Isle of Passion

Colima, Today

COLIMA IS A SMALL CITY, white and peaceful, with the same palm trees, the same air and rhythm of so many cities by the sea. But Colima is far away from the sea: two hours inland from the port of Manzanillo on the Pacific Coast. I am now at the bus station in the outskirts of town. It is very hot, and I don’t have any specific target address. I came here in search of Victoriano Alvarez’s past, and I have only a few details on the black soldier’s life before Clipperton: that he was born here, that he left in his youth and never returned, and that he had no children. That’s all. I tell the cabdriver to take me to the zócalo because the main plazas preserve, as if in formaldehyde, the old town stories. I walk along the streets around the plaza, where little has changed since the turn of the century. The heat is oppressive, and I can’t help but think that it would be easier to try to find a needle in a haystack. Seventy-one years after his death, who’s going to recall anything about this unknown soldier? Who’s going to remember one of the least memorable of its citizens?

At the Portal Medellín there is a place that seems to have witnessed several generations of townspeople. It is a general store with an oversized and weathered dark wood counter. Outside, a sign reads, “Here is the traditional, renowned, and prestigious Casa Ceballos, open since 1893.” Inside you can find anything, from hardware to underwear. The owner, Don Carlos Ceballos, inherited the business over fifty years ago. He is a well-educated, polite gentleman, like those of yesteryear. I tell him what I am looking for and ask for his help, and he suggests that I come back in the afternoon. He is going to gather a number of people who might have some information.

Hours later, Don Carlos has assembled a group of friends and townspeople about his age at the Hotel Ceballos, next to the store. They are important local people, and a few historians and journalists.

“Last name Alvarez, from Colima, and black?” they want to be sure. “There is only one family, the illegitimate descendants of our illustrious leader, General Manuel Alvarez, our first state governor.”

“But the Alvarezes from Colima are not pure black,” they point out, “they are mulattoes.”

In the center of Villa Alvarez Plaza, cast in bronze and ruling over the town from his pedestal, is soldier Victoriano Alvarez’s paternal grandfather, General Manuel Alvarez. In the assembly room of the Colima town hall, there he is again, in an oil painting with his name in gold. He is a thickset man with sharp features. And he is milky white.

At the corner of Venustiano Carranza and 5 de Mayo lie the ruins of what was his home, a one-story colonial structure. The facade is still standing, but the interior has crumbled down due to the Colima earthquakes. The bases of the walls, like a blueprint, are still visible, indicating where the patios, the kitchen, the bedrooms, and the sitting rooms were. The family rooms were toward the front of the house, next to the street. That is, the general and his successive wives lived there — he became a widower three times and married four times — together with his numerous offspring.

At the back of the house, surrounding the patio, is where the help lived: servants, chambermaids, grooms. The general, great patriarch and stud, fathered children everywhere he went. Willing or not, no female escaped him. At night and in haste, he used to sneak across to the back side of the house, to ravish the young servants, take care of the older ones, and make love to a black maid called Aleja, who was faithful to him all her life.

His wives did not live long; three of them died in childbirth. But not Aleja. She prevailed, surviving her childbirths, and bearing him countless children. The general recognized some and gave them his name. They were his illegitimate, mulatto descendants, among them Victoriano Alvarez, father of the Clipperton Victoriano.

General Alvarez was named governor on July 15, 1857, and five weeks later, during his siesta, his political enemies rioted and gathered at the plaza shouting their slogan, “Law and Religion.” Annoyed, the general woke up, and when informed of the news, he was furious. Livid with rage and without waiting for anyone, he loaded his guns, jumped on his horse, and rushed toward the plaza to end the revolt all by himself. He didn’t get past the first intersection. A gun blast received him, and a bullet nested in his heart. The family went to the church and asked to let him have the last rites and absolution administered postmortem, as was the custom when Christians died suddenly or violently, and to allow his being laid to rest in the cemetery. The parish priest denied the request because the general, a liberal through and through, had been excommunicated for supporting the federal constitution. Finally the priest acceded, in exchange for two thousand pesos, provided they let him whip the demons out of the dead body. So after receiving the bullet that killed him, General Alvarez had to withstand a whipping, and then he was able to go down peacefully into his sepulcher.

His fourth wife, Panchita Córdoba, was young when he died, and soon married Filomeno Bravo. Good-looking Filomeno, reputedly the handsomest man in Mexico, held fast to the household’s same macho and big-daddy traditions practiced by the deceased general. His blue eyes and golden beard made him resemble Emperor Maximilian himself, which served him well in order to reach Empress Carlota’s bed no less. After this, there was no woman he could not claim. He was shrewd and resourceful enough to court them and deceive them all. One afternoon he picked up an unknown, pretty woman all dressed in red. He pulled her onto his horse and took her to the outskirts of town, where he made love to her in an open field. He was seen by neighbors passing by. Before anyone could relay the story to Panchita, his wife, Filomeno rushed home, ordered her to put on a red dress, pulled her onto his horse, and took her on horseback to the outskirts of town, where he made love to her in an open field. That way, if anyone came to her with the story, she, blissfully innocent, would believe that “the mystery lady in the red dress was no one but me.”

When the great Benito Juárez, then president of Mexico, came one day to Colima, he was about to be shot by Filomeno the Blond, who decided to spare his life. Benito Juárez, in gratitude, signed a card for him that read: “You have reciprocity for your life.” So once when Filomeno, imprisoned in Zacatecas, was about to be executed, he showed the card promising “reciprocity for your life,” and was let go. Years later, like General Alvarez, he was also killed by a bullet to his heart, and the people of Colima thought up an epitaph for him: “Filomeno’s pax is a relief for everybody’s ass.”

Miguel Alvarez García, General Manuel Alvarez’s grandson, was also a governor, and a great-grandchild, Griselda Alvarez Ponce de León, was a governor as well. Pomp and circumstance accompanied the Alvarez family for several generations. At least for the white, legitimate Alvarezes, those who lived in the front part of the house.

Victoriano, the mulatto grandson of the general and his black servant Aleja, shared the fate of those who lived at the back of the house. He learned of the family history through the maids’ gossip. He was an invisible, mute witness to the economic success, the political struggles, and the military adventures of his grandfather, uncles, and his white siblings and cousins. Through the cracks he spied on their amorous conquests and their forced ones. Until he got tired of lusting after the women they possessed, got bored with their feats, that is, with admiring and envying their style of life. He wanted to live his own life, so he joined the army and ended up in Clipperton.

Clipperton, 1915

THE RAFT THAT WAS TAKING Arnaud and Cardona became unreal, like a faded memory, as it entered a zone of greenish fog. The women and children were watching it from the beach. They saw it moving away with difficulty toward the reef, bobbing up and down, fragile and tentative, in the treacherously contradictory ocean waves. The effort exerted by the two men rowing diligently made the raft advance, but the force of the waves kept pushing it back. It moved away, grew smaller, darker; it approached, became more visible, and then disappeared again. From the beach, the women kept it afloat with the power of their eyes, they saved it through their prayers to the Saint of Cabora, they brought it closer to shore with the power of their thoughts. When the image became more blurred, they waded in up to their knees to bring it nearer and to hold it back, to rescue it.

“Do you think they’ll reach the ship?” Alicia asked Tirsa. Their soaked petticoats entangled their legs and they had to hold on to each other’s arms in order to withstand the waves and the wind. “Say yes, please say yes.”

“I don’t see the ship anymore.”

“But Rosalía sees it. And Ramón was sure—”

“Maybe it’s behind the fog. Maybe they can get to it, Tirsa.”

“There is nothing, and you know it. Shout with me.”

They shouted together — they all shouted, the children shouted — but the noise of the churning sea swallowed their voices.

The raft was getting close to the reefs and was being jostled about. It would ride up to the crest of a wave and then fall. The women lost sight of it, and then it appeared again, floating amid the greenish vapors or on top of another mountain of water. A big black wave pulled it back toward the beach.

“They’re coming back! They heard us, and they’re coming back!”

“Yes, they are returning.”

The women were screaming until their voices became hoarse. Speaking at the same time, they cursed, they prayed, they argued. Another wave caught the raft and threw it against the rocks.

Alicia covered her eyes with her hands.

“Tell me if they went over the reef,” she pleaded.

“I don’t see them. Yes, I do! There they are—”

“Do you see them?”

“Yes, over there.”

“Thank heaven. .. Are they all right?”

“I think so. But look… look at that dark thing that is coming out of the water.”

“A dark thing—”

“It’s a manta ray. The ray is attacking them!”

“Shut up, Rosalía. Those are rocks. Tirsa, do you see them?”

“I only see shadows.”

“Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be—”

“Stop praying, Alta, and take care of the children.”

The seven children had forgotten all about the raft and were mindlessly splashing about in the water.

“I am telling you it is a manta ray. It overturned the raft!”

“Open your eyes, Alicia. Help me look.”

“No, I see them. They sank! Can anybody see them?”

“There they go, there they go, I see my papa!”

“Children, hush!”

“My daddy is struggling with a manta ray.”

“Shut up! Don’t you understand? Altagracia, I’m telling you to get the children out of the water. Tirsa, do you see them?”

“No, Alicia, I don’t see them.”

“Altagracia, do you see them?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Rosalía, anybody! How come nobody sees anything?”

“Oh, Jesus, the sea swallowed them.”

“You shut up, too! Come, Tirsa, come with me.” Alicia waded deeper into the water. Ramoncito clung to her neck.

“Ramoncito, you must go back to shore.”

“No.”

“Go away, you’re going to drown, and you’re drowning me. Somebody come and get this child!”

Altagracia pulled the screaming Ramoncito away. The rest walked away also. Only Alicia and Tirsa remained, getting deeper into the water until they couldn’t touch bottom. So they floated for a while, swallowing water each time the waves went over their heads.

“Tirsa, do you see them?”

“No, I haven’t seen them for a while. I see shark fins.”

“Sharks? The sharks got them!”

“Wait. Let’s go to the beach to look for them, maybe they came back on the other side.”

They got out of the water. The children were running, all wet, their teeth chattering with cold.

“Alta, you stay with the children. Take off their clothes and put them out to dry. Everybody, help us search for Ramón and Cardona. Rosalía and Francisca, you go that way. Tirsa and I will go this way.”

They spent the rest of the morning walking over the ground coral all around the shore. Sometimes one of them seemed to see something, and they both would go into the water, calling their men in loud voices, and then they would come out of the water and continue walking. By midafternoon their feet were bleeding, cut by the broken coral. Occasionally they met the other women.

“Did you see them?”

“Nothing.”

“Keep looking. Keep looking until you find them.”

They met Altagracia and the kids. Ramoncito ran after his mother and clung to her legs.

“Not now, child.”

Ramoncito cried. He did not want to let go.

“Alta, take this child away. Give them something to eat. They must be hungry.”

“What do I give them?”

“Whatever you can find.”

“There is no fish.”

“Give them eggs. Give them water, they are thirsty. Get them dressed, they are cold.”

“Their clothes are all wet.”

“Then light a bonfire. Let me go, Ramón. Help Alta make a bonfire.”

“And Daddy? I know where Daddy is.”

“Where?”

“At home. He got there already.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

Alicia ran home. The child ran after her, and Altagracia after the child. When they arrived, they found the house empty.

“Didn’t you, ma’am, have something to look at things from far away?”

“Ramón gave it to the Dutchmen.”

“If they could reach Acapulco, maybe the master can also.”

“On a few tied-up boards? Don’t be silly. Take this child with you, Alta. Play with him, put him to sleep, feed him, do anything, but take him away from me. I must find Ramón.”

Alicia and Tirsa ran toward the southern rock. Seeing them go away, Ramoncito screamed, and with so much crying and hiccups, he could barely breathe. The other children, meanwhile, were playing blindman’s buff. The two women climbed up to the lighthouse and searched in all directions until their eyes hurt. The fog had grown thicker, and it was like a veil occasionally parted by the sharp fins of the sharks. Nightfall found them still there, battered by the wind’s frozen eddies, and they were still there at dawn, eyes fixed on the horizon. The sun was coming up strong, dissipating the phantasmagoric mists, and the sea woke up in shades of yellow, rose, and orange, without even a shadow to darken the limpid sunshine.

The following days were like one another, and brought no changes. Alicia wrapped her wounded feet in rags to protect them from the coral, and she wandered about the beaches incessantly, in an anguished, irrational agitation. Once in a while, she would mutter in passing.

“Alta, the children are hungry. Feed them.”

“What do I feed them, ma’am?”

“Whatever you can.”

Or else it would go like this:

“Alta, it’s very late. Put the children to bed.”

“They don’t want to, ma’am.”

“Then, let them stay up a while longer.”

She didn’t go to bed at all. She would wander around the isle like a soul in purgatory, always looking at the sea. Ramoncito, whimpering and with a runny nose, would trot behind her.

“Mommy, I know where Daddy is.”

“Listen, let’s not pretend.”

On the third day, Alicia sat in a corner of the kitchen, her feet full of blisters. She could no longer move and remained there, silent, catatonic, until Rosalía came with the news that she had seen the raft buried in the sand toward the north shore. Forgetting about her feet, Alicia rushed out, with the child tagging behind her as usual. The raft was there, but not the men. Not even a trace of them.

“Tirsa, do you think they are dead?”

“Yes.”

Alicia lay down on the sand as if she had decided to stay there forever. More than a widow’s sorrow, she felt the spite of an abandoned bride. A painful kind of anger and unreasonable jealousy consumed her. It was the sorrowful rancor of a woman whose lover leaves her for another woman, or of a man betrayed by his friends. There was no letup in her anxiety, like a woman demanding of her lover to come back, or like a man expecting a well-deserved apology. To leave and abandon her had been Ramón’s betrayal. If he ever returned, she would throw that in his face. What right had he of dying in such an absurd manner, so senselessly, and leaving her so desolate? If he ever returned, she would tell him: Didn’t you think of your children before taking such risks? If he returned — of course she would pardon him. She would embrace him, adore him, she would dry his feet with her hair. If he returned — perhaps he would return, surely he would. And Alicia lifted her head again to search the horizon.

The rest of the world no longer existed for her. She did not see, hear, or understand; she did not touch the food prepared for her. She was not even aware of Ramoncito’s presence as he clambered upon her shoulders, pulled her by the arms, and fluttered around her, constantly talking to her.

“Mom, look at this conch. Mom, it hurts here. Mom? Can I tell you a story? Mom, I saw Daddy a while ago. Could I make a necklace for you, Mom, with this shell?”

Alicia did not respond. She had drifted far away without wanting to return. The child caught a crab and began playing with it. It had fiery pop eyes, and a red shell with white dots. It would open and close its pincers and had hair on its legs and antennae on its head. In an attempt to escape, it ran backward, sideways. Ramoncito blocked its way with a log. He pricked it with a stick and harassed it with his foot.

“Mom? Look at this sea monster, Mom.”

The animal suffered, got angry, went mad; it was fascinating in its desperation. The child got his face closer to see it better.

His screaming and his bloodied face pulled Alicia from the bottomless pit of her loneliness. The crab had bitten Ramoncito on the lip, parting it in two. She picked up the child and ran home with him in her arms.

“Did you see, Mom? The sea monster got furious.”

She hugged him, kissed his hair and his eyes, asked him for forgiveness.

“I’m sorry, my son, I’m sorry. Forgive me, it was my fault, I am to blame, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”

Back at home, Alicia cleaned the wound, took out her sewing basket from the trunk where she kept her valuables, and threaded a needle with the last strong, long blue strand left.

“Where is Tirsa?” she asked Altagracia.

“She’s not nearby, ma’am. Do you want me to go get her?”

“There is no time. Alta, hold the child.”

Alicia took a deep breath, controlling the tremor in her hands, and summoning a courage she did not have, she started to sew the wound, stitch by stitch, with the needle and the blue thread. When she finished, she lay the child on his bed and kept caressing his head until he fell asleep. Then she called the other women. The five came: Tirsa, Altagracia, Benita Pérez (Private Arnulfo Pérez’s widow), Francisca (who was Pedrito Carvajal’s girlfriend), and Rosalía (who belonged to all and to no one in particular). Alicia glanced at them — they were all disheveled, undernourished, dressed in rags — and she thought they looked ten years older than they actually were. I must look like this, too, she thought. Like a witch. If Ramón had returned then, he would have been scared to death. She asked the women to sit down and hear her out.

“The men here have died, but we are still alive. The children are alive, and we have to feed them. It’s not going to be easy. We must work hard, so the mourning period is over. We must stop crying for our husbands because we have to take care of our children.”

As a result of this meeting, the first one headed by Alicia, the wearing of skirts was forbidden.

“No rags to get in the way,” she said. “And we must learn how to fish.”

She distributed the pairs of pants left by the men. Cutting them above the knee, they cinched them around their smaller waists with hemp. All had been living on the isle for seven years but had not learned how to fish: to provide food had been solely a male endeavor. From that day, come early dawn, they were working by the ocean, setting traps among the corals, and toiling with nets, fishing poles, and hooks. They hurled sharp sticks at anything that moved underwater. Hours later they would lie on the beach, enervated from overexposure to the Clipperton sun, completely exhausted and demoralized after so much fruitless effort. The first week they went hungry; they caught only a couple of eels, an octopus, and a small ray.

The discovery of an easier way to fish came to the children. One day when the women returned from the seaside empty-handed, they found the children sitting around a half-dozen sardines still alive and flapping.

“Who gave those to you?”

“Nobody. We took them away from the birds.”

They saw how the children, golden and supple, disbanded and rushed to the beach. When a booby darted into the water and got a fish in its beak, the children zigzagged after it, prancing around, and then lunged forward to grab the bird and shake it by the legs until it let go of its catch. The children came back bursting with pride, shiny fish in hand. The women laughed — it was cute to see them run, and funny to watch them shaking the ugly birds — and then tried to imitate the children but couldn’t, lacking their agility. Alicia and Francisca ran after one bird, got entangled with each other, and fell to the ground. The bird started to fly away. Alicia managed to stand up, lunged, and, still holding on to a few feathers, fell again. Lying down and with the children shouting and clapping around her, she understood what a minute before would have seemed inconceivable to her. She realized that, in spite of everything, she could still feel happy. She felt ashamed of herself on account of Ramón, got up quickly, and shook the sand off her hair. That night the women lit a bonfire by the seashore and roasted more fish than they could eat.

In time, they perfected other practical ways of fishing. The most effective was to lie facedown at the dock with a sharp stick ready, and then wait until a big fish came around looking for shelter underneath. It was easy to mount a surprise harpoon attack through the broken deck boards. With this method they obtained sawfish, sea bass, tiger fish, and moonfish. Alicia regained her role as a schoolteacher, and the children and the rest of the women had to attend her classes daily. For paper and pencil, they wrote on the sand with sticks. Since all the books had been lost, the readers used were the accounting records of the guano company and some old newspaper clippings about the invasion of Veracruz. They conjugated verbs in English and in French, and learned religion, good manners, and civics.

Long ago, Ramón had solved the lack of a calendar by carving lines on the veranda of their house. After his death, Alicia completely forgot to mark the days. Now she wanted to keep track, but she had no clear notion of how much time had elapsed. She thought it was about a month and Tirsa believed it was only twenty-five days. So they compromised, and marked twenty-eight lines.

“I have no idea what day is today in the rest of the world,” Alicia declared, “but here it is Tuesday, June 24, 1915.”

Between teaching, taking care of the children, and the intense, indispensable survival activities, they managed one day at a time, without the leisure of wondering about the days gone by or the days to come. In that way, without realizing it, they overcame the nightmare in which they were living and made it bearable.

All that was during the day. But when night fell, their fears and sorrows came back to overwhelm them. The children were so frightened that they clung to the women and would not fall asleep unless cuddled in their arms. In spite of being so tired, the women could not sleep either. In the dark, memories weighed so heavily that the past became present, and the dead returned, first one and then another, until they filled the house, and those still alive had to nestle in the corners to make room for them.

The moans of the flagellants were heard again, and the cries of Irra’s young sons, struck down by scurvy. Jesús Neri would appear, bitten by sharks, together with Juana, his wife, smelling horrible. Some of the visits were pleasant, like those of Ramón and Cardona, who would talk about their own death. Their voices came out of the dark as in the old happy times when they gathered at dusk.

“Ramón, I say there is no ship.”

“You don’t see it, Secundino, but it’s there, all lit and silvery, waiting for us.”

“It’s not a ship, Ramón, it’s a manta ray, the one that killed us.”

“It was not a manta ray, Secundino. It was sharks.”

During the day Alicia understood and accepted Ramón’s death. But come night she allowed herself to be confused by these apparitions, and she would often sit looking at the sea in the moonlight and awaiting his return. Not even Tirsa, the strong one, who did not know about poetry or believe in the afterlife, was able to escape this collective delusion where the living and the dead coexisted.

“Secundino came last night to console me,” she told Alicia once.

“And what did he say?”

“Evil does not last forever, and neither do we.”

“He’s right.”

The souls of Pedrito Carvajal, Arnulfo Pérez, Faustino Almazán, and the other soldiers would come in at midnight through the holes in the roof, and, after extending a gray serape on the floor, they played cards, drank pulque, and filled the house with their loud shouts.

“You can kiss your money good-bye, I have the king and the jack.”

“Then you can shove them you know where, because here comes the ace.”

Besides those who had died, there were the private ghosts. These had come from everybody’s hometown or were inherited from loved ones. The women started talking about them in order to pass the time, to recall their lost childhood fears. But the darkness of night in Clipperton was so desolate that it naturally evoked all sorts of phantoms. Alicia summoned the dead dwarfs that people called chaneques; an image of Our Lady of Sorrows pierced by seven daggers; and the legendary Ensign Nun, whom Death did not carry away in a horse carriage, like in Orizaba, but in the ship of the Flying Dutchman. Tirsa dragged in all the specters Cardona had left with her, brought to Clipperton from the land of the Chamula Indians. The one that terrified them most was Yalambequet, a flying skeleton that made his way into people’s homes to steal their souls, announcing his presence by a thunderous clattering of bones that pierced the air.

“There goes Yalambequet. May God have mercy on us,” the women and the children soon learned to say when there was a storm, and even when there wasn’t one, just in case Yalambequet came unannounced.

They saw La Llorona, beautiful and phosphorescent, her arms full of lilies and her naked body wrapped in a rebozo, always wandering, always howling about the loss of her children and sweeping her long hair against people. They saw Doña Carlota, Ramón’s mother, who appeared in a white nightgown and with her bonnet of black feathers, complaining about how undernourished and uncared for the children were. They frequently saw a silent, nice lady dressed in brown, whom nobody had met before. Clipperton itself had its own ghosts, like Ferdinand Magellan, the mariner who gave it its name, Isle of Passion, because of all the pain and sickness his crew had suffered when sailing close to it. Or like the pirate John Clipperton, who retired to his favorite refuge in order to relive orgies of old, keeping the women awake with the noise of wineglasses shattering on the floor, harlots’ laughter, and swords clashing.

The ocean was dotted with ghost ships. The Flying Dutchman’s was joined by a black schooner with her sails forming a cross, and another one that was just drifting, enveloped in flames. It was common belief that Arnaud and Cardona had been deceived by the Marie Celeste, the infernal ship that attracted death and ill fate the way a magnet attracts iron.

Supernatural incidents were on the increase in quantity and quality; they ceased being individual events and turned into collective experiences. Night after night when the temperature lowered, a throng of ghosts formed at the southern rock to begin the pilgrimage around the isle, carrying lighted torches, praying, dragging their chains, and leaving behind letters and messages for the living. They were the souls of all those who had died in connection with Clipperton, from those who had been condemned and marooned by the pirates to the Dutch sailor who drowned on his way to Acapulco. At first, the women ran home, bolted their doors, and covered their heads with their arms, in order not to see the river of lights or hear the thump-thump of their footsteps. But later they dared kneel on their balconies, waiting for the procession to pass by. The next morning they went out early to pick up the messages from the other world, and if these contained any orders or wishes, they would fulfill them faithfully. It did not take very long for the living to join the nightly wanderings of the spirits. Against Alicia and Tirsa’s wishes, Francisca, Benita, Rosalía, and sometimes Altagracia marched all night behind the dead, and the next morning, bedraggled, they also looked like ghosts and had no energy to deal with their daily chores.

The spirits became capricious and demanding. Their orders took up all the time of those still living. They asked for stone altars, ceremonies, offers of food, and even goods impossible to obtain on the isle, like cigarettes and bunches of the fire-red cempaxuchitl flowers, which feed the insatiable hunger that tortures the dead in their tombs. The isle looked like a primitive holy land. Everywhere there were stone altars surrounded by plates of food, yellowed photos of the deceased, and a few remaining personal possessions: a straw hat, a sandal, a razor, a handkerchief, an image of the Virgin.

One night Tirsa and Alicia stayed home with all the children while the other women marched in the procession. Tirsa told Alicia that she had discovered Benita and Francisca flagellating themselves and wearing hair shirts and tight pieces of old rope around their thighs.

“Things cannot go on like this,” warned Alicia, “or we are going to end up burying each other alive.”

Alicia and Tirsa agreed to take drastic measures for all, beginning with themselves. The only way to survive was to stop this delirium. They bid farewell forever to the souls of Ramón and Secundino, explained the dangers of the situation, and wrote five commandments. They swore to enforce them until common sense prevailed and things returned to normal, for which they might have to impose penalties on those who would not comply. With a knife, they carved these commandments in big letters on the wall, and when the others returned at dawn, they were surprised by the following pentalogue:

First: From now on it is absolutely prohibited to pray, to build altars, and to perform religious sacrifices.

Second: Only what we see and the people we can touch are real. All others are hereby banished from Clipperton forever. It is forbidden to deal with the dead.

Third: No one is allowed to go out of the house at night, unless it is for a short task and after obtaining permission. The hours of the night are for resting, and for protecting the children and keeping them company.

Fourth: Nobody can scare a child, or say to a child things that are not true.

Fifth: She who violates any of these laws, in word or deed, will be thrown out of her house, separated from her children, and condemned to live in isolation.

Alicia and Tirsa went all around the isle toppling altars and burning idols and fetishes. Alicia’s moral authority and her imposing personality, Tirsa’s courage and physical strength, plus the unwavering alliance between the two, ensured their leaving behind these ominous times in which the dead invaded Clipperton and made slaves out of the living.

In spite of heading the struggle against the threat of the incorporeal, Alicia began to have strange experiences, to feel inexplicable presences. She felt she was weakening, and that something inside her was depriving her of energy, something that hoarded the food she ate, that sucked the liquid with which she calmed her thirst. Someone who took away the air she breathed and robbed her heart of blood. She seemed to have a strength inside of her, smaller but more powerful, which existed and thrived at the expense of her own stamina, as her body, already ravished by malnutrition and fatigue, became weaker.

Two months after her husband was swallowed by the ocean, Alicia realized the nature of her problem. It was simple and obvious, and if she had not understood before, it was just because of her panic over accepting it. She called Tirsa.

“I am pregnant,” she told her.

“This is incredible,” Tirsa responded. “I didn’t want to tell you because I wasn’t sure, but I think I’m pregnant, too.”

That night, hiding in her kitchen, Alicia cried all that she had not been able to cry when Ramón died. Violating her own commandment, she talked to him again, which she had not done for a long time.

“I called you many times, and I begged you to come back,” she told him, “but not in this way. I needed your company and your protection, and look at what you are sending me instead of you: another baby.”

Altagracia realized what the situation was and came to offer her consolation.

“Don’t worry, ma’am, someone will soon come for me, and I’ll take you with me, and all the others also,” she told her.

“And who is going to come for you?”

“It’s a secret.”

“Don’t come to me with stories of the dead. It’s forbidden.”

“He’s not dead, he’s alive.”

“Alive? Tell me who.”

“The German fellow.”

“Schultz?”

“The same. He promised me he would come for me.”

“Stop dreaming, my child. You’re in worse shape than the ones who believe in ghosts.”

“He is going to come. He promised me.”

“He promised that to you because he was crazy.”

“He was not crazy. He was just too lonesome. I cured him.”

“Enough! All that you would need is to make an altar to your blond saint and pray to him for a miracle!”

“It’s not a miracle, ma’am. It’s that he loves me.”

“It’s over a year since he left, and he has not come.”

“But he must be looking for me, I know.”

“He was probably locked up in a nuthouse.”

“Then he will escape and come for me.”

“All right, you can believe anything you want. You might be right. You better keep on believing in Schultz’s love, since you are lucky he’s alive. Hold on to your memories so that despair does not dry you up, as it has done to us.”

Mexico City, Today

THERE ARE CONFLICTING DETAILS regarding the deaths of Captain Ramón Arnaud and Lieutenant Secundino Cardona.

The first is the exact date: the day, the month, the year they occurred.

The second has to do with the kind of fish that overturned their raft, or that killed them when they fell in the water. Did it exist, really? If it existed, was it a manta ray? Or was it sharks?

The third is more complex, and it refers to the vessel that appeared that day on the horizon, the one they were trying to intercept. Was it a real ship? Was it, on the contrary, a mirage produced by a man’s anguish, or a product of the Clipperton survivors’ collective wish?

The four direct testimonies that I found about this event are contradictory, and do not dispel our doubts. Quite the opposite.

First: Letter of the nurse María Noriega, Lieutenant Cardona’s legal wife, dated July 1940, in which she claims her widow’s pension from the Mexican government.

DIVISION GENERAL LÁZARO CÁRDENAS

NATIONAL PALACE

BY HAND

I am the widow of Infantry Lieutenant Secundino Angel Cardona, who under orders of the Secretary of Defense and of the Navy, with a detail of the Thirteenth Infantry Battalion commanded by Captain Ramón Arnaud, left the port of Acapulco on board the Mexican steamship Corrigan II.

My deceased husband informed me before parting that his stay on Clipperton Island, where they were headed, would last only a year; but after the year was over, he never returned, leaving me and my children without economic support, and restlessly waiting for him while locking in my heart the joy of ever seeing him again.

But fate or misfortune decreed to keep us apart forever. At dawn, on May 4th, 1915, they saw a sailing ship headed from east to west, to the northeast of the isle, and Captain Arnaud and my husband, in the hope of being rescued, started out in an improvised rowboat to follow the ship, which did not meet with success, and they perished at sea.

The persons who had stayed on the isle feverishly followed the fugitive ship, which became more and more distant, and observed anxiously and with despair the frantic efforts of the little boat, which was being left behind without managing to be seen. The ship finally disappeared on the horizon; only the boat could be seen, advancing with difficulty, and then disappearing behind some clouds. When these dissipated, the boat had vanished, swallowed by the ocean […].

Yours truly,

María Noriega, Cardona’s widow

Second: Logbook of Captain H. P. Perril, of the gunboat Yorktown, of the U.S. Navy, dated Wednesday, 17 July 1917. Captain Perril heard the story of the events that day from an eyewitness.

Captain Arnaud considered himself responsible for the desperate situation in which the people on the isle found themselves and worried so much about it that his mind lost its balance.

One day, imagining that he saw a ship at a short distance from shore, he forced his men to launch a boat and row out to sea to intercept it in order to seek help. The men refused to give in to the whim of their captain, well aware that the ship existed only in his imagination. Finally they obeyed his command and started out in the boat against heavy seas.

Shortly after, through her binoculars, Mrs. Arnaud saw the boat capsize and the men disappear in a sea full of sharks.

Third: Report filed in 1982 by Ramón Arnaud Rovira, Captain Arnaud’s eldest son, who was about six or seven years old at the moment of his father’s death.

One day at the end of May 1915, […] my younger sister Alicia came in running and announced, addressing my father, “Dad, a ship!” […] In fact, a small shape was seen approaching from the northwest. We all ran to the dock. […] About one hour after we saw it, it was in front of us, its steel-gray gleams indicating its position in full sunlight.

In spite of all our signals and shouts, the vessel seemed not to be stopping, and continued on its course, ignoring us, […]

“The ship is leaving! Why? How could this be? O Lord, have pity on us! Don’t abandon us!” my disconsolate mother was shouting. […]

The threatening tide was beginning to rise. By then the sea was already dangerous and our boat was not in very good condition. A strong wind was already blowing. The boat struggled against the thrust of the waves. In the meantime, the ship continued on its course. […]

Suddenly, a big thing made them capsize. It was a gigantic sea animal, I suppose it was a manta ray that made the canoe capsize!”*

Fourth: Version of General Francisco Urquizo, written in 1954 and documented in the Annals and Archives of the Mexican Army:

Captain Arnaud is already at the edge of insanity. ..

It was October 5 of that fateful year of 1916.

The sun was already out, promising a clear, peaceful day, one of those days when the sun dazzles […]. The watchman at the lighthouse called out that there seemed to be the silhouette of a steamship looming on the horizon.

Everybody went up the tower in the avid hope of confirming the news.

It was true. This was no mirage or delusion. There was a ship in the distance. It might be headed toward the isle or it could just hold its course, but it was there.

Arnaud thought that he was losing his mind; this was the opportunity he had been waiting for, the only opportunity to liberate his people. Afraid that the ship would pass them by, he decided to start out and try to intercept it. They boarded the only boat they had and started out rowing to the limit of their physical strength. He was carrying a long pole with a white flag to make signals.

Nervousness, desperation, hope: all contributed to give the men enough energy to row.

From the tower on the cliff, Alicia, her children, and the rest of the women saw the boat grow distant and silently prayed for success.

“Let them be seen, O Lord! Let them be seen! […]

Impossible.

It was written.

That day, October 5, 1916, was a fatal day. […]

Those who were watching saw with anguish and desperation that the boat had stopped and that there was a struggle on board.

A big black mass had taken hold of the boat, and the men were furiously trying to hit it with their oars.

It was a manta ray!

It all happened in a matter of seconds. The sea monster was more powerful than the weak men and their little boat. It quickly overturned the tiny craft and it sank. The men never came back to the surface. […]

The sea was calm as if nothing had happened. The ship’s silhouette, indifferent, continued on its course.*

Acapulco, Today

I COME TO ACAPULCO to find out what happened to Gustav Schultz after he left Clipperton on the gunboat Cleveland, of the U.S. Navy. In a newspaper of 1935, I found the first trace, the thread that would lead me to unravel the story: the German fellow never returned to his native country.

After Captain Arnaud threw him out of the isle, Schultz stayed for the rest of his days, which were many, in the Mexican port of Acapulco. What tied him to a country that, besides being foreign to him, was being torn asunder at the moment by a violent revolution? There was only one thing: a deep, sworn commitment. The one that he had screamed at the Clipperton shore, a few minutes before his departure, to the woman he loved, whom he was being forced to leave behind against his will. With his blond locks prey to the winds and a stormy expression in his madman’s eyes, he had promised Altagracia Quiroz that he would not rest until he could rescue her, that he would marry her and make her happy. And if there was a reason he had remained in Mexico, it was to fulfill his impossible promise.

I have been able to find the address in Acapulco of one of the houses in which he lived. It’s an adobe structure on a large piece of land in the colonial district of La Pocita. I talk to the old local neighbors, those who had heard about him and still remember his name. I ask them if he was insane when he arrived or if he was ever crazy.

“No, not crazy, never,” they answer me. “Mr. Schultz was a great man here in Acapulco. A respected and beloved person, who gave us drinking water here in our port. We owe our first aqueduct to him. Did you already visit the Water House? It is a tourist attraction, but it was his home for years. At first he lived here in this house, but after he brought the water, he moved over there.”

In the Water House one can still see the tanks, the pumps, and the hydraulic equipment that Gustav Schultz brought, installing them himself and making it all work, certainly applying the same meticulous care that he had taken with the Decauville train tracks in Clipperton.

A few years later he became a Mexican citizen and accepted a public office which he served with honesty and Teutonic perseverence: that of the port captain.

“Had he any children?” I ask people.

They say no, but he adopted a newborn Mexican baby from an orphanage, and gave him both his first and family names.

So now I’m looking for Gustavo Schultz, his adoptive son, at the place I am told he works. He is the owner of a poultry business in the Acapulco Central Food Market. The passageways have been recently washed with buckets of water mixed with a disinfectant. I get lost in a labyrinth crowded with all sorts of colors and smells. I pass by the striking piñatas in the shape of stars, ships, bulls. I pass by the mangoes and the custard apples; the fifty-eight varieties of chiles; the images of baby Jesus on a throne, donning crown and mantle; the kiosks of the clothes menders waiting for customers in front of antique sewing machines. I circulate among the ears of corn, the sweet potatoes, and the prickly pears; and in between the tables with benches where one can eat tacos, flautas, and burritos prepared by sweaty fast cooks. I see the huitlacoche and the incredible variety of mushrooms; someone offers me colorfully striped serapes, neck scarves, and hand-embroidered huipiles. They want me to buy paper cutouts, candy skulls, and cempaxuchitl flowers for the dead. Pumpkin flowers to make soup, and Jamaica flowers for agua fresca. I cross through the meat kiosks shouldering past legs of beef and heads of lamb. Until I finally reach the chickens.

They hang by the legs, all in a tight row, ugly and featherless, a hostile look in their dead eyes. There are thousands of chickens in more than two hundred kiosks, with at least one vendor in each kiosk. I go one by one, asking, “Are you Gustavo Schultz, or do you know him?”

“He had a business here, but he died about three years ago. His son, who has the same name, lives in Chilpancingo, state of Guerrero.”

Gustav Schultz, the German fellow, Gustavo Schultz, his son, Gustavo Shultz, his grandson. I search in the Chilpancingo phone book, make a long-distance call, and talk with the last Schultz, the only one still alive. His voice sounds young, and he tells me he’s in politics. He remembers his grandfather as very blond, with a light complexion and bushy eyebrows. He says that neither he nor his father, who are both dark-haired, resembles him physically because they had no blood connection. He confessed not to know any details of the Clipperton drama because the family does not like to recall such a painful past.

He does not have more information, he acknowledges, but in order not to disappoint me, he reads on the phone from a clipping he has kept for years. It is an interview of his grandfather by the journalist Hernán Rosales, published in the Mexico City newspaper El Universal on May 14, 1935. In it Schultz tells more about other people than about himself. His grandson reads with some difficulty because, as he explains, the clipping is now yellowed and faded. On the phone I get the story of the first Gustav Schultz, succinctly told by himself.

He says that in 1904, when he was twenty-four, he embarked in San Francisco, without much thought, for a place he had never heard of, Clipperton Island. He was going there to work for an English phosphate company. When he arrived, the uninhabited and barren isle filled him with melancholy: “I was living there like Robinson Crusoe.” Eager to see and touch something green and alive, he sailed from Clipperton to the island of Socorro in the Revillagigedo Archipelago to bring back thirteen young and tender coconut palms and forty tons of topsoil in which to plant them. As man cannot subsist on coconuts alone, he also imported some company for himself: a young woman, Daría Pinzón, and her only daughter, Jesusa Lacursa.

On his return to Clipperton, he shared his life with that woman, watched the palm trees he planted grow, and made his employees work like slaves. He worked like a beast of burden himself. “I fell in love with my life in that desert seascape,” he says. About his conflicts with Ramón Arnaud and his violent and crazy days, Gustav Schultz chose to keep silent. About the appearance of Altagracia Quiroz in his life, he confesses: “Her presence relieved my great sadness.”

He refers to the arrival of Captain Williams at Clipperton, and confirms that he agreed to travel to Mexico aboard the Cleveland out of his own free will, not forced to do so by anyone. Once on the continent, it seems he recovered his sanity, if it is true that he had ever lost it, and he dedicated himself to try to rescue Altagracia. In the midst of the revolution that was rocking the country, she was merely a blade of grass lost in the storm, like so many other Mexicans. To reach Clipperton was not easy; a trip could not be improvised on a small vessel. He had to obtain the collaboration of a government that would be willing to make a large vessel available for the sole purpose of rescuing the remaining survivors. It was wartime, when thousands of people were dying, and a rescue mission for a few soldiers left in an enemy camp was certainly not among the priorities of the Mexican government.

But Gustav Schultz did not forget his promise. On the contrary, his steadfast determination became an obsession. He traveled regularly to various places with the purpose of making inquiries about Altagracia Quiroz before the proper authorities and the rebels, those of the deposed administrations as well as the elected ones. In the interview he tells how he spent a year going from one government office to another, and from one department to the next, uselessly making his request over and over again to bureaucrats who would ask him to present it in writing, just to bury it in their archives, or who, insisting on protocol, would then shut their doors in his face for good. Convinced that he had tried all possibilities on the Pacific coast, in June 1915 he went to Veracruz, on the Atlantic side, to speak with a government official who was known to be a humanitarian, generous person. His name was Hilario Rodríguez Malpica. This kind man listened to the whole story, worried about the situation of those forsaken on the isle, and commissioned Schultz to go to Clipperton to rescue them. For days they contacted people high in government and some who were influential with the navy, until a plan was agreed upon. Gustav Schultz was to travel to Salina Cruz, a Pacific port, and there would board a ship, the Corrigan III, for the isle.

He had finally secured governmental support and help from the navy, had received a commission, money for the trip and essential crew, and a set departure date. Perhaps he even had a bouquet of roses to give to his fiancée at the time of their meeting. “But fate,” Schultz recounts, “determined that upon my arrival at Salina Cruz, I found the Corrigan III aground at the dock.”

Since it was impossible to repair the Corrigan III, the only available ship, the trip was called off, and the poor German fellow had to start all over again. For two more years he continued in his efforts, to no avail, and in January 1917 he traveled again to Veracruz to visit the only man who had ever listened to him. This time, however, even Rodríguez Malpica discouraged him.

“My advice, Mr. Schultz, is that you face reality. You need to look at things with more pessimism. I regret having to tell you this, because I consider you my friend. But you must realize that all of them must have died by now. Your Altagracia Quiroz, and all the others, are dead.”

“I don’t agree, my friend. I can assure you that woman is alive and is going to marry me. Someday. Besides, I am certain that day is not far off. And you, who have always been so kind to me, you are going to be my best man.”

Clipperton, 1915–1916

WITH A RAG ATTACHED to the end of a stick (brooms had disappeared long before) Alicia was trying to sweep the sand out of the house. This chore, which she had done every day for seven years, was an obsession with her still, now that they were living in rubble. The effort exhausted her, and she had to sit down to rest. In the past, each time she was pregnant she had been full of joy and bursting with energy. But not this time. Malnourishment had greatly affected her. She felt old and dispirited, and her disposition had turned sour. She was tormented by the thought of her body having to compete with her own offspring for the scant nutrition she was receiving. It was obvious that the baby resented the lack of food even more than she did, since the size of her belly after five months of pregnancy had not reached the volume of her previous ones at three months.

Tirsa Rendón was not doing much better. Her pregnancy had started a month later, but she was also looking wasted. Tirsa, the brave one, the strong one, the one who managed to collect, all by herself, three-fourths of all the food they ate, had become quite a different Tirsa: distant and listless, covering up her infinite fatigue with an indifferent exterior.

Alicia got up to finish her chore. Every time she swept a room, the children would come running in and bring the sand back.

“I tire myself less if I sweep again than if I scold them,” she would explain.

She went into the small room next to her bedroom. Instead of a stained-glass window, there was now a big gaping hole that allowed the wind in. Instead of the wicker chair, which the hurricane had carried away, there was a wooden box, and she sat on it. She opened the trunk where she kept her most precious possessions. She took out Ramón’s gala uniform, his woolen jacket with the double line of buttons, epaulets and chevron still golden; his military hat, flattened sideways, with its braid unstitched; his sword; his black boots. She took out her wedding gown, with its twenty yards of lace, and a dozen tablecloths and bedsheets, among them the wedding-night saintly sheet. Two little sailor suits that had belonged to her older children but could still fit the younger ones. Some clothes she had bought (but never got to wear) on her one and only trip to the Mexican capital. Carefully wrapped in tissue paper, there was a bar of Ivory soap, already half used. She took it out, smelled it, and wrapped it again. There was a silver frame, with its glass missing, from which her father smiled at her. He was young and wore a white suit. She untied the silk ribbon around a huge wad of bills and counted them: there were four thousand two hundred pesos, all the money she and Ramón had saved. She took out his hairbrush, the one with the silver handle, let her hair down, and brushed it for the first time in months. It was coming out in handfuls, and she rolled a ball with the hair left entangled in the bristles.

“When Tirsa comes,” she said to herself, “I am going to tell her that tomorrow we’ll get our hair cut. This long hair is of no use to us; on the contrary, it’s sapping away our babies’ calcium and iron.”

She opened her jewelry case. In it she saw her ring and the diamond earrings, a sapphire brooch, several gold hoops, chains, and several twigs of black coral that the children had gotten out of the sea to give to her. In the bottom she found what she was looking for: the gray pearl necklace that Ramón had sent her from Japan. She put it on, caressing it for a long time: she seemed to want the tips of her fingers to memorize even the tiniest irregularities in each pearl.

She folded everything back in, arranging things inside the trunk, except for the sheets and the tablecloths. She needed them to cover herself at night, to use as towels after her bath, to make clothes for the children and diapers for the babies to come. She took off the crude tunic she was wearing, made out of real sailcloth, and wrapped herself in the saintly bedsheet like a sari. She closed the trunk tight and dragged it out to the veranda, making rest stops. When she managed to bring it to the edge, she gave it a big push. The trunk fell about five feet, sinking somewhat into the sand. She went down and spent the rest of the morning digging a hole around it.

Ramoncito came to help her.

“What are you doing, Mom?”

“I am burying the trunk.”

“What for?”

“To protect what is inside.”

“And what is inside?”

“The clothes and the money I am going to need the day we are rescued.”

“Are we going to be rescued?”

“Perhaps.”

“I don’t want to leave. Do you?”

“I do.”

“Why? Is it better somewhere else?”

“Much better. Perhaps.”

“And why do you need clothes the day we are rescued?”

“I don’t want to be pitied.”

“And you also saved clothes for me?”

“No, not for you. Your old clothes are too small for you.”

“Then I am going to be pitied?”

“No. I am going to buy you a new suit as soon as we land. And a pair of shoes.”

“I don’t like to wear shoes.”

“When you are there, you’ll like them.”

“I don’t like it over there. I don’t want to go.”

The rest of the women were still on the cliff side. Every day they clambered down the steep rock, competing with the waves in order to take away the ocean’s bounty of oysters, squid, and crayfish. Tirsa, the most skilled at this task, could not do it anymore and limited herself to offering instructions from higher up. Alicia heard their voices.

“They are coming,” she told Ramón. “Let’s hurry and finish burying this. They’re coming back early. They must have made a good catch.”

They were coming at a gallop, bolting like colts, but carrying no food. They stopped in a circle around Alicia, without saying anything. She saw them panting, extremely pale, a wild look in their eyes.

“What’s the matter, for God’s sake? Someone fell down?”

“No, ma’am.”

“What happened? Why won’t you tell me?”

“Because you will scold us if we tell you, ma’am.”

“The children! Something happened to the children?”

“No, nothing to do with the children. It’s because up on the cliff we saw — We saw Lucifer.”

“Are we going to start that again?” barked Alicia, making no effort to conceal her fury.

Tirsa, who had lagged behind, came then.

“It’s true, Alicia. This time I saw him myself.”

“Did you see the devil? You, too?” There was more sarcasm than surprise in Alicia’s voice.

“Yes,” Tirsa said. “Me, too. I don’t know if it was the devil, but it was some horrible being.”

Then, all started talking at once: he was tall, big, his red hair standing out, hairy all over, hairy only on his back. His eyes spewed fire, no, they were human but he had a snout instead of a mouth. His face was that of a man. He walked on all fours. He didn’t walk on four, only on three. In any case, he was on two legs, but he did not walk like other people. His skin was dark, dried up, he had scales like an iguana. He smelled putrid, and before he appeared on top of the cliff they had perceived his stink, like a rotten corpse. He was naked, and his private parts were the devil’s, or at least very big, and anyway, he was truly male, no doubt about that.

“The devil surely he’s not,” Alicia decreed. “So he is a man or a beast. Or he’s nothing, like so many other ghosts around here.”

“He’s a beast,” some women said.

“He’s a man,” said the others.

“Could he be a shipwrecked sailor who got here?” Alicia asked.

“Well, if he was shipwrecked,” Tirsa answered, “he must have lived at the bottom of the sea for years.”

They decided that a few women, armed with sticks and headed by Tirsa, would go around the isle. They would go to places they had not been since they had set essential perimeters of action for themselves.

“We’d better not go today. It’s already late and darkness will soon close in on us,” Benita pleaded.

“Yes,” agreed Tirsa, “we’d better do it tomorrow when it’s light.”

“Better never,” Alicia said. “Let’s not look for him, but wait and see if he appears. There is no hurry, since he has caused no harm so far.”

The women had a restless though quiet night. At dawn Alicia summoned all to the beach. When they arrived, they saw in Tirsa’s hands two kitchen knives, which she was sharpening on a stone.

“Are we going to hunt that demon we saw?” they asked.

“No. We aren’t hunting any demons. We are going to cut our hair,” Alicia announced, “because it’s interfering with our tasks. Besides, we cannot take care of it anymore, and, unkempt like this, our manes look frightful. We have all discussed this several times, it was decided long ago, and we’re finally doing it. Who will be the first volunteer?”

Rosalía was first, then Benita and Francisca. Alicia and Tirsa would grab the long tresses and shear them just below the ears, throwing the cuttings on a single pile that started to look like a sleeping hairy animal. Then Alicia and Tirsa cut each other’s manes. Someone brought the broken mirror; they looked at their short haircuts, and they all laughed.

“Let me see how you look,” Francisca said to Benita. “I bet you will not get any beaux with your hair like that.”

“And whom did you have in mind for me? The cliff monster?”

“I’ll wait for this child to grow up and marry me,” Rosalía said, lifting Ramoncito up in her arms and smacking kisses on his face. “And by then, my hair will be long again.”

“We are already shorn,” Alicia said. “All but you, Alta.”

“Not me, ma’am, I’m not cutting it.”

“Come on, you’re not eating enough for you and your hair.”

“No, ma’am, I can’t… because my German friend likes it.”

“Let it be, then. This girl is really in love.”

The little girls came running with their porcelain doll all battered and ragged.

“Alta! Dear Alta! Make a real wig for the doll,” they begged her, “she is tired of having no hair.”

“No hair, no hands, and only one eye. The poor thing is hopeless,” Alta said while choosing a good chunk of hair for the wig.

That afternoon Benita separated from the group to go salt the fish. She came back breathless, her face all flushed.

“The monster appeared, ma’am,” she told Alicia. “He’s — It’s Victoriano Alvarez.”

“What do you mean? Victoriano Alvarez died months ago.”

“No, ma’am, he didn’t die.”

“Of course he did. Scurvy did him in!”

“No, it didn’t kill him. He’s disfigured, but he didn’t die.”

“It must be another apparition. Did you touch him?”

“He touched me. He really did touch me.”

Benita said that she was cutting the fish in fillets and separating the bones when she smelled a strong, unpleasant odor. She thought of the fetid lagoon, or that maybe there was still an unburied corpse. The monster then came up behind her without making any noise. When she realized it, she jumped up and screamed, and he told her not to be frightened, that he was Victoriano.

“Victoriano Alvarez? Are you dead?” Benita asked him, almost in a whisper.

“I almost died, but I came back to life all by myself.”

She looked very carefully at the ghost who was facing her and recognized in him a remote resemblance to the lighthouse keeper, to the big and strong soldier of old. His legs were now bent and full of boils. In order to stand up he needed to support himself on a stick. His skin was spotty and his thin mat of flaming red, spiky hair continued in hard corkscrew tufts all down his back. He had toadlike eyes, and his gums had shrunk. He had no teeth.

“What happened to you that made you so ugly, Victoriano?”

“Hunger and disease did it.”

He said he lay dying in his hammock for many days in the lighthouse lair, and when his soul left him, the crabs invaded his den. When he woke up, he was able to catch and eat them by simply reaching out, and that had saved his life because he was so weak he could not even get up. When he was very thirsty, he dragged himself across the floor and lay faceup in the rain. As time passed and there were no signs of other human beings, he thought they had all died and he was the only survivor. He recuperated some and began hunting and eating boobies. They were raw, slimy, and reeking of iodine. As he could not get to his feet, he lay there, dead still, waiting for hours at a time until a bird got close enough to be hit. It took him quite a while to be able to stand up. Then, leaning on a stick, he would take a step, two steps, and fall. He needed to wriggle like a snake in order to reach the hammock and rest, to catch his breath before trying again. Days and nights went by, and he was finally able to wade on the beach and harpoon fish, hurling his regulation bayonet. He began to notice signs that he was not alone, to suspect that there were other survivors, and in his search for them he ventured a bit farther each time. He also said that the pain in his legs tormented him and that walking was torture. Two weeks before, he had discovered the other survivors, the women, and he spied on them day and night without being seen. He found out that the rest of the men had died: he knew that he was the last man on Clipperton Island.

“Why didn’t you ask for help?” Benita asked him.

“When I did, you all tried to kill me.”

Victoriano told about the beating he had suffered the day Irra’s family was laid down.

“Those who beat you up are all dead,” the woman said. “Come home with me. Mrs. Arnaud and the others will welcome you.”

The man accepted, but on the way he drew a knife and pressed it against her neck.

“‘First I need to have a woman, so lie down,’” Victoriano demanded, Benita said.

“Oh, my God! And what did you do?” Alicia asked, terrified.

“Lie down, ma’am, what else could I do?” answered Benita, without offering any explanation. “He’s here now, around the corner, waiting for permission to come in.”

Alicia sent for him. First they perceived the stink of someone who, though reprieved at the last moment, still had the smell of death. When he crossed the threshold, the women found themselves face to face with the cliff monster. It was all true: scurvy, arthritis, and rickets had turned Victoriano Alvarez into a fright. Yet they were glad to see him, and after a while they got used to the way he looked. He was in a sorry state, but it was good to have a man around.

“You’re in bad shape, but you are alive, Victoriano,” Alicia said to him.

“But not thanks to you.”

“We are not alive thanks to you either. But this is no time for recriminations. We can help you, and you can help us. Provided you behave. You abused Benita, and that was evil. If you want to live with us, you cannot do that again, ever.”

“I needed to be with a woman, after so much loneliness.”

“Next time, you have to ask her whether she also wants to be with you.”

“And if she doesn’t want to?”

“Then you have to do without, as we do.”

They brought him food, and he spoke again of his struggle for survival.

“In the end, we are the only ones left, you and us,” Alicia said. “It’s not so strange, women and blacks are the most resilient races on the planet.”

“And you have turned black.”

“Why, yes, that’s true, we’re dark like you now. The sun made us all look alike.”

“The sun and the suffering, ma’am, have toughened our skin.”

“If suffering darkens people, Victoriano, our souls must be coal black.”

As he bid farewell to return to the lighthouse, they brought him one of the bedsheets, a spoon, and a few other utensils he had asked them to lend him. They saw little of him during the following days. They knew sometimes that he was around because they could perceive his deathly stench, and because they learned to recognize the rattling of his bones and his limping steps. Alicia and Tirsa suspected that the purpose of his visits was to meet furtively with Benita. Once in a while he came by the house, bringing seafood or fish. The women would feed him, and he would sit around to ruminate the food in his misshapen mouth, without saying a word. They gave him any available remedies and some cod liver oil that they had extracted themselves. Rubbed in well, this warmed his body and offered some relief for his rheumatism. They made a paste out of ground mother-of-pearl to treat his old scars, which he complained still itched and burned.

Late one night they realized that Benita had not returned home. They searched around calling her, but she did not respond. They thought she probably was in the lighthouse lair and went for her. Victoriano was at the door, blocking their entrance.

“We have come for Benita.”

“She is staying with me, and you’re not taking her away from here.”

“Benita, do you want to stay?” shouted Alicia.

“Yes, ma’am, I’m staying,” came her voice from inside.

For several weeks the women did not meet either of them, until one morning while collecting shrimp by the ocean-bathed cliff. It was Rosalía who found Benita’s body. Her head was split, and she had red marks all over her body.

“She fell off the cliff and broke her neck, poor thing!”

“What are those things on her body? All those red marks.”

“They are Judas kisses.”

“An octopus sucked her dry.”

“No,” Tirsa said slowly and with sorrow. “Victoriano beat her up, then killed her. And he’s coming to take another one of us with him.”

That same night, they heard him come near, invisible in the dark. When the air turned rancid and they heard femurs and tibias clatter, Alicia and Tirsa came out to face him, pushing their big pregnant bellies ahead of them.

“You are a murderer, and you’re not coming into the house.”

“I can go in anywhere I want to, because now I am the governor.”

The clouds that were hiding the moon parted like a curtain, and a chalky light spread over everything. They were then able to see the ferocious aspect of the tattered leper pirate: he had three daggers tucked under his belt, a rifle in bandolier, and he was wielding a heavy club.

“Why did you kill her?”

“I killed her for being a disrespectful lazybones. Now I am the governor, see. I’m in command, and all the women are mine for whatever I want. I’ll take you two with me after you give birth.”

“You will pay for your crimes, Victoriano,” Alicia threatened.

“Oh really, ma’am. And who will make me pay? You?”

“Justice, when we are rescued.”

“Nobody is going to come, and if they do, I’ll kill all of you first, so there will be no tattletales left. If you don’t want a beating now, don’t stand in my way, because I’m going in.”

With a hard swipe of his left arm, he broke into the house and grabbed Altagracia. He jostled her, brought her down, and dragged her by the hair. Her long, blue-black, shiny hair.

“I’m taking this one with me,” he said, “so she can cook for me and be my woman.”

He walked away, tottering painfully on his shaky legs, with Altagracia on his shoulder. Eyes closed, ears and mind closed in order not to see, not to hear, not to feel, she let herself be carried like a sack of flour. Her hair was dragging, sweeping the floor and leaving a track through the pebbles and seashells.

A few hours later, Alicia went into labor prematurely. It was a baby boy, ethereal and fragile like a sigh, and no one doubted that such an angelical face would soon return to heaven. In order not to let him be held back halfway there, suffering in purgatory, they baptized him immediately with water on his head and salt on his mouth, and they named him Angel Miguel after Ramón father. Alicia was not even able to breast-feed him.

“You’re so anguished the milk cannot come down,” Tirsa told her.

The baby was kept alive with teaspoonfuls of coconut water and booby egg whites until Tirsa’s delivery. She had a baby girl, big and strong, and named her Guadalupe Cardona. Tirsa breast-fed both babies and neither was ever satisfied. They cried all the time. Lupe screamed loudly, and the boy squealed like a sick little bird. But neither wanted to die, and both consciously clung to life.

Alicia and Tirsa knew that the time had come to face Victoriano. They had some weapons, a few guns and regulation rifles, but no ammunition. They had run out of that years before.

“It is as useless as still keeping your mother after she’s dead,” Tirsa commented.

In spite of his condition, Victoriano was still powerful and an excellent shot. Adversity had made him evil, cruel, and fierce. He presented a terrible challenge for them, like an unconquerable mountain.

“We must kill him, no matter what. It’s our duty.” Tirsa was really firm on this.

“Our only duty is to stay alive, for the sake of our children,” Alicia countered, equally firm.

Their disagreement and their fright paralyzed them, and even though they were overwhelmed by the certainty that for Altagracia each minute could be her last one, they spent evenings discussing what to do, but without taking any action. They finally found a compromise. They would try to kill him, but without risking getting killed by him.

“Poison,” Alicia said, running in search of whatever remained of Ramón’s pharmacy. Most of the bottles were broken, empty, or dry, but the blue flask she was looking for was intact. It had never even been opened. It still had its original label: “Agua zafia (Arandula vertiginosa),” and Arnaud’s handwritten red label, which read, “Potentially lethal,” and included instructions for its use: “One drop dissolved in a half cup of water taken after meals, good for heartburn; two drops, at eleven, improves appetite; five drops, excellent aphrodisiac; ten drops taken daily, great tonic for the heart, prolongs life; but thirty drops taken at once endanger it; two tablespoons of agua zafia will kill anybody.”*

They needed Altagracia’s complicity, and they were looking for a way to communicate with her without Victoriano’s knowing. They discovered that the best time was early in the morning while he was in deepest sleep. They found Altagracia turned inward; protected, aloof, and untouchable in the fortress of her dreams.

“Is he hurting you much?” they whispered, not to wake up the man.

“He only hurts my body,” she answered, “because my mind thinks of the one who loves me, and it escapes with him very far away from here.”

“The memory of your German fellow saves you,” Alicia told her, “and you are the one who is going to save us.”

They prepared two full tablespoons of agua zafia dissolved into a thick fish soup and explained to Altagracia that for him to die, she had to make him eat it. That she should not taste it, not even a sip. She could tell him she had prepared it especially for him.

“He’s not going to believe me,” protested Altagracia. “I don’t cook for him, even when he hits me for it.”

They convinced her, embraced her, gave her their blessings, and returned home. For the following two days they had no news, either from Altagracia or from Victoriano, and they tormented themselves with the possibilities.

“He must have swallowed only enough for the dose to be an aphrodisiac, and he’s going to come now and rape us all.”

“Or maybe he took the dose that prolongs life, and then not even a bolt of lightning could touch him.”

“Or the poison opened his appetite, and he wants more soup. ..”

On the third day he reappeared, furious like a wild beast, more haggard and horrible than before because, he growled, he had eaten the soup and kept vomiting, nonstop, for three days. He beat up all the women, dragged them by the hair, and then took away all the rifles, guns, tools, and even kitchen knives so that they could not use any of them against him.

“Bitches, you wanted to kill me! I’m going to kill you all, and save your tender daughters for later. I’ll teach them to love me while they are still young, and not to stab me in the back.”

One day Alicia woke up quite determined. She could find no rest after Victoriano had threatened the girls. She had a responsibility, even though it meant doing something horrible. At dawn, she prepared her children’s breakfast. She wrapped Angel in a rebozo and slung him on her back as the women had shown her. She grabbed Ramón by the hand and called Alicia and Olga.

“Where are we going, Mom?”

“To the southern rock.”

The children were happy, remembering the times their father used to go on outings with them. Though their mother did that frequently now, it was not the same. When they got to the top of the rock, she would stand at the edge of the cliff in utter silence. She did not show them the stars, as he used to, or talk to them about the direction of the winds. She just stood there, lost in thought, while they played. Then suddenly she would say, “Let’s go back home, children, our excursion is over,” and it was of no use to plead with her to stay a little while longer, or to ask her to let them go down to the bottom of the rock through the center hole. But it didn’t matter: they were happy to go anyway.

The girls ran ahead, and Alicia had to run to catch up with them. When they were close, with the sun already out, she asked them, as usual, to be silent so as not to wake up Victoriano, and to crouch as they walked so he could not see them in case he did. Nervous but with shiny eyes, the children obeyed, trying to hold back their laughter with their hands.

Alicia was climbing up with the baby, but he was so small that she didn’t feel his weight. Her older boy guided her, told her where to step. She trembled, determined to do what she had not dared do on other occasions. It was different now, they were running out of time. It was now or never; if she waited any longer, it would be too late.

The girls clambered up the cliff, holding on to the rocks. They were naked, suntanned, electric, and agile like monkeys.

When they reached the top, Alicia looked down, and her heart shrank. This is utter madness, she thought. She had stood there several times, reviewing all the proceedings in her head, rehearsing it all mentally in order not to fail at the moment of truth. Night after night she had prepared herself for this moment. But now, when it was real and there was no turning back, nothing seemed according to plan, even in her darkest forebodings. The cliff felt more hostile, more merciless. Its height, which had seemed tolerable to her, opened into a black void, terrifying and abysmal. It would take them ages to fall to the bottom, they would hit the rocks on the way down, their bodies would be mangled before reaching the water. They would not die quickly, as she had thought, but, instead, descend slowly through the morning mist, and the children would have time to realize what was going on, to feel the panic, to scream at her for help, and not to forgive her for all eternity. “Let’s forget it! This time we’ll go back the same way we came,” Alicia said, but then she remembered Victoriano, his threats to kill them and rape the girls. If he ever touched her girls, if he mistreated them, could she ever forgive herself? Would Ramón forgive her? I’ll jump with the children now. There is no other solution, she thought.

Then she realized that the children were not going to stand still waiting for her to push them. They were going to run helter-skelter, to squeeze by and defend themselves. She would have to run after them. This had not occurred to her before, perhaps because it wasn’t ever real. She had imagined them holding hands with her and jumping into the void, unaware, half asleep, tired of living, resigned to their fate, accepting death. But the creatures ahead of her, playing and jumping around, were full of vitality. They were life itself, and they would cling to her with overwhelming energy. “Oh Lord, forgive me for planning such a stupid atrocity. What I must do is kill Victoriano.” She felt strong and determined. She had been hiding Ramón’s sword. She would do it. She and Tirsa would kill him. Could they do it? Would the enormous and rusty sword be serviceable? No, they could not do it. What would probably happen is that he would kill them first, and that the children would be left at his mercy. There is no other way out, she thought. Today there is no turning back.

The extent of her pain surprised her. Even though in her soul she knew, or wanted to convince herself, that this time they would not jump either, she suffered as if they were going to. She firmly believed that she had suffered all the pain that a human being could withstand, that she knew suffering deep and wide, that it was already familiar terrain with no surprises. But her suffering now was a hundred times, a thousand times worse than all she had been through before. She was horrified at the intensity of the anguish her heart could tolerate.

The children found the hole that led to the interior of the big rock, used by Ramón and his men in search of treasure years ago.

“Look, Mom! Look at all the bats!”

“Come here, Mom, the toads are so ugly!”

“Mom! Help me catch one, Mom.”

Alicia suddenly realized that her children were happy. Many times before, she had watched them behaving in the same way, saying the same things, playing in the same manner, but she had not realized that. Now she saw it clearly: that all her years of tragedy were for them just everyday life. They had nothing to compare it with; they missed nothing. Like other times before, she convinced herself that she should go down the cliff, walk back home, and forget about demented solutions. How was she going to kill her own children, when neither hunger nor Victoriano had yet been able to? It made no sense. It was absurd. Horrible. She was not going to do that. She wouldn’t do it for anything in the world. Her pain diminished, allowing her to breathe again. An unexpected joy of life came over her, and to see the children alive, alive in spite of everything, made her happy.

She almost told them, like often before, “Let’s go back home, children, our excursion is over.” But she remembered the three years they had been abandoned on the isle without hope. They would be in the same situation after three more years, and in three more, six; and three more, nine, and three more, twelve, and three more, fifteen. The words died in her throat. It was better to jump and be done with it.

Over and over she made up her mind, got close to the abyss, looked at the children, and changed her mind, anguishing in her doubts. Her heart could not take it any longer. The sun had not reached high noon yet, and there was still a layer of green mist over the ocean.

Behind the fog, on the horizon, Alicia saw a radiance. Points of light were moving, shining. They twinkled, died down, they reappeared suddenly, to disappear again as quickly. She remembered watching the sky as a child in Orizaba when sometimes she had been able to see, very high and far away, the fireworks celebrating a neighboring town’s patron saint. But now the lights were low, at water level.

“The last thing I need,” she said. “A ghost ship.”

She felt light-headed, and shivers went down her spine.

“Oh, Ramón, don’t do this to me. Don’t send me mirages also; we had to pay so dearly for yours.”

She rubbed her eyes, bit her lips, but the brilliant points of light were still there. They were compacting, becoming a solid mass.

“Please, Ramón, don’t make fun of me, not now. Take away this vision and give me strength to jump, before the suffering makes me hesitate again.”

The children, lost in their world, were making a lot of noise, holding on to her legs, pulling her to and fro. As usual, they wanted to go into that hole inside the rock, catch a toad, or wanted to know if it was true that bats could smoke. She remained mute, motionless, and stunned, without being able to free herself from her hallucination. A big gray thing was advancing toward the isle, cutting through the waves and dispersing the fog.

“Ramoncito!” she summoned her son. “Come here. Tell me, what do you see over there? But don’t lie to me, don’t pretend. Just tell me what you see.”

“It’s a ship, Mom.”

There it was, facing them, in the water. Metallic and solid, identical to the one she had seen reflected in her husband’s eyes before he died.

“Make some signals, son,” Alicia ventured in a weak, brittle voice.

The boy waved his arms. Alicia did not dare to, she did not want to fall into that trap. Her body was paralyzed, but her heart was racing. She would not make any signals. She would not shout at a ghost to ask for help. It was all a dream, and she was bound to wake up. Since everything was lost, at least she would keep her composure, her reason. She remembered her own dictum: only what one can touch exists. That ship was intangible; it did not exist. Ramoncito was screaming: “Here, we are heeeere!”

The two girls came to see what was going on, and they went crazy when they saw the ship. Ramón took off the piece of material he was wearing as a loincloth, and waved it over his head. The girls soon imitated him. They let themselves be carried away by their enthusiasm. They were running in every direction, yelling for help, waving their rags as if possessed.

“Help!” Alicia heard herself shout, to her surprise.

This first shout was like a door opening in her throat, letting out all the hopes she had held back, after so many years of stifling them, of not giving them wings. Now she, too, was running, screaming, laughing, and praying, kissing her children.

“This is the real thing, Ramón. This is really it!” she repeated, looking upward, more in an effort to convince herself than to inform her husband.

The ship was closer now, and she could see the flag: it was the U.S. flag. A sharp panic stunned her: What if nobody on board saw them and the ship went back? It was not a Mexican ship, and therefore it would probably just cruise by. Unless they could manage to make it stop.

“Let’s yell loud and clear, so they hear us!” she told the children, and she herself put her whole soul into each yell.

In the furor of all the clamor, Alicia tore off the saintly bedsheet she had wrapped around herself. Naked like her children, with Angel on her back, and brimming with the joy of her renewed desire to live, she waved the white sheet in the air.

“You rag, better be good for something,” she commanded. “Make them see us!”

High Seas, Aboard the Gunboat Yorktown, 1916

IT WAS STILL AS DARK AS night at six fifteen on Wednesday, 18 July when Captain H. P. Perril came to the bridge. He was hit by a milky curtain that, at first, he could not decipher as fog or as the nebulae in his still-sleepy brain. Nobody on board the Yorktown had been able to sleep due to the choppy seas and the extreme heat. A few of the men had tried to sleep on deck, until various scattered but recurrent rainstorms forced them to go back in. At four o’clock, even the captain had managed some light sleep, which had just become deep sleep by the time he was awakened, as usual, at six.

Slowly he began to connect with the real world: a strong wind was blowing from the southwest, and an impatient sea jolted the ship without mercy or rhythm. He asked the helmsman if he could see anything, and he answered, “Only the fog, sir.” There was no visibility until nine fifty, when the lookout shouted that he had sighted land.

“That boy has an eagle eye,” commented Perril, uselessly trying to see it.

Not until fifteen minutes later was he able to see a gray shadow in the distance. As they got closer, the shadow darkened and took first the tall aspect of a ship’s sails, and later that of a castle. It was Clipperton, no doubt. It was the big rock on the southeast coast, according to description. Captain Perril felt uneasy. Neither he nor his men had entertained any desire to sail there. Before they left San Francisco, however, Admiral Fullam, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, had informed them that Clipperton was to be included in their itinerary. They were in the middle of the world war and there were rumors that the Germans, taking advantage of the tense relationship between the Mexican and U.S. governments, had installed radio stations or submarine bases along the Pacific coast of Mexico. The gunboat Yorktown had to engage in a meticulous surveillance trip.

It was a monotonous, routine job, and his crew was anxious to be in action, so he received the news reluctantly. Before the gunboat parted from the continent, they had determined their ports of call carefully. Admiral Fullam had placed the quadrant on top of the map and traced an appropriate itinerary from Honolulu to Panama. Clipperton was just underneath the black line.

Captain Perril protested. “I am going to make a foolish request, Admiral. You know the men don’t like to get near that isle. I know there are superstitions, of course, but if possible, it would be better to avoid it.”

“I’m sorry, Captain, it can’t be done. It is well within our area of operation.” Fullam was explicit, knowing well what Perril was referring to. Clipperton was one of those places sailors consider bad omens, in part because of the difficulties they present for navigation, in part due to superstition. In the case of Clipperton, there seemed to be a good basis for both, since the number of shipwrecks around it was strangely elevated.

The ship’s itinerary had been, in fact, slow and boring, and as they had suspected, it had been only a rumor, they did not find even a trace of the Germans. Accustomed to matter-of-fact issues, Captain Perril felt uncomfortable about this wild-goose chase. To make things worse, now he also had to pass by Clipperton. After Perril read his navigation instructions and the unfavorable information about access to the atoll, he was convinced that he should not make any attempt except in broad daylight.

Therefore, that Monday afternoon of 16 July, he reduced speed in order to reach the isle at dawn on Wednesday. On Tuesday, at 2000, he veered the gunboat slightly east so that, maintaining course during the night, their position in the morning would be five miles east of the isle. However, a night squall had altered his plans somewhat, and by 0600 Wednesday, Clipperton was still not in sight as expected. The isle had not yet appeared by seven, nor by eight, and Captain Perril, convinced that it had been left behind, decided with some relief not to reverse course. He was troubled to learn then, at 0950, that against all odds, Clipperton had suddenly emerged from the mist dead ahead.

The encounter had been a matter of chance rather than willingness, or, perhaps, it had been due to the isle’s willpower rather than his own. In spite of his Anglo-Saxon phlegm and pragmatism, Captain Perril could not help but feel disturbed by the idea that this undesirable place had willed him to its shores. Notwithstanding, the Yorktown approached the coast without any difficulty. The ship circumnavigated the atoll while Perril watched through his spyglass without finding anything abnormal. On the contrary, it was sort of a deception, since everything he saw was small, barren, quiet, insignificant. Nothing that could suggest a black legend. The only signs of life seemed to be some people with handkerchiefs waving good-bye. Just the usual. A while later the people were still waving handkerchiefs, and it seemed to the captain there were perhaps women, and also children, running on the beach waving good-bye.

They keep doing that, Perril thought. They must have nothing to do.

He considered his mission accomplished, and was about to give orders to set sail, when something made him change his mind. Nothing specific, just an impulse, the stirring of a premonition. He ordered his second in command, Lieutenant Kerr, to get ready to disembark. Kerr looked at him in surprise. A risky landing would have to be made by boat because of the choppy seas, and there was no apparent justification for it. Perril noticed his bewilderment and tried to formulate an explanation.

“I want to know whether the lighthouse I see over there is working,” he said without conviction. Lieutenant Kerr nodded, but his bewildered expression did not change.

Taxco, Today

I AM LOOKING FOR ALTAGRACIA Quiroz, the chambermaid at the Hotel San Agustín who left for Clipperton as nursemaid for the Arnauds’ children. I find out she died last year at a very old age, but I meet with her cousin, who was close to her and knew her well. Her name is Guillermina Yamada. She had a Japanese father and a Mexican mother, and lives in the town of Taxco. She is tall and slender, her fingers are long and aristocratic, and she has deep circles under her Asiatic eyes.

I interview her on July 5, 1988, a day before the presidential elections. All of Mexico is papered with posters, and the faces of the candidates jump out from all the walls and around every corner. Aside from the election din, the place where she lives looks like a tourist postcard. It is a small house with balconies and bougainvillea, squeezed in with other houses on a narrow, uphill street: Number 9 on Benito Juárez, a few yards away from the Taxco zócalo.

Guillermina’s manner is deliberate and aloof, and she apologizes for her failing memory. She explains that after her husband’s death she suffered a brain seizure that erased all the past from her mind. She never recovered and even forgets the present, she says, her daughters have to help her find her things, because she does not remember where she places them.

At first, sometime after Altagracia returned from Clipperton, they had been like mother and daughter, because of their age difference. Altagracia was born in 1901 and Guillermina in 1918. But later, as time went on, they became friends, confidants.

I inquire about Altagracia’s life after her return from Clipperton. “Tell me, Doña Guillermina, did your cousin ever get married?”

“Yes, of course she did, with a man called — you are not going to believe this—”

“Yes, I believe you. I have been told already. His name was Gustav Schultz, and he represented a foreign company dealing in guano at Clipperton.”

“Exactly. Isn’t it unbelievable? The love story of those two is like a soap opera.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it.”

Guillermina remembers more than she believes; she is more lucid than she claims to be. Between one apology and another about the weakness of her mind, she tells me about her cousin, the woman who had been like a mother to her, and who later became her best friend, Señora Altagracia Quiroz Schultz.

“Alta died a year ago, I accompanied her in her last days. I had a debt to repay to her, because she had accompanied me in my life. For many years we had talked and talked, but at the end she could not hold a conversation. She had lost her mind by the time she died, due to all the beatings she had to endure from that sick soldier. He damaged her for life. She had an inoperable tumor that gradually made her insane. In her last days she could not make any sense, but only at the end, when she was very old. Not before. Before, she only had memory lapses once in a while. During those times she got desperate when all her memory went, but afterward she recovered, and the rhythm of her life continued.

““Altagracia must have suffered a lot on the isle,” says her cousin and goddaughter, Doña Guillermina, “because that man tortured her mercilessly. He was what is called a sadist. She could never have children with her husband, the German fellow, and that was also the result of the damage done to her by that evil man who raped the women. He beat all the women on the head, grabbing them by the hair and dragging them on the ground. Alta had the most beautiful, longest hair that I have ever seen in my life. But you are not right when you say that all the women cut their hair in Clipperton because it interfered with their work, with doing the men’s jobs that life had forced them to do. It did not bother them, because they kept it in thick braids tied up on top of their heads. That was not the reason. They cut their hair so nobody would use it to drag them around, and knock them unconscious.”

“Then they cut their hair to spare their heads.”

“That’s right. That Victoriano Alvarez, Alta used to tell me, was so evil that he held the isle in a spell so that ships would not get close to it. They knew it was he who kept them isolated, and that as long as he was alive, that spell on Clipperton would not be broken. That was why, and also because he beat them and raped them, they wanted to kill him. Altagracia told me that when they could not stand it anymore, they had once prepared him some poison, mixed with marmalade, in order to do away with him. He realized it was a trick, and that day they were the ones almost done in. His fury turned him into a more cruel beast than he usually was. He grabbed them by the hair, one by one, and beat them all unconscious. It was then that they decided to cut their hair short.”

“Did they attempt to poison him with marmalade?” I ask her. “Wasn’t it with soup?”

“With marmalade.”

“Where did they get the fruit and the sugar?”

“I don’t know, but Alta said it was with marmalade. My cousin’s bad luck started when she met Mrs. Alicia Rovira Arnaud at a hotel in Mexico City. That lady already had three children and was looking for a nursemaid to take to the isle when she realized that her chambermaid, Alta, was an educated person who worked there only because of the situation in which the Mexican Revolution had left her family. Our family. Alta’s father was a schoolteacher and had taught her to write with good spelling and good penmanship. They lived in Yautepec, state of Morelos, which was the zone of the rebel Emiliano Zapata and of the peasants in arms. The Quiroz family was running away from the fracas when they were almost killed in a shooting. Alta was saved by a soldier who galloped by, pulled her up onto his horse, and got her out of there. She never knew to what side he belonged. The family disbanded after leaving their home, and all had to fend on their own. Alta had to earn her living as best she could in the capital. She accepted the Arnauds’ offer, and when the family went back to Clipperton, she left with them. I suppose she did because it was her best prospect. She was fourteen years old and making five pesos a month. The Arnauds offered her ten and promised her that she would be on the isle only for four months and could return with the next ship. They were able to provide the double salary, but not her return in four months. Not that.

“Alicia and Altagracia were together in their predicament. One was the mistress and the other the servant, but fate treated them, I mean, mistreated them, equally. They were both forced to be Victoriano’s lovers, like all the other women in Clipperton. None was saved from that. He was the king and they were his slaves, and there were no privileges under this tyrant.

“But the more you suffer, the faster you get to heaven, and that was what happened to Altagracia. Heaven on earth, because when she returned from the isle, she met the German fellow again, who had never stopped looking for her, and they married. She had the good luck then of having an adoring husband who had established himself in Mexico in order to be with her, and who was totally devoted to her. He took her with him to live in the Water House in Acapulco, and since he always treated her like a princess, the local people called her ‘the Princess of the Water House.’

“So she never had to work again, Schultz put three servants and a gardener at her disposal. He bought her the best imported dresses and the most expensive shoes from incoming ships overflowing with merchandise. For her, mind you, who had been dressed in rags and had run barefoot for so long in Clipperton. Since she had been deprived of food, he gave her all the food she wished. It was usually German food, it’s true, like sausages and cabbage, which were the only things he liked, but she hid in the kitchen to prepare her Mexican mole or stuffed chiles, and shared them with the three servants and the gardener.

“That German fellow, Gustav Schultz, became the most beloved foreigner in Acapulco, because he was the one who brought drinking water to the port city. He probably did this to compensate her for all the thirst she suffered, and the many mouthfuls of seawater she had to swallow when it did not rain.

“I have always asked myself why Altita — that was how her husband called her — was able to inspire such love in a foreigner. Surely it was because of the way she was. There is no other explanation. She had a sweet but strong temperament, and he always liked to see her happy, in spite of all she had suffered. She was not pretty, we might say she was rather ugly. Her best feature was her precious hair. It was quite unusual. But in everything else she was quite ordinary. She was thickset, short, with peasant features, and I especially remember her fat fingers,” Guillermina tells me, looking wistfully at hers, so long and graceful, and she smiles when I tell her that it should have been the other way around, that she should have been the one named Altagracia, since she was so graceful, and her cousin, Guillermina.

“Alta told me many times about her life in Clipperton, without hate, without regrets. She did not mind her sad past anymore because her present was so happy. She would talk about it because she liked to reminisce. She lived to an old age and was a bit crazy, but she was happy. Her life was like a fairy tale, with a lot of suffering, but a happy marriage afterward. I cannot tell you any more, because I had a brain seizure that made me lose my memory,” Guillermina Yamada tells me once more, wringing her beautiful hands.

Clipperton, 1916

TAKING HER LAST CHANCE against death, Alicia climbed to the lighthouse to make signals to the approaching vessel. She heard voices coming from below, from the beach. The rest of the women had already seen the ship and were frantically shouting for help. If we all see it, she thought, then it must be real. While she was waving the sheet, the idea of a rescue became a real possibility. Her father, Orizaba, a school for the children, and so many ghosts that had become parts of an abandoned dream were suddenly taking substantial form again. Nobody could keep that ship from reaching the shore. The only thing to do was to pray for time to pass quickly, to precipitate the end without her having to go through the preliminaries: the wait that burned her throat, the smarting anxiety that made her eyes hurt. This time nobody could prevent it, it was enough to extend her arm to reach salvation. Nobody would stand in the way. Nobody.

Except Victoriano Alvarez. Like a vulture flying low and hitting her with its wing, the thought of Victoriano threatening to kill all of them before they could be rescued — so they couldn’t denounce him — jolted Alicia like a bolt.

She let herself go downhill, running without looking where she placed her feet, without stopping, and still struggling to keep her body wrapped in the sheet, getting up quickly every time she stumbled, without feeling the sharp rocks cutting her ankles, her legs, her knees. After reaching her three children, she untied Angel from the sling on her back, and laying him down on a safe spot, told her son Ramón:

“Now you stay here and keep an eye on the baby and on your sisters. We might be rescued, but we’ll have to do things very carefully. Swear to me, Ramoncito, that none of you are going to move away from here until I come back.”

She kept on going down without waiting for the child’s reply. I always climb this rocky cliff full of reasons to stop living, and I go down again full of reasons to keep on living, was what came to her mind as she descended, half running, half sliding. She saw Tirsa trying to light a bonfire on the beach, surely in order to make signals, and she called her, catching her voice, not daring to shout. Victoriano’s lair was on the other side of the rock, and he should be there if he was still sleeping. She was afraid the wind would carry their voices and wake him up.

“Tirsa,” she said when she got close to her, “we must kill Victoriano. Right now, before he kills us.”

“He wouldn’t dare, the boat is too close.”

“Yes he would, because he’s insane. He will shoot us, as he promised, and then he will hide, or he will leave, he alone. Let’s go, we have no time to waste.”

“How do we kill him?

“I buried Ramón’s sword next to the house—”

“No, we can’t use that. It has to be something we can hide so he doesn’t see it. We better hit him on the head with a rock.”

They chose a medium-sized rock, sharp-edged, with a pointed end. They got close to the lighthouse lair and called Victoriano. Tirsa hid the rock behind her, and Alicia walked in Tirsa’s shadow. They could feel the irregular pounding of their blood, and everything seemed unreal, like someone else’s nightmare. Nobody answered, and they called again. Altagracia came out and said the man was not there. She had not seen the ship, nor heard the shouts. She was not aware of anything.

“Do you think Victoriano has found out?” asked Alicia.

“No, surely he hasn’t either. A while ago he took his harpoons and walked north to go fishing.”

“Will you help us, Alta? We’re going to kill him.”

“How?”

“Whatever way we can.”

“But look at your legs, Señora Alicia, you’re bleeding. You’d better wash first, and calm down. If he sees you like that, so nervous, he’s going to suspect your intentions.”

“That’s right,” Tirsa said, “to kill him, we have to trick him. We have to think this out better.”

“We have no time to think anything. We have to go and hit him, and that’s it.” Alicia did not want to say more and started walking. “If you’re not coming, I’ll go alone.”

Tirsa grabbed her arm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go ahead, ma’am.”

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

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

“It’s something important, Victoriano.”

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

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

“That you what?”

“That I want to marry you.”

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

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

“And what problems do we need to solve?”

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

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

“I am the governor already.”

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

“Porfirio Díaz is dead now.”

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

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

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

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

“Which grandfather?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No. There is no more poison.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I always treated you right.”

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

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

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

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

“Are you through now?”

“I think so.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just in case.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How come?”

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

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

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

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

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

Perril asked all the castaways to come aboard, welcomed them warmly, gave them boxes of chocolates as gifts, and ordered the preparation of the watchkeeper’s quarters, which had sanitary facilities. He personally supervised a menu, palatable enough but appropriate for their digestive systems, which were unaccustomed to oils and spices. About two hours later, the Clipperton survivors were taken to the dining room, where the children became the center of attention for the sailors, who joked with them and made faces. This resulted in their crying and running for cover behind their mothers. They were served chicken breasts Maryland, mashed potatoes, salad greens, milk, and apples.

After dinner, Captain Perril took Alicia to his cabin for the customary official questioning, with the help of Dr. Ross, who spoke some Spanish.

“Could I serve you something to drink, a liqueur perhaps?” he asked to break the ice. She said no thanks.

“I would like to know what day is today,” Alicia asked.

She was told it was Wednesday, 18 July 1917.

“How strange,” she commented, “we thought it was Monday, 16 July 1916. We were off by only two days, but we obliterated a whole year. I do not know how this could happen.”

“Don’t give it another thought,” Perril answered. “If according to you we are in 1916, we shall make it 1916. I like that number.”

She was asked for names, dates, events, and motivations. They found out all the hows and whys. She answered as accurately as she could, in the English she had learned under the nuns’ guidance in her adolescence, and which up to that moment she had only used to write love letters to Ramón. Perril wrote everything down, and when they finished, he asked if she would like to accompany him for some fresh air on deck, to take advantage of such a pleasant evening. Dr. Ross decided to retire, concluding that they no longer needed his services as translator in order to understand each other.

Looking at the ocean and enjoying the evening breeze, Captain Perril wished to express to Mrs. Arnaud the profound sympathy he felt for their misfortune and his admiration for the courageous way in which they had preserved the lives of adults and children. He put phrases together in his head, he had them at the tip of his tongue, but he could not articulate any of them. He was surprised to find himself insecure and bashful in the presence of this woman dressed in such an old-fashioned way and who, in spite of everything, still impressed him as beautiful.

“Don’t you have a special desire, or wish for anything in particular?” Perril managed to say. “I would like very much to be able to please you, after the many years of deprivation that you had to suffer.”

She thought about it for a moment, and told him there was something, that she would like to have some orange juice. The captain ordered a tall glass for her, and while drinking it, Alicia commented that if they had not lacked this on the isle, many lives would have been saved. From there, she told him about the scurvy episode. Then he told her about the world war, and she spoke about Victoriano; he informed her about the Russian Revolution, and she explained how they used to catch boobies. So he told her about the death of Emperor Francis Joseph I, and time went fast without their realizing it. They had engaged in a conversation that lasted until one o’clock in the morning and which they ended just because it grew too cold on deck. Before going in, the captain confessed his worries of that morning about approaching the atoll.

“Those underwater reefs,” he commented, “make navigation in that area a very delicate matter. I am happy we are already far away from that place.”

“However, I have already begun to feel nostalgia for it,” she said, smiling.

While he accompanied her to the cabin where the other women and the children had already retired earlier, Perril had one more question.

“Please tell me, Mrs. Arnaud, were those nine years a real torment for you?”

She gave it careful thought, weighed the good and the bad, and answered him with honesty.

“They were bearable, Captain. Thanks.”

After wishing her happy dreams on the first night of her new life, Perril went to the radio room. Together with the radio operator until three in the morning, he tried to send a radiogram to the British consul in Acapulco, who was also in charge of U.S. affairs, with the notification of the ship’s expected arrival at Salina Cruz in four days’ time, and of the survivors he had rescued from Clipperton Island. This accomplished, he retired to his cabin, but since he was not able to sleep, he made some informal notes in his diary.

Captain Arnaud’s widow is the only white survivor in the group. She is only twenty-nine years old, and, even though she seems older, she still is a beautiful woman, and very intelligent, as her conversation proves. She must be. Otherwise, she would not have been able to help the group through the extreme hardships they were subjected to. Her clothes are very old fashioned but of excellent quality, and she wears some splendid diamonds that speak of more fortunate times. She showed me the money she has accumulated and protected, which she intends to put to good use upon her return. I did not dare confess that even though that money could have represented a fortune in the times of General Huerta, now it is worth almost nothing. Except for her and her children, all of the others are Mexican Indians, but at first I thought they were black, they are so suntanned. Dr. Ross examined them and informed me that he found all in reasonably good health. He told me also that he had talked with the women and learned that when our boat returned to the ship after the failed first landing attempt, they felt so desperate that they thought of killing the children and then committing suicide by drowning in the ocean. The one who seems to have the strongest resolve and a most energetic personality is Tirsa Rendón, widow of the lieutenant at that post. As soon as she came on board, she asked if we would lend her a sewing machine from the quartermaster and without any time to waste, she started to make garments out of some drill material for the children.

The children are very timid, but very curious. Everything seems strange to them, and they want to see and touch everything. They cried when the bluejackets carried them to the gunboat because they thought they would be separated from their mothers, who were still on the boat. The men paid much attention to these children and gave them boxes of candy, although the children had no idea what it was. I spent some time watching a young Indian girl trying to open a box of marshmallows. When she succeeded, she walked to the guardrail, threw the marshmallows in the water one by one, then closed the box and took it with her, satisfied with her new toy. She placed it on the deck, and let it slide back and forth with the movement of the ship. At dinner-time, the younger ones did not want to eat even a bite of anything they were served because, I heard them say, they wanted to eat booby, which is the kind of seagull they used to eat on the isle. The women, on the other hand, said that they hoped not to have to eat more seagulls as long as they lived.

They brought on board two desolate pigs, the scrawniest I have ever seen in my life. The men say they look like the original pair just out of Noah’s ark, and even though they were offered to the cook, no one wants to kill them. It would be cruel for them to lose their lives right after being rescued, after such a hard struggle to survive.

At four in the morning Captain Perril closed his notebook and fell asleep. Two hours later, the radio operator woke him up with the British consul’s reply. He said he would go personally to welcome the survivors and had already notified some of the relatives who had maintained contact with him as part of their rescue efforts.

On Sunday, 21 July, at 1700, the gunboat Yorktown dropped anchor in the Mexican port of Salina Cruz. Three men stood waiting at the dock: the British consul; Alicia’s father, Don Félix Rovira; and the German fellow, Gustav Schultz. Captain Perril ordered the admittance of Don Félix to the cabin where his daughter awaited him. That night he wrote in his diary that he saw them embrace with such emotion that, for the first time in many years, he could not hold back his tears. That they sat together, in silence, looking into each other’s eyes, very moved, and holding hands tightly. Perril also wrote that he left them alone in the cabin, and when he returned, half an hour later, they were still in the same position he had left them, unable to utter a word.