Isle of Passion

by Laura Restrepo

Alicia swore to God that it wasn’t true, saying she recognized that Cardona did indeed sing and dance like an angel, but that did not mean anything. Ramón was the only man in her life, she purred, cuddling next to him, soft and loving like a cat, and suddenly, if Ramón was still offended and indifferent, the kitten became a tigress. Her eyes shone with rage, and she practically spit her words through clenched teeth.

  “And what about you and that good-for-nothing Pinzón woman?”—she was referring to Schultz’s lover—“Why can’t you take your eyes off her bottom when she stops by the infirmary to meet with you alone, on the ridiculous pretext of asking you for a remedy for her headaches?”

  “It is no pretext, the poor woman suffers from terrible migraines, and besides, her ass does not interest me,” Ramón countered. He was playing kitten now, and Alicia was the one showing indifference.

  And in this way the perfect harmony they had achieved before their argument was crushed to smithereens, and their eternal love was scattered on the floor, their lives destroyed, riddled with discontent. Alicia ran to the bedroom to cry her eyes out, and Ramón locked himself up in his office. When they grew tired of ruminating in spite and of flagellating themselves with jealousy, when their anger came down like the foam of boiling milk after it is removed from the fire, they found some excuse to meet again, to embrace with the absolute happiness of reconciliation, and without more ado, without transitions or logical reasoning, order was restored, and their hurt feelings disappeared somewhere as if they had never existed, and everything returned to the way it was before.

  As a reminder of their tragic moments, there were Alicia’s swollen eyelids, which Ramón tended to by applying tea compresses. Life went on until another placid afternoon, a few weeks later, when a loose comment would again trigger a conjugal fight, copious like the rain, and thus fulfill its decisive and definite function of restoring their faded emotions and sparkling their dialogue, which was so endless that otherwise it would have to repeat itself like the piano roll of “White Kitten” in her Pianola.

  The effect of so much isolation was soon felt. The calendar became a useless object in the unchanging Clipperton time, and for Alicia the notion of dates had dissipated. Monday was the same as Thursday or Sunday, and there was no difference between September and October or November. At the beginning of December, however, she realized that for a long time she had not needed to wash the linen used for her menstrual flow, and when she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw that her waist was gone.

  News of the pregnancy made Ramón unreasonably anxious about the delay, already incomprehensible by then, in the arrival of the ship. December marked the fourth month since they had been forsaken on the isle, and there was no excuse for this. It was in blatant disagreement with any arrangement made. The rains had eroded the garden soil, and the shortage of greens and citrus fruit began to be felt. He was afraid they would all soon be suffering from a terrible disease, the one that attacked seamen and shipwrecked sailors, and about which he had informed himself in the medical books: scurvy. He did not want to cause panic needlessly, and he did not say a word about it, but while he spoke with anyone, he surreptitiously tried to take a look at their gums to see if they were blackened, which would be the first signal.

  But above all, Ramón was tormented by the idea that his wife could have complications at the time of delivery and that they might not be able to resolve them due to the isolation from the continent. In the delirium of his frequent sleepless nights, he obsessed about being marooned on the island and about having a wild creature born to them. The only things that assuaged his throbbing anguish were their sessions of lovemaking, which had not been interrupted, and the certainty, growing in him as he kept reading and rereading all the documents about Clipperton, that a fabulous treasure had been abandoned by the pirate somewhere on the atoll, which had to be, Arnaud concluded, in the lagoon or in the big rock to the south.

  In spite of these reassuring ideas, people noticed his lost serenity when he developed a nervous tic that curled his lips on the left side, which became progressively more obvious and frequent, and eventually accompanied by a quick blinking of his eye on the same side.

  “Stop making so many faces, things are not yet a matter of life and death,” Alicia kept telling him. “The stupid ship will come.”

  Finally while they were talking in the studio one afternoon, through the yellow, red, and violet stained-glass windows, they saw Cardona’s wife, Tirsa Rendón, coming by. She was dripping wet and screaming that a ship was approaching. They all ran to the dock, where they stood under bursts of rain, their palpitating hearts in their throats, and waited until the approaching blurred silhouette took shape among the raging waves.

  It was neither El Demócrata nor the Corrigan II, but the ship from the American guano company, coming for its annual visit to pick up the product. It brought exquisite gifts from Brander to Schultz, his successor in the post: bottles of French champagne, Amaretto di Saronno, boxes of dates, olive oil from Seville, jars of maraschino cherries, and canned Danish ham.

  But it also brought them news that dealt a heavy blow to their thin hopes: the Pacific Phosphate Company Ltd. was no longer much interested in Clipperton. They had found unexploited and abundant guano deposits on islands that were closer and presented a less risky approach. Therefore, they announced that they were cutting down the frequency of their trips to the atoll but were asking Schultz to stay there a few more months as holder of their concession, until the definite closing of the plant and his transfer to another one.

  From Schultz’s throat surged a long series of incomprehensible obscenities, and Ramón’s facial tic increased in frequency to two or three incidents per second.

  Clipperton Island, 1705

  THIS WAS NOT its name yet. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, people believed this island had no name because it did not deserve to have one. Only those well versed in maritime routes and cartography knew that Magellan had sailed close to it and given it the sonorous but desolate name of Isle of Passion.

  In 1705 the English corsair John Clipperton landed on it for the first time. Some say that his vessel, the Five Ports, did not fly the usual pirate’s black flag with skull and crossbones, but always proudly flew a vermilion flag with a winged wild boar. Whether the boar was alate or rampant, or both, nobody knows for sure.

  Miraculously, he managed to dodge the isle’s surrounding reefs, which had destroyed—and will destroy for centuries to come—so many other vessels. Some people say it was because the isle recognized the flag of the man who was to become its master and bowed down, allowing him safe passage. Others say that the explanation lies in the shape of his vessel, sleek and swift, narrow in the beam, and with low draft and freeboards.

  One fact is undisputed: the name of his vessel, the Five Ports, honored the ancient brotherhood of buccaneers to which he belonged: the Cinque Ports (Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover, and Sandwich, old bastions on England’s southern shores). The rebirth of piracy in America, now at the expense of the Spanish galleons, had also revived the confederation and its ilk—the Shore Brotherhood, or the Beggars of the Sea—in order to protect the Turtle Island corsairs.

  Captain John Clipperton sighted the atoll that today bears his name one good day while navigating through uncharted waters far from the common sailing routes. The story is told that he was looking for a place, a sandbank or rock out of the water, in order to abandon and punish with death a member of his crew considered a traitor because he had violated the oath of strict obedience. “Maroon!” was the unanimous demand of the Five Ports crew in punishment for his guilt, and marooned he would be: the law of the sea would be carried out.

  Clipperton, cruel and notorious for his drastic sanctions, spotted the silhouette of the atoll, which he had never explored, and gave out orders to approach it and to prepare the condemned man. It is rumored that showing a slave trader’s mercy and a murderer’s humor, Clipperton said a few sarcastic words of consolation to the
wretched man and handed him—as prescribed by maroon law—a bottle of drinking water and a gun with a single bullet.

  But in crossing over the reefs and looking closely at the coastline, Clipperton found much more than he was looking for. He discovered the ideal place, not to cast out a traitor but to find refuge for himself. It was the perfect hideout.

  Treatises on the pirate world indicate that a buccaneer feels no attachment to his ship. He can bare it of all wood carvings, of luxurious furnishings, of anything that increases weight and decreases speed, since what he needs is a swift and seaworthy vessel, efficient in the assault of his victims. A buccaneer is willing to get rid of his ship without any sentimentality, and to replace it any time he captures a better one.

  It’s not the same with his lair. On inhabited and regulated lands the pirate is merely a fugitive, a criminal who ends up losing his freedom and his life. So when he finds a piece of land belonging to no one, where he can establish the same dominion he enjoys on the high seas, he keeps it to himself, and loves it fiercely. He feels a very vital connection to his hiding place.

  Henri Keppel, a shrewd pirate hunter, knew what he was talking about when he said that the lawless men of the sea, just like spiders, are found in the nooks and crannies. And Clipperton Island was full of them: it was an isolated corner of the world providing the right protection for spiders and pirates.

  John Clipperton made a quick decision as soon as he saw the atoll: it would be his hideout. Remote and hostile, it was surrounded by sharp coral reefs like fangs that would make a breach in the hull of any other vessel that dared come close enough, while he and his men could camouflage their presence along its many bays.

  Nobody would find him there, nobody would even look for him there. So he established his shadowy domain and called it Clipperton Island. Not to give it his name, but to declare his act of possession. The island belonging to John Clipperton, buccaneer and rebel, solitary prowler with lots of raw courage, very few loves, and no faith. Perhaps he never learned that the place had already been named the Isle of Passion, or if he did, he probably thought it sounded too romantically Iberian and disregarded the fact.

  Another characteristic made this atoll the right place for him: its location. It is well documented that for years John Clipperton had centered his efforts on a desirable target: the Chinese fleet also known as the La Plata Fleet. Its galleons were loaded with three hundred tons of precious merchandise being transported from Manila to Acapulco. And then another three hundred tons on the return crossing from Acapulco to Manila, following the route Friar Andrés de Urdaneta had discovered, which, unbeknownst to him, passed within a few miles of the Isle of Passion.

  On their outbound voyage, the China Fleet carried damask, woven fabrics, muslin, stockings, and Spanish shawls, dishes of fine Ching dynasty porcelain, tea, cinnamon, clover, pepper, nutmeg, saffron, lacquer, and folding screens. On the return voyage—when the ocean currents brought the ships closer to the isle—they carried gold bars and silver and gold ornaments as well as coffee, cacao and vanilla beans, sugar, cochineal, tobacco, aniline blue, sisal, flannel, and straw hats. Sometimes there were kidnappable passengers—high officials, friars, noble ladies, military officers—whose ransom could be a negotiated from Turtle Island.

  To attack a Chinese nao was a dangerous adventure. For protection against corsair raids, each fleet was composed of four ships—two galleons and two tenders—all with dual capabilities as freighters or warships, armed to the teeth, including an assigned artilleryman for each copper cannon and an arsenal for the crew. To board such ships was an endeavor for suicides. Or for experts, like Captain John Clipperton.

  Holed up in his lookout, chewing American tobacco and hawking up bitter spittle, Clipperton would wait tensely for days and nights. When he smelled the right moment—it was said he could whiff the air and detect the presence of precious metals several leagues away—he rushed to intercept the convoy and board the ships.

  His island always welcomed him on his return from an assault, and he sometimes sought refuge on its black sand beaches, overwhelmed and physically wounded, his ship badly battered and his crew decimated. At other times, his return was accompanied by howls of victory, with the Five Ports lumbering in, overburdened by the weight of his booty. Once the cargo was unloaded, the orgy of apportioning the treasure floated down rivers of alcohol. Meticulously fair in this, Clipperton distributed the gold pieces equally among all his men, himself included, and reserved as the captain’s due only the best piece of gold jewelry in the lot. He used to favor heavy Baroque chalices encrusted with precious stones. More than for their value, he chose them to enhance his pleasure as he committed the sacrilege of using them to drink his favorite mixture of coconut milk and rum from the Antilles.

  Over their tatters eaten away by the surf and salt spray that also roughened their skins, these sea wolves from Clipperton donned the silk blousons and the damask jackets they had peeled off their victims. They wore too many periwigs and too much perfume, too much jewelry and lace, and thus bedecked, resembling Easter Sunday altars, they started their celebrations.

  Only rarely did they bring women from the continent, kidnapped from prisons, orphanages, or brothels. These were mostly beastly whores, covered with lice, who ministered to them without any tenderness, but after all the frolicking was over—by dawn the next day they had mellowed with homesickness—they gave off a tepid maternal warmth that lulled and consoled the men.

  Most often the feasts were for men only. They played a pistol game, first covering all windows and sealing any cracks in a room to create total darkness. A man would then sit in the center of the floor and place two pistols in front of him. The others would trample one another blindly, seeking a space to crouch in a protected corner. Someone gave the signal and the man in the middle took the pistols, crossed his arms, and shot. Not until the next light of day did they find out who had died.

  Enough victuals were laid out, and the men gobbled up pork, fowl, turtle. They drank until they burst, and in the nebulae of their savage, childish bouts with alcohol, they threw food and poured wine on one another, laughed, pulled each other’s ears, pinched and pricked with their daggers, vomited, sobbed, fell into pools of their own urine and slept there. The next day, Clipperton Island would see them wake up battered and foul-smelling, their throats dry, and walk around on the beaches, overcome by the lasting melancholy that usually follows such brutal excesses of merriment.

  Of all the loot they had hauled, there is now only the memory. Of all the gold that John Clipperton and his pirates took to their island hideout, nothing remains. Nobody left buried treasure, because to save money and increase one’s fortune is of no concern to men who are amazed each day to find themselves alive.

  None of them was patient enough or eager enough to accumulate wealth, least of all John Clipperton, a show-off, gambler, and spendthrift who prided himself on having wasted, coin by coin and without any regrets, an immense fortune.

  The inhabitants of Tortuga would attest to that, since one morning they saw him land his Five Ports loaded with gold ingots, hostages, and sacks of goods; they saw him negotiate everything that same day for fabulous sums of money; they saw him that evening strutting in the local taverns and bawdy houses, where he threw money away right and left, boasted of being a cardsharp, and bragged about money spent on reveling and on alms. And at dawn they saw him lying in a dark corner, in a happy drunken stupor, while a badly mutilated beggar removed from his purse the last few coins, final vestiges of his prodigious loot.

  Clipperton, 1908–1909

  THAT CHRISTMAS WAS a silent one in Clipperton. After dusk on New Year’s Eve, torrents seemed to break the sky open, and when the waters fell on the isle, the people, already taciturn, went early to bed and covered their heads in order to keep from being blinded by the glare of the relentless lightning flashes. At the Arnauds’ home the usual Friday guests had gathered, feasting on the delicacies and spirits Brander had sent them. But the
midnight toasts were laconic and the embraces tearful: the ship that was not coming and the feeling of abandonment weighed too heavily on their souls.

  The true celebration was on the second day of January, the day El Demócrata finally arrived with supplies, relief personnel, bags of topsoil for their green garden, letters from relatives, and news from Mexico. The forty-four adults and children who at that moment were the entire Clipperton population joined the captain, nineteen sailors, and six passengers of El Demócrata to eat, dance, and drink all night, gathered in an empty guano storehouse.

  Ramón, eager to have news from Mexico, pulled aside the ship’s captain, Diógenes Mayorga, and the man reeled off a long string of bureaucratic excuses for his delay in arriving at the isle. Then his expression acquired a pained, sad look.

  “Things in the country are turning ugly,” he said.

  He told how Don Porfirio Díaz—eighty years old and thirty years in power—was getting ready for his sixth reelection, and how his enemies were suddenly coming forth out of nowhere. They called themselves “anti-reelectionists” and the name of their leader was Madero. Francisco Madero.

  “This Madero is a short man with a goatee, the heir of one of the five largest fortunes in the country. The Porfirio followers call him “the loony man” because he is devoted to spiritualism and astrology. He believes himself to be a medium and speaks with spirits. What I am telling you is that he might be crazy, but he is still dangerous, because he has the Indians all excited with the slogan that we have had enough of Porfirio and his tyranny.”

  “And he talks to spirits?” asked Ramón in disbelief, his eyes round and wide open.

  “That’s what they say, Governor. That he communicates daily with his kid brother, Raúl is his name, a little angel that burned himself to death with a kerosene lamp. People who know say that little Raúl’s spirit has possessed his brother Francisco and that he dictates what Francisco is to do; that in spite of being an innocent soul, he knows a lot about politics; and that because he died with so much suffering, he must have become a visionary in his other life. They say that Madero does exactly whatever his dear brother’s spirit demands. And what do you think he’s asking for? Well, he wants his brother to give up drinking and smoking, to distribute his fortune among the poor, to cure the sick, to observe carnal abstinence. . . . And Francisco Madero is doing all that.”