Free Isle of Passion by Laura Restrepo Page A

at the most, without fail or delay, either that ship or El Demócrata , also from the Mexican Navy, would bring to Clipperton all the supplies necessary for survival.
    It was well established that from such an isle, a lazy, barren piece of rock, they could not get much more than crabs, salt, and polluted water. The arrival of the ship would be like the umbilical cord that would keep them alive. As the Corrigan II sailed away, Ramón felt that his only connection with the outside world was drifting farther and farther out of reach, lost behind an ocean wall.
    When the ship could no longer be seen, Ramón realized that he felt offended, hurt, abandoned like a dog. His nomination as governor, the promotion to the rank of captain, the interview with Porfirio Díaz, all seemed now like fancy decoys covering up the stark reality: he had been totally forsaken in the last place he would have chosen to be, had he the freedom to choose.
    The old feeling that he had been made to pay too dearly for his mistakes returned, and he ran, over and over in his mind like a rat in a maze, through all the twists and turns. That old resentment knew very well all the labyrinths in his gray matter because he himself had trained it each and every day and night during his incarceration in Santiago Tlatelolco. And during every hour of his training as an army private. It was a resentment so close to him, so domestic and familiar, Ramón thought now, that he had not ceased nurturing it for a second. And this truth surprised him.
    Since he was a child he had entertained the suspicion that someone, some powerful and abstract being, was cruelly punishing him. And now, at the Clipperton dock, this punishment acquired the shape of an old and lost meaning in the English language, derived from the Spanish. It was a combination of just a few letters, unknown to him until a few days ago and which, notwithstanding—it was very clear now—had been his destiny from the beginning. This word, which sounded cabalistic to him, was “marooned,” derived from “cimaroon”—in turn derived from the Spanish “cimarrón,” or runaway slave. And by some logical play of association, “to maroon” also referred to the capital punishment meted out to traitors by English pirates in the Caribbean: they abandoned them on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean, with nothing but a few sips of water in a bottle and a gun loaded with only one bullet, to use when the torture and the agony became unbearable.
    “Marooned,” Arnaud repeated to himself, fascinated by its sound. “Marooned,” and a sticky malaise took hold of him. Standing there facing the Pacific Ocean alone, he offered no resistance. A hot wind ruffled his eyelashes, buzzed over his ears, kept flapping on the nape of his neck the kerchief he was wearing to protect himself from the sun. An endless series of waves, resigned and identical, crashed against the boards under his feet, and he observed them, mesmerized, and let them lull him with their monotonous murmur: marooned , they whispered, marooned .
    He was comfortably installed in his melancholy and without any intention of getting out of it, when he saw Alicia in the distance trying to carry a barrel heavier than she was up the steep steps leading to the house. She would advance two steps and the force of gravity made her go backward three, just to start again, unflaggingly. Ramón thought that the diligence his wife applied to the task at hand was an irrational defiance of the sweltering heat, that her useless doggedness disrupted the relaxing inertia that the heat imposed on everything else. He saw her as being obsessed with her futile endeavor, her porcelain complexion beaded with pearls of sweat, and completely oblivious of the departing ship, of the resentments and premonitions that were asphyxiating him, of the cruelty of the Caribbean pirates and of the human race in general. Why does she persist in not letting the soldiers take care of those