Isle of Passion

by Laura Restrepo

  “I thought that this sickness had no cure, but our plan seems to be working,” Ramón said, without daring yet to declare it a miracle cure.

  “God willing.”

  Either God was willing or the coconut remedy did it, but Ramón recuperated. They went back to their disciplined routine as if nothing had happened, but keeping a tight control over the coconuts, several dozen of which they stored under lock and key. And they renewed their gatherings at dusk with Tirsa and Cardona.

  “Victoriano is rebelling again,” the lieutenant’s voice resounded in the dark.

  “Is he again agitating the people?”

  “No, the trouble now is that he is doing nothing. Does not even light the lantern in the lighthouse. I had to put Pedrito Carvajal in charge of that, because the man refuses to get up from his hammock. Threats don’t work. He says we can shoot him if we want to, but right there, lying in his hammock. He does not want to get up.”

  “Is he sick?” Alicia inquired.

  “He doesn’t seem to be. It just seems to be lethargy.”

  The two men walked up to the lighthouse cave to see Victoriano. As soon as Arnaud came in, he recognized the smell: it was the same putrid smell of his own body a few days ago. It was pitch black inside. Arnaud groped the walls to get a sense of where he was going, and found them moist. They were permeated with the unhealthy vapors of the disease.

  “Victoriano?”

  “Yessir.”

  “It’s me, Arnaud.”

  “At your service, Captain.”

  His knees bumped against the hammock, which hung on the diagonal. There was his man.

  “My whole body aches,” they heard him say. “I think rheumatism got me. It got even my teeth, because they are falling out.”

  Ramón did not need to see him. He heard his hard breathing and could easily imagine the bruises on his skin and the ulcerations in his mouth. He returned at dawn to apply medications and feed him some coconut mush. He also asked Sergeant Irra’s wife to look after him.

  Victoriano Alvarez moaned all day, screamed all night, and in the morning he looked like a martyr. His skin was covered with ulcers, as if somebody had beaten him to a pulp. His gums were bleeding, and his mouth was all infected with boils. The news spread all over the island. People came to the lighthouse to see him and gathered at the door of his cabin, their eyes fixed on him. The children sneaked in and circled around his hammock.

  A few days later, Ramón summoned his people in front of the room that had been the pharmacy and made them parade in their skivvies to check them out. He found the tell-tale signs on a woman. She was Irra’s companion, the one who had been taking care of Victoriano.

  The rumor spread like wildfire that this was a contagious epidemic and that it would infect anyone who came near Victoriano Alvarez. Arnaud did everything possible to stop the confusion. He ordered some community meetings and explained the characteristics of the disease, its causes and symptoms. He seemed never to tire of saying that it wasn’t catching, and using a stick, even scratched out on the ground crude human figures to explain the body’s systemic functions and failures. Despite all his efforts, he could not convince anyone. People did not want to hear anything about “scurvy” and preferred to keep calling it “the plague.” The plague, they said, pronouncing the word with more fatalism than hope for a cure. They also refused to believe the citrus story. The disease was contagious, and that was the only truth they were willing to accept. Besides, they needed a more believable culprit than a perfectly innocent looking orange or lemon.

  In its secret path, before it became full-blown, the disease altered body humors—fermenting blood, souring bile, poisoning mucus—and brought forth dark passions, and Victoriano Alvarez became the scapegoat. They came to hate him from the bottom of their hearts: they cursed him for being black and for being contagious, demanding that he be isolated and placed in quarantine. Nobody wanted to take care of him. Or even to get close to the big rock, or to turn on the beam in the lighthouse. Ramón agreed to isolate him, in part so as not to agitate the crowd even more, in part for fear they would end up by lynching their chosen victim.

  During the days that followed, many people began to look yellowish, like Asians, and suffered attacks of rash and rancorous apathy that made it difficult to get them to do anything or to follow any discipline. Ramón knew how to interpret this: as the first signs of the disease that was spreading to everybody. He devoted himself, together with Cardona, to rebuilding the pharmacy. He inventoried the few medications left, had the women wash and boil rags, and in the depository that had once been ransacked by The Hand That Strangles, he continued storing coconuts, after he fixed some locks and bolts. He had everybody receive a coconut ration together with their daily food.

  Scurvy spread with implacable speed anyway, and rashes, sores, brown spots, and hematomas proliferated. Women and children were less affected; the disease attacked the men with particular virulence.

  The sickly coconut palms could not produce enough, and the portions of coconut were reduced to ridiculous amounts. Ramón ordered the pulp to be grated and mixed with fish, and the coconut milk extended with rainwater. But even so, the remedy was not enough. In desperation, Tirsa Rendón thought of using the shells also. They tried to boil them in a big pot and prepared an infusion that they started to distribute in their pewter bowls, a ladleful at a time. Since the taste was awful, people refused to drink it, and Ramón made it compulsory to have it under threat of punishment.

  The soldiers thought he had lost his wits.

  “Our good Captain Arnaud blames everything on the oranges and wants to stop us from dying with coconut milk!” Since no one wanted to take care of the agonizing Victoriano, Alicia, who was still healthy, volunteered to do it. He was in a sorrowful state. His body emitted a putrid odor, his sores were oozing, and he could not get up from the hammock even to relieve himself. Making a big effort and trying to control her nausea, she fed him and tried to alleviate his suffering as best she could. Once, during wash time, she lifted the dirty serape that covered him. His body was naked, emaciated, and ghostly, but between his legs, in full erection and apparently in good health, Alicia saw his large-sized member. She was stunned. She let go of the serape and searched his face as if expecting an explanation. His eyes were gazing at her without shame, with some amusement, in fact. For a moment she felt paralyzed, then stepped back. Victoriano grabbed her hand, but she escaped and ran away as if Lucifer himself had touched her. She did not stop running until she met Ramón in the infirmary, on the other side of the island.

  “I’m not taking care of Victoriano anymore,” she announced, still breathless from her moment of panic and her racing away from it. “It’s a man’s job.”

  “Why?”

  She did not dare tell the truth.

  “Because he is too heavy and I cannot handle him.”

  Alicia never went back to the lighthouse lair, and with so many sick people to take care of, Ramón completely forgot about Victoriano Alvarez. The soldier was left forsaken in his cave, dreaming of revenge while seeing his body rot away, piece by piece.

  But the scurvy continued spreading around. The ulcerated sores and bursting boils increased, and some of the infections were so bad as to be swarming with worms. The antiseptics ran out, and Ramón had to resort to drastic old ways. With cold-blooded Tirsa Rendón as his assistant, he filled the wounds with gunpowder, added a wick, and let them burn out.

  The rainy season came suddenly, and the deluge seemed like the sky wanted to wash away the miasmas from the plague. The floods forced people to disband. The sick became isolated, with only their own horror to face.

  On one stormy dawn, someone knocked at the Arnauds’ home. Alicia got up to open the door and met face to face with a monster. It took her a while to realize it was Irra’s wife. She had lost all her teeth, and her face was purple and disfigured. Her gums were swollen beyond any possible imagining. From the opening gap that was now her mouth came a rancid
odor that Alicia recognized: it was the odor of death.

  “I came to ask you where I can bury my two children,” she mumbled. “They died last night.”

  The burial was scheduled for that afternoon, next to Jesús Neri’s grave, Clipperton’s first fatality, the old soldier who was attacked by sharks. But Irra’s wife died before then. They placed her body in the same box with her two children, and a sad procession dragged along under the downpour, all the way to the cemetery by the southern rock, with the makeshift coffin on their shoulders. Their heads were bent, and they avoided looking at one another: it was too hard to see their own disaster reflected in the others’ faces. There was no ceremony, either religious or military. They did not have the strength. Whatever strength they had left was spent by the sick in keeping themselves on their feet, and by the healthy in digging into the rock, the rain pounding on their backs.

  The dead disappeared underground, and the living scattered in the storm. Only a small group of men stayed by the grave, keeping company with Sergeant Irra, who had just buried his whole family. Without a word, they knew what they wanted to do. They walked slowly toward the lighthouse lair, all with a single aim, a single will. They found Victoriano lying in his hammock, still alive, and bludgeoned him until they felt he was dead. “We did the right thing,” they wrote on the earth floor of the cabin.

  Doña Juana the midwife, Jesús Neri’s widow, had become an ill-tempered, mad loner. She had no home—nobody remembered whether her house had collapsed or had been blown away by the hurricane or dragged off by the floods—and she wandered around with her belongings on her back. Life in the open had shrunk, wrinkled, and darkened her skin like a raisin. During the day she kept mumbling, and at night she lulled herself to sleep as if she were her own child. The others forgot about her and would greet her only in passing, “Morning, Doña Juana,” or “Good morning, Doña Juana.”

  “What’s ‘good’ about it?” she would mumble, though nobody paid attention. “There are only bad ones and worse ones.”

  When the scurvy condition worsened, they remembered her.

  “The midwife could help us with our sores!”

  They looked for her by the lagoon, under the pile of rubble and garbage where she had taken refuge, and she came out dressed in rags. She stood on a mound of rocks and spoke about the devil. Clipperton was living in sin, “like Sodom and Gomorrah,” she preached, “and the plague was God’s punishment. Men and women were living together without the sacred sanction, and the children were growing up without being baptized.” She would take care of them, she promised, provided they first achieved peace with their consciences. It was easy for her to convince them. She conducted marriage ceremonies, blessing the pathetic brides and grooms ravished by disease. She held communal baptisms, making the little ones go into the rotten waters of the lagoon up to their knees. Her regalia as priestess for these occasions was really striking. To the various rags, she added pelts from dead animals, and on her head she wore an old lamp shade decorated with tassels all around. At one end of a long stick, which she used as a bishop’s crosier, she had attached a porcelain doll.

  Notwithstanding their repentance, their prayers and sacraments, the faithful continued to writhe in pain. The midwife then complemented her mysticism with medicine. She prepared infusions with turkey feathers, sea urchin shells, bat pee, and toad milk. She applied leeches, vents, and guano poultices. The sick stopped going to the pharmacy for their daily ration of coconut, and established themselves at the shore of the lagoon, all around the midwife’s hovel. Their days and nights were divided either between moans and agonies, or prayers and processions.

  The death toll kept increasing, and the living became impatient waiting for a miracle cure. The midwife expanded her gospel repertoire. She told them that there was poison in the air, and ordered people to light bonfires to cleanse it and to feed the fires with the belongings of those who died. So, into this purifying fire went scapulars, combs, petticoats, shirts, love letters, toys: the last remaining family memories, the few friendly objects that were left, minute traces of a bygone world.

  But nobody was getting better; they all got worse. Their skin fell off in scales, and their flesh was raw. With their lowered defenses, other diseases took hold: anemia, rheumatic fever, bronchitis, leukemia, diarrhea, depression.

  The faithful were losing patience.

  “You lying hag, if you don’t cure us, we’ll throw you into the lagoon,” the people shouted at her one day in the middle of one of her rituals.

  Then she demanded sacrifices. She said that the sins had been so numerous that only blood could wash them away. Dutifully, they threw into the fire a whole litter of newborn piglets. A new brotherhood of flagellants was formed, and they went around the island flailing their backs.

  The flagellants, led by Sergeant Irra, punished themselves and everything around them. Weak and in pain, they were nonetheless a pitiful horde of hooligans and predators. Their emblem was to carry a handful of hair that each had pulled out from someone’s corpse; their slogan, “Long Live Death”; and their hymn, the “Salve Regina, Empress of Heaven.” Using the same whips and heavy sticks with which they mortified their flesh, they killed all the animals and destroyed all structures and water tanks, as well as ransacked the food depot. They would have cut down the palm trees with their machetes, had Arnaud and Cardona’s gunshots not prevented them.

  As long as Ramón was in control, burials were made in the cemetery. But when Clipperton became a no-man’s-land, each one dug a hole for his dead wherever he could. The island was dotted with graves. Sometimes—though not often—their presence was indicated by a wooden cross or a heap of stones. At the end, when the living were fewer than the dead, and the presence of death became overwhelming, they threw the corpses into the lagoon or into the sea.

  Arnaud’s authority had collapsed. He and his military orders and coconut milk could not compete with Doña Juana’s magical, mystical influence. In one last attempt to bring this pandemonium to some semblance of order, he walked to the lagoon with the clear intention of confronting the old woman.

  “You are no priestess, and no doctor. You’re nothing!” he shouted in the presence of her followers. “You’re nothing but a deranged old woman, and I forbid you to keep on driving these people mad.”

  “You are not in charge anymore, Arnaud,” she countered. “And neither am I. This is the reign of death. Go and die in peace, and let others die the way they want to.”

  Ramón walked away from the place without a word, and resolved to keep to himself at home with his family, Altagracia, Tirsa, Cardona, three widows, and one orphan. The isle became two domains—the midwife’s colony and the Arnaud home—that had less and less contact with each other, each side finally ignoring the other as if they were an ocean apart.

  Those who stayed in the house organized a guard duty day and night to prevent an attack from the flagellants, and, against all hopes, they kept eating coconut and drinking an infusion made with the shells. Not even Arnaud did it out of conviction. For him this irrational gesture only embodied the remnants of his will to live.

  Though the curtain of water falling from the skies did not abate, some signs from the other side were perceived. Laments from those dying, smoke from the bonfires, hymns from the flagellants. At night the sounds became weaker, more surreal, like voices from the other world that were growing fainter. Like the echoes from a nightmare when one is about to wake up.

  Then the rains suddenly stopped. The sky changed colors, like a snake changes skins, and the color it finally acquired was a limpid, innocent blue. The Arnauds and their three children, the Cardonas, and the rest of those in the house were still alive. Besides, they were healthy. They were the only survivors on Clipperton Island.

  “Blessed are the holy coconuts,” Ramón said, and went out with his children to the beach to welcome the sunshine.

  Clipperton, 1915

  “SECUNDINO, A SHIP is going by!” shouted Ramón Arnaud
one quiet, gray morning.

  Everything seemed to be at peace, except for the ocean. In between the lazy stillness of the sky and that of the land, the sea in frantic waves exploded on the reefs.

  Ramón Arnaud and Secundino Cardona had been sitting on the beach for hours, just killing time. The smell of death still lingered and reached them once in a while, but they did not notice. They had become inured to having their noses tickled by mellow, rotten scents, and no longer remembered the smell of pure air. A few weeks before, when the rains stopped, they had ventured to the midwife’s hill and found only corpses. Together they piled them up and set them on fire. They killed a few pigs that had been eating here and there and burned them also. They did not want to eat animals that had eaten human flesh. Then they left that place, never to return.

  Death had made the island a profane, polluted wasteland, and the survivors stayed around the Arnaud home, the only clean spot. They even forgot about the lighthouse, for they did not want to go there. They only ventured far from the house once a day to collect coconuts. Whatever else was left, they had close by, and they still had the habit of keeping together in a compact group, as if anyone who strayed would be exposed to greater perils than the rest. As if the spirit of the plague, or of impending disaster, were still around. They were alive but had felt death too close, and that had left its mark. They turned fearful and superstitious, and in their minds they found room for the god they had worshiped in another time. The one and only god, all powerful, magnificent, beginning and end of everything: a ship that would rescue them.

  Relaxing on the beach by the house, Arnaud and Cardona were playing with pebbles. When the waves receded, so fast that for a moment they left a smooth film of water, they were casting pebbles horizontally so that they would skip on the surface several times. Cardona always won. His stones would rebound four and five times; Arnaud’s, only two or three.