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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,