First: From now on it is absolutely prohibited to pray, to build altars, and to perform religious sacrifices.
Second: Only what we see and the people we can touch are real. All others are hereby banished from Clipperton forever. It is forbidden to deal with the dead.
Third: No one is allowed to go out of the house at night, unless it is for a short task and after obtaining permission. The hours of the night are for resting, and for protecting the children and keeping them company.
Fourth: Nobody can scare a child, or say to a child things that are not true.
Fifth: She who violates any of these laws, in word or deed, will be thrown out of her house, separated from her children, and condemned to live in isolation.
Alicia and Tirsa went all around the isle toppling altars and burning idols and fetishes. Alicia’s moral authority and her imposing personality, Tirsa’s courage and physical strength, plus the unwavering alliance between the two, ensured their leaving behind these ominous times in which the dead invaded Clipperton and made slaves out of the living.
In spite of heading the struggle against the threat of the incorporeal, Alicia began to have strange experiences, to feel inexplicable presences. She felt she was weakening, and that something inside her was depriving her of energy, something that hoarded the food she ate, that sucked the liquid with which she calmed her thirst. Someone who took away the air she breathed and robbed her heart of blood. She seemed to have a strength inside of her, smaller but more powerful, which existed and thrived at the expense of her own stamina, as her body, already ravished by malnutrition and fatigue, became weaker.
Two months after her husband was swallowed by the ocean, Alicia realized the nature of her problem. It was simple and obvious, and if she had not understood before, it was just because of her panic over accepting it. She called Tirsa.
“I am pregnant,” she told her.
“This is incredible,” Tirsa responded. “I didn’t want to tell you because I wasn’t sure, but I think I’m pregnant, too.”
That night, hiding in her kitchen, Alicia cried all that she had not been able to cry when Ramón died. Violating her own commandment, she talked to him again, which she had not done for a long time.
“I called you many times, and I begged you to come back,” she told him, “but not in this way. I needed your company and your protection, and look at what you are sending me instead of you: another baby.”
Altagracia realized what the situation was and came to offer her consolation.
“Don’t worry, ma’am, someone will soon come for me, and I’ll take you with me, and all the others also,” she told her.
“And who is going to come for you?”
“It’s a secret.”
“Don’t come to me with stories of the dead. It’s forbidden.”
“He’s not dead, he’s alive.”
“Alive? Tell me who.”
“The German fellow.”
“Schultz?”
“The same. He promised me he would come for me.”
“Stop dreaming, my child. You’re in worse shape than the ones who believe in ghosts.”
“He is going to come. He promised me.”
“He promised that to you because he was crazy.”
“He was not crazy. He was just too lonesome. I cured him.”
“Enough! All that you would need is to make an altar to your blond saint and pray to him for a miracle!”
“It’s not a miracle, ma’am. It’s that he loves me.”
“It’s over a year since he left, and he has not come.”
“But he must be looking for me, I know.”
“He was probably locked up in a nuthouse.”
“Then he will escape and come for me.”
“All right, you can believe anything you want. You might be right. You better keep on believing in Schultz’s love, since you are lucky he’s alive. Hold on to your memories so that despair does not dry you up, as it has done to us.”
Mexico City, Today
THERE ARE CONFLICTING DETAILS regarding the deaths of Captain Ramón Arnaud and Lieutenant Secundino Cardona.
The first is the exact date: the day, the month, the year they occurred.
The second has to do with the kind of fish that overturned their raft, or that killed them when they fell in the water. Did it exist, really? If it existed, was it a manta ray? Or was it sharks?
The third is more complex, and it refers to the vessel that appeared that day on the horizon, the one they were trying to intercept. Was it a real ship? Was it, on the contrary, a mirage produced by a man’s anguish, or a product of the Clipperton survivors’ collective wish?
The four direct testimonies that I found about this event are contradictory, and do not dispel our doubts. Quite the opposite.
First: Letter of the nurse María Noriega, Lieutenant Cardona’s legal wife, dated July 1940, in which she claims her widow’s pension from the Mexican government.
DIVISION GENERAL LÁZARO CÁRDENAS
NATIONAL PALACE
BY HAND
I am the widow of Infantry Lieutenant Secundino Angel Cardona, who under orders of the Secretary of Defense and of the Navy, with a detail of the Thirteenth Infantry Battalion commanded by Captain Ramón Arnaud, left the port of Acapulco on board the Mexican steamship Corrigan II.
My deceased husband informed me before parting that his stay on Clipperton Island, where they were headed, would last only a year; but after the year was over, he never returned, leaving me and my children without economic support, and restlessly waiting for him while locking in my heart the joy of ever seeing him again.
But fate or misfortune decreed to keep us apart forever. At dawn, on May 4th, 1915, they saw a sailing ship headed from east to west, to the northeast of the isle, and Captain Arnaud and my husband, in the hope of being rescued, started out in an improvised rowboat to follow the ship, which did not meet with success, and they perished at sea.
The persons who had stayed on the isle feverishly followed the fugitive ship, which became more and more distant, and observed anxiously and with despair the frantic efforts of the little boat, which was being left behind without managing to be seen. The ship finally disappeared on the horizon; only the boat could be seen, advancing with difficulty, and then disappearing behind some clouds. When these dissipated, the boat had vanished, swallowed by the ocean […].
Yours truly,
María Noriega, Cardona’s widow
Second: Logbook of Captain H. P. Perril, of the gunboat Yorktown, of the U.S. Navy, dated Wednesday, 17 July 1917. Captain Perril heard the story of the events that day from an eyewitness.
Captain Arnaud considered himself responsible for the desperate situation in which the people on the isle found themselves and worried so much about it that his mind lost its balance.
One day, imagining that he saw a ship at a short distance from shore, he forced his men to launch a boat and row out to sea to intercept it in order to seek help. The men refused to give in to the whim of their captain, well aware that the ship existed only in his imagination. Finally they obeyed his command and started out in the boat against heavy seas.