Isle of Passion by Laura Restrepo Read Free Book Online Page A

novels.”
    The time came to set the wedding date and begin the preparations. Ramón was no longer a decent, pennyless adolescent, nor a dishonored military man labeled as a deserter. Now he had a career and a future—risky and unpredictable, but still promising—to offer his beloved, so he asked for her hand in marriage. On a windy night, accompanied by his mother, Doña Carlota, he arrived at the home of Félix Rovira and his wife, Petra, Alicia’s parents, who served them glasses of sherry and some olives, while Don Félix overdid himself, being gallant and making pretentious jokes. He was courteously pompous when he offered a toast for the future couple. Nobody suspected that his eyes were swollen and his nose red because for hours before the visit, he had locked himself up in the library in a rage and he had cried and had thrown on the floor, tome after tome, most of his Encyclopedia Britannica in an attack of paternal jealousy.
    The announcements and the invitations to the wedding were ordered to be printed in an ocher shade. There was a breakfast planned for after the ceremony with French-style hot chocolate, link sausages, the blood pudding that Don Félix, who was from Galicia, prepared himself, and the assorted hors d’oeuvres with Doña Carlota’s famous mayonnaise.
    The day had come, and now the wedding ceremony was coming to an end without a hitch, apart from the collectively experienced lack of air. Alicia followed every detail and imprinted them all in her memory, where they would be etched forever: Doña Carlota’s large diamond, which Ramón had set in an engagement ring that reflected tiny rainbows from her little girl’s hand; the weight of the earrings, which matched the ring; the Holy Sacrament of the Communion held on high by the priest’s fat fingers; the nostalgia on her father’s face, which everybody except Alicia simply interpreted as pure emotion; the extremely sharp timbre, practically superhuman, of the solo voice from the choir singing the “Ave María”; Ramón’s beatific smile as he thought of breaking his fast with the sausages and the chocolate. And above all, overpowering everything, the dense, compact scent emanating from the flowers.
    At the climax of the ceremony, the final benediction, Alicia looked at the black feathers of her mother-in-law’s outrageous hat. They annoyed her, they seemed to her like a bad omen, and, involuntarily, she made a face. As if he had heard what she was thinking, Ramón bent down toward her and whispered in her ear: “I told my mother not to wear that ugly bird hat because it was going to scare you.”

Orizaba, Today

    I COME TO O RIZABA looking for traces of that wedding. It is a small city, dull and graceless. In the Pensión Loyo—where Alicia Arnaud Loyo lives alone since she became a widow—I find one of the marriage announcements, printed in ocher on heavy paper and folded in four. The message is written twice, according to custom.
    Mr. Félix Rovira and Mrs. Petra G. Rovira
    are pleased to inform you of the forthcoming
    marriage of their daughter Alicia
    and Mr. Ramón Arnaud
    Mrs. Carlota Vignon Arnaud
    is pleased to inform you of the forthcoming
    marriage of her son Ramón
    and Miss Alicia Rovira
    According to the Arnauds’ biographers (their granddaughter, María Teresa Arnaud Guzmán, and General Francisco Urquizo), the wedding took place on June 24. However, the wedding invitation contradicts this fact because it says “. . . has the pleasure of inviting you to the ecclesiastical ceremony, which will take place on the twenty-fourth of the present month,” and it is dated “Orizaba, July 1908.” They were married then in July, not June. This is not the first time that the calendar of their lives gets muddled, and it will not be the last in which time plays tricks on them.
    In his manuscript “The Orizaba I Remember,” Don Antonio Díaz Meléndez writes that after the religious ceremony “they headed for the Hotel de