Isle of Passion

by Laura Restrepo

  In fact, the president had spoken only about furnishings: “Lovely brass candelabra. I had them brought in from Paris,” or “Notice this Pompadour boudoir. Solid mahogany, feel it,” or “Do you see the tapestry designs depicting the ancient Greek games? Thirty-five hundred pesos,” or “Do you like the billiards room? Queen’s style. The table is a Callender and the curtains are English.” The president’s comments were all of this nature, obsessed as he was with the restoration of his summer residence.

  Walking ahead a few blocks, Arnaud remembered also his own answers: confused monosyllables, false exclamations of admiration. He could hear the exact tone of his voice repeating “I find everything just right for my taste, Your Excellency” whenever the president pointed at some object or piece of furniture. “Just right for my taste,” he had said in a forced timbre, and recalling it now made him blush. Did His Excellency care about his taste? Probably his phrase was not even grammatically correct.

  The evening before he had been carefully preparing to say different remarks, like, “When I was a child, my father used to tell me about your heroic campaigns,” but when the time came, he had only come up with “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” and, to top it all, in that falsetto voice. He had lost sleep reviewing everything concerning Clipperton, its possibilities as a source for exporting guano, the many judicial facets of the litigation with France, its strategically important location in case of war. He could have gone on for hours discussing these things with Don Porfirio, and would have dazzled him with his factual knowledge, with his enthusiasm for the island, with his firm decision to establish himself there. But Don Porfirio gave him no opportunity to deal with those issues.

  The fact was, the sole indication of the importance of his assignment, of the trust bestowed upon him, was the strong farewell pat on his shoulder, and the president’s final words: “Good luck, young man.” He did say that to him, “Good luck.” Surely His Excellency meant good luck in Clipperton, the radiant Arnaud elaborated as he walked aimlessly, as if mesmerized, along the Paseo de la Reforma. Or maybe luck on the trip to Japan, luck in this difficult undertaking, luck in the defense of the national sovereignty. Or maybe not. Perhaps he had only wished him good luck.

  But the meaninglessness of their dialogue was not enough to dampen Arnaud’s joy. What he told the president did not matter; what counted was that Don Porfirio had called for him, that gesture was significant, that he had personally received him—him, of all people; him, Ramón Arnaud, in spite of everything. He had not been so brilliant in his interview, he had to admit, but that did not count. After all, Porfirio Díaz had not been so brilliant either, Ramón Arnaud thought, satisfied with himself.

  Marble from Carrara, Baccarat lamps, Henry II furniture—or his fucking mother’s, who gave a good goddamn, he had the lieutenant bars pinned on his jacket, his appointment had been signed, and in eight days he was leaving for Japan with Avalos, representing his government; he had been granted a face-to-face interview with none other than Don Porfirio himself, and, come what may, no one could take that away from him.

  It all had happened as if by magic; literally from one day to the next he had gone from being a poor devil, an outlaw, a loser, a failed junior officer, a provincial nobody, and a deserter, to becoming a lieutenant and a governor, a man trusted by the establishment. Suddenly he had been graced by the gods.

  “Some day a page will be written about me in the history of my homeland,” he unexpectedly declared out loud.

  That night in his room, while he unbuttoned his suffocating dress uniform jacket, and relaxed the muscles of his incipient belly, he added: “And if nothing gets written, at least I got a pay raise.”

  Orizaba, México, 1908

  A PHOTOGRAPH IN SEPIA, taken in an interior with printed velvet draperies in the background, and dated on the lower-right corner “May 1908”—that is, a few days before the wedding—shows Alicia the way she was then: with a gracefully dimpled chin, a porcelain complexion on her doll-like face, the light shadow of her straight eyebrows, and an adult gaze in her little girl’s eyes.

  It took her six months to do the twenty yards of lace for her wedding dress, and during this time she repeated the same operation a million times—hook in one hand and in the other the ball of linen thread from Holland—yarn over twice, insert hook, draw up a loop. Those were the last six months she spent at home with her parents in Orizaba, at number 30 Calle Tercera de la Reforma, while her fiancé, Ramón, was away on his military mission.

  She, the child bride, was waiting for his return. At times she felt like an adult attending marriage preparation courses, where she learned that at the moment of the marital encounter, she should close her eyes and pray, “Oh Lord, make me not take pleasure in this.” Or she would sit and visit with her relatives Dorita Rovira, now Mrs. Virgilio, and Esther Rovira, who was Mrs. Castillo. Or she would sit and sew clothes for the poor with Ramón’s sister, Adelita, and with his aunts Trinidad Vignon, Maria Vignon Aspiri, and Leonor Arnaud, who was a widow.

  At times she was just like a child running along the house corridors shaded by ferns, making sure she did not step on the yellow floor tiles, only the blue ones. Or without stepping on the blue ones, only on the yellow ones. She played wolf with her sisters, and cops and robbers, or pretended that the hallway was the ocean and that the pillows they laid on the floor were sharks. When she got tired, she sat on a bench under the palm tree in the patio to think about Ramón, or something else, or nothing at all. She liked to imagine lavish weddings, eternal loves, honeymoons on a deserted island.

  Sunny mornings in Orizaba always had a warm fragrance, bittersweet and tropical green. It smelled of moss in between rocks, of beasts ruminating on wet grass, of fresh cow dung, of oranges just squeezed. That fragrance made its way to Alicia’s bed and into her nostrils, caught her skin and made her hair curl. She felt an urge to go out in the open air, to the open country, to be going up and down the surrounding hills on her own—letting her stubborn mule lead the way.

  “Where are you going? Have you lost your mind?” shouted her mother, seeing her on her way out with her hair undone.

  She did not know where. Anywhere. She ran barefoot, like the Indian girls, through open yards full of chickens, past clotheslines with newly washed clothes, and by poor people’s homes with their red gladioli.

  “Miss Alicia, buy some peaches!” “Here, get some tortillas!” “Let me sell you this turkey!” She dropped by Santa Gertrudis to see the burlap factory, the latest novelty in Orizaba. For hours she observed the four hundred laborers milling around like ants. Amazed, she tried to understand how the falling water could move the looms and the machines to spin the fibers, to sew the sacks, to roll the fabric.

  “The water falls with the power of eight hundred horses,” said the foreman, who explained everything all over again each time she came.

  “Of eight hundred horses,” echoed Alicia, and she asked him again about the dynamos, about the Pelton system, about the copper strips that distributed the electricity.

  There were days when her mule’s easy trot would take her far, up to the cotton textile factory in Rio Blanco. It was the largest and most modern in the world. Six thousand men, women, and children worked there. As she was getting closer, her heart beat faster, her mouth became dry. She and Ramón had been there once. She liked to stay there for a while, looking at the big clock the owners had placed on top of a tower facing the buildings, with its four transparent quadrants lit by night, and the loud bells and whistles to strike every hour on the hour. There was nothing like it in Orizaba.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Ramón had said.

  “Let’s wait a little bit more, the clock is just about to strike,” she pleaded.

  “Let’s go now, this place has the smell of blood.”

  On the way back Ramón told her what nobody in Orizaba ever mentioned. He made her swear, kissing a cross, never to repeat it. If anybody found out he had told her that, he would be thrown out of the army. />
  “A few years ago there was a strike here and workers were killed. I do not know how many of them, probably hundreds. A friend of mine who worked for the local sheriff’s office saw their corpses. They were piled on the two railroad platforms, so many he could not even count them. There were women and children, and also loose parts, arms, legs. My friend told me that the train left for Veracruz, where the dead were thrown to the sharks.”

  Orizaba grew chilly in the afternoons, the fragrances in the air died out, and smells from the kitchen invaded the house, particularly that of hot chocolate with cinnamon and vanilla. There was often a persistent light rain the townspeople called chipichipi. Her mother and her aunts turned wistful. Sitting at the long dining room table, Alicia listened to their talk, while dunking bits of Mexican pan dulce into her hot chocolate. Doña Petra and her sisters waxed nostalgic about many things, but above all about the day they saw Emperor Maximilian passing by at close range, his golden beard parted in two, accompanied by the demented empress in her mauve silks.

  After the chocolate they usually joined the religious procession. Alicia tried to protect her head from the drizzle with a black lace mantilla and accompanied all the women in her family, including the maids, to take Our Lady of Sorrows for an outing. They would rescue her image from its niche in the Temple of the Twelve Virgins, where she had been agonizing since colonial times, her face haggard, and take her on their shoulders to parade her in the streets, decked in her black velvet mantle all embroidered in baroque pearls.

  The evenings belonged to the ghosts. At the Rovira home, the family retired early to hear them pass by. At the stroke of midnight, in a vertiginous horse carriage, death would take the legendary figure of la Monja Alférez (the Ensign Nun) to receive her nightly punishment for the unmentionable sins she had committed in life. Then, through all the underground tunnels beneath the city, Mexican soldiers marched, trying to escape from the invading French, and one could hear the trampling of their feet and their laments. And through small openings in the draperies, dead orphaned children, called chaneques by the locals, would peer in from the darkness in order to spy on the lit interiors of the town houses. These giggling chaneques, with their lighted candles, were small, infantile, wicked.

  But neither the nun’s cries nor the taunts of the chaneques got the best of Alicia because her father, Don Félix Rovira, kept a small bed next to his in the master bedroom where she could come running at midnight if she woke up in a panic.

  “Father, the chaneques are trying to pull my hair,” she would tell Don Félix, and he would keep her company until she fell asleep again. But in fact, those who appeared in her nightmares were Our Lady of Sorrows and the dismembered arms and legs of the Río Blanco workers.

  Yarn over twice, insert hook, draw up a loop, and close the row with a double stitch; Alicia spent many hours with her two sisters making feather stitches for the roses and nightingales of her lace wedding dress. The three of them would sit on Turkish-style stools in an intimate, closed circle. They would make fun of the large bedsheet with the big eyelet in the center that Alicia was going to use on her wedding night so Ramón would not see her naked. They giggled, whispered to each other, and one would stick her finger through the eyelet and touch the other’s cheek.

  “Peekaboo, guess who’s inside you!”

  Huddling close together like clandestine accomplices, they covered their mouths to contain their laughter, repeating as if it were a tongue twister the words that were taught to future brides being prepared for marriage: “We do this, O Holy of Holies, not because of our evil ways, nor for fornication, but to bring forth a child in your holy service”—and they competed to see who could say it fastest—“Do this, Holy O, to serve in your holy fornication, the holy vice of your holy son, Fornitio, venicio, holy servitio.”

  Her mother, Doña Petra, would cross herself at such heresies. But then, moving closer to them, she would get into the conversation and break the gap, risking an argument.

  “If ever, God forbid, a man is about to rape you and there is a gun within your reach, kill yourself before you are dishonored!”

  The girls would laugh.

  “You’re crazy, Mother, it would be better to shoot the man.”

  They doubled and redoubled a strand of thread and tacked it to the arch. The three of them took turns in their needlework, but Sarita had a tighter stitch than Alicia, and Esther’s was looser, and so the nightingales in the wedding dress were large and angular in some places, and smaller with fat wings in others. Their mother made them undo their work and start all over again. One day while embroidering they were eating cherry chocolate cordials and stained the lace. Hiding from Doña Petra, they washed it with hydrogen peroxide and salt.

  They would again bring the yarn over twice, insert the hook, and draw up a loop to make a double stitch while listening to their mother’s domestic advice.

  “For stomach pain, remember this. When you are in Clipperton, if you run out of your paregoric elixir, boil an avocado seed for fifteen minutes: that tea makes a good substitute.”

  The girls just laughed.

  “But the avocados will be gone before the elixir!”

  Yarn over twice, insert hook, draw up a loop, and the wedding date was approaching. One day a messenger arrived in Orizaba with a long necklace of gray pearls for the bride to be that her fiancé had sent her from Japan. The whole neighborhood found out about it and came over to admire the pearls. Alicia delighted in wearing them around her neck and went outside to the patio to do acrobatics and cartwheels with the servants’ children.

  That is how her life went. She would embroider her white dress and learn to cook rice on the big coal stove so it would not come out too salty or lumpy. When nobody noticed, she would lock herself up to read and reread alone her fiancé’s love letters and to answer them on small notepaper from her stationery set, taking great care in penning her round lowercase letters and large, elaborate capitals.

  Before writing to him she would review the latest news, the important happenings in Orizaba during his absence. A pregnant Indian who used to sell tortillas and tortillas chips in the market was gored in the belly by a cow. The woman was still alive, bleeding and screaming, and Alicia helped to take her to the Women’s Hospital, where they saved her and her baby. Another day, the satyr in the Santa Anita neighborhood was finally caught and hanged. He had raped fifteen girls, giving them the French venereal disease and getting all of them pregnant.

  In the end, Alicia would reject these stories because Ramón would not be interested, and she wrote only about her love for him, such as the card written in English that, years after the tragedy, appeared in a book about Clipperton by General Francisco L. Urquizo, which says exactly this on one side:

  Señor

  Ramón Arnaud

  Acapulco

  And on the other,

  I never forget you

  and I love you with

  all my soul, Alice.

  Orizaba, June 14, 1908

  A line in violet-colored ink springs up from the letter e in “Alice,” turns back and curls around the last a in “Orizaba.” Yarn over twice, insert hook, draw up a loop, close the row, and end off.

  Mexico City, Today

  “NO, IT ISN’T TRUE, she didn’t embroider her wedding gown,” Alicia’s granddaughter, Mrs. Guzmán (née María Teresa Arnaud) tells me, then going on to quote from the book she wrote on family memories: “Alicia’s wedding gown has arrived from Europe; it is very elegant, and for several weeks now it has been on display in the shop window at Las Fábricas de Francia. The wedding is to be held shortly,” she says, reading from La tragedia de Clipperton, published in Mexico in 1982.

  “Of course I know this very well. I know my grandmother’s life to the minute, I see it all through her eyes. Do you want more details about that dress? It was ordered through the Chabrands, the owners of the best clothing store in Orizaba, Las Fábricas de Francia, which had sent for it by telegram to France. Many
years later, for my own wedding—my husband is a water management engineer—I said I wanted to get married in my grandmother Alicia’s wedding gown. I was told I was crazy, that it would not fit me, since she was almost a child when she got married. But I was bent on wearing it, and it smelled of mothballs when I took it out of the chest. Up to the last minute, people were telling me not to be so stubborn, I couldn’t possibly get into it. However, it fit me marvelously: I could button it easily. We were exactly the same size; we resembled each other, and had the same body shape, the two of us!” says her proud granddaughter, sitting on a heavy wood rocking chair, Mexican colonial style, in the living room of her San Angel home in Mexico City. Her snow-white hair, clear proof of a recent visit to a beauty salon, frames her doll face: perfect features, slightly dimpled chin, and luminous complexion in spite of her being fifty already.

  “My whole family tells me now that I look exactly like my grandmother. You don’t know me, you know nothing about us, but you have called me Alicia a couple of times, though my name is María Teresa. Even though she died long before I was born, there is a deep bond between us that goes beyond logic. I can never put her memory down to rest. Her intense suffering and courage were remarkable. No one recognizes that today.”

  Through the large windows we can see the meticulously manicured garden. In the center of the living room there is a table, and a Talavera ceramic vase with five black feathers in it. There are several seashells in a little box.

  “Those are feathers from Clipperton birds; the shells are from Clipperton beaches. Does that surprise you? My home is truly a sanctuary for the island. For years I have saved all the newspaper and magazine articles written about it from around the world. I still have letters from my grandfather, and clothing that belonged to my grandmother. I have soil samples and water samples from Clipperton—I am a chemist by profession, you know. These things were brought to me because I have never been there. When I wrote my book about the isle, I met my destiny. I knew that my mission on earth was to tell that story, which is also my own story. I am selling the book from home and from my husband’s office. He is, as I already told you, an engineer in water management. Every week I make a presentation on Clipperton. The navy invites me, I have friends there. For me, each conference is psychologically and emotionally exhausting, because as I talk, I revive the tragedy, I relive it again. I come back home two to five pounds thinner, and I have to stay in bed for a couple of days in order to recuperate.”