Isle of Passion

by Laura Restrepo

  At that moment her husband comes down the stairs. He is a short man, wears glasses, and is carrying his raincoat over his arm. On his way to work, he greets us politely and looks at her tenderly, with admiration even, and then leaves.

  “Did you see how he looks at me? He shares my mission and has worked tirelessly to make my book widely known, but sometimes it worries him to think that I go too far. ‘Come down to earth, María Teresa,’ he tells me, ‘come back to reality.’ And I tell him that my reality is not here but in Clipperton, because that isle is my life.”

  María Teresa goes to the kitchen to make coffee. On the dining room wall there is a large portrait of her, hands on her lap, her white muslin strapless dress baring her equally white shoulders. She is looking straight ahead, unsmiling. In a silver frame propped on a mahogany sideboard is a photo of her grandmother Alicia. They really resemble each other.

  María Teresa brings the coffee on a tray. Unlike her dress in the portrait, the one she is wearing now is severe, with a collar up to her neck and sleeves down to her wrists, in a dark shade of purple, a color of mourning. She wears no rings on her fingers, just a pair of showy gold earrings and a cross, also in gold, on her chest.

  “People say that I am a porfirista like my grandfather, who fought in Porfirio Díaz’s federal army. It is true that I feel nostalgia for the past and have no interest in present-day politics. But I am not a throwback. We all have our idiosyncracies. Look, my grandfather was really a Frenchman, his parents were French, and he sacrificed his life so that Mexico would not lose a piece of land, which today, after many a turn and tumble, is precisely in the hands of the French. That is why, because of his spilled blood, my family finds no peace and cannot rest until Clipperton is again under the Mexican flag.”

  The big entrance door to the house has amber glass panels on both sides. The light comes through them and falls on María Teresa while she says good-bye with an admonition.

  “So you are taking on Clipperton? Do you really want to trace its tragic history? Do you honestly want to understand all the love and all the forgiving that occurred on that inhospitable rock in the midst of the Pacific Ocean? You better watch out then and mind my words. Clipperton was not always its name. Its original name was Isle of Passion, and whoever gave it that name understood it very well. Whoever enters its world pays dearly for it. What you’ll find there is a sea of sorrows.”

  Señora María Teresa Arnaud (Mrs. Guzmán), the granddaughter of the Arnauds from Orizaba, has come to see me off at the door of her San Angel home. She stands next to the glazed door. The light coming through gives her complexion a strange tone, alabaster-like. She has something else to say.

  “Let me make one more thing clear: my grandmother and her sisters did indeed spend time embroidering together a few months before the wedding. They spent hours and hours doing that. Not making a lace dress, no. They embroidered all the linens for the home on the isle—sheets, towels, tablecloths, napkins. They even embroidered the famous saintly bedsheet, with its keyhole opening and all, which was used in those days on the wedding night to consummate the marriage. They did a beautiful job embroidering the bride’s initials, A.R.A. That is why you became confused. It is because of such things that my father and I do not want anyone outside of us two to tell our story. People talk of things they know nothing about, they spread versions that are not accurate.”

  Orizaba, Today

  SITTING IN THE KITCHEN AT PENSIÓN LOYO, Alicia Arnaud remembers the gray pearl necklace that her father sent her mother from Japan.

  “I remember my mother wearing that necklace. She liked to finger it, caress it, while she spoke about Dad, while she told us all that happened. I do not know who might have it now. When Mother died, Aunt Adela Arnaud, my father’s sister, took us in. Had it not been for her, we would have ended up in an orphanage. We never found out what happened to Mother’s things, the ones that were left after her death. I do not know who might have that necklace now, but I remember it as if I were looking at it.”

  In the whole Clipperton story, the gray pearl necklace takes on a political significance, apart from its emotional value: it is the only evidence left of Ramón Arnaud’s trip to Japan. As far as it’s known, he didn’t tell anybody the reason for his trip, and didn’t leave any written record either.

  “We never found out why he took it. I think he didn’t even tell my mother,” Alicia Arnaud says.

  Porfirio Díaz himself commissioned him and took the trouble of interviewing him personally for it. The trip took place in 1907, immediately after Arnaud was named governor of Clipperton Island. By then, relations between Japan and Mexico were becoming stronger. Japanese imports became fashionable in Mexico City, judo was the rage, poets wrote odes to bamboo trees, and the ladies bought parasols and silk fans.

  Then there were persistent rumors of a secret treaty between Mexico and Japan. People said that Japan would declare war on the United States to secure its control over the Pacific, and that Mexico would be its ally. In accordance with such an agreement, it is possible that Clipperton would have been considered of strategic importance due to its location. On the other hand, it is also possible that this often-mentioned secret treaty between Mexico and Japan was just a rumor. That is, nothing but a distracting strategy on the part of the German government, which, in an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, wanted to set the United States and Japan, its two principal enemies, against each other. To spread the tale of a sinister plan to gain control over the Pacific region would foster the paranoia of the “yellow peril” that was affecting the United States.

  That leaves another possible explanation: that Arnaud did not say much about his trip, leaving no records, not because of its secret and transcendental historical import, but just the opposite, because of its mere triviality. For instance, Ramón might have been sent to Tokyo as a translator for formal diplomatic affairs. Or to take to the emperor of Japan a piece of Sèvres porcelain as a gift from the president. And perhaps Clipperton never had any strategic importance for anyone, except for birds as a convenient place to leave their droppings.

  Whether it was decisive or trivial, this piece of the puzzle has been hopelessly lost. Nothing is known about why Lieutenant Ramón Arnaud went to Japan. There is only one known fact: that from Japan he sent his fiancée a necklace of gray pearls.

  Orizaba, 1908

  THE MORNING OF JUNE 24 was a bit warm. The stones at the portico of the parish church, still wet from a midnight downpour, were quickly being dried out by the brand-new sun. Steam was rising from the ground. The early morning mists and the incense that from time to time escaped from the interior gave the facade of the old church on the plaza a blurred, milky appearance, a nervous silhouette.

  At five minutes after six Alicia appeared as if floating on the white ocean spray of her wedding dress and trailing a cloud of tulle after her. She walked holding on to her father’s arm from the wrought-iron fence up to the entrance and then, one step at a time, up the stairs and inside the church, all the way to the main altar. Ramón in his dress uniform was waiting for her. By his side, the voluminous, solid figure of his mother, Doña Carlota, all draped in black.

  Alicia was bedazzled by the thousands of lit candles, by the tiny flames that multiplied in the reflection on the gold leaf that covered the carved cedar of the altars. She felt overwhelmed by the quantity of flowers. The saints, niches, naves, corners, both sides of the aisles, the pulpit: the whole church was bursting with blooms. They combined in a full range of colors and scents, dominating all the available oxygen inside. She felt asphyxiated and a little dizzy, and, closing her eyes, she slowly let some air into her lungs and tried to focus only on the smells. In spite of the incense, she was able to distinguish floral scents—the sweet jasmines, the slightly acrid daisies, the steamy gardenias, the familiar roses, and the almost imperceptible yet treacherous charm of orchids. The overloaded breath of air wrapped around her and numbed her senses, isolating her from reality.

>   She opened her eyes, inhaling deeply, and was able, little by little, to focus on the blurred images. Particularly one of them, a stranger who stood stiffly by her side. She looked at him in amazement, as if seeing for the first time his thin mustache, his doll-like eyelashes, his round, introspective eyes, his hair, disciplined with brilliantine and sharply parted in the middle. He, Ramón, the stranger with whom she was to live for the rest of her days, turned to look at her and smiled. Though it came from that strange face, his smile was warm and familiar, and brought Alicia back down to earth.

  I know him little, but I love him, Alicia thought, after catching her breath, and she busied herself arranging her tulle veil around her feet. Actually, they had known each other since childhood and had been engaged since adolescence, but during their courtship they never had the opportunity of being alone, of talking freely until they ran out of topics to talk about, of being close, of being in physical contact, of scrutinizing the nooks and crannies of each other’s soul. In the last seven years, Ramón had been away on military duty. Once or twice a year he had been granted a furlough to return to Orizaba, and on those visits, which would last a few days or a few weeks, he alternated between sleeping all his postponed siestas, letting himself be fed and pampered by his mother, and courting his fiancée.

  An engagement in Orizaba—a twisted, fearful, and overly pious town, teeming with gossip—consisted of no more than after-dinner family gatherings, bouquets of roses, croquet games, kissing of hands, and walks on the alameda. There is testimony, for instance, that after their engagement was formalized and made public, the two lovers began to stroll arm in arm. This is stated in an unpublished manuscript by a local friend of Alicia’s family, Don Antonio Díaz Meléndez, entitled “Orizaba de mis recuerdos” (The Orizaba I remember).

  There is no mention in it, however, of the piles of garbage on the streets where the pigs snooped around, of the dark vestries where priests used to exorcise epileptics by beating them, nor of the street corners, right in the center of town, where the poor used to relieve themselves. But the lost graces of Orizaba do get nostalgic mention: the well-trimmed lawn and shade trees in the alameda, the fountain of playful waters, the aristocratic family gatherings listening to the strains of the Municipal Military Band playing Juventino Rosas’s “Over the Waves” waltz in the gazebo of the central plaza after the eleven o’clock mass. Don Antonio tells how one Sunday in the middle of an open-air concert and the pleasant strolling of the townspeople, he saw a beautiful girl “wearing an elegant hat and a dress with a discreet neckline, reaching down to the tips of her shiny patent leather booties, as the fashion in those days demanded. She was Miss Alicia Rovira, on the arm of a handsome officer, whom she introduced to me as her fiancé. It was Captain Arnaud. This was the first and last time I saw him, and he made an excellent impression on me with his pleasant conversation and loving behavior toward his fiancée, charming Alicia.”

  One day, dressed up and serene, they were walking a few steps ahead of her parents, siblings, and cousins when Alicia stopped suddenly and told Ramón, “Besides being in love and getting married, I would like us to be friends, you and me.”

  Ramón looked at her in surprise. He kept silent for a while.

  “I would like that, too. But that will have to be when we live together, alone. For now, with so many people around us, it’s even difficult to be romantically in love like in the novels.”

  The time came to set the wedding date and begin the preparations. Ramón was no longer a decent, pennyless adolescent, nor a dishonored military man labeled as a deserter. Now he had a career and a future—risky and unpredictable, but still promising—to offer his beloved, so he asked for her hand in marriage. On a windy night, accompanied by his mother, Doña Carlota, he arrived at the home of Félix Rovira and his wife, Petra, Alicia’s parents, who served them glasses of sherry and some olives, while Don Félix overdid himself, being gallant and making pretentious jokes. He was courteously pompous when he offered a toast for the future couple. Nobody suspected that his eyes were swollen and his nose red because for hours before the visit, he had locked himself up in the library in a rage and he had cried and had thrown on the floor, tome after tome, most of his Encyclopedia Britannica in an attack of paternal jealousy.

  The announcements and the invitations to the wedding were ordered to be printed in an ocher shade. There was a breakfast planned for after the ceremony with French-style hot chocolate, link sausages, the blood pudding that Don Félix, who was from Galicia, prepared himself, and the assorted hors d’oeuvres with Doña Carlota’s famous mayonnaise.

  The day had come, and now the wedding ceremony was coming to an end without a hitch, apart from the collectively experienced lack of air. Alicia followed every detail and imprinted them all in her memory, where they would be etched forever: Doña Carlota’s large diamond, which Ramón had set in an engagement ring that reflected tiny rainbows from her little girl’s hand; the weight of the earrings, which matched the ring; the Holy Sacrament of the Communion held on high by the priest’s fat fingers; the nostalgia on her father’s face, which everybody except Alicia simply interpreted as pure emotion; the extremely sharp timbre, practically superhuman, of the solo voice from the choir singing the “Ave María”; Ramón’s beatific smile as he thought of breaking his fast with the sausages and the chocolate. And above all, overpowering everything, the dense, compact scent emanating from the flowers.

  At the climax of the ceremony, the final benediction, Alicia looked at the black feathers of her mother-in-law’s outrageous hat. They annoyed her, they seemed to her like a bad omen, and, involuntarily, she made a face. As if he had heard what she was thinking, Ramón bent down toward her and whispered in her ear: “I told my mother not to wear that ugly bird hat because it was going to scare you.”

  Orizaba, Today

  I COME TO ORIZABA looking for traces of that wedding. It is a small city, dull and graceless. In the Pensión Loyo—where Alicia Arnaud Loyo lives alone since she became a widow—I find one of the marriage announcements, printed in ocher on heavy paper and folded in four. The message is written twice, according to custom.

  Mr. Félix Rovira and Mrs. Petra G. Rovira

  are pleased to inform you of the forthcoming

  marriage of their daughter Alicia

  and Mr. Ramón Arnaud

  Mrs. Carlota Vignon Arnaud

  is pleased to inform you of the forthcoming

  marriage of her son Ramón

  and Miss Alicia Rovira

  According to the Arnauds’ biographers (their granddaughter, María Teresa Arnaud Guzmán, and General Francisco Urquizo), the wedding took place on June 24. However, the wedding invitation contradicts this fact because it says “. . . has the pleasure of inviting you to the ecclesiastical ceremony, which will take place on the twenty-fourth of the present month,” and it is dated “Orizaba, July 1908.” They were married then in July, not June. This is not the first time that the calendar of their lives gets muddled, and it will not be the last in which time plays tricks on them.

  In his manuscript “The Orizaba I Remember,” Don Antonio Díaz Meléndez writes that after the religious ceremony “they headed for the Hotel de Francia, where the customary wedding hot chocolate was served.”

  I have come to learn more about this hotel, which still exists. At that time, I am told, it was the most prestigious social center of the city. Today it is in ruins. The sign that presents it as the Grand Hotel de France has several letters missing, the tiles that cover the walls are falling off, and its fifty-nine rooms are indefinitely closed “for repairs.” From its times of splendor, as a memento, there is one guest remaining who suffers from all sorts of minor ailments. A Spaniard who came to Mexico fleeing from the war, he has stayed here ever since, and when the hotel was closed, the management could not get rid of him. He still walks around its balconies, now without railings, and its fountains, dry for some time, while he curses the humidity and his arthritis.

 
However, in spite of the passing of time and the extensive dilapidation of the Grand Hotel de France, one can still perceive traces of Ramón and Alicia’s wedding. They remain imprinted in the spacious hall that was once the dining room, in the midst of the scaffolding that holds the now worm-eaten beams, in the green spots that are taking over the walls, and in whatever remains of the Art Nouveau stained-glass windows, badly in need of restoration. Whenever the wind blows in, the ghosts of that wedding reception seem to be floating around again: white dust clouds come up from the rubble that very well could have been rice showers, icing from the cake, or the bride’s veil.

  But no. It seems there is some error here, too. In spite of Don Antonio’s assertion, it is improbable that their wedding breakfast was held at the hotel. Their granddaughter, for example, says otherwise in her book. She insists that it was held at the home of Alicia’s parents.