Gustav Schultz, the German fellow, Gustavo Schultz, his son, Gustavo Shultz, his grandson. I search in the Chilpancingo phone book, make a long-distance call, and talk with the last Schultz, the only one still alive. His voice sounds young, and he tells me he’s in politics. He remembers his grandfather as very blond, with a light complexion and bushy eyebrows. He says that neither he nor his father, who are both dark-haired, resembles him physically because they had no blood connection. He confessed not to know any details of the Clipperton drama because the family does not like to recall such a painful past.
He does not have more information, he acknowledges, but in order not to disappoint me, he reads on the phone from a clipping he has kept for years. It is an interview of his grandfather by the journalist Hernán Rosales, published in the Mexico City newspaper El Universal on May 14, 1935. In it Schultz tells more about other people than about himself. His grandson reads with some difficulty because, as he explains, the clipping is now yellowed and faded. On the phone I get the story of the first Gustav Schultz, succinctly told by himself.
He says that in 1904, when he was twenty-four, he embarked in San Francisco, without much thought, for a place he had never heard of, Clipperton Island. He was going there to work for an English phosphate company. When he arrived, the uninhabited and barren isle filled him with melancholy: “I was living there like Robinson Crusoe.” Eager to see and touch something green and alive, he sailed from Clipperton to the island of Socorro in the Revillagigedo Archipelago to bring back thirteen young and tender coconut palms and forty tons of topsoil in which to plant them. As man cannot subsist on coconuts alone, he also imported some company for himself: a young woman, Daría Pinzón, and her only daughter, Jesusa Lacursa.
On his return to Clipperton, he shared his life with that woman, watched the palm trees he planted grow, and made his employees work like slaves. He worked like a beast of burden himself. “I fell in love with my life in that desert seascape,” he says. About his conflicts with Ramón Arnaud and his violent and crazy days, Gustav Schultz chose to keep silent. About the appearance of Altagracia Quiroz in his life, he confesses: “Her presence relieved my great sadness.”
He refers to the arrival of Captain Williams at Clipperton, and confirms that he agreed to travel to Mexico aboard the Cleveland out of his own free will, not forced to do so by anyone. Once on the continent, it seems he recovered his sanity, if it is true that he had ever lost it, and he dedicated himself to try to rescue Altagracia. In the midst of the revolution that was rocking the country, she was merely a blade of grass lost in the storm, like so many other Mexicans. To reach Clipperton was not easy; a trip could not be improvised on a small vessel. He had to obtain the collaboration of a government that would be willing to make a large vessel available for the sole purpose of rescuing the remaining survivors. It was wartime, when thousands of people were dying, and a rescue mission for a few soldiers left in an enemy camp was certainly not among the priorities of the Mexican government.
But Gustav Schultz did not forget his promise. On the contrary, his steadfast determination became an obsession. He traveled regularly to various places with the purpose of making inquiries about Altagracia Quiroz before the proper authorities and the rebels, those of the deposed administrations as well as the elected ones. In the interview he tells how he spent a year going from one government office to another, and from one department to the next, uselessly making his request over and over again to bureaucrats who would ask him to present it in writing, just to bury it in their archives, or who, insisting on protocol, would then shut their doors in his face for good. Convinced that he had tried all possibilities on the Pacific coast, in June 1915 he went to Veracruz, on the Atlantic side, to speak with a government official who was known to be a humanitarian, generous person. His name was Hilario Rodríguez Malpica. This kind man listened to the whole story, worried about the situation of those forsaken on the isle, and commissioned Schultz to go to Clipperton to rescue them. For days they contacted people high in government and some who were influential with the navy, until a plan was agreed upon. Gustav Schultz was to travel to Salina Cruz, a Pacific port, and there would board a ship, the Corrigan III, for the isle.
He had finally secured governmental support and help from the navy, had received a commission, money for the trip and essential crew, and a set departure date. Perhaps he even had a bouquet of roses to give to his fiancée at the time of their meeting. “But fate,” Schultz recounts, “determined that upon my arrival at Salina Cruz, I found the Corrigan III aground at the dock.”
Since it was impossible to repair the Corrigan III, the only available ship, the trip was called off, and the poor German fellow had to start all over again. For two more years he continued in his efforts, to no avail, and in January 1917 he traveled again to Veracruz to visit the only man who had ever listened to him. This time, however, even Rodríguez Malpica discouraged him.
“My advice, Mr. Schultz, is that you face reality. You need to look at things with more pessimism. I regret having to tell you this, because I consider you my friend. But you must realize that all of them must have died by now. Your Altagracia Quiroz, and all the others, are dead.”
“I don’t agree, my friend. I can assure you that woman is alive and is going to marry me. Someday. Besides, I am certain that day is not far off. And you, who have always been so kind to me, you are going to be my best man.”
Clipperton, 1915–1916
WITH A RAG ATTACHED to the end of a stick (brooms had disappeared long before) Alicia was trying to sweep the sand out of the house. This chore, which she had done every day for seven years, was an obsession with her still, now that they were living in rubble. The effort exhausted her, and she had to sit down to rest. In the past, each time she was pregnant she had been full of joy and bursting with energy. But not this time. Malnourishment had greatly affected her. She felt old and dispirited, and her disposition had turned sour. She was tormented by the thought of her body having to compete with her own offspring for the scant nutrition she was receiving. It was obvious that the baby resented the lack of food even more than she did, since the size of her belly after five months of pregnancy had not reached the volume of her previous ones at three months.
Tirsa Rendón was not doing much better. Her pregnancy had started a month later, but she was also looking wasted. Tirsa, the brave one, the strong one, the one who managed to collect, all by herself, three-fourths of all the food they ate, had become quite a different Tirsa: distant and listless, covering up her infinite fatigue with an indifferent exterior.
Alicia got up to finish her chore. Every time she swept a room, the children would come running in and bring the sand back.
“I tire myself less if I sweep again than if I scold them,” she would explain.
She went into the small room next to her bedroom. Instead of a stained-glass window, there was now a big gaping hole that allowed the wind in. Instead of the wicker chair, which the hurricane had carried away, there was a wooden box, and she sat on it. She opened the trunk where she kept her most precious possessions. She took out Ramón’s gala uniform, his woolen jacket with the double line of buttons, epaulets and chevron still golden; his military hat, flattened sideways, with its braid unstitched; his sword; his black boots. She took out her wedding gown, with its twenty yards of lace, and a dozen tablecloths and bedsheets, among them the wedding-night saintly sheet. Two little sailor suits that had belonged to her older children but could still fit the younger ones. Some clothes she had bought (but never got to wear) on her one and only trip to the Mexican capital. Carefully wrapped in tissue paper, there was a bar of Ivory soap, already half used. She took it out, smelled it, and wrapped it again. There was a silver frame, with its glass missing, from which her father smiled at her. He was young and wore a white suit. She untied the silk ribbon around a huge wad of bills and counted them: there were four thousand two hundred pesos, all the money she and Ramón had saved. She took out his hairbrush, the one with the silver handle, let her hair down, and brushed it for the first time in months. It was coming out in handfuls, and she rolled a ball with the hair left entangled in the bristles.