JUST THE WAY IT WAS: A Real-Life Story

Por Mario Ignacio Zunzunegui

This book is a simple and humble gift, a present, a legacy of past life and love.

It is a tale of many joys, laughs, and even laughter, as well as tears that sometimes came to be shed.

It is a small present without any monetary or significant value of any commercial interest.

Nevertheless, it is very exclusive because only the author can make this gift, because within the gift there are many experiences and anecdotes of a lifetime that only he is aware of.

It is a gift that may one day be useful to dad or mom, when their son or daughter asks you to tell a story.

Well, finally in decades to come, this dusty and forgotten old gift might have served for something useful.

At the request of my great friend Mario Ignacio Zunzunegui, I allow myself to review his book where he captures his memoir with absolute reality.

We first met many years ago through the sport of rock and high mountain climbing in Mexico City. I wish to testify that Mario recounts with absolute veracity events in his book and in which he cites me as an active participant. I congratulate Mario for his excellent memory in recounting those events in which he names my sister, Yoselinda, and me. We planned a trip to climb the rock El Zorro in the state of Hidalgo, in which Mario made the daring act of bringing her down from the summit by rappelling a hundred meters tied to his back.

I feel God’s blessings by Mario’s return to his faith and Christianity after having such bad experiences which involved him with drugs and drug trafficking.

I want to reiterate my deep friendship and admiration to my dear friend.

• Idioma: Español
• Editorial: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Fecha de lanzamiento: 7 abr 2020
• ISBN: 9781643342504

Vista previa del libro

First Stage of My Life

Chapter 1

How did it start? This story begins as that of each and every one of the more than eight billion inhabitants of this turbulent but exciting Planet Earth.

It was on June 19, 1940, the year in which my mother gave birth to the naughty and mischievous Nachito or little Nacho, the name which she always used to call me as a child and continued to refer to me as I grew older.

Nachito at only five years old

When I was born, my two older sisters had preceded me. Ernestina was born eleven years before me, followed by another little brother who was also called Ignacio. But after two years, he died of a strong case of the whooping cough. Then came my sister Bertha, who was eight years older and who unfortunately died in October 2000. May she rest in peace. My youngest sibling, Maria Olga, is one year and nine months younger than I. We were all born in El Paso, Texas.

My parents were of 100 percent Mexican origin. My father, Ignacio Zunzunegui Ponce, was born on July 4, 1906, in the distant state of Hidalgo in a small town called Acatlán. And my mother, María Cisneros Martínez, originally from Chihuahua, was also born in 1906 on December 20. I remember that she always said that she was born in 1907. It was not until her death that upon seeing her birth certificate, we learned the exact year in which she had been born and became aware of the missing year. The classic feminine vanity of always wanting to appear younger before your partner, even when it was only a year, especially in those remote times.

May they both rest in peace: a mother and a father truly admirable in the full extent of the word until their deaths. They provided us with a solid morale, love, and the best examples in life through more than fifty years of marriage, until their deaths. My father died in 1986, and my mother died five years later.

With only two years under my belt, my parents decided to return to Ciudad Juárez after living fifteen years in El Paso, Texas.

When I was about four or five years old in Ciudad Juárez, I remember my childhood years were very comfortable and were quiet times, since my father had a good job as regional manager of a famous cotton company, Anderson & Clayton SA of CV, an American company of international fame that was a producer of bales of cotton.

For this reason, from my early years, I got to know the huge seed cellars and the gins that impressed me greatly by their noisy and sophisticated machinery, boilers, and presses of thousands and thousands of kilos of pressure where the belts were fastened on the white, beautiful, and heavy bales of the oro blanco (white gold), as cotton was known in those days.

Don Nacho, as everyone knew my father, would get me into the truck on the weekends to accompany him to supervise the gins that he had throughout the Juárez Valley, in the towns of Senecú, San Ignacio, and Porvenir, as well as some other gins on the road to Nuevo Casas Grandes. We visited the fields of the farmers that the company revamped to harvest the cotton that would later be ginned by Anderson & Clayton.

So the years passed until I began my adolescence—a time when I was studying at St. Mary’s School run by nuns in El Paso, Texas. I finished my primary studies, and my parents decided that I would continue attending Catholic schools. Consequently, I was enrolled with the famous Brothers of Cathedral High School back in the year 1953.

During my high school years, I practiced all the sports of that time: baseball, basketball, football. However, soccer was not yet very common in the north part of the country. During the decade of the 1950s, I was very interested in martial arts which were quite popular, such as judo, jiujitsu, personal defense, some boxing and wrestling, achieving through all these exercises a good skill which, above all, was very useful for the risky and hectic life that I did not know destiny had in store for me.

During this time, I was interested and quite passionate in Scouting with the Boy Scouts or Explorers of Mexico. I joined the popular Group 4 established in the parish of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. As much as I liked hiking, I quickly climbed the ranks and became patrol guide at a very young age. In three more years, Humberto, Damián, and Guadalupe Juárez, whom I remember with great affection, were the main leaders of the group and entrusted me with the entire troop that consisted of more than thirty Scouts. I would take them on excursions for up to fifteen days, traveling through the Sierra Madre of Casas Grandes, Madera, Las Barrancas de la Tarahumara, and many other places.

I remember that when I was fifteen years of age, I took young boys of seventeen to eighteen years old, of whom the mothers would ask me to take good care of their children. I thought, And who will take care of me if they were much older than myself? At that time, I got interested in meeting young and pretty girls (and not so young as well), bohemian music, poetry, saloons, and especially the nightlife, which became attractive. Since I looked older than my age, I would get served beer and liquor at bars and was well received. I got a fake ID from the state police and became very fond of the nightlife, being a slacker and looking for fights. I did not have the best fame, but I was respected.

Some years passed and I was already close to graduating at Cathedral High. One day in an algebra exam, there was an American nerd with whom I did not have a good relationship, and we stared at each other and swore at each other’s mother with our eyes, resulting in angry hitting, kicking, and throwing of punches at each other. The teacher (brother) and some students intervened in order to separate us. Because I had the best part of the fight, the teacher favored the other guy, having certain empathy and affinity of race and some prior negative feelings toward me, which worsened my situation. A month and a half later, during another exam and due to bad luck in the same subject and with the same teacher, while I was sitting in front of him no more than five feet away, there were two students behind me, laughing, talking, and distracting the whole class. The brother who was in a bitter bitch rage and was flatly mistaken thought I was the one laughing and distracting the whole classroom. Without me realizing it, he took his bulky key ring that he had on his desk, which easily weighed a quarter of a kilo, and as if he were a baseball pitcher, he threw it at me forcefully, crashing it in the center of my chest. Thankfully, the key chain did not hit me on the face, but the blow was terrible and painful. For me it was the most humiliating and shameful experience of my life. Filled with rage, pain, and humiliation, and with tears in my eyes, I picked up the key chain and went to the abusive religious brother. I got as close to him as I could and said, Brother, here is your key chain. And I placed it at the height of his face while he was sitting down. As he reached out to get it, I turned it to the left and he, following it with his eyesight, placed his jaw in splendid profile. With all my strength and anger that I had within me, I managed a tremendous punch between his eyebrow and ear. I only managed to see his eyes turning white. This was all I saw because I made a swift and almost nonstop run until I reached Juárez.

Needless to say, the compromising incident finished my attendance in school. And consequently, I was unable to graduate, forcing me to withdraw from the schools for the time being.

It was then that I went back to work at Anderson & Clayton, where I previously worked only in the summer. My job in the company as a purchasing agent did not pay much, but I had a very generous income under the table. I would buy and make the various transactions of the different parts, spare parts, and materials that were bought in El Paso for the maintenance of the gins that the powerful and rich company handled.

I built some hidden compartments in the pickup that they had designated to me for my work, and in that way, I would smuggle expensive electronic items for the operation of that cotton industry. I must clarify that there were thousands and thousands of dollars that I saved from the company, avoiding having to pay the high taxes that border customs required for the importation of all those products.

The juicy income that I received from that noble fayuca (contraband) provided me with a comfortable lifestyle. I was well dressed with a nice car and with plenty of money always in my pocket to allow me to enjoy leisurely the restless year of a seventeen-year-old.

In those years, my father decided that we would plant cotton in the Juárez Valley in a far village called Banderas, about 130 kilometers from Ciudad Juárez on the Juárez-Porvenir highway. The highway would end at Porvenir, and the additional fifty kilometers is a really bad stretch that would make the journey too long and tiresome. For this reason, we traveled on the American side since the ranch was on the bank of the Rio Grande and would take us only one and a half hours to make the trip. In contrast, the trip on the Mexican side consisted of four tedious and long hours.

I remember that of those one hundred hectares planted, only half was good land because the rest was clay or sandy soil. Additionally, I felt that the region had been abandoned by God because it was deserted, dry, and barren with very scarce and insufficient rain. We drilled four or five wells and never managed to find good water, much less potable water. It was so salty that not even the animals could drink it. After putting so much effort during several planting seasons, we decided to leave the hardship of cotton agriculture experience behind. It was when I returned to Ciudad Juárez that I was confronted with some romantic problems of courtship. I was always attracted to ladies older than me. In order to avoid confrontations with some jealous husbands and prevent giving a serious or tragic headache to my parents, I decided to go to Mexico City. Before turning eighteen, I was looking for new horizons and a new life away from the homeland, because in Ciudad Juárez I was unable to make it.

When I arrived in the Mexican capital, I lived for three months with some uncles and cousins. Then I quickly got a job at the Goodrich Euskadi tire factory, where I worked for more than four years. Within the company, there was a club with more than two hundred trusted employees that would get involved doing different activities. During my first year, I founded the hiking division, and soon after the high mountain club. Such activities gained great popularity with the participating employees. By this time, I was already an active member of the Socorro Alpino de Mexico, as well as a member of the Escuela de Guías (Guide’s School), directed by José Luis Beteta. My mountaineering enthusiasm was such that I had the fortune to conquer, more than twenty-five times, the peaks of the high volcanoes and very high mountains near the Mexican capital. The summits climbed included the Popocatépetl, Iztaccíhuatl (the sleeping woman), and the highest mountain in all of Mexico, the Citlaltépetl or Pico de Orizaba. I also participated in many rescue missions with the Alpine Relief, helping foreign climbers who came from Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and other European countries who were unaware of the routes of our high mountains and got lost or injured.

During this time of my adventurous youth, I became very fond of rock climbing and founded Cordada # 3 in the Escuela de Guías (Guide’s School), made up of two very good friends and excellent climbers—Juan Cuellar and Miguel Fosado—and myself.

There were many popular rocks and cliffs to climb in those days. There were Las Ventanas, El Zorro, Los Frailes, Las Carolinas, and Las Arañas, just to mention a few. This last rock was very impressive and difficult to climb because in order to reach the top, the climber had to overcome a roof from where he would hang from a few small pegs with a free fall of more than 150 meters. This was a really spectacular climb, and that’s why it was called Las Arañas (the spiders) because when the person was hanging from that very high ceiling, the climber would be perceived from below like a real spider. La Muralla (the wall) was another impressive climb which was considered fourth-degree level of difficulty. By the way, in that climb I suffered a fall of more than eighteen meters, having been hanging from the rope, and thanks to the peg that withstood the strong stress of my weight plus the stretch that increased the eighteen meters, I was able to survived the fall. Thanks to the precise assistance of my dear companions Juan and Miguel, and of course the support and protection of the Almighty, I am presently writing these memoirs. As a point of reference, most of these challenging rocks and cliffs are located in the State of Hidalgo, near the beautiful city of Pachuca (La Bella Airosa). However, the most dangerous climbing expedition ever, feared and considered the defying one of the climbers, was and (I’m sure still is) the infamous Colmillo (the fang), not only for its height but for its degree of difficulty, which is considered higher than a fifth-degree level.

Our team, la Cordada # 3 of the Escuela de Guías (Guide’s School) which I was leading, had planned to make an attempt to conquer this rock (El Colmillo) within two or three years, since we required much more experience and practice in the art of climbing rocks. To continue, I would like to make a brief statement about this cutthroat rock.

Before starting to talk about this transcendent experience and why transcendent, well, you will see, because in that climbing experience I understood that every human being, when he or she proposes to reach apparently impossible goals, if the person offers a maximum capacity and absolute commitment, that impossible assumption can be realized. For me, El Colmillo left a mark in my memory and soul. By being at those heights and in situations of fatal risk, if I did not make the right decision and take the right step, that was the end of my existence and the end of everything. The desperation and anguish of seeing me fall into a vacuum taught me to find skill and fortitude in order to overcome those crucial moments. Well, all those events that transcended in my life really helped me in the course of my life in general, not only in business but in health, and even in my romantic life since my whole life has been full of difficult situations and with an infinite amount of challenges to overcome. Today, every time I see myself in predicaments and troubles, I immediately remember El Colmillo. It comes to mind that in those precarious and tragic moments, I managed to overcome them at the height of eighty meters in the air. In my entire life thereafter, depending on my decision and courage, the problems, hardships, and adversities that occurred in my daily life, without risking life and with both feet secure on the ground, become peccata minuta. And that’s the reason why El Colmillo was for me a transcendent experience.

El Colmillo

Chapter 2

It was a weekend in the year of 1959 or 1960; the month escapes my memory. It was when Juan Cuellar, Eduardo Villegas, and myself planned to go out to climb La Muralla rock (the wall), which Juan and I were not familiar with. We were ready to pick up Villegas at his house when they informed us that he had to work overtime and was unable to go with us. For this reason, our plans to make the excursion failed, since he was the one who knew the route.

Being eight o’clock at night in the city of Mexico, Juan and I were unsure of where to go to satisfy our desires to climb rocks. After discussing it for half an hour, we decided to keep going straight toward the Bella Airosa or the city of Pachuca in the state of Hidalgo, because that was the road to get to El Colmillo. Of course, our plans were to go to the rock and take some pictures in order to study the climbing routes of the legendary and feared rock, because as I had mentioned previously, we were still inexperienced for that challenge. I pointed my Pontiac in that direction, and we took off.

After getting directions from people, we took a dirt road, and in half of an hour, we arrived at some little huts where a number of humble and hungry indigenous families lived. They were natives of those arid and desolate mountains of the state of Hidalgo. As they saw the car, an older man with children of about eight and ten years old came out to see what this nocturnal visit was about. We greeted them and told them that we were going to meet and take some pictures of the rock. But do not try to climb it, said the indigenous Hidalguense, because that’s the devil’s stone. We spent the night in the car, halfway dozing off. And about five thirty on Sunday morning, we got up, had some coffee, and started preparing our backpacks and equipment to start our journey to El Colmillo.

The sons of that sullen native followed us a short stretch, and before returning to their little hut, the smaller one hugged me from my leg. And with tears in his eyes, pulling from my pants, he asked me to return and not to go there, pointing with his little finger toward El Colmillo. Both Juan and I were deeply moved and influenced by the attitude of the little boy. But more than anything, he sowed an uncertainty in us, and it goes without saying, fear of going to the rock.

The walk lasted a couple of hours. We advanced almost without saying a word, each one with our minds absorbed and focused on that tall sentinel that we already saw at a distance.

Upon arrival, our great surprise was that the oval-shaped base of that huge imposing mass measured forty to fifty meters by approximately thirty-five meters wide, with an elevation of more than eighty meters in the direction of a blue and peaceful sky. Apart from the majesty of the rock, which left us speechless, there were more than a dozen crosses buried around the grim stone. No doubt in memory of all the climbers who had failed, crashing their heads on the rock or on the ground, perishing in their failed attempt to conquer such a difficult and risky test.

They were tragic scenes surely witnessed by those natives who asked us to get away from the stone of the devil.

Juan and I took off our backpacks and sat down to meditate and contemplate that threatening Goliath. Minutes later, we got something to eat, we savored a bit of ham, a delicious Swiss cheese, and we uncorked a bottle of red wine that we shared. After our refreshment, we let ourselves be absorbed by a gentle relaxation. And being mentally exhausted, we took a pleasant and comforting siesta of twenty-five minutes. Around two o’clock in the afternoon, I woke up surrounded by an inexplicable tranquility, security, and calmness. I got up and took a turn around the rock, looking sideways at the different crosses and trying to ignore them. On my way I was able to discover a route and see a peg about twenty meters high.

Juan was still asleep. I took my safety rope, some safety hooks, and the forty-meter nylon rope. I approached my partner, saying, Juanito, I’m going to touch this little rock.

Half asleep, he told me, Be careful, Mario.

As I mentioned before, I felt a tranquility and confidence in myself that without fear of being wrong, I was overcome by a source of inspiration that could only come from the All Powerful.

I started to climb the first meters, as I found the handles with no difficulty and the small projections of the rock, none larger than the size of a potato to support me by placing the tips of my boots. Within a short time, I was holding a hook from the safety peg that I had located from below. I made the journey with a strange sensation to keep on caressing the rock, because my arms and the rest of my movements were surprisingly coordinated—something that caught my attention and surprised me, because my usual style of climbing was more intrepid and rapturous. Once secured to the peg, I yelled at Juan, Bring the other rope and meet me here! He asked me how I saw the climbing. I replied, Great. Get yourself over here. I threw one end of my rope, and as he tied it around him, he started to climb. And in a few minutes, he was by my side. We were both standing on a few small rock projections, but we were already secured to the first peg.

He congratulated me by saying, Mario, I saw you when you went up, and I noticed you were very calm, coordinated, and safe.

Yes, Juanito, I answered. I feel very well and with a strange encouraging inspiration to keep on climbing.

In art and music, as well as in climbing, there are moments of inspiration in which the spirit and soul are plundered by skill and courage, overcoming setbacks and making things go well. We stayed for a few minutes in that place, searching and studying the route to follow. We had aluminum stirrups with nylon ropes, but we came to the conclusion that the route was free climbing and not artificial. I took the forefront again by advancing another eight or ten meters over a much more difficult area than I had traveled before, because the inclination of the rock toward the outside gives a sensation that the rock begins to push one toward the abyss, which is a horrible feeling.

As I reached the next peg, making it safely, I told Juan to start climbing in order to meet me. I kept the rope taut until he calmly and without difficulty arrived next to me. When there is already a rope in front of which one is tied to, it gives the sensation of support and security, and with that slight pull, a great psychological help is provided in the ascent.

When Juan met with me, we found ourselves on a small ledge of no more than ten to fifteen centimeters coming out of the wall and a half meter wide where we had our four feet perched. Even being on such a narrow step and at that height, we felt safe by being tied to a very well-placed peg.

Five minutes later, Juan told me, Mario, you are climbing very well and with self-assuredness, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to take the forefront on the next stretch.

I was sure of his great ability as a climber, the many experiences we had shared, and the confidence that I had in him. I replied, Of course, Juanito, go ahead.

It was also about both of us sharing the conquest of such a dream climb. At the height at which we were, it was impossible for us to return since the placed pegs were not adequate, nor could they withstand a rappel. Thus we had to continue, finding ourselves approximately fifty meters high perpendicular to the rock.

With marked