Isle of Passion (2 page)

With its back to the parking area, her cool L-shaped house opens onto a patio. There are several rooms, though the only other person in the house is a domestic servant who has been helping her for several years. The walls are papered with photos of her children. “Let’s rather talk about the present,” she tells me, pointing at the photos, taking me through first communions, weddings, graduations. Then she has me sit at her kitchen table while she pours into several containers the milk that her oldest son, a rancher, has brought her from the hacienda. “Don’t talk to me about the past, let me forget it,” she repeats. “It’s been so long since I talked about Clipperton. I was born on the island in 1911 and lived there until I was six or seven. What’s the point of my telling you about those old things?”

While she keeps rejecting her memories, Clipperton begins to come back and quietly invades her kitchen, little by little. The more she talks, the more enthusiastic she grows. Her tone of voice gets more lively. She forgets about the milk.

“I only have good memories, happy memories, what can I tell you. What happened in Clipperton was a tragedy, but only for the grownups. We children were happy. The difficulties started later, when we returned. But while we were there, it was fine, we never wanted to leave. Sometimes we saw grown-ups crying, and we cried, too, for a little while and without knowing why, but soon we were carrying on as usual.

“We were playing all day long. As soon as a game ended, we started a new one, we never stopped playing. At the beginning we had reading and writing lessons. Father didn’t want us to be uncivilized upon our return to Orizaba. Mother started a little schoolhouse where she was the teacher and the students were the little Irra brothers, the two Jensen girls, Jesusa Lacursa, and us, the Arnaud children—plus the other children who gradually joined us in Clipperton. But later, with so many things going on, the adults could no longer take care of the little ones, except for short whiles in order to feed us or tuck us in at night. During the rest of the time we were free, on our own, like wild animals. We played and played until we fell asleep out of exhaustion.

“You probably want me to talk about my father, but I remember little. There were times when he let himself be absorbed so much by his obsessions that he didn’t see us even though we were right before his eyes. Like when he got the idea of trying to recover the sunken treasures of Clipperton the pirate from the bottom of the lake. For months he thought of nothing else. Other times we became his obsession, like when he spent days and days carving toy ships out of wood for us to play with. They were perfectly beautiful miniatures. We still had other toys brought from the mainland—I remember well a porcelain doll for which Altagracia Quiroz had made a wig of real hair the day all the women on the island cut their hair—but the ships that my father carved himself were always my favorites. Some were warships and others freighters. We set them sailing on the lagoon and made believe they had shipwrecked. And their passengers, at least some of them—poor things—were drowning. We allowed the rest to survive.

“My father was severe only when we were at the dinner table. He said that even though we were in the most remote corner of the world and only the crabs could see us, we had to eat like civilized people. Of course, after the calamities began he could not make the same demands, and we turned wild. After the hurricane swept away everything, including the china, the silverware, and the tablecloths, we soon forgot the good table manners he had taught us. All the better for us, we thought, for we felt freer and more relaxed. We ended up eating very fast with our hands, and taking big bites. The booby eggs had nice blue shells, and we loved them. Playing at the beach, we cooked them and sprinkled sea salt on them.

“We spent a lot of time with the crabs. There must be more of those crabs in Clipperton than in the rest of the world. There were so many, it was hard to walk anywhere. If the house had not been on higher ground, the crabs would have invaded it, just as they had invaded the beach, the reefs, the caves. Everything was blanketed with crabs. We liked to watch them fight. They are ferocious beasts and dismember each other with their pincers. We used to lock them in jars to start crab wars.

“This is how things were and we had a happy life. At the end, we were running barefoot and half naked, with some clothes Mom made out of sailcloth from ships’ sails. We were so suntanned from so much sun exposure that we looked like Africans, and our hair was wild and spiky, since we could only bathe in saltwater and without soap.

“As children in Clipperton, we never knew the meaning of suffering. Perhaps only my brother Ramón, the oldest, did. I think that once in a while he realized that things were not going well at all. Ramón adored my mother, and when she cried, he clung desperately to her skirt.

“The day Dad died, we all—both the older children and the little ones—were standing on the beach and watching him sail away on a boat when suddenly a manta ray capsized his boat. We all saw him being swallowed by the waves. We also saw the manta ray, enormous and black like a shadow, coming out of the water. I am not quite sure we saw it, or just thought we did. We sometimes said it was black with blue stripes, and other times, that it was silvery and gave off electrical sparks.

“Part of our game was inventing our own stories, some out of fear, others about the grandparents we hardly knew, or about our cousins, from what our mother had told us. We had imaginary friends, as many as we wanted, so we didn’t need any more. We invented a lot of stories about our father after he died. We liked to think that he had found some pirate’s sunken treasure at the bottom of the sea and that he had given us the jewels and the crowns. Or that he had become the king of the deep and rode underwater on a carriage pulled by the manta ray. Sometimes we also said that he had not died, that he had just gone away and was coming back to bring us toys and oranges. Later at night we couldn’t sleep, afraid that he would really appear.

“I remember all this because after everything happened, our mother kept retelling these stories to us, over and over, for years. Whenever she spoke of our father, she took out of her treasure chest a long necklace of gray pearls that he had brought her from Japan and allowed us to touch it.

“But none of this is important, you know, they are small, blurred memories, not good enough for you to write a book about. If you can afford the time, it would be better for you to come with me to the hacienda, only twenty minutes by car, and I’ll take you to see my father.”

In the outskirts of Orizaba, the two rancher sons of Señora Alicia Loyo, née Alicia Arnaud, are talking and resting on the porch of the hacienda after the day’s work. They are eating nopal tacos with chiles and drinking expensive brandy with bottled water from Tehuacán. Facing them there is an expanse of land, all paved, where sheep, pigs, and hens surround a circular trough set right in the center. Señora Arnaud is pointing in its direction. At the center of the animals’ drinking place, on top of a metal cask and accompanied by the chatter of his progeny and the din of the domestic animals, there is a bronze bust of Captain Ramón Nonato Arnaud Vignon, with a spiky Prussian helmet on his head.

T
HAT WAS
R
AMÓN
A
RNAUD’S
personal description, July 8, 1901, as recorded in the enlistment papers of his troubled military career, when he was twenty-two years old. He started as a first sergeant in the Seventh Regiment cavalry of the Mexican Army. It is recorded in the archives of the National Defense Ministry.

His dossier even includes anthropometric notations, which indicate he was a man of medium height (67 inches), of small, almost feminine feet (left foot, 9.75 inches), normal-sized head, and small hands (his left hand, up to the tip of his middle finger, was 4.75 inches long).

Exactly a year after this dossier was recorded, on July 8, 1902, his rosy white skin had become mousy gray, his brown hair was jumping with lice, and the small scar on the waxen texture of his ample forehead stood out like a cross carved by fingernails. Lying on a cot in his cell in the Santiago Tlatelolco military prison, he left his ration of refried beans untouched on its pewter plate, and cried out of rage and humiliation.

A court-martial had dictated his sentence. Five and a half months of imprisonment for being an army deserter, and he had been stripped of rank, degraded to enlisted man. On the night of May 20 just seven weeks before, he had been waiting in a cold sweat for the right time to escape from the barracks, crouching behind some sacks of maize and anticipating with horror the moment that the news would reach his hometown, Orizaba: “Ramón Arnaud is an army deserter.”

But he, poor devil, was incapable of enduring what his comrades in arms in the Seventh Regiment could easily bear. Those hungry, barefoot Indians were able to overcome the inhuman discipline, the kick in the ass, the filth, and the dire poverty that being an army trooper meant. But not he. And neither could he tolerate his comrades: he considered them backward, smelly, half naked in the rags they wore as uniforms, adrift in alcohol and marijuana.

While he, an Arnaud Vignon, a well-educated white man whose family influence had expeditiously advanced him to first sergeant, was more of a shit than all of that shit. And this would be the prized gossip in Orizaba—whispers at the church portico, on the alameda boulevards, during the afternoon hot chocolate.

The town of Orizaba had a French gazebo in the center of the plaza, an Art Nouveau train station, a municipal palace with a wrought-iron facade designed by Eiffel himself—the man made famous by his tower—which had been brought disassembled, screw by screw, from France. The Orizaba families had a Gallic air and were industrious and prosperous. They had more faith in the progress achieved through violent force by their president, Don Porfirio Díaz, than in the heretical, nationalistic ideals of the Indian Benito Juárez. There were such families as the Legrands, who manufactured percale, piqués, calicos, blankets, and French linen in their Cocolapan Woven Goods Factory. And the Suberbies, whose fortune rose like the foam of their Moctezuma beer; Monsieur Chabrand, who sold fine silks and haberdashery in his store, which he had named The Factories of France. The society ladies wore silk
shantung
dresses embroidered with
soutache
to stroll down the alameda, and then had to lift their skirts and underskirts a bit to avoid soiling them in human excrement when crossing any of the other streets, used as public latrines by Orizaba’s poor.

A few years earlier, Napoleon’s invading troops had almost turned the city into their permanent headquarters, and the local gentlemen devoted themselves to the pastime of identifying their more exotic army uniforms. They could recognize the Vincennes hunters for their dark blue woolen jackets; the Zouaves, with their red britches, so wide they resembled skirts, and their yellow leather walking boots; the Algerian Zouaves, with their dark skin and white turbans; the Spanish soldiers under General Prim, for their light uniforms and straw hats, and their officers, who wore jaunty little caps they called “leopoldines.”

Orizaba the Damned was condemned by the rest of the nation for its recent docility in the face of European domination and its fascination with the extravagant and phantasmagorical reign of Archduke Maximilian, who served as Emperor of Mexico for three years and seven days, until the Indian Juárez had him killed in the Cerro de las Campanas to prove that no blond-bearded Austrian would rule over the free men of his Aztec homeland. And to make sure this was completely understood, after he was shot, his body was returned to Europe in a rosewood coffin, properly embalmed, and having, instead of his own, the glass eyes from an image of Saint Ursula.

Ramón’s French father, Angel Miguel Arnaud, had crossed the ocean and settled in Orizaba. He loved his new land more than his old one, toiled tirelessly, and managed to accumulate a sizable fortune. He took advantage of a transportation subsidy given to him by the Porfirio Díaz administration to build the local railroad. He became the owner of a hacienda and of a home on Calle Real. He was named Orizaba postmaster, and that was how he had turned into one of the thousands of bureaucrats supported by Don Porfirio in fulfillment of his political slogan, “Let’s feed the donkey.”