Isle of Passion

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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.

Santiago Tlatelolco Prison, Mexico City, 1902

Given name: Ramón Nonato

Family names: Arnaud Vignon

Date of birth: August 31, 1879

Place: Orizaba

Father: Angel Miguel Arnaud (French citizen)

Mother: Carlota Vignon (French citizen)

Height: 5' 7"

Color of hair: brown

Complexion: white

Forehead: ample

Mouth: regular, thin lips

Nose: chiseled

Distinctive markings: small scar in the middle of his forehead

THAT WAS RAMÓN ARNAUD’S personal description, July 8, 1901, as recorded in the enlistment papers of his troubled military career, when he was twenty-two years old. He started as a first sergeant in the Seventh Regiment cavalry of the Mexican Army. It is recorded in the archives of the National Defense Ministry.

His dossier even includes anthropometric notations, which indicate he was a man of medium height (67 inches), of small, almost feminine feet (left foot, 9.75 inches), normal-sized head, and small hands (his left hand, up to the tip of his middle finger, was 4.75 inches long).

Exactly a year after this dossier was recorded, on July 8, 1902, his rosy white skin had become mousy gray, his brown hair was jumping with lice, and the small scar on the waxen texture of his ample forehead stood out like a cross carved by fingernails. Lying on a cot in his cell in the Santiago Tlatelolco military prison, he left his ration of refried beans untouched on its pewter plate, and cried out of rage and humiliation.

A court-martial had dictated his sentence. Five and a half months of imprisonment for being an army deserter, and he had been stripped of rank, degraded to enlisted man. On the night of May 20 just seven weeks before, he had been waiting in a cold sweat for the right time to escape from the barracks, crouching behind some sacks of maize and anticipating with horror the moment that the news would reach his hometown, Orizaba: “Ramón Arnaud is an army deserter.”

But he, poor devil, was incapable of enduring what his comrades in arms in the Seventh Regiment could easily bear. Those hungry, barefoot Indians were able to overcome the inhuman discipline, the kick in the ass, the filth, and the dire poverty that being an army trooper meant. But not he. And neither could he tolerate his comrades: he considered them backward, smelly, half naked in the rags they wore as uniforms, adrift in alcohol and marijuana.

While he, an Arnaud Vignon, a well-educated white man whose family influence had expeditiously advanced him to first sergeant, was more of a shit than all of that shit. And this would be the prized gossip in Orizaba — whispers at the church portico, on the alameda boulevards, during the afternoon hot chocolate.

The town of Orizaba had a French gazebo in the center of the plaza, an Art Nouveau train station, a municipal palace with a wrought-iron facade designed by Eiffel himself — the man made famous by his tower — which had been brought disassembled, screw by screw, from France. The Orizaba families had a Gallic air and were industrious and prosperous. They had more faith in the progress achieved through violent force by their president, Don Porfirio Díaz, than in the heretical, nationalistic ideals of the Indian Benito Juárez. There were such families as the Legrands, who manufactured percale, piqués, calicos, blankets, and French linen in their Cocolapan Woven Goods Factory. And the Suberbies, whose fortune rose like the foam of their Moctezuma beer; Monsieur Chabrand, who sold fine silks and haberdashery in his store, which he had named The Factories of France. The society ladies wore silk shantung dresses embroidered with soutache to stroll down the alameda, and then had to lift their skirts and underskirts a bit to avoid soiling them in human excrement when crossing any of the other streets, used as public latrines by Orizaba’s poor.

A few years earlier, Napoleon’s invading troops had almost turned the city into their permanent headquarters, and the local gentlemen devoted themselves to the pastime of identifying their more exotic army uniforms. They could recognize the Vincennes hunters for their dark blue woolen jackets; the Zouaves, with their red britches, so wide they resembled skirts, and their yellow leather walking boots; the Algerian Zouaves, with their dark skin and white turbans; the Spanish soldiers under General Prim, for their light uniforms and straw hats, and their officers, who wore jaunty little caps they called “leopoldines.”

Orizaba the Damned was condemned by the rest of the nation for its recent docility in the face of European domination and its fascination with the extravagant and phantasmagorical reign of Archduke Maximilian, who served as Emperor of Mexico for three years and seven days, until the Indian Juárez had him killed in the Cerro de las Campanas to prove that no blond-bearded Austrian would rule over the free men of his Aztec homeland. And to make sure this was completely understood, after he was shot, his body was returned to Europe in a rosewood coffin, properly embalmed, and having, instead of his own, the glass eyes from an image of Saint Ursula.

Ramón’s French father, Angel Miguel Arnaud, had crossed the ocean and settled in Orizaba. He loved his new land more than his old one, toiled tirelessly, and managed to accumulate a sizable fortune. He took advantage of a transportation subsidy given to him by the Porfirio Díaz administration to build the local railroad. He became the owner of a hacienda and of a home on Calle Real. He was named Orizaba postmaster, and that was how he had turned into one of the thousands of bureaucrats supported by Don Porfirio in fulfillment of his political slogan, “Let’s feed the donkey.”

In spite of that slogan, life was not easy for these bureaucrats. Their salaries were usually not paid for months, and they were kept in a state of alert for fear of losing their posts at the slightest suspicion of disloyalty to the government. For self-preservation, they had to belong to the appropriate political club, contribute large sums for official holiday celebrations, buy presents for their superior’s mistress, and march in all the parades.

Angel Miguel Arnaud understood these rules and knew how to play the game. During his lifetime, his family enjoyed a comfortable life, up to the provincial splendor customary in Orizaba. As soon as he died, his widow, Doña Carlota Vignon — who was until then a happy and carefree matron, famous for preparing the best homemade mayonnaise in town — squandered all of his fortune according to some, or fell victim to a greedy executor according to others, but with the same result: total ruin.

Ramón, their oldest child — by then a half-French, half-Mexican teenager with large, dreamy eyes and long, doll-like eyelashes — was so perplexed by this adversity that he had no idea of what to do with his life. He had been raised to count on an inheritance, not to deal with bankruptcy.

For a while he was an apothecary’s apprentice. He memorized the formulas and names of all available medications, and he began providing first aid until the apothecary abandoned town, business, and all, and moved to the capital. After a chaotic period of doing nothing, Ramón opted for a military career.

If he could have afforded it, he would have paid for an officer’s career with training at a military academy, as any son of a white man was wont to do, and would have received medals, honors, and all sorts of creature comforts for himself. But since he had no money, he had to become, like average Mexicans, just beaten-up army fodder. He did obtain one privilege in recognition of his social status, and that was to join with the rank of first sergeant.

At the first bitter taste of life in the barracks, young Ramón Arnaud regretted his decision and tried to change the course of his life a little too late, making his biggest error, the one that marked him, for better or for worse, till the end of his days.

It happened one night in the barracks, behind the sacks of maize. He started thinking about his life and that it was better to suffer humiliation than to be repelled by it all and be bored to death. He ran away.

After deserting, he went into hiding in Mexico City like an outlaw, ashamed like a sinner. He spent a month wandering in the sordid streets of Tepito, hiding in the warehouses of La Merced market, trying to avoid being doused by the locals emptying their chamber pots out the window. He took refuge in the whores’ hovels in Calle del Organo, lived in the taverns together with suicidal bohemians and blind musicians, and vied for coins on street corners, like the fire-eaters, the poetry hawkers, and the cat hunters.

Then came his dark day, when he was found and jailed as an army deserter. On those humid and unbearable nights in Santiago Tlatelolco, while his crumbled honor tormented him even more than the cold in his cell or the lice on his head, he realized that he had made a terrible mistake, that it was better to be dead a hundred times than to suffer that humiliation just once.

In his feverish insomnia he thought of the worst possible forms of death: being consumed by fire, his body dismembered and roasted over a grill; trapped in miasmas, slowly sinking into a viscous and foul-smelling swamp; or being dumped into the ocean and menaced by the shadowy blue glimmers of a great black manta ray until finally drowning.

“Any of them,” he said in his delirium, “I’ll take any of those torments, anything but this dishonor.”

The day he was set free, already recovered from his fevers and again in possession of his mental faculties, he made a sacred pact with himself. Once out of jail and looking back at the blackened pre-Columbian stone walls of Santiago Tlatelolco, he solemnly swore, on the memory of his father and on his mother’s love, on the seven daggers that pierce the heart of Our Lady of Sorrows and on the love of his country, that never ever again, in his personal life or as an army man, would he go through the shame of another humiliation like this one.

Mexico City, 1907

COLONEL ABELARDO AVALOS of the engineering division, godfather and protector of the young junior officer Ramón Arnaud, made an appointment to speak with his godson in Mexico City.

“Ramón, you are going to Clipperton. With a detail of eleven soldiers under your command.”

He was told just like that, no preambles.

When Arnaud heard the word “Clipperton,” he felt a stab of pain behind his eyes. He knew all about that miserable atoll lost in the middle of the ocean because he had accompanied Colonel Avalos there a couple of times. While his guts froze, his face was burning; he wiped the sweat off with his hands, and onto his pants.

“Banished,” he murmured almost imperceptibly, aware that with a desertion on his record he had no moral authority to protest.

Slouched in his chair, belittled, already twenty-seven years old, big and hirsute, but only a second lieutenant. His protest came almost in a whisper: going to that island would be like starting all over again, and for the third time. This was too much, it asked too much of him. How come nobody recognized that he did not deserve such an ill fate? Why was he being subjected to this third ordeal by fire when he was passing his second one with honors?

After serving his sentence at Santiago Tlatelolco, Arnaud, with a mule’s obstinacy, had intended to go back, to retrace his path in order to show courage instead of fear, and to be decisive where before he had faltered. He would respect the solemn oath he had made to himself facing the blackened walls of the military prison, even at the cost of his life.

On December 16, 1902, he had rejoined the army, this time just as a recruit, in the Twenty-third Battalion in Veracruz. The conditions were tougher there than those that had broken him after his original enlistment as first sergeant, but in spite of this, he endured the second hitch. He endured it all with resignation and ate crow with a large spoon. In six months, he made corporal and, later, sergeant second class. Then he was again a first sergeant, just as before.

In July 1904, already a second lieutenant, he was transferred to the Tenth Battalion in Yucatán, with orders to quash an insurrection of the Maya Indians. It was an impossible objective. His mission was to do away with a cross that talked, someone known as Saint Talking Cross, who acted as the supreme commander of the Indians and incited them to rebellion. Arnaud tried to fulfill his duty. He demolished temple fortresses, and with his sword toppled many of those Talking Cross leaders, who were using their gift of speech not to call the Mayas to prayer but to encourage them to struggle. For each cross he struck down, another three new talking crosses sprang in place, and his mission turned into an inferno, an endless nightmare.

As a reward for his efforts, ineffectual though superhuman, he was given the medal of merit and courage, and his lost honor was restored.

If he had put his past behind him and was now in good standing with the army, distinguishing himself as a junior officer and even earning a medal, why then was he being forced to start all over again? Why was he being isolated in the remotest, most insignificant corner on the map?

“Besides, Godfather, I am getting married,” Arnaud desperately pleaded to Colonel Avalos.

His wedding had already been arranged; he could not break his word and didn’t want to. He had already asked for Alicia’s hand in marriage, he was in love, and she was waiting for him. How could he explain to his fiancée that he was calling off their wedding? How to justify another failure to the people in his hometown of Orizaba? Everybody knew about his impending marriage. “Please understand,” pleaded Arnaud, “please realize that this wedding cannot be postponed.”

This merely served to free the torrent of Colonel Avalos’s patriotic fervor. His words were gushing out in spurts. Ramón Arnaud could perceive only fragments, unconnected phrases that reached his ears slowly, as if deferred, moments after being uttered.

“There are issues that must take precedence,” the colonel went on irrepressibly. “Now is the time for daring action… think of your country, your homeland… of defending this piece of Mexican soil from the French, who want to take possession… of taking up arms against historical injustice. .. You speak French, and have the right qualifications… of giving up your life if necessary… Mexicans do answer the call to arms. ..”

Arnaud was not concentrating on Avalos’s words. These bastards, he thought. They really want to torture me. But anyway, he held on to his dejected mien and his pleading look, in the faint hope of softening Avalos with his victimized expression. The result was, though, that the persuasive, deliberate voice of the colonel began to ring with impatience, suddenly acquiring a metallic vibration, and, coming down like an ax, it struck this threat:

“If you refuse, the Mexican Army will consider it a second desertion.”

“But, Godfather, if I accept, it will be close to a dishonorable discharge.”

The obvious blackmail had sent a shot of adrenaline through Arnaud’s brain, and, to his own amazement, his voice sounded virile and convincing, giving him strength to continue. “I’m not going to play the fool anymore; this one I am going to fight,” he told himself, and he was already going to let his anger out in a barrage of words when Avalos stopped him cold.

“Easy, young man,” he said. “If you stop taking it the hard way, I’ll tell you what’s good about it.”

And then he began dribbling the encouraging news: that same day he would be promoted to lieutenant, and President Porfirio Díaz in person would name him governor of the island.

“If you want to get married, my dear Ramón, you can go to Clipperton with your wife, and we’ll give you a good furlough to take care of the whole thing. I have met Alicia, and I know she will like that. I will put at your disposal whatever it is you need, so you’ll have everything. What’s more,” added Avalos, “within a week, you and I will depart for Japan on a special mission that has to do with your appointment in Clipperton. I will explain later, very delicate matters of state, you know.”

Clipperton, Japan, lieutenant, governor… Ramón did not quite understand. Then Avalos lunged upon him.

“You’ve got it made, my son. Congratulations,” he heard him say, while getting a big bear hug, with big paws patting him on the back.

That was how Ramón received notice that the following day the president was to send for him and assign him to a delicate mission because he considered him the right man, recognized his merits, pardoned his misdemeanors, and was going to name him governor of Clipperton Island and raise his pay. Arnaud was still stunned by it all. What at first had sounded like a terrible disgrace and a punishment had suddenly turned into that golden and unique opportunity to change the course of his life.

When his appointment with Don Porfirio came to an end, he took his leave with a lot of genuflections, and left the splendidly luxurious billiards room of the Chapultepec Castle, completely sure he was, at last, going to be a happy man.

The blood throbbing in his temples drowned the sound of his own footsteps — too quick to be martial — and he had the sensation that his black shoes, meticulously polished very early that morning, scarcely touched the parquet, an ostentatious display of precious woods. For a moment he feared that the weight of the president’s gaze on his back would make him lose control of his legs, and he anguished over the possibility of tripping and falling, but when at last he went through the door and heard it close behind him, he was finally able to breathe deeply and recover his composure. He looked up at the cherubs painted on the ceiling and felt that the smiles of their little rosy lips were for him.

After leaving the Chapultepec Castle, which was the presidential summer residence, Arnaud started walking aimlessly along the brand-new Paseo de la Reforma in total disbelief of the preceding events, and without seeing anything else but the two new resplendent metal bars on his army jacket that now accredited him as a lieutenant. He kept thinking that none of the pedestrians who crossed his way could help but admire them, and did not even notice that the unforgiving noonday sun was overheating him too much inside his dark woolen dress uniform.

He tried to reconstruct, word by word, his dialog with Porfirio Díaz, and mentally repeated each phrase about ten or twelve times. Though he did not say anything special to him, Arnaud made an effort to remember every word. Nor did the president receive him in his office, as anticipated, but instead, Arnaud was forced to walk around accompanying the president on an inspection tour of the esthetic reconstruction already under way at the castle.

In fact, the president had spoken only about furnishings: “Lovely brass candelabra. I had them brought in from Paris,” or “Notice this Pompadour boudoir. Solid mahogany, feel it,” or “Do you see the tapestry designs depicting the ancient Greek games? Thirty-five hundred pesos,” or “Do you like the billiards room? Queen’s style. The table is a Callender and the curtains are English.” The president’s comments were all of this nature, obsessed as he was with the restoration of his summer residence.

Walking ahead a few blocks, Arnaud remembered also his own answers: confused monosyllables, false exclamations of admiration. He could hear the exact tone of his voice repeating “I find everything just right for my taste, Your Excellency” whenever the president pointed at some object or piece of furniture. “Just right for my taste,” he had said in a forced timbre, and recalling it now made him blush. Did His Excellency care about his taste? Probably his phrase was not even grammatically correct.

The evening before he had been carefully preparing to say different remarks, like, “When I was a child, my father used to tell me about your heroic campaigns,” but when the time came, he had only come up with “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” and, to top it all, in that falsetto voice. He had lost sleep reviewing everything concerning Clipperton, its possibilities as a source for exporting guano, the many judicial facets of the litigation with France, its strategically important location in case of war. He could have gone on for hours discussing these things with Don Porfirio, and would have dazzled him with his factual knowledge, with his enthusiasm for the island, with his firm decision to establish himself there. But Don Porfirio gave him no opportunity to deal with those issues.

The fact was, the sole indication of the importance of his assignment, of the trust bestowed upon him, was the strong farewell pat on his shoulder, and the president’s final words: “Good luck, young man.” He did say that to him, “Good luck.” Surely His Excellency meant good luck in Clipperton, the radiant Arnaud elaborated as he walked aimlessly, as if mesmerized, along the Paseo de la Reforma. Or maybe luck on the trip to Japan, luck in this difficult undertaking, luck in the defense of the national sovereignty. Or maybe not. Perhaps he had only wished him good luck.

But the meaninglessness of their dialogue was not enough to dampen Arnaud’s joy. What he told the president did not matter; what counted was that Don Porfirio had called for him, that gesture was significant, that he had personally received him — him, of all people; him, Ramón Arnaud, in spite of everything. He had not been so brilliant in his interview, he had to admit, but that did not count. After all, Porfirio Díaz had not been so brilliant either, Ramón Arnaud thought, satisfied with himself.

Marble from Carrara, Baccarat lamps, Henry II furniture — or his fucking mother’s, who gave a good goddamn, he had the lieutenant bars pinned on his jacket, his appointment had been signed, and in eight days he was leaving for Japan with Avalos, representing his government; he had been granted a face-to-face interview with none other than Don Porfirio himself, and, come what may, no one could take that away from him.

It all had happened as if by magic; literally from one day to the next he had gone from being a poor devil, an outlaw, a loser, a failed junior officer, a provincial nobody, and a deserter, to becoming a lieutenant and a governor, a man trusted by the establishment. Suddenly he had been graced by the gods.

“Some day a page will be written about me in the history of my homeland,” he unexpectedly declared out loud.

That night in his room, while he unbuttoned his suffocating dress uniform jacket, and relaxed the muscles of his incipient belly, he added: “And if nothing gets written, at least I got a pay raise.”

Orizaba, México, 1908

A PHOTOGRAPH IN SEPIA, taken in an interior with printed velvet draperies in the background, and dated on the lower-right corner “May 1908”—that is, a few days before the wedding — shows Alicia the way she was then: with a gracefully dimpled chin, a porcelain complexion on her doll-like face, the light shadow of her straight eyebrows, and an adult gaze in her little girl’s eyes.

It took her six months to do the twenty yards of lace for her wedding dress, and during this time she repeated the same operation a million times — hook in one hand and in the other the ball of linen thread from Holland — yarn over twice, insert hook, draw up a loop. Those were the last six months she spent at home with her parents in Orizaba, at number 3 °Calle Tercera de la Reforma, while her fiancé, Ramón, was away on his military mission.

She, the child bride, was waiting for his return. At times she felt like an adult attending marriage preparation courses, where she learned that at the moment of the marital encounter, she should close her eyes and pray, “Oh Lord, make me not take pleasure in this.” Or she would sit and visit with her relatives Dorita Rovira, now Mrs. Virgilio, and Esther Rovira, who was Mrs. Castillo. Or she would sit and sew clothes for the poor with Ramón’s sister, Adelita, and with his aunts Trinidad Vignon, Maria Vignon Aspiri, and Leonor Arnaud, who was a widow.

At times she was just like a child running along the house corridors shaded by ferns, making sure she did not step on the yellow floor tiles, only the blue ones. Or without stepping on the blue ones, only on the yellow ones. She played wolf with her sisters, and cops and robbers, or pretended that the hallway was the ocean and that the pillows they laid on the floor were sharks. When she got tired, she sat on a bench under the palm tree in the patio to think about Ramón, or something else, or nothing at all. She liked to imagine lavish weddings, eternal loves, honeymoons on a deserted island.

Sunny mornings in Orizaba always had a warm fragrance, bittersweet and tropical green. It smelled of moss in between rocks, of beasts ruminating on wet grass, of fresh cow dung, of oranges just squeezed. That fragrance made its way to Alicia’s bed and into her nostrils, caught her skin and made her hair curl. She felt an urge to go out in the open air, to the open country, to be going up and down the surrounding hills on her own — letting her stubborn mule lead the way.

“Where are you going? Have you lost your mind?” shouted her mother, seeing her on her way out with her hair undone.

She did not know where. Anywhere. She ran barefoot, like the Indian girls, through open yards full of chickens, past clotheslines with newly washed clothes, and by poor people’s homes with their red gladioli.

“Miss Alicia, buy some peaches!” “Here, get some tortillas!” “Let me sell you this turkey!” She dropped by Santa Gertrudis to see the burlap factory, the latest novelty in Orizaba. For hours she observed the four hundred laborers milling around like ants. Amazed, she tried to understand how the falling water could move the looms and the machines to spin the fibers, to sew the sacks, to roll the fabric.

“The water falls with the power of eight hundred horses,” said the foreman, who explained everything all over again each time she came.

“Of eight hundred horses,” echoed Alicia, and she asked him again about the dynamos, about the Pelton system, about the copper strips that distributed the electricity.

There were days when her mule’s easy trot would take her far, up to the cotton textile factory in Rio Blanco. It was the largest and most modern in the world. Six thousand men, women, and children worked there. As she was getting closer, her heart beat faster, her mouth became dry. She and Ramón had been there once. She liked to stay there for a while, looking at the big clock the owners had placed on top of a tower facing the buildings, with its four transparent quadrants lit by night, and the loud bells and whistles to strike every hour on the hour. There was nothing like it in Orizaba.

“Let’s get out of here,” Ramón had said.

“Let’s wait a little bit more, the clock is just about to strike,” she pleaded.

“Let’s go now, this place has the smell of blood.”

On the way back Ramón told her what nobody in Orizaba ever mentioned. He made her swear, kissing a cross, never to repeat it. If anybody found out he had told her that, he would be thrown out of the army.

“A few years ago there was a strike here and workers were killed. I do not know how many of them, probably hundreds. A friend of mine who worked for the local sheriff’s office saw their corpses. They were piled on the two railroad platforms, so many he could not even count them. There were women and children, and also loose parts, arms, legs. My friend told me that the train left for Veracruz, where the dead were thrown to the sharks.”

Orizaba grew chilly in the afternoons, the fragrances in the air died out, and smells from the kitchen invaded the house, particularly that of hot chocolate with cinnamon and vanilla. There was often a persistent light rain the townspeople called chipichipi. Her mother and her aunts turned wistful. Sitting at the long dining room table, Alicia listened to their talk, while dunking bits of Mexican pan dulce into her hot chocolate. Doña Petra and her sisters waxed nostalgic about many things, but above all about the day they saw Emperor Maximilian passing by at close range, his golden beard parted in two, accompanied by the demented empress in her mauve silks.

After the chocolate they usually joined the religious procession. Alicia tried to protect her head from the drizzle with a black lace mantilla and accompanied all the women in her family, including the maids, to take Our Lady of Sorrows for an outing. They would rescue her image from its niche in the Temple of the Twelve Virgins, where she had been agonizing since colonial times, her face haggard, and take her on their shoulders to parade her in the streets, decked in her black velvet mantle all embroidered in baroque pearls.

The evenings belonged to the ghosts. At the Rovira home, the family retired early to hear them pass by. At the stroke of midnight, in a vertiginous horse carriage, death would take the legendary figure of la Monja Alférez (the Ensign Nun) to receive her nightly punishment for the unmentionable sins she had committed in life. Then, through all the underground tunnels beneath the city, Mexican soldiers marched, trying to escape from the invading French, and one could hear the trampling of their feet and their laments. And through small openings in the draperies, dead orphaned children, called chaneques by the locals, would peer in from the darkness in order to spy on the lit interiors of the town houses. These giggling chaneques, with their lighted candles, were small, infantile, wicked.

But neither the nun’s cries nor the taunts of the chaneques got the best of Alicia because her father, Don Félix Rovira, kept a small bed next to his in the master bedroom where she could come running at midnight if she woke up in a panic.

“Father, the chaneques are trying to pull my hair,” she would tell Don Félix, and he would keep her company until she fell asleep again. But in fact, those who appeared in her nightmares were Our Lady of Sorrows and the dismembered arms and legs of the Río Blanco workers.

Yarn over twice, insert hook, draw up a loop, and close the row with a double stitch; Alicia spent many hours with her two sisters making feather stitches for the roses and nightingales of her lace wedding dress. The three of them would sit on Turkish-style stools in an intimate, closed circle. They would make fun of the large bedsheet with the big eyelet in the center that Alicia was going to use on her wedding night so Ramón would not see her naked. They giggled, whispered to each other, and one would stick her finger through the eyelet and touch the other’s cheek.

“Peekaboo, guess who’s inside you!”

Huddling close together like clandestine accomplices, they covered their mouths to contain their laughter, repeating as if it were a tongue twister the words that were taught to future brides being prepared for marriage: “We do this, O Holy of Holies, not because of our evil ways, nor for fornication, but to bring forth a child in your holy service”—and they competed to see who could say it fastest—“Do this, Holy O, to serve in your holy fornication, the holy vice of your holy son, Fornitio, venicio, holy servitio.”

Her mother, Doña Petra, would cross herself at such heresies. But then, moving closer to them, she would get into the conversation and break the gap, risking an argument.

“If ever, God forbid, a man is about to rape you and there is a gun within your reach, kill yourself before you are dishonored!”

The girls would laugh.

“You’re crazy, Mother, it would be better to shoot the man.”

They doubled and redoubled a strand of thread and tacked it to the arch. The three of them took turns in their needlework, but Sarita had a tighter stitch than Alicia, and Esther’s was looser, and so the nightingales in the wedding dress were large and angular in some places, and smaller with fat wings in others. Their mother made them undo their work and start all over again. One day while embroidering they were eating cherry chocolate cordials and stained the lace. Hiding from Doña Petra, they washed it with hydrogen peroxide and salt.

They would again bring the yarn over twice, insert the hook, and draw up a loop to make a double stitch while listening to their mother’s domestic advice.

“For stomach pain, remember this. When you are in Clipperton, if you run out of your paregoric elixir, boil an avocado seed for fifteen minutes: that tea makes a good substitute.”

The girls just laughed.

“But the avocados will be gone before the elixir!”

Yarn over twice, insert hook, draw up a loop, and the wedding date was approaching. One day a messenger arrived in Orizaba with a long necklace of gray pearls for the bride to be that her fiancé had sent her from Japan. The whole neighborhood found out about it and came over to admire the pearls. Alicia delighted in wearing them around her neck and went outside to the patio to do acrobatics and cartwheels with the servants’ children.

That is how her life went. She would embroider her white dress and learn to cook rice on the big coal stove so it would not come out too salty or lumpy. When nobody noticed, she would lock herself up to read and reread alone her fiancé’s love letters and to answer them on small notepaper from her stationery set, taking great care in penning her round lowercase letters and large, elaborate capitals.

Before writing to him she would review the latest news, the important happenings in Orizaba during his absence. A pregnant Indian who used to sell tortillas and tortillas chips in the market was gored in the belly by a cow. The woman was still alive, bleeding and screaming, and Alicia helped to take her to the Women’s Hospital, where they saved her and her baby. Another day, the satyr in the Santa Anita neighborhood was finally caught and hanged. He had raped fifteen girls, giving them the French venereal disease and getting all of them pregnant.

In the end, Alicia would reject these stories because Ramón would not be interested, and she wrote only about her love for him, such as the card written in English that, years after the tragedy, appeared in a book about Clipperton by General Francisco L. Urquizo, which says exactly this on one side:

Señor

Ramón Arnaud

Acapulco

And on the other,

I never forget you

and I love you with

all my soul, Alice.

Orizaba, June 14, 1908

A line in violet-colored ink springs up from the letter e in “Alice,” turns back and curls around the last a in “Orizaba.” Yarn over twice, insert hook, draw up a loop, close the row, and end off.

Mexico City, Today

“NO, IT ISN’T TRUE, she didn’t embroider her wedding gown,” Alicia’s granddaughter, Mrs. Guzmán (née María Teresa Arnaud) tells me, then going on to quote from the book she wrote on family memories: “Alicia’s wedding gown has arrived from Europe; it is very elegant, and for several weeks now it has been on display in the shop window at Las Fábricas de Francia. The wedding is to be held shortly,” she says, reading from La tragedia de Clipperton, published in Mexico in 1982.

“Of course I know this very well. I know my grandmother’s life to the minute, I see it all through her eyes. Do you want more details about that dress? It was ordered through the Chabrands, the owners of the best clothing store in Orizaba, Las Fábricas de Francia, which had sent for it by telegram to France. Many years later, for my own wedding — my husband is a water management engineer — I said I wanted to get married in my grandmother Alicia’s wedding gown. I was told I was crazy, that it would not fit me, since she was almost a child when she got married. But I was bent on wearing it, and it smelled of mothballs when I took it out of the chest. Up to the last minute, people were telling me not to be so stubborn, I couldn’t possibly get into it. However, it fit me marvelously: I could button it easily. We were exactly the same size; we resembled each other, and had the same body shape, the two of us!” says her proud granddaughter, sitting on a heavy wood rocking chair, Mexican colonial style, in the living room of her San Angel home in Mexico City. Her snow-white hair, clear proof of a recent visit to a beauty salon, frames her doll face: perfect features, slightly dimpled chin, and luminous complexion in spite of her being fifty already.

“My whole family tells me now that I look exactly like my grandmother. You don’t know me, you know nothing about us, but you have called me Alicia a couple of times, though my name is María Teresa. Even though she died long before I was born, there is a deep bond between us that goes beyond logic. I can never put her memory down to rest. Her intense suffering and courage were remarkable. No one recognizes that today.”

Through the large windows we can see the meticulously manicured garden. In the center of the living room there is a table, and a Talavera ceramic vase with five black feathers in it. There are several seashells in a little box.

“Those are feathers from Clipperton birds; the shells are from Clipperton beaches. Does that surprise you? My home is truly a sanctuary for the island. For years I have saved all the newspaper and magazine articles written about it from around the world. I still have letters from my grandfather, and clothing that belonged to my grandmother. I have soil samples and water samples from Clipperton — I am a chemist by profession, you know. These things were brought to me because I have never been there. When I wrote my book about the isle, I met my destiny. I knew that my mission on earth was to tell that story, which is also my own story. I am selling the book from home and from my husband’s office. He is, as I already told you, an engineer in water management. Every week I make a presentation on Clipperton. The navy invites me, I have friends there. For me, each conference is psychologically and emotionally exhausting, because as I talk, I revive the tragedy, I relive it again. I come back home two to five pounds thinner, and I have to stay in bed for a couple of days in order to recuperate.”

At that moment her husband comes down the stairs. He is a short man, wears glasses, and is carrying his raincoat over his arm. On his way to work, he greets us politely and looks at her tenderly, with admiration even, and then leaves.

“Did you see how he looks at me? He shares my mission and has worked tirelessly to make my book widely known, but sometimes it worries him to think that I go too far. ‘Come down to earth, María Teresa,’ he tells me, ‘come back to reality.’ And I tell him that my reality is not here but in Clipperton, because that isle is my life.”

María Teresa goes to the kitchen to make coffee. On the dining room wall there is a large portrait of her, hands on her lap, her white muslin strapless dress baring her equally white shoulders. She is looking straight ahead, unsmiling. In a silver frame propped on a mahogany sideboard is a photo of her grandmother Alicia. They really resemble each other.

María Teresa brings the coffee on a tray. Unlike her dress in the portrait, the one she is wearing now is severe, with a collar up to her neck and sleeves down to her wrists, in a dark shade of purple, a color of mourning. She wears no rings on her fingers, just a pair of showy gold earrings and a cross, also in gold, on her chest.

“People say that I am a porfirista like my grandfather, who fought in Porfirio Díaz’s federal army. It is true that I feel nostalgia for the past and have no interest in present-day politics. But I am not a throwback. We all have our idiosyncracies. Look, my grandfather was really a Frenchman, his parents were French, and he sacrificed his life so that Mexico would not lose a piece of land, which today, after many a turn and tumble, is precisely in the hands of the French. That is why, because of his spilled blood, my family finds no peace and cannot rest until Clipperton is again under the Mexican flag.”

The big entrance door to the house has amber glass panels on both sides. The light comes through them and falls on María Teresa while she says good-bye with an admonition.

“So you are taking on Clipperton? Do you really want to trace its tragic history? Do you honestly want to understand all the love and all the forgiving that occurred on that inhospitable rock in the midst of the Pacific Ocean? You better watch out then and mind my words. Clipperton was not always its name. Its original name was Isle of Passion, and whoever gave it that name understood it very well. Whoever enters its world pays dearly for it. What you’ll find there is a sea of sorrows.”

Señora María Teresa Arnaud (Mrs. Guzmán), the granddaughter of the Arnauds from Orizaba, has come to see me off at the door of her San Angel home. She stands next to the glazed door. The light coming through gives her complexion a strange tone, alabaster-like. She has something else to say.

“Let me make one more thing clear: my grandmother and her sisters did indeed spend time embroidering together a few months before the wedding. They spent hours and hours doing that. Not making a lace dress, no. They embroidered all the linens for the home on the isle — sheets, towels, tablecloths, napkins. They even embroidered the famous saintly bedsheet, with its keyhole opening and all, which was used in those days on the wedding night to consummate the marriage. They did a beautiful job embroidering the bride’s initials, A.R.A. That is why you became confused. It is because of such things that my father and I do not want anyone outside of us two to tell our story. People talk of things they know nothing about, they spread versions that are not accurate.”

Orizaba, Today

SITTING IN THE KITCHEN AT PENSIÓN LOYO, Alicia Arnaud remembers the gray pearl necklace that her father sent her mother from Japan.

“I remember my mother wearing that necklace. She liked to finger it, caress it, while she spoke about Dad, while she told us all that happened. I do not know who might have it now. When Mother died, Aunt Adela Arnaud, my father’s sister, took us in. Had it not been for her, we would have ended up in an orphanage. We never found out what happened to Mother’s things, the ones that were left after her death. I do not know who might have that necklace now, but I remember it as if I were looking at it.”

In the whole Clipperton story, the gray pearl necklace takes on a political significance, apart from its emotional value: it is the only evidence left of Ramón Arnaud’s trip to Japan. As far as it’s known, he didn’t tell anybody the reason for his trip, and didn’t leave any written record either.

“We never found out why he took it. I think he didn’t even tell my mother,” Alicia Arnaud says.

Porfirio Díaz himself commissioned him and took the trouble of interviewing him personally for it. The trip took place in 1907, immediately after Arnaud was named governor of Clipperton Island. By then, relations between Japan and Mexico were becoming stronger. Japanese imports became fashionable in Mexico City, judo was the rage, poets wrote odes to bamboo trees, and the ladies bought parasols and silk fans.

Then there were persistent rumors of a secret treaty between Mexico and Japan. People said that Japan would declare war on the United States to secure its control over the Pacific, and that Mexico would be its ally. In accordance with such an agreement, it is possible that Clipperton would have been considered of strategic importance due to its location. On the other hand, it is also possible that this often-mentioned secret treaty between Mexico and Japan was just a rumor. That is, nothing but a distracting strategy on the part of the German government, which, in an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, wanted to set the United States and Japan, its two principal enemies, against each other. To spread the tale of a sinister plan to gain control over the Pacific region would foster the paranoia of the “yellow peril” that was affecting the United States.

That leaves another possible explanation: that Arnaud did not say much about his trip, leaving no records, not because of its secret and transcendental historical import, but just the opposite, because of its mere triviality. For instance, Ramón might have been sent to Tokyo as a translator for formal diplomatic affairs. Or to take to the emperor of Japan a piece of Sèvres porcelain as a gift from the president. And perhaps Clipperton never had any strategic importance for anyone, except for birds as a convenient place to leave their droppings.

Whether it was decisive or trivial, this piece of the puzzle has been hopelessly lost. Nothing is known about why Lieutenant Ramón Arnaud went to Japan. There is only one known fact: that from Japan he sent his fiancée a necklace of gray pearls.

Orizaba, 1908

THE MORNING OF JUNE 24 was a bit warm. The stones at the portico of the parish church, still wet from a midnight downpour, were quickly being dried out by the brand-new sun. Steam was rising from the ground. The early morning mists and the incense that from time to time escaped from the interior gave the facade of the old church on the plaza a blurred, milky appearance, a nervous silhouette.

At five minutes after six Alicia appeared as if floating on the white ocean spray of her wedding dress and trailing a cloud of tulle after her. She walked holding on to her father’s arm from the wrought-iron fence up to the entrance and then, one step at a time, up the stairs and inside the church, all the way to the main altar. Ramón in his dress uniform was waiting for her. By his side, the voluminous, solid figure of his mother, Doña Carlota, all draped in black.

Alicia was bedazzled by the thousands of lit candles, by the tiny flames that multiplied in the reflection on the gold leaf that covered the carved cedar of the altars. She felt overwhelmed by the quantity of flowers. The saints, niches, naves, corners, both sides of the aisles, the pulpit: the whole church was bursting with blooms. They combined in a full range of colors and scents, dominating all the available oxygen inside. She felt asphyxiated and a little dizzy, and, closing her eyes, she slowly let some air into her lungs and tried to focus only on the smells. In spite of the incense, she was able to distinguish floral scents — the sweet jasmines, the slightly acrid daisies, the steamy gardenias, the familiar roses, and the almost imperceptible yet treacherous charm of orchids. The overloaded breath of air wrapped around her and numbed her senses, isolating her from reality.

She opened her eyes, inhaling deeply, and was able, little by little, to focus on the blurred images. Particularly one of them, a stranger who stood stiffly by her side. She looked at him in amazement, as if seeing for the first time his thin mustache, his doll-like eyelashes, his round, introspective eyes, his hair, disciplined with brilliantine and sharply parted in the middle. He, Ramón, the stranger with whom she was to live for the rest of her days, turned to look at her and smiled. Though it came from that strange face, his smile was warm and familiar, and brought Alicia back down to earth.

I know him little, but I love him, Alicia thought, after catching her breath, and she busied herself arranging her tulle veil around her feet. Actually, they had known each other since childhood and had been engaged since adolescence, but during their courtship they never had the opportunity of being alone, of talking freely until they ran out of topics to talk about, of being close, of being in physical contact, of scrutinizing the nooks and crannies of each other’s soul. In the last seven years, Ramón had been away on military duty. Once or twice a year he had been granted a furlough to return to Orizaba, and on those visits, which would last a few days or a few weeks, he alternated between sleeping all his postponed siestas, letting himself be fed and pampered by his mother, and courting his fiancée.

An engagement in Orizaba — a twisted, fearful, and overly pious town, teeming with gossip — consisted of no more than after-dinner family gatherings, bouquets of roses, croquet games, kissing of hands, and walks on the alameda. There is testimony, for instance, that after their engagement was formalized and made public, the two lovers began to stroll arm in arm. This is stated in an unpublished manuscript by a local friend of Alicia’s family, Don Antonio Díaz Meléndez, entitled “Orizaba de mis recuerdos” (The Orizaba I remember).

There is no mention in it, however, of the piles of garbage on the streets where the pigs snooped around, of the dark vestries where priests used to exorcise epileptics by beating them, nor of the street corners, right in the center of town, where the poor used to relieve themselves. But the lost graces of Orizaba do get nostalgic mention: the well-trimmed lawn and shade trees in the alameda, the fountain of playful waters, the aristocratic family gatherings listening to the strains of the Municipal Military Band playing Juventino Rosas’s “Over the Waves” waltz in the gazebo of the central plaza after the eleven o’clock mass. Don Antonio tells how one Sunday in the middle of an open-air concert and the pleasant strolling of the townspeople, he saw a beautiful girl “wearing an elegant hat and a dress with a discreet neckline, reaching down to the tips of her shiny patent leather booties, as the fashion in those days demanded. She was Miss Alicia Rovira, on the arm of a handsome officer, whom she introduced to me as her fiancé. It was Captain Arnaud. This was the first and last time I saw him, and he made an excellent impression on me with his pleasant conversation and loving behavior toward his fiancée, charming Alicia.”

One day, dressed up and serene, they were walking a few steps ahead of her parents, siblings, and cousins when Alicia stopped suddenly and told Ramón, “Besides being in love and getting married, I would like us to be friends, you and me.”

Ramón looked at her in surprise. He kept silent for a while.

“I would like that, too. But that will have to be when we live together, alone. For now, with so many people around us, it’s even difficult to be romantically in love like in the novels.”

The time came to set the wedding date and begin the preparations. Ramón was no longer a decent, pennyless adolescent, nor a dishonored military man labeled as a deserter. Now he had a career and a future — risky and unpredictable, but still promising — to offer his beloved, so he asked for her hand in marriage. On a windy night, accompanied by his mother, Doña Carlota, he arrived at the home of Félix Rovira and his wife, Petra, Alicia’s parents, who served them glasses of sherry and some olives, while Don Félix overdid himself, being gallant and making pretentious jokes. He was courteously pompous when he offered a toast for the future couple. Nobody suspected that his eyes were swollen and his nose red because for hours before the visit, he had locked himself up in the library in a rage and he had cried and had thrown on the floor, tome after tome, most of his Encyclopedia Britannica in an attack of paternal jealousy.

The announcements and the invitations to the wedding were ordered to be printed in an ocher shade. There was a breakfast planned for after the ceremony with French-style hot chocolate, link sausages, the blood pudding that Don Félix, who was from Galicia, prepared himself, and the assorted hors d’oeuvres with Doña Carlota’s famous mayonnaise.

The day had come, and now the wedding ceremony was coming to an end without a hitch, apart from the collectively experienced lack of air. Alicia followed every detail and imprinted them all in her memory, where they would be etched forever: Doña Carlota’s large diamond, which Ramón had set in an engagement ring that reflected tiny rainbows from her little girl’s hand; the weight of the earrings, which matched the ring; the Holy Sacrament of the Communion held on high by the priest’s fat fingers; the nostalgia on her father’s face, which everybody except Alicia simply interpreted as pure emotion; the extremely sharp timbre, practically superhuman, of the solo voice from the choir singing the “Ave María”; Ramón’s beatific smile as he thought of breaking his fast with the sausages and the chocolate. And above all, overpowering everything, the dense, compact scent emanating from the flowers.

At the climax of the ceremony, the final benediction, Alicia looked at the black feathers of her mother-in-law’s outrageous hat. They annoyed her, they seemed to her like a bad omen, and, involuntarily, she made a face. As if he had heard what she was thinking, Ramón bent down toward her and whispered in her ear: “I told my mother not to wear that ugly bird hat because it was going to scare you.”

Orizaba, Today

I COME TO ORIZABA looking for traces of that wedding. It is a small city, dull and graceless. In the Pensión Loyo — where Alicia Arnaud Loyo lives alone since she became a widow — I find one of the marriage announcements, printed in ocher on heavy paper and folded in four. The message is written twice, according to custom.

Mr. Félix Rovira and Mrs. Petra G. Rovira

are pleased to inform you of the forthcoming

marriage of their daughter Alicia

and Mr. Ramón Arnaud

Mrs. Carlota Vignon Arnaud

is pleased to inform you of the forthcoming

marriage of her son Ramón

and Miss Alicia Rovira

According to the Arnauds’ biographers (their granddaughter, María Teresa Arnaud Guzmán, and General Francisco Urquizo), the wedding took place on June 24. However, the wedding invitation contradicts this fact because it says “… has the pleasure of inviting you to the ecclesiastical ceremony, which will take place on the twenty-fourth of the present month,” and it is dated “Orizaba, July 1908.” They were married then in July, not June. This is not the first time that the calendar of their lives gets muddled, and it will not be the last in which time plays tricks on them.

In his manuscript “The Orizaba I Remember,” Don Antonio Díaz Meléndez writes that after the religious ceremony “they headed for the Hotel de Francia, where the customary wedding hot chocolate was served.”

I have come to learn more about this hotel, which still exists. At that time, I am told, it was the most prestigious social center of the city. Today it is in ruins. The sign that presents it as the Grand Hotel de France has several letters missing, the tiles that cover the walls are falling off, and its fifty-nine rooms are indefinitely closed “for repairs.” From its times of splendor, as a memento, there is one guest remaining who suffers from all sorts of minor ailments. A Spaniard who came to Mexico fleeing from the war, he has stayed here ever since, and when the hotel was closed, the management could not get rid of him. He still walks around its balconies, now without railings, and its fountains, dry for some time, while he curses the humidity and his arthritis.

However, in spite of the passing of time and the extensive dilapidation of the Grand Hotel de France, one can still perceive traces of Ramón and Alicia’s wedding. They remain imprinted in the spacious hall that was once the dining room, in the midst of the scaffolding that holds the now worm-eaten beams, in the green spots that are taking over the walls, and in whatever remains of the Art Nouveau stained-glass windows, badly in need of restoration. Whenever the wind blows in, the ghosts of that wedding reception seem to be floating around again: white dust clouds come up from the rubble that very well could have been rice showers, icing from the cake, or the bride’s veil.

But no. It seems there is some error here, too. In spite of Don Antonio’s assertion, it is improbable that their wedding breakfast was held at the hotel. Their granddaughter, for example, says otherwise in her book. She insists that it was held at the home of Alicia’s parents.

Seeing Orizaba the way it is now, not as it was then, Ramón and Alicia’s bucolic romance seems inconceivable, unreal. I try to visualize them crossing these streets, now riddled with pollution and congested with cars, and stopping on the same sidewalks — narrow, devoid of trees, with open sewers — to greet friends, pay their respects to acquaintances, and smile at strangers. I attempt, but without success, to picture them having tea, solemn and a little smug, in the resounding mediocrity of the two-star Hotel Alvear, recently restored, with its beveled-mirrored lobby, its synthetic plush furniture, and the sign that reads “We accept Diner’s Club and American Express.”

Pale and old-fashioned Alicia and Ramón, in the mild attempt at a city that is Orizaba today. .. I don’t even want to imagine them — with the Avenida Oriente buses roaring past — discovering in front of TE-CA, the “First Tools Boutique,” the modest monument donated five years ago by the Lions Club.

The top part of the monument has the bronze bust of a Mexican officer wearing a Prussian helmet, and on its side is a pathetic little plaque in which the same officer is represented, now at full length, holding by the hand a woman with three children. The five of them are on a wild ocean shore under stormy clouds, all barefoot, their clothes in rags. Below this, on a smaller plaque, they would be aghast to read their own names and to learn about their fatal destiny, just as it appears on the inscription:

Captain Ramón Arnaud Vignon, who,

accompanied by his heroic wife, Alicia Rovira,

a good model of the virtues of Mexican women,

maintained Mexico’s sovereignty on the Isle of Passion

until his death on October 7, 1914.

Clipperton, 1917

H. P. PERRIL, CAPTAIN of the American gunboat Yorktown, had never ever had anything to do with Clipperton. The place did not intrigue him. Quite the contrary, it inspired in him a deep lack of interest and even an uneasy feeling. Against his will, however, that isle was fated to acquire great importance for him. En route from his naval base in California, and due to a whim of fate, he not only arrived there but did so at the right time. Not a moment too soon, not a moment too late.

He wished to leave a record in his own words of that story, which he considered unique in his long experience at sea and, as he commented to his family after returning to California, he had the impression of “carrying Robinson Crusoe tied to the mast.” He meant that the misfortunes of this shipwrecked legendary figure seemed like only the first chapter of those suffered by the Clipperton castaways, which he had been able to see with his own eyes.

When the captain finished writing, he had spent the whole night of July 18, 1917, telling the recent events in exact detail. It had been his lot to become witness and actor, both judge and participant. He stayed awake in his cabin until dawn, writing a long letter to his wife, Charlotte. Once in a while he would pause, absorbed in the metallic coldness of the moon reflecting on the waters. He felt he had to control the turmoil of the day’s memories so that he would not allow them to trample his measured and precise prose. “Tonight,” he wrote to his wife, “I have something really interesting to tell you.”

Twenty-four hours before, he had been sure that on his tedious voyage through Mexican waters only a few routine entries would be made in the ship’s log. However, strange things happened. So strange that they touched the heart of the unflappable Captain Perril, and made his hand tremble as he wrote to Charlotte: “It is something I will remember as long as I live. I hope to be able to tell you about it in a way that you and the children can also appreciate.”

He wanted to tell his wife the story in every minute detail, but begged her not to read it in haste, because: “In order to develop it in the proper chronological order, I am going to begin with its less important aspects.” He did not wish to render chaotic a story already confusing in itself, so he at first avoided broaching the heart of the matter. That would have to wait until later, and he was counting on her patience to last.

Pacific Ocean, 1908

ALICIA GLANCED AT her reflection in the porthole and did not like what she saw. Two days before, when she came on board, her long brown hair was piled high on her head, a hairpiece inside a horizontal curl that framed her face. It was an old-fashioned coiffure, rather too adult for her, that clashed with her girlish face, though she thought otherwise and lamented that the wind had undone it. Her hair fell on her shoulders, disorderly and sticky with sea spray. Dark shadows under her eyes, like the ones she had when she was sick with German measles, darkened her luminous complexion. And her small, perfect features appeared enlarged and distorted in the concave glass of the porthole.

On August 27, a month after the wedding, she and Ramón had boarded for Clipperton on the Corrigan II, a large gunboat of the Mexican Navy. In the compartments below deck they had all the paraphernalia necessary to turn that barren isle into a livable place: bags of black topsoil to make a garden and seeds to grow lettuce and other greens; an enormous supply of grain and fruit, including several hundred citrus; tools, rolls of fabric, and a sewing machine; carbines, machetes, and other weapons; a silk Mexican flag, green, white, and red and with the coat of arms embroidered in silver thread by nuns; pigs and chickens; pounds of dried beef from Oaxaca; medications and first-aid manuals; potted plants; coal and other fuels; family portraits and photographs; an Austrian formal sitting room set; wicker rocking chairs from Acapulco; a mandolin; a phonograph and some popular recordings; a set of silver horsehair brushes for Alicia’s hair; a pair of canaries in their cage; some delicacies to eat; books and newspapers; and in a leather trunk, carefully packed in mothballs, her wedding dress and its twenty yards of lace train.

Traveling on board with the couple were eleven soldiers, together with their children and camp followers, that would make up the garrison commanded by Arnaud. For all of them, a small, suffocating corner next to the engines had been assigned, where their pallets could fit only when placed one against the other. Before they were stricken by seasickness, they had enclosed themselves in the semidarkness to gamble their last pay on the whims of dice and playing cards.

The camp followers fluttered about the soldiers like anxious hens. Loud-mouthed, sweaty, rough and with unruly manes, they smelled of smoke and female musk. All of them, young and old, seemed to be of the same indecipherable age. With their raspy voices, which sounded like cornets, comic sopranos, or geese, they mingled prayers with blasphemy, and sweet, tender words with cursing and crude language. They elbowed their way and fought over a place to stow the few belongings they had on this earth: some rags and serapes tied up, a metate to grind corn, and a pot to cook beans. They had followed their men — their johns — on board without knowing where they were headed. As usual, they boiled some gunpowder in water and then drank it. This was how they tried to find the courage and the resignation to run around battlefields without thinking of anything else but having their men’s food ready as soon as the shooting stopped.

Compared to the hole where the underlings were quartered, the small cabin occupied by the Arnauds was luxurious. It had two bunks, a ewer with its dish and mirror for their personal cleanliness, and they even had some comforts that in a warship are usually the captain’s exclusive privilege, such as a coatrack and a desk. At first Alicia was very happy to spend her time there, fixing everything as if it were a doll-house. Since it was her first ocean voyage, Ramón advised her to take precautions against seasickness, like having only whitefish with no condiments, and drinking atole and lemon water. In spite of that, on the third day she overslept and woke up restless, overwhelmed by being locked up in her cabin. Ramón had not been there for hours. She got up quickly and went up to the deck. While climbing the ladder, she was startled to see her distorted reflection in a porthole. She looked awful.

With the early morning light, the sky was so overcast and the horizon seemed so close that she felt she could almost touch it with her hand. Between the sea and the sky, only a narrow strip was left for humans, and there the temperature was that of a steel furnace. All of a sudden the breeze had died, and a few small but viciously choppy waves were rocking the ship mercilessly. An unmistakable smell attacked her nostrils. Acrid and organic. It was vomit. Seasickness had spread like an implacable ritual baptism for the people who had, for the first time, ventured out to sea. Alicia saw soldiers, camp followers, and children wandering about, transparent and ghostly, and in the midst of this sorry spectacle, she heard again, for the hundredth time during that voyage, a childish voice repeating a silly ditty: “Day star of gold, don’t let me get cold, during the night, when there is no light, day star of gold…”

The hellish heat threatened to crack skulls, as well as the woodwork, making people’s heads hum with fever, and making the deck hot enough to fry johnnycakes. However, that child kept singing his ditty all throughout the voyage, “Day star of gold, don’t let me get cold,” sitting on a bench, his large eyes looking at nowhere in particular, his white piqué sailor hat down to his ears, while he bobbed in the air his little chocolate-colored boots with preposterously long shoelaces.

In the stillness of that sweltering heat, his piercing little songbird voice reached every corner. It was a minimal torture, but sustained like incessant drops of water on a prisoner’s head. Alicia wanted to distance herself, but she sat near him as if impelled by a small fatal fascination, and started to review in her mind ways of silencing him. As if it were all-important, as if in that child with his boots and bonnet, exactly in his voice, precisely in the particular timbre of that voice, lay the epicenter of the heat wave, of the collective seasickness, of the suffocating sensation of ill-being. Who were his parents? Where was his father, to pull his ears? Alicia’s nerves were raw, her humor prickly, and her thoughts turned to cruel ways in which to silence him. She remembered the nuns at school, Sister Carola and Sister Asunta, who, unexpectedly materializing from the shadows, used to pinch her, and then she felt that pain in her arm, brief like a hen’s peck but sharp. She would never do that to this child, but it calmed her nerves to entertain the thought.

Sensing that her system had reached its limits of endurance, Alicia leaned over the guardrail, hoping for an improbable breeze that would take away that nauseous feeling in the pit of her stomach. She then looked at the Pacific Ocean. It was churning, dense and gray, and on her face she felt the warm, soupy vapor. “If I keep looking at it, I will also be undone,” she told herself, and turned around so as not to see the spray and the bubbling dark waters. Then she noticed that her husband was only a few feet away.

Captain* Ramón Arnaud of the Mexican Army was bending pitifully overboard, jolted by retching, throwing up the very last yellow remnants in his stomach. He was not a seaman but an army man, a landlubber. Those rough years in a mad rush from one barracks to the other had seasoned him to overcome terrestrial calamities, but he was not prepared to confront the pounding of the ocean. He kept throwing up, though it seemed there was nothing else left, and in each spasm he got to know another dark corner of hell, trying to hold his entrails in but afraid he would be turned inside out like a glove. His drill uniform was soiled and unbuttoned, and his face wet with a cold sweat. His hair, however, held by brilliantine and oblivious to the violent jolts the rest of his body was experiencing, remained in place, perfectly parted in the middle, neat and martial-looking. To her he seemed tidy and elegant in spite of his disheveled appearance, and solemn even in his desolation. His hair is not even ruffled when he throws up, Alicia thought, and her miserable mood dissipated.

At that moment, wondrous gusts of cool wind began sweeping across the deck, brushing against the faces of the bedraggled passengers. That clean air renewed the condition of their lungs and sedated their digestive systems, soothing their death wishes. A seagull flew leisurely over the ship, announcing the proximity of land. As if by magic, the waters became calm, and the ocean, recovering its liquid state, became golden and smooth. The collective intestinal nightmare abated, and the child who sang like a bird became silent.

Men and women lifted their heads and saw it in the distance: before their eyes, white and radiantly barren, was the silhouette of Clipperton Island. It was August 30, 1908.

Clipperton, 1917

ON THE MORNING OF JULY 18, 1917, U.S. Navy captain H.P. Perril saw Clipperton Island for the first and last times. He never came ashore, but he took a very careful look at it from his ship, the Yorktown, through his spyglass. He circumnavigated the isle — outside the barrier reef, and at a safe distance from it — exactly in an hour, and confirmed that it was about five miles around. “Clipperton Island,” he wrote, “is a dangerous low atoll, approximately 2 miles in diameter.”

An atoll is an astonishing formation in the shape of a doughnut, with water in its center and around its perimeter. A ring of land with a lagoon in the center, floating in the middle of the ocean. At some moment in its prehistoric past, Clipperton had been a volcanic mountain surrounded by a powerful crown of coral reefs. The mountain in time sank slowly, and disappeared under the water, and the reef wall was the only thing left above sea level. What had been the crater of a volcano was now a lagoon of brackish waters, effervescent with sulfur coming from the belly of the earth.

The captain goes on: “[The isle] has a promontory 62 feet high on its southwest coast, which at first sight looks like a ship’s sail, and on approaching it, like a gigantic castle. This promontory can be seen from a distance of 12 to 15 miles provided there is no fog: then, the promontory and the isle itself can only be seen when it is already at very close range.

“The breakers on its eastern shore do not provide early enough warning for a ship to change course in order to avoid running aground. The isle is surrounded by an uninterrupted coral reef on which the ocean pounds heavily and ceaselessly, sometimes covering the isle. There are sharks swimming around. During the rainy season, waterfalls cascade on its southwestern coast.

“While we were circumnavigating the isle, I saw more seagulls, flying fish, and butterflies than I had ever seen on a similar stretch of coastline,” Perril comments, amazed at this place which, lacking any vegetation, no blade of grass to soften the hostility of those rocks, nonetheless abounds in an unusual and alarming proliferation of animal life. “Thousands of birds fly around the island, and the guano deposits are being exploited commercially. A colony was established to operate a phosphate plant some years ago. […] A layer of guano several feet deep covers the isle. There is no doubt that birds have inhabited it for years.”

Nine years earlier, and from the deck of another ship, the Corrigan II, the Arnauds had viewed, full of expectation, what for them was a promised land. Though that happened long before and they were seeing the isle through glasses of a different color, what they saw could not have been much dissimilar to what the American captain, H. P. Perril, saw when he accidentally approached its shores.

Clipperton, 1908

THERE WAS A BUNCH OF CHILDREN and women watching them from shore. Alicia looked at them from the barge, and they seemed dejected and lonesome in that hot weather. Their tanned skin, dark and dry, withstood the rigors of the sun while the white sun glare bleached out all the colors, already faded, of the scant garments they wore. Boobies, the shore birds, fluttered around them and walked over their feet, and people shooed them away with either strong arm gestures or lazy kicks.

The small, faded universe in front of her eyes reverberated and consumed itself in a slow combustion. Alicia saw how the ocean seemed to explode over the reefs, pounding the rocks, the few sickly coconut palms, and the human beings, then coming to rest on every crevice, hollow, and cranny. The sun lost no time in evaporating the water, and everything was soon covered with a mirrorlike layer of salt, refulgent, blinding. The ocean spray would fall slowly on the people, transforming them into salt statues. It was only in their eyes, in the feverish eagerness in their gaze, that Alicia discovered the great expectations, repressed but fierce, for the boat’s arrival.

A few yards ahead of the women, a half-dozen soldiers stood firmly, their heads covered with big straw hats, their drill uniforms battered, their feet in huarache sandals. They also appeared sleepy and blurred, like tin soldiers melting in the sun. They all look like castaways, Alicia thought uneasily. Someday I myself will be watching for the arrival of a boat and will also have an expression on my face like Juan Diego’s when the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to him.

Two masculine figures stood out in the group. One was a youthful man of medium height in uniform and the only one who seemed vital, miraculously fresh in his clean shirt, and the other was a big strong man, radically blond, with a single thick eyebrow extending from one temple to the other without a break in the middle. On a big pole set in a cement base in the midst of everything, a very faded national flag was waving rather reluctantly, as if it were laundry hung out to dry in the wind.

The Corrigan II was anchored at a prudent distance from the dangerous reefs surrounding the isle, and passengers and crew were disembarking from flat-bottomed barges. Alicia’s first sensation on setting foot on Clipperton was one of annoyance: the land was not firm enough, and her shoes sank into the black-green, sticky guano.

More conscious now of the nauseating vapors coming from the lagoon than of the prophetic vibrations that had jolted her a few moments before, she wrinkled her fine little nose and observed, “The whole thing smells like rotten cabbages.”

Suddenly Ramón came out of his mesmerizing seasickness, as if the penetrating smell of cabbages had the same effect on him as did the smelling salts on those who had fainted. Keeping in mind the role he had to play, he regained his natural color, composure, and energy and, with a commanding air, greeted one by one all the members of the reception committee, including the children, with an accompanying firm hand-shake. He immediately called his men and ordered an improvised ceremony for saluting the flag. His first act as governor would be to replace the existing flag with the brand-new one embroidered by nuns.

While the soldiers were delayed searching for it among the dozens of wooden crates they had brought ashore, the Arnauds pulled aside the young-looking officer and the strong blond man. The first was Lieutenant Secundino Angel Cardona, stationed in Clipperton for over six months and assigned as Ramón’s assistant. With six men under his command, he had come to the island before his superior in order to ready the necessary installations for the arrival of Alicia and the incoming troops.

Cardona was a good-looking guy, his hair arranged in the fashion of a neighborhood bully. His impeccable white teeth produced an open, frank smile, and not even his slightly prominent ears nor a few pockmarks managed to detract from his handsome presence.

The blond one was a twenty-eight-year-old German fellow, Gustav Schultz, who represented the English company exploiting the guano, the Pacific Phosphate Company Ltd. He had been established in Clipperton for four years, in charge of processing and exporting the product, and of a number of workers that fluctuated from fifteen, at best, to only two or three when business was not so good. Beneath his bushy, gruff eyebrows, his eyes looked gentle. He smiled softly, balancing on his enormous feet like on a platform, and seemed to expect the newcomer to make a speech.

Arnaud knew that one of the reasons he had been assigned to Clipperton was his knowledge of several languages. More than for international litigation — that was the province of diplomats in Europe — he would need them for communicating with the representatives of the guano company and the supervision of their activities in the name of the Mexican government. He greeted Schultz in strained English, taking extreme care in his pronunciation.

Schultz’s loud laughter interrupted him. Then in an incomprehensible pastiche of German, English, Italian, and Spanish, he mentioned something about palm trees and laughed again with great relish. Disconcerted, Ramón grew silent, and Lieutenant Cardona rushed to explain.

“Do not worry, Captain, nobody understands the blond guy — none of the workers, not even his wife. He lives here surrounded by foreigners. His men are all Italians who have not learned Spanish. He has in his head such a jumble of languages that he is the Tower of Babel personified. But he works hard and keeps good company records. At least we can understand his numbers, and that way we find out what is going on. Every time you see him, he tells the story of those palm trees. He brought them himself, it seems, and then planted them over there.” Cardona pointed his index finger at a group of ten or twelve coconut palms, the only trees on the island. Schultz was looking at Cardona and nodding, either in approval of or stunned by what he heard, as if he, too, did not understand anything other people were saying.

The troops finally came up with the flag. Those who had just landed stood in formation next to the soldiers already assembled. One of the new arrivals, no older than fourteen, who had made his living as a mariachi player before signing up, was now the army bugler and made the call to attention.

“Platoon! Fix… bayonets!” ordered Arnaud, trying to instill some life into those present.

With dissonant metallic clatter, the bayonets were attached to the muzzles of their rifles. The flag was hoisted, green, white, and red, with the eagle at its center seemingly pecking at the serpent, all shining brightly in the sun. The adolescent bugle boy played the national anthem with surprising elan. In a timid voice, as if breathed in, the others sang, “Think, O dear homeland, that Heaven has sent you a soldier in every son…”

Arnaud would have liked to feel moved, but only succeeded in feeling worried. Are these the sons of our homeland? he wondered. They look like a sorry lot. He took a good look around him: about thirty half-naked people, a lot of crabs, a depository of bird droppings, and a large rock. That was all.

This is Mexican land, and I am its governor, he thought, with a creeping feeling between ridicule and pride. It’s slim pickings, but still Mexican pickings, as long as I live. Let them send the whole French army if they wish, but nobody will get me out of here. They can torture me, but they will not get me out.

Now he was moved. His eyes welling, he stumbled over the words of a speech appropriate for the occasion, then shouted, “Viva México!” three times. And thus he closed the ceremony of taking territorial possession of Clipperton Island, formerly known as the Isle of Passion. It was over, and after leaving orders for unloading the cargo, Arnaud, together with Cardona, started on a reconnaissance tour. First, they were to take Alicia to her new home, then to inspect the constructions, and, finally, to get together with Schultz at his cabin. He had said good-bye still dwelling on the palm trees story and uttering, from the depths of his throat, the word “drinks” several times.

“He means that he is inviting us for a toast,” explained the lieutenant.

They started walking toward the southwest of the island, where the Arnauds were going to reside. On their way, they passed by the sheds used to store the guano, by the workers’ quarters, and by the soldiers’ barracks. These were flimsy rudimentary structures, barely able to stand and offering scant protection from the elements. All around there were large earthenware jars to collect rainwater, besides garbage, dogs, and a few skinny pigs running after the crabs for a meal.

An air of poverty permeated everything. Alicia was then amazed to see, solitary in the distance, the house that would be her home. It was a wonderful one-story structure in fine varnished pine, with a pitched roof. It faced an open stretch of beach and rested on stilts about five feet above the sands, safe from tides and crabs. There was an ample veranda all around, and, inside, the sunny and airy rooms were interconnected, each with its own access to the veranda. They were all spacious except one, which later became Alicia’s favorite refuge. It was a small study next to the master bedroom, with large stained-glass windows in various colors, all facing the ocean.

It was not precisely a mansion, but in the midst of everything else it seemed like a sample of Oriental splendor. There was nothing in the house that was not functional and in good order, nothing left to improvisation: everything had been made with care, to perfection. It had belonged to the preceding representative of the guano company, an Englishman who returned to Europe when the German Gustav Schultz came to replace him. The former owner, Arthur James Brander, was persnickety and a lover of luxury. He had accepted the position from the other side of the planet on condition that he be allowed to take with him a ready-to-assemble house of the best quality, and that the company would also pay for his Filipino servant’s fare. The man was a devoted servant who allowed his master to win at chess and who, even in Clipperton, served him his tea with just-baked muffins, promptly at five o’clock.

The Englishman had set the house in the only place on the island where the opaque, gray Pacific Ocean became translucent with underwater glimmerings, and where the unhealthy, suffocating smells from the lagoon were blown away by the breeze from the trade winds. An expert carpenter himself, Brander had complemented the basic structure with details of refinement: built-in bookcases and shelves, carved shutters for the windows. For the veranda facing east, he had brought from Nicaragua a hammock where he would lie, a shot of authentic Scotch whiskey in hand, to watch the sunrise. On the other side, on the corridor facing west, he enjoyed another hammock, another Scotch, and sunsets.

Within an hour, boxes and trunks filled with the Arnauds’ paraphernalia invaded the corridors of the Brander house. In the following days Ramón watched, crestfallen, as Alicia toiled with the eagerness of a worker ant and the nimbleness of a squirrel, moving things around and locating them almost anywhere but the places he had so meticulously planned.

She ordered the pots of geraniums to be unloaded where he had thought of constructing a chicken coop; she placed beds and mattresses where he wanted to have the dining room; kept her embroidery and sewing fabrics in the drawers of a desk he had thought his; housed chickens and ducks where he had the toolshed in mind; and stored preserves and marmalades on the shelves he had reserved for medications.

“Please stop for just a minute, honey,” he begged her, “and let’s have some lime blossom tea, which will soothe us while we put some sense into this pandemonium.”

She sat beside him, perspiring, listened to him uneasily, and five minutes later was again on her feet emptying trunks, hanging curtains, planting lettuce. She ordered her Pianola unloaded and placed in one corner, then in another; then she changed her mind and ordered it taken out again.

“You are running around like a chicken without a head, without thinking,” Ramón said to her on the third day of seeing her incessant rushing around, not even allowing time to eat or sleep.

“And you think and talk, give opinions and give orders, but you do not do anything,” she responded, and in this way they opened a discussion that they were to repeat hundreds of times, give or take a few words, during the years they lived together on the isle.

When practically everything was unpacked and they were close to having the house ready, she discovered, together with other pieces of linen in the bottom of the trunk, the saintly bedsheet, the one with the matrimonial keyhole in the center. Far from Orizaba, from Doña Carlota, from the Ten Commandments and the Seven Sacraments, Alicia had completely forgotten about it. Seeing it again made her feel guilty, but at this point, she thought it absurd to start using it, after so many nights without it.

For a moment she thought of giving it to the camp followers, but changed her mind, considering its fine embroidery. In the end she decided to use it in the dining room as a tablecloth for big occasions, placing a heavy pheasant centerpiece to cover the hole.

Clipperton, 1908

AFTER BEING ANCHORED for three days outside the reef barrier and passively allowing the breakers to jolt her at will, the Corrigan II, relieved of her cargo, set sail for the return to Acapulco. From the dock, Ramón Arnaud saw her depart. The gentleman’s agreement he had made with his superior and advisor, Colonel Avalos, was that every two months, three at the most, without fail or delay, either that ship or El Demócrata, also from the Mexican Navy, would bring to Clipperton all the supplies necessary for survival.

It was well established that from such an isle, a lazy, barren piece of rock, they could not get much more than crabs, salt, and polluted water. The arrival of the ship would be like the umbilical cord that would keep them alive. As the Corrigan II sailed away, Ramón felt that his only connection with the outside world was drifting farther and farther out of reach, lost behind an ocean wall.

When the ship could no longer be seen, Ramón realized that he felt offended, hurt, abandoned like a dog. His nomination as governor, the promotion to the rank of captain, the interview with Porfirio Díaz, all seemed now like fancy decoys covering up the stark reality: he had been totally forsaken in the last place he would have chosen to be, had he the freedom to choose.

The old feeling that he had been made to pay too dearly for his mistakes returned, and he ran, over and over in his mind like a rat in a maze, through all the twists and turns. That old resentment knew very well all the labyrinths in his gray matter because he himself had trained it each and every day and night during his incarceration in Santiago Tlatelolco. And during every hour of his training as an army private. It was a resentment so close to him, so domestic and familiar, Ramón thought now, that he had not ceased nurturing it for a second. And this truth surprised him.

Since he was a child he had entertained the suspicion that someone, some powerful and abstract being, was cruelly punishing him. And now, at the Clipperton dock, this punishment acquired the shape of an old and lost meaning in the English language, derived from the Spanish. It was a combination of just a few letters, unknown to him until a few days ago and which, notwithstanding — it was very clear now — had been his destiny from the beginning. This word, which sounded cabalistic to him, was “marooned,” derived from “cimaroon”—in turn derived from the Spanish “cimarrón,” or runaway slave. And by some logical play of association, “to maroon” also referred to the capital punishment meted out to traitors by English pirates in the Caribbean: they abandoned them on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean, with nothing but a few sips of water in a bottle and a gun loaded with only one bullet, to use when the torture and the agony became unbearable.

“Marooned,” Arnaud repeated to himself, fascinated by its sound. “Marooned,” and a sticky malaise took hold of him. Standing there facing the Pacific Ocean alone, he offered no resistance. A hot wind ruffled his eyelashes, buzzed over his ears, kept flapping on the nape of his neck the kerchief he was wearing to protect himself from the sun. An endless series of waves, resigned and identical, crashed against the boards under his feet, and he observed them, mesmerized, and let them lull him with their monotonous murmur: marooned, they whispered, marooned.

He was comfortably installed in his melancholy and without any intention of getting out of it, when he saw Alicia in the distance trying to carry a barrel heavier than she was up the steep steps leading to the house. She would advance two steps and the force of gravity made her go backward three, just to start again, unflaggingly. Ramón thought that the diligence his wife applied to the task at hand was an irrational defiance of the sweltering heat, that her useless doggedness disrupted the relaxing inertia that the heat imposed on everything else. He saw her as being obsessed with her futile endeavor, her porcelain complexion beaded with pearls of sweat, and completely oblivious of the departing ship, of the resentments and premonitions that were asphyxiating him, of the cruelty of the Caribbean pirates and of the human race in general. Why does she persist in not letting the soldiers take care of those tasks? How can she possibly not understand that on a disastrous day like today such things as barrels don’t deserve our attention? Ramón wondered anxiously, and ran to help her.

By the time he reached her, she had already succeeded in carrying her load up to the porch.

The days began to go a little faster. Not only had the ship departed, leaving them in God’s hands, but two or three hundred yards away from the place where it had been anchored, there still arose, now and forever, the silhouette of the Kinkora. Or her ghost. Or whatever was left of her. On a pitch-black night a few years ago, the Japanese ship did not see the isle and fell into its trap, lunging against it as if it wasn’t there. Clipperton had lain in wait for her, crouching and invisible, then ensnared her in its reefs and tore into her hull with the sharp fierceness of its corals.

Haunted by the somber, unavoidable presence of the Kinkora, through whose dilapidated timbers the wind whistled sad tunes of shipwrecks, Arnaud decided to dismantle her board by board. He could no longer stand the ominous energy that he perceived as coming from the wreck, which made his head burst and even gave him a toothache. He would remove that grim monument to failure from the coastline and neutralize its influence, and would use whatever he could recover to construct decent living quarters for his soldiers.

As usual, Ramón had suddenly shifted without any warning from a state of depression to one of euphoria, and during the following days he and his men were earnestly dedicated to their task. And from the worm-eaten timbers of the Kinkora—once cleaned and sanded — they built a small house for each soldier, with its oil lamp, its coal burner, and its cistern to store rainwater.

While Lieutenant Cardona and the others were in charge of the masonry work and the carpentry, Arnaud tried to solve the problem now annoying him: the crabs, which crawled around everywhere without any respect — not even for the soup pots, the clothes chests, or the babies’ cradles — and also fell inside to die in the rainwater tanks, their small corpses polluting the pure waters. Ramón designed traps and fortresses, and after several failed attempts at creating barriers to the thousands of persistent crabs, finally one morning he left the toolshed carrying some ingenious wooden covers with double gratings that attained their purpose.

In spite of the hellish oppressive heat and the ill-tempered breezes, Arnaud and his Clipperton men persisted in their construction frenzy. After the soldiers’ houses, they continued with a Decauville track brought from Acapulco. They labored hand in hand with Schultz and his workers, and they managed to make a toylike train, which hauled its row of small, uncovered wagons on a track that extended from the soft mounds of guano on the north of the isle and followed the eastern shore down to the storehouse, where the cargo was dried and processed, next to the dock.

Then came the reconstruction of the lighthouse on top of the big rock on the southern coast. The old one had an obsolete mechanism, already in total disrepair. Arnaud restored it by installing new prisms and burners on the old base. He ordered the construction of six sections of stairs, ten steps each, to civilize the steep ascent to the lighthouse, which had been a suicidal enterprise due to the slippery rock. He filled the tank with oil, and one starry and moonless night, he lit the burners.

Down below, men, women, and children were sitting on the beach in mystical silence around a fire they had built to drive away the mosquitoes. Behind them they had made pavilions with their rifles, leaning them against one another in threes and fours. They saw the big beacon light up and remained there for several hours, staring as if hypnotized at the pallid light as it turned. This was an important occasion. They no longer were a speck lost in the big nothingness. Now they were offering to the world an assertive testimonial: the Clipperton lighthouse, a little candle flickering in the midst of the infinite darkness where ocean and sky merged.

That night, at the foot of the lighted beacon, Lieutenant Arnaud commanded peremptorily that the light never be allowed to grow dark, and right then named one of his trusted men as the lighthouse keeper. He was a black soldier from the state of Colima named Victoriano Alvarez. So that he could attend to his duties with the necessary zeal, Arnaud assigned as his living quarters a small sheltered cabin at the base of the big rock. It was, in fact, a cave inside the rock, and he adapted its interior and added a log-cabin facade. The soldiers called it “the lighthouse lair.”

For Victoriano Alvarez, living there meant being isolated from his comrades, but in compensation, the appointment invested him with a special importance, an almost priestly aura. He became the man of the light, the guide to lost ships, the point of contact between Clipperton and what lay beyond.

The following weeks were also filled with hard work. The dock was reinforced, and a saltworks was constructed on the low cliffs so as to keep a permanent source of salt. Pig stalls and chicken coops were built so that the animals would not be running around free. Strict regulations were decreed so that human beings, no matter what their ages, had to use latrines for their physiological needs, unlike before, when people relieved themselves wherever the need arose.

As for feeding the troops, Ramón put an end to the anarchy of each one on his own and established a food store. There, under his strict control and according to family size, proportional rations of corn, beans, chiles, rice, coffee, flour, cereals, and dried beef were distributed. On Saturday mornings the soldiers were paid, and since there were no cantinas for them to get drunk, they had the luxury of buying in the store even items that, given the conditions, could be considered nonessential, such as soap, condiments, and beer. The stealing of supplies, common at the beginning, was curtailed by means of severe punishments imposed by Arnaud, ranging from whipping in the worst cases, to digging ditches under the noonday sun.

Next to the store, Ramón set up a pharmacy with surgical supplies, disinfectants, and remedies. Guided by the medical dictionaries he had brought from the continent, he personally turned apothecary first, then medic after gaining some confidence, and finally, when circumstances demanded it, surgeon. Clipperton offered him the opportunity to act in the profession he had wanted to follow but could not.

During the first months he limited himself to prescribing methylene blue gargles for sore throats, gentian violet for scrapes, magnesium sulfate enemas for stomachaches, ipecacuanha powder as a laxative. He learned that arandula vertiginosa, better known as agua zafia, was incomparable, if properly administered, to combat heartburn, lack of appetite, and lack of sexual drive as well. However, if the patient ingested more drops than prescribed, he would die in a matter of hours, his lips purple and blistering. Agua zafia came in small blue flasks that Ramón carefully kept under lock and key, given its lethal properties.

If a case presented crab bites or Portuguese man-of-war burns, he ordered that a child be brought to pee on the affected skin. For the common cold, he rubbed hot glycerine on the torso and wrapped it in paper strips. As the glycerine grew cold, it hardened under the paper and the grippe victim had to remain stiff and wrapped up like a mummy for hours. Later he also took care of serious wounds: knife fights among the men who became irascible and desperate in the island prison, or severe blows among the camp followers because of jealousy. In this way, Ramón learned to dispense first aid and got his training for what he had to deal with months later: childbirth, epidemics, and death.

Taking care of the vegetable garden became a ritual. In the middle of the bone-dry Clipperton terrain, the thousand square feet of black, moist soil speckled with green was a mirage. It was weeded and sprinkled with the tenderness granted to a firstborn child, and in the afternoons everybody, even those dedicated to other tasks, stopped by for a while before dusk to watch its progress. They stood in groups, next to the furrows, and voiced their alarm if they saw a worm among the cabbage leaves, or else clapped for the green carrot tops beginning to come out. This daily habit turned the garden into a meeting place serving all the functions of a town’s main plaza.

The soldiers spent all their time growing greens, carving chairs, taking care of the pigs, counting bales of guano, while military discipline was reduced to a minimum: close order and salute to the flag at dawn, cleaning of weapons and uniforms, and exercises within the limited space available. The practice of trotting around the isle was discontinued because the broken coral was destroying their boots and huaraches, and there were no replacements. Defense was limited to the rotating guard duty, day and night, at the lighthouse and the brigades of two or three men who made the rounds to patrol the order of the community. All of this troubled Ramón, and he told his assistant, Secundino Angel Cardona.

“Rather than a military outpost, this seems like an artisans’ commune.”

“Don’t worry about it, Captain,” Lieutenant Cardona responded, “here the coral reefs are in charge of the true defense. If an enemy ship approaches with intentions of invading, it will soon become firewood against the reefs. If the ship passes that barrier, then we fire at it from the lighthouse until we run out of ammunition, because there isn’t very much. If, in spite of all that, the enemy disembarks, we’ll engage them in hand-to-hand combat. And if they are too many for us, then the Faceless One will take us out.”

“That might sound absurd, but it’s really the only possible strategy,” Arnaud agreed. “You are right, it’s no use fretting any more about it.”

And life went on, full and bearable enough, within that penny-sized universe. The tremendous amount of work rendered results, and the people’s measure of well-being lay in simple things. The inhabited part of the isle did not look either like a slum or like a mound of bird droppings, and the first harvest of the vegetable garden was celebrated with a large salad shared by all. It consisted of lettuce, onions, radishes, and turnips, and Arnaud himself prepared a dressing of mayonnaise, the recipe for which he had inherited from Doña Carlota.

They carried on a routine in imitation of the civilized world, and the resulting peaceful monotony mimicked happiness. Only one expectation, one faith, united all the inhabitants: the arrival of the ship. Two months had gone by since their ship had weighed anchor, and there were no signs of its return. There was still no real cause for alarm because the schedule allowed for another month’s leeway.

One afternoon, while they were straightening accounts in Gustav Schultz’s cabin, he made one of his indecipherable statements, in the middle of which Arnaud picked up with total clarity a name that gave him goose pimples: that of Robinson Crusoe.

“Tell the German gentleman we do not welcome idle comparisons,” he told Lieutenant Cardona, so that he, making faces and gestures, would explain it to Schultz. “The only things that man had when he came to his island were a knife, a pipe, and a tin of tobacco, while we have more comforts here than the Queen of Sheba.”

“And that is not all,” he added without an iota of conviction but with an evident aggressiveness that altered his voice. “Tell him also not to forget that, unlike Crusoe, we are here of our own free will.”

Secundino Cardona did not understand why his superior had taken Schultz’s comments so much to heart.

Clipperton, 1908

OCTOBER CAME BUT the ship did not. Instead, devastating rains threatened to erase Clipperton’s precarious existence. During the heaviest storms, the ocean waters flooded the lowlands on the island for hours or days at a time, while the highlands became isolated promontories.

Because of the rain, all military operations and most communal tasks were suspended, and everybody retreated home to hibernate. Water was closing in on them from the sky and from the sea. The lagoon was overflowing and smelled like rotting skunks. The moth larvae were fat and even nested in people’s hair. The remedy was to sleep between damp sheets, but the humidity made one’s skin wrinkly like raisins.

During the time of forced seclusion, Ramón divided his working hours between the feverish reading of a series of books on the pirate Clipperton that he had found in the library abandoned by Brander, and writing his long, detailed reports, which no one was ever likely to read, about the production of guano and about how he was carrying out his mission on the isle.

Meanwhile, Alicia embroidered dozens of beautiful bedsheets and tablecloths that would never be used, since they had enough to last them till the end of their days. She used to sit on a wicker rocking chair by the stained-glass window in the studio next to her bedroom. While her expert fingers moved fast by themselves, time flitted by as she looked at the stormy waters turned icy through the blue-colored glass: frenzied through yellow; slow, almost dead calm, through green; nocturnal and not of this world through violet.

Ramón became obsessed with the notion that their isolation and the lack of any news from Orizaba was dampening his wife’s spirits. His own, though he would not admit it, were lost in the deep. It tortured him to remember the good life they had left behind, and he was beginning to think of it with heavy nostalgia as a thing of the past. Not the big things but the smaller ones tormented him the most: things he had considered insignificant before that now seemed unattainable dreams and gnawed at his heart like persistent little rodents. Such as the smell of clothes just washed clean and hung out to dry in the sun or the pleasure of smoking a good Havana cigar, the precise, cold sensation of the Solingen blade on his cheek when shaving, the fresh coolness of drinking in the shade a glass of tamarind water; the sound of his mother’s voice telling stories about Emperor Maximilian’s marital infidelities and about Empress Carlota’s fridgity.

One day Captain Arnaud, unable to contain himself any longer, burst into a rage in Alicia’s presence, nonstop until all his bitter litany came out.

“We cannot keep thinking that life is somewhere else, or that we have already lived and the only thing we have left is to reminisce. There must be more to life than watching the rain fall. I’ll be dammed if I have to continue watching water and more water come down, and keep waiting for a boat that never comes, and counting every last grain of rice that everybody gets to eat. Or fighting an enemy that never shows up, and writing reports about bird shit. It’s one thing to fulfill one’s military duty and another one to be expected to do without like a Mormon. Or like an idiot. A man has the right to do well for himself, damn it. He has the right to have fun, to be doing something he really likes once in a while: to eat his fill, to get rowdy, get drunk. .. Just to talk to friends already seems like a luxury! I want to be able to talk to people again, even to that German S.O.B., though I can’t understand him at all!”

Then, as if it were his only possible escape valve, Ramón created and established the Friday soirées. In these weekly evening gatherings held at his home, he attempted to recover, even though artificially and for only a while every week, some of his lost sense of well-being. His guests were Lieutenant Cardona and his wife, Tirsa Rendón, a gorgeous brunette with almond eyes and uncompromising character. And Gustav Schultz and his adopted family, a full-figured mulatto woman called Daria Pinzón — whom the German, in need of a woman after spending a year alone in Clipperton, had brought from the island of Socorro — and Daria’s daughter, a twelve-year-old girl, taciturn and strangely sexless, whose given name was Jesusa and her last name, inherited from someone nobody knew, was Lacursa.

Counter to their Franciscan restraint during the rest of the week, on Fridays they would prepare mole in tremendous quantities, tacos huitlacoche, refried black beans, sausages, dried beef, and dark coffee. While the others savored every bite as if it were their last, Schultz gobbled everything up, his eyes closed: according to what they believed to have understood, he had said that one had to be Mexican to be able to eat so much food that was black. Ramón Arnaud could never forgive him for this.

After dinner on those evenings, Arnaud took out his mandolin. Alicia would have preferred he played the guitar instead, or any other instrument. The mandolin seemed rather feminine, with its mother-of-pearl inlays and its high pitch, and with so many tuning pegs and fancy curlicues that it seemed ridiculous to her. But Ramón paid no attention and played with the verve of a Cossack taming a wild horse and the absorption of a virtuoso violinist on his first Stradivarius.

Lieutenant Cardona sang afterward and pleased Alicia with songs that had been popular in the dance halls of the capital, such as “White Kitten” and the one about picking violets at twilight.

Cardona produced a velvet tone, enchanting and seductive, going from bass to tenor as he warmed himself up with alcohol. Drinking gave his eyes a strange glimmer and his voice the mature, ladies’ man timbre of a veritable Don Juan, or a life-of-the-party professional. He set aside the trills and tricks, the white kittens, violets, and dance halls in the capital, and brought forth a full-throated deluge of totally plebeian, coarse tunes. Such as the one about the unhappy Empress of Mexico, who returned to Europe after losing her crown and her wits: “The rabble with the crosses scream and get excited, while the gale winds blow, and make your boat capsize: Mama Carlota, sweet darling, good-bye, good-bye.”

Accompanied by the strings of the Pianola, they danced polkas, waltzes, danzones and jarabes, and by dawn they started playing Parcheesi, dominoes, or cards, all of which ended in screams after it became clear that Daria Pinzón had been cheating.

The Friday festivities became a ritual, religiously observed even on the day a hurricane plucked the Pianola from its corner and smacked it against the rocks, and made the mandolin spin together with the coconuts, the chickens, and some chunks of wood, finally leaving it floating on the ocean.

But that was later. Now, and contrary to Ramón’s fears, his wife looked happier every day. Not because of the evening gatherings. What had happened, thanks to the rains, was that Alicia found herself in a world of ideal solitude, meticulously shared with Ramón within the complicity of the four walls of their home. In the midst of all their deprivations, Clipperton allowed something Orizaba would surely have denied them: the opportunity of becoming great friends and lovers.

In Clipperton they had the time and intimacy necessary to master the art of making love to each other, and after many failures and misunderstandings, they deciphered the exact science of mutual pleasure. They managed together to temper the chaos of their impulses to the rhythm of their hearts, softened their granite morals, got used to their nakedness, became more skilled and less timid, prayed less and laughed more. “Oh Lord, don’t allow me to enjoy this! Oh Lord, please, don’t allow me to enjoy this,” Alicia uselessly prayed when she felt an electric, inevitable wave of happiness that jolted her body.

Protected by the thick curtains of rainfall, they celebrated the daily lovemaking ritual in a postcard atmosphere, in the hammock of the western balcony, bathed in the golden reflections of many sunsets.

The lack of supplies — due to the delay in the arrival of the ship — imposed on their bodies physical transformations that exerted a favorable influence on this burst of passion. One of the first items that ran out in Clipperton was brilliantine, which forced Ramón to forgo the rigid coif that made him look like a ventriloquist’s doll and set free his thin, stiff mustache, which became thick and sensual. Besides, far away from the imperial banquets Doña Carlota had served him, his double chin disappeared as well as the incipient belly that was starting to give him a rounded figure.

For her part, Alicia ran out of rice talcum powder, and once she stopped using it, her translucent doll-like complexion took on a more human texture. She abandoned the mannequin stiffness, the rigidity of the corset and the crinolines, and her dainty silhouette recovered the childlike elasticity she had left behind in the hills of Orizaba. She lost one by one all of her hairpins until she had to renounce her old-fashioned tight buns and let her hair loose and free like a lion’s mane.

The hot sun of the preceding months had changed the ghostly paleness of their bodies into a healthier-looking tan. And once they used up the last drop of milk of magnesia, which applied to their underarms sweetened the humors of their armpits, they discovered the attraction of their natural animal odors.

This was also the time that Alicia remembered later as the happiest of her life, when she and Ramón engaged day after day in an interminable conversation, continued compulsively for many years. Not even Ramón’s death interrupted it, since Alicia would repeat it afterward all by herself, saying her part of the dialogue and repeating the answers that he had given her, which she knew by heart.

In this infinite dialogue that coiled upon itself like a snake, or a figure eight, they used to recite with all the inflections, all the intense feelings, all the upsets, the reasons and demands of their love, in counterpoint or in a duet. They made an inventory of all the good and all the bad traits of each and every person they knew; they would draw and erase future projects; they reviewed the commonplace and probed the transcendental; they evaluated past and present moments of their lives in this world and confessed to each other their fears and expectations about the one beyond.

Sometimes, in the middle of the lull brought by an afternoon downpour, any careless remark could trigger a conjugal fight. As when Alicia commented that Doña Carlota had wasted the Arnaud fortune, or when Ramón suggested that Don Félix Rovira was a domineering, possessive father. Then they stopped holding hands, and heatedly released an angry stream of words that would take them, without their knowing exactly when, to a point at which, viciously trying to hurt, they screamed their imperfections at each other, showing the animosity of two fighting cocks. Invariably, it all ended with an explosion of accumulated and festering pockets of jealousy that each of them had stored, without ever admitting it, in some corner of their livers.

Ramón accused her of swooning over Lieutenant Cardona’s singing on Friday evenings.

“Do you think I don’t notice that you prefer to dance the polkas with him?” he asked her with an indignation befitting someone who is demanding an explanation from his aged mother’s murderer.

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.”

“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.

Early in the morning the day Alicia woke up all wet with amniotic fluid, Ramón took out from the closet the objects he had already prepared and disinfected for the occasion, and ordered them neatly on the table at the foot of the bed. There were white rags boiled for hours, antiseptic soap, alcohol, scissors and pincers, clean ribbons to tie the umbilical cord, two large basins, needles and surgical gut twine in case sewing a tear was needed. Feeling with his hands and listening through the fetus-scope, Ramón helped Alicia lie down on clean sheets, rearranged her pillows, brought her a big pitcher of fresh water, opened all the windows to the breeze, lowered the jalousies to keep the room in semidarkness, and sat next to his wife, waiting for the birth of his son. Doña Juana was also waiting to be called in to help.

It was a long wait, more than ten hours. Her pains were intermittent, suddenly surging like thunderbolts. Then they went away like the tide, leaving her body in a relaxed rest and her mind lost in limbo, where all references to the concrete world were obliterated. Until the pain brought her again to reality and, tensing all the fibers in her body, jolted her in hot waves shooting from her innermost center up to her two eyelids and each one of her twenty nails, then gradually folded into itself in reverse, easing the tension, and dissolving into peace.

Between one contraction and the next, Ramón refreshed the water in the pitcher, caressed her hair, cooled her off with a fan in his hand. Sometimes they killed time playing checkers or card games, until interrupted by a returning stab of pain. When these became so close that they seemed to be only one with minor interruptions, and the pain came with triple intensity, they both knew the moment had arrived.

Alicia let go freely in an impulse that was more telluric than human and that exploded inside her and reached all of her senses. Her pain, though it had reached its maximum point, became secondary, turning into a weak, unimportant sensation, compared with the power in her effort. The fear and the uncertainty of the previous hours vanished in the face of a glorious willpower, a blind faith in her own strength, which surged overwhelmingly. After her last push, big and definitive, Alicia Rovira lost herself in the same drunkenness that makes a god dizzy after exercising his greatest gift, that of creating life.

Ramón was watching in wonderment mixed with terror. His guts twisted and turned, and his heart levitated at this very violent and bloody last act of procreation. He saw the head beginning to come out, and immediately receding again. In the third attempt it was fully out, wet and gelatinous, and Ramón was able to hold it with both hands. He saw the little face in an ugly adult frown, and without having to pull, he felt how the rest of its body was sliding out, swift and elusive like a lizard. He counted five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot, and checked that its facial features, though contorted by the effort of crying, were perfect.

It was male, just as Alicia had foretold.

“It’s a boy,” he announced, “a beautiful baby boy.”

With skill and a sure hand, as if he had done it many times, and with the help of the midwife, who toiled back and forth with the cotton rags and the boiled water, Ramón cut and sewed, extracted residues, and cleaned the rest. Before handing the baby to Doña Juana to be checked and cleaned, he stopped for a few seconds to look at him.

A little Martian, he thought, a little frightened Martian who has just arrived from an exhausting trip.

Then he lay down to rest next to Alicia on her bed, and Doña Juana returned the newborn to them. All cleaned, wrapped in a white linen gown, less shaken and less purple, he looked more like a creature of this world. From the depth of her exhaustion, Alicia looked at him with love and anguish, actually with too much love and too much anguish, like all women, female bears, tigresses, and cats right after giving birth.

“I was only mistaken in one thing,” she said. “His head is not round but pointed, like a gnome’s cap.”

She had not been mistaken in that either. After being out of the womb for a while and once it recovered from the struggle of going through the narrow tract, the baby’s head, still malleable, lost its sharp point and became rounder than a ball of wool.

Ramón opened one of the jalousies. Through the open window they saw the magnificent blue of the skies, high and limpid. Alicia remembered her dream. An image flashed through her brain, again showing her the paradise of the underwater world, and she was happy to be awake.

At this moment, life is also wonderfully perfect, she thought.

She looked at Ramón and the baby, who were both asleep, listened to their peaceful breathing and allowed herself to doze also.

It was hours later, or maybe minutes, that shouts from outside startled and woke them up. People were crying, calling out, running aimlessly. Ramón and Alicia opened their eyes and noticed that the piece of blue sky they had seen as bright and static had turned dark and was quickly changing from rose-colored to violet, and from violet to a voracious purple that swallowed everything. It was almost nightfall. The shouting was in crescendo and closing in.

Ramón hurried to the door still half asleep and, clumsily leaping over the porch steps, made his way through the circle of people, which opened for him. He saw in the center, lying on the pavement and covered with his own blood, the remains of a man. The dead man was Jesús Neri, the husband of Juana the midwife. He was an old soldier who had spent more time in Clipperton than the rest. They were all shouting at Arnaud about what had happened. There were different and contradictory versions, each one reflecting a particular vision.

The old man had been in the ocean up to his waist; no, up to his neck. He was next to the dock; no, not so close, ten yards from the dock. He was unloading from his barge some barrels he had brought from somewhere else on the isle. Five barrels that contained kerosene. No, not kerosene, fresh water. The old man wanted to carry drinking water from the dock to his home. Suddenly, they saw him flail his arms wildly. Victoriano saw him first; Faustino’s wife was the one who saw him first; no, it was some kids who started to scream.

The old man sank into the water and reappeared; one could see his head, his back, his arms, and then, he was gone. “He is being attacked by a manta ray,” shouted Victoriano. “It must be a jellyfish,” screamed Faustino’s wife. The children were shouting. Five men, no, they were four, six — three men and two women — came running to the dock. They saw him defending himself from the dark shadows attacking him, with his teeth, with his feet. They saw him helpless, overcome, with a plea for mercy on his face, with an expression that showed great pain, beseeched. Smacking the water with heavy sticks, the men scared off a school of sharks. There were three sharks; there were two sharks and a barracuda; it was only one enormous shark; there were six: five were black and one was white. The waters were red with blood by the time the men drove them away. Pedro managed to harpoon one of them; Pedro almost harpooned one. They rescued whatever was left of Jesús. When they got him out, he was already dead. When they got him out, he was still alive. Lying on the dock, he breathed with difficulty for a while, prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and called out to his wife, Juana. Lying on the dock, he did not say anything, he just died without saying anything. He tried to sit up with whatever was left of his body, a spurt of blood came out from his mouth, and he died. Right after he died, blood came pouring out of his wounds, his nose, his mouth. Then they placed him on a large blanket, carried him to the entrance of the big house, and called out for Captain Arnaud.

Ramón was perplexed at so much damage, so much misery for this mangled old soldier, so much sadness at seeing this man reduced to a bloody rag. He was stunned, just standing there looking at him. His skill as a doctor’s apprentice was gone, his authority as governor had vanished, he had lost his capacity to react. He could only stand there, watching. The impact of the delivery was still too fresh, and the two images were juxtaposed, melded, confusing. Crouching next to the dead man was Doña Juana, sobbing quietly, evenly, with no overblown gestures or even tears, resigned to death since long ago, since forever.

The voice of Lieutenant Cardona broke the collective hypnosis of watching the corpse.

“We must bury him,” he said.

“We must bury him,” Ramón repeated mechanically. “We must find an appropriate place for a cemetery.”

The layer of soil in Clipperton was so thin that to bury a man was almost impossible. To cover the body with shovefuls of guano would be unsanitary and sacrilegious, and to dig a grave in the rock would be too arduous an enterprise. “Throw him into the sea,” someone suggested, but the idea of letting the sharks finish the job horrified Ramón. If the man had been a sailor and had died on the high seas, maybe they could have done that, but the old man was a soldier, and he had died right there, close to land.

The women drove away the pigs, which had gone crazy sniffing around, and the flies swirling over the dried blood. One could begin to feel in the air the quick decomposition of the cadaver in the heat of a twilight without any breeze. A rapid decision was needed. After inspecting several sites, Arnaud decided on a secluded high area at the beach, near the lighthouse tower, where the water never reached. The accumulation of hard sand in that place made it possible to dig a deep enough grave. That would be the inauguration of their cemetery.

They wrapped Jesús Neri or whatever was left of him in shrouds and placed him in a square pine box, one of those in which the ship had brought them foodstuffs, and they buried him under a wooden cross. Lacking flowers, they arranged palm fronds over his tomb. Doña Juana had stopped crying and only whimpered softly, rhythmically. Arnaud said a few words.

“On this day, the second of June, 1909, life and death visited Clipperton for the first time since we arrived,” he said.

Mexico City, Today

I AM LOOKING FOR traces of Lieutenant Secundino Angel Cardona Mayorga. Of the life he led that finally brought him to Clipperton. I have found a photo of him, which I have on my desk. I found also an invaluable document for following his tracks, the complete dossier of his military record, from the time he entered the service until he died.

The photo, taken at a local studio, offers some faded brocade curtains in the background and a little round table in the foreground. Resting on the table, a nunchaku and the lieutenant’s right hand, the tips of his fingers barely touching the surface. With his left hand he is holding his sword by the handle, its point resting on the floor. In his military uniform, with its long army jacket, double row of golden buttons, and wide belt, he is a good-looking man, self-assured, and holding a martial stance without rigidity. Almost seductive, perhaps, but with a detectable tinge of sarcasm.

He appears to be about twenty years old. Behind the charming smile and the dress uniform, something reveals his Indian ancestry. He seems a little too cocky for his young age and humble origin.

His healthy head of dark hair has been combed back. He has a tanned complexion, straight nose, square jaw, Indian-looking eyes that don’t gaze at the camera but a little off to the left. His facial features are pleasant, chiseled, with the exception of his ears, two prominent half circles. In spite of the careful neatness of his attire, his boots are dusty. Those boots have traveled many roads and are well planted on solid ground.

His military record consists of a hundred or so handwritten reports in different styles of calligraphy, signed by Cardona’s diverse superior officers. They do not contradict the low-class dandyism that the lieutenant demonstrates in the photo. Just the opposite.

Secundino Angel was born on July 1, 1877, in Chiapas, Mexico, in the gutters of the city of San Cristóbal, a colonial enclave that exerted its domain over extensive indigenous territories. Its houses, all painted blue in honor of the Virgin Mary, were inhabited by white lawyers and clerics. In its stone-paved streets the Indians offered their wares, waited to be hired for jobs, and got drunk on alcohol or ether until they fell to the ground asleep, unconscious, or dead.

In the midst of the many Chamula Indians sitting in the dirt and filth of the plaza, Secundino was one more child, sickly, inveterately unclean, invisible, clinging to the dark woolen skirts of his mother, Gregoria Mayorga.

He was only one more child with adult resignation and burdens as he went up and down mountains carrying firewood behind his father, whose name was Rodolfo Cardona, and who was a Chamula Indian like any other: heavyset, hairy, with docile eyes. His only clothing was a short tunic that left his legs bare, a sheepskin over his shoulders, and a rolled white kerchief on his head. This was styled after the patron saint of the Chamulas, Saint John the Baptist, according to the biblical custom of these mountains, where tribal fashion was dictated by specific patron saints. The Chamulas were not the only ones in the world dressed in the style of a saint; the Pedranos wore capes, haversacks, and tunics in the style of Saint Peter; and the Huistecos had the mantles and the baggy pants of old, like the archangel Saint Michael.

Like his father, Rodolfo, and his mother, Gregoria, Secundino as a child was illiterate and did not even speak Spanish. However, by the age of twelve he could deal with hunger, withstand loneliness, and overcome fear, so he decided to abandon the land in which the life of an adult was worth nothing, and that of a child even less. It was not a willful decision, but the path he was following took him farther and farther away. He gradually left behind the mud huts, the sheep and the pigs, the land of the red earth. He went through the thick pine forests, and when he got to the blue mountains on the horizon, the ones he had seen from his home, he found himself at the barracks entrance. It was a National Guard battalion. The child dared to go in, and he stood in a corner at the horse stables, but since he spoke only Tzeltal, his Indian language, he did not say a word to anyone. He simply waited for hours, until somebody noticed him and signed him up as a volunteer.

He did his growing up at the barracks and learned Spanish, reading, and writing. He also learned to play reveille, taps, and tattoo, and by the age of thirteen was made bugler. Perhaps because he grew up in a town that manufactured mandolins and drums, music and singing were easy for him. Everything else was more difficult. According to the reports of his superior officers, he was “refractory” to learning and a rebel in matters of discipline. But music was his gift. In his spare time he went from the bugle to the guitar, and from military calls to love songs. When he sang, he acquired poise, looked taller, lost his shyness. He distinguished himself.

Besides, he was handsome, and learned to control his hair in a decorous way, to trim his mustache, and to look half smiling, half sleepy-eyed, as if he actually did not see what he was looking at. He freed himself from misery and sadness, and discovered the advantages of his good voice and good looks. Those were the means he found to create a niche for himself. He became an adventurer and a ladies’ man, a smart aleck who played dumb, a carouser and a troublemaker.

At seventeen he was transferred to the Public Security Battalion in the city of Tuxtla Guitiérrez. He was almost a man, not an adolescent anymore, and he was not an illiterate Indian, but he was not white either. He had exchanged his John the Baptist’s tunic for a soldier’s uniform, he was bilingual, and he knew how to court Indian girls as well as mestizo señoritas. Besides, he knew how to spell, and had a firm handwriting and pompous style that allowed him to work as an amanuensis at the political headquarters in the same town where he served. He had become the Indian who spoke Spanish, who acted as intermediary between the local authorities and the indigenous ones. Secundino Angel Cardona did not belong with his own, and neither with the others. But he counted on his voice, his looks, the shrewdness of an outcast, and a practical intelligence sharpened by misfortune, which he hid from others in order to go through life without being committed to anything or anybody, expecting no reward and avoiding any punishment.

For better or for worse, he managed to make a military career. Private first class, sergeant second class, sergeant first class, and second lieutenant in the auxiliary infantry. He left afterward for the war in Yucatán against the Maya Indians, who had taken up arms against white domination. There he discovered that the days he had lived in poverty with his parents and later in the filthy military barracks were not, as he had believed, the ultimate rung on the poverty scale, and actually not even the next to last. It was in the First Battalion, in the army campaign through the jungles of Yucatán, that Secundino Angel and his comrades in arms reached the bottom rung of the human condition.

They had buried themselves in a labyrinth of swamps with no exit, defeated beforehand not only by their confusion but also by malaria, mountain leprosy, extreme heat, and snakes, while the enemy knew the jungle inside out and lay in wait, immune to venom and miasmas.

They were moving with the pachydermic heaviness of the regular army while their adversaries, using guerrilla tactics, attacked them from all sides. War for them was an accursed mission, a detestable duty, while the Mayas were fighting for themselves in a holy war, and they fought with the conviction of cornered beasts acutely aware that the question was to kill or be killed.

Sometimes the soldiers’ guts would burst after drinking from a well poisoned by the Indians. Sometimes they fell into traps full of spines that had been kept for a while inside the decomposing body of a fox, and which, upon sinking into the flesh, produced ulcers that would not heal. Other times their bodies were exploded by prehistoric grenades, made with raw bullhide and tied together with sisal fibers. It could also happen that they would be gunned down by the luminous blasts from modern Lee-Enfield rifles that the rebels had obtained from the English in Belize.

These soldiers of the Mexican Army were immersed in the last circle of hell, subject to bureaucratic orders from an absentee general, while the enemy, descendants of the Mayas, had gone to war by divine design and received their combat orders from the so-called Saint Talking Cross, whom they were fiercely guarding in a fortress-sanctuary. There was no way to defeat them.

Whether it was for some act of bravery not specified in his military records or perhaps simply for having survived his Yucatán ordeal, Lieutenant Second Class Cardona received from the governor of the state a medal of valor and merit. It was the only decoration he ever received.

Punishments, on the other hand, seemed to rain on him. After his return from Yucatán with the First Battalion, while stationed in Puebla, he suffered a bout of rebelliousness and defiance of discipline, and his stays in the army prison became a matter of routine. His record is specific in this, overloaded with warnings and sanctions: he spent fifteen days in the military prison at Santiago Tlatelolco for failing to report for duty for two days; he was arrested in the flag hall for marching in a parade without his pistol; later, another fifteen days for showing disrespect to an officer. Then he was jailed for fifteen days for insulting an officer and “forcing him into a fight.” For this incident he received a reprimand equivalent to the step previous to being discharged by the army. Cardona did not pay much attention.

He turned to alcohol. He got apocalyptically drunk, and he would then do everything he had not dared to do sober. He would hit his friends, embrace his enemies, disrespect his superiors, rape the wives of his inferiors, reduce his guitar to smithereens, vomit on his uniform, and curse his fate.

He would not allow anyone to tell him not to drink because as a child he had been nurtured with firewater. When his mother suffered from convulsions that made her body stiff, the medicine man made her drink to drive the sickness away. When his father made straw hats and sold them in the market, he would go afterward to a cantina in San Cristóbal and fill his belly with firewater. Soaked in drivel, oblivious of his body, he would go into an autistic and astral trip to faraway and better worlds. Four or five days later, he would be found, in a ditch alongside the road, wearing the ragged costume and beatific expression of a saint that has been knocked down from his niche.

Secundino himself, as a child, learned the bittersweet happiness of being drunk when the firewater gourd was passed around during the fiestas and a cap of monkey fur was placed on his head.

“Be happy, my child,” he was told, “enjoy the fiesta. Be happy and dance and jump like a monkey.”

At twenty-eight he was dishonorably discharged from the army. He was an adult but not mature; he was neither an Indian nor a white man; neither a country peon nor an urban weasel; an alien among civilians and a reject among the soldiers. There was no place for Cardona in this world.

The following year he applied to the Ministry of the Army and Navy, asking to be reassigned on probation. The answer was unequivocal: “Not apt,” for being abusive with those of lower rank and considering himself equal to his superiors; because “coming from the troops, he adopted their ways and cannot change.” And in case this was not clear enough, the reporting officer wrote at the bottom of the page: “Tell the person concerned not to insist.”

But Cardona did insist. For three years he tried his hand at various jobs: as an employee for Mr. Enrique Perret, owner of a printing press at 3 Espíritu Santo, Mexico D.F.; as a clerk for Mr. Steffan, owner of a stationery store at 14 Coliseo Viejo in the same city; as a collector for Roger Heymans; as a construction worker for Mr. Enrique Schultz. He asked for letters of reference from all of them, and attached them to a new application for rehitching with the army. The answer was again no.

Among Cardona’s gifts were the patience of a saint, the tenacity of a beggar, and the ability to jump rank in order to reach the top authorities directly. He devoted a whole year to collecting his references, but this time he exceeded himself. He obtained letters from the head of Cavalry, Guillermo Pontones; from the head of Infantry, Félix Manjarrez; from the inspector of Police, E. Castillo Corzo, who professed to know him as an honorable person. And a last letter, which must have been the decisive one, signed by General Enrique Mondragón, stating that “this gentleman has improved his behavior considerably and, therefore, deserves to be admitted again in the military.”

Finally, the Ministry of the Army and Navy, having run out of patience, or because of pressure from above, repealed the previous resolutions and authorized Cardona’s readmission to the army, to the Twenty-seventh Battalion operating in the Sonora campaign. He was sent to fight the Yaqui Indians and later he was assigned to the mines in Cananea. His old tricks made a comeback, and he was arrested again repeatedly: nine days at the flag hall for failing to pay attention to his superior; nine more days for going to a cantina in his uniform; fifteen for absenteeism; another twelve days for the same reason; ten days with no specified motive; ten for not working on the firewood-gathering detail and not responding to the calls at six, reveille, and retreat; a month in the military prison at Tokin for serious misdeeds against the bugler’s wife; another month because, being under arrest, he asked permission to pee and bolted; eight days for not being present at reveille; eight days for not attending instruction meetings; eight days for errors committed in the performance of duty; eight more for the same; thirty days for wounding a comrade; a month for manhandling another soldier’s wife; a month for public disturbances.

His superiors decided to stop arresting him, because it didn’t solve anything, and opted to send him on dangerous missions, like the campaign against the rebels in the state of Guerrero. Later he was promoted to lieutenant for his daring behavior during several shooting incidents, but as he continued drinking, he was relegated to undesirable assignments. First he ended up with a group of handicapped and ragtag men and lost souls who called themselves the “Irregulars” Battalion, and then he was literally put away, like fourth-class material, in the Officers and Chiefs Depot.

From this depot he was rescued to be sent to Clipperton Island. There he was promoted to captain second class. But Secundino Angel Cardona never got to know it.

Mexico City, 1913

IN DECEMBER OF 1911 El Demócrata arrived again at Clipperton. People had been waiting for seven months under extremely hard conditions, but somehow during the previous two years the inhabitants of the isle came to the conclusion that the real periodical arrival of the ships was actually not every three months, but every six, approximately.

During this period a second child had been born to Ramón and Alicia. Since the firstborn had been a boy, he had been given his father’s name; this was a girl, and she received her mother’s name. She was growing up a happy and healthy child, as if beyond Clipperton there were nothing else, as if there were no better meal than a shark fillet, and no more enjoyable toys than seashells and crabs.

If Ramoncito was very close to his parents and overwhelmed with adult worries, Alicia, the younger one, was his total opposite. From the moment she learned to use her legs, at eleven months, she started running and organized her own world among the coral reefs, in the sand, in the mud puddles. It was an ordeal to put her to bed or to keep her contented inside the house.

As the years went by — a lot of them — this little girl became Alicia Arnaud, Mr. Loyo’s widow, the charming old lady in the Pensión Loyo, Orizaba, who, sitting at her kitchen table, pours milk into jars and enjoys her happy memories.

When El Demócrata arrived at last, there was a letter for Ramón from his mother, Doña Carlota. It was dated Orizaba, December 1910, so it had been delayed for a whole year. Before attending to anything else, Ramón locked himself up to read it.

It was unusually long and detailed, full of optimism and good humor. The mother was telling her son about the Centenary of Independence holidays, held in the capital in September 1910. Her invitation had come through some friends she still had in government. The centenary had coincided with General Porfirio Díaz’s birthday, and the old president, already in his eighties, decided on a grand celebration for the double occasion. The festivities were going to be the most lavish his poor country had ever seen. For a whole month there would be bread for everybody, and circus performances everywhere.

She wrote that there were people who tried to oust him through uprisings and revolts, but that he would take charge and demonstrate to all that he was still holding the reins, and quite securely. That some people said he was old and cracking, that anything made him cry like a babe in arms, that he was as deaf as a doorknob and had whims like a pregnant woman. That he was unbearable because he was such a sourpuss, and that his mind was gone and he could not even remember his second family name. Of course Porfirio Díaz would show them that his balls were still in the right place, whole and hale. All phonies and amateurs at taking over would learn who was the authentic “Patriot Nonpareil,” the “Prince of Peace,” the “World’s Statesman,” the “Creator of Wealth,” the “Father of His People.” They would find out.

Doña Carlota was dazzled by his presence when he showed himself in the balcony at El Zócalo, his breast glittering like a Christmas tree, or the starry heavens, with the hundreds of medals that he wore pinned to his uniform.

“You had to see it to believe it,” she commented in the letter to her son. “The older he gets, the more handsome, and even whiter, the old man becomes. I remember him when he was young, when he looked like what he really is, a Mixtec Indian. Now he looks like a true gentleman. Power and money whiten people.”

Doña Carlota proudly wore her high feather hat to attend the great allegorical parade during which all the characters in Mexican history, ancient as well as recent, marched down the Paseo de la Reforma. To open the parade there was a half-naked Moctezuma, with even more feathers than Mr. Arnaud’s widow, and to close it, a stylized, rejuvenated version of Don Porfirio himself.

Behind the parade came the retinue of invited guests, first those from foreign countries, then the ones from the provinces. Among these, proud and rotund, was the matron from Orizaba, Doña Carlota. Agape, she watched a capital city bedecked with arches of flowers, artificial lights, flags, brocade hangings. Only handsome faces and fine garments everywhere, and she noticed that the guards were keeping out of the paved zone its natural inhabitants: the lepers, the syphilitics, the harlots, the cripples.

The grand Gala Ball, which she also had the opportunity to attend, was more fantastic and magnificent than she could ever have dared dream. She had stood there — still handsome, candid, and dazzled like an aging, plump Cinderella — in that princely palace, impressed by the hundred and fifty musicians in the orchestra, by the five hundred lackeys serving twenty whole boxcars of French champagne, by the thirty thousand lights garlanding the ceiling, the countless dozens of roses crowding the halls.

“What a pity that you were not here to enjoy all the greatness of these moments,” she wrote to Ramón. “This is the right place for a young officer like you. A brilliant future would await you here, in the service of General Díaz. Even though people might think that I am interfering, I repeat again that my blood boils when I think that you are throwing your life away on that isolated island.”

Doña Carlota hit the bull’s-eye with this argument as she always did when it was a matter of manipulating complex guilt mechanisms, regrets, and resentments that Ramón sheltered inside his heart. But this time it lasted only for a few minutes.

Folding the letter carefully, Arnaud kissed it and put it inside his pocket. He immediately walked to the dock to receive the captain of El Demócrata, Diógenes Mayorga, who had seemed nervous before and truly upset on account of the last news he had brought from Mexico. This time, Mayorga looked serene, sure of himself. He seemed even to have an air of petulance or superiority. Not in a rush at all, he began to render his news report to Arnaud, while at the same time painstakingly picking his teeth. He opened his mouth, interrupting his phrases halfway to look — with curiosity, almost with pride — at the small particles on the tip of his toothpick.

“You people must be the only Mexicans who do not yet know,” he said. “Porfirio Díaz is out… out already.”

“What?” shouted Arnaud, his round eyes wide open.

“You heard right. Old Porfirio is out. He escaped on a boat to Paris, and there he must be, nursing his prostate.”

“It’s not possible, I do not understand it, how can you say that?” Arnaud’s tongue tripped over itself, his voice dissonant. “You are misinformed, look at this letter, it says here that General Díaz is stronger than ever, that he made a show of all his power at his birthday celebration, which was a great event—”

“Oh, yes,” interrupted Mayorga. “That big party. It was the last kick of a hanged man.”

“And who could have ousted General Díaz?”

“What do you mean ‘who’? Francisco Indalecio Madero, of course.”

“Madero? The little man with a goatee? The madman who invoked spirits?”

“Well, not so little and not so mad,” said Mayorga, digging his toothpick between his canine tooth and the first molar. “He is now the constitutional president of Mexico. Didn’t I tell you last time that there was a war? Well, Madero won. We are all on his side.”

“I don’t understand anything. How can you be on his side? Didn’t he defeat Porfirio Díaz and our army? At least that is what you are saying. Don’t you see how you are contradicting yourself? That President Madero you are talking about, who is he, finally? Friend or foe?”

“Just try a little harder, Captain Arnaud, to see if you can understand,” said Mayorga calmly, looking at Ramón with a defiant, sideways smile. “He was an enemy before, but now that he has won, he’s a friend. He promised not to dismantle the federal army, and you can see he is not a man who carries grudges, because he is going to keep us officers in our posts.”

“What a strange war,” commented Arnaud softly, practically to himself.

That night Ramón and Alicia could not sleep at all. They talked for hours on end, discussed, juggled and rejected possibilities, fought, made up, and by dawn they had agreed that the whole family would leave that same day for Mexico on El Demócrata’s return trip. They needed to have firsthand knowledge of the situation. To find out what designs this new government had for Clipperton.

“I don’t believe we’re going to find anything good for us,” Ramón whispered to Alicia during their long time awake. “I’m more and more convinced that this little island was only a personal whim for Don Porfirio. The new president probably has no idea where the heck we are.”

A few hours later they departed with their two children on the way to Acapulco, after packing just a few things in a suitcase and leaving instructions with Cardona to take charge until Arnaud’s return.

During the voyage, Captain Mayorga gave them a warning.

“Do you want to visit your families in Orizaba? You better forget that. You cannot travel with children on Mexican roads now. If the cattle rustlers do not hold you up, the revolutionaries ambush you, and that is worse. You would get killed, and they would entice the young orphans and take them away.”

Arnaud did not believe a word. He did not want to rely on, nor could he contradict, what Mayorga was telling him. It was as if Mayorga had come from a different time, from the future, and was speaking about a planet no longer familiar to Ramón.

Three days later, after they arrived in Mexico, they discovered all of a sudden that Colonel Avalos, Ramón’s friend and protector, was no longer in charge of Clipperton and no longer in Acapulco; that Doña Petra, Alicia’s mother, had died; and that her father, Don Félix Rovira, had left Orizaba and was now living in the port city of Salina Cruz, where he held a high position at the Moctezuma Brewery.

The last was the only good news, because from Acapulco it was easy to sail to Salina Cruz, where they indeed met with Don Félix. They were amazed to find him looking younger, full of enthusiasm, spring-like, wearing a white suit and white shoes with a mariner’s cap. With a grandchild on each knee, smoking his pipe with one hand while caressing Alicia’s hair with the other, he spoke fervently about democracy and Francisco Madero, whom he had met in Orizaba during a gigantic support rally.

“I don’t want to offend you, Ramón. I know that you favored Porfirio Díaz,” Don Félix told him. “But honestly, he was a real bandit. I do think that now we are in good hands.”

“I’m not a politician, Don Félix, I’m a career military man,” answered Ramón. “I am with whoever commands the federal army.”

Alicia and the children stayed with Don Félix in Salina Cruz, while Ramón started out on his exhausting peregrination to the capital to find out about his future and the future of his isle. But that was an old concern of the past administration. Nobody in the capital remembered that issue, and nobody cared. So, for months he was forced to fall asleep in interminable waiting rooms, explain the whole thing to a hundred government officials, pen hundreds of applications, fight hundreds of bureaucrats.

In the meantime, the country, which had gone wild, was suddenly reined in, then overflowed, found the right way, lost it, found it again, and lost it again, in the vertiginous rhythm of Pancho Villa and his Golden Warriors in the North, the cautious advance of Emiliano Zapata and his dispossessed peasants in the South, and the silent steps of Victoriano Huerta and his enclave of traitors in the capital.

Ramón, a man prone to obsessions and fixed ideas, was too much involved in his own problems to be fully aware of the whirlwind around him. After a lot of struggle, he finally managed to locate, covered with dust and lost in the last archive, some papers of importance to him. It was a document signed by Porfirio Díaz a few years before he fled from Mexico, according to which the French and Mexican governments — at the latter’s initiative — asked for Victor Emmanuel III, the king of Italy, to be the arbiter as to the sovereignty of Clipperton Island, vowing to accept his ruling.

With this document in hand, Arnaud finally managed an interview with the Madero administration’s Minister of the Army and Navy, who signed all the necessary authorizations for him to continue in his post and to keep the logistic support coming from Acapulco by ship.

In the meantime, Alicia, pregnant for the third time and getting close to her delivery date, went to Mexico City with Don Félix and her two children in order to be reunited with Ramón there. They moved into three large, comfortable rooms in a hotel located right in the center of the city, the San Agustín. They hired for their private service one of the hotel maids, named Altagracia Quiroz. She was a girl of fourteen from Yautepec, state of Morelos, who had been forced to flee to the capital during the disruptions caused by the revolution. She continued to dress like the other hotel maids, with a white percale apron and a red kerchief tied around her neck. In spite of her name, she was altogether lacking in grace. Her body was strong like a tree trunk and just as cylindrical. She was short and flat-nosed. But to counter her plain features, nature had endowed her with a glorious head of velvety black, silky hair reaching down to her ankles. “Your hair is like the Virgin of Guadalupe’s,” her mother had been telling her since she was a little girl. But she did not like her hair and always wore it tied up or braided. Given the choice, she would much prefer to have the Virgin of Guadalupe’s upturned little nose, her pink feet, or her generous miracle eyes.

Mrs. Arnaud asked her to take care of her two older children while she attended to delivering and nurturing her third child, and offered her a salary of ten pesos a month, which was double her hotel salary. Altagracia accepted, and from then on her life was inseparably tied to that family, strangers to her until the day before. Without knowing it, she had made a tragic pact with destiny in exchange for ten pesos a month.

A few days later, Olga made her entrance into the world. She was the only one of the four Arnaud children not to be born in Clipperton. Maybe because of this, the isle did not mark her the way it marked her siblings, in spite of the years she had to live there. Perhaps for the same reason, in her adult life Mrs. Olga Arnaud Rovira, Ramón and Alicia’s third child, born in the Hotel San Agustín in Mexico City, always refused to talk about Clipperton or to reminisce about that part of her life, either with relatives or outsiders.

On a February afternoon in 1913, Ramón was walking down the street on the way to his hotel when he could not pass through. There were free-shooters posted on the roofs, stray bullets whistling in every direction, corpses piled up at the corners, big fires blocking the streets, houses being tumbled down by cannonades, barricades of soldiers preventing crossings. He managed to find out what was going on. General Victoriano Huerta had initiated a coup to oust President Madero, and the city was at war.

For the first time since his return to the continent, Arnaud met with reality head-on. He had stumbled into a dilemma: the army was divided, and soldiers in the same army uniforms were killing one another. Which side should he take? Should he defend the government or the insurgents? He could not find an answer but realized that he did not care. It was too late for either.

For ten days and ten nights he stampeded with the masses. He roamed about, keeping close to the walls to save his neck, helping the wounded, who hung from his shoulder as if they were drunk, while attempting to draw some conclusions out of the contradictory reports. Most of all, he tried to get back to his hotel to find out how his family was.

Finally he succeeded. He stormed into the family’s rooms looking distraught, his clothes filthy and ragged, his hair wild like a madman’s. His wife and his father-in-law embraced him long and tight. He began to pace the bedroom in long strides like a caged beast, his words gushing forth. Without concern for order or logic, he began telling them what he had seen and heard.

“The president of the United States sent a message that there had been enough revolution already, and that if Mexico did not establish a better government, he was going to send warships and four thousand marines to invade. President Madero’s brother had both of his eyes gouged out, the good one and the glass one, with the tip of a sword. Madero’s loyal men were executed. The president fell prisoner, was obliged to resign, and was then assassinated. The American ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, was behind everything. They say that the only thing he did not get to do was to pull the trigger of the gun that killed Madero. General Huerta, a friend of the gringos, is now in power—”

Arnaud suddenly stopped his tirade and remained motionless in the center of the room, observing the members of his family. Once the commotion of his return was over and the anguish caused by his disappearance had subsided, they were now listening to him in silence. His family was evidently upset and alarmed by the news, but remained static as if immobilized by a serene stillness. Lying down wrapped in the white linen bedsheets, Alicia was breast-feeding her new baby. Don Félix was slowly drawing on his pipe. The two children were silently building towers of wooden blocks.

“It’s funny,” said Arnaud, now in a low voice. “On the other side of that window the whole world has just crumbled down. But here, the equilibrium continues to be perfect.”

He dropped like a piece of lead onto the bed next to his wife, fully dressed and with his shoes on, completely filthy and with blood, not his own, smeared all over. He fell asleep instantly.

A few days later Don Félix returned to Salina Cruz to oversee his business, which he had left adrift in the middle of the national commotion. The departure of her father, the postpartum blues, the series of violent events that the family had experienced, and even the smell of damp carpets in the halls of the hotel had sunk Alicia into deep melancholy.

One afternoon she finally spoke to Ramón.

“I want you to tell me honestly, from the bottom of your heart, what you think of all this.”

“Of all what?”

“Of all that is happening in this country.”

“I don’t know,” Ramón answered, without any hesitation. “I don’t think anything of it. I don’t believe this is my war.”

“Then, let’s go,” she pleaded in a tone that he had never heard. “Please, let’s go back home. Clipperton is paradise compared with the rest of Mexico.”

Ramón did not answer her right away. He took out of his shirt pocket the orders he had recently obtained from the Ministry of the Army and the Navy, and with the edge of the paper he stroked his wife’s nose.

“We must wait, darling,” he said. “This piece of paper was signed by a government no longer in power. Now we have to see if Huerta’s will ratify it.”