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.