Isle of Passion (12 page)

To attack a Chinese
nao
was a dangerous adventure. For protection against corsair raids, each fleet was composed of four ships—two galleons and two tenders—all with dual capabilities as freighters or warships, armed to the teeth, including an assigned artilleryman for each copper cannon and an arsenal for the crew. To board such ships was an endeavor for suicides. Or for experts, like Captain John Clipperton.

Holed up in his lookout, chewing American tobacco and hawking up bitter spittle, Clipperton would wait tensely for days and nights. When he smelled the right moment—it was said he could whiff the air and detect the presence of precious metals several leagues away—he rushed to intercept the convoy and board the ships.

His island always welcomed him on his return from an assault, and he sometimes sought refuge on its black sand beaches, overwhelmed and physically wounded, his ship badly battered and his crew decimated. At other times, his return was accompanied by howls of victory, with the
Five Ports
lumbering in, overburdened by the weight of his booty. Once the cargo was unloaded, the orgy of apportioning the treasure floated down rivers of alcohol. Meticulously fair in this, Clipperton distributed the gold pieces equally among all his men, himself included, and reserved as the captain’s due only the best piece of gold jewelry in the lot. He used to favor heavy Baroque chalices encrusted with precious stones. More than for their value, he chose them to enhance his pleasure as he committed the sacrilege of using them to drink his favorite mixture of coconut milk and rum from the Antilles.

Over their tatters eaten away by the surf and salt spray that also roughened their skins, these sea wolves from Clipperton donned the silk blousons and the damask jackets they had peeled off their victims. They wore too many periwigs and too much perfume, too much jewelry and lace, and thus bedecked, resembling Easter Sunday altars, they started their celebrations.

Only rarely did they bring women from the continent, kidnapped from prisons, orphanages, or brothels. These were mostly beastly whores, covered with lice, who ministered to them without any tenderness, but after all the frolicking was over—by dawn the next day they had mellowed with homesickness—they gave off a tepid maternal warmth that lulled and consoled the men.

Most often the feasts were for men only. They played a pistol game, first covering all windows and sealing any cracks in a room to create total darkness. A man would then sit in the center of the floor and place two pistols in front of him. The others would trample one another blindly, seeking a space to crouch in a protected corner. Someone gave the signal and the man in the middle took the pistols, crossed his arms, and shot. Not until the next light of day did they find out who had died.

Enough victuals were laid out, and the men gobbled up pork, fowl, turtle. They drank until they burst, and in the nebulae of their savage, childish bouts with alcohol, they threw food and poured wine on one another, laughed, pulled each other’s ears, pinched and pricked with their daggers, vomited, sobbed, fell into pools of their own urine and slept there. The next day, Clipperton Island would see them wake up battered and foul-smelling, their throats dry, and walk around on the beaches, overcome by the lasting melancholy that usually follows such brutal excesses of merriment.

Of all the loot they had hauled, there is now only the memory. Of all the gold that John Clipperton and his pirates took to their island hideout, nothing remains. Nobody left buried treasure, because to save money and increase one’s fortune is of no concern to men who are amazed each day to find themselves alive.

None of them was patient enough or eager enough to accumulate wealth, least of all John Clipperton, a show-off, gambler, and spendthrift who prided himself on having wasted, coin by coin and without any regrets, an immense fortune.

The inhabitants of Tortuga would attest to that, since one morning they saw him land his
Five Ports
loaded with gold ingots, hostages, and sacks of goods; they saw him negotiate everything that same day for fabulous sums of money; they saw him that evening strutting in the local taverns and bawdy houses, where he threw money away right and left, boasted of being a cardsharp, and bragged about money spent on reveling and on alms. And at dawn they saw him lying in a dark corner, in a happy drunken stupor, while a badly mutilated beggar removed from his purse the last few coins, final vestiges of his prodigious loot.

T
HAT
C
HRISTMAS WAS
a silent one in Clipperton. After dusk on New Year’s Eve, torrents seemed to break the sky open, and when the waters fell on the isle, the people, already taciturn, went early to bed and covered their heads in order to keep from being blinded by the glare of the relentless lightning flashes. At the Arnauds’ home the usual Friday guests had gathered, feasting on the delicacies and spirits Brander had sent them. But the midnight toasts were laconic and the embraces tearful: the ship that was not coming and the feeling of abandonment weighed too heavily on their souls.

The true celebration was on the second day of January, the day
El Demócrata
finally arrived with supplies, relief personnel, bags of topsoil for their green garden, letters from relatives, and news from Mexico. The forty-four adults and children who at that moment were the entire Clipperton population joined the captain, nineteen sailors, and six passengers of
El Demócrata
to eat, dance, and drink all night, gathered in an empty guano storehouse.

Ramón, eager to have news from Mexico, pulled aside the ship’s captain, Diógenes Mayorga, and the man reeled off a long string of bureaucratic excuses for his delay in arriving at the isle. Then his expression acquired a pained, sad look.

“Things in the country are turning ugly,” he said.

He told how Don Porfirio Díaz—eighty years old and thirty years in power—was getting ready for his sixth reelection, and how his enemies were suddenly coming forth out of nowhere. They called themselves “anti-reelectionists” and the name of their leader was Madero. Francisco Madero.

“This Madero is a short man with a goatee, the heir of one of the five largest fortunes in the country. The Porfirio followers call him “the loony man” because he is devoted to spiritualism and astrology. He believes himself to be a medium and speaks with spirits. What I am telling you is that he might be crazy, but he is still dangerous, because he has the Indians all excited with the slogan that we have had enough of Porfirio and his tyranny.”

“And he talks to spirits?” asked Ramón in disbelief, his eyes round and wide open.

“That’s what they say, Governor. That he communicates daily with his kid brother, Raúl is his name, a little angel that burned himself to death with a kerosene lamp. People who know say that little Raúl’s spirit has possessed his brother Francisco and that he dictates what Francisco is to do; that in spite of being an innocent soul, he knows a lot about politics; and that because he died with so much suffering, he must have become a visionary in his other life. They say that Madero does exactly whatever his dear brother’s spirit demands. And what do you think he’s asking for? Well, he wants his brother to give up drinking and smoking, to distribute his fortune among the poor, to cure the sick, to observe carnal abstinence. . . . And Francisco Madero is doing all that.”

“Instead of a troublemaker, that Madero sounds more like a saint to me,” commented Arnaud. “How could a man like that cause any harm?”

“well, so far so good. The trouble is that the spirit of the little dead one became revolutionary: the word is that he ordered his brother to devote himself to the campaign against Porfirio’s reelection. Madero, who does not dare to disobey the child because of his supernatural powers, followed his instructions and wrote an incendiary book that is selling like hotcakes.”

Arnaud was listening in silence and the captain of
El Demócrata
continued without taking a breath, scrambling his words one on top of the other. He said that Madero’s book called for sabotaging the reelection the following year, and he was sure of this because he had read it himself. And that the book urged the founding of a party to oppose the president.

“I assure you, Governor, that this damned party has many members already. The disgruntled, those with a chip on their shoulder, the ungrateful ones, all follow him. Francisco Madero has turned into the leader of those who believe that thirty years in power is enough, and that at eighty Don Porfirio is ready to wear the wooden suit rather than the presidential sash.”

Distressed about the amazing news but unable to wholly believe it, Ramón left the celebration, which had just begun, and walked in darkness all the way to his office.

On the way he met a group of his men, all huddled under the light of a candle to read the letters their relatives had sent.

“What news did you get from home, soldier?”

“Nothing but bad news, Captain. My mother is sick, and she is all alone now because my brothers decided to join the insurgents.”

“And what about you, Corporal?”

“About the same, sir. My uncle says the peons in the hacienda where he works also want to leave and join the rebels. And maybe he will also join them.”

Arnaud locked himself up in his office and lighted the kerosene lamp. He wanted to read the newspapers and magazines that his superior, Colonel Avalos, had selected and sent on
El Demócrata
. He devoured every issue of
El Imparcial
, page by page, looking for clues of the discontent, for indicators of the national commotion, traces of the opponents of the “reelectionists” or of Madero and his little brother. He found not a word. Not even a hint of their existence. All the news was about the inauguration of another new bridge or another new segment of railroad track, or the receptions honoring this or that foreign ambassador, or about the decoration bestowed upon Don Porfirio by the Emperor of Japan.

Arnaud had to double-check the dates to make sure he had not been sent newspapers from a year or two ago. No, they were all recent, not even two months old. However, it seemed to him he had read those exact words many times before. The only novelties he found, and he clipped them for his archives, were an extensive article about the influence of cold weather on the Russian character, another one on anthills, and, lastly, an article about botanical science in Manchuria.

He walked back, with long strides, to the party in the storehouse, mixed with the people, played his mandolin with more zest than ever, and danced out of step as usual. When Alicia approached him to inquire why he was so euphoric, he surprised her with an answer that sounded rather like a harangue.

“There is nothing going on in Mexico. Everything is fine and dandy. If Captain Mayorga says otherwise, then he must be the one who is raving, the one who is loony. That old Porfirio will not be toppled from his throne, not even with dynamite. And as long as he keeps his post, I will keep mine. The old fox might be very old, but he’s still very foxy, and he can swallow all of them whole. He can withstand six, ten, twelve reelections. This Francisco Madero is plain humbug!”

The last storm had come on New Year’s Eve. Then, after the electricity dissipated and the hysterical rains subsided, the winter skies, which had hung over Clipperton asphyxiating it like a cardboard ceiling, lifted and the azure reappeared, rising higher and higher.

After the arrival of the ship, and under the vibrant January sun, Clipperton came back to life, and its residents emerged as if roused from a heavy, humid siesta. There was again a flurry of activity in every corner of the isle.

Gustav Schultz made his employees double their workload, while he tripled his own. He repaired all the damage the rains had caused to the Decauville train tracks, filled the empty storehouses with tons of guano, and made a clean copy of his accounting records. In two weeks he had everything working again like a Swiss watch. He behaved as if he had never received orders from his company to start dismantling all installations, or as if he had misinterpreted them to mean just the opposite: that Clipperton was their future key location. Nobody questioned his actions since, as a given, no one expected to understand his reply. Alicia, however, thought she understood.

“Schultz, in his way, is reacting in the same way as all of us,” she told Ramón. “He simply does not want to recognize that everything he has accomplished here is a complete waste.”

The obsession with finding the Clipperton treasure took hold of Arnaud’s body and soul, and he, in turn, infused his delirium into Cardona and the rest of the men in the garrison. They decided to begin their search in the lagoon, and for that purpose they improvised a diver’s suit and fixed, as best they could, a damaged deep-sea diver’s headgear given them by the captain of
El Demócrata
. Cutting through the timeless waters, they descended into a dark, elusive world where they experienced the sensation of burying themselves alive. They had always thought there were no fish in the lagoon: nobody had ever fished there. However, in the deepest zone they could see ancient, timid creatures, the size of seals and armor-plated with thick scales, lying in wait in the grottoes or seeking protection behind clouds of volcanic lime. The men were convinced that the monsters, the only inhabitants familiar with these depths, could lead the divers to the place where the treasure was hidden, and more than once trying to follow them, they got stuck in the underwater rock labyrinths.