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.
Clipperton, 1908
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.”