Isle of Passion

by Laura Restrepo

  He had finally secured governmental support and help from the navy, had received a commission, money for the trip and essential crew, and a set departure date. Perhaps he even had a bouquet of roses to give to his fiancée at the time of their meeting. “But fate,” Schultz recounts, “determined that upon my arrival at Salina Cruz, I found the Corrigan III aground at the dock.”

  Since it was impossible to repair the Corrigan III, the only available ship, the trip was called off, and the poor German fellow had to start all over again. For two more years he continued in his efforts, to no avail, and in January 1917 he traveled again to Veracruz to visit the only man who had ever listened to him. This time, however, even Rodríguez Malpica discouraged him.

  “My advice, Mr. Schultz, is that you face reality. You need to look at things with more pessimism. I regret having to tell you this, because I consider you my friend. But you must realize that all of them must have died by now. Your Altagracia Quiroz, and all the others, are dead.”

  “I don’t agree, my friend. I can assure you that woman is alive and is going to marry me. Someday. Besides, I am certain that day is not far off. And you, who have always been so kind to me, you are going to be my best man.”

  Clipperton, 1915–1916

  WITH A RAG ATTACHED to the end of a stick (brooms had disappeared long before) Alicia was trying to sweep the sand out of the house. This chore, which she had done every day for seven years, was an obsession with her still, now that they were living in rubble. The effort exhausted her, and she had to sit down to rest. In the past, each time she was pregnant she had been full of joy and bursting with energy. But not this time. Malnourishment had greatly affected her. She felt old and dispirited, and her disposition had turned sour. She was tormented by the thought of her body having to compete with her own offspring for the scant nutrition she was receiving. It was obvious that the baby resented the lack of food even more than she did, since the size of her belly after five months of pregnancy had not reached the volume of her previous ones at three months.

  Tirsa Rendón was not doing much better. Her pregnancy had started a month later, but she was also looking wasted. Tirsa, the brave one, the strong one, the one who managed to collect, all by herself, three-fourths of all the food they ate, had become quite a different Tirsa: distant and listless, covering up her infinite fatigue with an indifferent exterior.

  Alicia got up to finish her chore. Every time she swept a room, the children would come running in and bring the sand back.

  “I tire myself less if I sweep again than if I scold them,” she would explain.

  She went into the small room next to her bedroom. Instead of a stained-glass window, there was now a big gaping hole that allowed the wind in. Instead of the wicker chair, which the hurricane had carried away, there was a wooden box, and she sat on it. She opened the trunk where she kept her most precious possessions. She took out Ramón’s gala uniform, his woolen jacket with the double line of buttons, epaulets and chevron still golden; his military hat, flattened sideways, with its braid unstitched; his sword; his black boots. She took out her wedding gown, with its twenty yards of lace, and a dozen tablecloths and bedsheets, among them the wedding-night saintly sheet. Two little sailor suits that had belonged to her older children but could still fit the younger ones. Some clothes she had bought (but never got to wear) on her one and only trip to the Mexican capital. Carefully wrapped in tissue paper, there was a bar of Ivory soap, already half used. She took it out, smelled it, and wrapped it again. There was a silver frame, with its glass missing, from which her father smiled at her. He was young and wore a white suit. She untied the silk ribbon around a huge wad of bills and counted them: there were four thousand two hundred pesos, all the money she and Ramón had saved. She took out his hairbrush, the one with the silver handle, let her hair down, and brushed it for the first time in months. It was coming out in handfuls, and she rolled a ball with the hair left entangled in the bristles.

  “When Tirsa comes,” she said to herself, “I am going to tell her that tomorrow we’ll get our hair cut. This long hair is of no use to us; on the contrary, it’s sapping away our babies’ calcium and iron.”

  She opened her jewelry case. In it she saw her ring and the diamond earrings, a sapphire brooch, several gold hoops, chains, and several twigs of black coral that the children had gotten out of the sea to give to her. In the bottom she found what she was looking for: the gray pearl necklace that Ramón had sent her from Japan. She put it on, caressing it for a long time: she seemed to want the tips of her fingers to memorize even the tiniest irregularities in each pearl.

  She folded everything back in, arranging things inside the trunk, except for the sheets and the tablecloths. She needed them to cover herself at night, to use as towels after her bath, to make clothes for the children and diapers for the babies to come. She took off the crude tunic she was wearing, made out of real sailcloth, and wrapped herself in the saintly bedsheet like a sari. She closed the trunk tight and dragged it out to the veranda, making rest stops. When she managed to bring it to the edge, she gave it a big push. The trunk fell about five feet, sinking somewhat into the sand. She went down and spent the rest of the morning digging a hole around it.

  Ramoncito came to help her.

  “What are you doing, Mom?”

  “I am burying the trunk.”

  “What for?”

  “To protect what is inside.”

  “And what is inside?”

  “The clothes and the money I am going to need the day we are rescued.”

  “Are we going to be rescued?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I don’t want to leave. Do you?”

  “I do.”

  “Why? Is it better somewhere else?”

  “Much better. Perhaps.”

  “And why do you need clothes the day we are rescued?”

  “I don’t want to be pitied.”

  “And you also saved clothes for me?”

  “No, not for you. Your old clothes are too small for you.”

  “Then I am going to be pitied?”

  “No. I am going to buy you a new suit as soon as we land. And a pair of shoes.”

  “I don’t like to wear shoes.”

  “When you are there, you’ll like them.”

  “I don’t like it over there. I don’t want to go.”

  The rest of the women were still on the cliff side. Every day they clambered down the steep rock, competing with the waves in order to take away the ocean’s bounty of oysters, squid, and crayfish. Tirsa, the most skilled at this task, could not do it anymore and limited herself to offering instructions from higher up. Alicia heard their voices.

  “They are coming,” she told Ramón. “Let’s hurry and finish burying this. They’re coming back early. They must have made a good catch.”

  They were coming at a gallop, bolting like colts, but carrying no food. They stopped in a circle around Alicia, without saying anything. She saw them panting, extremely pale, a wild look in their eyes.

  “What’s the matter, for God’s sake? Someone fell down?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “What happened? Why won’t you tell me?”

  “Because you will scold us if we tell you, ma’am.”

  “The children! Something happened to the children?”

  “No, nothing to do with the children. It’s because up on the cliff we saw—We saw Lucifer.”

  “Are we going to start that again?” barked Alicia, making no effort to conceal her fury.

  Tirsa, who had lagged behind, came then.

  “It’s true, Alicia. This time I saw him myself.”

  “Did you see the devil? You, too?” There was more sarcasm than surprise in Alicia’s voice.

  “Yes,” Tirsa said. “Me, too. I don’t know if it was the devil, but it was some horrible being.”

  Then, all started talking at once: he was tall, big, his red hair standing out, hairy all over, hairy only on his bac
k. His eyes spewed fire, no, they were human but he had a snout instead of a mouth. His face was that of a man. He walked on all fours. He didn’t walk on four, only on three. In any case, he was on two legs, but he did not walk like other people. His skin was dark, dried up, he had scales like an iguana. He smelled putrid, and before he appeared on top of the cliff they had perceived his stink, like a rotten corpse. He was naked, and his private parts were the devil’s, or at least very big, and anyway, he was truly male, no doubt about that.

  “The devil surely he’s not,” Alicia decreed. “So he is a man or a beast. Or he’s nothing, like so many other ghosts around here.”

  “He’s a beast,” some women said.

  “He’s a man,” said the others.

  “Could he be a shipwrecked sailor who got here?” Alicia asked.

  “Well, if he was shipwrecked,” Tirsa answered, “he must have lived at the bottom of the sea for years.”

  They decided that a few women, armed with sticks and headed by Tirsa, would go around the isle. They would go to places they had not been since they had set essential perimeters of action for themselves.

  “We’d better not go today. It’s already late and darkness will soon close in on us,” Benita pleaded.

  “Yes,” agreed Tirsa, “we’d better do it tomorrow when it’s light.”

  “Better never,” Alicia said. “Let’s not look for him, but wait and see if he appears. There is no hurry, since he has caused no harm so far.”

  The women had a restless though quiet night. At dawn Alicia summoned all to the beach. When they arrived, they saw in Tirsa’s hands two kitchen knives, which she was sharpening on a stone.

  “Are we going to hunt that demon we saw?” they asked.

  “No. We aren’t hunting any demons. We are going to cut our hair,” Alicia announced, “because it’s interfering with our tasks. Besides, we cannot take care of it anymore, and, unkempt like this, our manes look frightful. We have all discussed this several times, it was decided long ago, and we’re finally doing it. Who will be the first volunteer?”

  Rosalía was first, then Benita and Francisca. Alicia and Tirsa would grab the long tresses and shear them just below the ears, throwing the cuttings on a single pile that started to look like a sleeping hairy animal. Then Alicia and Tirsa cut each other’s manes. Someone brought the broken mirror; they looked at their short haircuts, and they all laughed.

  “Let me see how you look,” Francisca said to Benita. “I bet you will not get any beaux with your hair like that.”

  “And whom did you have in mind for me? The cliff monster?”

  “I’ll wait for this child to grow up and marry me,” Rosalía said, lifting Ramoncito up in her arms and smacking kisses on his face. “And by then, my hair will be long again.”

  “We are already shorn,” Alicia said. “All but you, Alta.”

  “Not me, ma’am, I’m not cutting it.”

  “Come on, you’re not eating enough for you and your hair.”

  “No, ma’am, I can’t . . . because my German friend likes it.”

  “Let it be, then. This girl is really in love.”

  The little girls came running with their porcelain doll all battered and ragged.

  “Alta! Dear Alta! Make a real wig for the doll,” they begged her, “she is tired of having no hair.”

  “No hair, no hands, and only one eye. The poor thing is hopeless,” Alta said while choosing a good chunk of hair for the wig.

  That afternoon Benita separated from the group to go salt the fish. She came back breathless, her face all flushed.

  “The monster appeared, ma’am,” she told Alicia. “He’s—It’s Victoriano Alvarez.”

  “What do you mean? Victoriano Alvarez died months ago.”

  “No, ma’am, he didn’t die.”

  “Of course he did. Scurvy did him in!”

  “No, it didn’t kill him. He’s disfigured, but he didn’t die.”

  “It must be another apparition. Did you touch him?”

  “He touched me. He really did touch me.”

  Benita said that she was cutting the fish in fillets and separating the bones when she smelled a strong, unpleasant odor. She thought of the fetid lagoon, or that maybe there was still an unburied corpse. The monster then came up behind her without making any noise. When she realized it, she jumped up and screamed, and he told her not to be frightened, that he was Victoriano.

  “Victoriano Alvarez? Are you dead?” Benita asked him, almost in a whisper.

  “I almost died, but I came back to life all by myself.”

  She looked very carefully at the ghost who was facing her and recognized in him a remote resemblance to the lighthouse keeper, to the big and strong soldier of old. His legs were now bent and full of boils. In order to stand up he needed to support himself on a stick. His skin was spotty and his thin mat of flaming red, spiky hair continued in hard corkscrew tufts all down his back. He had toadlike eyes, and his gums had shrunk. He had no teeth.

  “What happened to you that made you so ugly, Victoriano?”

  “Hunger and disease did it.”

  He said he lay dying in his hammock for many days in the lighthouse lair, and when his soul left him, the crabs invaded his den. When he woke up, he was able to catch and eat them by simply reaching out, and that had saved his life because he was so weak he could not even get up. When he was very thirsty, he dragged himself across the floor and lay faceup in the rain. As time passed and there were no signs of other human beings, he thought they had all died and he was the only survivor. He recuperated some and began hunting and eating boobies. They were raw, slimy, and reeking of iodine. As he could not get to his feet, he lay there, dead still, waiting for hours at a time until a bird got close enough to be hit. It took him quite a while to be able to stand up. Then, leaning on a stick, he would take a step, two steps, and fall. He needed to wriggle like a snake in order to reach the hammock and rest, to catch his breath before trying again. Days and nights went by, and he was finally able to wade on the beach and harpoon fish, hurling his regulation bayonet. He began to notice signs that he was not alone, to suspect that there were other survivors, and in his search for them he ventured a bit farther each time. He also said that the pain in his legs tormented him and that walking was torture. Two weeks before, he had discovered the other survivors, the women, and he spied on them day and night without being seen. He found out that the rest of the men had died: he knew that he was the last man on Clipperton Island.

  “Why didn’t you ask for help?” Benita asked him.

  “When I did, you all tried to kill me.”

  Victoriano told about the beating he had suffered the day Irra’s family was laid down.

  “Those who beat you up are all dead,” the woman said. “Come home with me. Mrs. Arnaud and the others will welcome you.”

  The man accepted, but on the way he drew a knife and pressed it against her neck.

  “‘First I need to have a woman, so lie down,’” Victoriano demanded, Benita said.

  “Oh, my God! And what did you do?” Alicia asked, terrified.

  “Lie down, ma’am, what else could I do?” answered Benita, without offering any explanation. “He’s here now, around the corner, waiting for permission to come in.”

  Alicia sent for him. First they perceived the stink of someone who, though reprieved at the last moment, still had the smell of death. When he crossed the threshold, the women found themselves face to face with the cliff monster. It was all true: scurvy, arthritis, and rickets had turned Victoriano Alvarez into a fright. Yet they were glad to see him, and after a while they got used to the way he looked. He was in a sorry state, but it was good to have a man around.

  “You’re in bad shape, but you are alive, Victoriano,” Alicia said to him.

  “But not thanks to you.”

  “We are not alive thanks to you either. But this is no time for recriminations. We can help you, and you can help us. Provided you behave. Yo
u abused Benita, and that was evil. If you want to live with us, you cannot do that again, ever.”

  “I needed to be with a woman, after so much loneliness.”

  “Next time, you have to ask her whether she also wants to be with you.”

  “And if she doesn’t want to?”

  “Then you have to do without, as we do.”

  They brought him food, and he spoke again of his struggle for survival.

  “In the end, we are the only ones left, you and us,” Alicia said. “It’s not so strange, women and blacks are the most resilient races on the planet.”

  “And you have turned black.”

  “Why, yes, that’s true, we’re dark like you now. The sun made us all look alike.”

  “The sun and the suffering, ma’am, have toughened our skin.”

  “If suffering darkens people, Victoriano, our souls must be coal black.”

  As he bid farewell to return to the lighthouse, they brought him one of the bedsheets, a spoon, and a few other utensils he had asked them to lend him. They saw little of him during the following days. They knew sometimes that he was around because they could perceive his deathly stench, and because they learned to recognize the rattling of his bones and his limping steps. Alicia and Tirsa suspected that the purpose of his visits was to meet furtively with Benita. Once in a while he came by the house, bringing seafood or fish. The women would feed him, and he would sit around to ruminate the food in his misshapen mouth, without saying a word. They gave him any available remedies and some cod liver oil that they had extracted themselves. Rubbed in well, this warmed his body and offered some relief for his rheumatism. They made a paste out of ground mother-of-pearl to treat his old scars, which he complained still itched and burned.

  Late one night they realized that Benita had not returned home. They searched around calling her, but she did not respond. They thought she probably was in the lighthouse lair and went for her. Victoriano was at the door, blocking their entrance.