Laura Restrepo - Isle of Passion

Everything was fine, except for a gnawing suspicion. Alicia had the intuition that out of nowhere there were harmful shadows lying in wait for her. Dark, cold shadows like rocks, like heavy, living rocks that were evading the sun rays and were circling around her. Damaged and causing damage, they crouched, marauding, lying in wait for an opportunity.

But she also knew that now they could not touch her. They would not come after her as long as she was underwater, as long as she did not pop her head up on the other side of the silvery sheet. They would not touch her as long as she was protected and watched over by the creature, by the underwater recesses of warm light, by the complicity of the powerful but quiet waters.

She could have stayed forever in the effortless, timeless pleasure of this great aquatic bed, but she started slowly if reluctantly to wake up. She saw herself in her bed, practically sitting, propped up by the necessary pillows that, because of her enormous belly, helped her to breathe. It took her a few seconds to understand that the warm, wet sensation she felt on her skin was due to her own waters that had broken a while ago, announcing the impending delivery of her baby. She began to feel the pain a few minutes later.

Up to a few weeks before, Ramón still had confidence that the ship would arrive in time to take them to Mexico. But frantically searching for treasure, he had been too busy to get into a frenzy about the ship’s delay.

All the men’s efforts to find the mythical treasure of Clipperton the pirate had been useless. After their search in the lagoon had failed so miserably, they also failed at the big rock on the southern coast. During two weeks of exploring it inch by inch, inside and out, they had gleaned only a few fossils and some lichens, ancient seashells, giant mushrooms, and lava rocks. The men cursed, fashioned amulets for themselves from some fossil or mother-of-pearl conch, and began, one by one, to abandon the project.

The first ones to desert Ramón were those who had been skeptical about the story of the treasure all along and collaborated only out of discipline. Next were those who had their doubts. A few days later, the enthusiastically confident ones, and finally the truly confirmed fanatics. The last one was Arnaud, for whom it had become a matter of honor. They were all exhausted, with the taste of failure in their mouths, and with their hands full of warts and their eyes boiling with sties, after getting so permeated with bat urine and toad milk.

By June the outlook was critical: they had lost a lot of time searching for the treasure, Alicia was beginning the ninth month of her pregnancy, and the ship had already been delayed five months. Ramón saw with rancor in his heart that the old anxiety, the tachycardia, the sleepless nights making and discarding hypotheses, praying to Heaven and cursing Colonel Avalos, were all coming back in an identical and useless repetition, and he refused to fall into that trap again. If the ship arrived, fine; if not, they would make do. At least as long as they could. As long as they didn’t die. He applied some leeches to suck up his bad blood and poisoned bile, exchanged the treatises on pirates for books on medicine, and devoted his time to preparations for personally taking care of the birth of his son. Doña Juana, the wife of the oldest of his soldiers, Jesús Neri, was experienced as a folk healer and midwife, and she could help him.

Early in the morning the day Alicia woke up all wet with amniotic fluid, Ramón took out from the closet the objects he had already prepared and disinfected for the occasion, and ordered them neatly on the table at the foot of the bed. There were white rags boiled for hours, antiseptic soap, alcohol, scissors and pincers, clean ribbons to tie the umbilical cord, two large basins, needles and surgical gut twine in case sewing a tear was needed. Feeling with his hands and listening through the fetus-scope, Ramón helped Alicia lie down on clean sheets, rearranged her pillows, brought her a big pitcher of fresh water, opened all the windows to the breeze, lowered the jalousies to keep the room in semidarkness, and sat next to his wife, waiting for the birth of his son. Doña Juana was also waiting to be called in to help.

It was a long wait, more than ten hours. Her pains were intermittent, suddenly surging like thunderbolts. Then they went away like the tide, leaving her body in a relaxed rest and her mind lost in limbo, where all references to the concrete world were obliterated. Until the pain brought her again to reality and, tensing all the fibers in her body, jolted her in hot waves shooting from her innermost center up to her two eyelids and each one of her twenty nails, then gradually folded into itself in reverse, easing the tension, and dissolving into peace.

Between one contraction and the next, Ramón refreshed the water in the pitcher, caressed her hair, cooled her off with a fan in his hand. Sometimes they killed time playing checkers or card games, until interrupted by a returning stab of pain. When these became so close that they seemed to be only one with minor interruptions, and the pain came with triple intensity, they both knew the moment had arrived.

Alicia let go freely in an impulse that was more telluric than human and that exploded inside her and reached all of her senses. Her pain, though it had reached its maximum point, became secondary, turning into a weak, unimportant sensation, compared with the power in her effort. The fear and the uncertainty of the previous hours vanished in the face of a glorious willpower, a blind faith in her own strength, which surged overwhelmingly. After her last push, big and definitive, Alicia Rovira lost herself in the same drunkenness that makes a god dizzy after exercising his greatest gift, that of creating life.

Ramón was watching in wonderment mixed with terror. His guts twisted and turned, and his heart levitated at this very violent and bloody last act of procreation. He saw the head beginning to come out, and immediately receding again. In the third attempt it was fully out, wet and gelatinous, and Ramón was able to hold it with both hands. He saw the little face in an ugly adult frown, and without having to pull, he felt how the rest of its body was sliding out, swift and elusive like a lizard. He counted five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot, and checked that its facial features, though contorted by the effort of crying, were perfect.

It was male, just as Alicia had foretold.

“It’s a boy,” he announced, “a beautiful baby boy.”

With skill and a sure hand, as if he had done it many times, and with the help of the midwife, who toiled back and forth with the cotton rags and the boiled water, Ramón cut and sewed, extracted residues, and cleaned the rest. Before handing the baby to Doña Juana to be checked and cleaned, he stopped for a few seconds to look at him.

A little Martian, he thought, a little frightened Martian who has just arrived from an exhausting trip.

Then he lay down to rest next to Alicia on her bed, and Doña Juana returned the newborn to them. All cleaned, wrapped in a white linen gown, less shaken and less purple, he looked more like a creature of this world. From the depth of her exhaustion, Alicia looked at him with love and anguish, actually with too much love and too much anguish, like all women, female bears, tigresses, and cats right after giving birth.

“I was only mistaken in one thing,” she said. “His head is not round but pointed, like a gnome’s cap.”

She had not been mistaken in that either. After being out of the womb for a while and once it recovered from the struggle of going through the narrow tract, the baby’s head, still malleable, lost its sharp point and became rounder than a ball of wool.