Isle of Passion

by Laura Restrepo

  For Victoriano Alvarez, living there meant being isolated from his comrades, but in compensation, the appointment invested him with a special importance, an almost priestly aura. He became the man of the light, the guide to lost ships, the point of contact between Clipperton and what lay beyond.

  The following weeks were also filled with hard work. The dock was reinforced, and a saltworks was constructed on the low cliffs so as to keep a permanent source of salt. Pig stalls and chicken coops were built so that the animals would not be running around free. Strict regulations were decreed so that human beings, no matter what their ages, had to use latrines for their physiological needs, unlike before, when people relieved themselves wherever the need arose.

  As for feeding the troops, Ramón put an end to the anarchy of each one on his own and established a food store. There, under his strict control and according to family size, proportional rations of corn, beans, chiles, rice, coffee, flour, cereals, and dried beef were distributed. On Saturday mornings the soldiers were paid, and since there were no cantinas for them to get drunk, they had the luxury of buying in the store even items that, given the conditions, could be considered nonessential, such as soap, condiments, and beer. The stealing of supplies, common at the beginning, was curtailed by means of severe punishments imposed by Arnaud, ranging from whipping in the worst cases, to digging ditches under the noonday sun.

  Next to the store, Ramón set up a pharmacy with surgical supplies, disinfectants, and remedies. Guided by the medical dictionaries he had brought from the continent, he personally turned apothecary first, then medic after gaining some confidence, and finally, when circumstances demanded it, surgeon. Clipperton offered him the opportunity to act in the profession he had wanted to follow but could not.

  During the first months he limited himself to prescribing methylene blue gargles for sore throats, gentian violet for scrapes, magnesium sulfate enemas for stomachaches, ipecacuanha powder as a laxative. He learned that arandula vertiginosa, better known as agua zafia, was incomparable, if properly administered, to combat heartburn, lack of appetite, and lack of sexual drive as well. However, if the patient ingested more drops than prescribed, he would die in a matter of hours, his lips purple and blistering. Agua zafia came in small blue flasks that Ramón carefully kept under lock and key, given its lethal properties.

  If a case presented crab bites or Portuguese man-of-war burns, he ordered that a child be brought to pee on the affected skin. For the common cold, he rubbed hot glycerine on the torso and wrapped it in paper strips. As the glycerine grew cold, it hardened under the paper and the grippe victim had to remain stiff and wrapped up like a mummy for hours. Later he also took care of serious wounds: knife fights among the men who became irascible and desperate in the island prison, or severe blows among the camp followers because of jealousy. In this way, Ramón learned to dispense first aid and got his training for what he had to deal with months later: childbirth, epidemics, and death.

  Taking care of the vegetable garden became a ritual. In the middle of the bone-dry Clipperton terrain, the thousand square feet of black, moist soil speckled with green was a mirage. It was weeded and sprinkled with the tenderness granted to a firstborn child, and in the afternoons everybody, even those dedicated to other tasks, stopped by for a while before dusk to watch its progress. They stood in groups, next to the furrows, and voiced their alarm if they saw a worm among the cabbage leaves, or else clapped for the green carrot tops beginning to come out. This daily habit turned the garden into a meeting place serving all the functions of a town’s main plaza.

  The soldiers spent all their time growing greens, carving chairs, taking care of the pigs, counting bales of guano, while military discipline was reduced to a minimum: close order and salute to the flag at dawn, cleaning of weapons and uniforms, and exercises within the limited space available. The practice of trotting around the isle was discontinued because the broken coral was destroying their boots and huaraches, and there were no replacements. Defense was limited to the rotating guard duty, day and night, at the lighthouse and the brigades of two or three men who made the rounds to patrol the order of the community. All of this troubled Ramón, and he told his assistant, Secundino Angel Cardona.

  “Rather than a military outpost, this seems like an artisans’ commune.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Captain,” Lieutenant Cardona responded, “here the coral reefs are in charge of the true defense. If an enemy ship approaches with intentions of invading, it will soon become firewood against the reefs. If the ship passes that barrier, then we fire at it from the lighthouse until we run out of ammunition, because there isn’t very much. If, in spite of all that, the enemy disembarks, we’ll engage them in hand-to-hand combat. And if they are too many for us, then the Faceless One will take us out.”

  “That might sound absurd, but it’s really the only possible strategy,” Arnaud agreed. “You are right, it’s no use fretting any more about it.”

  And life went on, full and bearable enough, within that penny-sized universe. The tremendous amount of work rendered results, and the people’s measure of well-being lay in simple things. The inhabited part of the isle did not look either like a slum or like a mound of bird droppings, and the first harvest of the vegetable garden was celebrated with a large salad shared by all. It consisted of lettuce, onions, radishes, and turnips, and Arnaud himself prepared a dressing of mayonnaise, the recipe for which he had inherited from Doña Carlota.

  They carried on a routine in imitation of the civilized world, and the resulting peaceful monotony mimicked happiness. Only one expectation, one faith, united all the inhabitants: the arrival of the ship. Two months had gone by since their ship had weighed anchor, and there were no signs of its return. There was still no real cause for alarm because the schedule allowed for another month’s leeway.

  One afternoon, while they were straightening accounts in Gustav Schultz’s cabin, he made one of his indecipherable statements, in the middle of which Arnaud picked up with total clarity a name that gave him goose pimples: that of Robinson Crusoe.

  “Tell the German gentleman we do not welcome idle comparisons,” he told Lieutenant Cardona, so that he, making faces and gestures, would explain it to Schultz. “The only things that man had when he came to his island were a knife, a pipe, and a tin of tobacco, while we have more comforts here than the Queen of Sheba.”

  “And that is not all,” he added without an iota of conviction but with an evident aggressiveness that altered his voice. “Tell him also not to forget that, unlike Crusoe, we are here of our own free will.”

  Secundino Cardona did not understand why his superior had taken Schultz’s comments so much to heart.

  Clipperton, 1908

  OCTOBER CAME BUT the ship did not. Instead, devastating rains threatened to erase Clipperton’s precarious existence. During the heaviest storms, the ocean waters flooded the lowlands on the island for hours or days at a time, while the highlands became isolated promontories.

  Because of the rain, all military operations and most communal tasks were suspended, and everybody retreated home to hibernate. Water was closing in on them from the sky and from the sea. The lagoon was overflowing and smelled like rotting skunks. The moth larvae were fat and even nested in people’s hair. The remedy was to sleep between damp sheets, but the humidity made one’s skin wrinkly like raisins.

  During the time of forced seclusion, Ramón divided his working hours between the feverish reading of a series of books on the pirate Clipperton that he had found in the library abandoned by Brander, and writing his long, detailed reports, which no one was ever likely to read, about the production of guano and about how he was carrying out his mission on the isle.

  Meanwhile, Alicia embroidered dozens of beautiful bedsheets and tablecloths that would never be used, since they had enough to last them till the end of their days. She used to sit on a wicker rocking chair by the stained-glass window in the studio next to her bedroom. While her exp
ert fingers moved fast by themselves, time flitted by as she looked at the stormy waters turned icy through the blue-colored glass: frenzied through yellow; slow, almost dead calm, through green; nocturnal and not of this world through violet.

  Ramón became obsessed with the notion that their isolation and the lack of any news from Orizaba was dampening his wife’s spirits. His own, though he would not admit it, were lost in the deep. It tortured him to remember the good life they had left behind, and he was beginning to think of it with heavy nostalgia as a thing of the past. Not the big things but the smaller ones tormented him the most: things he had considered insignificant before that now seemed unattainable dreams and gnawed at his heart like persistent little rodents. Such as the smell of clothes just washed clean and hung out to dry in the sun or the pleasure of smoking a good Havana cigar, the precise, cold sensation of the Solingen blade on his cheek when shaving, the fresh coolness of drinking in the shade a glass of tamarind water; the sound of his mother’s voice telling stories about Emperor Maximilian’s marital infidelities and about Empress Carlota’s fridgity.

  One day Captain Arnaud, unable to contain himself any longer, burst into a rage in Alicia’s presence, nonstop until all his bitter litany came out.

  “We cannot keep thinking that life is somewhere else, or that we have already lived and the only thing we have left is to reminisce. There must be more to life than watching the rain fall. I’ll be dammed if I have to continue watching water and more water come down, and keep waiting for a boat that never comes, and counting every last grain of rice that everybody gets to eat. Or fighting an enemy that never shows up, and writing reports about bird shit. It’s one thing to fulfill one’s military duty and another one to be expected to do without like a Mormon. Or like an idiot. A man has the right to do well for himself, damn it. He has the right to have fun, to be doing something he really likes once in a while: to eat his fill, to get rowdy, get drunk. . . . Just to talk to friends already seems like a luxury! I want to be able to talk to people again, even to that German S.O.B., though I can’t understand him at all!”

  Then, as if it were his only possible escape valve, Ramón created and established the Friday soirées. In these weekly evening gatherings held at his home, he attempted to recover, even though artificially and for only a while every week, some of his lost sense of well-being. His guests were Lieutenant Cardona and his wife, Tirsa Rendón, a gorgeous brunette with almond eyes and uncompromising character. And Gustav Schultz and his adopted family, a full-figured mulatto woman called Daria Pinzón—whom the German, in need of a woman after spending a year alone in Clipperton, had brought from the island of Socorro—and Daria’s daughter, a twelve-year-old girl, taciturn and strangely sexless, whose given name was Jesusa and her last name, inherited from someone nobody knew, was Lacursa.

  Counter to their Franciscan restraint during the rest of the week, on Fridays they would prepare mole in tremendous quantities, tacos huitlacoche, refried black beans, sausages, dried beef, and dark coffee. While the others savored every bite as if it were their last, Schultz gobbled everything up, his eyes closed: according to what they believed to have understood, he had said that one had to be Mexican to be able to eat so much food that was black. Ramón Arnaud could never forgive him for this.

  After dinner on those evenings, Arnaud took out his mandolin. Alicia would have preferred he played the guitar instead, or any other instrument. The mandolin seemed rather feminine, with its mother-of-pearl inlays and its high pitch, and with so many tuning pegs and fancy curlicues that it seemed ridiculous to her. But Ramón paid no attention and played with the verve of a Cossack taming a wild horse and the absorption of a virtuoso violinist on his first Stradivarius.

  Lieutenant Cardona sang afterward and pleased Alicia with songs that had been popular in the dance halls of the capital, such as “White Kitten” and the one about picking violets at twilight.

  Cardona produced a velvet tone, enchanting and seductive, going from bass to tenor as he warmed himself up with alcohol. Drinking gave his eyes a strange glimmer and his voice the mature, ladies’ man timbre of a veritable Don Juan, or a life-of-the-party professional. He set aside the trills and tricks, the white kittens, violets, and dance halls in the capital, and brought forth a full-throated deluge of totally plebeian, coarse tunes. Such as the one about the unhappy Empress of Mexico, who returned to Europe after losing her crown and her wits: “The rabble with the crosses scream and get excited, while the gale winds blow, and make your boat capsize: Mama Carlota, sweet darling, good-bye, good-bye.”

  Accompanied by the strings of the Pianola, they danced polkas, waltzes, danzones and jarabes, and by dawn they started playing Parcheesi, dominoes, or cards, all of which ended in screams after it became clear that Daria Pinzón had been cheating.

  The Friday festivities became a ritual, religiously observed even on the day a hurricane plucked the Pianola from its corner and smacked it against the rocks, and made the mandolin spin together with the coconuts, the chickens, and some chunks of wood, finally leaving it floating on the ocean.

  But that was later. Now, and contrary to Ramón’s fears, his wife looked happier every day. Not because of the evening gatherings. What had happened, thanks to the rains, was that Alicia found herself in a world of ideal solitude, meticulously shared with Ramón within the complicity of the four walls of their home. In the midst of all their deprivations, Clipperton allowed something Orizaba would surely have denied them: the opportunity of becoming great friends and lovers.

  In Clipperton they had the time and intimacy necessary to master the art of making love to each other, and after many failures and misunderstandings, they deciphered the exact science of mutual pleasure. They managed together to temper the chaos of their impulses to the rhythm of their hearts, softened their granite morals, got used to their nakedness, became more skilled and less timid, prayed less and laughed more. “Oh Lord, don’t allow me to enjoy this! Oh Lord, please, don’t allow me to enjoy this,” Alicia uselessly prayed when she felt an electric, inevitable wave of happiness that jolted her body.

  Protected by the thick curtains of rainfall, they celebrated the daily lovemaking ritual in a postcard atmosphere, in the hammock of the western balcony, bathed in the golden reflections of many sunsets.

  The lack of supplies—due to the delay in the arrival of the ship—imposed on their bodies physical transformations that exerted a favorable influence on this burst of passion. One of the first items that ran out in Clipperton was brilliantine, which forced Ramón to forgo the rigid coif that made him look like a ventriloquist’s doll and set free his thin, stiff mustache, which became thick and sensual. Besides, far away from the imperial banquets Doña Carlota had served him, his double chin disappeared as well as the incipient belly that was starting to give him a rounded figure.

  For her part, Alicia ran out of rice talcum powder, and once she stopped using it, her translucent doll-like complexion took on a more human texture. She abandoned the mannequin stiffness, the rigidity of the corset and the crinolines, and her dainty silhouette recovered the childlike elasticity she had left behind in the hills of Orizaba. She lost one by one all of her hairpins until she had to renounce her old-fashioned tight buns and let her hair loose and free like a lion’s mane.

  The hot sun of the preceding months had changed the ghostly paleness of their bodies into a healthier-looking tan. And once they used up the last drop of milk of magnesia, which applied to their underarms sweetened the humors of their armpits, they discovered the attraction of their natural animal odors.

  This was also the time that Alicia remembered later as the happiest of her life, when she and Ramón engaged day after day in an interminable conversation, continued compulsively for many years. Not even Ramón’s death interrupted it, since Alicia would repeat it afterward all by herself, saying her part of the dialogue and repeating the answers that he had given her, which she knew by heart.

  In this infinite dialogue that coiled
upon itself like a snake, or a figure eight, they used to recite with all the inflections, all the intense feelings, all the upsets, the reasons and demands of their love, in counterpoint or in a duet. They made an inventory of all the good and all the bad traits of each and every person they knew; they would draw and erase future projects; they reviewed the commonplace and probed the transcendental; they evaluated past and present moments of their lives in this world and confessed to each other their fears and expectations about the one beyond.

  Sometimes, in the middle of the lull brought by an afternoon downpour, any careless remark could trigger a conjugal fight. As when Alicia commented that Doña Carlota had wasted the Arnaud fortune, or when Ramón suggested that Don Félix Rovira was a domineering, possessive father. Then they stopped holding hands, and heatedly released an angry stream of words that would take them, without their knowing exactly when, to a point at which, viciously trying to hurt, they screamed their imperfections at each other, showing the animosity of two fighting cocks. Invariably, it all ended with an explosion of accumulated and festering pockets of jealousy that each of them had stored, without ever admitting it, in some corner of their livers.

  Ramón accused her of swooning over Lieutenant Cardona’s singing on Friday evenings.

  “Do you think I don’t notice that you prefer to dance the polkas with him?” he asked her with an indignation befitting someone who is demanding an explanation from his aged mother’s murderer.