“This time I will kill you, Victoriano,” she told him without anger, almost joyfully. “So that you learn not to go around raping women.”
With self-assurance and precision, without haste, repulsion, or remorse, she dealt a final blow right in the middle of his head and heard an abrupt, muffled dry noise, like that of a machete splitting a coconut.
“Let him go now,” Tirsa told Alicia, who was still biting. “He is dead.”
Alicia had to make an effort. Her jaws were rigid, as if welded together after pressing so hard. She pulled back, prying her teeth away from the inert arm around her neck, and stood next to the other woman. The body on the ground shook with a tremor, its bones clattered, and its eyes turned. Tirsa held the harpoon, took aim, and thrust it deep into the corpse’s chest.
“Enough! Why did you do that?” Alicia screamed.
“Just in case.”
“That’s enough. Let’s go, we’ll miss the ship.”
““And what about him? Do we leave him lying here, without burying him?”
“Let the sea take him away at high tide.”
They left, running as fast as their legs would permit, passed by the southern rock, and reached the little beach where they had left the other women, but there was no one. The ship was nowhere to be seen. Farther north on the isle, there seemed to be some movement, so there they headed, arriving just when the four men were landing.
“Could you take us on your ship?” Alicia begged, half in English and half in Spanish, while extending her hand in greeting. “Pleased to meet you, I am Alicia Rovira, Captain Arnaud’s widow. Could you take us to Acapulco or to Salina Cruz, please? These are my children, and these are my friends and their children. We are five women and nine children. We have been here eight years already, and we want to go back home.”
Lieutenant Kerr, who was looking at them wide-eyed as if they were from another planet, nodded and indicated they could climb on the boat.
“Give us one hour,” Alicia pleaded in English, “just one hour, please, to collect our belongings.”
They dispersed, and Alicia went home and dug up her trunk. She took out her bar of Ivory soap, put her four children into a tub of rainwater, and washed their hair, their faces, their bodies. She dressed Olga in a sailor suit that had belonged to Ramoncito, and for him and her oldest daughter, she found two of her blouses, of embroidered organza, that covered down to their knees. She combed their hair, made them sit where they would not get dirty, and ordered them not to move while she got dressed.
She called Tirsa, who was chasing after the only two remaining live pigs in order to take them also, and told her that she had stored enough clothes for both of them.
“No, Alicia. Thanks, but I never dressed that way, and I think I would look strange.”
“And don’t you think you look strange with that sailcloth sack, so thick it can stand up on its own?”
“I feel more comfortable because I look more like who I am.”
Alicia took all the time she needed to bathe. She covered every inch of her body with white foam from the Ivory soap, and then poured jugs of water to rinse herself off, feeling that the very cold water was purging all of her old anxieties and dead memories, besides Victoriano’s splattered, dry blood. She dried herself carefully, allowing no moisture to remain. From a nail care box she took out an orange stick, saved from floods and hurricanes for years, and removed the cuticles from each finger. When her hands seemed acceptable, she placed the wedding band and diamond ring on her left hand. She looked at herself this way and that in the broken mirror, trying to recognize from some angle the perfect features of the woman she had been. Putting on her earrings, she got distracted for a moment by the violet gleams of the diamonds in the sunlight. She slipped into her corset with copper eyelets and shiny braids, but when she wanted to adjust it, she realized how big it was on her and how many pounds she had lost. She chose a silk blouse in a rosemary color, pleated in front, with high neck and puff sleeves, which closed with a long row of tiny buttons. She shivered as her skin felt the fresh contact of the silk, and she buttoned the blouse slowly, enjoying the touch of each button, one by one, as it passed through its buttonhole. She clasped her gray pearl necklace, making sure the brooch was in front, to show it off. Out of her trunk she chose a floor-length taffeta skirt, black and smooth, then gathered her short hair under a woven straw hat with big muslin flowers, petal pink. She pushed it to the front, to the back, to one side and then the other, until she found the exact position that suited her best.
Last, she put the wad of bills into her pocket, lifted Angel, and took her other children by the hand. Dressed in that manner, although barefoot, they all walked toward the boat. Alicia asked Lieutenant Kerr to allow the bluejackets to help her by bringing her trunk on board.
“All right,” said the lieutenant, “provided it is only one.”
Tirsa and Altagracia were already on board with the other children, a barrel full of things, and the two pigs. Rosalía and Francisca came last. They stood in front of Alicia, their eyes downcast.
“Hurry up, we’re ready to leave,” said Alicia.
“No, ma’am. We are not leaving. We are staying.”
“How come?”
“Here is where our dead are, and we cannot leave them.”
“Our dead,” said Alicia, “have been blown by the wind, swallowed by the sea, and by now they must be flying over Africa or sailing around Europe. So, come on, quick, let’s go.”
The bluejackets first carried the children and the women, then brought the trunk on their shoulders, climbed on their boat, and rowed toward the Yorktown. It was already four o’clock when they left Clipperton.
From the sea, Lieutenant Kerr looked at the empty atoll, barren, inhospitable, disquieting, and wondered how it was that these people had been able to survive there for so many years without dying of loneliness and boredom. He saw the ruins of miserable huts; a sad cemetery with a half-dozen fallen crosses; an unhealthy lagoon; a ragged, jagged, uninviting cliff; and some debris on the beach, among which was the hull of a sunken ship, an old mattress full of holes, some rags, and the battered body of a bald doll. Alicia was also looking at Clipperton, but it presented itself before her as full of joys and sorrows, the stage where her life had been played. She bid farewell to the invisible wooden houses with cool verandas still resonating love words that she could repeat in their entirety by heart; to the mild prehistoric monsters at the bottom of the lagoon; to the caves that hid from the heavens the sickness and suffering of the scurvy epidemic; to the magnificent chalices that the English pirates had buried after desecrating them with Jamaican rum; to the live rock that cradled the bones of loved ones as well as hated ones; to the tablecloths and bedsheets embroidered lovingly days before her wedding; to the walls guarding against the hurricane’s fury; to the wrecked ghost ship that brought the twelve Dutch sailors; to her daughters’ porcelain doll; to the lamb’s wool mattress where her children were conceived, and brought into this world. To Secundino Angel Cardona’s seductive laughter and the heroic and violent battle that her husband, Captain Ramón Arnaud, had undertaken against no one, ultimately at the cost of his life.
From the ship’s bridge, Captain Perril, who had been alarmed by the delayed return of the boat, was astonished at the spectacle of women and children from the isle climbing into the gunboat. He had to keep his curiosity in check for twenty minutes, until Lieutenant Kerr came on board, explained the visitors’ presence, told him whatever he had been able to understand of their tragic story, and relayed their petition to be taken to Salina Cruz.