Or is there someone who can attest to the contrary? Is there any survivor who still remembers, who could bear witness that it all happened?
MEXICO CITY, DECEMBER 1988
Today in Orizaba, Mexico
THE PENSIÓN LOYO IS in Orizaba, at 124 Calle Sur II. It is actually a boardinghouse for automobiles. A large parking garage, gray like any other, attached to a house. I haven’t met the person who lives here, but it is the one I have been looking for in Manzanillo, in Mexico City, in Puebla, and beyond. Finally, after knocking on many wrong doors, poring through the telephone directories of those three cities, and consulting with public officials, admirals, deep-sea divers, pious church ladies, tarot card readers, and local historians, I came across someone on a street corner who, almost by chance, gave me this address. If it is correct, I will finally have found one of the last three survivors of the Clipperton tragedy.
It is Mrs. Alicia Arnaud, Mrs. Loyo until her husband died, who answers the door. As the second of the four children born to Captain Arnaud and his wife, Alicia, she is seventy-seven years old and does not at all want to remember. “Don’t come to stir up memories,” she says sweetly. But she knows the details; she can bear witness. In some dark corner of her mind this story that I am looking for is ensconced, well preserved. She knows, in her own flesh and bones, what happened there because when she was a child, early in the century, she lived through it all.
With its back to the parking area, her cool L-shaped house opens onto a patio. There are several rooms, though the only other person in the house is a domestic servant who has been helping her for several years. The walls are papered with photos of her children. “Let’s rather talk about the present,” she tells me, pointing at the photos, taking me through first communions, weddings, graduations. Then she has me sit at her kitchen table while she pours into several containers the milk that her oldest son, a rancher, has brought her from the hacienda. “Don’t talk to me about the past, let me forget it,” she repeats. “It’s been so long since I talked about Clipperton. I was born on the island in 1911 and lived there until I was six or seven. What’s the point of my telling you about those old things?”
While she keeps rejecting her memories, Clipperton begins to come back and quietly invades her kitchen, little by little. The more she talks, the more enthusiastic she grows. Her tone of voice gets more lively. She forgets about the milk.
“I only have good memories, happy memories, what can I tell you. What happened in Clipperton was a tragedy, but only for the grownups. We children were happy. The difficulties started later, when we returned. But while we were there, it was fine, we never wanted to leave. Sometimes we saw grown-ups crying, and we cried, too, for a little while and without knowing why, but soon we were carrying on as usual.
“We were playing all day long. As soon as a game ended, we started a new one, we never stopped playing. At the beginning we had reading and writing lessons. Father didn’t want us to be uncivilized upon our return to Orizaba. Mother started a little schoolhouse where she was the teacher and the students were the little Irra brothers, the two Jensen girls, Jesusa Lacursa, and us, the Arnaud children — plus the other children who gradually joined us in Clipperton. But later, with so many things going on, the adults could no longer take care of the little ones, except for short whiles in order to feed us or tuck us in at night. During the rest of the time we were free, on our own, like wild animals. We played and played until we fell asleep out of exhaustion.
“You probably want me to talk about my father, but I remember little. There were times when he let himself be absorbed so much by his obsessions that he didn’t see us even though we were right before his eyes. Like when he got the idea of trying to recover the sunken treasures of Clipperton the pirate from the bottom of the lake. For months he thought of nothing else. Other times we became his obsession, like when he spent days and days carving toy ships out of wood for us to play with. They were perfectly beautiful miniatures. We still had other toys brought from the mainland — I remember well a porcelain doll for which Altagracia Quiroz had made a wig of real hair the day all the women on the island cut their hair — but the ships that my father carved himself were always my favorites. Some were warships and others freighters. We set them sailing on the lagoon and made believe they had shipwrecked. And their passengers, at least some of them — poor things — were drowning. We allowed the rest to survive.
“My father was severe only when we were at the dinner table. He said that even though we were in the most remote corner of the world and only the crabs could see us, we had to eat like civilized people. Of course, after the calamities began he could not make the same demands, and we turned wild. After the hurricane swept away everything, including the china, the silverware, and the tablecloths, we soon forgot the good table manners he had taught us. All the better for us, we thought, for we felt freer and more relaxed. We ended up eating very fast with our hands, and taking big bites. The booby eggs had nice blue shells, and we loved them. Playing at the beach, we cooked them and sprinkled sea salt on them.
“We spent a lot of time with the crabs. There must be more of those crabs in Clipperton than in the rest of the world. There were so many, it was hard to walk anywhere. If the house had not been on higher ground, the crabs would have invaded it, just as they had invaded the beach, the reefs, the caves. Everything was blanketed with crabs. We liked to watch them fight. They are ferocious beasts and dismember each other with their pincers. We used to lock them in jars to start crab wars.
“This is how things were and we had a happy life. At the end, we were running barefoot and half naked, with some clothes Mom made out of sailcloth from ships’ sails. We were so suntanned from so much sun exposure that we looked like Africans, and our hair was wild and spiky, since we could only bathe in saltwater and without soap.
“As children in Clipperton, we never knew the meaning of suffering. Perhaps only my brother Ramón, the oldest, did. I think that once in a while he realized that things were not going well at all. Ramón adored my mother, and when she cried, he clung desperately to her skirt.
“The day Dad died, we all — both the older children and the little ones — were standing on the beach and watching him sail away on a boat when suddenly a manta ray capsized his boat. We all saw him being swallowed by the waves. We also saw the manta ray, enormous and black like a shadow, coming out of the water. I am not quite sure we saw it, or just thought we did. We sometimes said it was black with blue stripes, and other times, that it was silvery and gave off electrical sparks.
“Part of our game was inventing our own stories, some out of fear, others about the grandparents we hardly knew, or about our cousins, from what our mother had told us. We had imaginary friends, as many as we wanted, so we didn’t need any more. We invented a lot of stories about our father after he died. We liked to think that he had found some pirate’s sunken treasure at the bottom of the sea and that he had given us the jewels and the crowns. Or that he had become the king of the deep and rode underwater on a carriage pulled by the manta ray. Sometimes we also said that he had not died, that he had just gone away and was coming back to bring us toys and oranges. Later at night we couldn’t sleep, afraid that he would really appear.