JC2 The Raiders (15 page)

He was baptized Cord y Batista. The family never
deceived anyone about his origin. But the word
bastardo
was
never used about him. That would have incurred the wrath of Don Pedro
Escalante, and Don Pedro was a hidalgo whose wrath no one wanted to
incur. Don Pedro, it was well known, was the father of several
children outside his marriage. It was extremely unusual for a woman
of good family to bear an illegitimate child and acknowledge it; but
in this case the man involved had been a man of wealth and position,
and the child had probably been conceived in a first-class cabin on a
luxury liner, or if not there then in Berlin's finest hotel. The
circumstances made it all acceptable to Don Pedro. His
daughter-in-law had not succumbed to any cheap adventurer but to a
man like himself, like his son Virgilio. And if Virgilio did not
object, why should he?

The boy was always intensely curious about the man
who was the origin of his names Jonas and Cord.
Madre
was
never reticent about it. She told him that his father Jonas Cord was
a wealthy American businessman. They had loved each other for a time,
she said. Unfortunately, differences between them were very great,
and they had not been able to marry.

What really mattered, she told the young Jonas
often, was that she loved him,
Padre
loved him, and
Abuelo
— Grandfather — loved him, which was very important. As
the family grew, he was always older brother. His brothers and
sisters knew he was different, but they, too, had been reared to
understand the difference didn't matter.

His brothers and sisters, when they were old
enough to understand, watched Jonas struggling over the Sunday
edition of
The New York Times
, which came in every Thursday's
mail. Sometimes his mother marked stories and told him to be sure to
read them. They were stories about Jonas Cord.

Padre
was often away from the hacienda on
business,
Abuelo
stayed at home. From the time Jonas learned
to talk, his mother spoke to him sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in
English, and his grandfather did the same. Jonas Cord, they told him,
was a
norteamericano
, and he must learn to speak his father's
language, not just as it was spoken by educated Mexicans but as it
was spoken by the
yanquis
themselves. When
norteamericanos
came to the hacienda, for whatever reason, they were asked to talk
with the boy, to let him study their accents.

Abuelo
became his grandson's closest
friend. He told him who Sonja's family was. To many Mexicans,
Fulgencio Batista was only an upstart colonel and maybe worse. But
Don Pedro Escalante, though he was a hidalgo, had secretly sent money
to Pancho Villa. And now he was secretly giving money to his
daughter-in-law's uncle.

He was catholic in his political predilections but not Catholic in
his religious ones. Little Jonas was baptized by a priest, but he was
not reared a Catholic. His father was not a Catholic, so Grandfather
deemed it would be inappropriate someday to present a devout Catholic
son to a non-Catholic father — and he had no doubt the family
would someday present the son to the father.

Grandfather sent the boy to the grammar school in
Cordoba. Boys there knew he was a bastard and not only that but the
son of a
yanqui
, but they dared not torment the grandson of
the hidalgo. One did and suffered a broken nose for his effrontery.

Abuelo
carried a pistol on his hip. He
taught his grandson to shoot, and when Jonas was only eight years old
he gave him a .22-caliber seven-shot Harrington & Richards
revolver. Jonas practiced with it, under the careful tutelage of the
old man, and he became accurate, so accurate that his targets were
spent shotgun shells set up on a sawhorse to be fired on from twenty
meters.

One of the boy's proudest moments came when he was nine years old.
His little sister Maria was a toddler. She had been in the kitchen,
where the cook had given her a slice of pie, and she wandered out
through the back door, across the dooryard and beyond. Shortly Jonas
heard the cook scream. He was in his room reading, and before he ran
out to see what was wrong he grabbed his revolver. He had an instinct
that if some sort of danger was threatening, a gun might be useful.

He ran into the dooryard. The cook stood flushed, trembling,
terrified, pointing at the little girl. Maria sat on the ground, ten
meters beyond the dooryard fence. She too was frightened. Not two
meters from her a coiled rattlesnake buzzed its warning. She had
wandered near it when it was shedding its skin and was in a foul,
aggressive mood. Whether or not it would strike was uncertain, but it
might if she moved. It almost certainly would if anyone else came
near.

Jonas closed his left hand around his right wrist and took steady aim
on the rattlesnake. Its head was as big as four of the shotgun shells
that were his usual targets. Still, this was no easy shot. He held
his breath, which he did not usually do when he was shooting. He
fired. The .22 slug split the head of the rattler, and it writhed and
thrashed as the boy rushed up and grabbed his little sister to drag
her away from it.

He was a hero. It was a fine thing to be a hero. He enjoyed it.

The next year, 1936, he did not return to the grammar school in
Cordoba. Instead, he and his mother went to live in Mexico City, in a
flat maintained by Virgilio Escalante for his convenience in his
frequent visits to the capital. The family had used its considerable
political and economic influence to secure a place for Jonas at La
Escuela Diplomatica, an international school for the children of
diplomats. There he would study with Europeans and improve his
English and learn French and German.

He learned something else: that Mexico was not one of the world's
great nations, not in wealth, not in military might, not in cultural
achievement and influence. No. The Estados Unidos to the north was
all these things. Mexico was not. Mexico was a respectable nation but
not a leader of the world. At the grammar school in Cordoba the
teachers had taught otherwise.

His mother smiled when he asked her about this. The nuns had never
taught her, she said, that Cuba was one of the great nations. They
had taught her that Spain was the greatest nation of the world, with
the world's supreme culture, admired and envied by everyone. The poor
silly women had believed it, she said. And the teachers at Cordoba
had believed what they taught.

At La Escuela Diplomatica it meant nothing that he was the
illegitimate son of Jonas Cord, nothing that he was the grandson of
Don Pedro Escalante. No one there had ever heard of either of them.
He was Jonas Enrique Raul Cord y Batista, and all that counted was
that his family had enough money to pay his tuition — that and
the fact that he was bright enough to meet the challenge of a
singularly demanding school.

During his first year at the school he lived at home in the Escalante
apartment. In 1938, when he was twelve and no longer in the
grammar-school department, he moved into the boys' dormitory.

The boys lived two to a room. His roommate was Maurice Raynal, a boy
one year older than he was, who was supposed to act as a sort of
mentor in the realities of school life. Maurice was the son of the
naval attaché at the French embassy. Though a year older, he
was no bigger than Jonas, who was tall and muscular with a man's
voice, no longer a child in any sense.

Maurice's Spanish and English were heavily accented, as for that
matter was his German. The teachers were constantly at him about it.
The teachers asked Jonas to help him. They suggested that the two
boys speak only English and Spanish in their room. Jonas was happy to
do that, especially the English. The more he spoke English, the
better.

Maurice complained that Jonas did not speak
English the same as their English teacher. Eventually he understood.
"
Ah, Jonas, c'est Americain
!
Ce n'est pas Anglais
!
Vous parlez Americain
!"

Jonas could not have been happier. He was not English. His father was
not English. He wanted to speak his father's language, and his father
spoke American.

Maurice was the source of a problem, and also of an education. He
took off his clothes when they were alone in their room and the door
was bolted. He walked around naked. Jonas never did. Usually when he
did it, Maurice had an erection. Jonas was mature enough to know what
that was.

And then one evening Maurice lifted his penis in
his hand and asked, "
Dites-moi, mon ami. Est le votre si
grand
?"

Jonas glanced casually at the stiff organ. "
Oui
,"
he said. "
Plus grand
."

"
Vraiment? Me montrez
."

Jonas considered for a moment, then stood and
unbuttoned his pants and pulled out his own penis. "
Voila
,"
he said. "
Assez grand
?"

Maurice grinned and nodded. "
C'est beau
."

Jonas stuffed his back in, buttoned his pants, and turned his
attention to a problem in plane geometry.

He had supposed what Maurice had in mind was a competition. That was
not what Maurice had in mind at all. The next evening he asked Jonas
if he ever had wet dreams. Jonas admitted that he did.

Maurice spoke English. "A pleasure, no? But you need not wait
for that pleasure. You can make it happen."

That was an interesting idea. Jonas had guessed as much but had not
experimented.

Maurice saw he was interested. "I will show you how," he
said solemnly, and he proceeded to masturbate, casting his ejaculate
into a handkerchief. "See? Shall I do it for you?"

"I will do it for myself," said Jonas.

"Do. Let's see how much time you need."

Aroused, Jonas did what Maurice suggested, wetting his own
handkerchief.

"It is good, no?" Maurice asked. "It is better when we
do it for each other — at the same time."

The next evening Jonas consented. The two boys stretched out naked on
Maurice's narrow bed. They rubbed their penises together until both
of them were on the verge of their orgasms; then, cued by Maurice's
urgent cry, they grabbed at each other and finished with their hands.

What followed was inevitable. He would learn not long afterward that
there were ugly names for boys who did what he and Maurice did, and
he never did it again, but he would never hate the memory of Maurice
Raynal.

During the summer of 1939 many embassies called
their staffs home. Maurice Raynal wrote Jonas a letter from Paris,
saying he would not be returning to
La Escuela
for the fall
term. His father had been called home and was serving as first
officer aboard a French cruiser.

Jonas wrote Maurice that he would not return to the school either.
His mother and stepfather and grandfather had anticipated what would
happen: that the school would lose three-quarters of its European
students and would replace them with students who would not have been
admitted before, from Latin American nations. It would make the
school provincial — exactly what they did not want. His family
had enrolled him in a school in the United States, Culver Military
Academy in Indiana. Maurice should write him there, he said.

Jonas never heard from or of Maurice Raynal again.

Culver Military Academy was a difficult school,
and not one that he liked. He was lonely there. The climate was cold.
The
norteamericanos
were cold. He found it difficult to make
friends. He learned to introduce himself simply as Jonas Cord, a name
that sounded
yanqui
and saved him from the contempt most of
the boys felt for Mexicans. A few knew the name Jonas Cord. They did
not guess, fortunately, that he was an illegitimate son. He wore a
uniform and learned to stand at attention and march. He did well
academically. If he won any reputation at all, it was for his
marksmanship. He won medals on the rifle range. Even so, he did not
like Culver and did not enjoy his three years there.

The school had, just the same, a major impact on his life. His
English became more American. He studied more of science and
mathematics, less of languages, and so made up a deficiency in his
education. He acquired a lasting distaste for military organization
and discipline, yet a credential in them that would serve him well.

He learned that the relationship he'd had with Maurice was held in
sneering abhorrence by Americans, who made crude jokes about it in
foul language.

He graduated in June 1943. His mother and grandfather traveled all
the way from Mexico to be present. On their way home on the train,
his mother beamed as she announced what would be next in his life.

"We are very pleased, son. You have been admitted to Harvard!"
Then her smile faded. "Of course ... Next year you will be of
the age when every young American can be called to military service."

In the fall of 1942, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was an austere place.
Most of the upperclassmen were gone. The few who remained had obvious
physical infirmities. Jonas had no basis for comparison, but he
sensed that two things were missing from Harvard College that year:
first, the effervescence of youth and optimism, and, second, a
confident sense of permanence that must have been traditional.

Instead, the college was gloomy and tentative. The institution and
everyone associated with it were feeling their way, confident that
Harvard would endure, yet not quite sure how, confident they would
personally survive the war, while conscious that not all of them
would.

His classes were not difficult. He was enrolled in
an English class, which was really a class in English literature; a
mathematics class, where the subject was calculus; a class in the
history of Europe beginning with the Renaissance; a class in French,
advanced; and a philosophy class, in which the entire first semester
was devoted to the study of Plato's
Republic
. Except for the
last, his courses covered nothing he had not studied before. When he
took his first exams, the college decided it had a prodigy.