Isle of Passion (5 page)

That is how her life went. She would embroider her white dress and learn to cook rice on the big coal stove so it would not come out too salty or lumpy. When nobody noticed, she would lock herself up to read and reread alone her fiancé’s love letters and to answer them on small notepaper from her stationery set, taking great care in penning her round lowercase letters and large, elaborate capitals.

Before writing to him she would review the latest news, the important happenings in Orizaba during his absence. A pregnant Indian who used to sell tortillas and tortillas chips in the market was gored in the belly by a cow. The woman was still alive, bleeding and screaming, and Alicia helped to take her to the Women’s Hospital, where they saved her and her baby. Another day, the satyr in the Santa Anita neighborhood was finally caught and hanged. He had raped fifteen girls, giving them the French venereal disease and getting all of them pregnant.

In the end, Alicia would reject these stories because Ramón would not be interested, and she wrote only about her love for him, such as the card written in English that, years after the tragedy, appeared in a book about Clipperton by General Francisco L. Urquizo, which says exactly this on one side:

And on the other,

A line in violet-colored ink springs up from the letter
e
in “Alice,” turns back and curls around the last
a
in “Orizaba.” Yarn over twice, insert hook, draw up a loop, close the row, and end off.

“N
O, IT ISN’T TRUE
, she didn’t embroider her wedding gown,” Alicia’s granddaughter, Mrs. Guzmán (née María Teresa Arnaud) tells me, then going on to quote from the book she wrote on family memories: “Alicia’s wedding gown has arrived from Europe; it is very elegant, and for several weeks now it has been on display in the shop window at Las Fábricas de Francia. The wedding is to be held shortly,” she says, reading from
La tragedia de Clipperton
, published in Mexico in 1982.

“Of course I know this very well. I know my grandmother’s life to the minute, I see it all through her eyes. Do you want more details about that dress? It was ordered through the Chabrands, the owners of the best clothing store in Orizaba, Las Fábricas de Francia, which had sent for it by telegram to France. Many years later, for my own wedding—my husband is a water management engineer—I said I wanted to get married in my grandmother Alicia’s wedding gown. I was told I was crazy, that it would not fit me, since she was almost a child when she got married. But I was bent on wearing it, and it smelled of mothballs when I took it out of the chest. Up to the last minute, people were telling me not to be so stubborn, I couldn’t possibly get into it. However, it fit me marvelously: I could button it easily. We were exactly the same size; we resembled each other, and had the same body shape, the two of us!” says her proud granddaughter, sitting on a heavy wood rocking chair, Mexican colonial style, in the living room of her San Angel home in Mexico City. Her snow-white hair, clear proof of a recent visit to a beauty salon, frames her doll face: perfect features, slightly dimpled chin, and luminous complexion in spite of her being fifty already.

“My whole family tells me now that I look exactly like my grandmother. You don’t know me, you know nothing about us, but you have called me Alicia a couple of times, though my name is María Teresa. Even though she died long before I was born, there is a deep bond between us that goes beyond logic. I can never put her memory down to rest. Her intense suffering and courage were remarkable. No one recognizes that today.”

Through the large windows we can see the meticulously manicured garden. In the center of the living room there is a table, and a Talavera ceramic vase with five black feathers in it. There are several seashells in a little box.

“Those are feathers from Clipperton birds; the shells are from Clipperton beaches. Does that surprise you? My home is truly a sanctuary for the island. For years I have saved all the newspaper and magazine articles written about it from around the world. I still have letters from my grandfather, and clothing that belonged to my grandmother. I have soil samples and water samples from Clipperton—I am a chemist by profession, you know. These things were brought to me because I have never been there. When I wrote my book about the isle, I met my destiny. I knew that my mission on earth was to tell that story, which is also my own story. I am selling the book from home and from my husband’s office. He is, as I already told you, an engineer in water management. Every week I make a presentation on Clipperton. The navy invites me, I have friends there. For me, each conference is psychologically and emotionally exhausting, because as I talk, I revive the tragedy, I relive it again. I come back home two to five pounds thinner, and I have to stay in bed for a couple of days in order to recuperate.”

At that moment her husband comes down the stairs. He is a short man, wears glasses, and is carrying his raincoat over his arm. On his way to work, he greets us politely and looks at her tenderly, with admiration even, and then leaves.

“Did you see how he looks at me? He shares my mission and has worked tirelessly to make my book widely known, but sometimes it worries him to think that I go too far. ‘Come down to earth, María Teresa,’ he tells me, ‘come back to reality.’ And I tell him that my reality is not here but in Clipperton, because that isle is my life.”

María Teresa goes to the kitchen to make coffee. On the dining room wall there is a large portrait of her, hands on her lap, her white muslin strapless dress baring her equally white shoulders. She is looking straight ahead, unsmiling. In a silver frame propped on a mahogany sideboard is a photo of her grandmother Alicia. They really resemble each other.

María Teresa brings the coffee on a tray. Unlike her dress in the portrait, the one she is wearing now is severe, with a collar up to her neck and sleeves down to her wrists, in a dark shade of purple, a color of mourning. She wears no rings on her fingers, just a pair of showy gold earrings and a cross, also in gold, on her chest.

“People say that I am a
porfirista
like my grandfather, who fought in Porfirio Díaz’s federal army. It is true that I feel nostalgia for the past and have no interest in present-day politics. But I am not a throwback. We all have our idiosyncracies. Look, my grandfather was really a Frenchman, his parents were French, and he sacrificed his life so that Mexico would not lose a piece of land, which today, after many a turn and tumble, is precisely in the hands of the French. That is why, because of his spilled blood, my family finds no peace and cannot rest until Clipperton is again under the Mexican flag.”

The big entrance door to the house has amber glass panels on both sides. The light comes through them and falls on María Teresa while she says good-bye with an admonition.

“So you are taking on Clipperton? Do you really want to trace its tragic history? Do you honestly want to understand all the love and all the forgiving that occurred on that inhospitable rock in the midst of the Pacific Ocean? You better watch out then and mind my words. Clipperton was not always its name. Its original name was Isle of Passion, and whoever gave it that name understood it very well. Whoever enters its world pays dearly for it. What you’ll find there is a sea of sorrows.”

Señora María Teresa Arnaud (Mrs. Guzmán), the granddaughter of the Arnauds from Orizaba, has come to see me off at the door of her San Angel home. She stands next to the glazed door. The light coming through gives her complexion a strange tone, alabaster-like. She has something else to say.

“Let me make one more thing clear: my grandmother and her sisters did indeed spend time embroidering together a few months before the wedding. They spent hours and hours doing that. Not making a lace dress, no. They embroidered all the linens for the home on the isle—sheets, towels, tablecloths, napkins. They even embroidered the famous saintly bedsheet, with its keyhole opening and all, which was used in those days on the wedding night to consummate the marriage. They did a beautiful job embroidering the bride’s initials, A.R.A. That is why you became confused. It is because of such things that my father and I do not want anyone outside of us two to tell our story. People talk of things they know nothing about, they spread versions that are not accurate.”

S
ITTING IN THE KITCHEN AT
P
ENSIÓN
L
OYO
, Alicia Arnaud remembers the gray pearl necklace that her father sent her mother from Japan.

“I remember my mother wearing that necklace. She liked to finger it, caress it, while she spoke about Dad, while she told us all that happened. I do not know who might have it now. When Mother died, Aunt Adela Arnaud, my father’s sister, took us in. Had it not been for her, we would have ended up in an orphanage. We never found out what happened to Mother’s things, the ones that were left after her death. I do not know who might have that necklace now, but I remember it as if I were looking at it.”

In the whole Clipperton story, the gray pearl necklace takes on a political significance, apart from its emotional value: it is the only evidence left of Ramón Arnaud’s trip to Japan. As far as it’s known, he didn’t tell anybody the reason for his trip, and didn’t leave any written record either.

“We never found out why he took it. I think he didn’t even tell my mother,” Alicia Arnaud says.

Porfirio Díaz himself commissioned him and took the trouble of interviewing him personally for it. The trip took place in 1907, immediately after Arnaud was named governor of Clipperton Island. By then, relations between Japan and Mexico were becoming stronger. Japanese imports became fashionable in Mexico City, judo was the rage, poets wrote odes to bamboo trees, and the ladies bought parasols and silk fans.

Then there were persistent rumors of a secret treaty between Mexico and Japan. People said that Japan would declare war on the United States to secure its control over the Pacific, and that Mexico would be its ally. In accordance with such an agreement, it is possible that Clipperton would have been considered of strategic importance due to its location. On the other hand, it is also possible that this often-mentioned secret treaty between Mexico and Japan was just a rumor. That is, nothing but a distracting strategy on the part of the German government, which, in an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, wanted to set the United States and Japan, its two principal enemies, against each other. To spread the tale of a sinister plan to gain control over the Pacific region would foster the paranoia of the “yellow peril” that was affecting the United States.

That leaves another possible explanation: that Arnaud did not say much about his trip, leaving no records, not because of its secret and transcendental historical import, but just the opposite, because of its mere triviality. For instance, Ramón might have been sent to Tokyo as a translator for formal diplomatic affairs. Or to take to the emperor of Japan a piece of Sèvres porcelain as a gift from the president. And perhaps Clipperton never had any strategic importance for anyone, except for birds as a convenient place to leave their droppings.

Whether it was decisive or trivial, this piece of the puzzle has been hopelessly lost. Nothing is known about why Lieutenant Ramón Arnaud went to Japan. There is only one known fact: that from Japan he sent his fiancée a necklace of gray pearls.