Laura Restrepo - Isle of Passion

Arnaud did whatever he could to assuage their fears.

“What is the problem?” he asked the soldiers at daybreak as they mustered, pale and haggard, at the call of reveille. “If the Dutchman eats iron and drinks bile, so much the better. He won’t finish up our food.”

But it was useless. The Clipperton people had changed. They were now more mistrustful and selfish, doubly shrewd, eager to take advantage, spoiling for a fight. They had also changed physically: they had the looks now of having suffered damage for life and because of life, and of having been made beggars by nature itself, conditions that were irreversible. It was particularly evident in the children. The hurricane broke their ties with civilization and in twenty-four hours, twenty-four centuries were reversed. Given the emergency situation in which the isle was left, the adults kept forgetting to bathe and dress them, to regulate their schedules, to teach them and correct them, and by the time they realized this, their own children had become an unfriendly lot of semi-wild, naked creatures who ran around the rocks without caring what time of day it was, ate raw fish, and went in and out of the ocean waters with amphibian ease.

Their domestic animals, freed from cages and corrals, wandered at large around the isle, totally unrestrained. Since they stopped receiving any care or food from humans, they lost feathers and fur, did not preen, and became frail. In order to survive, they had to forgo the usual behaviors of their species. They sharpened their hunting skills, and it was quite a sight to see dogs and roosters attacking and devouring crabs. The women put their babies in high places for fear the pigs would bite them. Even the reproductive functions of animals became affected, and some people insisted that there were hens pairing with boobies.

If living beings changed, so did the environment. The Dutch were so industrious in their repair efforts that in a few weeks the home of the Arnauds, part of the barracks, the dock, and some of the depots were again standing. But they could not perform miracles, and the reconstructed Clipperton looked like a caricature of itself. Now the houses were horrendous combinations of varied patches and had been reduced to minimal structures very flimsily held together, when compared to their original condition. Inside they were empty, with nothing left to fill them other than the putrid smell of the lagoon, and outside they looked crooked, tottering. Everything on the isle was diminished and impoverished, trapped in the aura of a nostalgic shantytown.

After the fight between Schultz and Daría, Arnaud started injecting the German with sedatives in doses suitable for elephants, and ordered his men to add to his drinking water a few tablespoons of passionflower extract. In spite of which Schultz stayed calm only when sleeping, and as soon as he opened one eye, he began destroying anything within his reach. Once a pig was sniffing around him and he smashed its head with a clenched fist. Another day it was hens. Sergeant Irra’s wife reported that the German had attempted to slash the throat of one of her children, but nobody believed her because she was a notorious liar and because, deep down, everybody knew that Schultz was not a murderer.

One night he broke the rope that tied him to his house, and he appeared in the barracks, naked and screaming, causing more terror than the Abominable Snowman. The soldiers caught him, sedated him, and, instead of ropes, put a chain around his neck. Arnaud ordered that he be untied from the post every morning, and that three men, holding fast to his chain, were to take him for a walk. That dangerous and exhausting task was soon discontinued, and Schultz remained confined day and night.

After a month, he had calmed himself again and spent his time going around the post and repeating the same words: “I’m bored, I’m bored, and I’m bored. I’m bored, I’m bored, and I’m bored.”

Then the soldiers brought a bed closer to him so he would not have to sleep on the floor, and those in charge of feeding him were able to take cups of water and plates of food to him without fear that he would smash their heads with them. He showed improvement, and it was decided to assign a woman to take care of him, of bathing and feeding him.

Daría Pinzón didn’t even want to know of this. She was not frightened by stories of Flying Dutchmen, and had started a relationship with a fat one, full of warts, by the name of Halvorsen. She fixed up her daughter, Jesusa, who had reached puberty, with Knowles, a lanky one with a big nose.

The one chosen to take care of Gustav Schultz was Altagracia Quiroz.

Altagracia was the young girl the Arnauds had hired the year before at the Hotel San Agustín to help them with their children. She had come to Clipperton with them, with the incentive of being paid a double salary, and for the thrill of getting to know the sea. But she regretted it. The sea did not seem like much, and on the isle the paper bills she could accumulate from her wages were good for nothing. She was fourteen, short and rather plain, though she had that beautiful head of hair. Yet people were not aware of it because she kept it covered.

During the first weeks she had worked so hard at the Arnaud home that she had no time at all to spare. She watered the vegetable patch, ran after the children, washed, starched, and ironed the shirts, shined the silver, helped in the kitchen by grinding corn and washing dishes. After the hurricane things changed. The children did not want to be looked after, there was no starch for the clothes, no patch to water, no silver to shine, and, with all the scarcities that strangled Clipperton, the only thing they had plenty of was time.

Altagracia equipped herself with sponges, brushes, and buckets of water, and step by step, she approached Schultz’s cabin. She saw him standing with the chain around his neck, lonely, broken, and filthy, like a big bear in captivity, and right away her fear melted away.

“Come, come,” she said while approaching him, as if she were calling a domestic animal.

Schultz growled a little but took the piece of bacon she offered him and allowed her to get closer. Cautiously, she sponged the encrusted dirt off his back. Each time he growled, she gave him a piece of bacon, until she managed to get him passably clean. Then she helped him put on a grungy pair of pants that she found on the floor, tossed in a corner, the first piece of clothing Schultz wore during his period of madness. Then she brought him fried fish and a cup of steaming hot coffee. He ate the fish but spilled the coffee on the floor. She swept around his bed, looked for his best shirts, and took them with her.

The next day she came back with his shirts mended, washed, and ironed, and since it was a chilly morning, she lit a fire to heat the buckets of water. Schultz reacted so well to the warm water that he allowed her to wash his matted hair. Altagracia did it very carefully, massaging the scalp with the tips of her fingers, as she did with the Arnaud children. He also let her cut his nails, which already looked like claws, but growled in protest when she tried to cut his toenails as well.

In a few weeks tremendous progress was made. He allowed her to comb his hair, spruce him up, and even perfume him as if she were playing with a doll. She learned not to take any black food to him because he rejected it, and, once in a while, to smuggle a shot of mezcal to him. She polished his boots, darned his socks, brushed his big yellow teeth with ashes. She took him out for a walk, and he accepted being pulled by the chain like a lap dog.

Day by day, the cleaning up and feeding sessions became lengthier and more elaborate. At the beginning she had stayed from six to six thirty in the morning, and it got to be from six in the morning to six in the evening. Altagracia came at daybreak and returned to the Arnauds at dusk. When she left, Schultz was still chained to his post, sitting on his bed, playing solitary chess, updating the Pacific Phosphate books, looking at the stars, and waiting for her return at dawn.