Early in the morning the day Alicia woke up all wet with amniotic fluid, Ramón took out from the closet the objects he had already prepared and disinfected for the occasion, and ordered them neatly on the table at the foot of the bed. There were white rags boiled for hours, antiseptic soap, alcohol, scissors and pincers, clean ribbons to tie the umbilical cord, two large basins, needles and surgical gut twine in case sewing a tear was needed. Feeling with his hands and listening through the fetus-scope, Ramón helped Alicia lie down on clean sheets, rearranged her pillows, brought her a big pitcher of fresh water, opened all the windows to the breeze, lowered the jalousies to keep the room in semidarkness, and sat next to his wife, waiting for the birth of his son. Doña Juana was also waiting to be called in to help.
It was a long wait, more than ten hours. Her pains were intermittent, suddenly surging like thunderbolts. Then they went away like the tide, leaving her body in a relaxed rest and her mind lost in limbo, where all references to the concrete world were obliterated. Until the pain brought her again to reality and, tensing all the fibers in her body, jolted her in hot waves shooting from her innermost center up to her two eyelids and each one of her twenty nails, then gradually folded into itself in reverse, easing the tension, and dissolving into peace.
Between one contraction and the next, Ramón refreshed the water in the pitcher, caressed her hair, cooled her off with a fan in his hand. Sometimes they killed time playing checkers or card games, until interrupted by a returning stab of pain. When these became so close that they seemed to be only one with minor interruptions, and the pain came with triple intensity, they both knew the moment had arrived.
Alicia let go freely in an impulse that was more telluric than human and that exploded inside her and reached all of her senses. Her pain, though it had reached its maximum point, became secondary, turning into a weak, unimportant sensation, compared with the power in her effort. The fear and the uncertainty of the previous hours vanished in the face of a glorious willpower, a blind faith in her own strength, which surged overwhelmingly. After her last push, big and definitive, Alicia Rovira lost herself in the same drunkenness that makes a god dizzy after exercising his greatest gift, that of creating life.
Ramón was watching in wonderment mixed with terror. His guts twisted and turned, and his heart levitated at this very violent and bloody last act of procreation. He saw the head beginning to come out, and immediately receding again. In the third attempt it was fully out, wet and gelatinous, and Ramón was able to hold it with both hands. He saw the little face in an ugly adult frown, and without having to pull, he felt how the rest of its body was sliding out, swift and elusive like a lizard. He counted five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot, and checked that its facial features, though contorted by the effort of crying, were perfect.
It was male, just as Alicia had foretold.
“It’s a boy,” he announced, “a beautiful baby boy.”
With skill and a sure hand, as if he had done it many times, and with the help of the midwife, who toiled back and forth with the cotton rags and the boiled water, Ramón cut and sewed, extracted residues, and cleaned the rest. Before handing the baby to Doña Juana to be checked and cleaned, he stopped for a few seconds to look at him.
A little Martian, he thought, a little frightened Martian who has just arrived from an exhausting trip.
Then he lay down to rest next to Alicia on her bed, and Doña Juana returned the newborn to them. All cleaned, wrapped in a white linen gown, less shaken and less purple, he looked more like a creature of this world. From the depth of her exhaustion, Alicia looked at him with love and anguish, actually with too much love and too much anguish, like all women, female bears, tigresses, and cats right after giving birth.
“I was only mistaken in one thing,” she said. “His head is not round but pointed, like a gnome’s cap.”
She had not been mistaken in that either. After being out of the womb for a while and once it recovered from the struggle of going through the narrow tract, the baby’s head, still malleable, lost its sharp point and became rounder than a ball of wool.
Ramón opened one of the jalousies. Through the open window they saw the magnificent blue of the skies, high and limpid. Alicia remembered her dream. An image flashed through her brain, again showing her the paradise of the underwater world, and she was happy to be awake.
At this moment, life is also wonderfully perfect, she thought.
She looked at Ramón and the baby, who were both asleep, listened to their peaceful breathing and allowed herself to doze also.
It was hours later, or maybe minutes, that shouts from outside startled and woke them up. People were crying, calling out, running aimlessly. Ramón and Alicia opened their eyes and noticed that the piece of blue sky they had seen as bright and static had turned dark and was quickly changing from rose-colored to violet, and from violet to a voracious purple that swallowed everything. It was almost nightfall. The shouting was in crescendo and closing in.
Ramón hurried to the door still half asleep and, clumsily leaping over the porch steps, made his way through the circle of people, which opened for him. He saw in the center, lying on the pavement and covered with his own blood, the remains of a man. The dead man was Jesús Neri, the husband of Juana the midwife. He was an old soldier who had spent more time in Clipperton than the rest. They were all shouting at Arnaud about what had happened. There were different and contradictory versions, each one reflecting a particular vision.
The old man had been in the ocean up to his waist; no, up to his neck. He was next to the dock; no, not so close, ten yards from the dock. He was unloading from his barge some barrels he had brought from somewhere else on the isle. Five barrels that contained kerosene. No, not kerosene, fresh water. The old man wanted to carry drinking water from the dock to his home. Suddenly, they saw him flail his arms wildly. Victoriano saw him first; Faustino’s wife was the one who saw him first; no, it was some kids who started to scream.
The old man sank into the water and reappeared; one could see his head, his back, his arms, and then, he was gone. “He is being attacked by a manta ray,” shouted Victoriano. “It must be a jellyfish,” screamed Faustino’s wife. The children were shouting. Five men, no, they were four, six—three men and two women—came running to the dock. They saw him defending himself from the dark shadows attacking him, with his teeth, with his feet. They saw him helpless, overcome, with a plea for mercy on his face, with an expression that showed great pain, beseeched. Smacking the water with heavy sticks, the men scared off a school of sharks. There were three sharks; there were two sharks and a barracuda; it was only one enormous shark; there were six: five were black and one was white. The waters were red with blood by the time the men drove them away. Pedro managed to harpoon one of them; Pedro almost harpooned one. They rescued whatever was left of Jesús. When they got him out, he was already dead. When they got him out, he was still alive. Lying on the dock, he breathed with difficulty for a while, prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and called out to his wife, Juana. Lying on the dock, he did not say anything, he just died without saying anything. He tried to sit up with whatever was left of his body, a spurt of blood came out from his mouth, and he died. Right after he died, blood came pouring out of his wounds, his nose, his mouth. Then they placed him on a large blanket, carried him to the entrance of the big house, and called out for Captain Arnaud.
Ramón was perplexed at so much damage, so much misery for this mangled old soldier, so much sadness at seeing this man reduced to a bloody rag. He was stunned, just standing there looking at him. His skill as a doctor’s apprentice was gone, his authority as governor had vanished, he had lost his capacity to react. He could only stand there, watching. The impact of the delivery was still too fresh, and the two images were juxtaposed, melded, confusing. Crouching next to the dead man was Doña Juana, sobbing quietly, evenly, with no overblown gestures or even tears, resigned to death since long ago, since forever.
> The voice of Lieutenant Cardona broke the collective hypnosis of watching the corpse.
“We must bury him,” he said.
“We must bury him,” Ramón repeated mechanically. “We must find an appropriate place for a cemetery.”
The layer of soil in Clipperton was so thin that to bury a man was almost impossible. To cover the body with shovefuls of guano would be unsanitary and sacrilegious, and to dig a grave in the rock would be too arduous an enterprise. “Throw him into the sea,” someone suggested, but the idea of letting the sharks finish the job horrified Ramón. If the man had been a sailor and had died on the high seas, maybe they could have done that, but the old man was a soldier, and he had died right there, close to land.
The women drove away the pigs, which had gone crazy sniffing around, and the flies swirling over the dried blood. One could begin to feel in the air the quick decomposition of the cadaver in the heat of a twilight without any breeze. A rapid decision was needed. After inspecting several sites, Arnaud decided on a secluded high area at the beach, near the lighthouse tower, where the water never reached. The accumulation of hard sand in that place made it possible to dig a deep enough grave. That would be the inauguration of their cemetery.
They wrapped Jesús Neri or whatever was left of him in shrouds and placed him in a square pine box, one of those in which the ship had brought them foodstuffs, and they buried him under a wooden cross. Lacking flowers, they arranged palm fronds over his tomb. Doña Juana had stopped crying and only whimpered softly, rhythmically. Arnaud said a few words.
“On this day, the second of June, 1909, life and death visited Clipperton for the first time since we arrived,” he said.
Mexico City, Today
I AM LOOKING FOR traces of Lieutenant Secundino Angel Cardona Mayorga. Of the life he led that finally brought him to Clipperton. I have found a photo of him, which I have on my desk. I found also an invaluable document for following his tracks, the complete dossier of his military record, from the time he entered the service until he died.
The photo, taken at a local studio, offers some faded brocade curtains in the background and a little round table in the foreground. Resting on the table, a nunchaku and the lieutenant’s right hand, the tips of his fingers barely touching the surface. With his left hand he is holding his sword by the handle, its point resting on the floor. In his military uniform, with its long army jacket, double row of golden buttons, and wide belt, he is a good-looking man, self-assured, and holding a martial stance without rigidity. Almost seductive, perhaps, but with a detectable tinge of sarcasm.
He appears to be about twenty years old. Behind the charming smile and the dress uniform, something reveals his Indian ancestry. He seems a little too cocky for his young age and humble origin.
His healthy head of dark hair has been combed back. He has a tanned complexion, straight nose, square jaw, Indian-looking eyes that don’t gaze at the camera but a little off to the left. His facial features are pleasant, chiseled, with the exception of his ears, two prominent half circles. In spite of the careful neatness of his attire, his boots are dusty. Those boots have traveled many roads and are well planted on solid ground.
His military record consists of a hundred or so handwritten reports in different styles of calligraphy, signed by Cardona’s diverse superior officers. They do not contradict the low-class dandyism that the lieutenant demonstrates in the photo. Just the opposite.
Secundino Angel was born on July 1, 1877, in Chiapas, Mexico, in the gutters of the city of San Cristóbal, a colonial enclave that exerted its domain over extensive indigenous territories. Its houses, all painted blue in honor of the Virgin Mary, were inhabited by white lawyers and clerics. In its stone-paved streets the Indians offered their wares, waited to be hired for jobs, and got drunk on alcohol or ether until they fell to the ground asleep, unconscious, or dead.
In the midst of the many Chamula Indians sitting in the dirt and filth of the plaza, Secundino was one more child, sickly, inveterately unclean, invisible, clinging to the dark woolen skirts of his mother, Gregoria Mayorga.
He was only one more child with adult resignation and burdens as he went up and down mountains carrying firewood behind his father, whose name was Rodolfo Cardona, and who was a Chamula Indian like any other: heavyset, hairy, with docile eyes. His only clothing was a short tunic that left his legs bare, a sheepskin over his shoulders, and a rolled white kerchief on his head. This was styled after the patron saint of the Chamulas, Saint John the Baptist, according to the biblical custom of these mountains, where tribal fashion was dictated by specific patron saints. The Chamulas were not the only ones in the world dressed in the style of a saint; the Pedranos wore capes, haversacks, and tunics in the style of Saint Peter; and the Huistecos had the mantles and the baggy pants of old, like the archangel Saint Michael.
Like his father, Rodolfo, and his mother, Gregoria, Secundino as a child was illiterate and did not even speak Spanish. However, by the age of twelve he could deal with hunger, withstand loneliness, and overcome fear, so he decided to abandon the land in which the life of an adult was worth nothing, and that of a child even less. It was not a willful decision, but the path he was following took him farther and farther away. He gradually left behind the mud huts, the sheep and the pigs, the land of the red earth. He went through the thick pine forests, and when he got to the blue mountains on the horizon, the ones he had seen from his home, he found himself at the barracks entrance. It was a National Guard battalion. The child dared to go in, and he stood in a corner at the horse stables, but since he spoke only Tzeltal, his Indian language, he did not say a word to anyone. He simply waited for hours, until somebody noticed him and signed him up as a volunteer.
He did his growing up at the barracks and learned Spanish, reading, and writing. He also learned to play reveille, taps, and tattoo, and by the age of thirteen was made bugler. Perhaps because he grew up in a town that manufactured mandolins and drums, music and singing were easy for him. Everything else was more difficult. According to the reports of his superior officers, he was “refractory” to learning and a rebel in matters of discipline. But music was his gift. In his spare time he went from the bugle to the guitar, and from military calls to love songs. When he sang, he acquired poise, looked taller, lost his shyness. He distinguished himself.
Besides, he was handsome, and learned to control his hair in a decorous way, to trim his mustache, and to look half smiling, half sleepy-eyed, as if he actually did not see what he was looking at. He freed himself from misery and sadness, and discovered the advantages of his good voice and good looks. Those were the means he found to create a niche for himself. He became an adventurer and a ladies’ man, a smart aleck who played dumb, a carouser and a troublemaker.
At seventeen he was transferred to the Public Security Battalion in the city of Tuxtla Guitiérrez. He was almost a man, not an adolescent anymore, and he was not an illiterate Indian, but he was not white either. He had exchanged his John the Baptist’s tunic for a soldier’s uniform, he was bilingual, and he knew how to court Indian girls as well as mestizo señoritas. Besides, he knew how to spell, and had a firm handwriting and pompous style that allowed him to work as an amanuensis at the political headquarters in the same town where he served. He had become the Indian who spoke Spanish, who acted as intermediary between the local authorities and the indigenous ones. Secundino Angel Cardona did not belong with his own, and neither with the others. But he counted on his voice, his looks, the shrewdness of an outcast, and a practical intelligence sharpened by misfortune, which he hid from others in order to go through life without being committed to anything or anybody, expecting no reward and avoiding any punishment.
For better or for worse, he managed to make a military career. Private first class, sergeant second class, sergeant first class, and second lieutenant in the auxiliary infantry. He left afterward for the war in Yucatán against the Maya Indians, who had taken up arms against white domination. There he discov
ered that the days he had lived in poverty with his parents and later in the filthy military barracks were not, as he had believed, the ultimate rung on the poverty scale, and actually not even the next to last. It was in the First Battalion, in the army campaign through the jungles of Yucatán, that Secundino Angel and his comrades in arms reached the bottom rung of the human condition.
They had buried themselves in a labyrinth of swamps with no exit, defeated beforehand not only by their confusion but also by malaria, mountain leprosy, extreme heat, and snakes, while the enemy knew the jungle inside out and lay in wait, immune to venom and miasmas.
They were moving with the pachydermic heaviness of the regular army while their adversaries, using guerrilla tactics, attacked them from all sides. War for them was an accursed mission, a detestable duty, while the Mayas were fighting for themselves in a holy war, and they fought with the conviction of cornered beasts acutely aware that the question was to kill or be killed.
Sometimes the soldiers’ guts would burst after drinking from a well poisoned by the Indians. Sometimes they fell into traps full of spines that had been kept for a while inside the decomposing body of a fox, and which, upon sinking into the flesh, produced ulcers that would not heal. Other times their bodies were exploded by prehistoric grenades, made with raw bullhide and tied together with sisal fibers. It could also happen that they would be gunned down by the luminous blasts from modern Lee-Enfield rifles that the rebels had obtained from the English in Belize.
Isle of Passion Page 10