Isle of Passion

by Laura Restrepo

  Tirsa grabbed her arm.

  “Do you want us to commit suicide at the last minute? Calm down, Alicia, you need a cool head. While you tempt him, I’ll kill him.”

  “I tempt him? In five minutes? What do you want me to do?”

  “You tell him you’ll marry him, or that he is looking very handsome, or you ask him to kiss you. Tell him whatever you want: you distract him while I hit him.”

  “He’s not armed. He locked up the knives and guns before he left, but he left this out,” Altagracia said, and handed Tirsa the mallet Victoriano used to open coconuts.

  They agreed that if they were going to speak to him of love, Altagracia should not accompany them. Alicia alone should face him, and Tirsa should sneak up later from behind. Altagracia should instead go and bring the children down, before they fell off the cliff.

  Tirsa tied a rope around her waist to hold the mallet hidden in back while Alicia rinsed her legs in seawater and fixed her hair with her hand. They walked north as they discussed how best to approach him: together, alone, together, alone. Together. This continued until they saw him, about seventy feet ahead, sitting on the beach, with his reddish, corn-husk hair, his ashen skin, and his arthritic, bent legs. They slowed down, held and squeezed each other’s hand, and letting go, moved closer to him.

  “He is going to know because when I speak to him my voice will tremble,” whispered Alicia.

  “Your voice will not tremble when you speak to him, and my hand will not tremble when I hit him. All these months we have behaved like idiots. Now it’s time to act and do things right.”

  Victoriano was baiting his fishing hooks when he sensed their presence.

  “What do I tell him, Tirsa—” Alicia asked between her teeth.

  “Anything, it doesn’t matter. Go on! Now!”

  “Victoriano!” Alicia shouted. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Go ahead, ma’am.”

  “Aren’t you going to invite me to sit down?”

  “Since when do you need permission to sit on the ground?”

  “It’s something important, Victoriano.”

  “Sit down, then,” and he made a pompous gesture with his arm, pointing at the sand.

  “I’m coming to tell you that I want to marry you.”

  “That you what?”

  “That I want to marry you.”

  “Oh, that’s good. Until yesterday we were ready to kill each other, and today, we’re ready to get married.”

  “That’s true. We have been thinking, Tirsa and I, that since we are going to live out all our lives on this isle, it’s better we do it like civilized people and put an end to this war between you and us. I mean, for us to solve our problems peacefully.”

  “And what problems do we need to solve?”

  Alicia sensed that her proposal was not being well received. She felt ugly, old, disheveled, and thought, Nobody would want to marry me in this condition. Better try another tack.

  “Well . . . you want to be the governor, right?”

  “I am the governor already.”

  “Not true, you are a tyrant, and you only dominate by beating us. You have no authority over anybody. But I, I am indeed the governor, because Porfirio Díaz conferred that title upon my husband.”

  “Porfirio Díaz is dead now.”

  ““And so is my husband, and so many other people, but that does not change anything. If you and I get married, everybody will recognize you as the governor, as well as me, both of us. That way we could command the isle in peace, the way God intended, and not through violence, which is bad for the children, and for everyone.”

  “Does a man who marries a lady governor also become governor?”

  “That’s right, like he who marries a queen becomes king.”

  “I like that, to be the legitimate governor, like my grandfather.”

  “Which grandfather?”

  “My grandfather General Manuel Alvarez. He was a real governor, of the whole state of Colima. Not like Captain Arnaud, only governor of this shitty isle.”

  “It’s not so bad. Don’t you see that France wants to take it away from us? And the United States. Even the Japanese want it, there must be something.”

  “Oh well, heaven knows why. What I don’t understand is why there was so much hate between us and now so much sweetness.”

  “I already told you. If we are going to live here for the rest of our lives, we better do it in peace.”

  “But why do I need to marry you? Don’t be offended, ma’am: you’re very pretty and quite a woman. A little skinny, but you pass, and I am grateful for your deference. What I mean is, when I need you, I just go and take you home with me without asking for any permission, and that’s it. That’s how my white grandfather, the governor, used to do it, and that is what I do.”

  “But that way I am never going to love you.”

  “And if I marry you, you will not give me any more poisoned soup?”

  “No. There is no more poison.”

  Tirsa, who was sitting facing Victoriano, stood up, careful not to show her back to him.

  “I don’t trust this. It doesn’t sound good to me,” Victoriano said, and hearing this, Tirsa sat down again.

  At sea on the other side of the isle, from the bridge of the Yorktown, Captain Perril was looking through his spyglass at the strange behavior of the women and children who were making signals. It all seemed too urgent, too emotional to be only a greeting. He sent for Lieutenant Kerr, who was readying the landing boat together with two bluejackets.

  “Lieutenant,” he said to him, handing him the spyglass. “Watch. Those people are in trouble. An emergency, maybe. Take Dr. Ross with you, in case they need a surgeon.”

  Kerr, Dr. Ross, and the two bluejackets left on the boat. It was noon. They tried to get close to the coast through very heavy seas, and Captain Perril, who kept a close watch on them, feared they would be overcome by the waves and ordered to signal them to return.

  On the beach, Altagracia, Rosalía, and Francisca, their lives hanging from a thread, saw the approaching boat and gesticulated, trying to encourage the four men who were on board to row even faster and reach them. According to Alicia’s instructions not to shout, or else Victoriano would be alerted, they were making desperate gestures in silence, like mimes. Suddenly, when the men were only a few yards away from crossing the barrier reef, the women saw the boat turning around, heading back to the gunboat. Was it possible they would be abandoned again? What kind of abominable joke was this, for the boat to have come so close and then to head back, leaving them behind? Were they going to meet their deaths anyway, after almost being rescued? The women went all out, shouting, crying, pleading hysterically, wading into the sea, wanting to fly, swim, run, anything in order to reach the boat. But their nightmare was not over; there was no way to stop it. The rowboat reached the gunboat, and the men went aboard. They all saw them. It was not a mirage. The only mirage was the possibility of a rescue. It had been just another cruel joke, like the one that took Captain Arnaud and Lieutenant Cardona to their deaths. The women stopped shouting. They remained in the water, silent, vacant, suddenly lifeless, waiting for the ghost to disappear from view. The gunboat started to move away. They saw it going northwest and waited until it was engulfed in green mist.

  Lieutenant Kerr went up to the bridge and discussed the whole procedure again with Captain Perril. They agreed to attempt a landing farther to the northwest, where the sea seemed less aggressive.

  Sitting on the beach, worried and puzzled by the conversation, and unaware of what was happening on the other side, Victoriano Alvarez continued baiting his hooks nervously, trying to figure out what was behind Alicia’s words.

  “What you are proposing, ma’am, sounds good to me,” he said. “For us to become husband and wife, both to be governors, and to live in peace. What I don’t understand is why now, when you never wanted this to happen before.”

  “I always treated you right.”

&n
bsp; “Yes, in a condescending way. But you never treated me like a man.”

  “I had my husband, Victoriano, and I loved him very much.”

  “But then you became a widow, and you didn’t change.”

  “Then I had the baby, and besides, I was in mourning.”

  “Are you through now?”

  “I think so.”

  She noticed that Tirsa had stood up, walked away, and was moving her hands behind her back. Alicia guessed she was pulling loose the mallet secured with a rope, and made a superhuman effort not to follow her with her eyes so that Victoriano would not turn around.

  “And your children, will they accept me as their father?” he asked.

  Alicia had begun to tremble, and her mouth turned dry. “If you treat them right, of course—” the tension strangling the words in her throat as she felt Tirsa’s shadow approaching.

  If I look at her now, Alicia knew, Victoriano will kill her. But her eyes did not obey and moved on their own, her pupils dilated, fixed on the mallet that Tirsa had raised over the head with the red hair. In Alicia’s glance Victoriano saw the reflection of his own death. He recognized it immediately: he had faced it many times before. Once more he fought to evade it by trying to escape. He lurched to one side, but his sick legs responded very slowly. His movement was clumsy, his attempt faltered, and the descending mallet hit him on the nape of the neck. He was stunned for a fraction of a second, then recovered his reflexes, now sharpened, and instinctively reached for one of the harpoons. Tirsa was retreating, surprised that her attempt had failed, while Alicia watched the scene in a daze, numbed, as if she herself had received the blow. She felt like running away but restrained herself. She saw how Victoriano had taken the harpoon and was aiming it between Tirsa’s eyes, and saw her flex her legs, recover her position, and wait for the attack, ready to defend herself with the mallet. If I don’t do something, the harpoon will go through her, Alicia thought, and she lunged at the man from the side, far from the harpoon’s point. An arm curled around her neck and squeezed. She felt the sudden lack of air in her lungs, but remembering to use her mouth, she opened and closed it, digging her teeth in up to their roots. She recognized the taste of blood, and focused her whole being on the strength of the bite, aware that no earthly power could force her to let go. Tirsa took advantage of that moment to raise the mallet again, letting it fall where it would, and she heard Victoriano roar. She laughed, suddenly fascinated by her own strength.

  “This time I will kill you, Victoriano,” she told him without anger, almost joyfully. “So that you learn not to go around raping women.”

  With self-assurance and precision, without haste, repulsion, or remorse, she dealt a final blow right in the middle of his head and heard an abrupt, muffled dry noise, like that of a machete splitting a coconut.

  “Let him go now,” Tirsa told Alicia, who was still biting. “He is dead.”

  Alicia had to make an effort. Her jaws were rigid, as if welded together after pressing so hard. She pulled back, prying her teeth away from the inert arm around her neck, and stood next to the other woman. The body on the ground shook with a tremor, its bones clattered, and its eyes turned. Tirsa held the harpoon, took aim, and thrust it deep into the corpse’s chest.

  “Enough! Why did you do that?” Alicia screamed.

  “Just in case.”

  “That’s enough. Let’s go, we’ll miss the ship.”

  ““And what about him? Do we leave him lying here, without burying him?”

  “Let the sea take him away at high tide.”

  They left, running as fast as their legs would permit, passed by the southern rock, and reached the little beach where they had left the other women, but there was no one. The ship was nowhere to be seen. Farther north on the isle, there seemed to be some movement, so there they headed, arriving just when the four men were landing.

  “Could you take us on your ship?” Alicia begged, half in English and half in Spanish, while extending her hand in greeting. “Pleased to meet you, I am Alicia Rovira, Captain Arnaud’s widow. Could you take us to Acapulco or to Salina Cruz, please? These are my children, and these are my friends and their children. We are five women and nine children. We have been here eight years already, and we want to go back home.”

  Lieutenant Kerr, who was looking at them wide-eyed as if they were from another planet, nodded and indicated they could climb on the boat.

  “Give us one hour,” Alicia pleaded in English, “just one hour, please, to collect our belongings.”

  They dispersed, and Alicia went home and dug up her trunk. She took out her bar of Ivory soap, put her four children into a tub of rainwater, and washed their hair, their faces, their bodies. She dressed Olga in a sailor suit that had belonged to Ramoncito, and for him and her oldest daughter, she found two of her blouses, of embroidered organza, that covered down to their knees. She combed their hair, made them sit where they would not get dirty, and ordered them not to move while she got dressed.

  She called Tirsa, who was chasing after the only two remaining live pigs in order to take them also, and told her that she had stored enough clothes for both of them.

  “No, Alicia. Thanks, but I never dressed that way, and I think I would look strange.”

  “And don’t you think you look strange with that sailcloth sack, so thick it can stand up on its own?”

  “I feel more comfortable because I look more like who I am.”

  Alicia took all the time she needed to bathe. She covered every inch of her body with white foam from the Ivory soap, and then poured jugs of water to rinse herself off, feeling that the very cold water was purging all of her old anxieties and dead memories, besides Victoriano’s splattered, dry blood. She dried herself carefully, allowing no moisture to remain. From a nail care box she took out an orange stick, saved from floods and hurricanes for years, and removed the cuticles from each finger. When her hands seemed acceptable, she placed the wedding band and diamond ring on her left hand. She looked at herself this way and that in the broken mirror, trying to recognize from some angle the perfect features of the woman she had been. Putting on her earrings, she got distracted for a moment by the violet gleams of the diamonds in the sunlight. She slipped into her corset with copper eyelets and shiny braids, but when she wanted to adjust it, she realized how big it was on her and how many pounds she had lost. She chose a silk blouse in a rosemary color, pleated in front, with high neck and puff sleeves, which closed with a long row of tiny buttons. She shivered as her skin felt the fresh contact of the silk, and she buttoned the blouse slowly, enjoying the touch of each button, one by one, as it passed through its buttonhole. She clasped her gray pearl necklace, making sure the brooch was in front, to show it off. Out of her trunk she chose a floor-length taffeta skirt, black and smooth, then gathered her short hair under a woven straw hat with big muslin flowers, petal pink. She pushed it to the front, to the back, to one side and then the other, until she found the exact position that suited her best.

  Last, she put the wad of bills into her pocket, lifted Angel, and took her other children by the hand. Dressed in that manner, although barefoot, they all walked toward the boat. Alicia asked Lieutenant Kerr to allow the bluejackets to help her by bringing her trunk on board.

  “All right,” said the lieutenant, “provided it is only one.”

  Tirsa and Altagracia were already on board with the other children, a barrel full of things, and the two pigs. Rosalía and Francisca came last. They stood in front of Alicia, their eyes downcast.

  “Hurry up, we’re ready to leave,” said Alicia.

  “No, ma’am. We are not leaving. We are staying.”

  “How come?”

  “Here is where our dead are, and we cannot leave them.”

  “Our dead,” said Alicia, “have been blown by the wind, swallowed by the sea, and by now they must be flying over Africa or sailing around Europe. So, come on, quick, let’s go.”

  The bluejackets first carried the chi
ldren and the women, then brought the trunk on their shoulders, climbed on their boat, and rowed toward the Yorktown. It was already four o’clock when they left Clipperton.

  From the sea, Lieutenant Kerr looked at the empty atoll, barren, inhospitable, disquieting, and wondered how it was that these people had been able to survive there for so many years without dying of loneliness and boredom. He saw the ruins of miserable huts; a sad cemetery with a half-dozen fallen crosses; an unhealthy lagoon; a ragged, jagged, uninviting cliff; and some debris on the beach, among which was the hull of a sunken ship, an old mattress full of holes, some rags, and the battered body of a bald doll. Alicia was also looking at Clipperton, but it presented itself before her as full of joys and sorrows, the stage where her life had been played. She bid farewell to the invisible wooden houses with cool verandas still resonating love words that she could repeat in their entirety by heart; to the mild prehistoric monsters at the bottom of the lagoon; to the caves that hid from the heavens the sickness and suffering of the scurvy epidemic; to the magnificent chalices that the English pirates had buried after desecrating them with Jamaican rum; to the live rock that cradled the bones of loved ones as well as hated ones; to the tablecloths and bedsheets embroidered lovingly days before her wedding; to the walls guarding against the hurricane’s fury; to the wrecked ghost ship that brought the twelve Dutch sailors; to her daughters’ porcelain doll; to the lamb’s wool mattress where her children were conceived, and brought into this world. To Secundino Angel Cardona’s seductive laughter and the heroic and violent battle that her husband, Captain Ramón Arnaud, had undertaken against no one, ultimately at the cost of his life.

  From the ship’s bridge, Captain Perril, who had been alarmed by the delayed return of the boat, was astonished at the spectacle of women and children from the isle climbing into the gunboat. He had to keep his curiosity in check for twenty minutes, until Lieutenant Kerr came on board, explained the visitors’ presence, told him whatever he had been able to understand of their tragic story, and relayed their petition to be taken to Salina Cruz.