By age eight Antonio was inseparable from his father, rarely attending school (not compulsory) but instead squeezing onto the back of the homemade saddle on the family horse to take the forty minute ride into el centro every morning where they would sell the metal goods he’d helped his father forge.
It was at that age, on one of those trips to the center, that Arce witnessed the murder of his father. As they walked together, Antonio did not at first make the connection between the loud bang and his father’s sudden fall to his side and this failure persisted even as he frantically tried to squeeze his father’s neck to keep in its blood. When it was over and adults had gathered in increasing numbers, Antonio Arce took advantage of a sudden distraction, got on his horse, and rode home to tell his mother and sister; whose screams, it is said, caused a sinkhole in the pueblo with remains still visible to this day.
When, four years later, this sister drowned in a nearby river after becoming fixated on and following a group of grasshoppers out into the current, Arce’s mother was said to be a shell; one whose death a few months thereafter was attributed in the marginal notes of her parish death certificate to an alma derrotada or broken spirit.
Antonio and his sister having been the only two of their mother’s five births to survive past six weeks, Arce was alone. The twelve-year-old was expected to walk to a distant aunt in Manizales but instead kept walking until reaching Cali. Cali, a genuine city, was unlike anything Arce had seen to that point. On arrival there he could not read or write, had never really even seen a proper book, but he soon taught himself to do both at an astonishing rate. Discovering that neither activity led directly to food he ran with loosely organized gangs that operated petty crime operations like street fighting for which he demonstrated considerable aptitude, often deriving significant income by playing the part of the much younger overmatched opponent before violently and remuneratively revealing the truth.
At seventeen Arce joined Colombia’s military primarily in the hopes that their uniform might serve as a kind of explanation that would reduce the fear he seemed to inspire in perceptive women. He rose quickly, his unlikely pairing of effortless physical and mental courage and elite intelligence something that others almost gathered to observe. The explanation worked as well and at age twenty-five Colonel Antonio Arce married Damiana Villabón who on March 6, 1927 gave birth to their only child, Margarita.
The following year, Arce’s dissatisfaction with military service culminated in his refusal to obey multiple orders to shoot during the so-called Banana Massacre, refusals that resulted in his death being ordered and his sudden flight with wife and daughter to Colombia’s coastal region and Barranquilla in particular. Not a great deal is known of Arce’s ensuing decades in Barranquilla other than the fact that he managed to amass a considerable amount of land and other property under the assumed name of Nio de Santos. Nor is there any continued record, or explanation for the absence, of either Damiana or Margarita from this time forward.
What is known is that in 1948, following the assassination of presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Colombia descended into a kind of savage civil war between its two political parties: the Conservative Party (think military, church etc.) and the Liberal Party (think social reformists). As the country (especially the rural parts) sank into anarchic chaos one of the few things both parties could agree on was that they wanted Antonio Arce added to the list of more than 200,000 dead. Arce’s ultimate response was the abandonment of everything he’d built with the exception of the twenty-two foot boat he used to sail to Cuba.
In Cuba, Arce rebuilt what he’d lost but stood fast in his refusal to remarry, repeatedly characterizing such a move as a form of weakness. What he built there, aided by the island country’s improbably thriving economic environment of the nineteen-fifties, was a low-level media empire that included two radio stations and a newspaper. In 1960, the Cuban State began to help itself to private property including Arce’s stations and beloved paper. Though he was tempted to resist (Arce generally viewed Cuba’s men of violence as kind of quaintly cute) array enough numbers against any man and he accedes, meaning Arce had again lost everything including multiple boats he could have used to start anew.
What he did then was build a glorified raft with these crazy twin brothers everybody told him he should distrust and direct it to Florida, one of the United States of America. The waters between Cuba and Key West equal ninety miles of natural treachery. The unpredictable currents and a nasty storm with absurd swells made the many sharks therein suddenly and mortally relevant. The best Arce could manage at that point was to make the sharks most responsible for the death of the twins pay, like worker honey bees, the ultimate price for their aggression.
When he arrived on shore, after skillfully evading rescue, he walked in bloodied rags through horrified beachgoers to a remote area where he buried one belonging of each twin under a makeshift cross then made its sign. Then, after immediately and unfavorably assessing his surroundings, he continued on to New York City.
New York City in 1960 but all Arce seemed to see was books. His lack of English now offended him so he taught himself to speak, read, and ultimately write it. He did this while working as a restaurant dishwasher, one who was often kidded about his advanced age but rarely twice by the same person. Then he cooked and then he co-owned when the owner got himself into the kind of trouble with the kind of people that only Arce’s baleful intensity could get him out of.
From there Arce kept adding restaurants including some of the initial Colombian ones in highly Colombian Jackson Heights, Queens. He also began to write fiction. He wrote exclusively in English and he did so somewhat obsessively. On his 90th birthday, however, he destroyed everything he’d written to that point saying a man should only write that which he’d be willing to see engraved on his gravemarker. Expecting not to last much longer, he gave away his considerable possessions and devoted himself exclusively to writing.
In his last few years this devotion became almost monastic. He lived alone save for his cat Achilles. The circle of friends he played dominos and drank coffee with disappeared one by one and finally, inevitably, even his body began to give out. He kept writing best he could, often forgetting to eat or bathe to the point that the few interested observers wondered if intervention was warranted. It wasn’t and during this time Arce bled to produce The Ocean, Personae, and lastly Energeias: or Why Today the Sun May Not Rise in the East, Set in the West.
One of his last willful acts involved Achilles. Specifically, he came across the cat as it appeared to be torturing a mouse and prevented him from delivering the final blow. He then gave the cat away to a neighbor saying only “I’ve lost my stomach for it all.” The mouse ultimately perished due to its injuries but not before chewing an exposed line near the stove in Arce’s apartment creating a leak of CO or carbon monoxide that soon turned the cramped space into a kind of gas chamber. So what started as a headache that wouldn’t end was joined by nausea, fatigue, hallucinatory visions, and finally an extreme debilitating weakness that caused Antonio Arce to sit then lie on his kitchen floor where he died shortly thereafter. He is survived by no one. His influence, if any, is not yet known.