Laura Restrepo - Isle of Passion

All sorts of objects were flying out, as if a gaggle of madmen inside the house were throwing them up in the air. Ramón watched with resignation how his own dearest belongings and the ones that had accompanied them all these years were disappearing one by one. He allowed himself to feel bitter when he saw his reports and his books doing cabrioles in midair like pinwheels.

There is nothing to be done here, he thought. Let me find the rest of the people.

He looked in every direction without knowing where to head. There was only disaster around him, and then he saw, to the south, the beam of the lighthouse.

They must be there, he thought. Perhaps they took refuge in the cave.

He walked on, guided by the light, calling at the top of his voice, but nobody could hear him. The gusts threw sand in his eyes, and in the whirlwinds he was helplessly being pulled about like a puppet. The wound on his head hurt, his body was all bruised, and worst of all, he was alone, isolated by force from everybody. Ramón Arnaud felt personally aggravated and deeply humiliated.

Suddenly, when he was about to give up, he rebelled against so much humiliation. A wave of courage made his blood boil, and he regained control over his own body. He stood up, defiantly facing the wind, and in anger took off his belt and began whipping the air as if possessed. He brandished his belt right and left like a maniac while shouting at the hurricane at the top of his lungs. “Damn you, bastard, what do you have against me? Hey! What is it you want? Do you want me to finish you off with my whip? You’ve got five minutes, you shitty son of a bitch, I give you five minutes to get out of here!”

Giant angry waves, breaking into foam at their crests, were hitting Clipperton, running over it and coming out on the other shore undisturbed by this insignificant obstacle in their run across the ocean.

Ramón Arnaud kept shouting while holding on to his pants with one hand and whipping the air with the other, when one of those mountains of water reached him, lifted him, and hurled him a few yards away against one side of the big southern rock. Then it withdrew, leaving him stranded on one of the rocky recesses.

Arnaud coughed and vomited some of the water he had swallowed. When he was able to breathe again, he attempted to climb to a higher position, anticipating the next wave that would smash him against the rock. He had been lucky this time and miraculously made a soft landing, but in the next charge of the tide he could become imbedded there like the thousands of fossils that had found their eternal resting place.

In the meantime, in the shed next to the dock, the women and children, together with the animals, had spent several hours more or less protected from the elements gone beserk. At the beginning they had earnestly tried to cover, as best they could, all the cracks and holes where water and wind were coming in. Then they gathered in the center of the shed, huddling against one another in a tighter and tighter circle. They had been silent for a long while, stunned by the unbearable noise of the roof, which vibrated and screeched, threatening to fly off any minute, and by the wailing of the children, who competed all at once to see who could cry the loudest.

Some people had started to pray the litanies of the Holy Cross, and the rest slowly followed.

“If when I’m dying, / The devil wants to tempt me, / You will protect me, / Because at the feast of Santa Cruz, / A thousand times I repeated: / Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…”

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, repeated without pause or respite a hundred times; Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, in an endless, dull murmur that through repetition became susje, susje, susje, susje, susje. Someone did the counting and when it reached a hundred times, interrupted with the prayer, “If when I’m dying, / The devil wants to tempt me,” and the heavy torrent of voices repeated Jesus another hundred times, sounding like broken dishes rolling down, or rain falling, made almost inaudible by the roar of the storm.

It was not the feast of Santa Cruz that day — for a long time, dates had lost their significance for anybody in Clipperton — but there was every indication that the time of dying had come. “Because at the feast of Santa Cruz, / A thousand times I repeated: / Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…” echoed Alicia, but she was actually thinking of Ramón, and his absence made her feel anxious. They had lived together for a long time in close quarters on the isle, where, whether they wished it or not, they could seldom be more than five hundred yards apart from each other. Now that the danger of the situation was keeping them separated, Alicia let herself be overcome by an anxiety not experienced since her adolescence in Orizaba, when for months she had waited for her fiancé’s return in the patio of her family home, besieged by doubts about ever seeing him again. Holding on her lap baby Olga, who was badly in need of a diaper change and kept crying with surprising strength for her age, Alicia whispered again, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” But instead, she was thinking, Ramón, Ramón, Ramón.

On the other side of the island, under a sinister sky, Ramón was clinging to the rocks like a housefly. He was nearing physical exhaustion and mental delirium, when he seemed to hear a voice other than his own. A lament, perhaps, or a scream. Weak and faltering, it came from the darkness below. He thought of going down to it, but he told himself that he would be then at the merciless whim of the rising tide. Anyway, he felt the need to respond. It was dangerous, and he had better warm up his rigid muscles before attempting it. After stretching his arms and legs, which barely responded, he managed to go down a couple of yards. He couldn’t see anybody, but there was more urgency in the voice, which sometimes sounded human and at others it didn’t.

Could it be someone calling for help? he wondered. Or is it only the wind whistling and trying to deceive me? Or maybe it’s a mermaid. A wretched mermaid who wants me to die.

As if to settle the matter, the words were now pretty audible.

“It’s me, Ramón. Help me.”

It was the voice of Lieutenant Cardona.

“Is it you, Cardona?”

“It’s me, Ramón, here, on your right.”

“Are you there, Cardona?”

“Here, in the rubble.”

“Can you see me?”

“Yes, I do see you, I’m on your right, Ramón.”

“Where?”

“Under this beam.”

“I don’t see you, but I hear you fine.”

“Because the wind has stopped.”

Ramón then realized it was true, that the wind had unexpectedly stopped. A second before, it was all fury and chaos, and momentarily it all had become still, mysteriously quiet. The sea had gone back, ebbing quicky from the shore as if sucked into an enormous siphon. The wind was not calm, it seemed absent, leaving in its place a warm, thick substance that did not properly reach his lungs.

There was something phony and frightening in the abrupt stillness.

Ramón reached a deep recess at the base of the big rock perpendicular to the beach. Shaped like a cave, it had gathered whatever the hurricane had pulled out from various places. Blindly, feeling with his hands, Ramón began to dig, while listening to the lieutenant’s heavy breathing, which came from underneath all the debris.

“Be careful,” Cardona said, “my leg is trapped under something really heavy.”

Ramón could distinguish the dark bulk of the lieutenant’s head and trunk in the back, in a space bubble amid the debris. He could make out his left leg twisted into an impossible position and caught under a heavy beam with a pile of other things, unidentifiable in the dark, on top of it.

“You must have that leg completely smashed,” said Ramón.

“Help me to get all this off me.”