Isle of Passion

by Laura Restrepo

  “Instead of a troublemaker, that Madero sounds more like a saint to me,” commented Arnaud. “How could a man like that cause any harm?”

  “well, so far so good. The trouble is that the spirit of the little dead one became revolutionary: the word is that he ordered his brother to devote himself to the campaign against Porfirio’s reelection. Madero, who does not dare to disobey the child because of his supernatural powers, followed his instructions and wrote an incendiary book that is selling like hotcakes.”

  Arnaud was listening in silence and the captain of El Demócrata continued without taking a breath, scrambling his words one on top of the other. He said that Madero’s book called for sabotaging the reelection the following year, and he was sure of this because he had read it himself. And that the book urged the founding of a party to oppose the president.

  “I assure you, Governor, that this damned party has many members already. The disgruntled, those with a chip on their shoulder, the ungrateful ones, all follow him. Francisco Madero has turned into the leader of those who believe that thirty years in power is enough, and that at eighty Don Porfirio is ready to wear the wooden suit rather than the presidential sash.”

  Distressed about the amazing news but unable to wholly believe it, Ramón left the celebration, which had just begun, and walked in darkness all the way to his office.

  On the way he met a group of his men, all huddled under the light of a candle to read the letters their relatives had sent.

  “What news did you get from home, soldier?”

  “Nothing but bad news, Captain. My mother is sick, and she is all alone now because my brothers decided to join the insurgents.”

  “And what about you, Corporal?”

  “About the same, sir. My uncle says the peons in the hacienda where he works also want to leave and join the rebels. And maybe he will also join them.”

  Arnaud locked himself up in his office and lighted the kerosene lamp. He wanted to read the newspapers and magazines that his superior, Colonel Avalos, had selected and sent on El Demócrata. He devoured every issue of El Imparcial, page by page, looking for clues of the discontent, for indicators of the national commotion, traces of the opponents of the “reelectionists” or of Madero and his little brother. He found not a word. Not even a hint of their existence. All the news was about the inauguration of another new bridge or another new segment of railroad track, or the receptions honoring this or that foreign ambassador, or about the decoration bestowed upon Don Porfirio by the Emperor of Japan.

  Arnaud had to double-check the dates to make sure he had not been sent newspapers from a year or two ago. No, they were all recent, not even two months old. However, it seemed to him he had read those exact words many times before. The only novelties he found, and he clipped them for his archives, were an extensive article about the influence of cold weather on the Russian character, another one on anthills, and, lastly, an article about botanical science in Manchuria.

  He walked back, with long strides, to the party in the storehouse, mixed with the people, played his mandolin with more zest than ever, and danced out of step as usual. When Alicia approached him to inquire why he was so euphoric, he surprised her with an answer that sounded rather like a harangue.

  “There is nothing going on in Mexico. Everything is fine and dandy. If Captain Mayorga says otherwise, then he must be the one who is raving, the one who is loony. That old Porfirio will not be toppled from his throne, not even with dynamite. And as long as he keeps his post, I will keep mine. The old fox might be very old, but he’s still very foxy, and he can swallow all of them whole. He can withstand six, ten, twelve reelections. This Francisco Madero is plain humbug!”

  The last storm had come on New Year’s Eve. Then, after the electricity dissipated and the hysterical rains subsided, the winter skies, which had hung over Clipperton asphyxiating it like a cardboard ceiling, lifted and the azure reappeared, rising higher and higher.

  After the arrival of the ship, and under the vibrant January sun, Clipperton came back to life, and its residents emerged as if roused from a heavy, humid siesta. There was again a flurry of activity in every corner of the isle.

  Gustav Schultz made his employees double their workload, while he tripled his own. He repaired all the damage the rains had caused to the Decauville train tracks, filled the empty storehouses with tons of guano, and made a clean copy of his accounting records. In two weeks he had everything working again like a Swiss watch. He behaved as if he had never received orders from his company to start dismantling all installations, or as if he had misinterpreted them to mean just the opposite: that Clipperton was their future key location. Nobody questioned his actions since, as a given, no one expected to understand his reply. Alicia, however, thought she understood.

  “Schultz, in his way, is reacting in the same way as all of us,” she told Ramón. “He simply does not want to recognize that everything he has accomplished here is a complete waste.”

  The obsession with finding the Clipperton treasure took hold of Arnaud’s body and soul, and he, in turn, infused his delirium into Cardona and the rest of the men in the garrison. They decided to begin their search in the lagoon, and for that purpose they improvised a diver’s suit and fixed, as best they could, a damaged deep-sea diver’s headgear given them by the captain of El Demócrata. Cutting through the timeless waters, they descended into a dark, elusive world where they experienced the sensation of burying themselves alive. They had always thought there were no fish in the lagoon: nobody had ever fished there. However, in the deepest zone they could see ancient, timid creatures, the size of seals and armor-plated with thick scales, lying in wait in the grottoes or seeking protection behind clouds of volcanic lime. The men were convinced that the monsters, the only inhabitants familiar with these depths, could lead the divers to the place where the treasure was hidden, and more than once trying to follow them, they got stuck in the underwater rock labyrinths.

  After a couple of months, they had to knock off their project. They had found nothing more than crumbling old detritus, and even though they obstinately persisted in their search, they could not continue because the strong salt and sulfurous acid concentration was burning their eyes and eating away their skin. Neither the deep-sea diving headgear nor the improvised diver’s suit had given them enough protection against these malodorous waters, powerful enough to corrode anything that touched them.

  They abandoned the lagoon but continued the exploration of the big rock on the southern shore of the isle. They climbed to the top, holding on to the sharp-edged ridges along its sides, and explored all its caves and crevices. They discovered that the big rock was hollow the day they found a hole near the top. At first they thought it was a lair, but it proved to be the entrance to its great interior space. With the help of ropes, they dropped down inside the cave, convinced they had at last found the place where Clipperton the pirate had hidden his treasure.

  From the top opening, a cone of sunlight penetrated the interior, interrupted from every direction by thousands of bats in blind flight. In all the surrounding darkness there was a bitter, sticky smell like the musk of a caged animal, secreted by the glands of the bats or by the amorphous mass of fat toads huddled on top of one another in the background. In this exceedingly compressed kingdom of small black animals, the silence was so overpowering that it produced a ringing in the ears. In this spot, neither a puff of wind nor the sound of the sea could reach them.

  While gold fever made the men search for jewels and ancient coins even in the toad’s bellies, the women, brandishing brooms, mops, feather dusters, brushes, bottles of lye, and pieces of soap, were busy cleaning up the tidal debris brought in by the storms. In spite of being pregnant, Alicia was at the head of the cleaning brigades and more energetic than ever.

  She did not suffer from morning sickness, nor was she sleepy or depressed. The whims of her pregnancy took into account the prevailing limitations of their isle: she could feel compelled to drink
coconut milk at any hour, and she enjoyed being alone for long periods of time in the least hostile cove of the beach, sitting at the shore and feeling the tame waves caressing her belly after crashing against the rocks and turning into white foam.

  Doña Juana, the midwife, had already performed the needle test, the tape measure test, and the cup of coffee test, and, according to all of them, the baby was a girl. Ramón was saying the same thing, based on what his medical books stated as to the size and height of her pregnant belly.

  Against all evidence, Alicia was convinced otherwise. As if she could see inside herself, she knew it was a boy. She knew even more: the exact color of his eyes and hair, and the perfectly round shape of his head. She was sure that his name would be Ramón, that he would be a short, sweet boy, and that by an uncanny communion, his joys and sorrows would fluctuate—just as was happening already—in perfect harmony with hers, for years after he was born.

  According to Ramón’s calculations, the ship should be back in May, which would give them enough time for a trip to Orizaba. In that way, the June delivery and the baby’s first month could be properly attended by doctors and relatives.

  “This baby is going to be born in Clipperton,” Alicia assured him.

  “I have told you a thousand times not to say that,” he answered. “Colonel Avalos gave me his word of honor that this time there will be no delay. He knows about the impending birth, and he is not going to fail us.”

  “Then I don’t know what is going to happen,” she insisted, “but I know that this baby is going to be born in Clipperton.”

  Thoughts of her own child, whose presence was becoming more and more tangible, made Alicia aware for the first time of the existence of other children on the isle. She had looked at them before without seeing them, and suddenly, like creatures coming out of the sea, they were there, all of different ages and races, running around among the crabs and the booby birds. That was when she decided to take care of the school and to dedicate most of her time to it. On the beach, next to Brander’s house, they built a small open shelter with a thatched roof, and there they sat the children—nine in all—around a long table. The oldest one, twelve years old, was Jesusa Lacursa, Daría Pinzón’s daughter. Soon, the youngest one was to be a small, sweet child, always clinging to his mother’s skirts, Ramón Arnaud Jr.

  By then the women began to put aside their private jealousies and gossiping, and to weave a tight solidarity circle, a secret feminine group that was not ever going to dissolve and that, years later, would allow them to survive during the ominous times in which they were to go through hell.

  It was not their domestic chores that united them, or the school, or the sewing and embroidery workshops. It was the collective care of their hair, which became a weekly ritual. All of them, without exception—Alicia, Tirsa, Doña Juana the midwife, and the camp followers—had, reaching to their waists, splendid long tresses that had not been cut since their infancy. Except of course for the trimming ritual on Saint John’s feast day, when the moon’s influence pulled the hair sap in toward the roots and the tips could be trimmed without major damage.

  Every Wednesday at dawn they would gather around the washing sinks to rinse their hair with rainwater in clay vessels left exposed to the stars overnight. To counteract the lightening effect of the sun’s rays, they applied chiles mixed with aromatic herbs. To neutralize the drying effect of the salt spray, they applied a poultice of booby eggs. To strengthen their hair, they massaged it with Barry’s Trichoferus or snake oil; to perfume it, they sprinkled a few drops of vanilla. They rinsed it again and wrapped a shawl around their heads, pulled some chairs out in the sun and sat there to let it dry. Then the women brushed one another’s hair for hours and later, with wooden or bone combs, pulled it back so hard that their eyes seemed slanted. After braiding their hair in strands of three or four, they tied it with colored ribbons. On Saint John’s feast day, they trimmed their hair and carefully collected the cutoff tufts into little bags to be placed under their own pillows.*

  During these long sessions of hair care there was more than enough time to talk. They chatted about births and miscarriages, about love and deceit; whole family sagas were told, and stories of past battles and of other battalions were remembered.

  By the end of March or beginning of April when dozens of black fins began to appear in the waters around the reefs, the topic of sharks displaced all others, becoming obsessively frequent. The women tried to outdo one another with stories about isle inhabitants who had died in the jaws of sharks. Like the one about the nine fishermen who left at dawn on a barge, and only a big splash of blood in the water returned, dragging itself onto the sandy beach and staying there, forever indelible. Or about the effeminate gringo working for the guano company who, while getting a suntan close to shore one day, lost both his buttocks in one shark’s bite.

  “That was God’s punishment, taking away his sinful body part,” Doña Juana used to say, crossing herself.

  While they talked, they looked into the distance at the metallic gleams of the sharks’ backs, listened to the noise they made with their fins, cutting through the water like razor blades. The women believed they could detect fetid breath coming out of their jaws. At night they had nightmares of fangs and mutilations, of spooks that took the children away, of sharks that forced themselves sexually upon the women or came out of the ocean in human form in order to commit some atrocity.

  On Wednesday mornings, brushing their hair together, the women exorcised their fears by telling these stories, which up to then were only dubious memories and horrible dreams, impossible in the real world.

  Clipperton, 1909

  ALICIA WAS SWIMMING, gliding through the warm-water currents, which seemed to open like transparent blue curtains in her path. Her contact with these liquid barriers was unrushed and pleasurable, and it made her feel good. Many feet above her head she could see a sheet of silver, the sleek, shimmering surface. The sun hitting on the water from above made it appear metallic, like warm light beaming on a mirror.

  She perceived a ceaseless, soothing gurgling sound, like a pot bubbling on the stove. She felt bubbles tickling her throat, an effervescence coming up to her ears and caressing her timpani. The peaceful rhythm of the ocean lulled her and kept her company like the heartbeat of an enormous creature, an invisible protector, a powerful but docile beast. Alicia dived down, and looking up into the distance above, she saw the brilliant surface and knew she did not need to come up to reach it. She walked slowly underwater, without fear, without shortness of breath. Her breathing was deep and serene, her lungs expanding with the warm breath of the big animal. Her heart and that of the beast beat together. Everything was all right, translucent. Everything was peaceful and safe.

  Everything was fine, except for a gnawing suspicion. Alicia had the intuition that out of nowhere there were harmful shadows lying in wait for her. Dark, cold shadows like rocks, like heavy, living rocks that were evading the sun rays and were circling around her. Damaged and causing damage, they crouched, marauding, lying in wait for an opportunity.

  But she also knew that now they could not touch her. They would not come after her as long as she was underwater, as long as she did not pop her head up on the other side of the silvery sheet. They would not touch her as long as she was protected and watched over by the creature, by the underwater recesses of warm light, by the complicity of the powerful but quiet waters.

  She could have stayed forever in the effortless, timeless pleasure of this great aquatic bed, but she started slowly if reluctantly to wake up. She saw herself in her bed, practically sitting, propped up by the necessary pillows that, because of her enormous belly, helped her to breathe. It took her a few seconds to understand that the warm, wet sensation she felt on her skin was due to her own waters that had broken a while ago, announcing the impending delivery of her baby. She began to feel the pain a few minutes later.

  Up to a few weeks before, Ramón still had confidence that the ship
would arrive in time to take them to Mexico. But frantically searching for treasure, he had been too busy to get into a frenzy about the ship’s delay.

  All the men’s efforts to find the mythical treasure of Clipperton the pirate had been useless. After their search in the lagoon had failed so miserably, they also failed at the big rock on the southern coast. During two weeks of exploring it inch by inch, inside and out, they had gleaned only a few fossils and some lichens, ancient seashells, giant mushrooms, and lava rocks. The men cursed, fashioned amulets for themselves from some fossil or mother-of-pearl conch, and began, one by one, to abandon the project.

  The first ones to desert Ramón were those who had been skeptical about the story of the treasure all along and collaborated only out of discipline. Next were those who had their doubts. A few days later, the enthusiastically confident ones, and finally the truly confirmed fanatics. The last one was Arnaud, for whom it had become a matter of honor. They were all exhausted, with the taste of failure in their mouths, and with their hands full of warts and their eyes boiling with sties, after getting so permeated with bat urine and toad milk.

  By June the outlook was critical: they had lost a lot of time searching for the treasure, Alicia was beginning the ninth month of her pregnancy, and the ship had already been delayed five months. Ramón saw with rancor in his heart that the old anxiety, the tachycardia, the sleepless nights making and discarding hypotheses, praying to Heaven and cursing Colonel Avalos, were all coming back in an identical and useless repetition, and he refused to fall into that trap again. If the ship arrived, fine; if not, they would make do. At least as long as they could. As long as they didn’t die. He applied some leeches to suck up his bad blood and poisoned bile, exchanged the treatises on pirates for books on medicine, and devoted his time to preparations for personally taking care of the birth of his son. Doña Juana, the wife of the oldest of his soldiers, Jesús Neri, was experienced as a folk healer and midwife, and she could help him.