Isle of Passion (11 page)

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

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

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

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

Alicia swore to God that it wasn’t true, saying she recognized that Cardona did indeed sing and dance like an angel, but that did not mean anything. Ramón was the only man in her life, she purred, cuddling next to him, soft and loving like a cat, and suddenly, if Ramón was still offended and indifferent, the kitten became a tigress. Her eyes shone with rage, and she practically spit her words through clenched teeth.

“And what about you and that good-for-nothing Pinzón woman?”—she was referring to Schultz’s lover—“Why can’t you take your eyes off her bottom when she stops by the infirmary to meet with you alone, on the ridiculous pretext of asking you for a remedy for her headaches?”

“It is no pretext, the poor woman suffers from terrible migraines, and besides, her ass does not interest me,” Ramón countered. He was playing kitten now, and Alicia was the one showing indifference.

And in this way the perfect harmony they had achieved before their argument was crushed to smithereens, and their eternal love was scattered on the floor, their lives destroyed, riddled with discontent. Alicia ran to the bedroom to cry her eyes out, and Ramón locked himself up in his office. When they grew tired of ruminating in spite and of flagellating themselves with jealousy, when their anger came down like the foam of boiling milk after it is removed from the fire, they found some excuse to meet again, to embrace with the absolute happiness of reconciliation, and without more ado, without transitions or logical reasoning, order was restored, and their hurt feelings disappeared somewhere as if they had never existed, and everything returned to the way it was before.

As a reminder of their tragic moments, there were Alicia’s swollen eyelids, which Ramón tended to by applying tea compresses. Life went on until another placid afternoon, a few weeks later, when a loose comment would again trigger a conjugal fight, copious like the rain, and thus fulfill its decisive and definite function of restoring their faded emotions and sparkling their dialogue, which was so endless that otherwise it would have to repeat itself like the piano roll of “White Kitten” in her Pianola.

The effect of so much isolation was soon felt. The calendar became a useless object in the unchanging Clipperton time, and for Alicia the notion of dates had dissipated. Monday was the same as Thursday or Sunday, and there was no difference between September and October or November. At the beginning of December, however, she realized that for a long time she had not needed to wash the linen used for her menstrual flow, and when she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw that her waist was gone.

News of the pregnancy made Ramón unreasonably anxious about the delay, already incomprehensible by then, in the arrival of the ship. December marked the fourth month since they had been forsaken on the isle, and there was no excuse for this. It was in blatant disagreement with any arrangement made. The rains had eroded the garden soil, and the shortage of greens and citrus fruit began to be felt. He was afraid they would all soon be suffering from a terrible disease, the one that attacked seamen and shipwrecked sailors, and about which he had informed himself in the medical books: scurvy. He did not want to cause panic needlessly, and he did not say a word about it, but while he spoke with anyone, he surreptitiously tried to take a look at their gums to see if they were blackened, which would be the first signal.

But above all, Ramón was tormented by the idea that his wife could have complications at the time of delivery and that they might not be able to resolve them due to the isolation from the continent. In the delirium of his frequent sleepless nights, he obsessed about being marooned on the island and about having a wild creature born to them. The only things that assuaged his throbbing anguish were their sessions of lovemaking, which had not been interrupted, and the certainty, growing in him as he kept reading and rereading all the documents about Clipperton, that a fabulous treasure had been abandoned by the pirate somewhere on the atoll, which had to be, Arnaud concluded, in the lagoon or in the big rock to the south.

In spite of these reassuring ideas, people noticed his lost serenity when he developed a nervous tic that curled his lips on the left side, which became progressively more obvious and frequent, and eventually accompanied by a quick blinking of his eye on the same side.

“Stop making so many faces, things are not yet a matter of life and death,” Alicia kept telling him. “The stupid ship will come.”

Finally while they were talking in the studio one afternoon, through the yellow, red, and violet stained-glass windows, they saw Cardona’s wife, Tirsa Rendón, coming by. She was dripping wet and screaming that a ship was approaching. They all ran to the dock, where they stood under bursts of rain, their palpitating hearts in their throats, and waited until the approaching blurred silhouette took shape among the raging waves.

It was neither
El Demócrata
nor the
Corrigan II
, but the ship from the American guano company, coming for its annual visit to pick up the product. It brought exquisite gifts from Brander to Schultz, his successor in the post: bottles of French champagne, Amaretto di Saronno, boxes of dates, olive oil from Seville, jars of maraschino cherries, and canned Danish ham.

But it also brought them news that dealt a heavy blow to their thin hopes: the Pacific Phosphate Company Ltd. was no longer much interested in Clipperton. They had found unexploited and abundant guano deposits on islands that were closer and presented a less risky approach. Therefore, they announced that they were cutting down the frequency of their trips to the atoll but were asking Schultz to stay there a few more months as holder of their concession, until the definite closing of the plant and his transfer to another one.

From Schultz’s throat surged a long series of incomprehensible obscenities, and Ramón’s facial tic increased in frequency to two or three incidents per second.

T
HIS WAS NOT
its name yet. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, people believed this island had no name because it did not deserve to have one. Only those well versed in maritime routes and cartography knew that Magellan had sailed close to it and given it the sonorous but desolate name of Isle of Passion.

In 1705 the English corsair John Clipperton landed on it for the first time. Some say that his vessel, the
Five Ports
, did not fly the usual pirate’s black flag with skull and crossbones, but always proudly flew a vermilion flag with a winged wild boar. Whether the boar was alate or rampant, or both, nobody knows for sure.

Miraculously, he managed to dodge the isle’s surrounding reefs, which had destroyed—and will destroy for centuries to come—so many other vessels. Some people say it was because the isle recognized the flag of the man who was to become its master and bowed down, allowing him safe passage. Others say that the explanation lies in the shape of his vessel, sleek and swift, narrow in the beam, and with low draft and freeboards.

One fact is undisputed: the name of his vessel, the
Five Ports
, honored the ancient brotherhood of buccaneers to which he belonged: the Cinque Ports (Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover, and Sandwich, old bastions on England’s southern shores). The rebirth of piracy in America, now at the expense of the Spanish galleons, had also revived the confederation and its ilk—the Shore Brotherhood, or the Beggars of the Sea—in order to protect the Turtle Island corsairs.

Captain John Clipperton sighted the atoll that today bears his name one good day while navigating through uncharted waters far from the common sailing routes. The story is told that he was looking for a place, a sandbank or rock out of the water, in order to abandon and punish with death a member of his crew considered a traitor because he had violated the oath of strict obedience. “Maroon!” was the unanimous demand of the
Five Ports
crew in punishment for his guilt, and marooned he would be: the law of the sea would be carried out.

Clipperton, cruel and notorious for his drastic sanctions, spotted the silhouette of the atoll, which he had never explored, and gave out orders to approach it and to prepare the condemned man. It is rumored that showing a slave trader’s mercy and a murderer’s humor, Clipperton said a few sarcastic words of consolation to the wretched man and handed him—as prescribed by maroon law—a bottle of drinking water and a gun with a single bullet.

But in crossing over the reefs and looking closely at the coastline, Clipperton found much more than he was looking for. He discovered the ideal place, not to cast out a traitor but to find refuge for himself. It was the perfect hideout.

Treatises on the pirate world indicate that a buccaneer feels no attachment to his ship. He can bare it of all wood carvings, of luxurious furnishings, of anything that increases weight and decreases speed, since what he needs is a swift and seaworthy vessel, efficient in the assault of his victims. A buccaneer is willing to get rid of his ship without any sentimentality, and to replace it any time he captures a better one.

It’s not the same with his lair. On inhabited and regulated lands the pirate is merely a fugitive, a criminal who ends up losing his freedom and his life. So when he finds a piece of land belonging to no one, where he can establish the same dominion he enjoys on the high seas, he keeps it to himself, and loves it fiercely. He feels a very vital connection to his hiding place.

Henri Keppel, a shrewd pirate hunter, knew what he was talking about when he said that the lawless men of the sea, just like spiders, are found in the nooks and crannies. And Clipperton Island was full of them: it was an isolated corner of the world providing the right protection for spiders and pirates.

John Clipperton made a quick decision as soon as he saw the atoll: it would be his hideout. Remote and hostile, it was surrounded by sharp coral reefs like fangs that would make a breach in the hull of any other vessel that dared come close enough, while he and his men could camouflage their presence along its many bays.

Nobody would find him there, nobody would even look for him there. So he established his shadowy domain and called it Clipperton Island. Not to give it his name, but to declare his act of possession. The island belonging to John Clipperton, buccaneer and rebel, solitary prowler with lots of raw courage, very few loves, and no faith. Perhaps he never learned that the place had already been named the Isle of Passion, or if he did, he probably thought it sounded too romantically Iberian and disregarded the fact.

Another characteristic made this atoll the right place for him: its location. It is well documented that for years John Clipperton had centered his efforts on a desirable target: the Chinese fleet also known as the La Plata Fleet. Its galleons were loaded with three hundred tons of precious merchandise being transported from Manila to Acapulco. And then another three hundred tons on the return crossing from Acapulco to Manila, following the route Friar Andrés de Urdaneta had discovered, which, unbeknownst to him, passed within a few miles of the Isle of Passion.

On their outbound voyage, the China Fleet carried damask, woven fabrics, muslin, stockings, and Spanish shawls, dishes of fine Ching dynasty porcelain, tea, cinnamon, clover, pepper, nutmeg, saffron, lacquer, and folding screens. On the return voyage—when the ocean currents brought the ships closer to the isle—they carried gold bars and silver and gold ornaments as well as coffee, cacao and vanilla beans, sugar, cochineal, tobacco, aniline blue, sisal, flannel, and straw hats. Sometimes there were kidnappable passengers—high officials, friars, noble ladies, military officers—whose ransom could be a negotiated from Turtle Island.