OCTOBER CAME BUT the ship did not. Instead, devastating rains threatened to erase Clipperton’s precarious existence. During the heaviest storms, the ocean waters flooded the lowlands on the island for hours or days at a time, while the highlands became isolated promontories.
Because of the rain, all military operations and most communal tasks were suspended, and everybody retreated home to hibernate. Water was closing in on them from the sky and from the sea. The lagoon was overflowing and smelled like rotting skunks. The moth larvae were fat and even nested in people’s hair. The remedy was to sleep between damp sheets, but the humidity made one’s skin wrinkly like raisins.
During the time of forced seclusion, Ramón divided his working hours between the feverish reading of a series of books on the pirate Clipperton that he had found in the library abandoned by Brander, and writing his long, detailed reports, which no one was ever likely to read, about the production of guano and about how he was carrying out his mission on the isle.
Meanwhile, Alicia embroidered dozens of beautiful bedsheets and tablecloths that would never be used, since they had enough to last them till the end of their days. She used to sit on a wicker rocking chair by the stained-glass window in the studio next to her bedroom. While her expert fingers moved fast by themselves, time flitted by as she looked at the stormy waters turned icy through the blue-colored glass: frenzied through yellow; slow, almost dead calm, through green; nocturnal and not of this world through violet.
Ramón became obsessed with the notion that their isolation and the lack of any news from Orizaba was dampening his wife’s spirits. His own, though he would not admit it, were lost in the deep. It tortured him to remember the good life they had left behind, and he was beginning to think of it with heavy nostalgia as a thing of the past. Not the big things but the smaller ones tormented him the most: things he had considered insignificant before that now seemed unattainable dreams and gnawed at his heart like persistent little rodents. Such as the smell of clothes just washed clean and hung out to dry in the sun or the pleasure of smoking a good Havana cigar, the precise, cold sensation of the Solingen blade on his cheek when shaving, the fresh coolness of drinking in the shade a glass of tamarind water; the sound of his mother’s voice telling stories about Emperor Maximilian’s marital infidelities and about Empress Carlota’s fridgity.
One day Captain Arnaud, unable to contain himself any longer, burst into a rage in Alicia’s presence, nonstop until all his bitter litany came out.
“We cannot keep thinking that life is somewhere else, or that we have already lived and the only thing we have left is to reminisce. There must be more to life than watching the rain fall. I’ll be dammed if I have to continue watching water and more water come down, and keep waiting for a boat that never comes, and counting every last grain of rice that everybody gets to eat. Or fighting an enemy that never shows up, and writing reports about bird shit. It’s one thing to fulfill one’s military duty and another one to be expected to do without like a Mormon. Or like an idiot. A man has the right to do well for himself, damn it. He has the right to have fun, to be doing something he really likes once in a while: to eat his fill, to get rowdy, get drunk. . . . Just to talk to friends already seems like a luxury! I want to be able to talk to people again, even to that German S.O.B., though I can’t understand him at all!”
Then, as if it were his only possible escape valve, Ramón created and established the Friday soirées. In these weekly evening gatherings held at his home, he attempted to recover, even though artificially and for only a while every week, some of his lost sense of well-being. His guests were Lieutenant Cardona and his wife, Tirsa Rendón, a gorgeous brunette with almond eyes and uncompromising character. And Gustav Schultz and his adopted family, a full-figured mulatto woman called Daria Pinzón—whom the German, in need of a woman after spending a year alone in Clipperton, had brought from the island of Socorro—and Daria’s daughter, a twelve-year-old girl, taciturn and strangely sexless, whose given name was Jesusa and her last name, inherited from someone nobody knew, was Lacursa.
Counter to their Franciscan restraint during the rest of the week, on Fridays they would prepare mole in tremendous quantities, tacos huitlacoche, refried black beans, sausages, dried beef, and dark coffee. While the others savored every bite as if it were their last, Schultz gobbled everything up, his eyes closed: according to what they believed to have understood, he had said that one had to be Mexican to be able to eat so much food that was black. Ramón Arnaud could never forgive him for this.
After dinner on those evenings, Arnaud took out his mandolin. Alicia would have preferred he played the guitar instead, or any other instrument. The mandolin seemed rather feminine, with its mother-of-pearl inlays and its high pitch, and with so many tuning pegs and fancy curlicues that it seemed ridiculous to her. But Ramón paid no attention and played with the verve of a Cossack taming a wild horse and the absorption of a virtuoso violinist on his first Stradivarius.
Lieutenant Cardona sang afterward and pleased Alicia with songs that had been popular in the dance halls of the capital, such as “White Kitten” and the one about picking violets at twilight.
Cardona produced a velvet tone, enchanting and seductive, going from bass to tenor as he warmed himself up with alcohol. Drinking gave his eyes a strange glimmer and his voice the mature, ladies’ man timbre of a veritable Don Juan, or a life-of-the-party professional. He set aside the trills and tricks, the white kittens, violets, and dance halls in the capital, and brought forth a full-throated deluge of totally plebeian, coarse tunes. Such as the one about the unhappy Empress of Mexico, who returned to Europe after losing her crown and her wits: “The rabble with the crosses scream and get excited, while the gale winds blow, and make your boat capsize: Mama Carlota, sweet darling, good-bye, good-bye.”
Accompanied by the strings of the Pianola, they danced polkas, waltzes, danzones and jarabes, and by dawn they started playing Parcheesi, dominoes, or cards, all of which ended in screams after it became clear that Daria Pinzón had been cheating.
The Friday festivities became a ritual, religiously observed even on the day a hurricane plucked the Pianola from its corner and smacked it against the rocks, and made the mandolin spin together with the coconuts, the chickens, and some chunks of wood, finally leaving it floating on the ocean.
But that was later. Now, and contrary to Ramón’s fears, his wife looked happier every day. Not because of the evening gatherings. What had happened, thanks to the rains, was that Alicia found herself in a world of ideal solitude, meticulously shared with Ramón within the complicity of the four walls of their home. In the midst of all their deprivations, Clipperton allowed something Orizaba would surely have denied them: the opportunity of becoming great friends and lovers.
In Clipperton they had the time and intimacy necessary to master the art of making love to each other, and after many failures and misunderstandings, they deciphered the exact science of mutual pleasure. They managed together to temper the chaos of their impulses to the rhythm of their hearts, softened their granite morals, got used to their nakedness, became more skilled and less timid, prayed less and laughed more. “Oh Lord, don’t allow me to enjoy this! Oh Lord, please, don’t allow me to enjoy this,” Alicia uselessly prayed when she felt an electric, inevitable wave of happiness that jolted her body.
Protected by the thick curtains of rainfall, they celebrated the daily lovemaking ritual in a postcard atmosphere, in the hammock of the western balcony, bathed in the golden reflections of many sunsets.
The lack of supplies—due to the delay in the arrival of the ship—imposed on their bodies physical transformations that exerted a favorable influence on this burst of passion. One of the first items that ran out in Clipperton was brilliantine, which forced Ramón to forgo the rigid coif that made him look like a ventriloquist’s doll and set free his thin, stiff mustache, which became thick and sensual. Besides, far away from the imperial banquets Doña Carlota had served him, his double chin disappeared as well as the incipient belly that was starting to give him a rounded figure.
For her part, Alicia ran out of rice talcum powder, and once she stopped using it, her translucent doll-like complexion took on a more human texture. She abandoned the mannequin stiffness, the rigidity of the corset and the crinolines, and her dainty silhouette recovered the childlike elasticity she had left behind in the hills of Orizaba. She lost one by one all of her hairpins until she had to renounce her old-fashioned tight buns and let her hair loose and free like a lion’s mane.
The hot sun of the preceding months had changed the ghostly paleness of their bodies into a healthier-looking tan. And once they used up the last drop of milk of magnesia, which applied to their underarms sweetened the humors of their armpits, they discovered the attraction of their natural animal odors.
This was also the time that Alicia remembered later as the happiest of her life, when she and Ramón engaged day after day in an interminable conversation, continued compulsively for many years. Not even Ramón’s death interrupted it, since Alicia would repeat it afterward all by herself, saying her part of the dialogue and repeating the answers that he had given her, which she knew by heart.
In this infinite dialogue that coiled upon itself like a snake, or a figure eight, they used to recite with all the inflections, all the intense feelings, all the upsets, the reasons and demands of their love, in counterpoint or in a duet. They made an inventory of all the good and all the bad traits of each and every person they knew; they would draw and erase future projects; they reviewed the commonplace and probed the transcendental; they evaluated past and present moments of their lives in this world and confessed to each other their fears and expectations about the one beyond.
Sometimes, in the middle of the lull brought by an afternoon downpour, any careless remark could trigger a conjugal fight. As when Alicia commented that Doña Carlota had wasted the Arnaud fortune, or when Ramón suggested that Don Félix Rovira was a domineering, possessive father. Then they stopped holding hands, and heatedly released an angry stream of words that would take them, without their knowing exactly when, to a point at which, viciously trying to hurt, they screamed their imperfections at each other, showing the animosity of two fighting cocks. Invariably, it all ended with an explosion of accumulated and festering pockets of jealousy that each of them had stored, without ever admitting it, in some corner of their livers.
Ramón accused her of swooning over Lieutenant Cardona’s singing on Friday evenings.
“Do you think I don’t notice that you prefer to dance the polkas with him?” he asked her with an indignation befitting someone who is demanding an explanation from his aged mother’s murderer.
Alicia swore to God that it wasn’t true, saying she recognized that Cardona did indeed sing and dance like an angel, but that did not mean anything. Ramón was the only man in her life, she purred, cuddling next to him, soft and loving like a cat, and suddenly, if Ramón was still offended and indifferent, the kitten became a tigress. Her eyes shone with rage, and she practically spit her words through clenched teeth.
“And what about you and that good-for-nothing Pinzón woman?”—she was referring to Schultz’s lover—“Why can’t you take your eyes off her bottom when she stops by the infirmary to meet with you alone, on the ridiculous pretext of asking you for a remedy for her headaches?”
“It is no pretext, the poor woman suffers from terrible migraines, and besides, her ass does not interest me,” Ramón countered. He was playing kitten now, and Alicia was the one showing indifference.
And in this way the perfect harmony they had achieved before their argument was crushed to smithereens, and their eternal love was scattered on the floor, their lives destroyed, riddled with discontent. Alicia ran to the bedroom to cry her eyes out, and Ramón locked himself up in his office. When they grew tired of ruminating in spite and of flagellating themselves with jealousy, when their anger came down like the foam of boiling milk after it is removed from the fire, they found some excuse to meet again, to embrace with the absolute happiness of reconciliation, and without more ado, without transitions or logical reasoning, order was restored, and their hurt feelings disappeared somewhere as if they had never existed, and everything returned to the way it was before.
As a reminder of their tragic moments, there were Alicia’s swollen eyelids, which Ramón tended to by applying tea compresses. Life went on until another placid afternoon, a few weeks later, when a loose comment would again trigger a conjugal fight, copious like the rain, and thus fulfill its decisive and definite function of restoring their faded emotions and sparkling their dialogue, which was so endless that otherwise it would have to repeat itself like the piano roll of “White Kitten” in her Pianola.
The effect of so much isolation was soon felt. The calendar became a useless object in the unchanging Clipperton time, and for Alicia the notion of dates had dissipated. Monday was the same as Thursday or Sunday, and there was no difference between September and October or November. At the beginning of December, however, she realized that for a long time she had not needed to wash the linen used for her menstrual flow, and when she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw that her waist was gone.
News of the pregnancy made Ramón unreasonably anxious about the delay, already incomprehensible by then, in the arrival of the ship. December marked the fourth month since they had been forsaken on the isle, and there was no excuse for this. It was in blatant disagreement with any arrangement made. The rains had eroded the garden soil, and the shortage of greens and citrus fruit began to be felt. He was afraid they would all soon be suffering from a terrible disease, the one that attacked seamen and shipwrecked sailors, and about which he had informed himself in the medical books: scurvy. He did not want to cause panic needlessly, and he did not say a word about it, but while he spoke with anyone, he surreptitiously tried to take a look at their gums to see if they were blackened, which would be the first signal.
But above all, Ramón was tormented by the idea that his wife could have complications at the time of delivery and that they might not be able to resolve them due to the isolation from the continent. In the delirium of his frequent sleepless nights, he obsessed about being marooned on the island and about having a wild creature born to them. The only things that assuaged his throbbing anguish were their sessions of lovemaking, which had not been interrupted, and the certainty, growing in him as he kept reading and rereading all the documents about Clipperton, that a fabulous treasure had been abandoned by the pirate somewhere on the atoll, which had to be, Arnaud concluded, in the lagoon or in the big rock to the south.
In spite of these reassuring ideas, people noticed his lost serenity when he developed a nervous tic that curled his lips on the left side, which became progressively more obvious and frequent, and eventually accompanied by a quick blinking of his eye on the same side.
“Stop making so many faces, things are not yet a matter of life and death,” Alicia kept telling him. “The stupid ship will come.”
Finally while they were talking in the studio one afternoon, through the yellow, red, and violet stained-glass windows, they saw Cardona’s wife, Tirsa Rendón, coming by. She was dripping wet and screaming that a ship was approaching. They all ran to the dock, where they stood under bursts of rain, their palpitating hearts in their throats, and waited until the approaching blurred silhouette took shape among the raging waves.
It was neither El Demócrata nor the Corrigan II, but the ship from the American guano company, coming for its annual visit to pick up the product. It brought exquisite gifts from Brander to Schultz, his successor in the post: bottles of French champagne, Amaretto di Saronno, boxes of dates, olive oil from Seville, jars of maraschino cherries, and canned Danish ham.
But it also brought them news that dealt a heavy blow to their thin hopes: the Pacific Phosphate Company Ltd. was no longer much interested in Clipperton. They had found unexploited and abundant guano deposits on islands that were closer and presented a less risky approach. Therefore, they announced that they were cutting down the frequency of their trips to the atoll but were asking Schultz to stay there a few more months as holder of their concession, until the definite closing of the plant and his transfer to another one.
From Schultz’s throat surged a long series of incomprehensible obscenities, and Ramón’s facial tic increased in frequency to two or three incidents per second.