Isle of Passion

by Laura Restrepo

  Looking at her, he felt a tight lump in his throat. He had to refrain from going to help her, to dry her hair with a towel, to tell her, “Don’t worry, everything will be all right,” and to seek the shelter of her embrace, quietly hiding from the storm and from the unmanageable situation that had fallen on his shoulders.

  What I have to do is go for my men, he thought as if waking up, and waved Alicia a good-bye that she didn’t see.

  He left the shed to fulfill his duty, clinging to the walls of neighboring houses and without knowing exactly in which direction to go. He was trying body and soul not to be dragged by the elements when an airborne sharp object hit him on the forehead and knocked him backward. He lay on the ground, his eyes blinded and his mind taken over by a burning pain that reached to every corner of his brain. After he had been lying there a while, stunned, the first thought that came to his mind was about Gustav Schultz.

  Where could that German fellow be now? he wondered. Maybe he could tell me how long we can expect this to last.

  He tried to get up, but the pain from his wound did not let him. Feeling the warm flow of blood collecting over his right eye, then dripping lazily to the ground, he managed to drag himself up against a wall for some protection, and he lay there, looking at how the world was being transformed while darkness kept closing in around him.

  He saw an intermittent point of light in the dark sky and knew that the soldier in the lighthouse was doing his duty. Clouds in the sky were dissolving as they flitted by in vertiginous succession. Next to him a floor beam, still nailed down, vibrated incessantly, resisting the windstorm’s attempt to pull it out. He saw zinc planks, chairs, and wooden beams go by, surely on their way to crash down somewhere in the distance. Slowly turning his stunned head toward the sea, he saw instead mountains of solid water rushing toward the isle and threatening to engulf it. He noticed that the heat that had tormented him in the morning had dissipated and that now freezing gusts of wind against his soaked clothes were making him shiver.

  I have to move away from here, he thought. Here I am going to drown, or freeze. I am going to die, I must do something. We’re not going to get out alive from this one. Where is everybody? Where is that German fellow so I can ask him what to do?

  He decided to give his wounded head a few more minutes of rest. It was then that he saw a large, imprecise object rolling toward him and making a loud, harsh noise.

  “It’s the Pianola,” Ramón said to himself. “My whole house must have flown out the window.”

  Revived by his premonition, he was able to stand. The first thing he did was to move closer to the shed where the women and children were, and he was relieved to see it resisting the pounding of the hurricane. The effort of getting up made him nauseous but, in spite of that, he tried to walk toward his home with the intention of securing doors and windows.

  He was digging his fingers into the rocks, into the palm tree trunks, into whatever was closest by, in order to advance. His body felt heavy like a sack of stones, the wound on his temple pulsated like a chronometer, and the wind, which had torn his shirt, ended up taking away whatever was left of it. It seemed to cost him an eternity to advance every inch.

  He managed to reach a point where he could have a glimpse of his house, and in that moment he realized the true dimensions of the catastrophe. He quickly abandoned his idea of trying to secure doors and windows. He even felt guilty for having such a naive intent when he realized that the hurricane winds were getting into his house through the gaping hole left by the roof, now completely gone.

  All sorts of objects were flying out, as if a gaggle of madmen inside the house were throwing them up in the air. Ramón watched with resignation how his own dearest belongings and the ones that had accompanied them all these years were disappearing one by one. He allowed himself to feel bitter when he saw his reports and his books doing cabrioles in midair like pinwheels.

  There is nothing to be done here, he thought. Let me find the rest of the people.

  He looked in every direction without knowing where to head. There was only disaster around him, and then he saw, to the south, the beam of the lighthouse.

  They must be there, he thought. Perhaps they took refuge in the cave.

  He walked on, guided by the light, calling at the top of his voice, but nobody could hear him. The gusts threw sand in his eyes, and in the whirlwinds he was helplessly being pulled about like a puppet. The wound on his head hurt, his body was all bruised, and worst of all, he was alone, isolated by force from everybody. Ramón Arnaud felt personally aggravated and deeply humiliated.

  Suddenly, when he was about to give up, he rebelled against so much humiliation. A wave of courage made his blood boil, and he regained control over his own body. He stood up, defiantly facing the wind, and in anger took off his belt and began whipping the air as if possessed. He brandished his belt right and left like a maniac while shouting at the hurricane at the top of his lungs. “Damn you, bastard, what do you have against me? Hey! What is it you want? Do you want me to finish you off with my whip? You’ve got five minutes, you shitty son of a bitch, I give you five minutes to get out of here!”

  Giant angry waves, breaking into foam at their crests, were hitting Clipperton, running over it and coming out on the other shore undisturbed by this insignificant obstacle in their run across the ocean.

  Ramón Arnaud kept shouting while holding on to his pants with one hand and whipping the air with the other, when one of those mountains of water reached him, lifted him, and hurled him a few yards away against one side of the big southern rock. Then it withdrew, leaving him stranded on one of the rocky recesses.

  Arnaud coughed and vomited some of the water he had swallowed. When he was able to breathe again, he attempted to climb to a higher position, anticipating the next wave that would smash him against the rock. He had been lucky this time and miraculously made a soft landing, but in the next charge of the tide he could become imbedded there like the thousands of fossils that had found their eternal resting place.

  In the meantime, in the shed next to the dock, the women and children, together with the animals, had spent several hours more or less protected from the elements gone beserk. At the beginning they had earnestly tried to cover, as best they could, all the cracks and holes where water and wind were coming in. Then they gathered in the center of the shed, huddling against one another in a tighter and tighter circle. They had been silent for a long while, stunned by the unbearable noise of the roof, which vibrated and screeched, threatening to fly off any minute, and by the wailing of the children, who competed all at once to see who could cry the loudest.

  Some people had started to pray the litanies of the Holy Cross, and the rest slowly followed.

  “If when I’m dying, / The devil wants to tempt me, / You will protect me, / Because at the feast of Santa Cruz, / A thousand times I repeated: / Jesus, Jesus, Jesus . . .”

  Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, repeated without pause or respite a hundred times; Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, in an endless, dull murmur that through repetition became susje, susje, susje, susje, susje. Someone did the counting and when it reached a hundred times, interrupted with the prayer, “If when I’m dying, / The devil wants to tempt me,” and the heavy torrent of voices repeated Jesus another hundred times, sounding like broken dishes rolling down, or rain falling, made almost inaudible by the roar of the storm.

  It was not the feast of Santa Cruz that day—for a long time, dates had lost their significance for anybody in Clipperton—but there was every indication that the time of dying had come. “Because at the feast of Santa Cruz, / A thousand times I repeated: / Jesus, Jesus, Jesus . . .” echoed Alicia, but she was actually thinking of Ramón, and his absence made her feel anxious. They had lived together for a long time in close quarters on the isle, where, whether they wished it or not, they could seldom be more than five hundred yards apart from each other. Now that the danger of the situation was keeping them separated, Alicia let herself be overcome by an
anxiety not experienced since her adolescence in Orizaba, when for months she had waited for her fiancé’s return in the patio of her family home, besieged by doubts about ever seeing him again. Holding on her lap baby Olga, who was badly in need of a diaper change and kept crying with surprising strength for her age, Alicia whispered again, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” But instead, she was thinking, Ramón, Ramón, Ramón.

  On the other side of the island, under a sinister sky, Ramón was clinging to the rocks like a housefly. He was nearing physical exhaustion and mental delirium, when he seemed to hear a voice other than his own. A lament, perhaps, or a scream. Weak and faltering, it came from the darkness below. He thought of going down to it, but he told himself that he would be then at the merciless whim of the rising tide. Anyway, he felt the need to respond. It was dangerous, and he had better warm up his rigid muscles before attempting it. After stretching his arms and legs, which barely responded, he managed to go down a couple of yards. He couldn’t see anybody, but there was more urgency in the voice, which sometimes sounded human and at others it didn’t.

  Could it be someone calling for help? he wondered. Or is it only the wind whistling and trying to deceive me? Or maybe it’s a mermaid. A wretched mermaid who wants me to die.

  As if to settle the matter, the words were now pretty audible.

  “It’s me, Ramón. Help me.”

  It was the voice of Lieutenant Cardona.

  “Is it you, Cardona?”

  “It’s me, Ramón, here, on your right.”

  “Are you there, Cardona?”

  “Here, in the rubble.”

  “Can you see me?”

  “Yes, I do see you, I’m on your right, Ramón.”

  “Where?”

  “Under this beam.”

  “I don’t see you, but I hear you fine.”

  “Because the wind has stopped.”

  Ramón then realized it was true, that the wind had unexpectedly stopped. A second before, it was all fury and chaos, and momentarily it all had become still, mysteriously quiet. The sea had gone back, ebbing quicky from the shore as if sucked into an enormous siphon. The wind was not calm, it seemed absent, leaving in its place a warm, thick substance that did not properly reach his lungs.

  There was something phony and frightening in the abrupt stillness.

  Ramón reached a deep recess at the base of the big rock perpendicular to the beach. Shaped like a cave, it had gathered whatever the hurricane had pulled out from various places. Blindly, feeling with his hands, Ramón began to dig, while listening to the lieutenant’s heavy breathing, which came from underneath all the debris.

  “Be careful,” Cardona said, “my leg is trapped under something really heavy.”

  Ramón could distinguish the dark bulk of the lieutenant’s head and trunk in the back, in a space bubble amid the debris. He could make out his left leg twisted into an impossible position and caught under a heavy beam with a pile of other things, unidentifiable in the dark, on top of it.

  “You must have that leg completely smashed,” said Ramón.

  “Help me to get all this off me.”

  Ramón pulled with all his might, but the beam did not budge at all.

  “I don’t understand how you got trapped in here,” he said.

  “I don’t either. But get me out of here, and I’ll try to explain.”

  “Wait. Maybe if I can lean against something.”

  Ramón tried again, pivoting his own back against the big rock, to no avail. For a long while he jostled with the debris, which resulted only in increasing the pressure of the beam on Cardona’s leg, almost driving him to the point of losing consciousness several times.

  “Stop! Stop, Ramón, don’t do this anymore, you’re killing me. Look in my pouch for cigarettes, let’s have a smoke before going on.”

  Ramón reached for the pouch and found them.

  “This is unbelievable,” he said, “they are dry!”

  “Amazing.”

  There were matches, too, and Captain Arnaud lit one. The wind had calmed down so much that the little flame held steady without his needing to shelter it. When he drew the light closer to Cardona, he saw his face at last but could not recognize it. The expression of pain and helplessness had turned him into another man, like an older brother or a pitiful and older version of himself.

  “Gee, my friend, you look pale,” Arnaud told him.

  “This might be the last cigarette we smoke together,” whispered Cardona while he felt the smoke reaching in to his soul.

  “No, there are three more, and luckily they are dry, too,” Ramón answered.

  “What I mean is that this is the eye of the storm. Don’t you see? In a short while the wind will blow and the ruckus will start again. This cave will fill up with water, and you’re going to be outside, and me inside.”

  “No, Secundino, never. Either we both live or we both die.”

  Arnaud tried again in the darkness, now more desperately than before. After a while he managed to remove many smaller pieces of rubble, but the beam was still stuck in the rocks, pinning Cardona’s leg, and he moaned once in a while, more weakly each time.

  Then the rumble began again. At first a faint dissonance like an irregular heartbeat, and then like obsessive but distant war drums. Pleasant gusts of wind began cooling their sweat-drenched foreheads.

  “That’s it,” said Cardona, “here it comes again.”

  “We still have a little time, and this beam is starting to move, you’ll see.”

  “Not at all. We’d better have another smoke. That will give you time to recover.”

  Ramón acquiesced because he had reached not only the point of exhaustion but also the conclusion that he could never get that beam to move.

  “Did I ever tell you,” Cardona asked, “that in San Cristóbal de las Casas the air is clean and light, and it always smells like freshly chopped wood?”

  “Yes, you have told me many times.”

  “It’s true. Now go, Ramón. There’s nothing else to be done here. Not a thing.”

  “No, my friend, I’m not leaving. Keep telling me about the air in San Cristóbal while I take care of business here. Get ready for more pain, because I’m going to kick this beam to hell and you are going to see all the stars in the Milky Way.”

  Arnaud stretched his body over the lieutenant’s, filling in the only free space left in that recess of the big rock. He pulled his legs up, then pushed against the beam with all the strength left in his battered body.

  Cardona howled in pain, and Ramón stopped.

  “No more,” begged the lieutenant, “what you’re kicking to hell is my leg, and the beam is not moving. If I’m going to die, let me die in peace, and not like a martyred saint.”

  “Bear with me, as I told you. I’m going to get you out of here, leg or no leg.”

  “Yeah,” whispered Cardona, scarcely audible, “like a lizard dropping its tail to survive.”

  “You certainly have a knack for animal comparisons.”

  Ramón repeated his maneuver, and the effort was already making him dizzy when the first wave crashed into the cave, covering both of them, blocking their noses and lungs, almost bursting their hearts and ears, and leaving them flooded, almost drowned, for what seemed an eternity.

  What a pity, we’re going to die, Ramón thought.

  But they did not die. The big wave receded with the same fierceness with which it had come in, yanking their bodies outward and carrying the rubble with it. And then it happened: it was only a fraction of an inch, but Secundino Angel Cardona sensed that the centrifugal force of the water was moving the beam, releasing some of the pressure.

  “Now is the time!” he shouted, spitting salt spray, and with a merciless jolt, he liberated his leg and dragged himself to the opening of the cave.

  Ramón Arnaud followed him.

  Mexico City, Today

  TIRSA RENDÓN’S PHOTO was taken after all the events in Clipperton had ended; in it one can s
ee clearly the ravages caused by the tragedy.

  The focus is on the woman in the midst of a large group of people, and only her face can be seen. Her hair, not very professionally trimmed, is short and very straight, with a fringe in front that becomes rounded and longer on the sides, just covering her ears. This hairdo, plus the fact that her skin, naturally dark, has been tanned by the sun, gives her features, reminiscent of those of the Amazonian peoples, a slightly masculine air. This does not mean she is an ugly woman. Hers is an attractive face, handsome though not overly friendly, a face that stands out in a crowd.

  It is her eyes that command attention. The high contrast between the whites of her eyes and her dark irises, the maturity of her gaze, the arrogance of the lifted right eyebrow. In this photo Tirsa presents herself as tough and primitive but not naive. She is not taken by surprise either by the camera or by life, not even when death menaces dangerously near. Though surrounded by others, she appears alone like an Amazon jungle native who has survived massacres and ravages, solitary, defiant, tough; a native who has seen it all, knows it all, who has managed to outwit all enemies through shrewdness, and who has returned from beyond life and death.

  In the various existing documents about the Clipperton tragedy—those coming from María Teresa Arnaud Guzmán, General Francisco Urquizo, and Captain H. P. Perril—there are specific mentions of Tirsa. She is recognized as Mrs. Cardona, that is, Lieutenant Secundino Angel Cardona’s wife.

  In the lieutenant’s military dossier is a letter signed by him in which he refers to his wife. He is asking that his weekly pay be reduced by fifteen pesos, which are to be given to her in the capital city. However, the name of his wife here is not, as expected, Tirsa Rendón. It is María Noriega. Either Tirsa Rendón was a name adopted by María Noriega, or Tirsa Rendón was not really Secundino Cardona’s lawful wife.

  This second possibility proved to be true according to a group of documents at the end of the lieutenant’s dossier. Among them is a letter dated some years later (well after Cardona’s death), in which “María Noriega, Cardona’s widow,” a nurse at Puerto Central in Socorros and mother of two children, claims from the president of Mexico her widow’s pension. The confusion about the identity of the two women is evident in the answer the widow receives: “Please ask Mrs. María Noriega to send a copy of her marriage certificate to the deceased Captain Secundino Angel Cardona, due to the fact that in the investigation carried out by this ministry in reference to his last post on Clipperton Island, Teresa Rendón appears as that officer’s wife and gives testimony to the events that occurred there.”