Isle of Passion (16 page)

Doña Carlota was dazzled by his presence when he showed himself in the balcony at El Zócalo, his breast glittering like a Christmas tree, or the starry heavens, with the hundreds of medals that he wore pinned to his uniform.

“You had to see it to believe it,” she commented in the letter to her son. “The older he gets, the more handsome, and even whiter, the old man becomes. I remember him when he was young, when he looked like what he really is, a Mixtec Indian. Now he looks like a true gentleman. Power and money whiten people.”

Doña Carlota proudly wore her high feather hat to attend the great allegorical parade during which all the characters in Mexican history, ancient as well as recent, marched down the Paseo de la Reforma. To open the parade there was a half-naked Moctezuma, with even more feathers than Mr. Arnaud’s widow, and to close it, a stylized, rejuvenated version of Don Porfirio himself.

Behind the parade came the retinue of invited guests, first those from foreign countries, then the ones from the provinces. Among these, proud and rotund, was the matron from Orizaba, Doña Carlota. Agape, she watched a capital city bedecked with arches of flowers, artificial lights, flags, brocade hangings. Only handsome faces and fine garments everywhere, and she noticed that the guards were keeping out of the paved zone its natural inhabitants: the lepers, the syphilitics, the harlots, the cripples.

The grand Gala Ball, which she also had the opportunity to attend, was more fantastic and magnificent than she could ever have dared dream. She had stood there—still handsome, candid, and dazzled like an aging, plump Cinderella—in that princely palace, impressed by the hundred and fifty musicians in the orchestra, by the five hundred lackeys serving twenty whole boxcars of French champagne, by the thirty thousand lights garlanding the ceiling, the countless dozens of roses crowding the halls.

“What a pity that you were not here to enjoy all the greatness of these moments,” she wrote to Ramón. “This is the right place for a young officer like you. A brilliant future would await you here, in the service of General Díaz. Even though people might think that I am interfering, I repeat again that my blood boils when I think that you are throwing your life away on that isolated island.”

Doña Carlota hit the bull’s-eye with this argument as she always did when it was a matter of manipulating complex guilt mechanisms, regrets, and resentments that Ramón sheltered inside his heart. But this time it lasted only for a few minutes.

Folding the letter carefully, Arnaud kissed it and put it inside his pocket. He immediately walked to the dock to receive the captain of
El Demócrata
, Diógenes Mayorga, who had seemed nervous before and truly upset on account of the last news he had brought from Mexico. This time, Mayorga looked serene, sure of himself. He seemed even to have an air of petulance or superiority. Not in a rush at all, he began to render his news report to Arnaud, while at the same time painstakingly picking his teeth. He opened his mouth, interrupting his phrases halfway to look—with curiosity, almost with pride—at the small particles on the tip of his toothpick.

“You people must be the only Mexicans who do not yet know,” he said. “Porfirio Díaz is out . . . out already.”

“What?” shouted Arnaud, his round eyes wide open.

“You heard right. Old Porfirio is out. He escaped on a boat to Paris, and there he must be, nursing his prostate.”

“It’s not possible, I do not understand it, how can you say that?” Arnaud’s tongue tripped over itself, his voice dissonant. “You are misinformed, look at this letter, it says here that General Díaz is stronger than ever, that he made a show of all his power at his birthday celebration, which was a great event—”

“Oh, yes,” interrupted Mayorga. “That big party. It was the last kick of a hanged man.”

“And who could have ousted General Díaz?”

“What do you mean ‘who’? Francisco Indalecio Madero, of course.”

“Madero? The little man with a goatee? The madman who invoked spirits?”

“Well, not so little and not so mad,” said Mayorga, digging his toothpick between his canine tooth and the first molar. “He is now the constitutional president of Mexico. Didn’t I tell you last time that there was a war? Well, Madero won. We are all on his side.”

“I don’t understand anything. How can you be on his side? Didn’t he defeat Porfirio Díaz and our army? At least that is what you are saying. Don’t you see how you are contradicting yourself? That President Madero you are talking about, who is he, finally? Friend or foe?”

“Just try a little harder, Captain Arnaud, to see if you can understand,” said Mayorga calmly, looking at Ramón with a defiant, sideways smile. “He was an enemy before, but now that he has won, he’s a friend. He promised not to dismantle the federal army, and you can see he is not a man who carries grudges, because he is going to keep us officers in our posts.”

“What a strange war,” commented Arnaud softly, practically to himself.

That night Ramón and Alicia could not sleep at all. They talked for hours on end, discussed, juggled and rejected possibilities, fought, made up, and by dawn they had agreed that the whole family would leave that same day for Mexico on
El Demócrata
’s return trip. They needed to have firsthand knowledge of the situation. To find out what designs this new government had for Clipperton.

“I don’t believe we’re going to find anything good for us,” Ramón whispered to Alicia during their long time awake. “I’m more and more convinced that this little island was only a personal whim for Don Porfirio. The new president probably has no idea where the heck we are.”

A few hours later they departed with their two children on the way to Acapulco, after packing just a few things in a suitcase and leaving instructions with Cardona to take charge until Arnaud’s return.

During the voyage, Captain Mayorga gave them a warning.

“Do you want to visit your families in Orizaba? You better forget that. You cannot travel with children on Mexican roads now. If the cattle rustlers do not hold you up, the revolutionaries ambush you, and that is worse. You would get killed, and they would entice the young orphans and take them away.”

Arnaud did not believe a word. He did not want to rely on, nor could he contradict, what Mayorga was telling him. It was as if Mayorga had come from a different time, from the future, and was speaking about a planet no longer familiar to Ramón.

Three days later, after they arrived in Mexico, they discovered all of a sudden that Colonel Avalos, Ramón’s friend and protector, was no longer in charge of Clipperton and no longer in Acapulco; that Doña Petra, Alicia’s mother, had died; and that her father, Don Félix Rovira, had left Orizaba and was now living in the port city of Salina Cruz, where he held a high position at the Moctezuma Brewery.

The last was the only good news, because from Acapulco it was easy to sail to Salina Cruz, where they indeed met with Don Félix. They were amazed to find him looking younger, full of enthusiasm, spring-like, wearing a white suit and white shoes with a mariner’s cap. With a grandchild on each knee, smoking his pipe with one hand while caressing Alicia’s hair with the other, he spoke fervently about democracy and Francisco Madero, whom he had met in Orizaba during a gigantic support rally.

“I don’t want to offend you, Ramón. I know that you favored Porfirio Díaz,” Don Félix told him. “But honestly, he was a real bandit. I do think that now we are in good hands.”

“I’m not a politician, Don Félix, I’m a career military man,” answered Ramón. “I am with whoever commands the federal army.”

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.