Free Isle of Passion by Laura Restrepo Page B

tasks? How can she possibly not understand that on a disastrous day like today such things as barrels don’t deserve our attention? Ramón wondered anxiously, and ran to help her.
    By the time he reached her, she had already succeeded in carrying her load up to the porch.
    The days began to go a little faster. Not only had the ship departed, leaving them in God’s hands, but two or three hundred yards away from the place where it had been anchored, there still arose, now and forever, the silhouette of the Kinkora . Or her ghost. Or whatever was left of her. On a pitch-black night a few years ago, the Japanese ship did not see the isle and fell into its trap, lunging against it as if it wasn’t there. Clipperton had lain in wait for her, crouching and invisible, then ensnared her in its reefs and tore into her hull with the sharp fierceness of its corals.
    Haunted by the somber, unavoidable presence of the Kinkora , through whose dilapidated timbers the wind whistled sad tunes of shipwrecks, Arnaud decided to dismantle her board by board. He could no longer stand the ominous energy that he perceived as coming from the wreck, which made his head burst and even gave him a toothache. He would remove that grim monument to failure from the coastline and neutralize its influence, and would use whatever he could recover to construct decent living quarters for his soldiers.
    As usual, Ramón had suddenly shifted without any warning from a state of depression to one of euphoria, and during the following days he and his men were earnestly dedicated to their task. And from the worm-eaten timbers of the Kinkora —once cleaned and sanded—they built a small house for each soldier, with its oil lamp, its coal burner, and its cistern to store rainwater.
    While Lieutenant Cardona and the others were in charge of the masonry work and the carpentry, Arnaud tried to solve the problem now annoying him: the crabs, which crawled around everywhere without any respect—not even for the soup pots, the clothes chests, or the babies’ cradles—and also fell inside to die in the rainwater tanks, their small corpses polluting the pure waters. Ramón designed traps and fortresses, and after several failed attempts at creating barriers to the thousands of persistent crabs, finally one morning he left the toolshed carrying some ingenious wooden covers with double gratings that attained their purpose.
    In spite of the hellish oppressive heat and the ill-tempered breezes, Arnaud and his Clipperton men persisted in their construction frenzy. After the soldiers’ houses, they continued with a Decauville track brought from Acapulco. They labored hand in hand with Schultz and his workers, and they managed to make a toylike train, which hauled its row of small, uncovered wagons on a track that extended from the soft mounds of guano on the north of the isle and followed the eastern shore down to the storehouse, where the cargo was dried and processed, next to the dock.
    Then came the reconstruction of the lighthouse on top of the big rock on the southern coast. The old one had an obsolete mechanism, already in total disrepair. Arnaud restored it by installing new prisms and burners on the old base. He ordered the construction of six sections of stairs, ten steps each, to civilize the steep ascent to the lighthouse, which had been a suicidal enterprise due to the slippery rock. He filled the tank with oil, and one starry and moonless night, he lit the burners.
    Down below, men, women, and children were sitting on the beach in mystical silence around a fire they had built to drive away the mosquitoes. Behind them they had made pavilions with their rifles, leaning them against one another in threes and fours. They saw the big beacon light up and remained there for several hours, staring as if hypnotized at the pallid light as it turned. This was an important occasion. They no longer were a speck lost in the big nothingness. Now they were offering to the world