Isle of Passion

by Laura Restrepo

  “There is no fish.”

  “Give them eggs. Give them water, they are thirsty. Get them dressed, they are cold.”

  “Their clothes are all wet.”

  “Then light a bonfire. Let me go, Ramón. Help Alta make a bonfire.”

  “And Daddy? I know where Daddy is.”

  “Where?”

  “At home. He got there already.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  Alicia ran home. The child ran after her, and Altagracia after the child. When they arrived, they found the house empty.

  “Didn’t you, ma’am, have something to look at things from far away?”

  “Ramón gave it to the Dutchmen.”

  “If they could reach Acapulco, maybe the master can also.”

  “On a few tied-up boards? Don’t be silly. Take this child with you, Alta. Play with him, put him to sleep, feed him, do anything, but take him away from me. I must find Ramón.”

  Alicia and Tirsa ran toward the southern rock. Seeing them go away, Ramoncito screamed, and with so much crying and hiccups, he could barely breathe. The other children, meanwhile, were playing blindman’s buff. The two women climbed up to the lighthouse and searched in all directions until their eyes hurt. The fog had grown thicker, and it was like a veil occasionally parted by the sharp fins of the sharks. Nightfall found them still there, battered by the wind’s frozen eddies, and they were still there at dawn, eyes fixed on the horizon. The sun was coming up strong, dissipating the phantasmagoric mists, and the sea woke up in shades of yellow, rose, and orange, without even a shadow to darken the limpid sunshine.

  The following days were like one another, and brought no changes. Alicia wrapped her wounded feet in rags to protect them from the coral, and she wandered about the beaches incessantly, in an anguished, irrational agitation. Once in a while, she would mutter in passing.

  “Alta, the children are hungry. Feed them.”

  “What do I feed them, ma’am?”

  “Whatever you can.”

  Or else it would go like this:

  “Alta, it’s very late. Put the children to bed.”

  “They don’t want to, ma’am.”

  “Then, let them stay up a while longer.”

  She didn’t go to bed at all. She would wander around the isle like a soul in purgatory, always looking at the sea. Ramoncito, whimpering and with a runny nose, would trot behind her.

  “Mommy, I know where Daddy is.”

  “Listen, let’s not pretend.”

  On the third day, Alicia sat in a corner of the kitchen, her feet full of blisters. She could no longer move and remained there, silent, catatonic, until Rosalía came with the news that she had seen the raft buried in the sand toward the north shore. Forgetting about her feet, Alicia rushed out, with the child tagging behind her as usual. The raft was there, but not the men. Not even a trace of them.

  “Tirsa, do you think they are dead?”

  “Yes.”

  Alicia lay down on the sand as if she had decided to stay there forever. More than a widow’s sorrow, she felt the spite of an abandoned bride. A painful kind of anger and unreasonable jealousy consumed her. It was the sorrowful rancor of a woman whose lover leaves her for another woman, or of a man betrayed by his friends. There was no letup in her anxiety, like a woman demanding of her lover to come back, or like a man expecting a well-deserved apology. To leave and abandon her had been Ramón’s betrayal. If he ever returned, she would throw that in his face. What right had he of dying in such an absurd manner, so senselessly, and leaving her so desolate? If he ever returned, she would tell him: Didn’t you think of your children before taking such risks? If he returned—of course she would pardon him. She would embrace him, adore him, she would dry his feet with her hair. If he returned—perhaps he would return, surely he would. And Alicia lifted her head again to search the horizon.

  The rest of the world no longer existed for her. She did not see, hear, or understand; she did not touch the food prepared for her. She was not even aware of Ramoncito’s presence as he clambered upon her shoulders, pulled her by the arms, and fluttered around her, constantly talking to her.

  “Mom, look at this conch. Mom, it hurts here. Mom? Can I tell you a story? Mom, I saw Daddy a while ago. Could I make a necklace for you, Mom, with this shell?”

  Alicia did not respond. She had drifted far away without wanting to return. The child caught a crab and began playing with it. It had fiery pop eyes, and a red shell with white dots. It would open and close its pincers and had hair on its legs and antennae on its head. In an attempt to escape, it ran backward, sideways. Ramoncito blocked its way with a log. He pricked it with a stick and harassed it with his foot.

  “Mom? Look at this sea monster, Mom.”

  The animal suffered, got angry, went mad; it was fascinating in its desperation. The child got his face closer to see it better.

  His screaming and his bloodied face pulled Alicia from the bottomless pit of her loneliness. The crab had bitten Ramoncito on the lip, parting it in two. She picked up the child and ran home with him in her arms.

  “Did you see, Mom? The sea monster got furious.”

  She hugged him, kissed his hair and his eyes, asked him for forgiveness.

  “I’m sorry, my son, I’m sorry. Forgive me, it was my fault, I am to blame, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”

  Back at home, Alicia cleaned the wound, took out her sewing basket from the trunk where she kept her valuables, and threaded a needle with the last strong, long blue strand left.

  “Where is Tirsa?” she asked Altagracia.

  “She’s not nearby, ma’am. Do you want me to go get her?”

  “There is no time. Alta, hold the child.”

  Alicia took a deep breath, controlling the tremor in her hands, and summoning a courage she did not have, she started to sew the wound, stitch by stitch, with the needle and the blue thread. When she finished, she lay the child on his bed and kept caressing his head until he fell asleep. Then she called the other women. The five came: Tirsa, Altagracia, Benita Pérez (Private Arnulfo Pérez’s widow), Francisca (who was Pedrito Carvajal’s girlfriend), and Rosalía (who belonged to all and to no one in particular). Alicia glanced at them—they were all disheveled, undernourished, dressed in rags—and she thought they looked ten years older than they actually were. I must look like this, too, she thought. Like a witch. If Ramón had returned then, he would have been scared to death. She asked the women to sit down and hear her out.

  “The men here have died, but we are still alive. The children are alive, and we have to feed them. It’s not going to be easy. We must work hard, so the mourning period is over. We must stop crying for our husbands because we have to take care of our children.”

  As a result of this meeting, the first one headed by Alicia, the wearing of skirts was forbidden.

  “No rags to get in the way,” she said. “And we must learn how to fish.”

  She distributed the pairs of pants left by the men. Cutting them above the knee, they cinched them around their smaller waists with hemp. All had been living on the isle for seven years but had not learned how to fish: to provide food had been solely a male endeavor. From that day, come early dawn, they were working by the ocean, setting traps among the corals, and toiling with nets, fishing poles, and hooks. They hurled sharp sticks at anything that moved underwater. Hours later they would lie on the beach, enervated from overexposure to the Clipperton sun, completely exhausted and demoralized after so much fruitless effort. The first week they went hungry; they caught only a couple of eels, an octopus, and a small ray.

  The discovery of an easier way to fish came to the children. One day when the women returned from the seaside empty-handed, they found the children sitting around a half-dozen sardines still alive and flapping.

  “Who gave those to you?”

  “Nobody. We took them away from the birds.”

  They saw how the children, g
olden and supple, disbanded and rushed to the beach. When a booby darted into the water and got a fish in its beak, the children zigzagged after it, prancing around, and then lunged forward to grab the bird and shake it by the legs until it let go of its catch. The children came back bursting with pride, shiny fish in hand. The women laughed—it was cute to see them run, and funny to watch them shaking the ugly birds—and then tried to imitate the children but couldn’t, lacking their agility. Alicia and Francisca ran after one bird, got entangled with each other, and fell to the ground. The bird started to fly away. Alicia managed to stand up, lunged, and, still holding on to a few feathers, fell again. Lying down and with the children shouting and clapping around her, she understood what a minute before would have seemed inconceivable to her. She realized that, in spite of everything, she could still feel happy. She felt ashamed of herself on account of Ramón, got up quickly, and shook the sand off her hair. That night the women lit a bonfire by the seashore and roasted more fish than they could eat.

  In time, they perfected other practical ways of fishing. The most effective was to lie facedown at the dock with a sharp stick ready, and then wait until a big fish came around looking for shelter underneath. It was easy to mount a surprise harpoon attack through the broken deck boards. With this method they obtained sawfish, sea bass, tiger fish, and moonfish. Alicia regained her role as a schoolteacher, and the children and the rest of the women had to attend her classes daily. For paper and pencil, they wrote on the sand with sticks. Since all the books had been lost, the readers used were the accounting records of the guano company and some old newspaper clippings about the invasion of Veracruz. They conjugated verbs in English and in French, and learned religion, good manners, and civics.

  Long ago, Ramón had solved the lack of a calendar by carving lines on the veranda of their house. After his death, Alicia completely forgot to mark the days. Now she wanted to keep track, but she had no clear notion of how much time had elapsed. She thought it was about a month and Tirsa believed it was only twenty-five days. So they compromised, and marked twenty-eight lines.

  “I have no idea what day is today in the rest of the world,” Alicia declared, “but here it is Tuesday, June 24, 1915.”

  Between teaching, taking care of the children, and the intense, indispensable survival activities, they managed one day at a time, without the leisure of wondering about the days gone by or the days to come. In that way, without realizing it, they overcame the nightmare in which they were living and made it bearable.

  All that was during the day. But when night fell, their fears and sorrows came back to overwhelm them. The children were so frightened that they clung to the women and would not fall asleep unless cuddled in their arms. In spite of being so tired, the women could not sleep either. In the dark, memories weighed so heavily that the past became present, and the dead returned, first one and then another, until they filled the house, and those still alive had to nestle in the corners to make room for them.

  The moans of the flagellants were heard again, and the cries of Irra’s young sons, struck down by scurvy. Jesús Neri would appear, bitten by sharks, together with Juana, his wife, smelling horrible. Some of the visits were pleasant, like those of Ramón and Cardona, who would talk about their own death. Their voices came out of the dark as in the old happy times when they gathered at dusk.

  “Ramón, I say there is no ship.”

  “You don’t see it, Secundino, but it’s there, all lit and silvery, waiting for us.”

  “It’s not a ship, Ramón, it’s a manta ray, the one that killed us.”

  “It was not a manta ray, Secundino. It was sharks.”

  During the day Alicia understood and accepted Ramón’s death. But come night she allowed herself to be confused by these apparitions, and she would often sit looking at the sea in the moonlight and awaiting his return. Not even Tirsa, the strong one, who did not know about poetry or believe in the afterlife, was able to escape this collective delusion where the living and the dead coexisted.

  “Secundino came last night to console me,” she told Alicia once.

  “And what did he say?”

  “Evil does not last forever, and neither do we.”

  “He’s right.”

  The souls of Pedrito Carvajal, Arnulfo Pérez, Faustino Almazán, and the other soldiers would come in at midnight through the holes in the roof, and, after extending a gray serape on the floor, they played cards, drank pulque, and filled the house with their loud shouts.

  “You can kiss your money good-bye, I have the king and the jack.”

  “Then you can shove them you know where, because here comes the ace.”

  Besides those who had died, there were the private ghosts. These had come from everybody’s hometown or were inherited from loved ones. The women started talking about them in order to pass the time, to recall their lost childhood fears. But the darkness of night in Clipperton was so desolate that it naturally evoked all sorts of phantoms. Alicia summoned the dead dwarfs that people called chaneques; an image of Our Lady of Sorrows pierced by seven daggers; and the legendary Ensign Nun, whom Death did not carry away in a horse carriage, like in Orizaba, but in the ship of the Flying Dutchman. Tirsa dragged in all the specters Cardona had left with her, brought to Clipperton from the land of the Chamula Indians. The one that terrified them most was Yalambequet, a flying skeleton that made his way into people’s homes to steal their souls, announcing his presence by a thunderous clattering of bones that pierced the air.

  “There goes Yalambequet. May God have mercy on us,” the women and the children soon learned to say when there was a storm, and even when there wasn’t one, just in case Yalambequet came unannounced.

  They saw La Llorona, beautiful and phosphorescent, her arms full of lilies and her naked body wrapped in a rebozo, always wandering, always howling about the loss of her children and sweeping her long hair against people. They saw Doña Carlota, Ramón’s mother, who appeared in a white nightgown and with her bonnet of black feathers, complaining about how undernourished and uncared for the children were. They frequently saw a silent, nice lady dressed in brown, whom nobody had met before. Clipperton itself had its own ghosts, like Ferdinand Magellan, the mariner who gave it its name, Isle of Passion, because of all the pain and sickness his crew had suffered when sailing close to it. Or like the pirate John Clipperton, who retired to his favorite refuge in order to relive orgies of old, keeping the women awake with the noise of wineglasses shattering on the floor, harlots’ laughter, and swords clashing.

  The ocean was dotted with ghost ships. The Flying Dutchman’s was joined by a black schooner with her sails forming a cross, and another one that was just drifting, enveloped in flames. It was common belief that Arnaud and Cardona had been deceived by the Marie Celeste, the infernal ship that attracted death and ill fate the way a magnet attracts iron.

  Supernatural incidents were on the increase in quantity and quality; they ceased being individual events and turned into collective experiences. Night after night when the temperature lowered, a throng of ghosts formed at the southern rock to begin the pilgrimage around the isle, carrying lighted torches, praying, dragging their chains, and leaving behind letters and messages for the living. They were the souls of all those who had died in connection with Clipperton, from those who had been condemned and marooned by the pirates to the Dutch sailor who drowned on his way to Acapulco. At first, the women ran home, bolted their doors, and covered their heads with their arms, in order not to see the river of lights or hear the thump-thump of their footsteps. But later they dared kneel on their balconies, waiting for the procession to pass by. The next morning they went out early to pick up the messages from the other world, and if these contained any orders or wishes, they would fulfill them faithfully. It did not take very long for the living to join the nightly wanderings of the spirits. Against Alicia and Tirsa’s wishes, Francisca, Benita, Rosalía, and sometimes Altagracia marched all night behind the dead, and the next m
orning, bedraggled, they also looked like ghosts and had no energy to deal with their daily chores.

  The spirits became capricious and demanding. Their orders took up all the time of those still living. They asked for stone altars, ceremonies, offers of food, and even goods impossible to obtain on the isle, like cigarettes and bunches of the fire-red cempaxuchitl flowers, which feed the insatiable hunger that tortures the dead in their tombs. The isle looked like a primitive holy land. Everywhere there were stone altars surrounded by plates of food, yellowed photos of the deceased, and a few remaining personal possessions: a straw hat, a sandal, a razor, a handkerchief, an image of the Virgin.

  One night Tirsa and Alicia stayed home with all the children while the other women marched in the procession. Tirsa told Alicia that she had discovered Benita and Francisca flagellating themselves and wearing hair shirts and tight pieces of old rope around their thighs.

  “Things cannot go on like this,” warned Alicia, “or we are going to end up burying each other alive.”

  Alicia and Tirsa agreed to take drastic measures for all, beginning with themselves. The only way to survive was to stop this delirium. They bid farewell forever to the souls of Ramón and Secundino, explained the dangers of the situation, and wrote five commandments. They swore to enforce them until common sense prevailed and things returned to normal, for which they might have to impose penalties on those who would not comply. With a knife, they carved these commandments in big letters on the wall, and when the others returned at dawn, they were surprised by the following pentalogue:

  First: From now on it is absolutely prohibited to pray, to build altars, and to perform religious sacrifices.

  Second: Only what we see and the people we can touch are real. All others are hereby banished from Clipperton forever. It is forbidden to deal with the dead.

  Third: No one is allowed to go out of the house at night, unless it is for a short task and after obtaining permission. The hours of the night are for resting, and for protecting the children and keeping them company.