Isle of Passion
Page 22
Fourth: Nobody can scare a child, or say to a child things that are not true.
Fifth: She who violates any of these laws, in word or deed, will be thrown out of her house, separated from her children, and condemned to live in isolation.
Alicia and Tirsa went all around the isle toppling altars and burning idols and fetishes. Alicia’s moral authority and her imposing personality, Tirsa’s courage and physical strength, plus the unwavering alliance between the two, ensured their leaving behind these ominous times in which the dead invaded Clipperton and made slaves out of the living.
In spite of heading the struggle against the threat of the incorporeal, Alicia began to have strange experiences, to feel inexplicable presences. She felt she was weakening, and that something inside her was depriving her of energy, something that hoarded the food she ate, that sucked the liquid with which she calmed her thirst. Someone who took away the air she breathed and robbed her heart of blood. She seemed to have a strength inside of her, smaller but more powerful, which existed and thrived at the expense of her own stamina, as her body, already ravished by malnutrition and fatigue, became weaker.
Two months after her husband was swallowed by the ocean, Alicia realized the nature of her problem. It was simple and obvious, and if she had not understood before, it was just because of her panic over accepting it. She called Tirsa.
“I am pregnant,” she told her.
“This is incredible,” Tirsa responded. “I didn’t want to tell you because I wasn’t sure, but I think I’m pregnant, too.”
That night, hiding in her kitchen, Alicia cried all that she had not been able to cry when Ramón died. Violating her own commandment, she talked to him again, which she had not done for a long time.
“I called you many times, and I begged you to come back,” she told him, “but not in this way. I needed your company and your protection, and look at what you are sending me instead of you: another baby.”
Altagracia realized what the situation was and came to offer her consolation.
“Don’t worry, ma’am, someone will soon come for me, and I’ll take you with me, and all the others also,” she told her.
“And who is going to come for you?”
“It’s a secret.”
“Don’t come to me with stories of the dead. It’s forbidden.”
“He’s not dead, he’s alive.”
“Alive? Tell me who.”
“The German fellow.”
“Schultz?”
“The same. He promised me he would come for me.”
“Stop dreaming, my child. You’re in worse shape than the ones who believe in ghosts.”
“He is going to come. He promised me.”
“He promised that to you because he was crazy.”
“He was not crazy. He was just too lonesome. I cured him.”
“Enough! All that you would need is to make an altar to your blond saint and pray to him for a miracle!”
“It’s not a miracle, ma’am. It’s that he loves me.”
“It’s over a year since he left, and he has not come.”
“But he must be looking for me, I know.”
“He was probably locked up in a nuthouse.”
“Then he will escape and come for me.”
“All right, you can believe anything you want. You might be right. You better keep on believing in Schultz’s love, since you are lucky he’s alive. Hold on to your memories so that despair does not dry you up, as it has done to us.”
Mexico City, Today
THERE ARE CONFLICTING DETAILS regarding the deaths of Captain Ramón Arnaud and Lieutenant Secundino Cardona.
The first is the exact date: the day, the month, the year they occurred.
The second has to do with the kind of fish that overturned their raft, or that killed them when they fell in the water. Did it exist, really? If it existed, was it a manta ray? Or was it sharks?
The third is more complex, and it refers to the vessel that appeared that day on the horizon, the one they were trying to intercept. Was it a real ship? Was it, on the contrary, a mirage produced by a man’s anguish, or a product of the Clipperton survivors’ collective wish?
The four direct testimonies that I found about this event are contradictory, and do not dispel our doubts. Quite the opposite.
First: Letter of the nurse María Noriega, Lieutenant Cardona’s legal wife, dated July 1940, in which she claims her widow’s pension from the Mexican government.
DIVISION GENERAL LÁZARO CÁRDENAS
NATIONAL PALACE
BY HAND
I am the widow of Infantry Lieutenant Secundino Angel Cardona, who under orders of the Secretary of Defense and of the Navy, with a detail of the Thirteenth Infantry Battalion commanded by Captain Ramón Arnaud, left the port of Acapulco on board the Mexican steamship Corrigan II.
My deceased husband informed me before parting that his stay on Clipperton Island, where they were headed, would last only a year; but after the year was over, he never returned, leaving me and my children without economic support, and restlessly waiting for him while locking in my heart the joy of ever seeing him again.
But fate or misfortune decreed to keep us apart forever. At dawn, on May 4th, 1915, they saw a sailing ship headed from east to west, to the northeast of the isle, and Captain Arnaud and my husband, in the hope of being rescued, started out in an improvised rowboat to follow the ship, which did not meet with success, and they perished at sea.
The persons who had stayed on the isle feverishly followed the fugitive ship, which became more and more distant, and observed anxiously and with despair the frantic efforts of the little boat, which was being left behind without managing to be seen. The ship finally disappeared on the horizon; only the boat could be seen, advancing with difficulty, and then disappearing behind some clouds. When these dissipated, the boat had vanished, swallowed by the ocean [ . . . ].
Yours truly,
María Noriega, Cardona’s widow
Second: Logbook of Captain H. P. Perril, of the gunboat Yorktown, of the U.S. Navy, dated Wednesday, 17 July 1917. Captain Perril heard the story of the events that day from an eyewitness.
Captain Arnaud considered himself responsible for the desperate situation in which the people on the isle found themselves and worried so much about it that his mind lost its balance.
One day, imagining that he saw a ship at a short distance from shore, he forced his men to launch a boat and row out to sea to intercept it in order to seek help. The men refused to give in to the whim of their captain, well aware that the ship existed only in his imagination. Finally they obeyed his command and started out in the boat against heavy seas.
Shortly after, through her binoculars, Mrs. Arnaud saw the boat capsize and the men disappear in a sea full of sharks.
Third: Report filed in 1982 by Ramón Arnaud Rovira, Captain Arnaud’s eldest son, who was about six or seven years old at the moment of his father’s death.
One day at the end of May 1915, [ . . . ] my younger sister Alicia came in running and announced, addressing my father, “Dad, a ship!” [ . . . ] In fact, a small shape was seen approaching from the northwest. We all ran to the dock. [ . . . ] About one hour after we saw it, it was in front of us, its steel-gray gleams indicating its position in full sunlight.
In spite of all our signals and shouts, the vessel seemed not to be stopping, and continued on its course, ignoring us, [ . . . ]
“The ship is leaving! Why? How could this be? O Lord, have pity on us! Don’t abandon us!” my disconsolate mother was shouting. [ . . . ]
The threatening tide was beginning to rise. By then the sea was already dangerous and our boat was not in very good condition. A strong wind was already blowing. The boat struggled against the thrust of the waves. In the meantime, the ship continued on its course. [ . . . ]
Suddenly, a big thing made them capsize. It was a gigantic sea animal, I suppose it was a manta ray that made the canoe capsize!”*
Captain Arnaud is already at the edge of insanity. . . .
It was October 5 of that fateful year of 1916.
The sun was already out, promising a clear, peaceful day, one of those days when the sun dazzles [ . . . ]. The watchman at the lighthouse called out that there seemed to be the silhouette of a steamship looming on the horizon.
Everybody went up the tower in the avid hope of confirming the news.
It was true. This was no mirage or delusion. There was a ship in the distance. It might be headed toward the isle or it could just hold its course, but it was there.
Arnaud thought that he was losing his mind; this was the opportunity he had been waiting for, the only opportunity to liberate his people. Afraid that the ship would pass them by, he decided to start out and try to intercept it. They boarded the only boat they had and started out rowing to the limit of their physical strength. He was carrying a long pole with a white flag to make signals.
Nervousness, desperation, hope: all contributed to give the men enough energy to row.
From the tower on the cliff, Alicia, her children, and the rest of the women saw the boat grow distant and silently prayed for success.
“Let them be seen, O Lord! Let them be seen! [ . . . ]
Impossible.
It was written.
That day, October 5, 1916, was a fatal day. [ . . . ]
Those who were watching saw with anguish and desperation that the boat had stopped and that there was a struggle on board.
A big black mass had taken hold of the boat, and the men were furiously trying to hit it with their oars.
It was a manta ray!
It all happened in a matter of seconds. The sea monster was more powerful than the weak men and their little boat. It quickly overturned the tiny craft and it sank. The men never came back to the surface. [ . . . ]
The sea was calm as if nothing had happened. The ship’s silhouette, indifferent, continued on its course.*
Acapulco, Today
I COME TO ACAPULCO to find out what happened to Gustav Schultz after he left Clipperton on the gunboat Cleveland, of the U.S. Navy. In a newspaper of 1935, I found the first trace, the thread that would lead me to unravel the story: the German fellow never returned to his native country.
After Captain Arnaud threw him out of the isle, Schultz stayed for the rest of his days, which were many, in the Mexican port of Acapulco. What tied him to a country that, besides being foreign to him, was being torn asunder at the moment by a violent revolution? There was only one thing: a deep, sworn commitment. The one that he had screamed at the Clipperton shore, a few minutes before his departure, to the woman he loved, whom he was being forced to leave behind against his will. With his blond locks prey to the winds and a stormy expression in his madman’s eyes, he had promised Altagracia Quiroz that he would not rest until he could rescue her, that he would marry her and make her happy. And if there was a reason he had remained in Mexico, it was to fulfill his impossible promise.
I have been able to find the address in Acapulco of one of the houses in which he lived. It’s an adobe structure on a large piece of land in the colonial district of La Pocita. I talk to the old local neighbors, those who had heard about him and still remember his name. I ask them if he was insane when he arrived or if he was ever crazy.
“No, not crazy, never,” they answer me. “Mr. Schultz was a great man here in Acapulco. A respected and beloved person, who gave us drinking water here in our port. We owe our first aqueduct to him. Did you already visit the Water House? It is a tourist attraction, but it was his home for years. At first he lived here in this house, but after he brought the water, he moved over there.”
In the Water House one can still see the tanks, the pumps, and the hydraulic equipment that Gustav Schultz brought, installing them himself and making it all work, certainly applying the same meticulous care that he had taken with the Decauville train tracks in Clipperton.
A few years later he became a Mexican citizen and accepted a public office which he served with honesty and Teutonic perseverence: that of the port captain.
“Had he any children?” I ask people.
They say no, but he adopted a newborn Mexican baby from an orphanage, and gave him both his first and family names.
So now I’m looking for Gustavo Schultz, his adoptive son, at the place I am told he works. He is the owner of a poultry business in the Acapulco Central Food Market. The passageways have been recently washed with buckets of water mixed with a disinfectant. I get lost in a labyrinth crowded with all sorts of colors and smells. I pass by the striking piñatas in the shape of stars, ships, bulls. I pass by the mangoes and the custard apples; the fifty-eight varieties of chiles; the images of baby Jesus on a throne, donning crown and mantle; the kiosks of the clothes menders waiting for customers in front of antique sewing machines. I circulate among the ears of corn, the sweet potatoes, and the prickly pears; and in between the tables with benches where one can eat tacos, flautas, and burritos prepared by sweaty fast cooks. I see the huitlacoche and the incredible variety of mushrooms; someone offers me colorfully striped serapes, neck scarves, and hand-embroidered huipiles. They want me to buy paper cutouts, candy skulls, and cempaxuchitl flowers for the dead. Pumpkin flowers to make soup, and Jamaica flowers for agua fresca. I cross through the meat kiosks shouldering past legs of beef and heads of lamb. Until I finally reach the chickens.
They hang by the legs, all in a tight row, ugly and featherless, a hostile look in their dead eyes. There are thousands of chickens in more than two hundred kiosks, with at least one vendor in each kiosk. I go one by one, asking, “Are you Gustavo Schultz, or do you know him?”
“He had a business here, but he died about three years ago. His son, who has the same name, lives in Chilpancingo, state of Guerrero.”
Gustav Schultz, the German fellow, Gustavo Schultz, his son, Gustavo Shultz, his grandson. I search in the Chilpancingo phone book, make a long-distance call, and talk with the last Schultz, the only one still alive. His voice sounds young, and he tells me he’s in politics. He remembers his grandfather as very blond, with a light complexion and bushy eyebrows. He says that neither he nor his father, who are both dark-haired, resembles him physically because they had no blood connection. He confessed not to know any details of the Clipperton drama because the family does not like to recall such a painful past.
He does not have more information, he acknowledges, but in order not to disappoint me, he reads on the phone from a clipping he has kept for years. It is an interview of his grandfather by the journalist Hernán Rosales, published in the Mexico City newspaper El Universal on May 14, 1935. In it Schultz tells more about other people than about himself. His grandson reads with some difficulty because, as he explains, the clipping is now yellowed and faded. On the phone I get the story of the first Gustav Schultz, succinctly told by himself.
He says that in 1904, when he was twenty-four, he embarked in San Francisco, without much thought, for a place he had never heard of, Clipperton Island. He was going there to work for an English phosphate company. When he arrived, the uninhabited and barren isle filled him with melancholy: “I was living there like Robinson Crusoe.” Eager to see and touch something green and alive, he sailed from Clipperton to the island of Socorro in the Revillagigedo Archipelago to bring back thirteen young and tender coconut palms and forty tons of topsoil in which to plant them. As man cannot subsist on coconuts alone, he also imported some company for himself: a young woman, Daría Pinzón, and her only daughter, Jesusa Lacursa.
On his return to Clipperton, he shared his life with that woman, watched the palm trees he planted grow, and made his employees work like slaves. He worked like a beast of burden himself. “I fell in love with my life in that desert seascape,” he says. About his conflicts with Ramón Arnaud and his violent and crazy days, Gustav Schul
tz chose to keep silent. About the appearance of Altagracia Quiroz in his life, he confesses: “Her presence relieved my great sadness.”
He refers to the arrival of Captain Williams at Clipperton, and confirms that he agreed to travel to Mexico aboard the Cleveland out of his own free will, not forced to do so by anyone. Once on the continent, it seems he recovered his sanity, if it is true that he had ever lost it, and he dedicated himself to try to rescue Altagracia. In the midst of the revolution that was rocking the country, she was merely a blade of grass lost in the storm, like so many other Mexicans. To reach Clipperton was not easy; a trip could not be improvised on a small vessel. He had to obtain the collaboration of a government that would be willing to make a large vessel available for the sole purpose of rescuing the remaining survivors. It was wartime, when thousands of people were dying, and a rescue mission for a few soldiers left in an enemy camp was certainly not among the priorities of the Mexican government.
But Gustav Schultz did not forget his promise. On the contrary, his steadfast determination became an obsession. He traveled regularly to various places with the purpose of making inquiries about Altagracia Quiroz before the proper authorities and the rebels, those of the deposed administrations as well as the elected ones. In the interview he tells how he spent a year going from one government office to another, and from one department to the next, uselessly making his request over and over again to bureaucrats who would ask him to present it in writing, just to bury it in their archives, or who, insisting on protocol, would then shut their doors in his face for good. Convinced that he had tried all possibilities on the Pacific coast, in June 1915 he went to Veracruz, on the Atlantic side, to speak with a government official who was known to be a humanitarian, generous person. His name was Hilario Rodríguez Malpica. This kind man listened to the whole story, worried about the situation of those forsaken on the isle, and commissioned Schultz to go to Clipperton to rescue them. For days they contacted people high in government and some who were influential with the navy, until a plan was agreed upon. Gustav Schultz was to travel to Salina Cruz, a Pacific port, and there would board a ship, the Corrigan III, for the isle.