Laura Restrepo - Isle of Passion

“Victoriano?”

“Yessir.”

“It’s me, Arnaud.”

“At your service, Captain.”

His knees bumped against the hammock, which hung on the diagonal. There was his man.

“My whole body aches,” they heard him say. “I think rheumatism got me. It got even my teeth, because they are falling out.”

Ramón did not need to see him. He heard his hard breathing and could easily imagine the bruises on his skin and the ulcerations in his mouth. He returned at dawn to apply medications and feed him some coconut mush. He also asked Sergeant Irra’s wife to look after him.

Victoriano Alvarez moaned all day, screamed all night, and in the morning he looked like a martyr. His skin was covered with ulcers, as if somebody had beaten him to a pulp. His gums were bleeding, and his mouth was all infected with boils. The news spread all over the island. People came to the lighthouse to see him and gathered at the door of his cabin, their eyes fixed on him. The children sneaked in and circled around his hammock.

A few days later, Ramón summoned his people in front of the room that had been the pharmacy and made them parade in their skivvies to check them out. He found the tell-tale signs on a woman. She was Irra’s companion, the one who had been taking care of Victoriano.

The rumor spread like wildfire that this was a contagious epidemic and that it would infect anyone who came near Victoriano Alvarez. Arnaud did everything possible to stop the confusion. He ordered some community meetings and explained the characteristics of the disease, its causes and symptoms. He seemed never to tire of saying that it wasn’t catching, and using a stick, even scratched out on the ground crude human figures to explain the body’s systemic functions and failures. Despite all his efforts, he could not convince anyone. People did not want to hear anything about “scurvy” and preferred to keep calling it “the plague.” The plague, they said, pronouncing the word with more fatalism than hope for a cure. They also refused to believe the citrus story. The disease was contagious, and that was the only truth they were willing to accept. Besides, they needed a more believable culprit than a perfectly innocent looking orange or lemon.

In its secret path, before it became full-blown, the disease altered body humors — fermenting blood, souring bile, poisoning mucus — and brought forth dark passions, and Victoriano Alvarez became the scapegoat. They came to hate him from the bottom of their hearts: they cursed him for being black and for being contagious, demanding that he be isolated and placed in quarantine. Nobody wanted to take care of him. Or even to get close to the big rock, or to turn on the beam in the lighthouse. Ramón agreed to isolate him, in part so as not to agitate the crowd even more, in part for fear they would end up by lynching their chosen victim.

During the days that followed, many people began to look yellowish, like Asians, and suffered attacks of rash and rancorous apathy that made it difficult to get them to do anything or to follow any discipline. Ramón knew how to interpret this: as the first signs of the disease that was spreading to everybody. He devoted himself, together with Cardona, to rebuilding the pharmacy. He inventoried the few medications left, had the women wash and boil rags, and in the depository that had once been ransacked by The Hand That Strangles, he continued storing coconuts, after he fixed some locks and bolts. He had everybody receive a coconut ration together with their daily food.

Scurvy spread with implacable speed anyway, and rashes, sores, brown spots, and hematomas proliferated. Women and children were less affected; the disease attacked the men with particular virulence.

The sickly coconut palms could not produce enough, and the portions of coconut were reduced to ridiculous amounts. Ramón ordered the pulp to be grated and mixed with fish, and the coconut milk extended with rainwater. But even so, the remedy was not enough. In desperation, Tirsa Rendón thought of using the shells also. They tried to boil them in a big pot and prepared an infusion that they started to distribute in their pewter bowls, a ladleful at a time. Since the taste was awful, people refused to drink it, and Ramón made it compulsory to have it under threat of punishment.

The soldiers thought he had lost his wits.

“Our good Captain Arnaud blames everything on the oranges and wants to stop us from dying with coconut milk!” Since no one wanted to take care of the agonizing Victoriano, Alicia, who was still healthy, volunteered to do it. He was in a sorrowful state. His body emitted a putrid odor, his sores were oozing, and he could not get up from the hammock even to relieve himself. Making a big effort and trying to control her nausea, she fed him and tried to alleviate his suffering as best she could. Once, during wash time, she lifted the dirty serape that covered him. His body was naked, emaciated, and ghostly, but between his legs, in full erection and apparently in good health, Alicia saw his large-sized member. She was stunned. She let go of the serape and searched his face as if expecting an explanation. His eyes were gazing at her without shame, with some amusement, in fact. For a moment she felt paralyzed, then stepped back. Victoriano grabbed her hand, but she escaped and ran away as if Lucifer himself had touched her. She did not stop running until she met Ramón in the infirmary, on the other side of the island.

“I’m not taking care of Victoriano anymore,” she announced, still breathless from her moment of panic and her racing away from it. “It’s a man’s job.”

“Why?”

She did not dare tell the truth.

“Because he is too heavy and I cannot handle him.”

Alicia never went back to the lighthouse lair, and with so many sick people to take care of, Ramón completely forgot about Victoriano Alvarez. The soldier was left forsaken in his cave, dreaming of revenge while seeing his body rot away, piece by piece.

But the scurvy continued spreading around. The ulcerated sores and bursting boils increased, and some of the infections were so bad as to be swarming with worms. The antiseptics ran out, and Ramón had to resort to drastic old ways. With cold-blooded Tirsa Rendón as his assistant, he filled the wounds with gunpowder, added a wick, and let them burn out.

The rainy season came suddenly, and the deluge seemed like the sky wanted to wash away the miasmas from the plague. The floods forced people to disband. The sick became isolated, with only their own horror to face.

On one stormy dawn, someone knocked at the Arnauds’ home. Alicia got up to open the door and met face to face with a monster. It took her a while to realize it was Irra’s wife. She had lost all her teeth, and her face was purple and disfigured. Her gums were swollen beyond any possible imagining. From the opening gap that was now her mouth came a rancid odor that Alicia recognized: it was the odor of death.

“I came to ask you where I can bury my two children,” she mumbled. “They died last night.”

The burial was scheduled for that afternoon, next to Jesús Neri’s grave, Clipperton’s first fatality, the old soldier who was attacked by sharks. But Irra’s wife died before then. They placed her body in the same box with her two children, and a sad procession dragged along under the downpour, all the way to the cemetery by the southern rock, with the makeshift coffin on their shoulders. Their heads were bent, and they avoided looking at one another: it was too hard to see their own disaster reflected in the others’ faces. There was no ceremony, either religious or military. They did not have the strength. Whatever strength they had left was spent by the sick in keeping themselves on their feet, and by the healthy in digging into the rock, the rain pounding on their backs.