Isle of Passion

by Laura Restrepo

  These soldiers of the Mexican Army were immersed in the last circle of hell, subject to bureaucratic orders from an absentee general, while the enemy, descendants of the Mayas, had gone to war by divine design and received their combat orders from the so-called Saint Talking Cross, whom they were fiercely guarding in a fortress-sanctuary. There was no way to defeat them.

  Whether it was for some act of bravery not specified in his military records or perhaps simply for having survived his Yucatán ordeal, Lieutenant Second Class Cardona received from the governor of the state a medal of valor and merit. It was the only decoration he ever received.

  Punishments, on the other hand, seemed to rain on him. After his return from Yucatán with the First Battalion, while stationed in Puebla, he suffered a bout of rebelliousness and defiance of discipline, and his stays in the army prison became a matter of routine. His record is specific in this, overloaded with warnings and sanctions: he spent fifteen days in the military prison at Santiago Tlatelolco for failing to report for duty for two days; he was arrested in the flag hall for marching in a parade without his pistol; later, another fifteen days for showing disrespect to an officer. Then he was jailed for fifteen days for insulting an officer and “forcing him into a fight.” For this incident he received a reprimand equivalent to the step previous to being discharged by the army. Cardona did not pay much attention.

  He turned to alcohol. He got apocalyptically drunk, and he would then do everything he had not dared to do sober. He would hit his friends, embrace his enemies, disrespect his superiors, rape the wives of his inferiors, reduce his guitar to smithereens, vomit on his uniform, and curse his fate.

  He would not allow anyone to tell him not to drink because as a child he had been nurtured with firewater. When his mother suffered from convulsions that made her body stiff, the medicine man made her drink to drive the sickness away. When his father made straw hats and sold them in the market, he would go afterward to a cantina in San Cristóbal and fill his belly with firewater. Soaked in drivel, oblivious of his body, he would go into an autistic and astral trip to faraway and better worlds. Four or five days later, he would be found, in a ditch alongside the road, wearing the ragged costume and beatific expression of a saint that has been knocked down from his niche.

  Secundino himself, as a child, learned the bittersweet happiness of being drunk when the firewater gourd was passed around during the fiestas and a cap of monkey fur was placed on his head.

  “Be happy, my child,” he was told, “enjoy the fiesta. Be happy and dance and jump like a monkey.”

  At twenty-eight he was dishonorably discharged from the army. He was an adult but not mature; he was neither an Indian nor a white man; neither a country peon nor an urban weasel; an alien among civilians and a reject among the soldiers. There was no place for Cardona in this world.

  The following year he applied to the Ministry of the Army and Navy, asking to be reassigned on probation. The answer was unequivocal: “Not apt,” for being abusive with those of lower rank and considering himself equal to his superiors; because “coming from the troops, he adopted their ways and cannot change.” And in case this was not clear enough, the reporting officer wrote at the bottom of the page: “Tell the person concerned not to insist.”

  But Cardona did insist. For three years he tried his hand at various jobs: as an employee for Mr. Enrique Perret, owner of a printing press at 3 Espíritu Santo, Mexico D.F.; as a clerk for Mr. Steffan, owner of a stationery store at 14 Coliseo Viejo in the same city; as a collector for Roger Heymans; as a construction worker for Mr. Enrique Schultz. He asked for letters of reference from all of them, and attached them to a new application for rehitching with the army. The answer was again no.

  Among Cardona’s gifts were the patience of a saint, the tenacity of a beggar, and the ability to jump rank in order to reach the top authorities directly. He devoted a whole year to collecting his references, but this time he exceeded himself. He obtained letters from the head of Cavalry, Guillermo Pontones; from the head of Infantry, Félix Manjarrez; from the inspector of Police, E. Castillo Corzo, who professed to know him as an honorable person. And a last letter, which must have been the decisive one, signed by General Enrique Mondragón, stating that “this gentleman has improved his behavior considerably and, therefore, deserves to be admitted again in the military.”

  Finally, the Ministry of the Army and Navy, having run out of patience, or because of pressure from above, repealed the previous resolutions and authorized Cardona’s readmission to the army, to the Twenty-seventh Battalion operating in the Sonora campaign. He was sent to fight the Yaqui Indians and later he was assigned to the mines in Cananea. His old tricks made a comeback, and he was arrested again repeatedly: nine days at the flag hall for failing to pay attention to his superior; nine more days for going to a cantina in his uniform; fifteen for absenteeism; another twelve days for the same reason; ten days with no specified motive; ten for not working on the firewood-gathering detail and not responding to the calls at six, reveille, and retreat; a month in the military prison at Tokin for serious misdeeds against the bugler’s wife; another month because, being under arrest, he asked permission to pee and bolted; eight days for not being present at reveille; eight days for not attending instruction meetings; eight days for errors committed in the performance of duty; eight more for the same; thirty days for wounding a comrade; a month for manhandling another soldier’s wife; a month for public disturbances.

  His superiors decided to stop arresting him, because it didn’t solve anything, and opted to send him on dangerous missions, like the campaign against the rebels in the state of Guerrero. Later he was promoted to lieutenant for his daring behavior during several shooting incidents, but as he continued drinking, he was relegated to undesirable assignments. First he ended up with a group of handicapped and ragtag men and lost souls who called themselves the “Irregulars” Battalion, and then he was literally put away, like fourth-class material, in the Officers and Chiefs Depot.

  From this depot he was rescued to be sent to Clipperton Island. There he was promoted to captain second class. But Secundino Angel Cardona never got to know it.

  Mexico City, 1913

  IN DECEMBER OF 1911 El Demócrata arrived again at Clipperton. People had been waiting for seven months under extremely hard conditions, but somehow during the previous two years the inhabitants of the isle came to the conclusion that the real periodical arrival of the ships was actually not every three months, but every six, approximately.

  During this period a second child had been born to Ramón and Alicia. Since the firstborn had been a boy, he had been given his father’s name; this was a girl, and she received her mother’s name. She was growing up a happy and healthy child, as if beyond Clipperton there were nothing else, as if there were no better meal than a shark fillet, and no more enjoyable toys than seashells and crabs.

  If Ramoncito was very close to his parents and overwhelmed with adult worries, Alicia, the younger one, was his total opposite. From the moment she learned to use her legs, at eleven months, she started running and organized her own world among the coral reefs, in the sand, in the mud puddles. It was an ordeal to put her to bed or to keep her contented inside the house.

  As the years went by—a lot of them—this little girl became Alicia Arnaud, Mr. Loyo’s widow, the charming old lady in the Pensión Loyo, Orizaba, who, sitting at her kitchen table, pours milk into jars and enjoys her happy memories.

  When El Demócrata arrived at last, there was a letter for Ramón from his mother, Doña Carlota. It was dated Orizaba, December 1910, so it had been delayed for a whole year. Before attending to anything else, Ramón locked himself up to read it.

  It was unusually long and detailed, full of optimism and good humor. The mother was telling her son about the Centenary of Independence holidays, held in the capital in September 1910. Her invitation had come through some friends she still had in government. The centenary had coincided with General Por
firio Díaz’s birthday, and the old president, already in his eighties, decided on a grand celebration for the double occasion. The festivities were going to be the most lavish his poor country had ever seen. For a whole month there would be bread for everybody, and circus performances everywhere.

  She wrote that there were people who tried to oust him through uprisings and revolts, but that he would take charge and demonstrate to all that he was still holding the reins, and quite securely. That some people said he was old and cracking, that anything made him cry like a babe in arms, that he was as deaf as a doorknob and had whims like a pregnant woman. That he was unbearable because he was such a sourpuss, and that his mind was gone and he could not even remember his second family name. Of course Porfirio Díaz would show them that his balls were still in the right place, whole and hale. All phonies and amateurs at taking over would learn who was the authentic “Patriot Nonpareil,” the “Prince of Peace,” the “World’s Statesman,” the “Creator of Wealth,” the “Father of His People.” They would find out.

  Doña Carlota was dazzled by his presence when he showed himself in the balcony at El Zócalo, his breast glittering like a Christmas tree, or the starry heavens, with the hundreds of medals that he wore pinned to his uniform.

  “You had to see it to believe it,” she commented in the letter to her son. “The older he gets, the more handsome, and even whiter, the old man becomes. I remember him when he was young, when he looked like what he really is, a Mixtec Indian. Now he looks like a true gentleman. Power and money whiten people.”

  Doña Carlota proudly wore her high feather hat to attend the great allegorical parade during which all the characters in Mexican history, ancient as well as recent, marched down the Paseo de la Reforma. To open the parade there was a half-naked Moctezuma, with even more feathers than Mr. Arnaud’s widow, and to close it, a stylized, rejuvenated version of Don Porfirio himself.

  Behind the parade came the retinue of invited guests, first those from foreign countries, then the ones from the provinces. Among these, proud and rotund, was the matron from Orizaba, Doña Carlota. Agape, she watched a capital city bedecked with arches of flowers, artificial lights, flags, brocade hangings. Only handsome faces and fine garments everywhere, and she noticed that the guards were keeping out of the paved zone its natural inhabitants: the lepers, the syphilitics, the harlots, the cripples.

  The grand Gala Ball, which she also had the opportunity to attend, was more fantastic and magnificent than she could ever have dared dream. She had stood there—still handsome, candid, and dazzled like an aging, plump Cinderella—in that princely palace, impressed by the hundred and fifty musicians in the orchestra, by the five hundred lackeys serving twenty whole boxcars of French champagne, by the thirty thousand lights garlanding the ceiling, the countless dozens of roses crowding the halls.

  “What a pity that you were not here to enjoy all the greatness of these moments,” she wrote to Ramón. “This is the right place for a young officer like you. A brilliant future would await you here, in the service of General Díaz. Even though people might think that I am interfering, I repeat again that my blood boils when I think that you are throwing your life away on that isolated island.”

  Doña Carlota hit the bull’s-eye with this argument as she always did when it was a matter of manipulating complex guilt mechanisms, regrets, and resentments that Ramón sheltered inside his heart. But this time it lasted only for a few minutes.

  Folding the letter carefully, Arnaud kissed it and put it inside his pocket. He immediately walked to the dock to receive the captain of El Demócrata, Diógenes Mayorga, who had seemed nervous before and truly upset on account of the last news he had brought from Mexico. This time, Mayorga looked serene, sure of himself. He seemed even to have an air of petulance or superiority. Not in a rush at all, he began to render his news report to Arnaud, while at the same time painstakingly picking his teeth. He opened his mouth, interrupting his phrases halfway to look—with curiosity, almost with pride—at the small particles on the tip of his toothpick.

  “You people must be the only Mexicans who do not yet know,” he said. “Porfirio Díaz is out . . . out already.”

  “What?” shouted Arnaud, his round eyes wide open.

  “You heard right. Old Porfirio is out. He escaped on a boat to Paris, and there he must be, nursing his prostate.”

  “It’s not possible, I do not understand it, how can you say that?” Arnaud’s tongue tripped over itself, his voice dissonant. “You are misinformed, look at this letter, it says here that General Díaz is stronger than ever, that he made a show of all his power at his birthday celebration, which was a great event—”

  “Oh, yes,” interrupted Mayorga. “That big party. It was the last kick of a hanged man.”

  “And who could have ousted General Díaz?”

  “What do you mean ‘who’? Francisco Indalecio Madero, of course.”

  “Madero? The little man with a goatee? The madman who invoked spirits?”

  “Well, not so little and not so mad,” said Mayorga, digging his toothpick between his canine tooth and the first molar. “He is now the constitutional president of Mexico. Didn’t I tell you last time that there was a war? Well, Madero won. We are all on his side.”

  “I don’t understand anything. How can you be on his side? Didn’t he defeat Porfirio Díaz and our army? At least that is what you are saying. Don’t you see how you are contradicting yourself? That President Madero you are talking about, who is he, finally? Friend or foe?”

  “Just try a little harder, Captain Arnaud, to see if you can understand,” said Mayorga calmly, looking at Ramón with a defiant, sideways smile. “He was an enemy before, but now that he has won, he’s a friend. He promised not to dismantle the federal army, and you can see he is not a man who carries grudges, because he is going to keep us officers in our posts.”

  “What a strange war,” commented Arnaud softly, practically to himself.

  That night Ramón and Alicia could not sleep at all. They talked for hours on end, discussed, juggled and rejected possibilities, fought, made up, and by dawn they had agreed that the whole family would leave that same day for Mexico on El Demócrata’s return trip. They needed to have firsthand knowledge of the situation. To find out what designs this new government had for Clipperton.

  “I don’t believe we’re going to find anything good for us,” Ramón whispered to Alicia during their long time awake. “I’m more and more convinced that this little island was only a personal whim for Don Porfirio. The new president probably has no idea where the heck we are.”

  A few hours later they departed with their two children on the way to Acapulco, after packing just a few things in a suitcase and leaving instructions with Cardona to take charge until Arnaud’s return.

  During the voyage, Captain Mayorga gave them a warning.

  “Do you want to visit your families in Orizaba? You better forget that. You cannot travel with children on Mexican roads now. If the cattle rustlers do not hold you up, the revolutionaries ambush you, and that is worse. You would get killed, and they would entice the young orphans and take them away.”

  Arnaud did not believe a word. He did not want to rely on, nor could he contradict, what Mayorga was telling him. It was as if Mayorga had come from a different time, from the future, and was speaking about a planet no longer familiar to Ramón.

  Three days later, after they arrived in Mexico, they discovered all of a sudden that Colonel Avalos, Ramón’s friend and protector, was no longer in charge of Clipperton and no longer in Acapulco; that Doña Petra, Alicia’s mother, had died; and that her father, Don Félix Rovira, had left Orizaba and was now living in the port city of Salina Cruz, where he held a high position at the Moctezuma Brewery.

  The last was the only good news, because from Acapulco it was easy to sail to Salina Cruz, where they indeed met with Don Félix. They were amazed to find him looking younger, full of enthusiasm, spring-like, wearing a white suit an
d white shoes with a mariner’s cap. With a grandchild on each knee, smoking his pipe with one hand while caressing Alicia’s hair with the other, he spoke fervently about democracy and Francisco Madero, whom he had met in Orizaba during a gigantic support rally.

  “I don’t want to offend you, Ramón. I know that you favored Porfirio Díaz,” Don Félix told him. “But honestly, he was a real bandit. I do think that now we are in good hands.”

  “I’m not a politician, Don Félix, I’m a career military man,” answered Ramón. “I am with whoever commands the federal army.”

  Alicia and the children stayed with Don Félix in Salina Cruz, while Ramón started out on his exhausting peregrination to the capital to find out about his future and the future of his isle. But that was an old concern of the past administration. Nobody in the capital remembered that issue, and nobody cared. So, for months he was forced to fall asleep in interminable waiting rooms, explain the whole thing to a hundred government officials, pen hundreds of applications, fight hundreds of bureaucrats.

  In the meantime, the country, which had gone wild, was suddenly reined in, then overflowed, found the right way, lost it, found it again, and lost it again, in the vertiginous rhythm of Pancho Villa and his Golden Warriors in the North, the cautious advance of Emiliano Zapata and his dispossessed peasants in the South, and the silent steps of Victoriano Huerta and his enclave of traitors in the capital.

  Ramón, a man prone to obsessions and fixed ideas, was too much involved in his own problems to be fully aware of the whirlwind around him. After a lot of struggle, he finally managed to locate, covered with dust and lost in the last archive, some papers of importance to him. It was a document signed by Porfirio Díaz a few years before he fled from Mexico, according to which the French and Mexican governments—at the latter’s initiative—asked for Victor Emmanuel III, the king of Italy, to be the arbiter as to the sovereignty of Clipperton Island, vowing to accept his ruling.