Isle of Passion (3 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C
OLONEL
A
BELARDO
A
VALOS
of the engineering division, godfather and protector of the young junior officer Ramón Arnaud, made an appointment to speak with his godson in Mexico City.

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

He was told just like that, no preambles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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