AFTER BEING ANCHORED for three days outside the reef barrier and passively allowing the breakers to jolt her at will, the Corrigan II, relieved of her cargo, set sail for the return to Acapulco. From the dock, Ramón Arnaud saw her depart. The gentleman’s agreement he had made with his superior and advisor, Colonel Avalos, was that every two months, three at the most, without fail or delay, either that ship or El Demócrata, also from the Mexican Navy, would bring to Clipperton all the supplies necessary for survival.
It was well established that from such an isle, a lazy, barren piece of rock, they could not get much more than crabs, salt, and polluted water. The arrival of the ship would be like the umbilical cord that would keep them alive. As the Corrigan II sailed away, Ramón felt that his only connection with the outside world was drifting farther and farther out of reach, lost behind an ocean wall.
When the ship could no longer be seen, Ramón realized that he felt offended, hurt, abandoned like a dog. His nomination as governor, the promotion to the rank of captain, the interview with Porfirio Díaz, all seemed now like fancy decoys covering up the stark reality: he had been totally forsaken in the last place he would have chosen to be, had he the freedom to choose.
The old feeling that he had been made to pay too dearly for his mistakes returned, and he ran, over and over in his mind like a rat in a maze, through all the twists and turns. That old resentment knew very well all the labyrinths in his gray matter because he himself had trained it each and every day and night during his incarceration in Santiago Tlatelolco. And during every hour of his training as an army private. It was a resentment so close to him, so domestic and familiar, Ramón thought now, that he had not ceased nurturing it for a second. And this truth surprised him.
Since he was a child he had entertained the suspicion that someone, some powerful and abstract being, was cruelly punishing him. And now, at the Clipperton dock, this punishment acquired the shape of an old and lost meaning in the English language, derived from the Spanish. It was a combination of just a few letters, unknown to him until a few days ago and which, notwithstanding—it was very clear now—had been his destiny from the beginning. This word, which sounded cabalistic to him, was “marooned,” derived from “cimaroon”—in turn derived from the Spanish “cimarrón,” or runaway slave. And by some logical play of association, “to maroon” also referred to the capital punishment meted out to traitors by English pirates in the Caribbean: they abandoned them on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean, with nothing but a few sips of water in a bottle and a gun loaded with only one bullet, to use when the torture and the agony became unbearable.
“Marooned,” Arnaud repeated to himself, fascinated by its sound. “Marooned,” and a sticky malaise took hold of him. Standing there facing the Pacific Ocean alone, he offered no resistance. A hot wind ruffled his eyelashes, buzzed over his ears, kept flapping on the nape of his neck the kerchief he was wearing to protect himself from the sun. An endless series of waves, resigned and identical, crashed against the boards under his feet, and he observed them, mesmerized, and let them lull him with their monotonous murmur: marooned, they whispered, marooned.
He was comfortably installed in his melancholy and without any intention of getting out of it, when he saw Alicia in the distance trying to carry a barrel heavier than she was up the steep steps leading to the house. She would advance two steps and the force of gravity made her go backward three, just to start again, unflaggingly. Ramón thought that the diligence his wife applied to the task at hand was an irrational defiance of the sweltering heat, that her useless doggedness disrupted the relaxing inertia that the heat imposed on everything else. He saw her as being obsessed with her futile endeavor, her porcelain complexion beaded with pearls of sweat, and completely oblivious of the departing ship, of the resentments and premonitions that were asphyxiating him, of the cruelty of the Caribbean pirates and of the human race in general. Why does she persist in not letting the soldiers take care of those tasks? How can she possibly not understand that on a disastrous day like today such things as barrels don’t deserve our attention? Ramón wondered anxiously, and ran to help her.
By the time he reached her, she had already succeeded in carrying her load up to the porch.
The days began to go a little faster. Not only had the ship departed, leaving them in God’s hands, but two or three hundred yards away from the place where it had been anchored, there still arose, now and forever, the silhouette of the Kinkora. Or her ghost. Or whatever was left of her. On a pitch-black night a few years ago, the Japanese ship did not see the isle and fell into its trap, lunging against it as if it wasn’t there. Clipperton had lain in wait for her, crouching and invisible, then ensnared her in its reefs and tore into her hull with the sharp fierceness of its corals.
Haunted by the somber, unavoidable presence of the Kinkora, through whose dilapidated timbers the wind whistled sad tunes of shipwrecks, Arnaud decided to dismantle her board by board. He could no longer stand the ominous energy that he perceived as coming from the wreck, which made his head burst and even gave him a toothache. He would remove that grim monument to failure from the coastline and neutralize its influence, and would use whatever he could recover to construct decent living quarters for his soldiers.
As usual, Ramón had suddenly shifted without any warning from a state of depression to one of euphoria, and during the following days he and his men were earnestly dedicated to their task. And from the worm-eaten timbers of the Kinkora—once cleaned and sanded—they built a small house for each soldier, with its oil lamp, its coal burner, and its cistern to store rainwater.
While Lieutenant Cardona and the others were in charge of the masonry work and the carpentry, Arnaud tried to solve the problem now annoying him: the crabs, which crawled around everywhere without any respect—not even for the soup pots, the clothes chests, or the babies’ cradles—and also fell inside to die in the rainwater tanks, their small corpses polluting the pure waters. Ramón designed traps and fortresses, and after several failed attempts at creating barriers to the thousands of persistent crabs, finally one morning he left the toolshed carrying some ingenious wooden covers with double gratings that attained their purpose.
In spite of the hellish oppressive heat and the ill-tempered breezes, Arnaud and his Clipperton men persisted in their construction frenzy. After the soldiers’ houses, they continued with a Decauville track brought from Acapulco. They labored hand in hand with Schultz and his workers, and they managed to make a toylike train, which hauled its row of small, uncovered wagons on a track that extended from the soft mounds of guano on the north of the isle and followed the eastern shore down to the storehouse, where the cargo was dried and processed, next to the dock.
Then came the reconstruction of the lighthouse on top of the big rock on the southern coast. The old one had an obsolete mechanism, already in total disrepair. Arnaud restored it by installing new prisms and burners on the old base. He ordered the construction of six sections of stairs, ten steps each, to civilize the steep ascent to the lighthouse, which had been a suicidal enterprise due to the slippery rock. He filled the tank with oil, and one starry and moonless night, he lit the burners.
Down below, men, women, and children were sitting on the beach in mystical silence around a fire they had built to drive away the mosquitoes. Behind them they had made pavilions with their rifles, leaning them against one another in threes and fours. They saw the big beacon light up and remained there for several hours, staring as if hypnotized at the pallid light as it turned. This was an important occasion. They no longer were a speck lost in the big nothingness. Now they were offering to the world an assertive testimonial: the Clipperton lighthouse, a little candle flickering in the midst of the infinite darkness where ocean and sky merged.
That night, at the foot of the lighted beacon, Lieutenant Arnaud commanded peremptorily that the light never be allowed to grow dark, and right then named one of his trusted men as the lighthouse keeper. He was a black soldier from the state of Colima named Victoriano Alvarez. So that he could attend to his duties with the necessary zeal, Arnaud assigned as his living quarters a small sheltered cabin at the base of the big rock. It was, in fact, a cave inside the rock, and he adapted its interior and added a log-cabin facade. The soldiers called it “the lighthouse lair.”
For Victoriano Alvarez, living there meant being isolated from his comrades, but in compensation, the appointment invested him with a special importance, an almost priestly aura. He became the man of the light, the guide to lost ships, the point of contact between Clipperton and what lay beyond.
The following weeks were also filled with hard work. The dock was reinforced, and a saltworks was constructed on the low cliffs so as to keep a permanent source of salt. Pig stalls and chicken coops were built so that the animals would not be running around free. Strict regulations were decreed so that human beings, no matter what their ages, had to use latrines for their physiological needs, unlike before, when people relieved themselves wherever the need arose.
As for feeding the troops, Ramón put an end to the anarchy of each one on his own and established a food store. There, under his strict control and according to family size, proportional rations of corn, beans, chiles, rice, coffee, flour, cereals, and dried beef were distributed. On Saturday mornings the soldiers were paid, and since there were no cantinas for them to get drunk, they had the luxury of buying in the store even items that, given the conditions, could be considered nonessential, such as soap, condiments, and beer. The stealing of supplies, common at the beginning, was curtailed by means of severe punishments imposed by Arnaud, ranging from whipping in the worst cases, to digging ditches under the noonday sun.
Next to the store, Ramón set up a pharmacy with surgical supplies, disinfectants, and remedies. Guided by the medical dictionaries he had brought from the continent, he personally turned apothecary first, then medic after gaining some confidence, and finally, when circumstances demanded it, surgeon. Clipperton offered him the opportunity to act in the profession he had wanted to follow but could not.
During the first months he limited himself to prescribing methylene blue gargles for sore throats, gentian violet for scrapes, magnesium sulfate enemas for stomachaches, ipecacuanha powder as a laxative. He learned that arandula vertiginosa, better known as agua zafia, was incomparable, if properly administered, to combat heartburn, lack of appetite, and lack of sexual drive as well. However, if the patient ingested more drops than prescribed, he would die in a matter of hours, his lips purple and blistering. Agua zafia came in small blue flasks that Ramón carefully kept under lock and key, given its lethal properties.
If a case presented crab bites or Portuguese man-of-war burns, he ordered that a child be brought to pee on the affected skin. For the common cold, he rubbed hot glycerine on the torso and wrapped it in paper strips. As the glycerine grew cold, it hardened under the paper and the grippe victim had to remain stiff and wrapped up like a mummy for hours. Later he also took care of serious wounds: knife fights among the men who became irascible and desperate in the island prison, or severe blows among the camp followers because of jealousy. In this way, Ramón learned to dispense first aid and got his training for what he had to deal with months later: childbirth, epidemics, and death.
Taking care of the vegetable garden became a ritual. In the middle of the bone-dry Clipperton terrain, the thousand square feet of black, moist soil speckled with green was a mirage. It was weeded and sprinkled with the tenderness granted to a firstborn child, and in the afternoons everybody, even those dedicated to other tasks, stopped by for a while before dusk to watch its progress. They stood in groups, next to the furrows, and voiced their alarm if they saw a worm among the cabbage leaves, or else clapped for the green carrot tops beginning to come out. This daily habit turned the garden into a meeting place serving all the functions of a town’s main plaza.
The soldiers spent all their time growing greens, carving chairs, taking care of the pigs, counting bales of guano, while military discipline was reduced to a minimum: close order and salute to the flag at dawn, cleaning of weapons and uniforms, and exercises within the limited space available. The practice of trotting around the isle was discontinued because the broken coral was destroying their boots and huaraches, and there were no replacements. Defense was limited to the rotating guard duty, day and night, at the lighthouse and the brigades of two or three men who made the rounds to patrol the order of the community. All of this troubled Ramón, and he told his assistant, Secundino Angel Cardona.
“Rather than a military outpost, this seems like an artisans’ commune.”
“Don’t worry about it, Captain,” Lieutenant Cardona responded, “here the coral reefs are in charge of the true defense. If an enemy ship approaches with intentions of invading, it will soon become firewood against the reefs. If the ship passes that barrier, then we fire at it from the lighthouse until we run out of ammunition, because there isn’t very much. If, in spite of all that, the enemy disembarks, we’ll engage them in hand-to-hand combat. And if they are too many for us, then the Faceless One will take us out.”
“That might sound absurd, but it’s really the only possible strategy,” Arnaud agreed. “You are right, it’s no use fretting any more about it.”
And life went on, full and bearable enough, within that penny-sized universe. The tremendous amount of work rendered results, and the people’s measure of well-being lay in simple things. The inhabited part of the isle did not look either like a slum or like a mound of bird droppings, and the first harvest of the vegetable garden was celebrated with a large salad shared by all. It consisted of lettuce, onions, radishes, and turnips, and Arnaud himself prepared a dressing of mayonnaise, the recipe for which he had inherited from Doña Carlota.
They carried on a routine in imitation of the civilized world, and the resulting peaceful monotony mimicked happiness. Only one expectation, one faith, united all the inhabitants: the arrival of the ship. Two months had gone by since their ship had weighed anchor, and there were no signs of its return. There was still no real cause for alarm because the schedule allowed for another month’s leeway.
One afternoon, while they were straightening accounts in Gustav Schultz’s cabin, he made one of his indecipherable statements, in the middle of which Arnaud picked up with total clarity a name that gave him goose pimples: that of Robinson Crusoe.
“Tell the German gentleman we do not welcome idle comparisons,” he told Lieutenant Cardona, so that he, making faces and gestures, would explain it to Schultz. “The only things that man had when he came to his island were a knife, a pipe, and a tin of tobacco, while we have more comforts here than the Queen of Sheba.”
“And that is not all,” he added without an iota of conviction but with an evident aggressiveness that altered his voice. “Tell him also not to forget that, unlike Crusoe, we are here of our own free will.”
Secundino Cardona did not understand why his superior had taken Schultz’s comments so much to heart.