Isle of Passion Read Online Free PDF

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,