Laura Restrepo - Isle of Passion

Alicia and the children stayed with Don Félix in Salina Cruz, while Ramón started out on his exhausting peregrination to the capital to find out about his future and the future of his isle. But that was an old concern of the past administration. Nobody in the capital remembered that issue, and nobody cared. So, for months he was forced to fall asleep in interminable waiting rooms, explain the whole thing to a hundred government officials, pen hundreds of applications, fight hundreds of bureaucrats.

In the meantime, the country, which had gone wild, was suddenly reined in, then overflowed, found the right way, lost it, found it again, and lost it again, in the vertiginous rhythm of Pancho Villa and his Golden Warriors in the North, the cautious advance of Emiliano Zapata and his dispossessed peasants in the South, and the silent steps of Victoriano Huerta and his enclave of traitors in the capital.

Ramón, a man prone to obsessions and fixed ideas, was too much involved in his own problems to be fully aware of the whirlwind around him. After a lot of struggle, he finally managed to locate, covered with dust and lost in the last archive, some papers of importance to him. It was a document signed by Porfirio Díaz a few years before he fled from Mexico, according to which the French and Mexican governments — at the latter’s initiative — asked for Victor Emmanuel III, the king of Italy, to be the arbiter as to the sovereignty of Clipperton Island, vowing to accept his ruling.

With this document in hand, Arnaud finally managed an interview with the Madero administration’s Minister of the Army and Navy, who signed all the necessary authorizations for him to continue in his post and to keep the logistic support coming from Acapulco by ship.

In the meantime, Alicia, pregnant for the third time and getting close to her delivery date, went to Mexico City with Don Félix and her two children in order to be reunited with Ramón there. They moved into three large, comfortable rooms in a hotel located right in the center of the city, the San Agustín. They hired for their private service one of the hotel maids, named Altagracia Quiroz. She was a girl of fourteen from Yautepec, state of Morelos, who had been forced to flee to the capital during the disruptions caused by the revolution. She continued to dress like the other hotel maids, with a white percale apron and a red kerchief tied around her neck. In spite of her name, she was altogether lacking in grace. Her body was strong like a tree trunk and just as cylindrical. She was short and flat-nosed. But to counter her plain features, nature had endowed her with a glorious head of velvety black, silky hair reaching down to her ankles. “Your hair is like the Virgin of Guadalupe’s,” her mother had been telling her since she was a little girl. But she did not like her hair and always wore it tied up or braided. Given the choice, she would much prefer to have the Virgin of Guadalupe’s upturned little nose, her pink feet, or her generous miracle eyes.

Mrs. Arnaud asked her to take care of her two older children while she attended to delivering and nurturing her third child, and offered her a salary of ten pesos a month, which was double her hotel salary. Altagracia accepted, and from then on her life was inseparably tied to that family, strangers to her until the day before. Without knowing it, she had made a tragic pact with destiny in exchange for ten pesos a month.

A few days later, Olga made her entrance into the world. She was the only one of the four Arnaud children not to be born in Clipperton. Maybe because of this, the isle did not mark her the way it marked her siblings, in spite of the years she had to live there. Perhaps for the same reason, in her adult life Mrs. Olga Arnaud Rovira, Ramón and Alicia’s third child, born in the Hotel San Agustín in Mexico City, always refused to talk about Clipperton or to reminisce about that part of her life, either with relatives or outsiders.

On a February afternoon in 1913, Ramón was walking down the street on the way to his hotel when he could not pass through. There were free-shooters posted on the roofs, stray bullets whistling in every direction, corpses piled up at the corners, big fires blocking the streets, houses being tumbled down by cannonades, barricades of soldiers preventing crossings. He managed to find out what was going on. General Victoriano Huerta had initiated a coup to oust President Madero, and the city was at war.

For the first time since his return to the continent, Arnaud met with reality head-on. He had stumbled into a dilemma: the army was divided, and soldiers in the same army uniforms were killing one another. Which side should he take? Should he defend the government or the insurgents? He could not find an answer but realized that he did not care. It was too late for either.

For ten days and ten nights he stampeded with the masses. He roamed about, keeping close to the walls to save his neck, helping the wounded, who hung from his shoulder as if they were drunk, while attempting to draw some conclusions out of the contradictory reports. Most of all, he tried to get back to his hotel to find out how his family was.

Finally he succeeded. He stormed into the family’s rooms looking distraught, his clothes filthy and ragged, his hair wild like a madman’s. His wife and his father-in-law embraced him long and tight. He began to pace the bedroom in long strides like a caged beast, his words gushing forth. Without concern for order or logic, he began telling them what he had seen and heard.

“The president of the United States sent a message that there had been enough revolution already, and that if Mexico did not establish a better government, he was going to send warships and four thousand marines to invade. President Madero’s brother had both of his eyes gouged out, the good one and the glass one, with the tip of a sword. Madero’s loyal men were executed. The president fell prisoner, was obliged to resign, and was then assassinated. The American ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, was behind everything. They say that the only thing he did not get to do was to pull the trigger of the gun that killed Madero. General Huerta, a friend of the gringos, is now in power—”

Arnaud suddenly stopped his tirade and remained motionless in the center of the room, observing the members of his family. Once the commotion of his return was over and the anguish caused by his disappearance had subsided, they were now listening to him in silence. His family was evidently upset and alarmed by the news, but remained static as if immobilized by a serene stillness. Lying down wrapped in the white linen bedsheets, Alicia was breast-feeding her new baby. Don Félix was slowly drawing on his pipe. The two children were silently building towers of wooden blocks.

“It’s funny,” said Arnaud, now in a low voice. “On the other side of that window the whole world has just crumbled down. But here, the equilibrium continues to be perfect.”

He dropped like a piece of lead onto the bed next to his wife, fully dressed and with his shoes on, completely filthy and with blood, not his own, smeared all over. He fell asleep instantly.

A few days later Don Félix returned to Salina Cruz to oversee his business, which he had left adrift in the middle of the national commotion. The departure of her father, the postpartum blues, the series of violent events that the family had experienced, and even the smell of damp carpets in the halls of the hotel had sunk Alicia into deep melancholy.

One afternoon she finally spoke to Ramón.

“I want you to tell me honestly, from the bottom of your heart, what you think of all this.”

“Of all what?”

“Of all that is happening in this country.”

“I don’t know,” Ramón answered, without any hesitation. “I don’t think anything of it. I don’t believe this is my war.”