Laura Restrepo - Isle of Passion

It had been also a time of revelation in which Ramón learned to be a father. He discovered his children: for the first time in his life he became fully aware of the existence of those three creatures who were growing up freely and unencumbered in adversity as if it were one more element in nature. He spent whole days with them exploring the island, climbing the southern rock, or teaching them how to swim. With fine woods from the Nokomis and the Kinkora , he made them miniature ships that looked like the real ones. They took them to the lagoon, and by nightfall they were still sailing them. He taught them how to identify stars in the sky, and the different kinds of breezes, and when his children got quickly bored listening to him, he would silently watch them play.

At dusk Ramón, Alicia, Tirsa, and Cardona gathered to keep one another company during that difficult hour on the island when darkness seemed to swallow everything very fast.

“If at least I still had my mandolin,” lamented Arnaud.

“That’s the last thing we need,” countered Alicia.

“Please, Secundino, sing!” pleaded Tirsa.

“I can’t anymore. The salty air has dried up my voice.”

The four kept together so each one would not feel so alone, though they were not able to see one another’s faces and often repeated the same exchanges. Not to be overwhelmed by the enveloping darkness, they tightened the circle of friendship that had been put to all kinds of tests, from the petty annoyances of daily life to great catastrophic upheavals.

Of course they missed Mexico and their families, but as time went on, their nostalgia became more abstract and diffused. Eventually, the most persistent of memories dropped off like ripened fruit drops from trees, and vanished. Ramón had a period in which he talked of nothing else but his mother’s virtues. The desserts she used to bake for him, the stories she told him, the wonderful massages she gave him to relax his back muscles. When he noticed that this topic was boring to other people, he went through a period in which he read and reread her letters. Then he wrote poems about his filial love, like this poem recovered by General Urquizo in his biography of the Arnauds.

She was the old lady whose gaze

gave me the greatest joy ,

like a virgin full of grace ,

completely adored by her boy .

His obsession went so far that Alicia stopped calling him by his given name. “This is for Doña Carlota’s son,” she would say. “Here comes Doña Carlota’s son.” Until one night, when they were already in bed, they heard a noise, and Ramón got up to check through the empty house. After a while he returned to bed.

“It was Mother,” he announced. “She was in the kitchen.”

“What are you saying?”

“That it was Mother, I’m telling you.”

“Ramón, you’re crazy.”

“No, it’s not that, it’s that she is dead. She died yesterday, and she came to tell me.”

And he never mentioned her again.

That was how the preceding year had gone, without any big highs or lows. In spite of their countless needs, Ramón and Alicia were practically contented, almost happy.

Until scurvy appeared. In the past, Ramón’s hypochondria had made him think of his own death hundreds of times. He would torture himself in anticipation and imagine its cruelest forms. He barely kept secret his phobias of fire and of water. He felt a faint premonition that he would end up burned alive or drowned. But never, not even in his worst moments of self-pity, did he think he would die for lack of a lemon. My kingdom for a lemon, he kept thinking.

His body had resented the lack of vegetables. Lemon juice was all that he lacked in order to recover his health; a few bitter drops, a caustic cleansing that could burn the decay already existing inside his body, which in no time would show in every pore. Ramón lay back on his bed and began to murmur, like in a litany, first in a low voice and then in a crescendo:

“Lemons, limes, oranges, grapefruit. Lemons, limes, oranges, grapefruit! Lemons, limes, oranges, Brussels sprouts, watercress, green peppers, blackberries, radishes, and parsley! A lot of radishes and a lot of parsley! Beets, mushrooms, plums, tomatoes, coconuts. .. Coconut, coconut, coconut, coconut!”

Coconut they had plenty of. It was the only food from the vegetable kingdom that the island produced after the garden soil had been swept away. Coconut would be his salvation, the indispensable source of ascorbic acid that could prevent his death. Possibly prevent the death of all the inhabitants of the isle.

He put on a threadbare pair of pants and a poncho the women had patched together out of pieces of sailcloth. He climbed on a raft and rowed across the lagoon in a straight line. He landed where the thirteen coconut palms were. Until then, anyone who wanted to have some coconut needed only to go there. Coconuts were always in abundance, like the fish or the crabs, and one needed only to reach out and grab them.

Ramón took the ones on the ground to the raft. He figured that even in the sorry state of these palm trees, they could still produce about five coconuts a week, which could be painstakingly distributed equally among the twenty-one adults and nine children. He looked for Sergeant Irra and gave him quite an unexpected but peremptory order.

“Sergeant, from now on the palm trees are your responsibility. Make sure they are guarded day and night. Make sure nobody touches the coconuts. If there is one missing, I’ll hold you responsible.”

He walked away, sat on a rock, opened one with a machete, and drank its milk. During the following two days he tried to control the swelling of his gums with frequent dabs of iodine. However, the swelling increased to the point that he was unable to eat. He did not want to disclose his predicament to anyone, but Alicia discovered it.

“What did you eat that gives you such foul breath?”

He had to tell her the truth. They agreed to keep it secret, so as not to alarm the other people. They isolated themselves in concerted effort to heal the increasing ulcerations in his mouth by cleansing them with some antiseptics left in the pharmacy — methylene blue, gentian violet, iodine, hydrogen peroxide — one at a time, or all mixed into a disgusting, viscous concoction. Since Ramón was not able to chew his food, Alicia mashed the fish and pounded the coconut meat for him. In one week they were able to see some progress.

“I thought that this sickness had no cure, but our plan seems to be working,” Ramón said, without daring yet to declare it a miracle cure.

“God willing.”

Either God was willing or the coconut remedy did it, but Ramón recuperated. They went back to their disciplined routine as if nothing had happened, but keeping a tight control over the coconuts, several dozen of which they stored under lock and key. And they renewed their gatherings at dusk with Tirsa and Cardona.

“Victoriano is rebelling again,” the lieutenant’s voice resounded in the dark.

“Is he again agitating the people?”

“No, the trouble now is that he is doing nothing. Does not even light the lantern in the lighthouse. I had to put Pedrito Carvajal in charge of that, because the man refuses to get up from his hammock. Threats don’t work. He says we can shoot him if we want to, but right there, lying in his hammock. He does not want to get up.”

“Is he sick?” Alicia inquired.

“He doesn’t seem to be. It just seems to be lethargy.”

The two men walked up to the lighthouse cave to see Victoriano. As soon as Arnaud came in, he recognized the smell: it was the same putrid smell of his own body a few days ago. It was pitch black inside. Arnaud groped the walls to get a sense of where he was going, and found them moist. They were permeated with the unhealthy vapors of the disease.