Isle of Passion

by Laura Restrepo

  María Noriega must have sent the requested marriage certificate, since the pension was granted to her, which corroborates the legitimacy of the relationship. This also proves that the woman who lived with Secundino Cardona until the end of his days was not his wife, but the above-mentioned “Teresa Rendón,” a variant of the name Tirsa Rendón.

  In the end, everything is clear. Secundino Angel Cardona married a nurse, María Noriega, and they had two children. The ordeals of military life induced him to abandon her, and at some point in his many adventures he got together with Tirsa, who followed him from then on, to Clipperton. So Tirsa Rendón must have been, like the other Clipperton soldiers’ women, a camp follower.

  Clipperton, 1914

  UNDER THE PLANKS of the guano storehouse the roar of the storm was softer and more bearable, while outside, the isle was being pommeled by the tired, last battering. Men, women, and children were waiting, wide awake, for the coming dawn to clear the skies and finally quiet down the furies of wind and ocean.

  Almost inaudible, a sort of piercing sound was resounding in their stunned eardrums. It was sharp and feminine, as if coming from a soprano, a ship siren, or a mermaid. A high C floating intermittently into the rarified air of the storehouse, sneaking into the intervals of silence when the roof planks stopped clattering. It was an urgent call, but so unexpected and unreal that the Clipperton survivors perceived it without hearing it, and nobody thought of asking where it came from. It was simply another incomprehensible and unmanageable phenomenon that the hurricane had brought along.

  In a corner, Lieutenant Cardona lay on a straw mattress, a thick blanket over him. A bittersweet smile twisted his lips, allowing his white, Chamula Indian teeth to show. The excruciating pain in his disjointed, splintered leg still produced a dull tingling under the effects of the morphine injections Captain Arnaud had given him. Kneeling by his side, Tirsa Rendón, his common-law wife, tried to wring dry the cloths drenched with his perspiration, since all the liquid element in his body seemed to be flowing out freely from his forehead, his underarms, his back. As if the man wanted to die of dehydration.

  In the stupor of his weakness and his narcosis, lying at the borderline between this life and the other, Cardona also heard the surreal ringing and dreamed that women with friendly breasts and angelic voices relieved his suffering by singing lullabies in his ear.

  A few hours before, when the hurricane still thundered in all its fury, both captain and lieutenant had made their ghostly appearance at the storehouse. They came after their terrifying night, nearly naked and exhausted, like Moses rescued from the waters, numb with horror. If they managed to move along the isle, upsetting the devastating designs of nature, it was by mustering hidden reserves of energy and postponing death, step by step, with the last lifesaving iota of adrenaline.

  Between them, they had dragged Cardona’s torn leg as if it were a third person, a dying man, heavy and swollen, whom they were trying to rescue from the storm. When they reached the refuge, Arnaud attempted to rearrange that mess of bone and blood, starting with the instruments in his first-aid kit and, when these proved insufficient, resorting to the work tools in the storehouse.

  While Cardona howled and hallucinated about mermaids, Arnaud struggled with pincers and pulleys to reset his femur into the hip socket, to straighten his knee, which looked downward, to give some human form to this organic matter, so torn and disjointed.

  He would not have accomplished much were it not for Tirsa Rendón’s incredible level-headedness and almost virile stamina. Covered with blood like a butcher or a priestess, she helped consistently, without fainting or being repelled, helping him to unravel tendons, pull bones, and darn skin with needle and thread, like embroidering doilies with cross-stitch.

  When Arnaud had reached his outer limits of alertness and of his modest resources as a surgeon, he made splints and bandages, and not until then did he embrace Alicia, kiss his children, take off whatever was left of his soaked clothes, and cover himself with the heavy tablecloth with bobbin lace from Bruges that his wife had saved in her trunk. Wrapped in white cloth, like a tragic hero, he did a roll call to make a count of those present: eleven men, ten women, and nine children. Miraculously, the Mexicans were all there, except Victoriano Alvarez, posted at the lighthouse. Some of the men had wounds and contusions, but with the exception of Cardona’s leg wound, none was serious.

  The only foreigner who had not left the isle, Gustav Schultz, was absent. Very early in the morning of the day before, Lieutenant Cardona had seen him observing the sky. He pointed his index finger up and predicted, “Hurricane.”

  The lieutenant now recalled that last impression of his voluminous figure silhouetted against the dim predawn light. He knew better than anybody.

  “Maybe he’s dead,” someone said.

  But Ramón Arnaud was convinced that wasn’t so, and his face turned red with rage to think that instead of helping the community or contributing to its safety, Schultz had taken shelter on his own with his woman, inside the solid walls of his home. Arnaud imagined him to be at that moment dry, warm, and comfortably asleep in his bed, and felt something resembling hate.

  The Arnaud family gathered in a tight group. Interrupted by the roars of the dying hurricane, the creaking of the roof, the cries of the children, and the nervous noise of the frightened animals, Ramón and Alicia almost didn’t let each other finish a sentence, eagerly recounting all the events of the last hours, threading like telegraphic messages the fragments of the two stories into a single intermittent one. Every three words, Ramoncito, who wanted to know everything to the last detail, would interrupt to ask “What happened?” “How did you hurt yourself, Dad?” “Where did you fall down?” “Who was it?” “How was it?” “Why was it?”

  “Someone is knocking at the door,” a voice announced.

  The storehouse door was opened, and a lot of water came in together with Daría Pinzón and her daughter, Jesusa Lacursa.

  “Where is Schultz?” Arnaud asked them, no longer so sure about the answer.

  “He’s gone mad,” Daría Pinzón answered.

  “I’m not asking how he is, but where.”

  “He is around, mad as a hatter. While his house flew away, he spent the whole night outside, trying to salvage the train and all the machinery, and all those useless contraptions that the company abandoned. And he, also, he also was abandoned on this isle, but he doesn’t care. And as for me, the wind might as well blow me away, he doesn’t care about that either. He only cares for the interests of the company, as if they were his children,” Daria said on the verge of a nervous breakdown, without being able to stop. “He has gone nuts, Captain, believe me, that gringo has gone crazy. He was brought to Clipperton to ship the guano, and he wants to ship guano even though there is no guano, no Clipperton, no company—”

  “Calm down, Daría,” Arnaud said softly. “Go and get some hot coffee and find a spot here for you and your daughter.”

  The women were throwing dough balls into the small fires they had made. Accompanied by a well-tuned guitar, someone was singing a strange corrido that told the story of a cockroach that couldn’t walk. Several men were playing monte over a gray military serape, with total absorption, oblivious to everything. Every once in a while they shouted for everyone to hear, announcing the cards they had uncovered.

  “Two, for your rheumatism and your flu.”

  “Four-ce off the covers to sleep with your lovers.”

  “Six days of battle, and they stole my cattle.”

  “Three things nice: chocolate and sugar ’n’ spice.”

  In the meantime, the sharp whistle kept on unwittingly penetrating through every crack in the roof, subtle and distant but implacable, like a remote Judgment Day trumpet.

  The tail of the hurricane dissipated when the sun came up, and people slowly left the storehouse with the caution of shy animals that leave their lairs blinded by the light after hibernating, dazed by so much sleep. Arnaud headed a
n impromptu procession that sleepwalked along the coastline in religious silence, without saying a word about the spectacle before their eyes. The vegetable patch and its black soil, the buildings, the dock, all traces of civilization, all human undertakings—which had taken years to bring to fruition—had all disappeared.

  The fresh guano had also disappeared. The tons of excrement from hundreds of birds, deposited on land for years, had been dragged out to sea. Cleared and freed of the soft, greenish-black layer spread all over that appeared to be its second nature, Clipperton now displayed the cruel ancestral grayness of fossilized guano. There was a glorious stillness in the sky and in the ocean, a pristine calm. Clipperton lay in this half of the universe, clean and empty, virginal, like at the dawn of creation. The crabs and boobies had returned, by the dozens, by the hundreds, as if during their absence they had tripled in number. Now they were swarming around the bald rock, sure of themselves, arrogant lords of the reconquered realm.

  The men walked to the south and found the lighthouse intact at the top of the rock.

  “At least we have this left,” said Ramón Arnaud in an old man’s voice he did not recognize.

  Victoriano Alvarez, the lighthouse keeper, came to meet them. The color of his skin had turned ashen, but his eyes sparkled with an unusual phosphorescence.

  “Any news, soldier?” Arnaud asked, curling his mustache at the absurdity of his words under the circumstances.

  “Yes, sir!” was his answer. “Come and see for yourself.”

  They all followed Victoriano to the entrance of the lighthouse lair. He pushed the door open, and Captain Arnaud went in. In a few seconds his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness inside. Then he saw them.

  Lying on top of one another, asleep, their hair golden like that of the saints in colonial altars, there were nine men, one woman, and two children. Though they were lying down, it was easy to see how tall they were. The men had yellow beards, like prophets, and the skin of the woman was so transparent that one could follow, as on a map, the lilac veins of her arms and legs.

  In disbelief, Arnaud looked at these mysterious beings come out of nowhere. Fallen from the sky, like the white gods the Aztec prophecies had announced. But their wet clothes and the tiredness of their unhinged bodies denied any such divine nature. On the contrary, their desolate, forlorn air was unmistakably human.

  “Where did they come from?” Arnaud managed to ask after observing them for a while.

  “They don’t speak our language,” Victoriano responded, “but they were shipwrecked out there.”

  The soldier pointed to the sea, and Arnaud saw, about a mile from the beach, practically underwater and lying on her side, a three-masted schooner. The Pacific Ocean was so placid that morning that the vessel seemed to be catching up on sleep, like her crew.

  “All night long I heard their ship horn braving the storm,” Victoriano said. “Uuuuuuu uuuuuuu, she cried, howling like a ghost. It made my hair stand on end. Uuuuuuu, so sad, so piercing, uuuuuuu. I thought it was the Weeping Woman, wailing for us.”

  Listening to Victoriano, Arnaud remembered hearing that anguished sound for hours, but his brain had refused to register it.

  “It seems they got lost in the hurricane,” Victoriano Alvarez continued, “and the Clipperton lighthouse attracted them. That’s what I make of it, sir, though I couldn’t understand a word they said. They thought they could find refuge here. That’s it. And of course, their ship got smashed to hell against the reefs. When their boat sank, they kept afloat in the dark, holding on to the children so they wouldn’t drown. Maybe that’s what happened. They must have spent the night clinging like monkeys to floating pieces of wood, and at dawn they swam to shore. I saw them there and helped them. It would be better, Captain, when they wake up, for them to tell you their own story. You know so many languages, sir, you could understand them.”

  Ramón Arnaud felt compassion for this group of blond strangers lying at his feet. Perhaps they were not asleep but had fainted.

  “Fate is a prankster,” he finally said, too perplexed and exhausted to add a sense of drama to his voice. “In one blow it leaves us without food and brings bring us twelve extra mouths to feed.”

  Mexico City, Today

  THINKING ABOUT TIRSA RENDÓN, I read old novels and documents from the beginning of the century to find out about camp followers. There is not much about them. They were the dogs of war. Half heroines and half whores, they marched behind the troops, following their johns; the men on horses, the women on foot.

  They would sleep with a man for a couple of pesos and then leave him the next morning on a whim, unpredictable and slippery in their affairs. Or they could be loyal to him until death; get killed for just giving him a sip of water; steal or have knife fights over a chicken in order to have something they could give him to eat. They were the females in the troop, daughters of the hard life. Filthy, ragged, and drunk, like their johns. Tender and brave like them.

  They knew how to do many things, and were indispensable to the men. Without them, the men would have died of hunger, of filth, of loneliness. Always agitated, always shouting, always carrying on their heads the water jugs, the luggage, and the cured meats. On the river-banks they washed their petticoats and their men’s uniforms. At night they went into the barracks or the military camps and in smoky bonfires they prepared fried chicken or turkey, made fatty salt pork soup, threw dough balls into the fire. They slept on the floor under their serapes, legs entangled with their soldiers. On very cold daybreaks, they sang corridos and mañanitas in their shrill voices, and warmed up the air with their steaming hot coffee. Then they picked up their rags and their things and left while the officers shouted at them.

  “Out with these women!”

  They were also in charge of the prayers: they prayed for the soldiers who were alive so they would not die, and for the dead ones so they would not have to suffer in hell. Rather than to Jesus Christ or to the spirits, they prayed to the Saint of Cabora, Teresita Urrea, a living virgin from Chihuahua who was catatonic and epileptic, and who performed miracles and blessed the carbines so that for each and every bullet, a dead man. The camp followers sought shelter under her great power and hung around their necks pieces of Teresita’s poor garments, with tufts of her sacred hair. When a soldier died, they cried for him: with a lot of feeling or with a lot of wailing if he was someone they loved; and routinely just to fulfill their tradition if he was unknown.

  They were also in charge of looting. After a battle, when victory was on their side, the camp followers sacked the conquered towns, the abandoned ranches. Stepping on the wounded, kicking aside the corpses, they stole, raided houses, set them on fire, and all bloody, black with soot, and intoxicated with victory, they returned dragging their booty.

  As for smuggling, they were experts. In their bodices, in their babies’ diapers, and in between the corn tortillas, they knew how to hide the marijuana leaves. To save them for their men, they knew how to escape the controls and the searches in the barracks. They were carriers of the yerba santa, the only true relief from their suffering and helplessness, the liberating weed among the soldiers at war.

  The camp followers were also the news service for the troops. The men were confined, isolated, and got no news from outside. They knew only their officers’ shouts, they saw nothing but their own misery, they wished nothing more than to do their time in order to leave the post. Whatever happened in the rest of the world did not penetrate the barrack walls. The camp followers, on the other hand, came and went, had a chat with the storekeeper who knew all the gossip in town, with the railroad man who brought news from distant places, with the general’s mistress, who pricked up her ears to hear the plans of the high command. Through their women the troops found out if their battalion would take part in an attack or travel to another town. Thanks to the women they did not forget that there was still a world outside.

  Given the opportunity, the women also participated in the fighting. At the deat
h of her man, a woman inherited his horse, wore his cartridge belt, and shouldered his rifle.

  Tirsa Rendón, Lieutenant Cardona’s woman, was one of them. A camp follower.

  They met one day, when military life united them on the paths of Yucatán, or on the roads of Cananea. Perhaps they celebrated an urgent wedding of love and convenience, such as the one told—with the same words but different characters—by General Urquizo in his book Tropa vieja. He knew all about such things from his years with the troops.

  Young Tirsa and handsome Cardona had never met before. Perhaps they sat together on the train one day when the troops were being transfered. Fate squeezed one against the other in a car packed with soldiers, camp followers, and animals. The air was thick with sweat, dirty feet, rawhide, rifle oil, foods stored in pockets, farts, and burps.

  The jolts of the train brought them closer until she was almost on his lap. They both liked their skin contacts. They found pleasure in each other’s smell and body warmth. Perhaps he noticed her eyes, her very white whites and very dark irises, and perhaps she saw his smile.

  After their flirting briefly and brusquely, came the ceremony, what General Urquizo called a “wedding in pure military style.”

  “What’s your name, girl?”

  “Tirsa Rendón, and yours?”