Laura Restrepo: Isle of Passion

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.

“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.”