The Devil’s Sentry Box
by Bev Jafek
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
When night fell, the next sentry went off to his post whistling, thinking himself fortunate to be able to watch the night’s intriguingly mysterious show. Gonzalez was lurking in the dark, having thoroughly whipped his naked flesh, for he had nearly been unable to take up his hated post again.
He waited in the darkness, doubting whether he was even a sane man. They are visions, he kept saying in slow, torpid thoughts that could barely complete themselves. The world was terrible and beautiful at once: how could beauty and terror commingle so and why must he be its recorder? He thought of the corpulent general, fast asleep in his nightgown, his baldhead cradled by the night. When this is over, I will strangle him, he thought. He began to feel dangerous. I am a danger to myself and others, he thought. Lucifer, how you play with us. He waited in darkness that could never be relieved.
As the sudden intrusion of birdsong signaled the end of the watch, the sentry again threw down his weapons and cried out. Gonzalez knew what he must do: shouting in pure terror, he ran down the corridor and tackled the sentry. The man fell neatly into his arms; there was no struggle. I have him, thought Gonzalez, I have the vision! It is in my hands.
The sentry slowly turned his head toward the soldier who held him in the desperate embrace of a lover or an assassin. In the faint ray of moonlight shining into the open window, Sergeant Gonzalez saw that he was clutching a woman — a dark, beautiful woman, even, in a long gown. His hands were in fact clasping full breasts whose décolleté was rising and falling rapidly. Her face had a wild, passionate expression that astonished her captor and, with an eviscerating sensation, he realized that she was more dangerous to him than the tiger.
“Mary, Mother, save me!” he said uncontrollably, horribly aware that he was showing abject weakness before a woman. He released her and jumped to his feet, one hand covering his crotch, which had become a handful. The woman sprang to her feet even faster in a fluid, cat-like movement. They were now outside the sentry box, staring straight at one another in the moonlight. The woman had long, dark hair in great disarray, huge gray eyes brimming with an unknown intensity, and a full, dark mouth. Her neck and breasts were luminously sumptuous, and her eyebrows and eyes had a bold, uncivilized, almost animal stare.
She stepped toward the sergeant, causing him to step backwards, his hand held over the commotion in his pants. She stepped forward again and he, backwards. She stepped forward three times, forcing him to back up quickly. Again, a step from her and one backward from him. Three forward, three backward. One forward, one backward. He groaned, realizing he could only keep his vision by holding her with all his strength; yet God forbid! How could he do this to a beautiful, unknown woman? “What do you want?” he asked in a strangled sob.
“Nothing. Remember, it is nothing at all,” she said and tore away the front of her dress, her breasts descending heavily into the dark, tingling air like a sudden cascade of tropical fruit falling in a storm. He could not take his eyes off them: mesmerizing shadows played in rich arcs over her nipples and rested in the silvered roundness of her spheres in the moonlight.
It was beauty to vitiate the mind; it was terror beyond understanding. “What are you?” he whispered.
“The truth,” she shouted, “and you are a murderer!” Then she swept past him, the front of her gown blowing beside her in the wind. Heedlessly, she walked down Calle del Cristo followed by the sergeant, who held out one useless arm to grab her, his fingers a claw, his other hand still covering his crotch. Yet he must somehow hold onto her, he thought in desperation; she was his proof, his vision — yet he was utterly unable to touch her. So they walked down Calle del Cristo in the breaking dawn — the magnificent, striding, half-nude woman and the sergeant with his rigid arm stretched out and hand over his crotch, hobbling as awkwardly as an old man.
Gonzalez had no precise memory of what happened next. In a dream, it seemed, he returned and applied the whip harshly to his loins, praying fervently. He knew he had been defeated. The mission was over: he would ask to be relieved of his duty. Then he slept for many hours disturbed by no one. It was now common knowledge throughout the fort that he had been ordered to watch the sentries and, since he always returned, he was regarded with awe, the possessor of obscure, dark knowledge.
He awoke in bright light, utterly chastened. He thought immediately of the woman he had lost — to what, he could not imagine. A beautiful, half-naked woman walking the street in this tropical city would be welcome anywhere. Every door would be open to her. She could command a brilliant new life, and he was left with misery in uniform. He remembered his vow to strangle the general and knew himself to be incapable of it.
When Gonzalez entered the general’s office, he seemed to have aged years in but a few nights. He was dark, unshaven, grim. The general uttered, “Hmmmm.....?” in a purr of joy.
“I can now tell you the whole truth,” the bedraggled sergeant began. “The disappearances are solely, entirely, the work of the devil. There can be no more doubt. I myself have seen the visions at work. I beg you to relieve me of this duty. I cannot be asked to view the lewd, chaotic contents of Lucifer’s mind night after night. I will lose my sanity. Perhaps I already have.”
The general’s hard, rapacious look returned without a trace of the childishness he had shown in the last few days; the nights of his exhilarating plot against the universe, defying it to reveal the extent of its power over his unbridled ambition. Gonzalez would never see that boyishness again. General Tejadillo was once more the man of force and exquisite cunning, a Faust in uniform. “You have done very well, sergeant,” he said. “No one could have borne more of this foulness than you. I will promote you to the rank of major throughout the territories. I could not have a better man for the job.”
Gonzalez was too exhausted to feel pride or pleasure; he could barely salute. The general’s lips curled in a brutal smile, for he found the sergeant’s report to be a perfect resolution. His domination was secure, for how could he be expected to defend the fort against the devil? No man could. There were no defections, after all; his authority could not be questioned. Perhaps he would even stop dreaming of naked pirates...
A resolution suddenly came to Gonzalez as well. “If sentries must be placed there,” he said, “send only those whom the devil has already claimed. Send the most vicious, brutal, those who take pleasure in killing...” (He remembered the woman’s shouted accusation, Murderer!). “Yes, murderers,” he continued, “send brutes, your best soldiers. Send no one you have ever seen indulging in gentle pleasures like music, poetry, art. Not them. No, they will go mad.”
Their meeting was over, as was their brief common bond. Once more, they were men who would never meet intimately for any significant purpose, and they never mentioned the sentry box again. In the following days, General Tejadillo was deeply satisfied to implement the sergeant’s recommendations. Though neither man ever believed he had fully understood the bizarre events of the night watch, Gonzalez’s advice was a complete success: there were no more disappearing sentries. The brutes that went out to their nightly posts always returned, unperturbed.
General Tejadillo therefore imagined himself to have solved the problem and perhaps saved his men from an unknown fate beyond this world. He continued, however, to dream of beautifully muscular, hairy, naked pirates with dark, insatiable flesh and gorgeously erect genitals who committed unspeakable acts upon his helplessly inert, sleeping body that awakened drenched in its own semen.
Lately, he had begun to fear that his pools of semen were becoming more viscous and might eventually harden to a yellow metal all over his bed and furniture and even run up the walls of his office. Nonetheless, he regarded such dreams and fears as a minor peril accompanying the profound responsibility of high military command and the conquest of this chaotic new world the mapmakers called America.
The story’s hold on my arm has relaxed, yet has it revealed its meaning, why it has ushered up these two quite perverse men and the strange creations of their sentry box? A story is stubbornly unique and demands its own moment of revelation. In my child’s heart, I have always known the truth behind the mystery: The sentries were spirited away by the sight I myself saw out the garita window — the artless, spontaneous, overwhelming beauty of the earth, the power our least enlightened compatriots confuse with evil.
The sentries’ revelations were definitive, irreversible, transformative. They could no longer bear being soldiers, murderers of Indians. The symbols of military power — their weapons, their uniforms — became abhorrent to them. It is a small step in the endless country of the imagination to say that they became another gender, another species entirely. This transformation is one of the spirit and carries the haunting, resonant sense of a return to an immemorial self. We are angels long before we are taught to call ourselves devils.
The descendents of these transformed ones, these revenant angels, now live all over the world as well as the Caribbean. Among them are the composer and cellist, Pablo Casals; the playwright Alejandro Tapia y Rivera; and Felisa Rincon de Gautier, the woman who served for two decades as mayor of San Juan.
Last, in my child’s heart, I must declare that I am a descendant of the peacock, the tiger, and the woman.
Copyright © 2019 by Bev Jafek
