Seeing Orizaba the way it is now, not as it was then, Ramón and Alicia’s bucolic romance seems inconceivable, unreal. I try to visualize them crossing these streets, now riddled with pollution and congested with cars, and stopping on the same sidewalks—narrow, devoid of trees, with open sewers—to greet friends, pay their respects to acquaintances, and smile at strangers. I attempt, but without success, to picture them having tea, solemn and a little smug, in the resounding mediocrity of the two-star Hotel Alvear, recently restored, with its beveled-mirrored lobby, its synthetic plush furniture, and the sign that reads “We accept Diner’s Club and American Express.”
Pale and old-fashioned Alicia and Ramón, in the mild attempt at a city that is Orizaba today. . . . I don’t even want to imagine them—with the Avenida Oriente buses roaring past—discovering in front of TE-CA, the “First Tools Boutique,” the modest monument donated five years ago by the Lions Club.
The top part of the monument has the bronze bust of a Mexican officer wearing a Prussian helmet, and on its side is a pathetic little plaque in which the same officer is represented, now at full length, holding by the hand a woman with three children. The five of them are on a wild ocean shore under stormy clouds, all barefoot, their clothes in rags. Below this, on a smaller plaque, they would be aghast to read their own names and to learn about their fatal destiny, just as it appears on the inscription:
Captain Ramón Arnaud Vignon, who,
accompanied by his heroic wife, Alicia Rovira,
a good model of the virtues of Mexican women,
maintained Mexico’s sovereignty on the Isle of Passion
until his death on October 7, 1914.
Clipperton, 1917
H. P. PERRIL, CAPTAIN of the American gunboat Yorktown, had never ever had anything to do with Clipperton. The place did not intrigue him. Quite the contrary, it inspired in him a deep lack of interest and even an uneasy feeling. Against his will, however, that isle was fated to acquire great importance for him. En route from his naval base in California, and due to a whim of fate, he not only arrived there but did so at the right time. Not a moment too soon, not a moment too late.
He wished to leave a record in his own words of that story, which he considered unique in his long experience at sea and, as he commented to his family after returning to California, he had the impression of “carrying Robinson Crusoe tied to the mast.” He meant that the misfortunes of this shipwrecked legendary figure seemed like only the first chapter of those suffered by the Clipperton castaways, which he had been able to see with his own eyes.
When the captain finished writing, he had spent the whole night of July 18, 1917, telling the recent events in exact detail. It had been his lot to become witness and actor, both judge and participant. He stayed awake in his cabin until dawn, writing a long letter to his wife, Charlotte. Once in a while he would pause, absorbed in the metallic coldness of the moon reflecting on the waters. He felt he had to control the turmoil of the day’s memories so that he would not allow them to trample his measured and precise prose. “Tonight,” he wrote to his wife, “I have something really interesting to tell you.”
Twenty-four hours before, he had been sure that on his tedious voyage through Mexican waters only a few routine entries would be made in the ship’s log. However, strange things happened. So strange that they touched the heart of the unflappable Captain Perril, and made his hand tremble as he wrote to Charlotte: “It is something I will remember as long as I live. I hope to be able to tell you about it in a way that you and the children can also appreciate.”
He wanted to tell his wife the story in every minute detail, but begged her not to read it in haste, because: “In order to develop it in the proper chronological order, I am going to begin with its less important aspects.” He did not wish to render chaotic a story already confusing in itself, so he at first avoided broaching the heart of the matter. That would have to wait until later, and he was counting on her patience to last.
Pacific Ocean, 1908
ALICIA GLANCED AT her reflection in the porthole and did not like what she saw. Two days before, when she came on board, her long brown hair was piled high on her head, a hairpiece inside a horizontal curl that framed her face. It was an old-fashioned coiffure, rather too adult for her, that clashed with her girlish face, though she thought otherwise and lamented that the wind had undone it. Her hair fell on her shoulders, disorderly and sticky with sea spray. Dark shadows under her eyes, like the ones she had when she was sick with German measles, darkened her luminous complexion. And her small, perfect features appeared enlarged and distorted in the concave glass of the porthole.
On August 27, a month after the wedding, she and Ramón had boarded for Clipperton on the Corrigan II, a large gunboat of the Mexican Navy. In the compartments below deck they had all the paraphernalia necessary to turn that barren isle into a livable place: bags of black topsoil to make a garden and seeds to grow lettuce and other greens; an enormous supply of grain and fruit, including several hundred citrus; tools, rolls of fabric, and a sewing machine; carbines, machetes, and other weapons; a silk Mexican flag, green, white, and red and with the coat of arms embroidered in silver thread by nuns; pigs and chickens; pounds of dried beef from Oaxaca; medications and first-aid manuals; potted plants; coal and other fuels; family portraits and photographs; an Austrian formal sitting room set; wicker rocking chairs from Acapulco; a mandolin; a phonograph and some popular recordings; a set of silver horsehair brushes for Alicia’s hair; a pair of canaries in their cage; some delicacies to eat; books and newspapers; and in a leather trunk, carefully packed in mothballs, her wedding dress and its twenty yards of lace train.
Traveling on board with the couple were eleven soldiers, together with their children and camp followers, that would make up the garrison commanded by Arnaud. For all of them, a small, suffocating corner next to the engines had been assigned, where their pallets could fit only when placed one against the other. Before they were stricken by seasickness, they had enclosed themselves in the semidarkness to gamble their last pay on the whims of dice and playing cards.
The camp followers fluttered about the soldiers like anxious hens. Loud-mouthed, sweaty, rough and with unruly manes, they smelled of smoke and female musk. All of them, young and old, seemed to be of the same indecipherable age. With their raspy voices, which sounded like cornets, comic sopranos, or geese, they mingled prayers with blasphemy, and sweet, tender words with cursing and crude language. They elbowed their way and fought over a place to stow the few belongings they had on this earth: some rags and serapes tied up, a metate to grind corn, and a pot to cook beans. They had followed their men—their johns—on board without knowing where they were headed. As usual, they boiled some gunpowder in water and then drank it. This was how they tried to find the courage and the resignation to run around battlefields without thinking of anything else but having their men’s food ready as soon as the shooting stopped.
Compared to the hole where the underlings were quartered, the small cabin occupied by the Arnauds was luxurious. It had two bunks, a ewer with its dish and mirror for their personal cleanliness, and they even had some comforts that in a warship are usually the captain’s exclusive privilege, such as a coatrack and a desk. At first Alicia was very happy to spend her time there, fixing everything as if it were a doll-house. Since it was her first ocean voyage, Ramón advised her to take precautions against seasickness, like having only whitefish with no condiments, and drinking atole and lemon water. In spite of that, on the third day she overslept and woke up restless, overwhelmed by being locked up in her cabin. Ramón had not been there for hours. She got up quickly and went up to the deck. While climbing the ladder, she was startled to see her distorted reflection in a porthole. She looked awful.
With the early morning light, the sky was so overcast and the horizon seemed so close that she felt she could almost touch it with her hand. Between the sea and the sky, only a narrow strip was left for humans, and there th
e temperature was that of a steel furnace. All of a sudden the breeze had died, and a few small but viciously choppy waves were rocking the ship mercilessly. An unmistakable smell attacked her nostrils. Acrid and organic. It was vomit. Seasickness had spread like an implacable ritual baptism for the people who had, for the first time, ventured out to sea. Alicia saw soldiers, camp followers, and children wandering about, transparent and ghostly, and in the midst of this sorry spectacle, she heard again, for the hundredth time during that voyage, a childish voice repeating a silly ditty: “Day star of gold, don’t let me get cold, during the night, when there is no light, day star of gold . . .”
The hellish heat threatened to crack skulls, as well as the woodwork, making people’s heads hum with fever, and making the deck hot enough to fry johnnycakes. However, that child kept singing his ditty all throughout the voyage, “Day star of gold, don’t let me get cold,” sitting on a bench, his large eyes looking at nowhere in particular, his white piqué sailor hat down to his ears, while he bobbed in the air his little chocolate-colored boots with preposterously long shoelaces.
In the stillness of that sweltering heat, his piercing little songbird voice reached every corner. It was a minimal torture, but sustained like incessant drops of water on a prisoner’s head. Alicia wanted to distance herself, but she sat near him as if impelled by a small fatal fascination, and started to review in her mind ways of silencing him. As if it were all-important, as if in that child with his boots and bonnet, exactly in his voice, precisely in the particular timbre of that voice, lay the epicenter of the heat wave, of the collective seasickness, of the suffocating sensation of ill-being. Who were his parents? Where was his father, to pull his ears? Alicia’s nerves were raw, her humor prickly, and her thoughts turned to cruel ways in which to silence him. She remembered the nuns at school, Sister Carola and Sister Asunta, who, unexpectedly materializing from the shadows, used to pinch her, and then she felt that pain in her arm, brief like a hen’s peck but sharp. She would never do that to this child, but it calmed her nerves to entertain the thought.
Sensing that her system had reached its limits of endurance, Alicia leaned over the guardrail, hoping for an improbable breeze that would take away that nauseous feeling in the pit of her stomach. She then looked at the Pacific Ocean. It was churning, dense and gray, and on her face she felt the warm, soupy vapor. “If I keep looking at it, I will also be undone,” she told herself, and turned around so as not to see the spray and the bubbling dark waters. Then she noticed that her husband was only a few feet away.
Captain* Ramón Arnaud of the Mexican Army was bending pitifully overboard, jolted by retching, throwing up the very last yellow remnants in his stomach. He was not a seaman but an army man, a landlubber. Those rough years in a mad rush from one barracks to the other had seasoned him to overcome terrestrial calamities, but he was not prepared to confront the pounding of the ocean. He kept throwing up, though it seemed there was nothing else left, and in each spasm he got to know another dark corner of hell, trying to hold his entrails in but afraid he would be turned inside out like a glove. His drill uniform was soiled and unbuttoned, and his face wet with a cold sweat. His hair, however, held by brilliantine and oblivious to the violent jolts the rest of his body was experiencing, remained in place, perfectly parted in the middle, neat and martial-looking. To her he seemed tidy and elegant in spite of his disheveled appearance, and solemn even in his desolation. His hair is not even ruffled when he throws up, Alicia thought, and her miserable mood dissipated.
At that moment, wondrous gusts of cool wind began sweeping across the deck, brushing against the faces of the bedraggled passengers. That clean air renewed the condition of their lungs and sedated their digestive systems, soothing their death wishes. A seagull flew leisurely over the ship, announcing the proximity of land. As if by magic, the waters became calm, and the ocean, recovering its liquid state, became golden and smooth. The collective intestinal nightmare abated, and the child who sang like a bird became silent.
Men and women lifted their heads and saw it in the distance: before their eyes, white and radiantly barren, was the silhouette of Clipperton Island. It was August 30, 1908.
Clipperton, 1917
ON THE MORNING OF JULY 18, 1917, U.S. Navy captain H.P. Perril saw Clipperton Island for the first and last times. He never came ashore, but he took a very careful look at it from his ship, the Yorktown, through his spyglass. He circumnavigated the isle—outside the barrier reef, and at a safe distance from it—exactly in an hour, and confirmed that it was about five miles around. “Clipperton Island,” he wrote, “is a dangerous low atoll, approximately 2 miles in diameter.”
An atoll is an astonishing formation in the shape of a doughnut, with water in its center and around its perimeter. A ring of land with a lagoon in the center, floating in the middle of the ocean. At some moment in its prehistoric past, Clipperton had been a volcanic mountain surrounded by a powerful crown of coral reefs. The mountain in time sank slowly, and disappeared under the water, and the reef wall was the only thing left above sea level. What had been the crater of a volcano was now a lagoon of brackish waters, effervescent with sulfur coming from the belly of the earth.
The captain goes on: “[The isle] has a promontory 62 feet high on its southwest coast, which at first sight looks like a ship’s sail, and on approaching it, like a gigantic castle. This promontory can be seen from a distance of 12 to 15 miles provided there is no fog: then, the promontory and the isle itself can only be seen when it is already at very close range.
“The breakers on its eastern shore do not provide early enough warning for a ship to change course in order to avoid running aground. The isle is surrounded by an uninterrupted coral reef on which the ocean pounds heavily and ceaselessly, sometimes covering the isle. There are sharks swimming around. During the rainy season, waterfalls cascade on its southwestern coast.
“While we were circumnavigating the isle, I saw more seagulls, flying fish, and butterflies than I had ever seen on a similar stretch of coastline,” Perril comments, amazed at this place which, lacking any vegetation, no blade of grass to soften the hostility of those rocks, nonetheless abounds in an unusual and alarming proliferation of animal life. “Thousands of birds fly around the island, and the guano deposits are being exploited commercially. A colony was established to operate a phosphate plant some years ago. [ . . . ] A layer of guano several feet deep covers the isle. There is no doubt that birds have inhabited it for years.”
Nine years earlier, and from the deck of another ship, the Corrigan II, the Arnauds had viewed, full of expectation, what for them was a promised land. Though that happened long before and they were seeing the isle through glasses of a different color, what they saw could not have been much dissimilar to what the American captain, H. P. Perril, saw when he accidentally approached its shores.
Clipperton, 1908
THERE WAS A BUNCH OF CHILDREN and women watching them from shore. Alicia looked at them from the barge, and they seemed dejected and lonesome in that hot weather. Their tanned skin, dark and dry, withstood the rigors of the sun while the white sun glare bleached out all the colors, already faded, of the scant garments they wore. Boobies, the shore birds, fluttered around them and walked over their feet, and people shooed them away with either strong arm gestures or lazy kicks.
The small, faded universe in front of her eyes reverberated and consumed itself in a slow combustion. Alicia saw how the ocean seemed to explode over the reefs, pounding the rocks, the few sickly coconut palms, and the human beings, then coming to rest on every crevice, hollow, and cranny. The sun lost no time in evaporating the water, and everything was soon covered with a mirrorlike layer of salt, refulgent, blinding. The ocean spray would fall slowly on the people, transforming them into salt statues. It was only in their eyes, in the feverish eagerness in their gaze, that Alicia discovered the great expectations, repressed but fierce, for the boat’s arrival.
A few yards ahead of the women,
a half-dozen soldiers stood firmly, their heads covered with big straw hats, their drill uniforms battered, their feet in huarache sandals. They also appeared sleepy and blurred, like tin soldiers melting in the sun. They all look like castaways, Alicia thought uneasily. Someday I myself will be watching for the arrival of a boat and will also have an expression on my face like Juan Diego’s when the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to him.
Two masculine figures stood out in the group. One was a youthful man of medium height in uniform and the only one who seemed vital, miraculously fresh in his clean shirt, and the other was a big strong man, radically blond, with a single thick eyebrow extending from one temple to the other without a break in the middle. On a big pole set in a cement base in the midst of everything, a very faded national flag was waving rather reluctantly, as if it were laundry hung out to dry in the wind.
The Corrigan II was anchored at a prudent distance from the dangerous reefs surrounding the isle, and passengers and crew were disembarking from flat-bottomed barges. Alicia’s first sensation on setting foot on Clipperton was one of annoyance: the land was not firm enough, and her shoes sank into the black-green, sticky guano.
More conscious now of the nauseating vapors coming from the lagoon than of the prophetic vibrations that had jolted her a few moments before, she wrinkled her fine little nose and observed, “The whole thing smells like rotten cabbages.”
Suddenly Ramón came out of his mesmerizing seasickness, as if the penetrating smell of cabbages had the same effect on him as did the smelling salts on those who had fainted. Keeping in mind the role he had to play, he regained his natural color, composure, and energy and, with a commanding air, greeted one by one all the members of the reception committee, including the children, with an accompanying firm hand-shake. He immediately called his men and ordered an improvised ceremony for saluting the flag. His first act as governor would be to replace the existing flag with the brand-new one embroidered by nuns.
Isle of Passion Page 5