Laura Restrepo - Isle of Passion

At the Portal Medellín there is a place that seems to have witnessed several generations of townspeople. It is a general store with an oversized and weathered dark wood counter. Outside, a sign reads, “Here is the traditional, renowned, and prestigious Casa Ceballos, open since 1893.” Inside you can find anything, from hardware to underwear. The owner, Don Carlos Ceballos, inherited the business over fifty years ago. He is a well-educated, polite gentleman, like those of yesteryear. I tell him what I am looking for and ask for his help, and he suggests that I come back in the afternoon. He is going to gather a number of people who might have some information.

Hours later, Don Carlos has assembled a group of friends and townspeople about his age at the Hotel Ceballos, next to the store. They are important local people, and a few historians and journalists.

“Last name Alvarez, from Colima, and black?” they want to be sure. “There is only one family, the illegitimate descendants of our illustrious leader, General Manuel Alvarez, our first state governor.”

“But the Alvarezes from Colima are not pure black,” they point out, “they are mulattoes.”

In the center of Villa Alvarez Plaza, cast in bronze and ruling over the town from his pedestal, is soldier Victoriano Alvarez’s paternal grandfather, General Manuel Alvarez. In the assembly room of the Colima town hall, there he is again, in an oil painting with his name in gold. He is a thickset man with sharp features. And he is milky white.

At the corner of Venustiano Carranza and 5 de Mayo lie the ruins of what was his home, a one-story colonial structure. The facade is still standing, but the interior has crumbled down due to the Colima earthquakes. The bases of the walls, like a blueprint, are still visible, indicating where the patios, the kitchen, the bedrooms, and the sitting rooms were. The family rooms were toward the front of the house, next to the street. That is, the general and his successive wives lived there — he became a widower three times and married four times — together with his numerous offspring.

At the back of the house, surrounding the patio, is where the help lived: servants, chambermaids, grooms. The general, great patriarch and stud, fathered children everywhere he went. Willing or not, no female escaped him. At night and in haste, he used to sneak across to the back side of the house, to ravish the young servants, take care of the older ones, and make love to a black maid called Aleja, who was faithful to him all her life.

His wives did not live long; three of them died in childbirth. But not Aleja. She prevailed, surviving her childbirths, and bearing him countless children. The general recognized some and gave them his name. They were his illegitimate, mulatto descendants, among them Victoriano Alvarez, father of the Clipperton Victoriano.

General Alvarez was named governor on July 15, 1857, and five weeks later, during his siesta, his political enemies rioted and gathered at the plaza shouting their slogan, “Law and Religion.” Annoyed, the general woke up, and when informed of the news, he was furious. Livid with rage and without waiting for anyone, he loaded his guns, jumped on his horse, and rushed toward the plaza to end the revolt all by himself. He didn’t get past the first intersection. A gun blast received him, and a bullet nested in his heart. The family went to the church and asked to let him have the last rites and absolution administered postmortem, as was the custom when Christians died suddenly or violently, and to allow his being laid to rest in the cemetery. The parish priest denied the request because the general, a liberal through and through, had been excommunicated for supporting the federal constitution. Finally the priest acceded, in exchange for two thousand pesos, provided they let him whip the demons out of the dead body. So after receiving the bullet that killed him, General Alvarez had to withstand a whipping, and then he was able to go down peacefully into his sepulcher.

His fourth wife, Panchita Córdoba, was young when he died, and soon married Filomeno Bravo. Good-looking Filomeno, reputedly the handsomest man in Mexico, held fast to the household’s same macho and big-daddy traditions practiced by the deceased general. His blue eyes and golden beard made him resemble Emperor Maximilian himself, which served him well in order to reach Empress Carlota’s bed no less. After this, there was no woman he could not claim. He was shrewd and resourceful enough to court them and deceive them all. One afternoon he picked up an unknown, pretty woman all dressed in red. He pulled her onto his horse and took her to the outskirts of town, where he made love to her in an open field. He was seen by neighbors passing by. Before anyone could relay the story to Panchita, his wife, Filomeno rushed home, ordered her to put on a red dress, pulled her onto his horse, and took her on horseback to the outskirts of town, where he made love to her in an open field. That way, if anyone came to her with the story, she, blissfully innocent, would believe that “the mystery lady in the red dress was no one but me.”

When the great Benito Juárez, then president of Mexico, came one day to Colima, he was about to be shot by Filomeno the Blond, who decided to spare his life. Benito Juárez, in gratitude, signed a card for him that read: “You have reciprocity for your life.” So once when Filomeno, imprisoned in Zacatecas, was about to be executed, he showed the card promising “reciprocity for your life,” and was let go. Years later, like General Alvarez, he was also killed by a bullet to his heart, and the people of Colima thought up an epitaph for him: “Filomeno’s pax is a relief for everybody’s ass.”

Miguel Alvarez García, General Manuel Alvarez’s grandson, was also a governor, and a great-grandchild, Griselda Alvarez Ponce de León, was a governor as well. Pomp and circumstance accompanied the Alvarez family for several generations. At least for the white, legitimate Alvarezes, those who lived in the front part of the house.

Victoriano, the mulatto grandson of the general and his black servant Aleja, shared the fate of those who lived at the back of the house. He learned of the family history through the maids’ gossip. He was an invisible, mute witness to the economic success, the political struggles, and the military adventures of his grandfather, uncles, and his white siblings and cousins. Through the cracks he spied on their amorous conquests and their forced ones. Until he got tired of lusting after the women they possessed, got bored with their feats, that is, with admiring and envying their style of life. He wanted to live his own life, so he joined the army and ended up in Clipperton.

THE RAFT THAT WAS TAKING Arnaud and Cardona became unreal, like a faded memory, as it entered a zone of greenish fog. The women and children were watching it from the beach. They saw it moving away with difficulty toward the reef, bobbing up and down, fragile and tentative, in the treacherously contradictory ocean waves. The effort exerted by the two men rowing diligently made the raft advance, but the force of the waves kept pushing it back. It moved away, grew smaller, darker; it approached, became more visible, and then disappeared again. From the beach, the women kept it afloat with the power of their eyes, they saved it through their prayers to the Saint of Cabora, they brought it closer to shore with the power of their thoughts. When the image became more blurred, they waded in up to their knees to bring it nearer and to hold it back, to rescue it.

“Do you think they’ll reach the ship?” Alicia asked Tirsa. Their soaked petticoats entangled their legs and they had to hold on to each other’s arms in order to withstand the waves and the wind. “Say yes, please say yes.”