited him to have dinner there after sunset. He knew this sergeant to be a man of great moral purity who would not even allow himself an occasional visit to the prostitutes, who was horrified but sweatily proficient at killing Indians, who had even once wanted to become a priest and had often been seen to whip his naked back and buttocks to dispel unclean thoughts and actions and above all, who was the first to arrive at the Sunday church service within the fort; a small, hawk-nosed man who he thought of as on his knees or gingerly touching his tingling buttocks. If the devil did have a hand in the sentries’ disappearances — and General Tejadillo did not doubt for a moment the devil’s powerful influence in human affairs — he could not possibly blind the keen sight of a man so virtuous as Sergeant Gonzalez.
The general lit candles in his room that evening just after sunset when Sergeant Gonzalez was to be his dinner guest. He wore full military regalia since he was entirely bald beneath his imposing, broad hat. The waves were turbulent beneath his window, and the view of the ocean’s watery sheen beneath the full moon was spectacular. The candlelight cast an orange fire in the general’s hard, rapacious black eyes. He had a broad, shining face with grizzled gray sideburns and a small, well-trimmed beard that carefully suggested the man of action in spite of his considerable corpulence.
Sergeant Gonzalez, on the other hand had a lean, hard body held as rigid as his bayonet, upon which his uniform tended to bag at the shoulders and hips, since he barely filled them out. The sergeant had large, darkly penitent eyes in a boyish oval face that was carefully shaved everyday. They were clearly two men who would never meet intimately for any purpose other than plotting. The general, in particular, dearly loved a good plot and thoroughly enjoyed the prospect of his proposal to the sergeant.
The candle-lit dinner was an excellent swordfish with a liqueur dessert and abundant quantities of Spanish wine — the latter radiantly refused by the sergeant and liberally consumed by the general, to the intense pleasure of both. In near-breathless delight, the general revealed his purpose: he was assigning Gonzalez the mission of staying awake all night while hiding his presence and watching the sentry in the garita so as to determine whether the disappearances were the result of defection or indeed, the devil’s foul intervention into man’s noble war against the heathen Indian.
The Castilian turned pale in the wavering candlelight at the prospect of interfering with supernatural power; nonetheless, the general’s enthusiasm was overpowering. He called the sergeant his own Christian soldier and declared his staunch manhood impervious to demonic influence. Sergeant Gonzalez began to tremble with delight and at last accepted his assignment with relish.
The plan also entailed a vow of silence as to his surveillance of his own comrades as well as the opportunity to regain his sleep in the general’s own bed in the afternoon. General Tejadillo was delighted to see Sergeant Gonzalez immediately fall to his knees in prayer, unconsciously passing his hand over one tingling buttock, and then rise like a man of action to quit the room. Now, thought General Tejadillo as his eyes and full cheeks glowed with inebriation and over-eating and his jaw hardened in manly purposiveness, now he would get to the bottom of it. Surely he would find the truth and regain control of the fort, the only reasonable outcome for a man of his virile decisiveness. As night came down, he prepared for sleep and eventually dreamt of that infernally naked, hairy pirate with the midnight blue bandanna who once again sodomized him for hours and, in the morning, left him in a pool of his own semen as well as a fierce resolve to penetrate that confoundedly strange and ambiguous sentry box.
Sergeant Gonzalez, on the other hand, did not spend the night in sleep. He immediately gave himself a spiritual cleansing and a few applications of the whip before beginning his noble new mission. Within an hour, he had found a pitch black corner almost adjacent to the garita where the moon’s fingers of light never played and where he could maintain invisibility until 4:00am. The corner allowed a complete view of the corridor to the sentry box as well as the sentry as he looked out the window. The time of the full moon, he decided, was particularly propitious for beginning his adventure, both from the standpoint of greater visibility in the windy tropical night and as the time when the tide and surf were fullest, perhaps enhancing the devil’s power to influence mankind. Again, he felt a fierce pride in his purity and masculine fortitude, having been judged the best man for the job, invulnerable to the devil and now, unseen, he freely caressed his sore buttocks and delighted in their stinging, tingling sensation.
The night became colder as the end of the watch approached, but the sentry stayed at his post, alternately sitting and leaning against the wall as he looked out to sea. Sometime after 3:00am, he became strangely agitated; and Sergeant Gonzalez suspected that the man had fallen asleep and was dreaming against the wall. Then, the sentry stood up straight and cried out, brushing a torrent of tears from his face and covering his mouth with one hand as though in horror. He knocked his hat off and threw his bayonet out the window.
Astonished, Sergeant Gonzalez stared in fascination at the man, who began to rip his uniform, finally tearing his shirt off. Then, he turned toward his passageway and ran directly at the sergeant, who drew his sword. Yet inexplicably, the sentry did not even see him and continued crying while running out the passage. The man then threw himself over the sand dunes and disappeared down Calle del Cristo. Gonzalez ran after him and in an instant was at the top of the street, watching the man’s naked back disappear into the amorphous moonlight of the city.
Just as swiftly, he ran back to the sentry’s post and looked out the stone window. Incredibly, the scene was nothing more than the moon over the endlessly heaving ocean — beautiful, of course, but hardly the work of the devil, he thought. The sergeant could see no reason for the sentry’s agitation and flight and continued to look out to sea, feeling bewilderment and remorse at the incomprehensible event. To avoid the next sentry, he returned to his bed, where he continued to ponder the strange event he had witnessed. The situation, he decided, was utterly unfathomable and bizarre: there was insufficient evidence for either defection or the devil’s influence. He had no idea why the man displayed such uncontrollable emotion and ran from his post.
In the morning, the entire fort knew of the sentry’s disappearance and rumors of supernatural influence passed quickly among the soldiers. General Tejadillo grasped Sergeant Gonzalez’s arm as the younger man attempted to pass him in the afternoon. “A defection?” he whispered. Sergeant Gonzalez was silent. “The devil’s work!” the general exclaimed, his eyes widening to trembling black pools.
Copyright © 2019 by Bev Jafek
