Isle of Passion (30 page)
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.”
T
HERE 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.
D
IVISION
G
ENERAL
L
ÁZARO
C
ÁRDENAS
N
ATIONAL
P
ALACE
B
Y
H
AND
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.
*
I
COME TO
A
CAPULCO
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.”
