Isle of Passion

by Laura Restrepo

  With this document in hand, Arnaud finally managed an interview with the Madero administration’s Minister of the Army and Navy, who signed all the necessary authorizations for him to continue in his post and to keep the logistic support coming from Acapulco by ship.

  In the meantime, Alicia, pregnant for the third time and getting close to her delivery date, went to Mexico City with Don Félix and her two children in order to be reunited with Ramón there. They moved into three large, comfortable rooms in a hotel located right in the center of the city, the San Agustín. They hired for their private service one of the hotel maids, named Altagracia Quiroz. She was a girl of fourteen from Yautepec, state of Morelos, who had been forced to flee to the capital during the disruptions caused by the revolution. She continued to dress like the other hotel maids, with a white percale apron and a red kerchief tied around her neck. In spite of her name, she was altogether lacking in grace. Her body was strong like a tree trunk and just as cylindrical. She was short and flat-nosed. But to counter her plain features, nature had endowed her with a glorious head of velvety black, silky hair reaching down to her ankles. “Your hair is like the Virgin of Guadalupe’s,” her mother had been telling her since she was a little girl. But she did not like her hair and always wore it tied up or braided. Given the choice, she would much prefer to have the Virgin of Guadalupe’s upturned little nose, her pink feet, or her generous miracle eyes.

  Mrs. Arnaud asked her to take care of her two older children while she attended to delivering and nurturing her third child, and offered her a salary of ten pesos a month, which was double her hotel salary. Altagracia accepted, and from then on her life was inseparably tied to that family, strangers to her until the day before. Without knowing it, she had made a tragic pact with destiny in exchange for ten pesos a month.

  A few days later, Olga made her entrance into the world. She was the only one of the four Arnaud children not to be born in Clipperton. Maybe because of this, the isle did not mark her the way it marked her siblings, in spite of the years she had to live there. Perhaps for the same reason, in her adult life Mrs. Olga Arnaud Rovira, Ramón and Alicia’s third child, born in the Hotel San Agustín in Mexico City, always refused to talk about Clipperton or to reminisce about that part of her life, either with relatives or outsiders.

  On a February afternoon in 1913, Ramón was walking down the street on the way to his hotel when he could not pass through. There were free-shooters posted on the roofs, stray bullets whistling in every direction, corpses piled up at the corners, big fires blocking the streets, houses being tumbled down by cannonades, barricades of soldiers preventing crossings. He managed to find out what was going on. General Victoriano Huerta had initiated a coup to oust President Madero, and the city was at war.

  For the first time since his return to the continent, Arnaud met with reality head-on. He had stumbled into a dilemma: the army was divided, and soldiers in the same army uniforms were killing one another. Which side should he take? Should he defend the government or the insurgents? He could not find an answer but realized that he did not care. It was too late for either.

  For ten days and ten nights he stampeded with the masses. He roamed about, keeping close to the walls to save his neck, helping the wounded, who hung from his shoulder as if they were drunk, while attempting to draw some conclusions out of the contradictory reports. Most of all, he tried to get back to his hotel to find out how his family was.

  Finally he succeeded. He stormed into the family’s rooms looking distraught, his clothes filthy and ragged, his hair wild like a madman’s. His wife and his father-in-law embraced him long and tight. He began to pace the bedroom in long strides like a caged beast, his words gushing forth. Without concern for order or logic, he began telling them what he had seen and heard.

  “The president of the United States sent a message that there had been enough revolution already, and that if Mexico did not establish a better government, he was going to send warships and four thousand marines to invade. President Madero’s brother had both of his eyes gouged out, the good one and the glass one, with the tip of a sword. Madero’s loyal men were executed. The president fell prisoner, was obliged to resign, and was then assassinated. The American ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, was behind everything. They say that the only thing he did not get to do was to pull the trigger of the gun that killed Madero. General Huerta, a friend of the gringos, is now in power—”

  Arnaud suddenly stopped his tirade and remained motionless in the center of the room, observing the members of his family. Once the commotion of his return was over and the anguish caused by his disappearance had subsided, they were now listening to him in silence. His family was evidently upset and alarmed by the news, but remained static as if immobilized by a serene stillness. Lying down wrapped in the white linen bedsheets, Alicia was breast-feeding her new baby. Don Félix was slowly drawing on his pipe. The two children were silently building towers of wooden blocks.

  “It’s funny,” said Arnaud, now in a low voice. “On the other side of that window the whole world has just crumbled down. But here, the equilibrium continues to be perfect.”

  He dropped like a piece of lead onto the bed next to his wife, fully dressed and with his shoes on, completely filthy and with blood, not his own, smeared all over. He fell asleep instantly.

  A few days later Don Félix returned to Salina Cruz to oversee his business, which he had left adrift in the middle of the national commotion. The departure of her father, the postpartum blues, the series of violent events that the family had experienced, and even the smell of damp carpets in the halls of the hotel had sunk Alicia into deep melancholy.

  One afternoon she finally spoke to Ramón.

  “I want you to tell me honestly, from the bottom of your heart, what you think of all this.”

  “Of all what?”

  “Of all that is happening in this country.”

  “I don’t know,” Ramón answered, without any hesitation. “I don’t think anything of it. I don’t believe this is my war.”

  “Then, let’s go,” she pleaded in a tone that he had never heard. “Please, let’s go back home. Clipperton is paradise compared with the rest of Mexico.”

  Ramón did not answer her right away. He took out of his shirt pocket the orders he had recently obtained from the Ministry of the Army and the Navy, and with the edge of the paper he stroked his wife’s nose.

  “We must wait, darling,” he said. “This piece of paper was signed by a government no longer in power. Now we have to see if Huerta’s will ratify it.”

  Marooned

  Clipperton, 1914

  THE OCEAN SURROUNDING CLIPPERTON is dense and dark, muddled and entangled with an overload of plankton and other substances. Deep underwater currents determine its movements. When Ramón and Alicia managed to overcome all the red tape and returned from Mexico during the first months of 1914, they experienced such joy to be on their isle again that they devoted their time to finding unexplored nooks. They discovered then that bordering the barrier reef around the isle and under the opaque and seemingly hostile surface of the water, there was a diverse and luminous universe. It was impossible to explore it on the windward side: the enormous waves exploding against the reefs would overpower any human being who dared try. But it was possible on the leeward side, where the sea withdrew, its will already broken after crashing against the rocky shoreline of the isle.

  Making use of the old diver’s suit, Ramón and Alicia spied on the secrets of those monumental underwater palisades formed by billions of minute coral polyps piled on top of one another, making the reef come alive, breathe, move, and have a will of its own. They were always amazed at the whimsical, baroque structures that expanded in the shape of tree branches, mushrooms, umbrellas, cauliflowers, deer or moose antlers, deer horns, spines, lace, ruffles, and fringes.

  On land, out of the water, the sun incinerated and bleached everything it touched. All except the crabs, with their bright red shells.
Everything else was drab and brownish: the rocks, the sand, the sea, the seagulls. It was all a fading, monotonous body, in a camouflage of gray-brown tones with veins in paler shades. Like in an overexposed photo, the elements and the animals fused together, and it was impossible to distinguish one from the other, except for their silhouettes.

  Underwater, in contrast, it was a bright, multicolored universe. Against the dark bottom, one could see dots of dazzling light and explosions in phosphorescent violet, methylene blue, neon shades of green, translucent mauve tones, and iridescent golds. The rigid and desiccated textures found out of the water would become softened and spongy, organic, sticky. Through the cracks and rocky galleries, hallucinatory guests would peek out: bunches of little pink fingers, swollen livers sporting electrified manes, transparent tubers with luminous eyes, creatures with flexible arms that delicately reached for their food and took it to their mouths.

  Alicia and Ramón let themselves go with the timeless rhythm of the underwater world. Porfirio Díaz, Francisco Madero, Doña Carlota, even their own beings and all their history and everyday lives disappeared like fleeting ghosts when faced with the eternal reality of the squids’ slow-motion dances of love and death; with the rocklike creatures that, waking up apparently hungry, surprised their victims, sardines as well as occupants of sunken galleons; or with the sleepy lumbering of the sea bass, that sweet giant of the deep.

  This placid existence of the Arnauds would have continued slipping by, rocked only by the ebb tide, were it not for the dawn of February 28, when they were awakened by a strange, humid, asphyxiating heat, like a damp towel covering one’s nose and mouth.

  By five A.M., Ramón kicked off the sheet and began tossing about restlessly in bed.

  “The problem with the ocean is that it’s too noisy. All the time, day and night, it’s making noise. I’ve already forgotten what silence is. I miss the silence,” he whispered in the hush of night. He turned this way and that, rearranging his pillow and trying to go back to sleep, without success. “I must have slept on the wrong side of the bed and woken up angry. Even the sound of the waves, always so pleasant, is driving me wild today.”

  “You’re not the one who is angry, it’s the ocean. It’s making more noise than ever,” Alicia said, and got up to take a look out the window. In the sky, a sickly dawn was rising without any conviction. Under the scant light, the ocean itself was dead calm for miles. The motionless sea appeared gray, thick, and wrinkled, like the skin of an elephant.

  “The strangest thing is how quiet it looks,” commented Alicia in astonishment. “It roars like a wild beast, but it’s still, as if it were dead.”

  For a long time they had gotten into the habit of making love at sunrise, almost without consciously wanting to, letting themselves be carried by the energies that awaken independently after a night of rest. That morning they tried, but failed. Something in the air made their bodies feel like rag dolls and paralyzed every impulse before it was born.

  “I can’t,” said Ramón, sitting on the bed in order to fill his lungs. “I need air.”

  “I can’t either,” she said. “I need air, too.”

  The sticky weather made their clothes damp with perspiration even before they finished getting dressed. Ramón went into the hall to look at the barometer. He found it showed an extremely low reading and thought it was out of order. He looked at the time. It was already six twenty in the morning, but the amount of sunlight had not changed since five o’clock, as if the heavy air would not allow the light to filter through.

  “What the hell is going on?” he said out loud, but he could not hear his own words because of the loud noise coming from the ocean. Walking on the beach toward the soldiers’ barracks, he met Lieutenant Cardona, who was also looking for him.

  “That gringo Schultz thinks that a hurricane is coming,” Cardona announced. “He says we have to get ready, because it’s a strong one.”

  “He is not a gringo. He is German.”

  “About the same, isn’t it?”

  “Anyway, what does this German fellow know about hurricanes?” growled Arnaud in disgust, just when a tenuous line, ruffled and nebulous, appeared on the horizon, scarcely visible above the water. Neither Captain Arnaud nor Lieutenant Cardona could actually see it.

  Until noon they battled the weakness and heaviness that had come over them, in order to perform their usual chores. Wherever they went, they saw people lying down, children in silence, women inactive and distracted, soldiers sluggish and ill-tempered. Even the domestic animals were sprawled about carelessly, as if they had plopped down just anywhere.

  Arnaud looked around and asked Cardona, “And what about the crabs? And the boobies? They are always all over us, and today I haven’t seen even one since dawn.”

  “Heaven knows where they are,” the lieutenant answered.

  It was already noon, and yet, no daylight. A timid, unnatural light was filtering through, but it was not enough to dispel the darkness. Meanwhile, the sun seemed to have stopped in its position in the sky, swallowing timeless minutes.

  Arnaud went to the supply store and set aside several bags of foodstuffs. In a flat, business-as-usual tone, he gave instructions to Cardona.

  “Gather all the women and children at the vegetable patch, and have them wait there until we see what is going on. Ask the men to do a head count and make sure nobody is missing. Where do you think the people could be best protected? In the guano shed next to the dock?”

  “That’s correct, sir,” Cardona answered in his most energetic military tone. “That is the sturdiest structure on the isle.”

  “Besides, it’s on a higher ground and solidly built on pylons, so it will not be dragged away by floodwaters. Have someone take these food supplies there and a few barrels of drinking water. And make sure domestic animals are also sheltered.”

  “Two by two, just like Noah’s ark,” offered the lieutenant with a childish smile, seeming both excited and amused by the prospect of a great commotion.

  While Cardona and the soldiers corralled the pigs, chickens, and dogs in an improvised pen at one corner of the shed, Arnaud went to the lighthouse to speak to the soldier in charge, Victoriano Alvarez.

  “Turn on the beam, Victoriano,” he ordered, “and keep it on at all costs. If things get rough, tie yourself to the rock, or do whatever you can, but don’t let the light go out.”

  Arnaud joined Cardona and the other men in time to see how a sudden gust of wind whipped against the palm trees, folding their trunks almost at right angles and abruptly turning the fronds upside down as if it were pulling a bunch of reluctant young ladies by the hair.

  “Look at that! It’s the hurricane!” shouted Cardona, pointing toward it. “Here it comes already!”

  “Well, let it come,” said Arnaud. “Let it blow if it must but once and for all, because this dead calm is driving us nuts.”

  The unexpected gust of wind vanished and the palm trees recovered their composure, but the dark line that up to a minute before had seemed to rest on the horizon quickly covered in a few instants half the distance that separated it from Clipperton, showing its flying halo of leaves and other suspended objects being buffeted by the wind.

  “It’s time for the women and the children to get into the shed,” shouted Arnaud. Don’t let them leave until the storm is over.”

  At the mere mention of the word, as if it had been an invocation, the storm fiercely let loose all its force. As the jets of water hit them, the reality of the situation dawned, and the events, restrained up to then, came upon them in such rapid succession and with such violence that in spite of having been warned, they were taken by surprise.

  Standing at the entrance of the guano shed—well constructed by Schultz during the company’s golden age—Ramón helped the women in. With children hanging from their skirts, they came carrying baskets overflowing with serapes, pieces of cloth, scapularies, pictures of saints, kitchen pots, metates to grind corn: every imaginable thing that
deserved to be saved from the deluge.

  Ramón saw his wife and children coming in the middle of the group. As Ramoncito ran to him, eyes round identical to his, and eyelashes dripping water, he picked him up and tightly hugged his fragile frame, like a little bird’s.

  “Daddy,” the child shouted in his ear, “the winged horses went mad and started to gallop in the skies.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Doña Juana told me, and it’s true.”

  Alicia’s hair was loose and wet, and it stuck to her face and body. She was carrying baby Olga on one arm, and with the other she was pulling a large trunk, helped by Altagracia Quiroz, who pushed it from behind.

  Ramón quickly put his child down and lifted the trunk.

  “You are always doing the wrong thing at the wrong moment,” he told Alicia, but she did not understand at all.

  “What are you saying?”

  “What the heck do you have there?”

  “My wedding dress, my best clothes, and my jewelry,” Alicia shouted back.

  “Why do you need them now?”

  “The last thing I need is to lose these things to the wind,” she said, now without straining her voice, more to herself than to Ramón.

  He took the trunk inside and ran out again to help a woman whom another gust of wind had thrown into one of the rivers of rain running everywhere on the isle. He did not know how or where he caught her, a round, wet, soft, and difficult mass who held desperately to his legs, causing him to fall also. Finally he was able to drag her through the mud and bring her in. Through the existing confusion, Arnaud then looked at the back of the shed and in the semidarkness managed to see Alicia’s silhouette, placing the baby on a wheelbarrow she had found in the shed.