Isle of Passion Read online

  Dedication

  For my people: Pedro, Mamina,

  Carmen, Monko, María, and Bebeño

  ALL HISTORICAL FACTS, PLACES, NAMES, DATES, DOCUMENTS, TESTIMONIES, CHARACTERS, PERSONS LIVING OR DECEASED THAT APPEAR IN THIS STORY ARE REAL.

  MINOR DETAILS ALSO ARE, SOMETIMES.

  Epigraph

  . . . and then, in a sort of ridiculous ceremony, they gave him the keys to the town and accepted him as the perpetual governor of the Island of Barataria.

  —MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

  Don Quixote de la Mancha

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Clipperton

  Today in Orizaba, Mexico

  Santiago Tlatelolco Prison, Mexico City, 1902

  Mexico City, 1907

  Orizaba, México, 1908

  Mexico City, Today

  Orizaba, Today

  Orizaba, 1908

  Orizaba, Today

  Clipperton, 1917

  Pacific Ocean, 1908

  Clipperton, 1917

  Clipperton, 1908

  Clipperton, 1908

  Clipperton, 1908

  Clipperton Island, 1705

  Clipperton, 1908–1909

  Clipperton, 1909

  Mexico City, Today

  Mexico City, 1913

  Marooned

  Clipperton, 1914

  Mexico City, Today

  Clipperton, 1914

  Mexico City, Today

  Clipperton, 1914

  On the U.S.S. Cleveland, Heading for Acapulco, 1914

  U.S.S. Cleveland, Clipperton Island, 1914

  Clipperton, 1915

  Clipperton, 1915

  The Last Man

  Colima, Today

  Clipperton, 1915

  Mexico City, Today

  Acapulco, Today

  Clipperton, 1915–1916

  High Seas, Aboard the Gunboat Yorktown, 1916

  Taxco, Today

  Clipperton, 1916

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Praise for Laura Restrepo

  Praise for The Dark Bride

  Also by Laura Restrepo

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Clipperton

  A DOLL ABANDONED DECADES ago is lying on the rocks. Her eyelashes have faded as well as the color of her cheeks. Animals have nibbled at her porcelain skin. Dumbstruck, she seems to observe everything with her emptied eye sockets, and to register all in her head, now etched out in places by exposure to sea salts.

  After all the events that took place, the doll is still there, bearing dead witness, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of crabs that cover the sand in their turmoil, piling on top of one another in a frenzy of nervously moving layers; always around her and watchful in their siege of her hairless head and dismembered torso, peeking out the holes left by the lost arms and disappearing between her broken thighs.

  The army of crabs squirms in puzzlement at this remotely human presence. Perhaps because, together with other undefinable remnants, the doll is the only human vestige still left on Clipperton Island.

  On this same beach, where the doll now reigns over her hysterical court of crabs, a while back there were children running after booby birds, and women lifting their skirts to wet their feet in the pleasantly warm waters, while sailors unloaded crates of oranges and lemons.

  But this was all before tragedy struck.

  Afterward, nobody was either able or willing to return to Clipperton, except maybe a guano trader, and the half-dozen French sailors landing there once a month who, lulled by indifference and by the soporific vapors emanating from the land, performed the ritual of hoisting their country’s flag. Because Clipperton, which had been a Mexican territory in its golden age, had now become a French possession. This, too, in some way, as a result of the events that took place.

  Including the French, whose names have long been forgotten, very few people have set foot on Clipperton throughout its history; so few, in fact, that by going carefully over the existing documents, and with only a small margin of error, a list of visitors could be drawn. Most stayed only a few hours, a few days maybe, and a very small number of people managed to stay there for years.

  Those who have been there say that Clipperton is an unhealthy, unfriendly place. They claim that remnants of old shipwrecks surge onto its beaches with the tides and that there is an unpleasant smell of sulfur in the air, coming from a volcanic lagoon with poisoned water that neither tolerates animal life nor can be used to drink, and will burn the skin of anyone who attempts to bathe in it. This lagoon, nestled in an old crater, extends almost the full length of the atoll, about three miles, leaving as the only space for humans to tread a narrow ring of land around its brim, including beaches peppered with coarsely broken coral, and thirteen palm trees valiantly fighting the winds. Water surrounded by water; Clipperton is not much more than that.

  One reason for Clipperton’s isolation is that it is so far away from everything, and the other is its insignificant size and land conditions. It has been described as so small that one can walk all around it in a single morning, starting out leisurely at seven and returning full circle just before noon.

  It is also known that it lies on the Pacific Ocean, at 10° 13' north latitude and 105° 26' west, and that the closest land to it is the Mexican port of Acapulco, which is 511 nautical miles, or 945 kilometers, away. If you pictured it on a world map, it would be at the intersection of a line drawn south from Acapulco and another one going west from San José, Costa Rica, at the same distance from the equator as the cities of Cartagena in Colombia, and Maracaibo in Venezuela. Those are the known facts. Nevertheless, some navigational charts relegate the isle to uncertainty, marking its location with the initials D.E. (doubtful existence).

  The name of the isle is not even its real name. “Clipperton” is an alias, a sleight of hand. One of the many ways in which the isle hides and confuses. The real name, given to it between 1519 and 1521 when for the first time Ferdinand Magellan saw it from afar, is the sweet—and at the same time awesome—name of Isle of Passion. A suggestive name in a schizophrenic way because of its contradictory meanings: “passion,” which may evoke love but also suffering, fervent enthusiasm as well as torment, affection, or, instead, lust. Anyone can verify, just by opening a dictionary of synonyms, the contrasting meanings of its name. The Isle of Passion was the name given to that atoll in the Pacific by Ferdinand Magellan, an old mariner who, by exploring so many unknown lands, learned to understand them at first sight.

  Clipperton remains unpopulated not only because of its irrelevancy and isolation, but also, and above all, because the stubborn and angry isle has willed it that way. For centuries it has tried to become an unassailable fortress by building around itself, polyp by polyp, a living wall of coral reefs that lurks underwater with the intent of destroying any ship that comes near. This powerful reef is the only construction it tolerates, and in order to free itself from the others, from anything man-made, it acts as a magnet for hurricanes. Besides, the three large shoals that hug its coast will capsize every small boat and drown anyone who attempts to swim over them. And as for those who manage to land in spite of all hurdles and try to establish roots there in the illusion of having tamed it, the treacherous isle crushes them in the end with maledictions like scurvy, abandonment, and oblivion, and for every ounce of happiness it claims double in suffering.

  Foul odors, pestilence, hurricanes, reefs, shoals—all true, but Clipperton cannot be as nefarious as it seems, because if it were, other events, equally true and historically undeniable, could not be justified: three-quarters of a century ago
, a young officer of the Mexican Army, Captain Ramón Arnaud, and his new bride, Alicia Rovira, arrived there full of illusions, loaded with household items, and with the firm intention of populating the island with their descendants. The inhospitable Clipperton received them passively, allowed them to inhabit it without any fuss and be as happy there as Adam and Eve must have been in paradise.

  Still an adolescent, Alicia found it a magical, romantic place, just as she had imagined it, and she fell in love with its sunsets and its peacefulness. Ramón Arnaud, an obscure character until then, who spoke French better than Spanish due to his ancestry, arrived at its shores hoping to start anew and erase his somewhat tarnished past. It was precisely there, in such a questionable, lost corner of the planet, that he was given the opportunity to make a heroic gesture defending Mexican sovereignty against real and imaginary enemies, the latter being no less formidable than the former.

  That this story has a tragic ending does not belie the fact that Ramón and Alicia enjoyed a good life during their first five years on the Isle of Passion. So if it is true that this isle is neither hell nor paradise, if it evokes neither a joyous passion nor a painful one, then the remaining possibility is that Clipperton is nothing. Even its existence is doubtful: a tiny, imperceptible dot on the map, a place you may not find but from which you cannot escape. Storm swept, eroded by tides, erased from the charts, forgotten by men, lost in the middle of the ocean, once Mexican and now foreign, taken over, with its name changed and those who enacted its drama long dead. It just does not exist. There is no such place. An illusion at times, at others a nightmare, the isle is just that: a dream. Utopia.

  Or is there someone who can attest to the contrary? Is there any survivor who still remembers, who could bear witness that it all happened?

  MEXICO CITY, DECEMBER 1988

  Today in Orizaba, Mexico

  THE PENSIÓN LOYO IS in Orizaba, at 124 Calle Sur II. It is actually a boardinghouse for automobiles. A large parking garage, gray like any other, attached to a house. I haven’t met the person who lives here, but it is the one I have been looking for in Manzanillo, in Mexico City, in Puebla, and beyond. Finally, after knocking on many wrong doors, poring through the telephone directories of those three cities, and consulting with public officials, admirals, deep-sea divers, pious church ladies, tarot card readers, and local historians, I came across someone on a street corner who, almost by chance, gave me this address. If it is correct, I will finally have found one of the last three survivors of the Clipperton tragedy.

  It is Mrs. Alicia Arnaud, Mrs. Loyo until her husband died, who answers the door. As the second of the four children born to Captain Arnaud and his wife, Alicia, she is seventy-seven years old and does not at all want to remember. “Don’t come to stir up memories,” she says sweetly. But she knows the details; she can bear witness. In some dark corner of her mind this story that I am looking for is ensconced, well preserved. She knows, in her own flesh and bones, what happened there because when she was a child, early in the century, she lived through it all.

  With its back to the parking area, her cool L-shaped house opens onto a patio. There are several rooms, though the only other person in the house is a domestic servant who has been helping her for several years. The walls are papered with photos of her children. “Let’s rather talk about the present,” she tells me, pointing at the photos, taking me through first communions, weddings, graduations. Then she has me sit at her kitchen table while she pours into several containers the milk that her oldest son, a rancher, has brought her from the hacienda. “Don’t talk to me about the past, let me forget it,” she repeats. “It’s been so long since I talked about Clipperton. I was born on the island in 1911 and lived there until I was six or seven. What’s the point of my telling you about those old things?”

  While she keeps rejecting her memories, Clipperton begins to come back and quietly invades her kitchen, little by little. The more she talks, the more enthusiastic she grows. Her tone of voice gets more lively. She forgets about the milk.

  “I only have good memories, happy memories, what can I tell you. What happened in Clipperton was a tragedy, but only for the grownups. We children were happy. The difficulties started later, when we returned. But while we were there, it was fine, we never wanted to leave. Sometimes we saw grown-ups crying, and we cried, too, for a little while and without knowing why, but soon we were carrying on as usual.

  “We were playing all day long. As soon as a game ended, we started a new one, we never stopped playing. At the beginning we had reading and writing lessons. Father didn’t want us to be uncivilized upon our return to Orizaba. Mother started a little schoolhouse where she was the teacher and the students were the little Irra brothers, the two Jensen girls, Jesusa Lacursa, and us, the Arnaud children—plus the other children who gradually joined us in Clipperton. But later, with so many things going on, the adults could no longer take care of the little ones, except for short whiles in order to feed us or tuck us in at night. During the rest of the time we were free, on our own, like wild animals. We played and played until we fell asleep out of exhaustion.

  “You probably want me to talk about my father, but I remember little. There were times when he let himself be absorbed so much by his obsessions that he didn’t see us even though we were right before his eyes. Like when he got the idea of trying to recover the sunken treasures of Clipperton the pirate from the bottom of the lake. For months he thought of nothing else. Other times we became his obsession, like when he spent days and days carving toy ships out of wood for us to play with. They were perfectly beautiful miniatures. We still had other toys brought from the mainland—I remember well a porcelain doll for which Altagracia Quiroz had made a wig of real hair the day all the women on the island cut their hair—but the ships that my father carved himself were always my favorites. Some were warships and others freighters. We set them sailing on the lagoon and made believe they had shipwrecked. And their passengers, at least some of them—poor things—were drowning. We allowed the rest to survive.

  “My father was severe only when we were at the dinner table. He said that even though we were in the most remote corner of the world and only the crabs could see us, we had to eat like civilized people. Of course, after the calamities began he could not make the same demands, and we turned wild. After the hurricane swept away everything, including the china, the silverware, and the tablecloths, we soon forgot the good table manners he had taught us. All the better for us, we thought, for we felt freer and more relaxed. We ended up eating very fast with our hands, and taking big bites. The booby eggs had nice blue shells, and we loved them. Playing at the beach, we cooked them and sprinkled sea salt on them.

  “We spent a lot of time with the crabs. There must be more of those crabs in Clipperton than in the rest of the world. There were so many, it was hard to walk anywhere. If the house had not been on higher ground, the crabs would have invaded it, just as they had invaded the beach, the reefs, the caves. Everything was blanketed with crabs. We liked to watch them fight. They are ferocious beasts and dismember each other with their pincers. We used to lock them in jars to start crab wars.

  “This is how things were and we had a happy life. At the end, we were running barefoot and half naked, with some clothes Mom made out of sailcloth from ships’ sails. We were so suntanned from so much sun exposure that we looked like Africans, and our hair was wild and spiky, since we could only bathe in saltwater and without soap.

  “As children in Clipperton, we never knew the meaning of suffering. Perhaps only my brother Ramón, the oldest, did. I think that once in a while he realized that things were not going well at all. Ramón adored my mother, and when she cried, he clung desperately to her skirt.

  “The day Dad died, we all—both the older children and the little ones—were standing on the beach and watching him sail away on a boat when suddenly a manta ray capsized his boat. We all saw him being swallowed by the waves. We also saw the manta ray, enormous and black
like a shadow, coming out of the water. I am not quite sure we saw it, or just thought we did. We sometimes said it was black with blue stripes, and other times, that it was silvery and gave off electrical sparks.

  “Part of our game was inventing our own stories, some out of fear, others about the grandparents we hardly knew, or about our cousins, from what our mother had told us. We had imaginary friends, as many as we wanted, so we didn’t need any more. We invented a lot of stories about our father after he died. We liked to think that he had found some pirate’s sunken treasure at the bottom of the sea and that he had given us the jewels and the crowns. Or that he had become the king of the deep and rode underwater on a carriage pulled by the manta ray. Sometimes we also said that he had not died, that he had just gone away and was coming back to bring us toys and oranges. Later at night we couldn’t sleep, afraid that he would really appear.

  “I remember all this because after everything happened, our mother kept retelling these stories to us, over and over, for years. Whenever she spoke of our father, she took out of her treasure chest a long necklace of gray pearls that he had brought her from Japan and allowed us to touch it.

  “But none of this is important, you know, they are small, blurred memories, not good enough for you to write a book about. If you can afford the time, it would be better for you to come with me to the hacienda, only twenty minutes by car, and I’ll take you to see my father.”

  In the outskirts of Orizaba, the two rancher sons of Señora Alicia Loyo, née Alicia Arnaud, are talking and resting on the porch of the hacienda after the day’s work. They are eating nopal tacos with chiles and drinking expensive brandy with bottled water from Tehuacán. Facing them there is an expanse of land, all paved, where sheep, pigs, and hens surround a circular trough set right in the center. Señora Arnaud is pointing in its direction. At the center of the animals’ drinking place, on top of a metal cask and accompanied by the chatter of his progeny and the din of the domestic animals, there is a bronze bust of Captain Ramón Nonato Arnaud Vignon, with a spiky Prussian helmet on his head.