Isle of Passion (19 page)

Cardona howled in pain, and Ramón stopped.

“No more,” begged the lieutenant, “what you’re kicking to hell is my leg, and the beam is not moving. If I’m going to die, let me die in peace, and not like a martyred saint.”

“Bear with me, as I told you. I’m going to get you out of here, leg or no leg.”

“Yeah,” whispered Cardona, scarcely audible, “like a lizard dropping its tail to survive.”

“You certainly have a knack for animal comparisons.”

Ramón repeated his maneuver, and the effort was already making him dizzy when the first wave crashed into the cave, covering both of them, blocking their noses and lungs, almost bursting their hearts and ears, and leaving them flooded, almost drowned, for what seemed an eternity.

What a pity, we’re going to die, Ramón thought.

But they did not die. The big wave receded with the same fierceness with which it had come in, yanking their bodies outward and carrying the rubble with it. And then it happened: it was only a fraction of an inch, but Secundino Angel Cardona sensed that the centrifugal force of the water was moving the beam, releasing some of the pressure.

“Now is the time!” he shouted, spitting salt spray, and with a merciless jolt, he liberated his leg and dragged himself to the opening of the cave.

Ramón Arnaud followed him.

T
IRSA
R
ENDÓN’S PHOTO
was taken after all the events in Clipperton had ended; in it one can see clearly the ravages caused by the tragedy.

The focus is on the woman in the midst of a large group of people, and only her face can be seen. Her hair, not very professionally trimmed, is short and very straight, with a fringe in front that becomes rounded and longer on the sides, just covering her ears. This hairdo, plus the fact that her skin, naturally dark, has been tanned by the sun, gives her features, reminiscent of those of the Amazonian peoples, a slightly masculine air. This does not mean she is an ugly woman. Hers is an attractive face, handsome though not overly friendly, a face that stands out in a crowd.

It is her eyes that command attention. The high contrast between the whites of her eyes and her dark irises, the maturity of her gaze, the arrogance of the lifted right eyebrow. In this photo Tirsa presents herself as tough and primitive but not naive. She is not taken by surprise either by the camera or by life, not even when death menaces dangerously near. Though surrounded by others, she appears alone like an Amazon jungle native who has survived massacres and ravages, solitary, defiant, tough; a native who has seen it all, knows it all, who has managed to outwit all enemies through shrewdness, and who has returned from beyond life and death.

In the various existing documents about the Clipperton tragedy—those coming from María Teresa Arnaud Guzmán, General Francisco Urquizo, and Captain H. P. Perril—there are specific mentions of Tirsa. She is recognized as Mrs. Cardona, that is, Lieutenant Secundino Angel Cardona’s wife.

In the lieutenant’s military dossier is a letter signed by him in which he refers to his wife. He is asking that his weekly pay be reduced by fifteen pesos, which are to be given to her in the capital city. However, the name of his wife here is not, as expected, Tirsa Rendón. It is María Noriega. Either Tirsa Rendón was a name adopted by María Noriega, or Tirsa Rendón was not really Secundino Cardona’s lawful wife.

This second possibility proved to be true according to a group of documents at the end of the lieutenant’s dossier. Among them is a letter dated some years later (well after Cardona’s death), in which “María Noriega, Cardona’s widow,” a nurse at Puerto Central in Socorros and mother of two children, claims from the president of Mexico her widow’s pension. The confusion about the identity of the two women is evident in the answer the widow receives: “Please ask Mrs. María Noriega to send a copy of her marriage certificate to the deceased Captain Secundino Angel Cardona, due to the fact that in the investigation carried out by this ministry in reference to his last post on Clipperton Island, Teresa Rendón appears as that officer’s wife and gives testimony to the events that occurred there.”

María Noriega must have sent the requested marriage certificate, since the pension was granted to her, which corroborates the legitimacy of the relationship. This also proves that the woman who lived with Secundino Cardona until the end of his days was not his wife, but the above-mentioned “Teresa Rendón,” a variant of the name Tirsa Rendón.

In the end, everything is clear. Secundino Angel Cardona married a nurse, María Noriega, and they had two children. The ordeals of military life induced him to abandon her, and at some point in his many adventures he got together with Tirsa, who followed him from then on, to Clipperton. So Tirsa Rendón must have been, like the other Clipperton soldiers’ women, a camp follower.

U
NDER THE PLANKS
of the guano storehouse the roar of the storm was softer and more bearable, while outside, the isle was being pommeled by the tired, last battering. Men, women, and children were waiting, wide awake, for the coming dawn to clear the skies and finally quiet down the furies of wind and ocean.

Almost inaudible, a sort of piercing sound was resounding in their stunned eardrums. It was sharp and feminine, as if coming from a soprano, a ship siren, or a mermaid. A high C floating intermittently into the rarified air of the storehouse, sneaking into the intervals of silence when the roof planks stopped clattering. It was an urgent call, but so unexpected and unreal that the Clipperton survivors perceived it without hearing it, and nobody thought of asking where it came from. It was simply another incomprehensible and unmanageable phenomenon that the hurricane had brought along.

In a corner, Lieutenant Cardona lay on a straw mattress, a thick blanket over him. A bittersweet smile twisted his lips, allowing his white, Chamula Indian teeth to show. The excruciating pain in his disjointed, splintered leg still produced a dull tingling under the effects of the morphine injections Captain Arnaud had given him. Kneeling by his side, Tirsa Rendón, his common-law wife, tried to wring dry the cloths drenched with his perspiration, since all the liquid element in his body seemed to be flowing out freely from his forehead, his underarms, his back. As if the man wanted to die of dehydration.

In the stupor of his weakness and his narcosis, lying at the borderline between this life and the other, Cardona also heard the surreal ringing and dreamed that women with friendly breasts and angelic voices relieved his suffering by singing lullabies in his ear.

A few hours before, when the hurricane still thundered in all its fury, both captain and lieutenant had made their ghostly appearance at the storehouse. They came after their terrifying night, nearly naked and exhausted, like Moses rescued from the waters, numb with horror. If they managed to move along the isle, upsetting the devastating designs of nature, it was by mustering hidden reserves of energy and postponing death, step by step, with the last lifesaving iota of adrenaline.

Between them, they had dragged Cardona’s torn leg as if it were a third person, a dying man, heavy and swollen, whom they were trying to rescue from the storm. When they reached the refuge, Arnaud attempted to rearrange that mess of bone and blood, starting with the instruments in his first-aid kit and, when these proved insufficient, resorting to the work tools in the storehouse.

While Cardona howled and hallucinated about mermaids, Arnaud struggled with pincers and pulleys to reset his femur into the hip socket, to straighten his knee, which looked downward, to give some human form to this organic matter, so torn and disjointed.

He would not have accomplished much were it not for Tirsa Rendón’s incredible level-headedness and almost virile stamina. Covered with blood like a butcher or a priestess, she helped consistently, without fainting or being repelled, helping him to unravel tendons, pull bones, and darn skin with needle and thread, like embroidering doilies with cross-stitch.

When Arnaud had reached his outer limits of alertness and of his modest resources as a surgeon, he made splints and bandages, and not until then did he embrace Alicia, kiss his children, take off whatever was left of his soaked clothes, and cover himself with the heavy tablecloth with bobbin lace from Bruges that his wife had saved in her trunk. Wrapped in white cloth, like a tragic hero, he did a roll call to make a count of those present: eleven men, ten women, and nine children. Miraculously, the Mexicans were all there, except Victoriano Alvarez, posted at the lighthouse. Some of the men had wounds and contusions, but with the exception of Cardona’s leg wound, none was serious.

The only foreigner who had not left the isle, Gustav Schultz, was absent. Very early in the morning of the day before, Lieutenant Cardona had seen him observing the sky. He pointed his index finger up and predicted, “Hurricane.”

The lieutenant now recalled that last impression of his voluminous figure silhouetted against the dim predawn light. He knew better than anybody.

“Maybe he’s dead,” someone said.

But Ramón Arnaud was convinced that wasn’t so, and his face turned red with rage to think that instead of helping the community or contributing to its safety, Schultz had taken shelter on his own with his woman, inside the solid walls of his home. Arnaud imagined him to be at that moment dry, warm, and comfortably asleep in his bed, and felt something resembling hate.

The Arnaud family gathered in a tight group. Interrupted by the roars of the dying hurricane, the creaking of the roof, the cries of the children, and the nervous noise of the frightened animals, Ramón and Alicia almost didn’t let each other finish a sentence, eagerly recounting all the events of the last hours, threading like telegraphic messages the fragments of the two stories into a single intermittent one. Every three words, Ramoncito, who wanted to know everything to the last detail, would interrupt to ask “What happened?” “How did you hurt yourself, Dad?” “Where did you fall down?” “Who was it?” “How was it?” “Why was it?”

“Someone is knocking at the door,” a voice announced.

The storehouse door was opened, and a lot of water came in together with Daría Pinzón and her daughter, Jesusa Lacursa.

“Where is Schultz?” Arnaud asked them, no longer so sure about the answer.

“He’s gone mad,” Daría Pinzón answered.

“I’m not asking how he is, but where.”

“He is around, mad as a hatter. While his house flew away, he spent the whole night outside, trying to salvage the train and all the machinery, and all those useless contraptions that the company abandoned. And he, also, he also was abandoned on this isle, but he doesn’t care. And as for me, the wind might as well blow me away, he doesn’t care about that either. He only cares for the interests of the company, as if they were his children,” Daria said on the verge of a nervous breakdown, without being able to stop. “He has gone nuts, Captain, believe me, that gringo has gone crazy. He was brought to Clipperton to ship the guano, and he wants to ship guano even though there is no guano, no Clipperton, no company—”

“Calm down, Daría,” Arnaud said softly. “Go and get some hot coffee and find a spot here for you and your daughter.”

The women were throwing dough balls into the small fires they had made. Accompanied by a well-tuned guitar, someone was singing a strange
corrido
that told the story of a cockroach that couldn’t walk. Several men were playing monte over a gray military serape, with total absorption, oblivious to everything. Every once in a while they shouted for everyone to hear, announcing the cards they had uncovered.

“Two, for your rheumatism and your flu.”

“Four-ce off the covers to sleep with your lovers.”

“Six days of battle, and they stole my cattle.”

“Three things nice: chocolate and sugar ’n’ spice.”

In the meantime, the sharp whistle kept on unwittingly penetrating through every crack in the roof, subtle and distant but implacable, like a remote Judgment Day trumpet.

The tail of the hurricane dissipated when the sun came up, and people slowly left the storehouse with the caution of shy animals that leave their lairs blinded by the light after hibernating, dazed by so much sleep. Arnaud headed an impromptu procession that sleepwalked along the coastline in religious silence, without saying a word about the spectacle before their eyes. The vegetable patch and its black soil, the buildings, the dock, all traces of civilization, all human undertakings—which had taken years to bring to fruition—had all disappeared.