LongBench v2 / 66f920d8bb02136c067c4b81 / What is mainly symbolized by the frequent cholera outbreaks in the novel?

Chapter 1
IT WAS INEVITABLE: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequitedlove. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. TheAntillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, andhis most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromaticfumes of gold cyanide.
He found the corpse covered with a blanket on the campaign cot where he had always slept,and beside it was a stool with the developing tray he had used to vaporise the poison. On the floor,tied to a leg of the cot, lay the body of a black Great Dane with a snow-white chest, and next tohim were the crutches. At one window the splendour of dawn was just beginning to illuminate thestifling, crowded room that served as both bedroom and laboratory, but there was enough light forhim to recognise at once the authority of death. The other windows, as well as every other chink inthe room, were muffled with rags or sealed with black cardboard, which increased the oppressiveheaviness. A counter was crammed with jars and bottles without labels and two crumbling pewtertrays under an ordinary light bulb covered with red paper. The third tray, the one for the fixativesolution, was next to the body. There were old magazines and newspapers everywhere, piles ofnegatives on glass plates, broken furniture, but everything was kept free of dust by a diligent hand.
Although the air coming through the window had purified the atmosphere, there still remained forthe one who could identify it the dying embers of hapless love in the bitter almonds. Dr. JuvenalUrbino had often thought, with no premonitory intention, that this would not be a propitious placefor dying in a state of grace. But in time he came to suppose that perhaps its disorder obeyed anobscure determination of Divine Providence.
A police inspector had come forward with a very young medical student who was completinghis forensic training at the municipal dispensary, and it was they who had ventilated the room andcovered the body while waiting for Dr. Urbino to arrive. They greeted him with a solemnity thaton this occasion had more of condolence than veneration, for no one was unaware of the degree ofhis friendship with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour. The eminent teacher shook hands with each of them,as he always did with every one of his pupils before beginning the daily class in general clinicalmedicine, and then, as if it were a flower, he grasped the hem of the blanket with the tips of hisindex finger and his thumb, and slowly uncovered the body with sacramental circumspection.
Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was completely naked, stiff and twisted, eyes open, body blue, lookingfifty years older than he had the night before. He had luminous pupils, yellowish beard and hair,and an old scar sewn with baling knots across his stomach. The use of crutches had made his torsoand arms as broad as a galley slave's, but his defenceless legs looked like an orphan's. Dr. JuvenalUrbino studied him for a moment, his heart aching as it rarely had in the long years of his futilestruggle against death.
"Damn fool," he said. "The worst was over."He covered him again with the blanket and regained his academic dignity. His eightiethbirthday had been celebrated the year before with an official three-day jubilee, and in his thank-you speech he had once again resisted the temptation to retire. He had said: "I'll have plenty oftime to rest when I die, but this eventuality is not yet part of my plans." Although he heard lessand less with his right ear, and leaned on a silver-handled cane to conceal his faltering steps, hecontinued to wear a linen suit, with a gold watch chain across his vest, as smartly as he had in hisyounger years. His Pasteur beard, the colour of mother-of-pearl, and his hair, the same colour,carefully combed back and with a neat part in the middle, were faithful expressions of his character. He compensated as much as he could for an increasingly disturbing erosion of memoryby scribbling hurried notes on scraps of paper that ended in confusion in each of his pockets, asdid the instruments, the bottles of medicine, and all the other things jumbled together in hiscrowded medical bag. He was not only the city's oldest and most illustrious physician, he was alsoits most fastidious man. Still, his too obvious display of learning and the disingenuous manner inwhich he used the power of his name had won him less affection than he deserved.
His instructions to the inspector and the intern were precise and rapid. There was no need foran autopsy; the odour in the house was sufficient proof that the cause of death had been thecyanide vapours activated in the tray by some photographic acid, and Jeremiah de Saint-Amourknew too much about those matters for it to have been an accident. When the inspector showedsome hesitation, he cut him off with the kind of remark that was typical of his manner: "Don'tforget that I am the one who signs the death certificate." The young doctor was disappointed: hehad never had the opportunity to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. Dr. JuvenalUrbino had been surprised that he had not seen him at the Medical School, but he understood in aninstant from the young man's easy blush and Andean accent that he was probably a recent arrivalto the city. He said: "There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you thechance one of these days." And only after he said it did he realise that among the countlesssuicides he could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by thesufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice.
"And when you do find one, observe with care," he said to the intern: "they almost alwayshave crystals in their heart."Then he spoke to the inspector as he would have to a subordinate. He ordered him tocircumvent all the legal procedures so that the burial could take place that same afternoon andwith the greatest discretion. He said: "I will speak to the Mayor later." He knew that Jeremiah deSaint-Amour lived in primitive austerity and that he earned much more with his art than heneeded, so that in one of the drawers in the house there was bound to be more than enough moneyfor the funeral expenses.
"But if you do not find it, it does not matter," he said. "I will take care of everything."He ordered him to tell the press that the photographer had died of natural causes, although hethought the news would in no way interest them. He said: "If it is necessary, I will speak to theGovernor." The inspector, a serious and humble civil servant, knew that the Doctor's sense of civicduty exasperated even his closest friends, and he was surprised at the ease with which he skippedover legal formalities in order to expedite the burial. The only thing he was not willing to do wasspeak to the Archbishop so that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour could be buried in holy ground. Theinspector, astonished at his own impertinence, attempted to make excuses for him.
"I understood this man was a saint," he said.
"Something even rarer," said Dr. Urbino. "An atheistic saint. But those are matters for God todecide."In the distance, on the other side of the colonial city, the bells of the Cathedral were ringingfor High Mass. Dr. Urbino put on his half-moon glasses with the gold rims and consulted thewatch on its chain, slim, elegant, with the cover that opened at a touch: he was about to missPentecost Mass.
In the parlour was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with picturesof children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday.
Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen thegradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in thegallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future city, governed and corrupted by thoseunknown children, where not even the ashes of his glory would remain.
On the desk, next to a jar that held several old sea dog's pipes, was the chessboard with anunfinished game. Despite his haste and his sombre mood, Dr. Urbino could not resist thetemptation to study it. He knew it was the previous night's game, for Jeremiah de Saint-Amourplayed at dusk every day of the week with at least three different opponents, but he alwaysfinished every game and then placed the board and chessmen in their box and stored the box in adesk drawer. The Doctor knew he played with the white pieces and that this time it was evident hewas going to be defeated without mercy in four moves. "If there had been a crime, this would be agood clue," Urbino said to himself. "I know only one man capable of devising this masterful trap."If his life depended on it, he had to find out later why that indomitable soldier, accustomed tofighting to the last drop of blood, had left the final battle of his life unfinished.
At six that morning, as he was making his last rounds, the night watchman had seen the notenailed to the street door: Come in without knocking and inform the police. A short while later theinspector arrived with the intern, and the two of them had searched the house for some evidencethat might contradict the unmistakable breath of bitter almonds. But in the brief minutes theDoctor needed to study the unfinished game, the inspector discovered an envelope among thepapers on the desk, addressed to Dr. Juvenal Urbino and sealed with so much sealing wax that ithad to be ripped to pieces to get the letter out. The Doctor opened the black curtain over thewindow to have more light, gave a quick glance at the eleven sheets covered on both sides by adiligent handwriting, and when he had read the first paragraph he knew that he would missPentecost Communion. He read with agitated breath, turning back on several pages to find thethread he had lost, and when he finished he seemed to return from very far away and very longago. His despondency was obvious despite his effort to control it: his lips were as blue as thecorpse and he could not stop the trembling of his fingers as he refolded the letter and placed it inhis vest pocket. Then he remembered the inspector and the young doctor, and he smiled at themthrough the mists of grief.
"Nothing in particular," he said. "His final instructions."It was a half-truth, but they thought it complete because he ordered them to lift a loose tilefrom the floor, where they found a worn account book that contained the combination to thestrongbox. There was not as much money as they expected, but it was more than enough for thefuneral expenses and to meet other minor obligations. Then Dr. Urbino realised that he could notget to the Cathedral before the Gospel reading.
"It's the third time I've missed Sunday Mass since I've had the use of my reason," he said.
"But God understands."So he chose to spend a few minutes more and attend to all the details, although he couldhardly bear his intense longing to share the secrets of the letter with his wife. He promised tonotify the numerous Caribbean refugees who lived in the city in case they wanted to pay their lastrespects to the man who had conducted himself as if he were the most respectable of them all, the most active and the most radical, even after it had become all too clear that he had beenoverwhelmed by the burden of disillusion. He would also inform his chess partners, who rangedfrom distinguished professional men to nameless labourers, as well as other, less intimateacquaintances who might perhaps wish to attend the funeral. Before he read the posthumous letterhe had resolved to be first among them, but afterward he was not certain of anything. In any case,he was going to send a wreath of gardenias in the event that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour hadrepented at the last moment. The burial would be at five, which was the most suitable hour duringthe hottest months. If they needed him, from noon on he would be at the country house of Dr. Lides Olivella, his beloved disciple, who was celebrating his silver anniversary in the professionwith a formal luncheon that day.
Once the stormy years of his early struggles were over, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had followed a setroutine and achieved a respectability and prestige that had no equal in the province. He arose atthe crack of dawn, when he began to take his secret medicines: potassium bromide to raise hisspirits, salicylates for the ache in his bones when it rained, ergosterol drops for vertigo, belladonnafor sound sleep. He took something every hour, always in secret, because in his long life as adoctor and teacher he had always opposed prescribing palliatives for old age: it was easier for himto bear other people's pains than his own. In his pocket he always carried a little pad of camphorthat he inhaled deeply when no one was watching to calm his fear of so many medicines mixedtogether.
He would spend an hour in his study preparing for the class in general clinical medicine thathe taught at the Medical School every morning, Monday through Saturday, at eight o'clock, untilthe day before his death. He was also an avid reader of the latest books that his bookseller in Parismailed to him, or the ones from Barcelona that his local bookseller ordered for him, although hedid not follow Spanish literature as closely as French. In any case, he never read them in themorning, but only for an hour after his siesta and at night before he went to sleep. When he wasfinished in the study he did fifteen minutes of respiratory exercises in front of the open window inthe bathroom, always breathing toward the side where the roosters were crowing, which waswhere the air was new. Then he bathed, arranged his beard and waxed his moustache in anatmosphere saturated with genuine cologne from Farina Gegen ber, and dressed in white linen,with a vest and a soft hat and cordovan boots. At eighty-one years of age he preserved the sameeasygoing manner and festive spirit that he had on his return from Paris soon after the greatcholera epidemic, and except for the metallic colour, his carefully combed hair with the centre partwas the same as it had been in his youth. He breakfasted en famille but followed his own personalregimen of an infusion of wormwood blossoms for his stomach and a head of garlic that he peeledand ate a clove at a time, chewing each one carefully with bread, to prevent heart failure. Afterclass it was rare for him not to have an appointment related to his civic initiatives, or his Catholicservice, or his artistic and social innovations.
He almost always ate lunch at home and had a ten-minute siesta on the terrace in the patio,hearing in his sleep the songs of the servant girls under the leaves of the mango trees, the cries ofvendors on the street, the uproar of oil and motors from the bay whose exhaust fumes flutteredthrough the house on hot afternoons like an angel condemned to putrefaction. Then he read hisnew books for an hour, above all novels and works of history, and gave lessons in French andsinging to the tame parrot who had been a local attraction for years. At four o'clock, after drinking a large glass of lemonade with ice, he left to call on his patients. In spite of his age he would notsee patients in his office and continued to care for them in their homes as he always had, since thecity was so domesticated that one could go anywhere in safety.
After he returned from Europe the first time, he used the family landau, drawn by two goldenchestnuts, but when this was no longer practical he changed it for a Victoria and a single horse,and he continued to use it, with a certain disdain for fashion, when carriages had already begun todisappear from the world and the only ones left in the city were for giving rides to tourists andcarrying wreaths at funerals. Although he refused to retire, he was aware that he was called in onlyfor hopeless cases, but he considered this a form of specialisation too. He could tell what waswrong with a patient just by looking at him, he grew more and more distrustful of patentmedicines, and he viewed with alarm the vulgarisation of surgery. He would say: "The scalpel isthe greatest proof of the failure of medicine." He thought that, in a strict sense, all medication waspoison and that seventy percent of common foods hastened death. "In any case," he would say inclass, "the little medicine we know is known only by a few doctors." From youthful enthusiasm hehad moved to a position that he himself defined as fatalistic humanism: "Each man is master of hisown death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain."But despite these extreme ideas, which were already part of local medical folklore, his formerpupils continued to consult him even after they were established in the profession, for theyrecognised in him what was called in those days a clinical eye. In any event, he was always anexpensive and exclusive doctor, and his patients were concentrated in the ancestral homes in theDistrict of the Viceroys.
His daily schedule was so methodical that his wife knew where to send him a message if anemergency arose in the course of the afternoon. When he was a young man he would stop in theParish Caf?before coming home, and this was where he perfected his chess game with his fatherin-law's cronies and some Caribbean refugees. But he had not returned to the Parish Caf?since thedawn of the new century, and he had attempted to organise national tournaments under thesponsorship of the Social Club. It was at this time that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour arrived, his kneesalready dead, not yet a photographer of children, yet in less than three months everyone who knewhow to move a bishop across a chessboard knew who he was, because no one had been able todefeat him in a game. For Dr. Juvenal Urbino it was a miraculous meeting, at the very momentwhen chess had become an unconquerable passion for him and he no longer had many opponentswho could satisfy it.
Thanks to him, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour could become what he was among us. Dr. Urbinomade himself his unconditional protector, his guarantor in everything, without even taking thetrouble to learn who he was or what he did or what inglorious Avars he had come from in hiscrippled, broken state. He eventually lent him the money to set up his photography studio, andfrom the time he took his first picture of a child startled by the magnesium flash, Jeremiah deSaint-Amour paid back every last penny with religious regularity.
It was all for chess. At first they played after supper at seven o'clock, with a reasonablehandicap for Jeremiah de Saint-Amour because of his notable superiority, but the handicap wasreduced until at last they played as equals. Later, when Don Galileo Daconte opened the firstoutdoor cinema, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was one of his most dependable customers, and thegames of chess were limited to the nights when a new film was not being shown. By then he and the Doctor had become such good friends that they would go to see the films together, but neverwith the Doctor's wife, in part because she did not have the patience to follow the complicated plotlines, and in part because it always seemed to her, through sheer intuition, that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was not a good companion for anyone.
His Sundays were different. He would attend High Mass at the Cathedral and then returnhome to rest and read on the terrace in the patio. He seldom visited a patient on a holy day ofobligation unless it was of extreme urgency, and for many years he had not accepted a socialengagement that was not obligatory. On this Pentecost, in a rare coincidence, two extraordinaryevents had occurred: the death of a friend and the silver anniversary of an eminent pupil. Yetinstead of going straight home as he had intended after certifying the death of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, he allowed himself to be carried along by curiosity.
As soon as he was in his carriage, he again consulted the posthumous letter and told thecoachman to take him to an obscure location in the old slave quarter. That decision was so foreignto his usual habits that the coachman wanted to make certain there was no mistake. No, nomistake: the address was clear and the man who had written it had more than enough reason toknow it very well. Then Dr. Urbino returned to the first page of the letter and plunged once againinto the flood of unsavoury revelations that might have changed his life, even at his age, if hecould have convinced himself that they were not the ravings of a dying man.
The sky had begun to threaten very early in the day and the weather was cloudy and cool, butthere was no chance of rain before noon. In his effort to find a shorter route, the coachman bravedthe rough cobblestones of the colonial city and had to stop often to keep the horse from beingfrightened by the rowdiness of the religious societies and fraternities coming back from thePentecost liturgy. The streets were full of paper garlands, music, flowers, and girls with colouredparasols and muslin ruffles who watched the celebration from their balconies. In the Plaza of theCathedral, where the statue of The Liberator was almost hidden among the African palm trees andthe globes of the new streetlights, traffic was congested because Mass had ended, and not a seatwas empty in the venerable and noisy Parish Caf? Dr. Urbino's was the only horse-drawn carriage;it was distinguishable from the handful left in the city because the patent-leather roof was alwayskept polished, and it had fittings of bronze that would not be corroded by salt, and wheels andpoles painted red with gilt trimming like gala nights at the Vienna Opera. Furthermore, while themost demanding families were satisfied if their drivers had a clean shirt, he still required hiscoachman to wear livery of faded velvet and a top hat like a circus ringmaster's, which, more thanan anachronism, was thought to show a lack of compassion in the dog days of the Caribbeansummer.
Despite his almost maniacal love for the city and a knowledge of it superior to anyone's, Dr.
Juvenal Urbino had not often had reason as he did that Sunday to venture boldly into the tumult ofthe old slave quarter. The coachman had to make many turns and stop to ask directions severaltimes in order to find the house. As they passed by the marshes, Dr. Urbino recognised theiroppressive weight, their ominous silence, their suffocating gases, which on so many insomniacdawns had risen to his bedroom, blending with the fragrance of jasmine from the patio, and whichhe felt pass by him like a wind out of yesterday that had nothing to do with his life. But thatpestilence so frequently idealised by nostalgia became an unbearable reality when the carriagebegan to lurch through the quagmire of the streets where buzzards fought over the slaughterhouse offal as it was swept along by the receding tide. Unlike the city of the Viceroys where the houseswere made of masonry, here they were built of weathered boards and zinc roofs, and most of themrested on pilings to protect them from the flooding of the open sewers that had been inherited fromthe Spaniards. Everything looked wretched and desolate, but out of the sordid taverns came thethunder of riotous music, the godless drunken celebration of Pentecost by the poor. By the timethey found the house, gangs of ragged children were chasing the carriage and ridiculing thetheatrical finery of the coachman, who had to drive them away with his whip. Dr. Urbino,prepared for a confidential visit, realised too late that there was no innocence more dangerous thanthe innocence of age.
The exterior of the unnumbered house was in no way distinguishable from its less fortunateneighbours, except for the window with lace curtains and an imposing front door taken from someold church. The coachman pounded the door knocker, and only when he had made certain that itwas the right house did he help the Doctor out of the carriage. The door opened without a sound,and in the shadowy interior stood a mature woman dressed in black, with a red rose behind her ear.
Despite her age, which was no less than forty, she was still a haughty mulatta with cruel goldeneyes and hair tight to her skull like a helmet of steel wool. Dr. Urbino did not recognise her,although he had seen her several times in the gloom of the chess games in the photographer'sstudio, and he had once written her a prescription for tertian fever. He held out his hand and shetook it between hers, less in greeting than to help him into the house. The parlour had the climateand invisible murmur of a forest glade and was crammed with furniture and exquisite objects, eachin its natural place. Dr. Urbino recalled without bitterness an antiquarian's shop, No .26 rueMontmartre in Paris, on an autumn Monday in the last century. The woman sat down across fromhim and spoke in accented Spanish.
"This is your house, Doctor," she said. "I did not expect you so soon."Dr. Urbino felt betrayed. He stared at her openly, at her intense mourning, at the dignity ofher grief, and then he understood that this was a useless visit because she knew more than he didabout everything stated and explained in Jeremiah de Saint-Amour's posthumous letter. This wastrue. She had been with him until a very few hours before his death, as she had been with him forhalf his life, with a devotion and submissive tenderness that bore too close a resemblance to love,and without anyone knowing anything about it in this sleepy provincial capital where even statesecrets were common knowledge. They had met in a convalescent home in Port-au-Prince, whereshe had been born and where he had spent his early years as a fugitive, and she had followed himhere a year later for a brief visit, although both of them knew without agreeing to anything that shehad come to stay forever. She cleaned and straightened the laboratory once a week, but not eventhe most evil-minded neighbours confused appearance with reality because they, like everyoneelse, supposed that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour's disability affected more than his capacity to walk.
Dr. Urbino himself supposed as much for solid medical reasons, and never would have believedhis friend had a woman if he himself had not revealed it in the letter. In any event, it was difficultfor him to comprehend that two free adults without a past and living on the fringes of a closedsociety's prejudices had chosen the hazards of illicit love. She explained: "It was his wish."Moreover, a clandestine life shared with a man who was never completely hers, and in which theyoften knew the sudden explosion of happiness, did not seem to her a condition to be despised. Onthe contrary: life had shown her that perhaps it was exemplary.
On the previous night they had gone to the cinema, each one separately, and had sat apart asthey had done at least twice a month since the Italian immigrant, Don Galileo Daconte, hadinstalled his open-air theatre in the ruins of a seventeenth-century convent. They saw All Quiet onthe Western Front, a film based on a book that had been popular the year before and that Dr.
Urbino had read, his heart devastated by the barbarism of war. They met afterward in thelaboratory, she found him brooding and nostalgic, and thought it was because of the brutal scenesof wounded men dying in the mud. In an attempt to distract him, she invited him to play chess andhe accepted to please her, but he played inattentively, with the white pieces, of course, until hediscovered before she did that he was going to be defeated in four moves and surrendered withouthonour. Then the Doctor realised that she had been his opponent in the final game, and notGeneral Jer nimo Argote, as he had supposed. He murmured in astonishment: "It wasmasterful!"She insisted that she deserved no praise, but rather that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, alreadylost in the mists of death, had moved his pieces without love. When he stopped the game at abouta quarter past eleven, for the music from the public dances had ended, he asked her to leave him.
He wanted to write a letter to Dr. Juvenal Urbino, whom he considered the most honourable manhe had ever known, and his soul's friend, as he liked to say, despite the fact that the only affinitybetween the two was their addiction to chess understood as a dialogue of reason and not as ascience. And then she knew that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had come to the end of his sufferingand that he had only enough life left to write the letter. The Doctor could not believe it.
"So then you knew!" he exclaimed.
She not only knew, she agreed, but she had helped him to endure the suffering as lovingly asshe had helped him to discover happiness. Because that was what his last eleven months had been:
cruel suffering.
"Your duty was to report him," said the Doctor.
"I could not do that," she said, shocked. "I loved him too much."Dr. Urbino, who thought he had heard everything, had never heard anything like that, andsaid with such simplicity. He looked straight at her and tried with all his senses to fix her in hismemory as she was at that moment: she seemed like a river idol, undaunted in her black dress,with her serpent's eyes and the rose behind her ear. A long time ago, on a deserted beach in Haitiwhere the two of them lay naked after love, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had sighed: "I will never beold." She interpreted this as a heroic determination to struggle without quarter against the ravagesof time, but he was more specific: he had made the irrevocable decision to take his own life whenhe was seventy years old.
He had turned seventy, in fact, on the twenty-third of January of that year, and then he had setthe date as the night before Pentecost, the most important holiday in a city consecrated to the cultof the Holy Spirit. There was not a single detail of the previous night that she had not known aboutahead of time, and they spoke of it often, suffering together the irreparable rush of days thatneither of them could stop now. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour loved life with a senseless passion, heloved the sea and love, he loved his dog and her, and as the date approached he had graduallysuccumbed to despair as if his death had been not his own decision but an inexorable destiny.
"Last night, when I left him, he was no longer of this world," she said.
She had wanted to take the dog with her, but he looked at the animal dozing beside the crutches and caressed him with the tips of his fingers. He said: "I'm sorry, but Mister WoodrowWilson is coming with me." He asked her to tie him to the leg of the cot while he wrote, and sheused a false knot so that he could free himself. That had been her only act of disloyalty, and it wasjustified by her desire to remember the master in the wintry eyes of his dog. But Dr. Urbinointerrupted her to say that the dog had not freed himself. She said: "Then it was because he did notwant to." And she was glad, because she preferred to evoke her dead lover as he had asked her tothe night before, when he stopped writing the letter he had already begun and looked at her for thelast time.
"Remember me with a rose," he said to her.
She had returned home a little after midnight. She lay down fully dressed on her bed, tosmoke one cigarette after another and give him time to finish what she knew was a long anddifficult letter, and a little before three o'clock, when the dogs began to howl, she put the water forcoffee on the stove, dressed in full mourning, and cut the first rose of dawn in the patio. Dr.
Urbino already realised how completely he would repudiate the memory of that irredeemablewoman, and he thought he knew why: only a person without principles could be so complaisanttoward grief.
And for the remainder of the visit she gave him even more justification. She would not go tothe funeral, for that is what she had promised her lover, although Dr. Urbino thought he had readjust the opposite in one of the paragraphs of the letter. She would not shed a tear, she would notwaste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory, she would not bury herselfalive inside these four walls to sew her shroud, as native widows were expected to do. Sheintended to sell Jeremiah de Saint-Amour's house and all its contents, which, according to theletter, now belonged to her, and she would go on living as she always had, without complaining, inthis death trap of the poor where she had been happy.
The words pursued Dr. Juvenal Urbino on the drive home: "this death trap of the poor." Itwas not a gratuitous description. For the city, his city, stood unchanging on the edge of time: thesame burning dry city of his nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowersrusted and salt corroded, where nothing had happened for four centuries except a slow agingamong withered laurels and putrefying swamps. In winter sudden devastating downpours floodedthe latrines and turned the streets into sickening bogs. In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best-protected corners of the imagination by mad winds thattook the roofs off the houses and carried away children through the air. On Saturdays the poormulattoes, along with all their domestic animals and kitchen utensils, tumultuously abandonedtheir hovels of cardboard and tin on the edges of the swamps and in jubilant assault took over therocky beaches of the colonial district. Until a few years ago, some of the older ones still bore theroyal slave brand that had been burned onto their chests with flaming irons. During the weekendthey danced without mercy, drank themselves blind on home-brewed alcohol, made wild loveamong the icaco plants, and on Sunday at midnight they broke up their own party with bloodyfree-for-alls. During the rest of the week the same impetuous mob swarmed into the plazas andalleys of the old neighbourhoods with their stores of everything that could be bought and sold, andthey infused the dead city with the frenzy of a human fair reeking of fried fish: a new life.
Independence from Spain and then the abolition of slavery precipitated the conditions ofhonourable decadence in which Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been born and raised. The great old families sank into their ruined palaces in silence. Along the rough cobbled streets that had servedso well in surprise attacks and buccaneer landings, weeds hung from the balconies and openedcracks in the whitewashed walls of even the best-kept mansions, and the only signs of life at twoo'clock in the afternoon were languid piano exercises played in the dim light of siesta. Indoors, inthe cool bedrooms saturated with incense, women protected themselves from the sun as if it werea shameful infection, and even at early Mass they hid their faces in their mantillas. Their loveaffairs were slow and difficult and were often disturbed by sinister omens, and life seemedinterminable. At nightfall, at the oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorousmosquitoes rose out of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirred thecertainty of death in the depths of one's soul.
And so the very life of the colonial city, which the young Juvenal Urbino tended to idealise inhis Parisian melancholy, was an illusion of memory. In the eighteenth century, the commerce ofthe city had been the most prosperous in the Caribbean, owing in the main to the thanklessprivilege of its being the largest African slave market in the Americas. It was also the permanentresidence of the Viceroys of the New Kingdom of Granada, who preferred to govern here on theshores of the world's ocean rather than in the distant freezing capital under a centuries-old drizzlethat disturbed their sense of reality. Several times a year, fleets of galleons carrying the treasuresof Potos? Quito, and Veracruz gathered in the bay, and the city lived its years of glory. On Friday,June 8, 1708, at four o'clock in the afternoon, the galleon San Jos?set sail for C iz with a cargoof precious stones and metals valued at five hundred billion pesos in the currency of the day; itwas sunk by an English squadron at the entrance to the port, and two long centuries later it had notyet been salvaged. That treasure lying in its bed of coral, and the corpse of the commander floatingsideways on the bridge, were evoked by historians as an emblem of the city drowned in memories.
Across the bay, in the residential district of La Manga, Dr. Juvenal Urbino's house stood inanother time. One-story, spacious and cool, it had a portico with Doric columns on the outsideterrace, which commanded a view of the still, miasmic water and the debris from sunken ships inthe bay. From the entrance door to the kitchen, the floor was covered with black and whitecheckerboard tiles, a fact often attributed to Dr. Urbino's ruling passion without taking intoaccount that this was a weakness common to the Catalonian craftsmen who built this district forthe nouveaux riches at the beginning of the century. The large drawing room had the very highceilings found throughout the rest of the house, and six full-length windows facing the street, andit was separated from the dining room by an enormous, elaborate glass door covered withbranching vines and bunches of grapes and maidens seduced by the pipes of fauns in a bronzegrove. The furnishings in the reception rooms, including the pendulum clock that stood like aliving sentinel in the drawing room, were all original English pieces from the late nineteenthcentury, and the lamps that hung from the walls were all teardrop crystal, and there were Svresvases and bowls everywhere and little alabaster statues of pagan idylls. But that Europeancoherence vanished in the rest of the house, where wicker armchairs were jumbled together withViennese rockers and leather footstools made by local craftsmen. Splendid hammocks from SanJacinto, with multicoloured fringe along the sides and the owner's name embroidered in Gothicletters with silk thread, hung in the bedrooms along with the beds. Next to the dining room, thespace that had originally been designed for gala suppers was used as a small music room forintimate concerts when famous performers came to the city. In order to enhance the silence, the tiles had been covered with the Turkish rugs purchased at the World's Fair in Paris; a recent modelof a victrola stood next to a stand that held records arranged with care, and in a corner, drapedwith a Manila shawl, was the piano that Dr. Urbino had not played for many years. Throughout thehouse one could detect the good sense and care of a woman whose feet were planted firmly on theground.
But no other room displayed the meticulous solemnity of the library, the sanctuary of Dr.
Urbino until old age carried him off. There, all around his father's walnut desk and the tuftedleather easy chairs, he had lined the walls and even the windows with shelves behind glass doors,and had arranged in an almost demented order the three thousand volumes bound in identicalcalfskin with his initials in gold on the spines. Unlike the other rooms, which were at the mercy ofnoise and foul winds from the port, the library always enjoyed the tranquillity and fragrance of anabbey. Born and raised in the Caribbean superstition that one opened doors and windows tosummon a coolness that in fact did not exist, Dr. Urbino and his wife at first felt their heartsoppressed by enclosure. But in the end they were convinced of the merits of the Roman strategyagainst heat, which consists of closing houses during the lethargy of August in order to keep outthe burning air from the street, and then opening them up completely to the night breezes. Andfrom that time on theirs was the coolest house under the furious La Manga sun, and it was adelight to take a siesta in the darkened bedrooms and to sit on the portico in the afternoon to watchthe heavy, ash-grey freighters from New Orleans pass by, and at dusk to see the wooden paddlesof the riverboats with their shining lights, purifying the stagnant garbage heap of the bay with thewake of their music. It was also the best protected from December through March, when thenorthern winds tore away roofs and spent the night circling like hungry wolves looking for a crackwhere they could slip in. No one ever thought that a marriage rooted in such foundations couldhave any reason not to be happy.
In any case, Dr. Urbino was not when he returned home that morning before ten o'clock,shaken by the two visits that not only had obliged him to miss Pentecost Mass but also threatenedto change him at an age when everything had seemed complete. He wanted a short siesta until itwas time for Dr. L ides Olivella's gala luncheon, but he found the servants in an uproar as theyattempted to catch the parrot, who had flown to the highest branches of the mango tree when theytook him from his cage to clip his wings. He was a deplumed, maniacal parrot who did not speakwhen asked to but only when it was least expected, but then he did so with a clarity and rationalitythat were uncommon among human beings. He had been tutored by Dr. Urbino himself, whichafforded him privileges that no one else in the family ever had, not even the children when theywere young.
He had lived in the house for over twenty years, and no one knew how many years he hadbeen alive before then. Every afternoon after his siesta, Dr. Urbino sat with him on the terrace inthe patio, the coolest spot in the house, and he had summoned the most diligent reserves of hispassion for pedagogy until the parrot learned to speak French like an academician. Then, just forlove of the labour, he taught him the Latin accompaniment to the Mass and selected passages fromthe Gospel according to St. Matthew, and he tried without success to inculcate in him a workingnotion of the four arithmetic functions. On one of his last trips to Europe he brought back the firstphonograph with a trumpet speaker, along with many of the latest popular records as well as thoseby his favourite classical composers. Day after day, over and over again for several months, he played the songs of Yvette Guilbert and Aristide Bruant, who had charmed France during the lastcentury, until the parrot learned them by heart. He sang them in a woman's voice if they were hers,in a tenor's voice if they were his, and ended with impudent laughter that was a masterful imitationof the servant girls when they heard him singing in French. The fame of his accomplishments wasso widespread that on occasion distinguished visitors who had travelled from the interior on theriverboats would ask permission to see him, and once some of the many English tourists, who inthose days sailed the banana boats from New Orleans, would have bought him at any price. Butthe day of his greatest glory was when the President of the Republic, Don Marco Fidel Su ez,with his entourage of cabinet ministers, visited the house in order to confirm the truth of hisreputation. They arrived at about three o'clock in the afternoon, suffocating in the top hats andfrock coats they had worn during three days of official visits under the burning August sky, andthey had to leave as curious as when they arrived, because for two desperate hours the parrotrefused to say a single syllable, ignoring the pleas and threats and public humiliation of Dr.
Urbino, who had insisted on that foolhardy invitation despite the sage warnings of his wife.
The fact that the parrot could maintain his privileges after that historic act of defiance was theultimate proof of his sacred rights. No other animal was permitted in the house, with the exceptionof the land turtle who had reappeared in the kitchen after three or four years, when everyonethought he was lost forever. He, however, was not considered a living being but rather a mineralgood luck charm whose location one could never be certain of. Dr. Urbino was reluctant to confesshis hatred of animals, which he disguised with all kinds of scientific inventions and philosophicalpretexts that convinced many, but not his wife. He said that people who loved them to excess werecapable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile,that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws weresimply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust,and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.
On the other hand, Fermina Daza, his wife, who at that time was seventy-two years old andhad already lost the doe's gait of her younger days, was an irrational idolater of tropical flowersand domestic animals, and early in her marriage she had taken advantage of the novelty of love tokeep many more of them in the house than good sense would allow. The first were threeDalmatians named after Roman emperors, who fought for the favours of a female who did honourto her name of Messalina, for it took her longer to give birth to nine pups than to conceive anotherten. Then there were Abyssinian cats with the profiles of eagles and the manners of pharaohs,cross-eyed Siamese and palace Persians with orange eyes, who walked through the rooms likeshadowy phantoms and shattered the night with the howling of their witches' sabbaths of love. Forseveral years an Amazonian monkey, chained by his waist to the mango tree in the patio, elicited acertain compassion because he had the sorrowful face of Archbishop Obdulio y Rey, the samecandid eyes, the same eloquent hands; that, however, was not the reason Fermina got rid of him,but because he had the bad habit of pleasuring himself in honour of the ladies.
There were all kinds of Guatemalan birds in cages along the passageways, and premonitorycurlews, and swamp herons with long yellow legs, and a young stag who came in through thewindows to eat the anthurium in the flowerpots. Shortly before the last civil war, when there wastalk for the first time of a possible visit by the Pope, they had brought a bird of paradise fromGuatemala, but it took longer to arrive than to return to its homeland when it was learned that the announcement of the pontifical visit had been a lie spread by the government to alarm theconspiratorial Liberals. Another time, on the smugglers' ships from Cura ao, they bought awicker cage with six perfumed crows identical to the ones that Fermina Daza had kept as a girl inher father's house and that she still wanted to have as a married woman. But no one could bear thecontinual flapping of their wings that filled the house with the reek of funeral wreaths. They alsobrought in an anaconda, four meters long, whose insomniac hunter's sighs disturbed the darknessin the bedrooms although it accomplished what they had wanted, which was to frighten with itsmortal breath the bats and salamanders and countless species of harmful insects that invaded thehouse during the rainy months. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, so occupied at that time with his professionalobligations and so absorbed in his civic and cultural enterprises, was content to assume that in themidst of so many abominable creatures his wife was not only the most beautiful woman in theCaribbean but also the happiest. But one rainy afternoon, at the end of an exhausting day, heencountered a disaster in the house that brought him to his senses. Out of the drawing room, andfor as far as the eye could see, a stream of dead animals floated in a marsh of blood. The servantgirls had climbed on the chairs, not knowing what to do, and they had not yet recovered from thepanic of the slaughter.
One of the German mastiffs, maddened by a sudden attack of rabies, had torn to pieces everyanimal of any kind that crossed its path, until the gardener from the house next door found thecourage to face him and hack him to pieces with his machete. No one knew how many creatureshe had bitten or contaminated with his green slaverings, and so Dr. Urbino ordered the survivorskilled and their bodies burned in an isolated field, and he requested the services of MisericordiaHospital for a thorough disinfecting of the house. The only animal to escape, because nobodyremembered him, was the giant lucky charm tortoise.
Fermina Daza admitted for the first time that her husband was right in a domestic matter, andfor a long while afterward she was careful to say no more about animals. She consoled herselfwith colour illustrations from Linnaeus's Natural History, which she framed and hung on thedrawing room walls, and perhaps she would eventually have lost all hope of ever seeing an animalin the house again if it had not been for the thieves who, early one morning, forced a bathroomwindow and made off with the silver service that had been in the family for five generations. Dr.
Urbino put double padlocks on the window frames, secured the doors on the inside with ironcrossbars, placed his most valuable possessions in the strongbox, and belatedly acquired thewartime habit of sleeping with a revolver under his pillow. But he opposed the purchase of a fiercedog, vaccinated or unvaccinated, running loose or chained up, even if thieves were to stealeverything he owned.
"Nothing that does not speak will come into this house," he said.
He said it to put an end to the specious arguments of his wife, who was once againdetermined to buy a dog, and he never imagined that his hasty generalisation was to cost him hislife. Fermina Daza, whose straightforward character had become more subtle with the years,seized on her husband's casual words, and months after the robbery she returned to the ships fromCura ao and bought a royal Paramaribo parrot, who knew only the blasphemies of sailors butsaid them in a voice so human that he was well worth the extravagant price of twelve centavos.
He was a fine parrot, lighter than he seemed, with a yellow head and a black tongue, the onlyway to distinguish him from mangrove parrots who did not learn to speak even with turpentine suppositories. Dr. Urbino, a good loser, bowed to the ingenuity of his wife and was even surprisedat how amused he was by the advances the parrot made when he was excited by the servant girls.
On rainy afternoons, his tongue loosened by the pleasure of having his feathers drenched, heuttered phrases from another time, which he could not have learned in the house and which ledone to think that he was much older than he appeared. The Doctor's final doubts collapsed onenight when the thieves tried to get in again through a skylight in the attic, and the parrot frightenedthem with a mastiff's barking that could not have been more realistic if it had been real, and withshouts of stop thief stop thief stop thief, two saving graces he had not learned in the house. It wasthen that Dr. Urbino took charge of him and ordered the construction of a perch under the mangotree with a container for water, another for ripe bananas, and a trapeze for acrobatics. FromDecember through March, when the nights were cold and the north winds made living outdoorsunbearable, he was taken inside to sleep in the bedrooms in a cage covered by a blanket, althoughDr. Urbino suspected that his chronic swollen glands might be a threat to the healthy respiration ofhumans. For many years they clipped his wing feathers and let him wander wherever he chose towalk with his hulking old horseman's gait. But one day he began to do acrobatic tricks on thebeams in the kitchen and fell into the pot of stew with a sailor's shout of every man for himself,and with such good luck that the cook managed to scoop him out with the ladle, scalded anddeplumed but still alive. From then on he was kept in the cage even during the daytime, indefiance of the vulgar belief that caged parrots forget everything they have learned, and let outonly in the four o'clock coolness for his classes with Dr. Urbino on the terrace in the patio. No onerealised in time that his wings were too long, and they were about to clip them that morning whenhe escaped to the top of the mango tree.
And for three hours they had not been able to catch him. The servant girls, with the help ofother maids in the neighbourhood, had used all kinds of tricks to lure him down, but he insisted onstaying where he was, laughing madly as he shouted long live the Liberal Party, long live theLiberal Party damn it, a reckless cry that had cost many a carefree drunk his life. Dr. Urbino couldbarely see him amid the leaves, and he tried to cajole him in Spanish and French and even inLatin, and the parrot responded in the same languages and with the same emphasis and timbre inhis voice, but he did not move from his treetop. Convinced that no one was going to make himmove voluntarily, Dr. Urbino had them send for the fire department, his most recent civic pastime.
Until just a short time before, in fact, fires had been put out by volunteers using brickmasons'
ladders and buckets of water carried in from wherever it could be found, and methods sodisorderly that they sometimes caused more damage than the fires. But for the past year, thanks toa fund-organised by the Society for Public Improvement, of which Juvenal Urbino was honorarypresident, there was a corps of professional firemen and a water truck with a siren and a bell andtwo high-pressure hoses. They were so popular that classes were suspended when the church bellswere heard sounding the alarm, so that children could watch them fight the fire. At first that wasall they did. But Dr. Urbino told the municipal authorities that in Hamburg he had seen firemenrevive a boy found frozen in a basement after a three-day snowstorm. He had also seen them in aNeapolitan alley lowering a corpse in his coffin from a tenth-floor balcony because the stairway inthe building had so many twists and turns that the family could not get him down to the street.
That was how the local firemen learned to render other emergency services, such as forcing locksor killing poisonous snakes, and the Medical School offered them a special course in first aid for minor accidents. So it was in no way peculiar to ask them to please get a distinguished parrot, withall the qualities of a gentleman, out of a tree. Dr. Urbino said: "Tell them it's for me." And he wentto his bedroom to dress for the gala luncheon. The truth was that at that moment, devastated by theletter from Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, he did not really care about the fate of the parrot.
Fermina Daza had put on a loose-fitting silk dress belted at the hip, a necklace of real pearlswith six long, uneven loops, and high-heeled satin shoes that she wore only on very solemnoccasions, for by now she was too old for such abuses. Her stylish attire did not seem appropriatefor a venerable grandmother, but it suited her figure--long-boned and still slender and erect, herresilient hands without a single age spot, her steel-blue hair bobbed on a slant at her cheek. Herclear almond eyes and her inborn haughtiness were all that were left to her from her weddingportrait, but what she had been deprived of by age she more than made up for in character anddiligence. She felt very well: the time of iron corsets, bound waists, and bustles that exaggeratedbuttocks was receding into the past. Liberated bodies, breathing freely, showed themselves forwhat they were. Even at the age of seventy-two.
Dr. Urbino found her sitting at her dressing table under the slow blades of the electric fan,putting on her bell-shaped hat decorated with felt violets. The bedroom was large and bright, withan English bed protected by mosquito netting embroidered in pink, and two windows open to thetrees in the patio, where one could hear the clamour of cicadas, giddy with premonitions of rain.
Ever since their return from their honeymoon, Fermina Daza had chosen her husband's clothesaccording to the weather and the occasion, and laid them out for him on a chair the night before sothey would be ready for him when he came out of the bathroom. She could not remember whenshe had also begun to help him dress, and finally to dress him, and she was aware that at first shehad done it for love, but for the past five years or so she had been obliged to do it regardless of thereason because he could not dress himself. They had just celebrated their golden weddinganniversary, and they were not capable of living for even an instant without the other, or withoutthinking about the other, and that capacity diminished as their age increased. Neither could havesaid if their mutual dependence was based on love or convenience, but they had never asked thequestion with their hands on their hearts because both had always preferred not to know theanswer. Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband's step, his moodchanges, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did notidentify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood.
That was why she did not treat him like a difficult old man but as a senile baby, and that deceptionwas providential for the two of them because it put them beyond the reach of pity.
Life would have been quite another matter for them both if they had learned in time that itwas easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes than trivial everyday miseries. But if they hadlearned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good. Foryears Fermina Daza had endured her husband's jubilant dawns with a bitter heart. She clung to thelast threads of sleep in order to avoid facing the fatality of another morning full of sinisterpremonitions, while he awoke with the innocence of a newborn: each new day was one more dayhe had won. She heard him awake with the roosters, and his first sign of life was a cough withoutrhyme or reason that seemed intended to awaken her too. She heard him grumble, just to annoyher, while he felt around for the slippers that were supposed to be next to the bed. She heard himmake his way to the bathroom, groping in the dark. After an hour in his study, when she had fallen asleep again, he would come back to dress, still without turning on the light. Once, during a partygame, he had been asked how he defined himself, and he had said: "I am a man who dresses in thedark." She heard him, knowing full well that not one of those noises was indispensable, and thathe made them on purpose although he pretended not to, just as she was awake and pretended notto be. His motives were clear: he never needed her awake and lucid as much as he did during thosefumbling moments.
There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and herhand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed thesensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was. Dr. Urbino knew she waswaiting for his slightest sound, that she even would be grateful for it, just so she could blamesomeone for waking her at five o'clock in the morning, so that on the few occasions when he hadto feel around in the dark because he could not find his slippers in their customary place, shewould suddenly say in a sleepy voice: "You left them in the bathroom last night." Then right afterthat, her voice fully awake with rage, she would curse: "The worst misfortune in this house is thatnobody lets you sleep."Then she would roll over in bed and turn on the light without the least mercy for herself,content with her first victory of the day. The truth was they both played a game, mythical andperverse, but for all that comforting: it was one of the many dangerous pleasures of domestic love.
But one of those trivial games almost ended the first thirty years of their life together, because oneday there was no soap in the bathroom.
It began with routine simplicity. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had returned to the bedroom, in the dayswhen he still bathed without help, and begun to dress without turning on the light. As usual shewas in her warm foetal state, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow, that arm from a sacred danceabove her head. But she was only half asleep, as usual, and he knew it. After a prolonged sound ofstarched linen in the darkness, Dr. Urbino said to himself: "I've been bathing for almost a weekwithout any soap."Then, fully awake, she remembered, and tossed and turned in fury with the world because infact she had forgotten to replace the soap in the bathroom. She had noticed its absence three daysearlier when she was already under the shower, and she had planned to replace it afterward, butthen she forgot until the next day, and on the third day the same thing happened again. The truthwas that a week had not gone by, as he said to make her feel more guilty, but three unpardonabledays, and her anger at being found out in a mistake maddened her. As always, she defended herselfby attacking.
"Well I've bathed every day," she shouted, beside herself with rage, "and there's always beensoap."Although he knew her battle tactics by heart, this time he could not abide them. On someprofessional pretext or other he went to live in the interns' quarters at Misericordia Hospital,returning home only to change his clothes before making his evening house calls. She headed forthe kitchen when she heard him come in, pretending that she had something to do, and stayedthere until she heard his carriage in the street. For the next three months, each time they tried toresolve the conflict they only inflamed their feelings even more. He was not ready to come back aslong as she refused to admit there had been no soap in the bathroom, and she was not prepared tohave him back until he recognised that he had consciously lied to torment her.
The incident, of course, gave them the opportunity to evoke many other trivial quarrels frommany other dim and turbulent dawns. Resentments stirred up other resentments, reopened oldscars, turned them into fresh wounds, and both were dismayed at the desolating proof that in somany years of conjugal battling they had done little more than nurture their rancour. At last heproposed that they both submit to an open confession, with the Archbishop himself if necessary, sothat God could decide once and for all whether or not there had been soap in the soap dish in thebathroom. Then, despite all her self-control, she lost her temper with a historic cry: "To hell withthe Archbishop!"The impropriety shook the very foundations of the city, gave rise to slanders that were noteasy to disprove, and was preserved in popular tradition as if it were a line from an operetta: "Tohell with the Archbishop!" Realising she had gone too far, she anticipated her husband'spredictable response and threatened to move back to her father's old house, which still belonged toher although it had been rented out for public offices, and live there by herself. And it was not anidle threat: she really did want to leave and did not care about the scandal, and her husbandrealised this in time. He did not have the courage to defy his own prejudices, and he capitulated.
Not in the sense that he admitted there had been soap in the bathroom, but insofar as he continuedto live in the same house with her, although they slept in separate rooms, and he did not say aword to her. They ate in silence, sparring with so much skill that they sent each other messagesacross the table through the children, and the children never realised that they were
Chapter 1 (2)
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11
Chapter 2
FLORENTINO ARIZA, on the other hand, had not stopped thinking of her for a single momentsince Fermina Daza had rejected him out of hand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-oneyears, nine months, and four days ago. He did not have to keep a running tally, drawing a line foreach day on the walls of a cell, because not a day had passed that something did not happen toremind him of her. At the time of their separation he lived with his mother, Trsito Ariza, in onehalf of a rented house on the Street of Windows, where she had kept a notions shop ever since shewas a young woman, and where she also unravelled shirts and old rags to sell as bandages for themen wounded in the war. He was her only child, born of an occasional alliance with the well-known shipowner Don Pius V Loayza, one of the three brothers who had founded the RiverCompany of the Caribbean and thereby given new impetus to steam navigation along theMagdalena River.
Don Pius V Loayza died when his son was ten years old. Although he always took care of hisexpenses in secret, he never recognised him as his son before the law, nor did he leave him withhis future secure, so that Florentino Ariza used only his mother's name even though his trueparentage was always common knowledge. Florentino Ariza had to leave school after his father'sdeath, and he went to work as an apprentice in the Postal Agency, where he was in charge ofopening sacks, sorting the letters, and notifying the public that mail had arrived by flying the flagof its country of origin over the office door.
His good sense attracted the attention of the telegraph operator, the German igr?LotarioThugut, who also played the organ for important ceremonies in the Cathedral and gave musiclessons in the home. Lotario Thugut taught him the Morse code and the workings of the telegraphsystem, and after only a few lessons on the violin Florentino Ariza could play by ear like aprofessional. When he met Fermina Daza he was the most sought-after young man in his socialcircle, the one who knew how to dance the latest dances and recite sentimental poetry by heart,and who was always willing to play violin serenades to his friends' sweethearts. He was very thin,with Indian hair plastered down with scented pomade and eyeglasses for myopia, which added tohis forlorn appearance. Aside from his defective vision, he suffered from chronic constipation,which forced him to take enemas throughout his life. He had one black suit, inherited from hisdead father, but Trsito Ariza took such good care of it that every Sunday it looked new. Despitehis air of weakness, his reserve, and his sombre clothes, the girls in his circle held secret lotteriesto determine who would spend time with him, and he gambled on spending time with them untilthe day he met Fermina Daza and his innocence came to an end.
He had seen her for the first time one afternoon when Lotario Thugut told him to deliver atelegram to someone named Lorenzo Daza, with no known place of residence. He found him inone of the oldest houses on the Park of the Evangels; it was half in ruins, and its interior patio,with weeds in the flowerpots and a stone fountain with no water, resembled an abbey cloister.
Florentino Ariza heard no human sound as he followed the barefoot maid under the arches of thepassageway, where unopened moving cartons and bricklayer's tools lay among leftover lime andstacks of cement bags, for the house was undergoing drastic renovation. At the far end of the patio was a temporary office where a very fat man, whose curly sideburns grew into his moustache, satbehind a desk, taking his siesta. In fact his name was Lorenzo Daza, and he was not very wellknown in the city because he had arrived less than two years before and was not a man with manyfriends.
He received the telegram as if it were the continuation of an ominous dream. Florentino Arizaobserved his livid eyes with a kind of official compassion, he observed his uncertain fingers tryingto break the seal, the heartfelt fear that he had seen so many times in so many addressees who stillcould not think about telegrams without connecting them with death. After reading it he regainedhis composure. He sighed: "Good news." And he handed Florentino Ariza the obligatory fivereales, letting him know with a relieved smile that he would not have given them to him if thenews had been bad. Then he said goodbye with a handshake, which was not the usual thing to dowith a telegraph messenger, and the maid accompanied him to the street door, more to keep an eyeon him than to lead the way. They retraced their steps along the arcaded passageway, but this timeFlorentino Ariza knew that there was someone else in the house, because the brightness in thepatio was filled with the voice of a woman repeating a reading lesson. As he passed the sewingroom, he saw through the window an older woman and a young girl sitting very close together ontwo chairs and following the reading in the book that the woman held open on her lap. It seemed astrange sight: the daughter teaching the mother to read. His interpretation was incorrect only inpart, because the woman was the aunt, not the mother of the child, although she had raised her asif she were her own. The lesson was not interrupted, but the girl raised her eyes to see who waspassing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that stillhad not ended half a century later.
All that Florentino Ariza could learn about Lorenzo Daza was that he had come from SanJuan de la Ci aga with his only daughter and his unmarried sister soon after the choleraepidemic, and those who saw him disembark had no doubt that he had come to stay since hebrought everything necessary for a well-furnished house. His wife had died when the girl was veryyoung. His sister, named Escol tica, was forty years old, and she was fulfilling a vow to wearthe habit of St. Francis when she went out on the street and the penitent's rope around her waistwhen she was at home. The girl was thirteen years old and had the same name as her dead mother:
Fermina.
It was supposed that Lorenzo Daza was a man of means, because he lived well with noknown employment and had paid hard cash for the Park of the Evangels house, whose restorationmust have cost him at least twice the purchase price of two hundred gold pesos. His daughter wasstudying at the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, where for two centuries youngladies of society had learned the art and technique of being diligent and submissive wives. Duringthe colonial period and the early years of the Republic, the school had accepted only thosestudents with great family names. But the old families, ruined by Independence, had to submit tothe realities of a new time, and the Academy opened its doors to all applicants who could pay thetuition, regardless of the colour of their blood, on the essential condition that they were legitimatedaughters of Catholic marriages. In any event, it was an expensive school, and the fact thatFermina Daza studied there was sufficient indication of her family's economic situation, if not ofits social position. This news encouraged Florentino Ariza, since it indicated to him that thebeautiful adolescent with the almond-shaped eyes was within reach of his dreams. But her father's strict regime soon provided an irremediable difficulty. Unlike the other students, who walked toschool in groups or accompanied by an older servant, Fermina Daza always walked with herspinster aunt, and her behaviour indicated that she was permitted no distraction.
It was in this innocent way that Florentino Ariza began his secret life as a solitary hunter.
From seven o'clock in the morning, he sat on the most hidden bench in the little park, pretendingto read a book of verse in the shade of the almond trees, until he saw the impossible maiden walkby in her blue-striped uniform, stockings that reached to her knees, masculine laced oxfords, and asingle thick braid with a bow at the end, which hung down her back to her waist. She walked withnatural haughtiness, her head high, her eyes unmoving, her step rapid, her nose pointing straightahead, her bag of books held against her chest with crossed arms, her doe's gait making her seemimmune to gravity. At her side, struggling to keep up with her, the aunt with the brown habit andrope of St. Francis did not allow him the slightest opportunity to approach. Florentino Ariza sawthem pass back and forth four times a day and once on Sundays when they came out of HighMass, and just seeing the girl was enough for him. Little by little he idealised her, endowing herwith improbable virtues and imaginary sentiments, and after two weeks he thought of nothing elsebut her. So he decided to send Fermina Daza a simple note written on both sides of the paper in hisexquisite notary's hand. But he kept it in his pocket for several days, thinking about how to hand itto her, and while he thought he wrote several more pages before going to bed, so that the originalletter was turning into a dictionary of compliments, inspired by books he had learned by heartbecause he read them so often during his vigils in the park.
Searching for a way to give her the letter, he tried to make the acquaintance of some of theother students at Presentation Academy, but they were too distant from his world. Besides, aftermuch thought, it did not seem prudent to let anyone else know of his intentions. Still, he managedto find out that Fermina Daza had been invited to a Saturday dance a few days after their arrival inthe city, and her father had not allowed her to go, with a conclusive: "Everything in due course."By the time the letter contained more than sixty pages written on both sides, Florentino Arizacould no longer endure the weight of his secret, and he unburdened himself to his mother, the onlyperson with whom he allowed himself any confidences. Trsito Ariza was moved to tears by herson's innocence in matters of love, and she tried to guide him with her own knowledge. She beganby convincing him not to deliver the lyrical sheaf of papers, since it would only frighten the girl ofhis dreams, who she supposed was as green as he in matters of the heart. The first step, she said,was to make her aware of his interest so that his declaration would not take her so much bysurprise and she would have time to think.
"But above all," she said, "the first person you have to win over is not the girl but her aunt."Both pieces of advice were wise, no doubt, but they came too late. In reality, on the day whenFermina Daza let her mind wander for an instant from the reading lesson she was giving her auntand raised her eyes to see who was walking along the passageway, Florentino Ariza had impressedher because of his air of vulnerability. That night, during supper, her father had mentioned thetelegram, which was how she found out why Florentino Ariza had come to the house and what hedid for a living. This information increased her interest, because for her, as for so many otherpeople at that time, the invention of the telegraph had something magical about it. So that sherecognised Florentino Ariza the first time she saw him reading under the trees in the little park,although it in no way disquieted her until her aunt told her he had been there for several weeks.
Then, when they also saw him on Sundays as they came out of Mass, her aunt was convinced thatall these meetings could not be casual. She said: "He is not going to all this trouble for me." Fordespite her austere conduct and penitential habit, Aunt Escol tica had an instinct for life and avocation for complicity, which were her greatest virtues, and the mere idea that a man wasinterested in her niece awakened an irresistible emotion in her. Fermina Daza, however, was stillsafe from even simple curiosity about love, and the only feeling that Florentino Ariza inspired inher was a certain pity, because it seemed to her that he was sick. But her aunt told her that one hadto live a long time to know a man's true nature, and she was convinced that the one who sat in thepark to watch them walk by could only be sick with love.
Aunt Escoltica was a refuge of understanding and affection for the only child of a lovelessmarriage. She had raised her since the death of her mother, and in her relations with Lorenzo Dazashe behaved more like an accomplice than an aunt. So that the appearance of Florentino Ariza wasfor them another of the many intimate diversions they invented to pass the time. Four times a day,when they walked through the little Park of the Evangels, both hurried to look with a rapid glanceat the thin, timid, unimpressive sentinel who was almost always dressed in black despite the heatand who pretended to read under the trees. "There he is," said the one who saw him first,suppressing her laughter, before he raised his eyes and saw the two rigid, aloof women of his lifeas they crossed the park without looking at him.
"Poor thing," her aunt had said. "He does not dare approach you because I am with you, butone day he will if his intentions are serious, and then he will give you a letter."Foreseeing all kinds of adversities, she taught her to communicate in sign language, anindispensable strategy in forbidden love. These unexpected, almost childish antics caused anunfamiliar curiosity in Fermina Daza, but for several months it did not occur to her that it could goany further. She never knew when the diversion became a preoccupation and her blood frothedwith the need to see him, and one night she awoke in terror because she saw him looking at herfrom the darkness at the foot of her bed. Then she longed with all her soul for her aunt'spredictions to come true, and in her prayers she begged God to give him the courage to hand herthe letter just so she could know what it said.
But her prayers were not answered. On the contrary. This occurred at the time that FlorentinoAriza made his confession to his mother, who dissuaded him from handing Fermina Daza hisseventy pages of compliments, so that she continued to wait for the rest of the year. Herpreoccupation turned into despair as the December vacation approached, and she asked herselfover and over again how she would see him and let him see her during the three months when shewould not be walking to school. Her doubts were still unresolved on Christmas Eve, when she wasshaken by the presentiment that he was in the crowd at Midnight Mass, looking at her, and thisuneasiness flooded her heart. She did not dare to turn her head, because she was sitting betweenher father and her aunt, and she had to control herself so that they would not notice her agitation.
But in the crowd leaving the church she felt him so close, so clearly, that an irresistible powerforced her to look over her shoulder as she walked along the central nave and then, a hand'sbreadth from her eyes, she saw those icy eyes, that livid face, those lips petrified by the terror oflove. Dismayed by her own audacity, she seized Aunt Escol tica's arm so she would not fall,and her aunt felt the icy perspiration on her hand through the lace mitt, and she comforted her withan imperceptible sign of unconditional complicity. In the din of fireworks and native drums, ofcoloured lights in the doorways and the clamour of the crowd yearning for peace, Florentino Arizawandered like a sleepwalker until dawn, watching the fiesta through his tears, dazed by thehallucination that it was he and not God who had been born that night.
His delirium increased the following week, when he passed Fermina Daza's house in despairat the siesta hour and saw that she and her aunt were sitting under the almond trees at the doorway.
It was an open-air repetition of the scene he had witnessed the first afternoon in the sewing room:
the girl giving a reading lesson to her aunt. But Fermina Daza seemed different without the schooluniform, for she wore a narrow tunic with many folds that fell from her shoulders in the Greekstyle, and on her head she wore a garland of fresh gardenias that made her look like a crownedgoddess. Florentino Ariza sat in the park where he was sure he would be seen, and then he did nothave recourse to his feigned reading but sat with the book open and his eyes fixed on the illusorymaiden, who did not even respond with a charitable glance.
At first he thought that the lesson under the almond trees was a casual innovation due,perhaps, to the interminable repairs on the house, but in the days that followed he came tounderstand that Fermina Daza would be there, within view, every afternoon at the same timeduring the three months of vacation, and that certainty filled him with new hope. He did not havethe impression that he was seen, he could not detect any sign of interest or rejection, but in herindifference there was a distinct radiance that encouraged him to persevere. Then, one afternoontoward the end of January, the aunt put her work on the chair and left her niece alone in thedoorway under the shower of yellow leaves falling from the almond trees. Encouraged by theimpetuous thought that this was an arranged opportunity, Florentino Ariza crossed the street andstopped in front of Fermina Daza, so close to her that he could detect the catches in her breathingand the floral scent that he would identify with her for the rest of his life. He spoke with his headhigh and with a determination that would be his again only half a century later, and for the samereason.
"All I ask is that you accept a letter from me," he said.
It was not the voice that Fermina Daza had expected from him: it was sharp and clear, with acontrol that had nothing to do with his languid manner. Without lifting her eyes from herembroidery, she replied: "I cannot accept it without my father's permission." Florentino Arizashuddered at the warmth of that voice, whose hushed tones he was not to forget for the rest of hislife. But he held himself steady and replied without hesitation: "Get it." Then he sweetened thecommand with a plea: "It is a matter of life and death." Fermina Daza did not look at him, she didnot interrupt her embroidering, but her decision opened the door a crack, wide enough for theentire world to pass through.
"Come back every afternoon," she said to him, "and wait until I change my seat."Florentino Ariza did not understand what she meant until the following Monday when, fromthe bench in the little park, he saw the same scene with one variation: when Aunt Escol ticawent into the house, Fermina Daza stood up and then sat in the other chair. Florentino Ariza, witha white camellia in his lapel, crossed the street and stood in front of her. He said: "This is thegreatest moment of my life." Fermina Daza did not raise her eyes to him, but she looked allaround her and saw the deserted streets in the heat of the dry season and a swirl of dead leavespulled along by the wind.
"Give it to me," she said.
Florentino Ariza had intended to give her the seventy sheets he could recite from memoryafter reading them so often, but then he decided on a sober and explicit half page in which hepromised only what was essential: his perfect fidelity and his everlasting love. He took the letterout of his inside jacket pocket and held it before the eyes of the troubled embroiderer, who hadstill not dared to look at him. She saw the blue envelope trembling in a hand petrified with terror,and she raised the embroidery frame so he could put the letter on it, for she could not admit thatshe had noticed the trembling of his fingers. Then it happened: a bird shook himself among theleaves of the almond trees, and his droppings fell right on the embroidery. Fermina Daza movedthe frame out of the way, hid it behind the chair so that he would not notice what had happened,and looked at him for the first time, her face aflame. Florentino Ariza was impassive as he held theletter in his hand and said: "It's good luck." She thanked him with her first smile and almostsnatched the letter away from him, folded it, and hid it in her bodice. Then he offered her thecamellia he wore in his lapel. She refused: "It is a flower of promises." Then, conscious that theirtime was almost over, she again took refuge in her composure.
"Now go," she said, "and don't come back until I tell you to."After Florentino Ariza saw her for the first time, his mother knew before he told her becausehe lost his voice and his appetite and spent the entire night tossing and turning in his bed. Butwhen he began to wait for the answer to his first letter, his anguish was complicated by diarrhoeaand green vomit, he became disoriented and suffered from sudden fainting spells, and his motherwas terrified because his condition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastationof cholera. Florentino Ariza's godfather, an old homoeopathic practitioner who had been TrsitoAriza's confidant ever since her days as a secret mistress, was also alarmed at first by the patient'scondition, because he had the weak pulse, the hoarse breathing, and the pale perspiration of adying man. But his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his onlyconcrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first ofthe patient and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were thesame as those of cholera. He prescribed infusions of linden blossoms to calm the nerves andsuggested a change of air so he could find consolation in distance, but Florentino Ariza longed forjust the opposite: to enjoy his martyrdom.
Tr sito Ariza was a freed quadroon whose instinct for happiness had been frustrated bypoverty, and she took pleasure in her son's suffering as if it were her own. She made him drink theinfusions when he became delirious, and she smothered him in wool blankets to keep away thechills, but at the same time she encouraged him to enjoy his prostration.
"Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can," she said to him,"because these things don't last your whole life."In the Postal Agency, of course, they did not agree. Florentino Ariza had become negligent,and he was so distracted that he confused the flags that announced the arrival of the mail, and oneWednesday he hoisted the German flag when the ship was from the Leyland Company and carriedthe mail from Liverpool, and on another day he flew the flag of the United States when the shipwas from the Compagnie G ale Transatlantique and carried the mail from Saint-Nazaire.
These confusions of love caused such chaos in the distribution of the mail and provoked so manyprotests from the public that if Florentino Ariza did not lose his job it was because Lotario Thugutkept him at the telegraph and took him to play the violin in the Cathedral choir. They had afriendship difficult to understand because of the difference in their ages, for they might have beengrandfather and grandson, but they got along at work as well as they did in the taverns around theport, which were frequented by everyone out for the evening regardless of social class, fromdrunken beggars to young gentlemen in tuxedos who fled the gala parties at the Social Club to eatfried mullet and coconut rice. Lotario Thugut was in the habit of going there after the last shift atthe telegraph office, and dawn often found him drinking Jamaican punch and playing theaccordion with the crews of madmen from the Antillean schooners. He was corpulent and bull-necked, with a golden beard and a liberty cap that he wore when he went out at night, and all heneeded was a string of bells to look like St. Nicholas. At least once a week he ended the eveningwith a little night bird, as he called them, one of the many who sold emergency love in a transienthotel for sailors. When he met Florentino Ariza, the first thing he did, with a certain magisterialdelight, was to initiate him into the secrets of his paradise. He chose for him the little birds hethought best, he discussed their price and style with them and offered to pay in advance with hisown money for their services. But Florentino Ariza did not accept: he was a virgin, and he haddecided not to lose his virginity unless it was for love.
The hotel was a colonial palace that had seen better days, and its great marble salons androoms were divided into plasterboard cubicles with peepholes, which were rented out as much forwatching as for doing. There was talk of busybodies who had their eyes poked out with knittingneedles, of a man who recognised his own wife as the woman he was spying on, of well-bredgentlemen who came disguised as tarts to forget who they were with the boatswains on shoreleave, and of so many other misadventures of observers and observed that the mere idea of goinginto the next room terrified Florentino Ariza. And so Lotario Thugut could never persuade himthat watching and letting himself be watched were the refinements of European princes.
As opposed to what his corpulence might suggest, Lotario Thugut had the rosebud genitals ofa cherub, but this must have been a fortunate defect, because the most tarnished birds argued overwho would have the chance to go to bed with him, and then they shrieked as if their throats werebeing cut, shaking the buttresses of the palace and making its ghosts tremble in fear. They said heused an ointment made of snake venom that inflamed women's loins, but he swore he had noresources other than those that God had given him. He would say with uproarious laughter: "It'spure love." Many years had to pass before Florentino Ariza would understand that perhaps he wasright. He was convinced at last, at a more advanced stage of his sentimental education, when hemet a man who lived like a king by exploiting three women at the same time. The three of themrendered their accounts at dawn, prostrate at his feet to beg forgiveness for their meagre profits,and the only gratification they sought was that he go to bed with the one who brought him themost money. Florentino Ariza thought that terror alone could induce such indignities, but one ofthe three girls surprised him with the contradictory truth.
"These are things," she said, "you do only for love."It was not so much for his talents as a fornicator as for his personal charm that LotarioThugut had become one of the most esteemed clients of the hotel. Florentino Ariza, because hewas so quiet and elusive, also earned the esteem of the owner, and during the most arduous periodof his grief he would lock himself in the suffocating little rooms to read verses and tearfulserialised love stories, and his reveries left nests of dark swallows on the balconies and the soundof kisses and the beating of wings in the stillness of siesta. At dusk, when it was cooler, it wasimpossible not to listen to the conversations of men who came to console themselves at the end oftheir day with hurried love. So that Florentino Ariza heard about many acts of disloyalty, and evensome state secrets, which important clients and even local officials confided to their ephemerallovers, not caring if they could be overheard in the adjoining rooms. This was also how he learnedthat four nautical leagues to the north of the Sotavento Archipelago, a Spanish galleon had beenlying under water since the eighteenth century with its cargo of more than five hundred billionpesos in pure gold and precious stones. The story astounded him, but he did not think of it againuntil a few months later, when his love awakened in him an overwhelming desire to salvage thesunken treasure so that Fermina Daza could bathe in showers of gold.
Years later, when he tried to remember what the maiden idealised by the alchemy of poetryreally was like, he could not distinguish her from the heartrending twilights of those times. Evenwhen he observed her, unseen, during those days of longing when he waited for a reply to his firstletter, he saw her transfigured in the afternoon shimmer of two o'clock in a shower of blossomsfrom the almond trees where it was always April regardless of the season of the year. The onlyreason he was interested in accompanying Lotario Thugut on his violin from the privilegedvantage point in the choir was to see how her tunic fluttered in the breeze raised by the canticles.
But his own delirium finally interfered with that pleasure, for the mystic music seemed soinnocuous compared with the state of his soul that he attempted to make it more exciting with lovewaltzes, and Lotario Thugut found himself obliged to ask that he leave the choir. This was the timewhen he gave in to his desire to eat the gardenias that Trsito Ariza grew in pots in the patio, sothat he could know the taste of Fermina Daza. It was also the time when he happened to find inone of his mother's trunks a litre bottle of the cologne that the sailors from the Hamburg-AmericanLine sold as contraband, and he could not resist the temptation to sample it in order to discoverother tastes of his beloved. He continued to drink from the bottle until dawn, and he became drunkon Fermina Daza in abrasive swallows, first in the taverns around the port and then as he staredout to sea from the jetties where lovers without a roof over their heads made consoling love, untilat last he succumbed to unconsciousness. Trsito Ariza, who had waited for him until six o'clockin the morning with her heart in her mouth, searched for him in the most improbable hidingplaces, and a short while after noon she found him wallowing in a pool of fragrant vomit in a coveof the bay where drowning victims washed ashore.
She took advantage of the hiatus of his convalescence to reproach him for his passivity as hewaited for the answer to his letter. She reminded him that the weak would never enter the kingdomof love, which is a harsh and ungenerous kingdom, and that women give themselves only to menof resolute spirit, who provide the security they need in order to face life. Florentino Ariza learnedthe lesson, perhaps too well. Tr sito Ariza could not hide a feeling of pride, more carnal thanmaternal, when she saw him leave the notions shop in his black suit and stiff felt hat, his lyricalbow tie and celluloid collar, and she asked him as a joke if he was going to a funeral. Heanswered, his ears flaming: "It's almost the same thing." She realised that he could hardly breathewith fear, but his determination was invincible. She gave him her final warnings and her blessing,and laughing for all she was worth, she promised him another bottle of cologne so they couldcelebrate his victory together.
He had given Fermina Daza the letter a month before, and since then he had often broken hispromise not to return to the little park, but he had been very careful not to be seen. Nothing hadchanged. The reading lesson under the trees ended at about two o'clock, when the city was wakingfrom its siesta, and Fermina Daza embroidered with her aunt until the day began to cool.
Florentino Ariza did not wait for the aunt to go into the house, and he crossed the street with amartial stride that allowed him to overcome the weakness in his knees, but he spoke to her aunt,not to Fermina Daza.
"Please be so kind as to leave me alone for a moment with the young lady," he said. "I havesomething important to tell her.""What impertinence!" her aunt said to him. "There is nothing that has to do with her that Icannot hear.""Then I will not say anything to her," he said, "but I warn you that you will be responsible forthe consequences."That was not the manner Escoltica Daza expected from the ideal sweetheart, but she stoodup in alarm because for the first time she had the overwhelming impression that Florentino Arizawas speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So she went into the house to changeneedles and left the two young people alone under the almond trees in the doorway.
In reality, Fermina Daza knew very little about this taciturn suitor who had appeared in herlife like a winter swallow and whose name she would not even have known if it had not been forhis signature on the letter. She had learned that he was the fatherless son of an unmarried womanwho was hardworking and serious but forever marked by the fiery stigma of her single youthfulmistake. She had learned that he was not a messenger, as she had supposed, but a well-qualifiedassistant with a promising future, and she thought that he had delivered the telegram to her fatheronly as a pretext for seeing her. This idea moved her. She also knew that he was one of themusicians in the choir, and although she never dared raise her eyes to look at him during Mass,she had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone, the violinplayed for her alone. He was not the kind of man she would have chosen. His foundling'seyeglasses, his clerical garb, his mysterious resources had awakened in her a curiosity that wasdifficult to resist, but she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love.
She herself could not explain why she had accepted the letter. She did not reproach herselffor doing so, but the ever-increasing pressure to respond complicated her life. Her father's everyword, his casual glances, his most trivial gestures, seemed set with traps to uncover her secret. Herstate of alarm was such that she avoided speaking at the table for fear some slip might betray her,and she became evasive even with her Aunt Escol tica, who nonetheless shared her repressedanxiety as if it were her own. She would lock herself in the bathroom at odd hours and for noreason other than to reread the letter, attempting to discover a secret code, a magic formula hiddenin one of the three hundred fourteen letters of its fifty-eight words, in the hope they would tell hermore than they said. But all she found was what she had understood on first reading, when she ranto lock herself in the bathroom, her heart in a frenzy, and tore open the envelope hoping for a long,feverish letter, and found only a perfumed note whose determination frightened her.
At first she had not even thought seriously that she was obliged to respond, but the letter wasso explicit that there was no way to avoid it. Meanwhile, in the torment of her doubts, she wassurprised to find herself thinking about Florentino Ariza with more frequency and interest than shecared to allow, and she even asked herself in great distress why he was not in the little park at theusual hour, forgetting that it was she who had asked him not to return while she was preparing herreply. And so she thought about him as she never could have imagined thinking about anyone,having premonitions that he would be where he was not, wanting him to be where he could not be,awaking with a start, with the physical sensation that he was looking at her in the darkness whileshe slept, so that on the afternoon when she heard his resolute steps on the yellow leaves in thelittle park it was difficult for her not to think this was yet another trick of her imagination. Butwhen he demanded her answer with an authority that was so different from his languor, shemanaged to overcome her fear and tried to dodge the issue with the truth: she did not know how toanswer him. But Florentino Ariza had not leapt across an abyss only to be shooed away with suchexcuses.
"If you accepted the letter," he said to her, "it shows a lack of courtesy not to answer it."That was the end of the labyrinth. Fermina Daza regained her self-control, begged his pardonfor the delay, and gave him her solemn word that he would have an answer before the end of thevacation. And he did. On the last Friday in February, three days before school reopened, AuntEscol tica went to the telegraph office to ask how much it cost to send a telegram to Piedras deMoler, a village that did not even appear on the list of places served by the telegraph, and sheallowed Florentino Ariza to attend her as if she had never seen him before, but when she left shepretended to forget a breviary covered in lizard skin, leaving it on the counter, and in it there wasan envelope made of linen paper with golden vignettes. Delirious with joy, Florentino Ariza spentthe rest of the afternoon eating roses and reading the note letter by letter, over and over again, andthe more he read the more roses he ate, and by midnight he had read it so many times and hadeaten so many roses that his mother had to hold his head as if he were a calf and force him toswallow a dose of castor oil.
It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except thinkabout the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they feltwhen they answered them. Never in that delirious spring, or in the following year, did they havethe opportunity to speak to each other. Moreover, from the moment they saw each other for thefirst time until he reiterated his determination a half century later, they never had the opportunityto be alone or to talk of their love. But during the first three months not one day went by that theydid not write to each other, and for a time they wrote twice a day, until Aunt Escol tica becamefrightened by the intensity of the blaze that she herself had helped to ignite.
After the first letter that she carried to the telegraph office with an ember of revenge againsther own destiny, she had allowed an almost daily exchange of messages in what appeared to becasual encounters on the street, but she did not have the courage to permit a conversation, nomatter how banal and fleeting it might be. Still, after three months she realised that her niece wasnot the victim of a girlish fancy, as it had seemed at first, and that her own life was threatened bythe fire of love. The truth was that Escol tica Daza had no other means of support except herbrother's charity, and she knew that his tyrannical nature would never forgive such a betrayal ofhis confidence. But when it was time for the final decision, she did not have the heart to cause herniece the same irreparable grief that she had been obliged to nurture ever since her youth, and shepermitted her to use a strategy that allowed her the illusion of innocence. The method was simple:
Fermina Daza would leave her letter in some hiding place along her daily route from the house tothe Academy, and in that letter she would indicate to Florentino Ariza where she expected to findhis answer. Florentino Ariza did the same. In this way, for the rest of the year, the conflicts in AuntEscol tica's conscience were transferred to baptisteries in churches, holes in trees, and cranniesin ruined colonial fortresses. Sometimes their letters were soaked by rain, soiled by mud, torn byadversity, and some were lost for a variety of other reasons, but they always found a way to be intouch with each other again.
Florentino Ariza wrote every night. Letter by letter, he had no mercy as he poisoned himselfwith the smoke from the palm oil lamps in the back room of the notions shop, and his lettersbecame more discursive and more lunatic the more he tried to imitate his favourite poets from thePopular Library, which even at that time was approaching eighty volumes. His mother, who hadurged him with so much fervour to enjoy his torment, became concerned for his health. "You aregoing to wear out your brains," she shouted at him from the bedroom when she heard the firstroosters crow. "No woman is worth all that." She could not remember ever having known anyonein such a state of unbridled passion. But he paid no attention to her. Sometimes he went to theoffice without having slept, his hair in an uproar of love after leaving the letter in the prearrangedhiding place so that Fermina Daza would find it on her way to school. She, on the other hand,under the watchful eye of her father and the vicious spying of the nuns, could barely manage to fillhalf a page from her notebook when she locked herself in the bathroom or pretended to take notesin class. But this was not only due to her limited time and the danger of being taken by surprise, itwas also her nature that caused her letters to avoid emotional pitfalls and confine themselves torelating the events of her daily life in the utilitarian style of a ship's log. In reality they weredistracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, whileFlorentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line. Desperate to infect her with his own madness,he sent her miniaturist's verses inscribed with the point of a pin on camellia petals. It was he, notshe, who had the audacity to enclose a lock of his hair in one letter, but he never received theresponse he longed for, which was an entire strand of Fermina Daza's braid. He did move her atlast to take one step further, and from that time on she began to send him the veins of leaves driedin dictionaries, the wings of butterflies, the feathers of magic birds, and for his birthday she gavehim a square centimetre of St. Peter Clavier's habit, which in those days was being sold in secret ata price far beyond the reach of a schoolgirl her age. One night, without any warning, FerminaDaza awoke with a start: a solo violin was serenading her, playing the same waltz over and overagain. She shuddered when she realised that each note was an act of thanksgiving for the petalsfrom her herbarium, for the moments stolen from arithmetic to write her letters, for her fear ofexaminations when she was thinking more about him than about the natural sciences, but she didnot dare believe that Florentino Ariza was capable of such imprudence.
The next morning at breakfast Lorenzo Daza could not contain his curiosity--first because hedid not know what playing a single piece meant in the language of serenades, and second because,despite the attention with which he had listened, he could not determine which house it had beenintended for. Aunt Escol tica, with a sangfroid that took her niece's breath away, stated that shehad seen through the bedroom curtains that the solitary violinist was standing on the other side ofthe park, and she said that in any event a single piece was notification of severed relations. In thatday's letter Florentino Ariza confirmed that he had played the serenade, that he had composed thewaltz, and that it bore the name he called Fermina Daza in his heart: "The Crowned Goddess." Hedid not play it in the park again, but on moonlit nights in places chosen so that she could listenwithout fear in her bedroom. One of his favoured spots was the paupers' cemetery, exposed to thesun and the rain on an indigent hill, where turkey buzzards dozed and the music achieved asupernatural resonance. Later he learned to recognise the direction of the winds, and in this way hewas certain that his melody carried as far as it had to.
In August of that year a new civil war, one of the many that had been devastating the countryfor over half a century, threatened to spread, and the government imposed martial law and a sixo'clock curfew in the provinces along the Caribbean coast. Although some disturbances hadalready occurred, and the troops had committed all kinds of retaliatory abuses, Florentino Arizawas so befuddled that he was unaware of the state of the world, and a military patrol surprised himone dawn as he disturbed the chastity of the dead with his amorous provocations. By some miraclehe escaped summary execution after he was accused of being a spy who sent messages in the keyof G to the Liberal ships marauding in nearby waters.
"What the hell do you mean, a spy?" said Florentino Ariza. "I'm nothing but a poor lover."For three nights he slept with irons around his ankles in the cells of the local garrison. Butwhen he was released he felt defrauded by the brevity of his captivity, and even in the days of hisold age, when so many other wars were confused in his memory, he still thought he was the onlyman in the city, and perhaps the country, who had dragged five-pound leg irons for the sake oflove.
Their frenetic correspondence was almost two years old when Florentino Ariza, in a letter ofonly one paragraph, made a formal proposal of marriage to Fermina Daza. On several occasionsduring the preceding six months he had sent her a white camellia, but she would return it to him inher next letter so that he would have no doubt that she was disposed to continue writing to him,but without the seriousness of an engagement. The truth is that she had always taken the comingsand goings of the camellia as a lovers' game, and it had never occurred to her to consider it as acrossroads in her destiny. But when the formal proposal arrived she felt herself wounded for thefirst time by the clawings of death. Panic-stricken, she told her Aunt Escol tica, who gave heradvice with the courage and lucidity she had not had when she was twenty and was forced todecide her own fate.
"Tell him yes," she said. "Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, becausewhatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no."Fermina Daza, however, was so confused that she asked for some time to think it over. Firstshe asked for a month, then two, then three, and when the fourth month had ended and she hadstill not replied, she received a white camellia again, not alone in the envelope as on otheroccasions but with the peremptory notification that this was the last one: it was now or never.
Then that same afternoon it was Florentino Ariza who saw the face of death when he received anenvelope containing a strip of paper, torn from the margin of a school notebook, on which a one-line answer was written in pencil: Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eateggplant.
Florentino Ariza was not prepared for that answer, but his mother was. Since he had firstspoken to her six months earlier about his intention to marry, Tr sito Ariza had begunnegotiations for renting the entire house which, until that time, she had shared with two otherfamilies. A two-story structure dating from the seventeenth century, it was the building where thetobacco monopoly had been located under Spanish rule, and its ruined owners had been obliged torent it out in bits and pieces because they did not have the money to maintain it. It had one sectionfacing the street, where the retail tobacco shop had been, another section at the rear of a pavedpatio, where the factory had been located, and a very large stable that the current tenants used incommon for washing and drying their clothes. Tr sito Ariza occupied the first section, whichwas the most convenient and the best preserved, although it was also the smallest. The notionsstore was in the old tobacco shop, with a large door facing the street, and to one side was theformer storeroom, with only a skylight for ventilation, where Trsito Ariza slept. The stockroomtook up half the space that was divided by a wooden partition. In it were a table and four chairs,used for both eating and writing, and it was there that Florentino Ariza hung his hammock whendawn did not find him writing. It was a good space for the two of them, but too small for a thirdperson, least of all a young lady from the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virginwhose father had restored a house in ruins until it was like new, while the families with seventitles went to bed with the fear that the roofs of their mansions would cave in on them while theyslept. So Tr sito Ariza had arranged with the owner to let her also occupy the gallery in thepatio, and in exchange she would keep the house in good condition for five years.
She had the resources to do so. In addition to the cash income from the notions store and thehemostatic rags, which sufficed for her modest life, she had multiplied her savings by lendingthem to a clientele made up of the embarrassed new poor, who accepted her excessive interestrates for the sake of her discretion. Ladies with the airs of queens descended from their carriagesat the entrance to the notions shop, unencumbered by nursemaids or servants, and as theypretended to buy Holland laces and passementerie trimmings, they pawned, between sobs, the lastglittering ornaments of their lost paradise. Tr sito Ariza rescued them from difficulties with somuch consideration for their lineage that many of them left more grateful for the honour than forthe favour they had received. In less than ten years she knew the jewels, so often redeemed andthen tearfully pawned again, as if they had been her own, and at the time her son decided to marry,the profits, converted into gold, lay hidden in a clay jar under her bed. Then she did her accountsand discovered not only that she could undertake to keep the rented house standing for five years,but that with the same shrewdness and a little more luck she could perhaps buy it, before she died,for the twelve grandchildren she hoped to have. Florentino Ariza, for his part, had receivedprovisional appointment as First Assistant at the telegraph office, and Lotario Thugut wanted himto head the office when he left to direct the School of Telegraphy and Magnetism, which heexpected to do the following year.
So the practical side of the marriage was resolved. Still, Tr sito Ariza thought that twofinal conditions were prudent. The first was to find out who Lorenzo Daza really was, for thoughhis accent left no doubt concerning his origins, no one had any certain information as to hisidentity and livelihood. The second was that the engagement be a long one so that the fianccould come to know each other person to person, and that the strictest reserve be maintained untilboth felt very certain of their affections. She suggested they wait until the war was over.
Florentino Ariza agreed to absolute secrecy, not only for his mother's reasons but because of thehermeticism of his own character. He also agreed to the delay, but its terms seemed unrealistic tohim, since in over half a century of independent life the nation had not had a single day of civilpeace.
"We'll grow old waiting," he said.
His godfather, the homoeopathic practitioner, who happened to be taking part in theconversation, did not believe that the wars were an obstacle. He thought they were nothing morethan the struggles of the poor, driven like oxen by the landowners, against barefoot soldiers whowere driven in turn by the government.
"The war is in the mountains," he said. "For as long as I can remember, they have killed us inthe cities with decrees, not with bullets."In any case, the details of the engagement were settled in their letters during the weeks thatfollowed. Fermina Daza, on the advice of her Aunt Escol tica, accepted both the two-yearextension and the condition of absolute secrecy, and suggested that Florentino Ariza ask for herhand when she finished secondary school, during the Christmas vacation. When the time camethey would decide on how the engagement was to be formalised, depending on the degree ofapproval she obtained from her father. In the meantime, they continued to write to each other withthe same ardour and frequency, but free of the turmoil they had felt before, and their letters tendedtoward a domestic tone that seemed appropriate to husband and wife. Nothing disturbed theirdreams.
Florentino Ariza's life had changed. Requited love had given him a confidence and strengthhe had never known before, and he was so efficient in his work that Lotario Thugut had no troublehaving him named his permanent assistant. By that time his plans for the School of Telegraphyand Magnetism had failed, and the German dedicated his free time to the only thing he reallyenjoyed: going to the port to play the accordion and drink beer with the sailors, finishing theevening at the transient hotel. It was a long time before Florentino Ariza, realised that LotarioThugut's influence in the palace of pleasure was due to the fact that he had become the owner ofthe establishment as well as impresario for the birds in the port. He had bought it gradually withhis savings of many years, but the person who ran it for him was a lean, one-eyed little man with apolished head and a heart so kind that no one understood how he could be such a good manager.
But he was. At least it seemed that way to Florentino Ariza when the manager told him, withouthis requesting it, that he had the permanent use of a room in the hotel, not only to resolveproblems of the lower belly whenever he decided to do so, but so that he could have at his disposala quiet place for his reading and his love letters. And as the long months passed until theformalising of the engagement, he spent more time there than at the office or his house, and therewere periods when Trsito Ariza saw him only when he came home to change his clothes.
Reading had become his insatiable vice. Ever since she had taught him to read, his motherhad bought him illustrated books by Nordic authors which were sold as stories for children but inreality were the crudest and most perverse that one could read at any age. When he was five yearsold, Florentino Ariza would recite them from memory, both in his classes and at literary eveningsat school, but his familiarity with them did not alleviate the terror they caused. On the contrary, itbecame acute. So that when he began to read poetry, by comparison it was like finding an oasis.
Even during his adolescence he had devoured, in the order of their appearance, all the volumes ofthe Popular Library that Tr sito Ariza bought from the bargain booksellers at the Arcade of theScribes, where one could find everything from Homer to the least meritorious of the local poets.
But he made no distinctions: he read whatever came his way, as if it had been ordained by fate,and despite his many years of reading, he still could not judge what was good and what was not inall that he had read. The only thing clear to him was that he preferred verse to prose, and in versehe preferred love poems that he memorised without even intending to after the second reading,and the better rhymed and metered they were, and the more heartrending, the more easily helearned them.
They were the original source of his first letters to Fermina Daza, those half-bakedendearments taken whole from the Spanish romantics, and his letters continued in that vein untilreal life obliged him to concern himself with matters more mundane than heartache. By that timehe had moved on to tearful serialised novels and other, even more profane prose of the day. He hadlearned to cry with his mother as they read the pamphlets by local poets that were sold in plazasand arcades for two centavos each. But at the same time he was able to recite from memory themost exquisite Castilian poetry of the Golden Age. In general, he read everything that fell into hishands in the order in which it fell, so that long after those hard years of his first love, when he wasno longer young, he would read from first page to last the twenty volumes of the Young People'sTreasury, the complete catalogue of the Gamier Bros. Classics in translation, and the simplestworks that Don Vicente Blasco Ibz published in the Prometeo collection.
In any event, his youthful adventures in the transient hotel were not limited to reading andcomposing feverish letters but also included his initiation into the secrets of loveless love. Life inthe house began after noon, when his friends the birds got up as bare as the day they were born, sothat when Florentino Ariza arrived after work he found a palace populated by naked nymphs whoshouted their commentaries on the secrets of the city, which they knew because of thefaithlessness of the protagonists. Many displayed in their nudity traces of their past: scars of knifethrusts in the belly, starbursts of gunshot wounds, ridges of the razor cuts of love, Caesareansections sewn up by butchers. Some of them had their young children with them during the day,those unfortunate fruits of youthful defiance or carelessness, and they took off their children'sclothes as soon as they were brought in so they would not feel different in that paradise of nudity.
Each one cooked her own food, and no one ate better than Florentino Ariza when they invited himfor a meal, because he chose the best from each. It was a daily fiesta that lasted until dusk, whenthe naked women marched, singing, toward the bathrooms, asked to borrow soap, toothbrushes,scissors, cut each other's hair, dressed in borrowed clothes, painted themselves like lugubriousclowns, and went out to hunt the first prey of the night. Then life in the house became impersonaland dehumanised, and it was impossible to share in it without paying.
Since he had known Fermina Daza, there was no place where Florentino Ariza felt more atease, because it was the only place where he felt that he was with her. Perhaps it was for similarreasons that an elegant older woman with beautiful silvery hair lived there but did not participatein the uninhibited life of the naked women, who professed sacramental respect for her. Apremature sweetheart had taken her there when she was young, and after enjoying her for a time,abandoned her to her fate. Nevertheless, despite the stigma, she had made a good marriage. Whenshe was quite old and alone, two sons and three daughters argued over who would have thepleasure of taking her to live with them, but she could not think of a better place to live than thathotel of her youthful debaucheries. Her permanent room was her only home, and this made forimmediate communion with Florentino Ariza, who, she said, would become a wise man knownthroughout the world because he could enrich his soul with reading in a paradise of salaciousness.
Florentino Ariza, for his part, developed so much affection for her that he helped her with hershopping and would spend the afternoons in conversation with her. He thought she was a womanwise in the ways of love, since she offered many insights into his affair without his having toreveal any secrets to her.
If he had not given in to the many temptations at hand before he experienced Fermina Daza'slove, he certainly would not succumb now that she was his official betrothed. So Florentino Arizalived with the girls and shared their pleasures and miseries, but it did not occur to him or them togo any further. An unforeseen event demonstrated the severity of his determination. One afternoonat six o'clock, when the girls were dressing to receive that evening's clients, the woman whocleaned the rooms on his floor in the hotel came into his cubicle. She was young, but haggard andold before her time, like a fully dressed penitent surrounded by glorious nakedness. He saw herevery day without feeling himself observed: she walked through the rooms with her brooms, abucket for the trash, and a special rag for picking up used condoms from the floor. She came intothe room where Florentino Ariza lay reading, and as always she cleaned with great care so as notto disturb him. Then she passed close to the bed, and he felt a warm and tender hand low on hisbelly, he felt it searching, he felt it finding, he felt it unbuttoning his trousers while her breathingfilled the room. He pretended to read until he could not bear it any longer and had to move hisbody out of the way.
She was dismayed, for the first thing they warned her about when they gave her the cleaningjob was that she should not try to sleep with the clients. They did not have to tell her that, becauseshe was one of those women who thought that prostitution did not mean going to bed for moneybut going to bed with a stranger. She had two children, each by a different father, not because theywere casual adventures but because she could never love any man who came back after the thirdvisit. Until that time she had been a woman without a sense of urgency, a woman whose natureprepared her to wait without despair, but life in that house proved stronger than her virtue. Shecame to work at six in the afternoon, and she spent the whole night going through the rooms,sweeping them out, picking up condoms, changing the sheets. It was difficult to imagine thenumber of things that men left after love. They left vomit and tears, which seemed understandableto her, but they also left many enigmas of intimacy: puddles of blood, patches of excrement, glasseyes, gold watches, false teeth, lockets with golden curls, love letters, business letters, condolenceletters--all kinds of letters. Some came back for the items they had lost, but most were unclaimed,and Lotario Thugut kept them under lock and key and thought that sooner or later the palace thathad seen better days, with its thousands of forgotten belongings, would become a museum of love.
The work was hard and the pay was low, but she did it well. What she could not endure werethe sobs, the laments, the creaking of the bedsprings, which filled her blood with so much ardourand so much sorrow that by dawn she could not bear the desire to go to bed with the first beggarshe met on the street, with any miserable drunk who would give her what she wanted with nopretensions and no questions. The appearance of a man like Florentino Ariza, young, clean, andwithout a woman, was for her a gift from heaven, because from the first moment she realised thathe was just like her: someone in need of love. But he was unaware of her compelling desire. Hehad kept his virginity for Fermina Daza, and there was no force or argument in this world thatcould turn him from his purpose.
That was his life, four months before the date set for formalising the engagement, whenLorenzo Daza showed up at the telegraph office one morning at seven o'clock and asked for him.
Since he had not yet arrived, Lorenzo Daza waited on the bench until ten minutes after eight,slipping a heavy gold ring with its noble opal stone from one finger to another, and as soon asFlorentino Ariza came in, he recognised him as the employee who had delivered the telegram, andhe took him by the arm.
"Come with me, my boy," he said. "You and I have to talk for five minutes, man to man."Florentino Ariza, as green as a corpse, let himself be led. He was not prepared for thismeeting, because Fermina Daza had not found either the occasion or the means to warn him. Thefact was that on the previous Saturday, Sister Franca de la Luz, Superior of the Academy of thePresentation of the Blessed Virgin, had come into the class on Ideas of Cosmogony with thestealth of a serpent, and spying on the students over their shoulders, she discovered that FerminaDaza was pretending to take notes in her notebook when in reality she was writing a love letter.
According to the rules of the Academy, that error was reason for expulsion. Lorenzo Dazareceived an urgent summons to the rectory, where he discovered the leak through which his ironregime was trickling. Fermina Daza, with her innate fortitude, confessed to the error of the letter,but refused to reveal the identity of her secret sweetheart and refused again before the Tribunal ofthe Order which, therefore, confirmed the verdict of expulsion. Her father, however, searched herroom, until then an inviolate sanctuary, and in the false bottom of her trunk he found the packetsof three years' worth of letters hidden away with as much love as had inspired their writing. Thesignature was unequivocal, but Lorenzo Daza could not believe--not then, not ever--that hisdaughter knew nothing about her secret lover except that he worked as a telegraph operator andthat he loved the violin.
Certain that such an intricate relationship was understandable only with the complicity of hissister, he did not grant her the grace of an excuse or the right of appeal, but shipped her on theschooner to San Juan de la C
Chapter 2 (2)
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Chapter 3
AT THE AGE of twenty-eight, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been the most desirable of bachelors. Hehad returned from a long stay in Paris, where he had completed advanced studies in medicine andsurgery, and from the time he set foot on solid ground he gave overwhelming indications that hehad not wasted a minute of his time. He returned more fastidious than when he left, more incontrol of his nature, and none of his contemporaries seemed as rigorous and as learned as he inhis science, and none could dance better to the music of the day or improvise as well on the piano.
Seduced by his personal charms and by the certainty of his family fortune, the girls in his circleheld secret lotteries to determine who would spend time with him, and he gambled, too, on beingwith them, but he managed to keep himself in a state of grace, intact and tempting, until hesuccumbed without resistance to the plebeian charms of Fermina Daza.
He liked to say that this love was the result of a clinical error. He himself could not believethat it had happened, least of all at that time in his life when all his reserves of passion wereconcentrated on the destiny of his city which, he said with great frequency and no secondthoughts, had no equal in the world. In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart througha late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons,with the woody odour of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable loverskissing on the open terraces, and still he had told himself with his hand on his heart that he wasnot prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still tooyoung to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanksto this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he stood at the railing of theship and saw the white promontory of the colonial district again, the motionless buzzards on theroofs, the washing of the poor hung out to dry on the balconies, only then did he understand towhat extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.
The ship made its way across the bay through a floating blanket of drowned animals, andmost of the passengers took refuge in their cabins to escape the stench. The young doctor walkeddown the gangplank dressed in perfect alpaca, wearing a vest and dustcoat, with the beard of ayoung Pasteur and his hair divided by a neat, pale part, and with enough self-control to hide thelump in his throat caused not by terror but by sadness. On the nearly deserted dock guarded bybarefoot soldiers without uniforms, his sisters and mother were waiting for him, along with hisclosest friends, whom he found insipid and without expectations despite their sophisticated airs;they spoke about the crisis of the civil war as if it were remote and foreign, but they all had anevasive tremor in their voices and an uncertainty in their eyes that belied their words. His mothermoved him most of all. She was still young, a woman who had made a mark on life with herelegance and social drive, but who was now slowly withering in the aroma of camphor that rosefrom her widow's crepe. She must have seen herself in her son's confusion, and she asked inimmediate self-defence why his skin was as pale as wax.
"It's life over there, Mother," he said. "You turn green in Paris."A short while later, suffocating with the heat as he sat next to her in the closed carriage, hecould no longer endure the unmerciful reality that came pouring in through the window. The oceanlooked like ashes, the old palaces of the marquises were about to succumb to a proliferation ofbeggars, and it was impossible to discern the ardent scent of jasmine behind the vapours of deathfrom the open sewers. Everything seemed smaller to him than when he left, poorer and sadder, andthere were so many hungry rats in the rubbish heaps of the streets that the carriage horsesstumbled in fright. On the long trip from the port to his house, located in the heart of the Districtof the Viceroys, he found nothing that seemed worthy of his nostalgia. Defeated, he turned hishead away so that his mother would not see, and he began to cry in silence.
The former palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, historic residence of the Urbino de la Callefamily, had not escaped the surrounding wreckage. Dr. Juvenal Urbino discovered this with abroken heart when he entered the house through the gloomy portico and saw the dusty fountain inthe interior garden and the wild brambles in flower beds where iguanas wandered, and he realisedthat many marble flagstones were missing and others were broken on the huge stairway with itscopper railings that led to the principal rooms. His father, a physician who was more self-sacrificing than eminent, had died in the epidemic of Asian cholera that had devastated thepopulation six years earlier, and with him had died the spirit of the house. Do a Blanca, hismother, smothered by mourning that was considered eternal, had substituted evening novenas forher dead husband's celebrated lyrical soir s and chamber concerts. His two sisters, despite theirnatural inclinations and festive vocation, were fodder for the convent.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not sleep at all on the night of his return; he was frightened by thedarkness and the silence, and he said three rosaries to the Holy Spirit and all the prayers he couldremember to ward off calamities and shipwrecks and all manner of night terrors, while a curlewthat had come in through a half-closed door sang every hour on the hour in his bedroom. He wastormented by the hallucinating screams of the madwomen in the Divine Shepherdess Asylum nextdoor, the harsh dripping from the water jar into the washbasin which resonated throughout thehouse, the long-legged steps of the curlew wandering in his bedroom, his congenital fear of thedark, and the invisible presence of his dead father in the vast, sleeping mansion. When the curlewsang five o'clock along with the local roosters, Dr. Juvenal Urbino commended himself body andsoul to Divine Providence because he did not have the heart to live another day in his rubble-strewn homeland. But in time the affection of his family, the Sundays in the country, and thecovetous attentions of the unmarried women of his class mitigated the bitterness of his firstimpression. Little by little he grew accustomed to the sultry heat of October, to the excessiveodours, to the hasty judgments of his friends, to the We'll see tomorrow, Doctor, don't worry, andat last he gave in to the spell of habit. It did not take him long to invent an easy justification for hissurrender. This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had providedfor him, and he was responsible to it.
The first thing he did was to take possession of his father's office. He kept in place the hard,sombre English furniture made of wood that sighed in the icy cold of dawn, but he consigned tothe attic the treatises on viceregal science and romantic medicine and filled the bookshelvesbehind their glass doors with the writings of the new French school. He took down the fadedpictures, except for the one of the physician arguing with Death for the nude body of a femalepatient, and the Hippocratic Oath printed in Gothic letters, and he hung in their place, next to hisfather's only diploma, the many diverse ones he himself had received with highest honours fromvarious schools in Europe.
He tried to impose the latest ideas at Misericordia Hospital, but this was not as easy as it hadseemed in his youthful enthusiasm, for the antiquated house of health was stubborn in itsattachment to atavistic superstitions, such as standing beds in pots of water to prevent disease fromclimbing up the legs, or requiring evening wear and chamois gloves in the operating room becauseit was taken for granted that elegance was an essential condition for asepsis. They could nottolerate the young newcomer's tasting a patient's urine to determine the presence of sugar, quotingCharcot and Trousseau as if they were his roommates, issuing severe warnings in class against themortal risks of vaccines while maintaining a suspicious faith in the recent invention ofsuppositories. He was in conflict with everything: his renovating spirit, his maniacal sense of civicduty, his slow humour in a land of immortal pranksters--everything, in fact, that constituted hismost estimable virtues provoked the resentment of his older colleagues and the sly jokes of theyounger ones.
His obsession was the dangerous lack of sanitation in the city. He appealed to the highestauthorities to fill in the Spanish sewers that were an immense breeding ground for rats, and tobuild in their place a closed sewage system whose contents would not empty into the cove at themarket, as had always been the case, but into some distant drainage area instead. The well-equipped colonial houses had latrines with septic tanks, but two thirds of the population lived inshanties at the edge of the swamps and relieved themselves in the open air. The excrement dried inthe sun, turned to dust, and was inhaled by everyone along with the joys of Christmas in the cool,gentle breezes of December. Dr. Juvenal Urbino attempted to force the City Council to impose anobligatory training course so that the poor could learn how to build their own latrines. He foughtin vain to stop them from tossing garbage into the mangrove thickets that over the centuries hadbecome swamps of putrefaction, and to have them collect it instead at least twice a week andincinerate it in some uninhabited area.
He was aware of the mortal threat of the drinking water. The mere idea of building anaqueduct seemed fantastic, since those who might have supported it had underground cisterns attheir disposal, where water rained down over the years was collected under a thick layer of scum.
Among the most valued household articles of the time were carved wooden water collectorswhose stone filters dripped day and night into large earthen water jars. To prevent anyone fromdrinking from the aluminium cup used to dip out the water, its edges were as jagged as the crownof a mock king. The water was crystalline and cool in the dark clay, and it tasted of the forest. ButDr. Juvenal Urbino was not taken in by these appearances of purity, for he knew that despite allprecautions, the bottom of each earthen jar was a sanctuary for waterworms. He had spent theslow hours of his childhood watching them with an almost mystical astonishment, convincedalong with so many other people at the time that waterworms were animes, supernatural creatureswho, from the sediment in still water, courted young maidens and could inflict furious vengeancebecause of love. As a boy he had seen the havoc they had wreaked in the house of Lara Conde,a schoolteacher who dared to rebuff the animes, and he had seen the watery trail of glass in thestreet and the mountain of stones they had thrown at her windows for three days and three nights.
And so it was a long while before he learned that waterworms were in reality the larvae ofmosquitoes, but once he learned it he never forgot it, because from that moment on he realised thatthey and many other evil animes could pass through our simple stone filters intact.
For a long time the water in the cisterns had been honoured as the cause of the scrotal herniathat so many men in the city endured not only without embarrassment but with a certain patrioticinsolence. When Juvenal Urbino was in elementary school, he could not avoid a spasm of horrorat the sight of men with ruptures sitting in their doorways on hot afternoons, fanning theirenormous testicle as if it were a child sleeping between their legs. It was said that the herniawhistled like a lugubrious bird on stormy nights and twisted in unbearable pain when a buzzardfeather was burned nearby, but no one complained about those discomforts because a large, well-carried rupture was, more than anything else, a display of masculine honour. When Dr. JuvenalUrbino returned from Europe he was already well aware of the scientific fallacy in these beliefs,but they were so rooted in local superstition that many people opposed the mineral enrichment ofthe water in the cisterns for fear of destroying its ability to cause an honourable rupture.
Impure water was not all that alarmed Dr. Juvenal Urbino. He was just as concerned with thelack of hygiene at the public market, a vast extension of cleared land along Lasimas Bay wherethe sailing ships from the Antilles would dock. An illustrious traveller of the period described themarket as one of the most varied in the world. It was rich, in fact, and profuse and noisy, but also,perhaps, the most alarming of markets. Set on its own garbage heap, at the mercy of capricioustides, it was the spot where the bay belched filth from the sewers back onto land. The offal fromthe adjoining slaughterhouse was also thrown away there--severed heads, rotting viscera, animalrefuse that floated, in sunshine and starshine, in a swamp of blood. The buzzards fought for it withthe rats and the dogs in a perpetual scramble among the deer and succulent capons from Sotaventohanging from the eaves of the market stalls, and the spring vegetables from Arjona displayed onstraw mats spread over the ground. Dr. Urbino wanted to make the place sanitary, he wanted aslaughterhouse built somewhere else and a covered market constructed with stained-glass turrets,like the one he had seen in the old boquer s in Barcelona, where the provisions looked sosplendid and clean that it seemed a shame to eat them. But even the most complaisant of hisnotable friends pitied his illusory passion. That is how they were: they spent their livesproclaiming their proud origins, the historic merits of the city, the value of its relics, its heroism,its beauty, but they were blind to the decay of the years. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, on the other hand,loved it enough to see it with the eyes of truth.
"How noble this city must be," he would say, "for we have spent four hundred years trying tofinish it off and we still have not succeeded,"They almost had, however. The epidemic of cholera morbus, whose first victims were struckdown in the standing water of the market, had, in eleven weeks, been responsible for the greatestdeath toll in our history. Until that time the eminent dead were interred under the flagstones in thechurches, in the exclusive vicinity of archbishops and capitulars, while the less wealthy wereburied in the patios of convents. The poor were sent to the colonial cemetery, located on a windyhill that was separated from the city by a dry canal whose mortar bridge bore the legend carvedthere by order of some clairvoyant mayor: Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate. After the first twoweeks of the cholera epidemic, the cemetery was overflowing and there was no room left in thechurches despite the fact that they had dispatched the decayed remains of many nameless civicheroes to the communal ossuary. The air in the Cathedral grew thin with the vapours from badlysealed crypts, and its doors did not open again until three years later, at the time that Fermina Dazasaw Florentino Ariza at close quarters as she left Midnight Mass. By the third week the cloister ofthe Convent of St. Clare was full all the way to its poplar-lined walks, and it was necessary to usethe Community's orchard, which was twice as large, as a cemetery. There graves were dug deepenough to bury the dead on three levels, without delay and without coffins, but this had to bestopped because the brimming ground turned into a sponge that oozed sickening, infected blood atevery step. Then arrangements were made to continue burying in The Hand of God, a cattle ranchless than a league from the city, which was later consecrated as the Universal Cemetery.
From the time the cholera proclamation was issued, the local garrison shot a cannon from thefortress every quarter hour, day and night, in accordance with the local superstition thatgunpowder purified the atmosphere. The cholera was much more devastating to the blackpopulation, which was larger and poorer, but in reality it had no regard for colour or background.
It ended as suddenly as it had begun, and the extent of its ravages was never known, not becausethis was impossible to establish but because one of our most widespread virtues was a certainreticence concerning personal misfortune.
Dr. Marco Aurelio Urbino, the father of Juvenal, was a civic hero during that dreadful time,as well as its most distinguished victim. By official decree he personally designed and directedpublic health measures, but on his own initiative he intervened to such an extent in every socialquestion that during the most critical moments of the plague no higher authority seemed to exist.
Years later, reviewing the chronicle of those days, Dr. Juvenal Urbino confirmed that his father'smethodology had been more charitable than scientific and, in many ways, contrary to reason, sothat in large measure it had fostered the voraciousness of the plague. He confirmed this with thecompassion of sons whom life has turned, little by little, into the fathers of their fathers, and forthe first time he regretted not having stood with his father in the solitude of his errors. But he didnot dispute his merits: his diligence and his self-sacrifice and above all his personal couragedeserved the many honours rendered him when the city recovered from the disaster, and it waswith justice that his name was found among those of so many other heroes of less honourablewars.
He did not live to see his own glory. When he recognised in himself the irreversiblesymptoms that he had seen and pitied in others, he did not even attempt a useless struggle butwithdrew from the world so as not to infect anyone else. Locked in a utility room at MisericordiaHospital, deaf to the calls of his colleagues and the pleas of his family, removed from the horror ofthe plague victims dying on the floor in the packed corridors, he wrote a letter of feverish love tohis wife and children, a letter of gratitude for his existence in which he revealed how much andwith how much fervour he had loved life. It was a farewell of twenty heartrending pages in whichthe progress of the disease could be observed in the deteriorating script, and it was not necessaryto know the writer to realise that he had signed his name with his last breath. In accordance withhis instructions, his ashen body was mingled with others in the communal cemetery and was notseen by anyone who loved him.
Three days later, in Paris, Dr. Juvenal Urbino received a telegram during supper with friends,and he toasted the memory of his father with champagne. He said: "He was a good man." Later hewould reproach himself for his lack of maturity: he had avoided reality in order not to cry. Butthree weeks later he received a copy of the posthumous letter, and then he surrendered to the truth.
All at once the image of the man he had known before he knew any other was revealed to him inall its profundity, the man who had raised him and taught him and had slept and fornicated withhis mother for thirty-two years and yet who, before that letter, had never revealed himself bodyand soul because of timidity, pure and simple. Until then Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his family hadconceived of death as a misfortune that befell others, other people's fathers and mothers, otherpeople's brothers and sisters and husbands and wives, but not theirs. They were people whose liveswere slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappearedlittle by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they wereabsorbed into oblivion. His father's posthumous letter, more than the telegram with the bad news,hurled him headlong against the certainty of death. And yet one of his oldest memories, when hewas nine years old perhaps, perhaps when he was eleven, was in a way an early sign of death inthe person of his father. One rainy afternoon the two of them were in the office his father kept inthe house; he was drawing larks and sunflowers with coloured chalk on the tiled floor, and hisfather was reading by the light shining through the window, his vest unbuttoned and elasticarmbands on his shirt sleeves. Suddenly he stopped reading to scratch his back with a long-handled back scratcher that had a little silver hand on the end. Since he could not reach the spotthat itched, he asked his son to scratch him with his nails, and as the boy did so he had the strangesensation of not feeling his own body. At last his father looked at him over his shoulder with a sadsmile.
"If I died now," he said, "you would hardly remember me when you are my age."He said it for no apparent reason, and the angel of death hovered for a moment in the coolshadows of the office and flew out again through the window, leaving a trail of feathers flutteringin his wake, but the boy did not see them. More than twenty years had gone by since then, andJuvenal Urbino would very soon be as old as his father was that afternoon. He knew he wasidentical to him, and to that awareness had now been added the awful consciousness that he wasalso as mortal.
Cholera became an obsession for him. He did not know much more about it than he hadlearned in a routine manner in some marginal course, when he had found it difficult to believe thatonly thirty years before, it had been responsible for more than one hundred forty thousand deathsin France, including Paris. But after the death of his father he learned all there was to know aboutthe different forms of cholera, almost as a penance to appease his memory, and he studied with themost outstanding epidemiologist of his time and the creator of the cordons sanitaires, ProfessorAdrien Proust, father of the great novelist. So that when he returned to his country and smelled thestench of the market while he was still out at sea and saw the rats in the sewers and the childrenrolling naked in the puddles on the streets, he not only understood how the tragedy had occurredbut was certain that it would be repeated at any moment.
The moment was not long in coming. In less than a year his students at Misericordia Hospitalasked for his help in treating a charity patient with a strange blue coloration all over his body. Dr.
Juvenal Urbino had only to see him from the doorway to recognise the enemy. But they were inluck: the patient had arrived three days earlier on a schooner from Curaao and had come to thehospital clinic by himself, and it did not seem probable that he had infected anyone else. In anyevent, Dr. Juvenal Urbino alerted his colleagues and had the authorities warn the neighbouringports so that they could locate and quarantine the contaminated schooner, and he had to restrainthe military commander of the city who wanted to declare martial law and initiate the therapeuticstrategy of firing the cannon every quarter hour.
"Save that powder for when the Liberals come," he said with good humour. "We are nolonger in the Middle Ages."The patient died in four days, choked by a grainy white vomit, but in the following weeks noother case was discovered despite constant vigilance. A short while later, The Commercial Dailypublished the news that two children had died of cholera in different locations in the city. It waslearned that one of them had had common dysentery, but the other, a girl of five, appeared to havebeen, in fact, a victim of cholera. Her parents and three brothers were separated and placed underindividual quarantine, and the entire neighbourhood was subjected to strict medical supervision.
One of the children contracted cholera but recovered very soon, and the entire family returnedhome when the danger was over. Eleven more cases were reported in the next three months, and inthe fifth there was an alarming outbreak, but by the end of the year it was believed that the dangerof an epidemic had been averted. No one doubted that the sanitary rigour of Dr. Juvenal Urbino,more than the efficacy of his pronouncements, had made the miracle possible. From that time on,and well into this century, cholera was endemic not only in the city but along most of theCaribbean coast and the valley of the Magdalena, but it never again flared into an epidemic. Thecrisis meant that Dr. Juvenal Urbino's warnings were heard with greater seriousness by publicofficials. They established an obligatory Chair of Cholera and Yellow Fever in the MedicalSchool, and realised the urgency of closing up the sewers and building a market far from thegarbage dump. By that time, however, Dr. Urbino was not concerned with proclaiming victory, norwas he moved to persevere in his social mission, for at that moment one of his wings was broken,he was distracted and in disarray and ready to forget everything else in life, because he had beenstruck by the lightning of his love for Fermina Daza.
It was, in fact, the result of a clinical error. A physician who was a friend of his thought hedetected the warning symptoms of cholera in an eighteen-year-old patient, and he asked Dr.
Juvenal Urbino to see her. He called that very afternoon, alarmed at the possibility that the plaguehad entered the sanctuary of the old city, for all the cases until that time had occurred in the poorneighbourhoods, and almost all of those among the black population. He encountered other, lessunpleasant, surprises. From the outside, the house, shaded by the almond trees in the Park of theEvangels, appeared to be in ruins, as did the others in the colonial district, but inside there was aharmony of beauty and an astonishing light that seemed to come from another age. The entranceopened directly into a square Sevillian patio that was white with a recent coat of lime and hadflowering orange trees and the same tiles on the floor as on the walls. There was an invisiblesound of running water, and pots with carnations on the cornices, and cages of strange birds in thearcades. The strangest of all were three crows in a very large cage, who filled the patio with anambiguous perfume every time they flapped their wings. Several dogs, chained elsewhere in thehouse, began to bark, maddened by the scent of a stranger, but a woman's shout stopped themdead, and numerous cats leapt all around the patio and hid among the flowers, frightened by theauthority in the voice. Then there was such a diaphanous silence that despite the disorder of thebirds and the syllables of water on stone, one could hear the desolate breath of the sea.
Shaken by the conviction that God was present, Dr. Juvenal Urbino thought that such a housewas immune to the plague. He followed Gala Placidia along the arcaded corridor, passed by thewindow of the sewing room where Florentino Ariza had seen Fermina Daza for the first time,when the patio was still a shambles, climbed the new marble stairs to the second floor, and waitedto be announced before going into the patient's bedroom. But Gala Placidia came out again with amessage: "The seorita says you cannot come in now because her papa is not at home."And so he returned at five in the afternoon, in accordance with the maid's instructions, andLorenzo Daza himself opened the street door and led him to his daughter's bedroom. There heremained, sitting in a dark corner with his arms folded, and making futile efforts to control hisragged breathing during the examination. It was not easy to know who was more constrained, thedoctor with his chaste touch or the patient in the silk chemise with her virgin's modesty, butneither one looked the other in the eye; instead, he asked questions in an impersonal voice and sheresponded in a tremulous voice, both of them very conscious of the man sitting in the shadows. Atlast Dr. Juvenal Urbino asked the patient to sit up, and with exquisite care he opened hernightdress down to the waist; her pure high breasts with the childish nipples shone for an instant inthe darkness of the bedroom, like a flash of gunpowder, before she hurried to cover them withcrossed arms. Imperturbable, the physician opened her arms without looking at her and examinedher by direct auscultation, his ear against her skin, first the chest and then the back.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino used to say that he experienced no emotion when he met the woman withwhom he would live until the day of his death. He remembered the sky-blue chemise edged inlace, the feverish eyes, the long hair hanging loose over her shoulders, but he was so concernedwith the outbreak of cholera in the colonial district that he took no notice of her floweringadolescence: he had eyes only for the slightest hint that she might be a victim of the plague. Shewas more explicit: the young doctor she had heard so much about in connection with the choleraepidemic seemed a pedant incapable of loving anyone but himself. The diagnosis was an intestinalinfection of alimentary origin, which was cured by three days of treatment at home. Relieved bythis proof that his daughter had not contracted cholera, Lorenzo Daza accompanied Dr. JuvenalUrbino to the door of his carriage, paid him a gold peso for the visit, a fee that seemed excessiveeven for a physician to the rich, and he said goodbye with immoderate expressions of gratitude.
He was overwhelmed by the splendour of the Doctor's family names, and he not only did not hideit but would have done anything to see him again, under less formal circumstances.
The case should have been considered closed. But on Tuesday of the following week, withoutbeing called and with no prior announcement, Dr. Juvenal Urbino returned to the house at theinconvenient hour of three in the afternoon. Fermina Daza was in the sewing room, having alesson in oil painting with two of her friends, when he appeared at the window in his spotlesswhite frock coat and his white top hat and signalled to her to come over to him. She put her palettedown on a chair and tiptoed to the window, her ruffled skirt raised to keep it from dragging on thefloor. She wore a diadem with a jewel that hung on her forehead, and the luminous stone was thesame aloof colour as her eyes, and everything in her breathed an aura of coolness. The Doctor wasstruck by the fact that she was dressed for painting at home as if she were going to a party. Hetook her pulse through the open window, he had her stick out her tongue, he examined her throatwith an aluminium tongue depressor, he looked inside her lower eyelids, and each time he noddedin approval. He was less inhibited than on the previous visit, but she was more so, because shecould not understand the reason for the unexpected examination if he himself had said that hewould not come back unless they called him because of some change. And even more important:
she did not ever want to see him again. When he finished his examination, the Doctor put thetongue depressor back into his bag, crowded with instruments and bottles of medicine, and closedit with a resounding snap.
"You are like a new-sprung rose," he said.
"Thank you.""Thank God," he said, and he misquoted St. Thomas: "Remember that everything that isgood, whatever its origin, comes from the Holy Spirit. Do you like music?""What is the point of that question?" she asked in turn.
"Music is important for one's health," he said.
He really thought it was, and she was going to know very soon, and for the rest of her life,that the topic of music was almost a magic formula that he used to propose friendship, but at thatmoment she interpreted it as a joke. Besides, her two friends, who had pretended to paint whileshe and Dr. Juvenal Urbino were talking at the window, tittered and hid their faces behind theirpalettes, and this made Fermina Daza lose her self-control. Blind with fury, she slammed thewindow shut. The Doctor stared at the sheer lace curtains in bewilderment, he tried to find thestreet door but lost his way, and in his confusion he knocked into the cage with the perfumedcrows. They broke into sordid shrieking, flapped their wings in fright, and saturated the Doctor'sclothing with a feminine fragrance. The thundering voice of Lorenzo Daza rooted him to the spot:
"Doctor--wait for me there."He had seen everything from the upper floor and, swollen and livid, he came down the stairsbuttoning his shirt, his side-whiskers still in an uproar after a restless siesta. The Doctor tried toovercome his embarrassment.
"I told your daughter that she is like a rose.""True enough," said Lorenzo Daza, "but one with too many thorns."He walked past Dr. Urbino without greeting him. He pushed open the sewing room windowand shouted a rough command to his daughter: "Come here and beg the Doctor's pardon."The Doctor tried to intervene and stop him, but Lorenzo Daza paid no attention to him. Heinsisted: "Hurry up." She looked at her friends with a secret plea for understanding, and she said toher father that she had nothing to beg pardon for, she had only closed the window to keep out thesun. Dr. Urbino, with good humour, tried to confirm her words, but Lorenzo Daza insisted that hebe obeyed. Then Fermina Daza, pale with rage, turned toward the window, and extending her rightfoot as she raised her skirt with her fingertips, she made a theatrical curtsy to the Doctor.
"I give you my most heartfelt apologies, sir," she said.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino imitated her with good humour, making a cavalier's flourish with his tophat, but he did not win the compassionate smile he had hoped for. Then Lorenzo Daza invited himto have a cup of coffee in his office to set things right, and he accepted with pleasure so that therewould be no doubt whatsoever that he did not harbour a shred of resentment in his heart.
The truth was that Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not drink coffee, except for a cup first thing in themorning. He did not drink alcohol either, except for a glass of wine with meals on solemnoccasions, but he not only drank down the coffee that Lorenzo Daza offered him, he also accepteda glass of anisette. Then he accepted another coffee with another anisette, and then another andanother, even though he still had to make a few more calls. At first he listened with attention to theexcuses that Lorenzo Daza continued to offer in the name of his daughter, whom he defined as anintelligent and serious girl, worthy of a prince whether he came from here or anywhere else,whose only defect, so he said, was her mulish character. But after the second anisette, the Doctorthought he heard Fermina Daza's voice at the other end of the patio, and his imagination went afterher, followed her through the night that had just descended in the house as she lit the lights in thecorridor, fumigated the bedrooms with the insecticide bomb, uncovered the pot of soup on thestove, which she was going to share that night with her father, the two of them alone at the table,she not raising her eyes, not tasting the soup, not breaking the rancorous spell, until he was forcedto give in and ask her to forgive his severity that afternoon.
Dr. Urbino knew enough about women to realise that Fermina Daza would not pass by theoffice until he left, but he stayed nevertheless because he felt that wounded pride would give himno peace after the humiliations of the afternoon. Lorenzo Daza, who by now was almost drunk,did not seem to notice his lack of attention, for he was satisfied with his own indomitableeloquence. He talked at full gallop, chewing the flower of his unlit cigar, coughing in shouts,trying to clear his throat, attempting with great difficulty to find a comfortable position in theswivel chair, whose springs wailed like an animal in heat. He had drunk three glasses of anisette toeach one drunk by his guest, and he paused only when he realised that they could no longer seeeach other, and he stood up to light the lamp. Dr. Juvenal Urbino looked at him in the new light,he saw that one eye was twisted like a fish's and that his words did not correspond to themovement of his lips, and he thought these were hallucinations brought on by his abuse of alcohol.
Then he stood up, with the fascinating sensation that he was inside a body that belonged not tohim but to someone who was still in the chair where he had been sitting, and he had to make agreat effort not to lose his mind.
It was after seven o'clock when he left the office, preceded by Lorenzo Daza. There was a fullmoon. The patio, idealised by anisette, floated at the bottom of an aquarium, and the cagescovered with cloths looked like ghosts sleeping under the hot scent of new orange blossoms. Thesewing room window was open, there was a lighted lamp on the worktable, and the unfinishedpaintings were on their easels as if they were on exhibit. "Where art thou that thou art not here,"said Dr. Urbino as he passed by, but Fermina Daza did not hear him, she could not hear him,because she was crying with rage in her bedroom, lying face down on the bed and waiting for herfather so that she could make him pay for the afternoon's humiliation. The Doctor did notrenounce his hope of saying goodbye to her, but Lorenzo Daza did not suggest it. He yearned forthe innocence of her pulse, her cat's tongue, her tender tonsils, but he was disheartened by the ideathat she never wanted to see him again and would never permit him to try to see her. WhenLorenzo Daza walked into the entryway, the crows, awake under their sheets, emitted a funerealshriek. "They will peck out your eyes," the Doctor said aloud, thinking of her, and Lorenzo Dazaturned around to ask him what he had said.
"It was not me," he said. "It was the anisette."Lorenzo Daza accompanied him to his carriage, trying to force him to accept a gold peso forthe second visit, but he would not take it. He gave the correct instructions to the driver for takinghim to the houses of the two patients he still had to see, and he climbed into the carriage withouthelp. But he began to feel sick as they bounced along the cobbled streets, so that he ordered thedriver to take a different route. He looked at himself for a moment in the carriage mirror and sawthat his image, too, was still thinking about Fermina Daza. He shrugged his shoulders. Then hebelched, lowered his head to his chest, and fell asleep, and in his dream he began to hear funeralbells. First he heard those of the Cathedral and then he heard those of all the other churches, oneafter another, even the cracked pots of St. Julian the Hospitaler.
"Shit," he murmured in his sleep, "the dead have died." His mother and sisters were havingcaf?con leche and crullers for supper at the formal table in the large dining room when they sawhim appear in the door, his face haggard and his entire being dishonoured by the whorish perfumeof the crows. The largest bell of the adjacent Cathedral resounded in the immense empty space ofthe house. His mother asked him in alarm where in the world he had been, for they had lookedeverywhere for him so that he could attend General Ignacio Mar, the last grandson of theMarquis de Jara de la Vera, who had been struck down that afternoon by a cerebralhaemorrhage: it was for him that the bells were tolling. Dr. Juvenal Urbino listened to his motherwithout hearing her as he clutched the doorframe, and then he gave a half turn, trying to reach hisbedroom, but he fell flat on his face in an explosion of star anise vomit.
"Mother of God," shouted his mother. "Something very strange must have happened for youto show up in your own house in this state."The strangest thing, however, had not yet occurred. Taking advantage of the visit of thefamous pianist Romeo Lussich, who played a cycle of Mozart sonatas as soon as the city hadrecovered from mourning the death of General Ignacio Mar, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had the pianofrom the Music School placed in a mule-drawn wagon and brought a history-making serenade toFermina Daza. She was awakened by the first measures, and she did not have to look out thegrating on the balcony to know who was the sponsor of that uncommon tribute. The only thing sheregretted was not having the courage of other harassed maidens, who emptied their chamber potson the heads of unwanted suitors. Lorenzo Daza, on the other hand, dressed without delay as theserenade was playing, and when it was over he had Dr. Juvenal Urbino and the pianist, stillwearing their formal concert clothes, come in to the visitors' parlour, where he thanked them forthe serenade with a glass of good brandy.
Fermina Daza soon realised that her father was trying to soften her heart. The day after theserenade, he said to her in a casual manner: "Imagine how your mother would feel if she knew youwere being courted by an Urbino de la Calle." Her dry response was: "She would turn over in hergrave." The friends who painted with her told her that Lorenzo Daza had been invited to lunch atthe Social Club by Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who had received a severe reprimand for breaking clubrules. It was only then that she learned that her father had applied for membership in the SocialClub on several occasions, and that each time he had been rejected with such a large number ofblack balls that another attempt was not possible. But Lorenzo Daza had an infinite capacity forassimilating humiliations, and he continued his ingenious strategies for arranging casualencounters with Juvenal Urbino, not realising that it was Juvenal Urbino who went out of his wayto let himself be encountered. At times they spent hours chatting in the office, while the houseseemed suspended at the edge of time because Fermina Daza would not permit anything to run itsnormal course until he left. The Parish Caf?was a good intermediate haven. It was there thatLorenzo Daza gave Juvenal Urbino his first lessons in chess, and he was such a diligent pupil thatchess became an incurable addiction that tormented him until the day of his death.
One night, a short while after the serenade by solo piano, Lorenzo Daza discovered a letter,its envelope sealed with wax, in the entryway to his house. It was addressed to his daughter andthe monogram "J. U. C." was imprinted on the seal. He slipped it under the door as he passedFermina's bedroom, and she never understood how it had come there, since it was inconceivable toher that her father had changed so much that he would bring her a letter from a suitor. She left iton the night table, for the truth was she did not know what to do with it, and there it stayed,unopened, for several days, until one rainy afternoon when Fermina Daza dreamed that JuvenalUrbino had returned to the house to give her the tongue depressor he had used to examine herthroat. In the dream, the tongue depressor was made not of aluminium but of a delicious metal thatshe had tasted with pleasure in other dreams, so that she broke it in two unequal pieces and gavehim the smaller one.
When she awoke she opened the letter. It was brief and proper, and all that Juvenal Urbinoasked was permission to request her father's permission to visit her. She was impressed by itssimplicity and seriousness, and the rage she had cultivated with so much love for so many daysfaded away on the spot. She kept the letter in the bottom of her trunk, but she remembered that shehad also kept Florentino Ariza's perfumed letters there, and she took it out of the chest to findanother place for it, shaken by a rush of shame. Then it seemed that the most decent thing to dowas to pretend she had not received it, and she burned it in the lamp, watching how the drops ofwax exploded into blue bubbles above the flame. She sighed: "Poor man." And then she realisedthat it was the second time she had said those words in little more than a year, and for a momentshe thought about Florentino Ariza, and even she was surprised at how removed he was from herlife: poor man.
Three more letters arrived with the last rains in October, the first of them accompanied by alittle box of violet pastilles from Flavigny Abbey. Two had been delivered at the door by Dr.
Juvenal Urbino's coachman, and the Doctor had greeted Gala Placidia from the carriage window,first so that there would be no doubt that the letters were his, and second so that no one could tellhim they had not been received. Moreover, both of them were sealed with his monogram in waxand written in the cryptic scrawl that Fermina Daza already recognised as a physician'shandwriting. Both of them said in substance what had been said in the first, and were conceived inthe same submissive spirit, but underneath their propriety one could begin to detect an impatiencethat was never evident in the parsimonious letters of Florentino Ariza. Fermina Daza read them assoon as they were delivered, two weeks apart, and without knowing why, she changed her mind asshe was about to throw them into the fire. But she never thought of answering them.
The third letter in October had been slipped under the street door, and was in every waydifferent from the previous ones. The handwriting was so childish that there was no doubt it hadbeen scrawled with the left hand, but Fermina Daza did not realise that until the text itself provedto be a poison pen letter. Whoever had written it took for granted that Fermina Daza hadbewitched Dr. Juvenal Urbino with her love potions, and from that supposition sinisterconclusions had been drawn. It ended with a threat: if Fermina Daza did not renounce her effortsto move up in the world by means of the most desirable man in the city, she would be exposed topublic disgrace.
She felt herself the victim of a grave injustice, but her reaction was not vindictive. On thecontrary: she would have liked to discover who the author of the anonymous letter was in order toconvince him of his error with all the pertinent explanations, for she felt certain that never, for anyreason, would she respond to the wooing of Juvenal Urbino. In the days that followed she receivedtwo more unsigned letters, as perfidious as the first, but none of the three seemed to be written bythe same person. Either she was the victim of a plot, or the false version of her secret love affairhad gone further than anyone could imagine. She was disturbed by the idea that it was all theresult of a simple indiscretion on the part of Juvenal Urbino. It occurred to her that perhaps he wasdifferent from his worthy appearance, that perhaps he talked too much when he was making housecalls and boasted of imaginary conquests, as did so many other men of his class. She thoughtabout writing him a letter to reproach him for the insult to her honour, but then she decided againstthe idea because that might be just what he wanted. She tried to learn more from the friends whopainted with her in the sewing room, but they had heard only benign comments concerning theserenade by solo piano. She felt furious, impotent, humiliated. In contrast to her initial feeling thatshe wanted to meet with her invisible enemy in order to convince him of his errors, now she onlywanted to cut him to ribbons with the pruning shears. She spent sleepless nights analysing detailsand phrases in the anonymous letters in the hope of finding some shred of comfort. It was a vainhope: Fermina Daza was, by nature, alien to the inner world of the Urbino de la Calle family, andshe had weapons for defending herself from their good actions but not from their evil ones.
This conviction became even more bitter after the fear caused by the black doll that was sentto her without any letter, but whose origin seemed easy to imagine: only Dr. Juvenal Urbino couldhave sent it. It had been bought in Martinique, according to the original tag, and it was dressed inan exquisite gown, its hair rippled with gold threads, and it closed its eyes when it was laid down.
It seemed so charming to Fermina Daza that she overcame her scruples and laid it on her pillowduring the day and grew accustomed to sleeping with it at night. After a time, however, shediscovered when she awoke from an exhausting dream that the doll was growing: the originalexquisite dress she had arrived in was up above her thighs, and her shoes had burst from thepressure of her feet. Fermina Daza had heard of African spells, but none as frightening as this. Onthe other hand, she could not imagine that a man like Juvenal Urbino would be capable of such anatrocity. She was right: the doll had been brought not by his coachman but by an itinerantshrimpmonger whom no one knew. Trying to solve the enigma, Fermina Daza thought for amoment of Florentino Ariza, whose depressed condition caused her dismay, but life convinced herof her error. The mystery was never clarified, and just thinking about it made her shudder withfear long after she was married and had children and thought of herself as destiny's darling: thehappiest woman in the world.
Dr. Urbino's last resort was the mediation of Sister Franca de la Luz, Superior of theAcademy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, who could not deny the request of a familythat had supported her Community since its establishment in the Americas. She appeared onemorning at nine o'clock in the company of a novice, and for half an hour the two of them had toamuse themselves with the birdcages while Fermina Daza finished her bath. She was a masculineGerman with a metallic accent and an imperious gaze that had no relationship to her puerilepassions. Fermina Daza hated her and everything that had to do with her more than anything inthis world, and the mere memory of her false piety made scorpions crawl in her belly. Just thesight of her from the bathroom door was enough to revive the torture of school, the unbearableboredom of daily Mass, the terror of examinations, the servile diligence of the novices, all of thatlife distorted by the prism of spiritual poverty. Sister Franca de la Luz, on the other hand, greetedher with a joy that seemed sincere. She was surprised at how much she had grown and matured,and she praised the good judgment with which she managed the house, the good taste evident inthe patio, the brazier filled with orange blossoms. She ordered the novice to wait for her withoutgetting too close to the crows, who in a careless moment might peck out her eyes, and she lookedfor a private spot where she could sit down and talk alone with Fermina, who invited her into thedrawing room.
It was a brief and bitter visit. Sister Franca de la Luz, wasting no time on formalities, offeredhonourable reinstatement to Fermina Daza. The reason for her expulsion would be erased not onlyfrom the records but also from the memory of the Community, and this would allow her to finishher studies and receive her baccalaureate degree. Fermina Daza was perplexed and wanted toknow why.
"It is the request of someone who deserves everything he desires and whose only wish is tomake you happy," said the nun. "Do you know who that is?"Then she understood. She asked herself with what authority a woman who had made her lifemiserable because of an innocent letter served as the emissary of love, but she did not dare tospeak of it. Instead she said yes, she knew that man, and by the same token she also knew that hehad no right to interfere in her life.
"All he asks is that you allow him to speak with you for five minutes," said the nun. "I amcertain your father will agree."Fermina Daza's anger grew more intense at the idea that her father was an accessory to thevisit.
"We saw each other twice when I was sick," she said. "Now there is no reason for us to seeeach other again.""For any woman with a shred of sense, that man is a gift from Divine Providence," said thenun.
She continued to speak of his virtues, of his devotion, of his dedication to serving those inpain. As she spoke she pulled from her sleeve a gold rosary with Christ carved in marble, anddangled it in front of Fermina Daza's eyes. It was a family heirloom, more than a hundred yearsold, carved by a goldsmith from Siena and blessed by Clement IV.
"It is yours," she said.
Fermina Daza felt the blood pounding through her veins, and then she dared.
"I do not understand how you can lend yourself to this," she said, "if you think that love is asin."Sister Franca de la Luz pretended not to notice the remark, but her eyelids flamed. Shecontinued to dangle the rosary in front of Fermina Daza's eyes.
"It would be better for you to come to an understanding with me," she said, "because after mecomes His Grace the Archbishop, and it is a different story with him.""Let him come," said Fermina Daza.
Sister Franca de la Luz tucked the gold rosary into her sleeve. Then from the other she took awell-used handkerchief squeezed into a ball and held it tight in her fist, looking at Fermina Dazafrom a great distance and with a smile of commiseration.
"My poor child," she sighed, "you are still thinking about that man."Fermina Daza chewed on the impertinence as she looked at the nun without blinking, lookedher straight in the eye without speaking, chewing in silence, until she saw with infinite satisfactionthat those masculine eyes had filled with tears. Sister Franca de la Luz dried them with the ball ofthe handkerchief and stood up.
"Your father is right when he says that you are a mule," she said.
The Archbishop did not come. So the siege might have ended that day if Hildebranda Schez had not arrived to spend Christmas with her cousin, and life changed for both of them. Theymet her on the schooner from Riohacha at five o'clock in the morning, surrounded by a crowd ofpassengers half dead from seasickness, but she walked off the boat radiant, very much a woman,and excited after the bad night at sea. She arrived with crates of live turkeys and all the fruits ofher fertile lands so that no one would lack for food during her visit. Lis aco S chez, herfather, sent a message asking if they needed musicians for their holiday parties, because he had thebest at his disposal, and he promised to send a load of fireworks later on. He also announced thathe could not come for his daughter before March, so there was plenty of time for them to enjoylife. The two cousins began at once. From the first afternoon they bathed together, naked, the twoof them making their reciprocal ablutions with water from the cistern. They soaped each other,they removed each other's nits, they compared their buttocks, their quiet breasts, each looking atherself in the other's mirror to judge with what cruelty time had treated them since the lastoccasion when they had seen each other undressed. Hildebranda was large and solid, with goldenskin, but all the hair on her body was like a mulatta's, as short and curly as steel wool. FerminaDaza, on the other hand, had a pale nakedness, with long lines, serene skin, and straight hair. GalaPlacidia had two identical beds placed in the bedroom, but at times they lay together in one andtalked in the dark until dawn. They smoked long, thin highwaymen's cigars that Hildebranda hadhidden in the lining of her trunk, and afterward they had to burn Armenian paper to purify the ranksmell they left behind in the bedroom. Fermina Daza had smoked for the first time in Valledupar,and had continued in Fonseca and Riohacha, where as many as ten cousins would lock themselvesin a room to talk about men and to smoke. She learned to smoke backward, with the lit end in hermouth, the way men smoked at night during the wars so that the glow of their cigarettes would notbetray them. But she had never smoked alone. With Hildebranda in her house, she smoked everynight before going to sleep, and it was then that she acquired the habit although she always hid it,even from her husband and her children, not only because it was thought improper for a woman tosmoke in public but because she associated the pleasure with secrecy.
Hildebranda's trip had also been imposed by her parents in an effort to put distance betweenher and her impossible love, although they wanted her to think that it was to help Fermina decideon a good match. Hildebranda had accepted, hoping to mock forgetfulness as her cousin had donebefore her, and she had arranged with the telegraph operator in Fonseca to send her messages withthe greatest prudence. And that is why her disillusion was so bitter when she learned that FerminaDaza had rejected Florentino Ariza. Moreover, Hildebranda had a universal conception of love,and she believed that whatever happened to one love affected all other loves throughout the world.
Still, she did not renounce her plan. With an audacity that caused a crisis of dismay in FerminaDaza, she went to the telegraph office alone, intending to win the favour of Florentino Ariza.
She would not have recognised him, for there was nothing about him that corresponded to theimage she had formed from Fermina Daza. At first glance it seemed impossible that her cousincould have been on the verge of madness because of that almost invisible clerk with his air of awhipped dog, whose clothing, worthy of a rabbi in disgrace, and whose solemn manner could notperturb anyone's heart. But she soon repented of her first impression, for Florentino Ariza placedhimself at her unconditional service without knowing who she was: he never found out. No onecould have understood her as he did, so that he did not ask for identification or even for heraddress. His solution was very simple: she would pass by the telegraph office on Wednesdayafternoons so that he could place her lover's answers in her hand, and nothing more. And yet whenhe read the written message that Hildebranda brought him, he asked if she would accept asuggestion, and she agreed. Florentino Ariza first made some corrections between the lines, erasedthem, rewrote them, had no more room, and at last tore up the page and wrote a completely newmessage that she thought very touching. When she left the telegraph office, Hildebranda was onthe verge of tears. "He is ugly and sad," she said to Fermina Daza, "but he is all love." What moststruck Hildebranda was her cousin's solitude. She seemed, she told her, an old maid of twenty.
Accustomed to large scattered families in houses where no one was certain how many people wereliving or eating at any given time, Hildebranda could not imagine a girl her age reduced to thecloister of a private life. That was true: from the time she awoke at six in the morning until sheturned out the light in the bedroom, Fermina Daza devoted herself to killing time. Life wasimposed on her from outside. First, at the final rooster crow, the milkman woke her with hisrapping on the door knocker. Then came the knock of the fishwife with her box of red snappersdying on a bed of algae, the sumptuous fruit sellers with vegetables from Mar la Baja and fruitfrom San Jacinto. And then, for the rest of the day, everyone knocked at the door: beggars, girlswith lottery tickets, the Sisters of Charity, the knife grinder with the gossip, the man who boughtbottles, the man who bought old gold, the man who bought newspapers, the fake gipsies whooffered to read one's destiny in cards, in the lines of one's palm, in coffee grounds, in the water inwashbasins. Gala Placidia spent the week opening and closing the street door to say no, anotherday, or shouting from the balcony in a foul humour to stop bothering us, damn it, we alreadybought everything we need. She had replaced Aunt Escol tica with so much fervour and somuch grace that Fermina confused them to the point of loving her. She had the obsessions of aslave. Whenever she had free time she would go to the workroom to iron the linens; she kept themperfect, she kept them in cupboards with lavender, and she ironed and folded not only what shehad just washed but also what might have lost its brightness through disuse. With the same careshe continued to maintain the wardrobe of Fermina S chez, Fermina's mother, who had diedfourteen years before. But Fermina Daza was the one who made the decisions. She ordered whatthey would eat, what they would buy, what had to be done in every circumstance, and in that wayshe determined the life in a house where in reality nothing had to be determined. When shefinished washing the cages and feeding the birds, and making certain that the flowers wanted fornothing, she was at a loss. Often, after she was expelled from school, she would fall asleep atsiesta and not wake up until the next day. The painting classes were only a more amusing way tokill time.
Her relationship with her father had lacked affection since the expulsion of Aunt Escoltica, although they had found the way to live together without bothering each other. When sheawoke, he had already gone to his business. He rarely missed the ritual of lunch, although healmost never ate, for the aperitifs and Galician appetisers at the Parish Caf?satisfied him. He didnot eat supper either: they left his meal on the table, everything on one plate covered by another,although they knew that he would not eat it until the next day when it was reheated for hisbreakfast. Once a week he gave his daughter money for expenses, which he calculated with careand she administered with rigour, but he listened with pleasure to any request she might make forunforeseen expenses. He never questioned a penny she spent, he never asked her for anyexplanations, but she behaved as if she had to make an accounting before the Tribunal of the HolyOffice. He had never spoken to her about the nature or condition of his business, and he had nevertaken her to his offices in the port, which were in a location forbidden to decent young ladies evenif accompanied by their fathers. Lorenzo Daza did not come home before ten o'clock at night,which was the curfew hour during the less critical periods of the wars. Until that time he wouldstay at the Parish Caf? playing one game or another, for he was an expert in all salon games and agood teacher as well. He always came home sober, not disturbing his daughter, despite the factthat he had his first anisette when he awoke and continued chewing the end of his unlit cigar anddrinking at regular intervals throughout the day. One night, however, Fermina heard him come in.
She heard his cossack's step on the stair, his heavy breathing in the second-floor hallway, hispounding with the flat of his hand on her bedroom door. She opened it, and for the first time shewas frightened by his twisted eye and the slurring of his words.
"We are ruined," he said. "Total ruin, so now you know."That was all he said, and he never said it again, and nothing happened to indicate whether hehad told the truth, but after that night Fermina Daza knew that she was alone in the world. Shelived in a social limbo. Her former schoolmates were in a heaven that was closed to her, above allafter the dishonour of her expulsion, and she was not a neighbour to her neighbours, because theyhad known her without a past, in the uniform of the Academy of the Presentation of the BlessedVirgin. Her father's world was one of traders and stevedores, of war refugees in the public shelterof the Parish Caf? of solitary men. In the last year the painting classes had alleviated her seclusionsomewhat, for the teacher preferred group classes and would bring the other pupils to the sewingroom. But they were girls of varying and undefined social circumstances, and for Fermina Dazathey were no more than borrowed friends whose affection ended with each class. Hildebrandawanted to open the house, air it, bring in her father's musicians and fireworks and castles ofgunpowder, and have a Carnival dance whose gale winds would clear out her cousin's moth-eatenspirit, but she soon realised that her proposals were to no avail, and for a very simple reason: therewa
Chapter 3 (2)
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11
Chapter 4
THE DAY THAT Florentino Ariza saw Fermina Daza in the atrium of the Cathedral, in the sixthmonth of her pregnancy and in full command of her new condition as a woman of the world, hemade a fierce decision to win fame and fortune in order to deserve her. He did not even stop tothink about the obstacle of her being married, because at the same time he decided, as if itdepended on himself alone, that Dr. Juvenal Urbino had to die. He did not know when or how, buthe considered it an ineluctable event that he was resolved to wait for without impatience orviolence, even till the end of time.
He began at the beginning. He presented himself unannounced in the office of Uncle LeoXII, President of the Board of Directors and General Manager of the River Company of theCaribbean, and expressed his willingness to yield to his plans. His uncle was angry with himbecause of the manner in which he had thrown away the good position of telegraph operator inVilla de Leyva, but he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are notborn once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them overand over again to give birth to themselves. Besides, his brother's widow had died the year before,still smarting from rancour but without any heirs. And so he gave the job to his errant nephew.
It was a decision typical of Don Leo XII Loayza. Inside the shell of a soulless merchant washidden a genial lunatic, as willing to bring forth a spring of lemonade in the Guajira Desert as toflood a solemn funeral with weeping at his heartbreaking rendition of "In Questa Tomba Oscura."His head was covered with curls, he had the lips of a faun, and all he needed was a lyre and alaurel wreath to be the image of the incendiary Nero of Christian mythology. When he was notoccupied with the administration of his decrepit vessels, still afloat out of sheer distraction on thepart of fate, or with the problems of river navigation, which grew more and more critical everyday, he devoted his free time to the enrichment of his lyric repertoire. He liked nothing better thanto sing at funerals. He had the voice of a galley slave, untrained but capable of impressiveregisters. Someone had told him that Enrico Caruso could shatter a vase with the power of hisvoice, and he had spent years trying to imitate him, even with the windowpanes. His friendsbrought him the most delicate vases they had come across in their travels through the world, andthey organised special parties so that he might at last achieve the culmination of his dream. Henever succeeded. Still, in the depth of his thundering there was a glimmer of tenderness that brokethe hearts of his listeners as if they were the crystal vases of the great Caruso, and it was this thatmade him so revered at funerals. Except at one, when he thought it a good idea to sing "When IWake Up in Glory," a beautiful and moving funeral song from Louisiana, and he was told to bequiet by the priest, who could not understand that Protestant intrusion in his church.
And so, between operatic encores and Neapolitan serenades, his creative talent and hisinvincible entrepreneurial spirit made him the hero of river navigation during the time of itsgreatest splendour. He had come from nothing, like his dead brothers, and all of them went as faras they wished despite the stigma of being illegitimate children and, even worse, illegitimatechildren who had never been recognised. They were the cream of what in those days was calledthe "shop-counter aristocracy," whose sanctuary was the Commercial Club. And yet, even when hehad the resources to live like the Roman emperor he resembled, Uncle Leo XII lived in the oldcity because it was convenient to his business, in such an austere manner and in such a plain housethat he could never shake off an unmerited reputation for miserliness. His only luxury was evensimpler: a house by the sea, two leagues from his offices, furnished only with six handmadestools, a stand for earthenware jars, and a hammock on the terrace where he could lie down tothink on Sundays. No one described him better than he did when someone accused him of beingrich.
"No, not rich," he said. "I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing."His strange nature, which someone once praised in a speech as lucid dementia, allowed himto see in an instant what no one else ever saw in Florentino Ariza. From the day he came to hisoffice to ask for work, with his doleful appearance and his twenty-six useless years behind him, hehad tested him with the severity of a barracks training that could have broken the hardest man. Buthe did not intimidate him. What Uncle Leo XII never suspected was that his nephew's courage didnot come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but froma driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break.
The worst years were the early ones, when he was appointed clerk to the Board of Directors,which seemed a position made to order for him. Lotario Thugut, Uncle Leo XII's old musicteacher, was the one who advised him to give his nephew a writing job because he was a voraciouswholesale consumer of literature, although he preferred the worst to the best. Uncle Leo XIIdisregarded what he said concerning his nephew's bad taste in reading, for Lotario Thugut wouldalso say of him that he had been his worst voice student, and still he could make even tombstonescry. In any case, the German was correct in regard to what he had thought about least, which wasthat Florentino Ariza wrote everything with so much passion that even official documents seemedto be about love. His bills of lading were rhymed no matter how he tried to avoid it, and routinebusiness letters had a lyrical spirit that diminished their authority. His uncle himself came to hisoffice one day with a packet of correspondence that he had not dared put his name to, and he gavehim his last chance to save his soul.
"If you cannot write a business letter you will pick up the trash on the dock," he said.
Florentino Ariza accepted the challenge. He made a supreme effort to learn the mundanesimplicity of mercantile prose, imitating models from notarial files with the same diligence he hadonce used for popular poets. This was the period when he spent his free time in the Arcade of theScribes, helping unlettered lovers to write their scented love notes, in order to unburden his heartof all the words of love that he could not use in customs reports. But at the end of six months, nomatter how hard he twisted, he could not wring the neck of his diehard swan. So that when UncleLeo XII reproached him a second time, he admitted defeat, but with a certain haughtiness.
"Love is the only thing that interests me," he said.
"The trouble," his uncle said to him, "is that without river navigation there is no love."He kept his threat to have him pick up trash on the dock, but he gave him his word that hewould promote him, step by step, up the ladder of faithful service until he found his place. And hedid. No work could defeat him, no matter how hard or humiliating it was, no salary, no matter howmiserable, could demoralise him, and he never lost his essential fearlessness when faced with theinsolence of his superiors. But he was not an innocent, either: everyone who crossed his pathsuffered the consequences of the overwhelming determination, capable of anything, that laybehind his helpless appearance. Just as Uncle Leo XII had foreseen, and according to his desirethat his nephew not be ignorant of any secret in the business, Florentino Ariza moved throughevery post during thirty years of dedication and tenacity in the face of every trial. He fulfilled allhis duties with admirable skill, studying every thread in that mysterious warp that had so much todo with the offices of poetry, but he never won the honour he most desired, which was to writeone, just one, acceptable business letter. Without intending to, without even knowing it, hedemonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day thatthere was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucidor dangerous, than a poet. That, at least, is what he was told by Uncle Leo XII, who talked to himabout his father during moments of sentimental leisure and created an image that resembled adreamer more than it did a businessman.
He told him that Pius V Loayza used the offices for matters more pleasant than work, and thathe always arranged to leave the house on Sundays, with the excuse that he had to meet or dispatcha boat. What is more, he had an old boiler installed in the warehouse patio, with a steam whistlethat someone would sound with navigation signals in the event his wife became suspicious.
According to his calculations, Uncle Leo XII was certain that Florentino Ariza had been conceivedon a desk in some unlocked office on a hot Sunday afternoon, while from her house his father'swife heard the farewells of a boat that never sailed. By the time she learned the truth it was toolate to accuse him of infamy because her husband was already dead. She survived him by manyyears, destroyed by the bitterness of not having a child and asking God in her prayers for theeternal damnation of his bastard son.
The image of his father disturbed Florentino Ariza. His mother had spoken of him as a greatman with no commercial vocation, who had at last gone into the river business because his olderbrother had been a very close collaborator of the German commodore Johann B. Elbers, the fatherof river navigation. They were the illegitimate sons of the same mother, a cook by trade, who hadthem by different men, and all bore her surname and the name of a pope chosen at random fromthe calendar of saints' days, except for Uncle Leo XII, named after the Pope in office when he wasborn. The man called Florentino was their maternal grandfather, so that the name had come downto the son of Trsito Ariza after skipping over an entire generation of pontiffs.
Florentino always kept the notebook in which his father wrote love poems, some of theminspired by Tr sito Ariza, its pages decorated with drawings of broken hearts. Two thingssurprised him. One was the character of his father's handwriting, identical to his own although hehad chosen his because it was the one he liked best of the many he saw in a manual. The other wasfinding a sentence that he thought he had composed but that his father had written in the notebooklong before he was born: The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.
He had also seen the only two pictures of his father. One had been taken in Santa Fe, when hewas very young, the same age as Florentino Ariza when he saw the photograph for the first time,and in it he was wearing an overcoat that made him look as if he were stuffed inside a bear, and hewas leaning against a pedestal that supported the decapitated gaiters of a statue. The little boybeside him was Uncle Leo XII, wearing a ship captain's hat. In the other photograph, his fatherwas with a group of soldiers in God knows which of so many wars, and he held the longest rifle,and his moustache had a gunpowder smell that wafted out of the picture. He was a Liberal and aMason, just like his brothers, and yet he wanted his son to go to the seminary. Florentino Ariza didnot see the resemblance that people observed, but according to his Uncle Leo XII, Pius V was alsoreprimanded for the lyricism of his documents. In any case, he did not resemble him in thepictures, or in his memories of him, or in the image transfigured by love that his mother painted,or in the one unpainted by his Uncle Leo XII with his cruel wit. Nevertheless, Florentino Arizadiscovered the resemblance many years later, as he was combing his hair in front of the mirror,and only then did he understand that a man knows when he is growing old because he begins tolook like his father.
He had no memory of him on the Street of Windows. He thought he knew that at one time hisfather slept there, very early in his love affair with Tr sito Ariza, but that he did not visit heragain after the birth of Florentino. For many years the baptismal certificate was our only validmeans of identification, and Florentino Ariza's, recorded in the parish church of St. Tiburtius, saidonly that he was the natural son of an unwed natural daughter called Trsito Ariza. The name ofhis father did not appear on it, although Pius V took care of his son's needs in secret until the dayhe died. This social condition closed the doors of the seminary to Florentino Ariza, but he alsoescaped military service during the bloodiest period of our wars because he was the only son of anunmarried woman.
Every Friday after school he sat across from the offices of the River Company of theCaribbean, looking at pictures of animals in a book that was falling apart because he had looked atit so often. His father would walk into the building without looking at him, wearing the frock coatsthat Tr sito Ariza later had to alter for him, and with a face identical to that of St. John theEvangelist on the altars. When he came out, many hours later, he would make certain that no onesaw him, not even his coachman, and he would give him money for the week's expenses. They didnot speak, not only because his father made no effort to, but because he was terrified of him. Oneday, after he waited much longer than usual, his father gave him the coins and said: "Take themand do not come back again."It was the last time he saw him. But in time he was to learn that Uncle Leo XII, who wassome ten years younger, continued to bring money to Tr sito Ariza, and was the one who tookcare of her after Pius V died of an untreated colic without leaving anything in writing and withoutthe time to make any provisions for his only child: a child of the streets.
The drama of Florentino Ariza while he was a clerk for the River Company of the Caribbeanwas that he could not avoid lyricism because he was always thinking about Fermina Daza, and hehad never learned to write without thinking about her. Later, when he was moved to other posts,he had so much love left over inside that he did not know what to do with it, and he offered it tounlettered lovers free of charge, writing their love missives for them in the Arcade of the Scribes.
That is where he went after work. He would take off his frock coat with his circumspect gesturesand hang it over the back of the chair, he would put on the cuffs so he would not dirty his shirtsleeves, he would unbutton his vest so he could think better, and sometimes until very late at nighthe would encourage the hopeless with letters of mad adoration. From time to time he would be approachedby a poor woman who had a problem with one of her children, a war veteran whopersisted in demanding payment of his pension, someone who had been robbed and wanted to filea complaint with the government, but no matter how he tried, he could not satisfy them, becausethe only convincing document he could write was a love letter. He did not even ask his new clientsany questions, because all he had to do was look at the whites of their eyes to know what theirproblem was, and he would write page after page of uncontrolled love, following the infallibleformula of writing as he thought about Fermina Daza and nothing but Fermina Daza. After thefirst month he had to establish a system of appointments made in advance so that he would not beswamped by yearning lovers.
His most pleasant memory of that time was of a very timid young girl, almost a child, whotrembled as she asked him to write an answer to an irresistible letter that she had just received, andthat Florentino Ariza recognised as one he had written on the previous afternoon. He answered itin a different style, one that was in tune with the emotions and the age of the girl, and in a handthat also seemed to be hers, for he knew how to create a handwriting for every occasion, accordingto the character of each person. He wrote, imagining to himself what Fermina Daza would havesaid to him if she had loved him as much as that helpless child loved her suitor. Two days later, ofcourse, he had to write the boy's reply with the same hand, style, and kind of love that he hadattributed to him in the first letter, and so it was that he became involved in a feverishcorrespondence with himself. Before a month had passed, each came to him separately to thankhim for what he himself had proposed in the boy's letter and accepted with devotion in the girl'sresponse: they were going to marry.
Only when they had their first child did they realise, after a casual conversation, that theirletters had been written by the same scribe, and for the first time they went together to the Arcadeto ask him to be the child's godfather. Florentino Ariza was so enraptured by the practical evidenceof his dreams that he used time he did not have to write a Lovers' Companion that was more poeticand extensive than the one sold in doorways for twenty centavos and that half the city knew byheart. He categorised all the imaginable situations in which he and Fermina Daza might findthemselves, and for all of them he wrote as many models and alternatives as he could think of.
When he finished, he had some thousand letters in three volumes as complete as the CovarrubiasDictionary, but no printer in the city would take the risk of publishing them, and they ended up inan attic along with other papers from the past, for Tr sito Ariza flatly refused to dig out theearthenware jars and squander the savings of a lifetime on a mad publishing venture. Years later,when Florentino Ariza had the resources to publish the book himself, it was difficult for him toaccept the reality that love letters had gone out of fashion.
As he was starting out in the River Company of the Caribbean and writing letters free ofcharge in the Arcade of the Scribes, the friends of Florentino Ariza's youth were certain that theywere slowly losing him beyond recall. And they were right. When he returned from his voyagealong the river, he still saw some of them in the hope of dimming the memory of Fermina Daza,he played billiards with them, he went to their dances, he allowed himself to be raffled off amongthe girls, he allowed himself to do everything he thought would help him to become the man hehad once been. Later, when Uncle Leo XII took him on as an employee, he played dominoes withhis officemates in the Commercial Club, and they began to accept him as one of their own whenhe spoke to them of nothing but the navigation company, which he did not call by its completename but by its initials: the R C. C. He even changed the way he ate. As indifferent and irregularas he had been until then regarding food, that was how habitual and austere he became until theend of his days: a large cup of black coffee for breakfast, a slice of poached fish with white ricefor lunch, a cup of caf?con leche and a piece of cheese before going to bed. He drank black coffeeat any hour, anywhere, under any circumstances, as many as thirty little cups a day: a brew likecrude oil which he preferred to prepare himself and which he always kept near at hand in athermos. He was another person, despite his firm decision and anguished efforts to continue to bethe same man he had been before his mortal encounter with love.
The truth is that he was never the same again. Winning back Fermina Daza was the solepurpose of his life, and he was so certain of achieving it sooner or later that he convinced Trsito Ariza to continue with the restoration of the house so that it would be ready to receive herwhenever the miracle took place. In contrast to her reaction to the proposed publication of theLovers' Companion, Tr sito Ariza went much further: she bought the house at once andundertook a complete renovation. They made a reception room where the bedroom had been, onthe upper floor they built two spacious, bright bedrooms, one for the married couple and anotherfor the children they were going to have, and in the space where the old tobacco factory had beenthey put in an extensive garden with all kinds of roses, which Florentino Ariza himself tendedduring his free time at dawn. The only thing they left intact, as a kind of testimony of gratitude tothe past, was the notions shop. The back room where Florentino Ariza had slept they left as it hadalways been, with the hammock hanging and the writing table covered with untidy piles of books,but he moved to the room planned as the conjugal bedroom on the upper floor. This was thelargest and airiest in the house, and it had an interior terrace where it was pleasant to sit at nightbecause of the sea breeze and the scent of the rosebushes, but it was also the room that bestreflected Florentino Ariza's Trappist severity. The plain whitewashed walls were rough andunadorned, and the only furniture was a prison cot, a night table with a candle in a bottle, an oldwardrobe, and a washstand with its basin and bowl.
The work took almost three years, and it coincided with a brief civic revival owing to theboom in river navigation and trade, the same factors that had maintained the city's greatnessduring colonial times and for more than two centuries had made her the gateway to America. Butthat was also the period when Tr sito Ariza manifested the first symptoms of her incurabledisease. Her regular clients were older, paler, and more faded each time they came to the notionsshop, and she did not recognise them after dealing with them for half a lifetime, or she confusedthe affairs of one with those of another, which was a very grave matter in a business like hers, inwhich no papers were signed to protect her honour or theirs, and one's word of honour was givenand accepted as sufficient guarantee. At first it seemed she was growing deaf, but it soon becameevident that her memory was trickling away. And so she liquidated her pawn business, the treasurein the jars paid for completing and furnishing the house, and still left over were many of the mostvaluable old jewels in the city, whose owners did not have funds to redeem them.
During this period Florentino Ariza had to attend to too many responsibilities at the sametime, but his spirits never flagged as he sought to expand his work as a furtive hunter. After hiserratic experience with the Widow Nazaret, which opened the door to street love, he continued tohunt the abandoned little birds of the night for several years, still hoping to find a cure for the painof Fermina Daza. But by then he could no longer tell if his habit of fornicating without hope was amental necessity or a simple vice of the body. His visits to the transient hotel became lessfrequent, not only because his interests lay elsewhere but because he did not like them to see himthere under circumstances that were different from the chaste domesticity of the past.
Nevertheless, in three emergency situations he had recourse to the simple strategy of an era beforehis time: he disguised his friends, who were afraid of being recognised, as men, and they walkedinto the hotel together as if they were two gentlemen out on the town. Yet on two of theseoccasions someone realised that he and his presumptive male companion did not go to the bar butto a room, and the already tarnished reputation of Florentino Ariza received the coup de grace. Atlast he stopped going there, except for the very few times he did so not to catch up on what he hadmissed but for just the opposite reason: to find a refuge where he could recuperate from hisexcesses.
And it was just as well. No sooner did he leave his office at five in the afternoon than hebegan to hunt like a chicken hawk. At first he was content with what the night provided. He pickedup serving girls in the parks, black women in the market, sophisticated young ladies from theinterior on the beaches, gringas on the boats from New Orleans. He took them to the jetties wherehalf the city also went after nightfall, he took them wherever he could, and sometimes even wherehe could not, and not infrequently he had to hurry into a dark entryway and do what he could,however he could do it, behind the gate.
The lighthouse was always a blessed refuge in a storm, which he evoked with nostalgia in thedawn of his old age when he had everything settled, because it was a good place to be happy,above all at night, and he thought that something of his loves from that time flashed out to thesailors with every turn of the light. So that he continued to go there more than to any other spot,while his friend the lighthouse keeper was delighted to receive him with a simplemindedexpression on his face that was the best guarantee of discretion for the frightened little birds.
There was a house at the foot of the tower, close to the thunder of the waves breaking against thecliffs, where love was more intense because it seemed like a shipwreck. But Florentino Arizapreferred the light tower itself, late at night, because one could see the entire city and the trail oflights on the fishing boats at sea, and even in the distant swamps.
It was in those days that he devised his rather simplistic theories concerning the relationshipbetween a woman's appearance and her aptitude for love. He distrusted the sensual type, the oneswho looked as if they could eat an alligator raw and tended to be the most passive in bed. The typehe preferred was just the opposite: those skinny little tadpoles that no one bothered to turn aroundand look at in the street, who seemed to disappear when they took off their clothes, who made youfeel sorry for them when their bones cracked at the first impact, and yet who could leave the manwho bragged the most about his virility ready for the trashcan. He had made notes of thesepremature observations, intending to write a practical supplement to the Lovers' Companion, butthe project met the same fate as the previous one after Ausencia Santander sent him tumbling withher old dog's wisdom, stood him on his head, tossed him up and threw him down, made him asgood as new, shattered all his virtuous theories, and taught him the only thing he had to learnabout love: that nobody teaches life anything.
Ausencia Santander had had a conventional marriage for twenty years, which left her withthree children who had married and had children in turn, so that she boasted of being thegrandmother with the best bed in the city. It was never clear if she had abandoned her husband, orif he had abandoned her, or if they had abandoned each other at the same time, but he went to livewith his regular mistress, and then she felt free, in the middle of the day and at the front door, toreceive Rosendo de la Rosa, a riverboat captain whom she had often received in the middle of thenight at the back door. Without giving the matter a second thought, he brought Florentino Ariza tomeet her.
He brought him for lunch. He also brought a demijohn of homemade aguardiente andingredients of the highest quality for an epic sancocho, the kind that was possible only withchickens from the patio, meat with tender bones, rubbish-heap pork, and greens and vegetablesfrom the towns along the river. Nevertheless, from the very first, Florentino Ariza was not asenthusiastic about the excellence of the cuisine or the exuberance of the lady of the house as hewas about the beauty of the house itself. He liked her because of her house, bright and cool, withfour large windows facing the sea and beyond that a complete view of the old city. He liked thequantity and the splendour of the things that gave the living room a confused and at the same timerigorous appearance, with all kinds of handcrafted objects that Captain Rosendo de la Rosabrought back from each trip until there was no room left for another piece. On the sea terrace,sitting on his private ring, was a cockatoo from Malaya, with unbelievable white plumage and apensive tranquillity that gave one much to think about: it was the most beautiful animal thatFlorentino Ariza had ever seen.
Captain Rosendo de la Rosa was enthusiastic about his guest's enthusiasm, and he told him indetail the history of each object. As he spoke he sipped aguardiente without pause. He seemed tobe made of reinforced concrete: he was enormous, with hair all over his body except on his head, amoustache like a housepainter's brush, a voice like a capstan, which would have been his alone,and an exquisite courtesy. But not even his body could resist the way he drank. Before they satdown to the table he had finished half of the demijohn, and he fell forward onto the tray of glassesand bottles with a slow sound of demolition. Ausencia Santander had to ask Florentino Ariza tohelp her drag the inert body of the beached whale to bed and undress him as he slept. Then, in aflash of inspiration that they attributed to a conjunction of their stars, the two of them undressed inthe next room without agreeing to, without even suggesting it or proposing it to each other, and formore than seven years they continued undressing wherever they could while the Captain was on atrip. There was no danger of his surprising them, because he had the good sailor's habit of advisingthe port of his arrival by sounding the ship's horn, even at dawn, first with three long howls for hiswife and nine children, and then with two short, melancholy ones for his mistress.
Ausencia Santander was almost fifty years old and looked it, but she had such a personalinstinct for love that no homegrown or scientific theories could interfere with it. Florentino Arizaknew from the ship's itineraries when he could visit her, and he always went unannounced,whenever he wanted to, at any hour of the day or night, and never once was she not waiting forhim. She would open the door as her mother had raised her until she was seven years old: starknaked, with an organdy ribbon in her hair. She would not let him take another step until she hadundressed him, because she thought it was bad luck to have a clothed man in the house. This wasthe cause of constant discord with Captain Rosendo de la Rosa, because he had the superstitiousbelief that smoking naked brought bad luck, and at times he preferred to put off love rather thanput out his inevitable Cuban cigar. On the other hand, Florentino Ariza was very taken with thecharms of nudity, and she removed his clothes with sure delight as soon as she closed the door, noteven giving him time to greet her, or to take off his hat or his glasses, kissing him and letting himkiss her with sharp-toothed kisses, unfastening his clothes from bottom to top, first the buttons ofhis fly, one by one after each kiss, then his belt buckle, and at the last his vest and shirt, until hewas like a live fish that had been slit open from head to tail. Then she sat him in the living roomand took off his boots, pulled on his trouser cuffs so that she could take off his pants while sheremoved his long underwear, and at last she undid the garters around his calves and took off hissocks. Then Florentino Ariza stopped kissing her and letting her kiss him so that he could do theonly thing he was responsible for in that precise ceremony: he took his watch and chain out of thebuttonhole in his vest and took off his glasses and put them in his boots so he would be sure not toforget them. He always took that precaution, always without fail, whenever he undressed insomeone else's house.
As soon as he had done that, she attacked him without giving him time for anything else,there on the same sofa where she had just undressed him, and only on rare occasions in the bed.
She mounted him and took control of all of him for all of her, absorbed in herself, her eyes closed,gauging the situation in her absolute inner darkness, advancing here, retreating there, correctingher invisible route, trying another, more intense path, another means of proceeding withoutdrowning in the slimy marsh that flowed from her womb, droning like a horsefly as she askedherself questions and answered in her native jargon; where was that something in the shadows thatonly she knew about and that she longed for just for herself, until she succumbed without waitingfor anybody, she fell alone into her abyss with a jubilant explosion of total victory that made theworld tremble. Florentino Ariza was left exhausted, incomplete, floating in a puddle of theirperspiration, but with the impression of being no more than an instrument of pleasure. He wouldsay: "You treat me as if I were just anybody." She would roar with the laughter of a free femaleand say: "Not at all: as if you were nobody." He was left with the impression that she took awayeverything with mean-spirited greed, and his pride would rebel and he would leave the housedetermined never to return. But then he would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, andthe memory of the self-absorbed love of Ausencia Santander was revealed to him for what it was:
a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it wasimpossible to escape.
One Sunday, two years after they met, the first thing she did when he arrived was to take offhis glasses instead of undressing him, so that she could kiss him with greater ease, and this washow Florentino Ariza learned that she had begun to love him. Despite the fact that from the firstday he had felt very comfortable in the house that he now loved as if it were his own, he had neverstayed longer than two hours, and he had never slept there, and he had eaten there only oncebecause she had given him a formal invitation. He went there, in fact, only for what he had comefor, always bringing his only gift, a single rose, and then he would disappear until the nextunforeseeable time. But on the Sunday when she took off his glasses to kiss him, in part becauseof that and in part because they fell asleep after gentle love-making, they spent the afternoonnaked in the Captain's enormous bed. When he awoke from his nap, Florentino Ariza stillremembered the shrieking of the cockatoo, whose strident calls belied his beauty. But the silencewas diaphanous in the four o'clock heat, and through the bedroom window one could see theoutline of the old city with the afternoon sun at its back, its golden domes, its sea in flames all theway to Jamaica. Ausencia Santander stretched out an adventurous hand, seeking the sleepingbeast, but Florentino Ariza moved it away. He said: "Not now. I feel something strange, as ifsomeone were watching us." She aroused the cockatoo again with her joyous laughter. She said:
"Not even Jonah's wife would swallow that story." Neither did she, of course, but she admitted itwas a good one, and the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without makinglove again. At five o'clock, with the sun still high, she jumped out of bed, naked as always andwith the organdy ribbon in her hair, and went to find something to drink in the kitchen. But shehad not taken a single step out of the bedroom when she screamed in horror.
She could not believe it. The only objects left in the house were the lamps attached to thewalls. All the rest, the signed furniture, the Indian rugs, the statues and the hand-woven tapestries,the countless trinkets made of precious stones and metals, everything that had made hers one ofthe most pleasant and best decorated houses in the city, everything, even the sacred cockatoo,everything had vanished. It had been carried out through the sea terrace without disturbing theirlove. All that was left were empty rooms with the four open windows, and a message painted onthe rear wall: This is what you get for fucking around. Captain Rosendo de la Rosa could neverunderstand why Ausencia Santander did not report the robbery, or try to get in touch with thedealers in stolen goods, or permit her misfortune to be mentioned again.
Florentino Ariza continued to visit her in the looted house, whose furnishings were reducedto three leather stools that the thieves forgot in the kitchen, and the contents of the bedroom wherethe two of them had been. But he did not visit her as often as before, not because of the desolationin the house, as she supposed and as she said to him, but because of the novelty of a mule-drawntrolley at the turn of the new century, which proved to be a prodigious and original nest of free-flying little birds. He rode it four times a day, twice to go to the office, twice to return home, andsometimes when his reading was real, and most of the time when it was pretence, he would takethe first steps, at least, toward a future tryst. Later, when Uncle Leo XII put at his disposal acarriage drawn by two little grey mules with golden trappings, just like the one that belonged toPresident Rafael N ez, he would long for those times on the trolley as the most fruitful of allhis adventures in falconry. He was right: there is no worse enemy of secret love than a carriagewaiting at the door. In fact, he almost always left it hidden at his house and made his hawkishrounds On foot so that he would not leave wheel marks in the dust. That is why he evoked withsuch great nostalgia the old trolley with its emaciated mules covered with sores, in which asideways glance was all one needed to know where love was. However, in the midst of so manytender memories, he could not elude his recollection of a helpless little bird whose name he neverknew and with whom he spent no more than half a frenetic night, but that had been enough to ruinthe innocent rowdiness of Carnival for him for the rest of his life.
She had attracted his attention on the trolley for the fearlessness with which she travelledthrough the riotous public celebration. She could not have been more than twenty years old, andshe did not seem to share the spirit of Carnival, unless she was disguised as an invalid: her hairwas very light, long, and straight, hanging loose over her shoulders, and she wore a tunic of plain,unadorned linen. She was completely removed from the confusion of music in the streets, thehandfuls of rice powder, the showers of aniline thrown at the passengers on the trolley, whosemules were whitened with cornstarch and wore flowered hats during those three days of madness.
Taking advantage of the confusion, Florentino Ariza invited her to have an ice with him, becausehe did not think he could ask for anything more. She looked at him without surprise. She said: "Iam happy to accept, but I warn you that I am crazy." He laughed at her witticism, and took her tosee the parade of floats from the balcony of the ice cream shop. Then he put on a rented cape, andthe two of them joined the dancing in the Plaza of the Customhouse, and enjoyed themselves likenewborn sweethearts, for her indifference went to the opposite extreme in the uproar of the night:
she danced like a professional, she was imaginative and daring in her revelry, and she haddevastating charm.
"You don't know the trouble you've got into with me," she shouted, laughing in the fever ofCarnival. "I'm a crazy woman from the insane asylum."For Florentino Ariza, that night was a return to the innocent unruliness of adolescence, whenhe had not yet been wounded by love. But he knew, more from hearsay than from personalexperience, that such easy happiness could not last very long. And so before the night began todegenerate, as it always did after prizes were distributed for the best costumes, he suggested to thegirl that they go to the lighthouse to watch the sunrise. She accepted with pleasure, but she wantedto wait until after they had given out the prizes.
Florentino Ariza was certain that the delay saved his life. In fact, the girl had indicated to himthat they should leave for the lighthouse, when she was seized by two guards and a nurse fromDivine Shepherdess Asylum. They had been looking for her since her escape at three o'clock thatafternoon--they and the entire police force. She had decapitated a guard and seriously woundedtwo others with a machete that she had snatched away from the gardener because she wanted to godancing at Carnival. It had not occurred to anyone that she might be dancing in the streets; theythought she would be hiding in one of the many houses where they had searched even the cisterns.
It was not easy to take her away. She defended herself with a pair of gardening shears thatshe had hidden in her bodice, and six men were needed to put her in the strait jacket while thecrowd jammed into the Plaza of the Customhouse applauded and whistled with glee in the beliefthat the bloody capture was one of many Carnival farces. Florentino Ariza was heartbroken, andbeginning on Ash Wednesday he would walk down Divine Shepherdess Street with a box ofEnglish chocolates for her. He would stand and look at the inmates, who shouted all kinds ofprofanities and compliments at him through the windows, and he would show them the box ofchocolates in case luck would have it that she, too, might look out at him through the iron bars.
But he never saw her. Months later, as he was getting off the mule-drawn trolley, a little girlwalking with her father asked him for a piece of chocolate from the box he was carrying in hishand. Her father reprimanded her and begged Florentino Ariza's pardon. But he gave the wholebox to the child, thinking that the action would redeem him from all bitterness, and he soothed thefather with a pat on the back.
"They were for a love that has gone all to hell," he said.
As a kind of compensation from fate, it was also in the mule-drawn trolley that FlorentinoAriza met Leona Cassiani, who was the true woman in his life although neither of them ever knewit and they never made love. He had sensed her before he saw her as he was going home on thetrolley at five o'clock; it was a tangible look that touched him as if it were a finger. He raised hiseyes and saw her, at the far end of the trolley, but standing out with great clarity from the otherpassengers. She did not look away. On the contrary: she continued to look at him with suchboldness that he could not help thinking what he thought: black, young, pretty, but a whorebeyond the shadow of a doubt. He rejected her from his life, because he could not conceive ofanything more contemptible than paying for love: he had never done it.
Florentino Ariza got off at the Plaza of the Carriages, which was the end of the line, hurriedthrough the labyrinth of commerce because his mother was expecting him at six, and when heemerged on the other side of the crowd, he heard the tapping heels of a loose woman on thepaving stones and turned around so that he would be certain of what he already knew: it was she,dressed like the slave girls in engravings, with a skirt of veils that was raised with the gesture of adancer when she stepped over the puddles in the streets, a low-cut top that left her shoulders bare,a handful of coloured necklaces, and a white turban. He knew them from the transient hotel. Itoften happened that at six in the afternoon they were still eating breakfast, and then all they coulddo was to use sex as if it were a bandit's knife and put it to the throat of the first man they passedon the street: your prick or your life. As a final test, Florentino Ariza changed direction and wentdown the deserted Oil Lamp Alley, and she followed, coming closer and closer to him. Then hestopped, turned around, blocked her way on the sidewalk, and leaned on his umbrella with bothhands. She stood facing him.
"You made a mistake, good-looking," he said. "I don't do that.""Of course you do," she said. "One can see it in your face."Florentino Ariza remembered a phrase from his childhood, something that the family doctor,his godfather, had said regarding his chronic constipation: "The world is divided into those whocan shit and those who cannot." On the basis of this dogma the Doctor had elaborated an entiretheory of character, which he considered more accurate than astrology. But with what he hadlearned over the years, Florentino Ariza stated it another way: "The world is divided into thosewho screw and those who do not." He distrusted those who did not: when they strayed from thestraight and narrow, it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if theyhad just invented it. Those who did it often, on the other hand, lived for that alone. They felt sogood that their lips were sealed as if they were tombs, because they knew that their lives dependedon their discretion. They never spoke of their exploits, they confided in no one, they feignedindifference to the point where they earned the reputation of being impotent, or frigid, or above alltimid fairies, as in the case of Florentino Ariza. But they took pleasure in the error because theerror protected them. They formed a secret society, whose members recognised each other all overthe world without need of a common language, which is why Florentino Ariza was not surprisedby the girl's reply: she was one of them, and therefore she knew that he knew that she knew.
It was the great mistake of his life, as his conscience was to remind him every hour of everyday until the final day of his life. What she wanted from him was not love, least of all love thatwas paid for, but a job, any kind of job, at any salary, in the River Company of the Caribbean.
Florentino Ariza felt so ashamed of his own conduct that he took her to the head of Personnel,who gave her the lowest-level job in the General Section, which she performed with seriousness,modesty, and dedication for three years.
Ever since its founding, the R. C. C. had had its offices across from the river dock, and it hadnothing in common with the port for ocean liners on the opposite side of the bay, or with themarket pier on Las imas Bay. The building was of wood, with a sloping tin roof, a single longbalcony with columns at the front, and windows, covered with wire mesh, on all four sidesthrough which one had complete views of the boats at the dock as if they were paintings hangingon the wall. When the German founders built it, they painted the tin roof red and the wooden wallsa brilliant white, so that the building itself bore some resemblance to a riverboat. Later it waspainted all blue, and at the time that Florentino Ariza began to work for the company it was adusty shed of no definite colour, and on the rusting roof there were patches of new tin plates overthe original ones. Behind the building, in a gravel patio surrounded by chicken wire, stood twolarge warehouses of more recent construction, and at the back there was a closed sewer pipe, dirtyand foul-smelling, where the refuse of a half a century of river navigation lay rotting: the debris ofhistoric boats, from the early one with a single smokestack, christened by Sim n Bol ar, tosome so recent that they had electric fans in the cabins. Most of them had been dismantled formaterials to be used in building other boats, but many were in such good condition that it seemedpossible to give them a coat of paint and launch them without frightening away the iguanas ordisturbing the foliage of the large yellow flowers that made them even more nostalgic.
The Administrative Section was on the upper floor of the building, in small but comfortableand well-appointed offices similar to the cabins on the boats, for they had been built not by civilarchitects but by naval engineers. At the end of the corridor, like any employee, Uncle Leo XIIdispatched his business in an office similar to all the others, the one exception being that everymorning he found a glass vase filled with sweet-smelling flowers on his desk. On the ground floorwas the Passenger Section, with a waiting room that had rustic benches and a counter for sellingtickets and handling baggage. Last of all was the confusing General Section, its name alonesuggesting the vagueness of its functions, where problems that had not been solved elsewhere inthe company went to die an ignominious death. There sat Leona Cassiani, lost behind a student'sdesk surrounded by corn stacked for shipping and unresolved papers, on the day that Uncle LeoXII himself went to see what the devil he could think of to make the General Section good forsomething. After three hours of questions, theoretical assumptions, and concrete evidence, with allthe employees in the middle of the room, he returned to his office tormented by the certainty thatinstead of a solution to so many problems, he had found just the opposite: new and differentproblems with no solution.
The next day, when Florentino Ariza came into his office, he found a memorandum fromLeona Cassiani, with the request that he study it and then show it to his uncle if he thought itappropriate. She was the only one who had not said a word during the inspection the previousafternoon. She had remained silent in full awareness of the worth of her position as a charityemployee, but in the memorandum she noted that she had said nothing not because of negligencebut out of respect for the hierarchies in the section. It had an alarming simplicity. Uncle Leo XIIhad proposed a thorough reorganisation, but Leona Cassiani did not agree, for the simple reasonthat in reality the General Section did not exist: it was the dumping ground for annoying but minorproblems that the other sections wanted to get rid of. As a consequence, the solution was toeliminate the General Section and return the problems to the sections where they had originated, tobe solved there.
Uncle Leo XII did not have the slightest idea who Leona Cassiani was, and he could notremember having seen anyone who could be Leona Cassiani at the meeting on the previousafternoon, but when he read the memorandum he called her to his office and talked with herbehind closed doors for two hours. They spoke about everything, in accordance with the methodhe used to learn about people. The memorandum showed simple common sense, and hersuggestion, in fact, would produce the desired result. But Uncle Leo XII was not interested in that:
he was interested in her. What most attracted his attention was that her only education afterelementary school had been in the School of Millinery. Moreover, she was learning English athome, using an accelerated method with no teacher, and for the past three months she had beentaking evening classes in typing, a new kind of work with a wonderful future, as they used to sayabout the telegraph and before that the steam engine.
When she left the meeting, Uncle Leo XII had already begun to call her what he wouldalways call her: my namesake Leona. He had decided to eliminate with the stroke of a pen thetroublesome section and distribute the problems so that they could be solved by the people whohad created them, in accordance with Leona Cassiani's suggestion, and he had created a newposition for her, which had no title or specific duties but in effect was his Personal Assistant. Thatafternoon, after the inglorious burial of the General Section, Uncle Leo XII asked Florentino Arizawhere he had found Leona Cassiani, and he answered with the truth.
"Well, then, go back to the trolley and bring me every girl like her that you find," his unclesaid. "With two or three more, we'll salvage your galleon."Florentino Ariza took this as one of Uncle Leo XII's typical jokes, but the next day he foundhimself without the carriage that had been assigned to him six months earlier, and that was takenback now so that he could continue to look for hidden talent on the trolleys. Leona Cassiani, forher part, soon overcame her initial scruples, and she revealed what she had kept hidden with somuch astuteness during her first three years. In three more years she had taken control ofeverything, and in the next four she stood on the threshold of the General Secretaryship, but sherefused to cross it because it was only one step below Florentino Ariza. Until then she had takenorders from him, and she wanted to continue to do so, although the fact of the matter was thatFlorentino himself did not realise that he took orders from her. Indeed, he had done nothing moreon the Board of Directors than follow her suggestions, which helped him to move up despite thetraps set by his secret enemies.
Leona Cassiani had a diabolical talent for handling secrets, and she always knew how to bewhere she had to be at the right time. She was dynamic and quiet, with a wise sweetness. Butwhen it was indispensable she would, with sorrow in her heart, give free rein to a character ofsolid iron. However, she never did that for herself. Her only objective was to clear the ladder atany cost, with blood if necessary, so that Florentino Ariza could move up to the position he hadproposed for himself without calculating his own strength very well. She would have done this inany event, of course, because she had an indomitable will to power, but the truth was that she didit consciously, out of simple gratitude. Her determination was so great that Florentino Arizahimself lost his way in her schemes, and on one unfortunate occasion he attempted to block her,thinking that she was trying to do the same to him. Leona Cassiani put him in his place.
"Make no mistake," she said to him. "I will withdraw from all this whenever you wish, butthink it over carefully."Florentino Ariza, who in fact had never thought about it, thought about it then, as well as hecould, and he surrendered his weapons. The truth is that in the midst of that sordid internecinebattle in a company in perpetual crisis, in the midst of his disasters as a tireless falconer and themore and more uncertain dream of Fermina Daza, the impassive Florentino Ariza had not had amoment of inner peace as he confronted the fascinating spectacle of that fierce black womansmeared with shit and love in the fever of battle. Many times he regretted in secret that she had notbeen in fact what he thought she was on the afternoon he met her, so that he could wipe his asswith his principles and make love to her even if it cost nuggets of shining gold. For LeonaCassiani was still the woman she had been that afternoon on the trolley, with the same clothes,worthy of an impetuous runaway slave, her mad turbans, her earrings and bracelets made of bone,her necklaces, her rings with fake stones on every finger: a lioness in the streets. The years hadchanged her appearance very little, and that little became her very well. She moved in splendidmaturity, her feminine charms were even more exciting, and her ardent African body wasbecoming more compact. Florentino Ariza had made no propositions to her in ten years, a hardpenance for his original error, and she had helped him in everything except that.
One night when he had worked late, something he did often after his mother's death,Florentino Ariza was about to leave when he saw a light burning in Leona Cassiani's office. Heopened the door without knocking, and there she was: alone at her desk, absorbed, serious, withthe new eyeglasses that gave her an academic air. Florentino Ariza realised with joyful fear thatthe two of them were alone in the building, the piers were deserted, the city asleep, the nighteternal over the dark sea, and the horn mournful on the ship that would not dock for another hour.
Florentino Ariza leaned both hands on his umbrella, just as he had done in Oil Lamp Alley whenhe barred her way, only now he did it to hide the trembling in his knees.
"Tell me something, lionlady of my soul," he said. "When are we ever going to stop this?"She took off her glasses without surprise, with absolute self-control, and dazzled him withher solar laugh. It was the first time she used the familiar form of address with him.
"Ay, Florentino Ariza," she said, "I've been sitting here for ten years waiting for you to askme that."It was too late: the opportunity had been there with her in the mule-drawn trolley, it hadalways been with her there on the chair where she was sitting, but now it was gone forever. Thetruth was that after all the dirty tricks she had done for him, after so much sordidness endured forhim, she had moved on in life and was far beyond his twenty-year advantage in age: she hadgrown too old for him. She loved him so much that instead of deceiving him she preferred tocontinue loving him, although she had to let him know in a brutal manner.
"No," she said to him. "I would feel as if I were going to bed with the son I never had."Florentino Ariza was left with the nagging suspicion that this was not her last word. Hebelieved that when a woman says no, she is waiting to be urged before making her final decision,but with her he could not risk making the same mistake twice. He withdrew without protest, andeven with a certain grace, which was not easy for him. From that night on, any cloud there mighthave been between them was dissipated without bitterness, and Florentino Ariza understood at lastthat it is possible to be a woman's friend and not go to bed with her.
Leona Cassiani was the only human being to whom Florentino Ariza was tempted to revealthe secret of Fermina Daza. The few people who had known were beginning to forget for reasonsover which they had no control. Three of them were, beyond the shadow of any doubt, in thegrave: his mother, whose memory had been erased long before she died; Gala Placidia, who haddied of old age in the service of one who had been like a daughter to her; and the unforgettableEscol tica Daza, the woman who had brought him the first love letter he had ever received inhis life, hidden in her prayerbook, and who could not still be alive after so many years. LorenzoDaza (no one knew if he was alive or dead) might have revealed the secret to Sister Franca de laLuz when he was trying to stop Fermina Daza's expulsion, but it was unlikely that it had gone anyfurther. That left the eleven telegraph operators in Hildebranda Sanchez's province who hadhandled telegrams with their complete names and exact addresses, and Hildebranda S chezherself, and her court of indomitable cousins.
What Florentino Ariza did not know was that Dr. Juvenal Urbino should have been includedon the list. Hildebranda S chez had revealed the secret to him during one of her many visits inthe early years. But she did so in such a casual way and at such an inopportune moment that it didnot go in one of Dr. Urbino's ears and out the other, as she thought; it did not go in at all.
Hildebranda had mentioned Florentino Ariza as one of the secret poets who, in her opinion, mightwin the Poetic Festival. Dr. Urbino could not remember who he was, and she told him--she did notneed to, but there was no hint of malice in it--that he was Fermina Daza's only sweetheart beforeshe married. She told him, convinced that it had been something so innocent and ephemeral that infact it was rather touching. Dr. Urbino replied without looking at her: "I did not know that fellowwas a poet." And then he wiped him from his memory, because among other things, his professionhad accustomed him to the ethical management of forgetfulness.
Florentino Ariza observed that, with the exception of his mother, the keepers of the secretbelonged to Fermina Daza's world. In his, he was alone with the crushing weight of a burden thathe had often needed to share, but until then there had been no one worthy of so much trust. LeonaCassiani was the only one, and all he needed was the opportunity and the means. This was what hewas thinking on the hot summer afternoon when Dr. Juvenal Urbino climbed the steep stairs of theR. C. C., paused on each step in order to survive the three o'clock heat, appeared in FlorentinoAriza's office, panting and soaked with perspiration down to his trousers, and gasped with his lastbreath: "I believe a cyclone is coming." Florentino Ariza had seen him there many times, askingfor Uncle Leo XII, but never until now had it seemed so clear to him that this uninvited guest hadsomething to do with his life.
This was during the time that Dr. Juvenal Urbino had overcome the pitfalls of his profession,and was going from door to door, almost like a beggar with his hat in his hand, asking forcontributions to his artistic enterprises. Uncle Leo XII had always been one of his most faithfuland generous contributors, but just at that moment he had begun his daily ten-minute siesta, sittingin the swivel chair at his desk. Florentino Ariza asked Dr. Juvenal Urbino to please wait in hisoffice, which was next to Uncle Leo XII's and, in a certain sense, served as his waiting room.
They had seen each other on various occasions, but they had never before been face to face asthey were now, and once again Florentino Ariza experienced the nausea of feeling himself inferior.
The ten minutes were an eternity, during which he stood up three times in the hope that his unclehad awakened early, and he drank an entire thermos of black coffee. Dr. Urbino refused to drinkeven a single cup. He said: "Coffee is poison." And he continued to chat about one thing andanother and did not even care if anyone was listening to him. Florentino Ariza could not bear hisnatural distinction, the fluidity and precision of his words, his faint scent of camphor, his personalcharm, the easy and elegant manner in which he made his most frivolous sentences seem essentialonly because he had said them. Then, without warning, the Doctor changed the subject.
"Do you like music?"He was taken by surprise. In reality, Florentino Ariza attended every concert and operaperformed in the city, but he did not feel capable of engaging in a critical or well-informeddiscussion. He had a weakness for popular music, above all sentimental waltzes, whose similarityto the ones he had composed as an adolescent, or to his secret verses, could not be denied. He hadonly to hear them once, and then for nights on end there was no power in heaven or earth thatcould shake the melody out of his head. But that would not be a serious answer to a seriousquestion put to him by a specialist.
"I like Gardel," he said.
Dr. Urbino understood. "I see," he said. "He is popular." And he slipped into a recounting ofhis many new projects which, as always, had to be realised without official backing. He called tohis attention the disheartening inferiority of the performances that could be heard here now,compared with the splendid ones of the previous century. That was true: he had spent a yearselling subscriptions to bring the Cortot-Casals-Thibaud trio to the Dramatic Theatre, and therewas no one in the government who even knew who they were, while this very month there wereno seats left for the Ram n Caralt company that performed detective dramas, for the Operettaand Zarzuela Company of Don Manolo de la Presa, for the Santanelas, ineffable mimics,illusionists, and artistes, who could change their clothes on stage in the wink of an eye, for DanyseD'Altaine, advertised as a former dancer with the Folies-Berg re, and even for the abominableUrsus, a Basque madman who took on a fighting bull all by himself. There was no reason tocomplain, however, if the Europeans themselves were once again setting the bad example of abarbaric war when we had begun to live in peace after nine civil wars in half a century, which, ifthe truth were told, were all one war: always the same war. What most attracted Florentino Ariza'sattention in that intriguing speech was the possibility of reviving the Poetic Festival, the mostrenowned and long-lasting of the enterprises that Dr. Juvenal Urbino had conceived in the past. Hehad to bite his tongue to keep from telling him that he had been an assiduous participant in theannual competition that had eventually interested famous poets, not only in the rest of the countrybut in other nations of the Caribbean as well.
No sooner had the conversation begun than t
Chapter 4 (2)
C?F?C
Chapter 5
ON THE OCCASION of the celebration of the new century, there was an innovative program ofpublic ceremonies, the most memorable of which was the first journey in a balloon, the fruit of theboundless initiative of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Half the city gathered on the Arsenal Beach to expresstheir wonderment at the ascent of the enormous balloon made of taffeta in the colours of the flag,which carried the first airmail to San Juan de la Ci aga, some thirty leagues to the northeast asthe crow flies. Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his wife, who had experienced the excitement of flight atthe World's Fair in Paris, were the first to climb into the wicker basket, followed by the pilot andsix distinguished guests. They were carrying a letter from the Governor of the Province to themunicipal officials of San Juan de la Ci aga, in which it was documented for all time that thiswas the first mail transported through the air. A journalist from the Commercial Daily asked Dr.
Juvenal Urbino for his final words in the event he perished during the adventure, and he did noteven take the time to think about the answer that would earn him so much abuse.
"In my opinion," he said, "the nineteenth century is passing for everyone except us."Lost in the guileless crowd that sang the national anthem as the balloon gained altitude,Florentino Ariza felt himself in agreement with the person whose comments he heard over the din,to the effect that this was not a suitable exploit for a woman, least of all one as old as FerminaDaza. But it was not so dangerous after all. Or at least not so much dangerous as depressing. Theballoon reached its destination without incident after a peaceful trip through an incredible bluesky. They flew well and very low, with a calm, favourable wind, first along the spurs of the snow-covered mountains and then over the vastness of the Great Swamp.
From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the very old and heroic cityof Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because ofthe cholera panic after three centuries of resistance to the sieges of the English and the atrocities ofthe buccaneers. They saw the walls still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortificationsdevoured by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the Viceroys rotting withplague inside their armour.
They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted in lunatic colours, withpens holding iguanas raised for food and balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrinegardens. Excited by everyone's shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water,jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the houses and from the canoes that theyhandled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to recover the bundles of clothing, the bottlesof cough syrup, the beneficent food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to themfrom the basket of the balloon.
They flew over the dark ocean of the banana plantations, whose silence reached them like alethal vapour, and Fermina Daza remembered herself at the age of three, perhaps four, walkingthrough the shadowy forest holding the hand of her mother, who was almost a girl herself,surrounded by other women dressed in muslin, just like her mother, with white parasols and hatsmade of gauze. The pilot, who was observing the world through a spyglass, said: "They seemdead." He passed the spyglass to Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who saw the oxcarts in the cultivated fields,the boundary lines of the railroad tracks, the blighted irrigation ditches, and wherever he looked hesaw human bodies. Someone said that the cholera was ravaging the villages of the Great Swamp.
Dr. Urbino, as he spoke, continued to look through the spyglass.
"Well, it must be a very special form of cholera," he said, "because every single corpse hasreceived the coup de grace through the back of the neck."A short while later they flew over a foaming sea, and they landed without incident on abroad, hot beach whose surface, cracked with niter burned like fire. The officials were there withno more protection against the sun than ordinary umbrellas, the elementary schools were therewaving little flags in time to the music, and the beauty queens with scorched flowers and crownsmade of gold cardboard, and the brass band of the prosperous town of Gayra, which in those dayswas the best along the Caribbean coast. All that Fermina Daza wanted was to see her birthplaceagain, to confront it with her earliest memories, but no one was allowed to go there because of thedangers of the plague. Dr. Juvenal Urbino delivered the historic letter, which was then mislaidamong other papers and never seen again, and the entire delegation almost suffocated in thetedium of the speeches. The pilot could not make the balloon ascend again, and at last they wereled on muleback to the dock at Pueblo Viejo, where the swamp met the sea. Fermina Daza wassure she had passed through there with her mother when she was very young, in a cart drawn by ateam of oxen. When she was older, she had repeated the story several times to her father, who diedinsisting that she could not possibly recall that.
"I remember the trip very well, and what you say is accurate," he told her, "but it happened atleast five years before you were born."Three days later the members of the balloon expedition, devastated by a bad night of storms,returned to their port of origin, where they received a heroes' welcome. Lost in the crowd, ofcourse, was Florentino Ariza, who recognised the traces of terror on Fermina Daza's face.
Nevertheless he saw her again that same afternoon in a cycling exhibition that was also sponsoredby her husband, and she showed no sign of fatigue. She rode an uncommon velocipede thatresembled something from a circus, with a very high front wheel, over which she was seated, anda very small back wheel that gave almost no support. She wore a pair of loose trousers trimmed inred, which scandalised the older ladies and disconcerted the gentlemen, but no one was indifferentto her skill.
That, along with so many other ephemeral images in the course of so many years, wouldsuddenly appear to Florentino Ariza at the whim of fate, and disappear again in the same way,leaving behind a throb of longing in his heart. Taken together, they marked the passage of his life,for he experienced the cruelty of time not so much in his own flesh as in the imperceptiblechanges he discerned in Fermina Daza each time he saw her.
One night he went to Don Sancho's Inn, an elegant colonial restaurant, and sat in the mostremote corner, as was his custom when he ate his frugal meals alone. All at once, in the largemirror on the back wall, he caught a glimpse of Fermina Daza sitting at a table with her husbandand two other couples, at an angle that allowed him to see her reflected in all her splendour. Shewas unguarded, she engaged in conversation with grace and laughter that exploded like fireworks,and her beauty was more radiant under the enormous teardrop chandeliers: once again, Alice hadgone through the looking glass.
Holding his breath, Florentino Ariza observed her at his pleasure: he saw her eat, he saw herhardly touch her wine, he saw her joke with the fourth in the line of Don Sanchos; from hissolitary table he shared a moment of her life, and for more than an hour he lingered, unseen, in theforbidden precincts of her intimacy. Then he drank four more cups of coffee to pass the time untilhe saw her leave with the rest of the group. They passed so close to him that he could distinguishher scent among the clouds of other perfumes worn by her companions.
From that night on, and for almost a year afterward, he laid unrelenting siege to the owner ofthe inn, offering him whatever he wanted, money or favours or whatever he desired most in life, ifhe would sell him the mirror. It was not easy, because old Don Sancho believed the legend that thebeautiful frame, carved by Viennese cabinetmakers, was the twin of another, which had belongedto Marie Antoinette and had disappeared without a trace: a pair of unique jewels. When at last hesurrendered, Florentino Ariza hung the mirror in his house, not for the exquisite frame but becauseof the place inside that for two hours had been occupied by her beloved reflection.
When he saw Fermina Daza she was almost always on her husband's arm, the two of them inperfect harmony, moving through their own space with the astonishing fluidity of Siamese cats,which was broken only when they stopped to greet him. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, in fact, shook hishand with warm cordiality, and on occasion even permitted himself a pat on the shoulder. She, onthe other hand, kept him relegated to an impersonal regime of formalities and never made theslightest gesture that might allow him to suspect that she remembered him from her unmarrieddays. They lived in two different worlds, but while he made every effort to reduce the distancebetween them, every step she took was in the opposite direction. It was a long time before hedared to think that her indifference was no more than a shield for her timidity. This occurred tohim suddenly, at the christening of the first freshwater vessel built in the local shipyards, whichwas also the first official occasion at which Florentino Ariza, as First Vice President of the R. C.
C., represented Uncle Leo XII. This coincidence imbued the ceremony with special solemnity, andeveryone of any significance in the life of the city was present.
Florentino Ariza was looking after his guests in the main salon of the ship, still redolent offresh paint and tar, when there was a burst of applause on the docks, and the band struck up atriumphal march. He had to repress the trembling that was almost as old as he was when he sawthe beautiful woman of his dreams on her husband's arm, splendid in her maturity, striding like aqueen from another time past the honour guard in parade uniform, under the shower of paperstreamers and flower petals tossed at them from the windows. Both responded to the ovation witha wave of the hand, but she was so dazzling, dressed in imperial gold from her high-heeledslippers and the foxtails at her throat to her bell-shaped hat, that she seemed to be alone in themidst of the crowd.
Florentino Ariza waited for them on the bridge with the provincial officials, surrounded bythe crash of the music and the fireworks and the three heavy screams from the ship, whichenveloped the dock in steam. Juvenal Urbino greeted the members of the reception line with thatnaturalness so typical of him, which made everyone think the Doctor bore him a special fondness:
first the ship's captain in his dress uniform, then the Archbishop, then the Governor with his andthe Mayor with his, and then the military commander, who was a newcomer from the Andes.
Beyond the officials stood Florentino Ariza, dressed in dark clothing and almost invisible amongso many eminent people. After greeting the military commander, Fermina seemed to hesitatebefore Florentino Ariza's outstretched hand. The military man, prepared to introduce them, askedher if they did not know each other. She did not say yes and she did not say no, but she held outher hand to Florentino Ariza with a salon smile. The same thing had occurred twice in the past,and would occur again, and Florentino Ariza always accepted these occasions with a strength ofcharacter worthy of Fermina Daza. But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacityfor illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.
The mere idea excited his youthful desires. Once again he haunted Fermina Daza's villa,filled with the same longings he had felt when he was on duty in the little Park of the Evangels,but his calculated intention was not that she see him, but rather that he see her and know that shewas still in the world. Now, however, it was difficult for him to escape notice. The District of LaManga was on a semi-deserted island, separated from the historic city by a canal of green waterand covered by thickets of icaco plum, which had sheltered Sunday lovers in colonial times. Inrecent years, the old stone bridge built by the Spaniards had been torn down, and in its stead wasone made of brick and lined with streetlamps for the new mule-drawn trolleys. At first theresidents of La Manga had to endure a torture that had not been anticipated during construction,which was sleeping so close to the city's first electrical plant whose vibration was a constantearthquake. Not even Dr. Juvenal Urbino, with all his prestige, could persuade them to move itwhere it would not disturb anyone, until his proven complicity with Divine Providence intercededon his behalf. One night the boiler in the plant blew up in a fearful explosion, flew over the newhouses, sailed across half the city, and destroyed the largest gallery in the former convent of St.
Julian the Hospitaler. The old ruined building had been abandoned at the beginning of the year, butthe boiler caused the deaths of four prisoners who had escaped from the local jail earlier that nightand were hiding in the chapel.
The peaceful suburb with its beautiful tradition of love was, however, not the most propitiousfor unrequited love when it became a luxury neighbourhood. The streets were dusty in summer,swamp-like in winter, and desolate all year round, and the scattered houses were hidden behindleafy gardens and had mosaic tile terraces instead of old-fashioned projecting balconies, as if theyhad been built for the purpose of discouraging furtive lovers. It was just as well that at this time itbecame fashionable to drive out in the afternoon in hired old Victorias that had been converted toone-horse carriages, and that the excursion ended on a hill where one could appreciate theheartbreaking twilights of October better than from the lighthouse, and observe the watchfulsharks lurking at the seminarians' beach, and see the Thursday ocean liner, huge and white, thatcould almost be touched with one's hands as it passed through the harbour channel. FlorentinoAriza would hire a Victoria after a hard day at the office, but instead of folding down the top, aswas customary during the hot months, he would stay hidden in the depths of the seat, invisible inthe darkness, always alone, and requesting unexpected routes so as not to arouse the evil thoughtsof the driver. In reality, the only thing that interested him on the drive was the pink marbleParthenon half hidden among leafy banana and mango trees, a luckless replica of the idyllicmansions on Louisiana cotton plantations. Fermina Daza's children returned home a little beforefive. Florentino Ariza would see them arrive in the family carriage, and then he would see Dr.
Juvenal Urbino leave for his routine house calls, but in almost a year of vigilance he never evencaught the glimpse he so desired.
One afternoon when he insisted on his solitary drive despite the first devastating rains ofJune, the horse slipped and fell in the mud. Florentino Ariza realised with horror that they werejust in front of Fermina Daza's villa, and he pleaded with the driver, not thinking that hisconsternation might betray him.
"Not here, please," he shouted. "Anywhere but here."Bewildered by his urgency, the driver tried to raise the horse without unharnessing him, andthe axle of the carriage broke. Florentino Ariza managed to climb out of the coach in the drivingrain and endure his embarrassment until passersby in other carriages offered to take him home.
While he was waiting, a servant of the Urbino family "ad seen him, his clothes soaked through,standing in mud up to his Knees, and she brought him an umbrella so that he could take refuge onthe terrace. In the wildest of his deliriums Florentino Ariza had never dreamed of such goodfortune, but on that afternoon he would have died rather than allow Fermina Daza to see him inthat condition.
When they lived in the old city, Juvenal Urbino and his family would walk on Sundays fromtheir house to the Cathedral for eight o'clock Mass, which for them was more a secular ceremonythan a religious one. Then, when they moved, they continued to drive there for several years, andat times they visited with friends under the palm trees in the park. But when the temple of thetheological seminary was built in La Manga, with a private beach and its own cemetery, they nolonger went to the Cathedral except on very solemn occasions. Ignorant of these changes,Florentino Ariza waited Sunday after Sunday on the terrace of the Parish Caf? watching the peoplecoming out of all three Masses. Then he realised his mistake and went to the new church, whichwas fashionable until just a few years ago, and there, at eight o'clock sharp on four Sundays inAugust, he saw Dr. Juvenal Urbino with his children, but Fermina Daza was not with them. Onone of those Sundays he visited the new cemetery adjacent to the church, where the residents ofLa Manga were building their sumptuous pantheons, and his heart skipped a beat when hediscovered the most sumptuous of all in the shade of the great ceiba trees. It was already complete,with Gothic stained-glass windows and marble angels and gravestones with gold lettering for theentire family. Among them, of course, was that of Do a Fermina Daza de Urbino de la Calle,and next to it her husband's, with a common epitaph: Together still in the peace of the Lord.
For the rest of the year, Fermina Daza did not attend any civic or social ceremonies, not eventhe Christmas celebrations, in which she and her husband had always been illustrious protagonists.
But her absence was most notable on the opening night of the opera season. During intermission,Florentino Ariza happened on a group that, beyond any doubt, was discussing her withoutmentioning her name. They said that one midnight the previous June someone had seen herboarding the Cunard ocean liner en route to Panama, and that she wore a dark veil to hide theravages of the shameful disease that was consuming her. Someone asked what terrible illnesswould dare to attack a woman with so much power, and the answer he received was saturated withblack bile: "A lady so distinguished could suffer only from consumption."Florentino Ariza knew that the wealthy of his country did not contract short-term diseases.
Either they died without warning, almost always on the eve of a major holiday that could not becelebrated because of the period of mourning, or they faded away in long, abominable illnesseswhose most intimate details eventually became public knowledge. Seclusion in Panama wasalmost an obligatory penance in the life of the rich.
They submitted to God's will in the Adventist Hospital, an immense white warehouse lost inthe prehistoric downpours of Dari, where the sick lost track of the little life that was left tothem, and in whose solitary rooms with their burlap windows no one could tell with certainty ifthe smell of carbolic acid was the odour of health or of death. Those who recovered came backbearing splendid gifts that they would distribute with a free hand and a kind of agonised longing tobe pardoned for their indiscretion in still being alive. Some returned with their abdomenscrisscrossed by barbarous stitches that seemed to have been sewn with cobbler's hemp; they wouldraise their shirts to display them when people came to visit, they compared them with those ofothers who had suffocated from excesses of joy, and for the rest of their days they would describeand describe again the angelic visions they had seen under the influence of chloroform. On theother hand, no one ever learned about the visions of those who did not return, including thesaddest of them all: those who had died as exiles in the tuberculosis pavilion, more from thesadness of the rain than because of the complications of their disease.
If he had been forced to choose, Florentino Ariza did not know which fate he would havewanted for Fermina Daza. More than anything else he wanted the truth, but no matter howunbearable, and regardless of how he searched, he could not find it. It was inconceivable to himthat no one could even give him a hint that would confirm the story he had heard. In the world ofriverboats, which was his world, no mystery could be maintained, no secret could be kept. And yetno one had heard anything about the woman in the black veil. No one knew anything in a citywhere everything was known, and where many things were known even before they happened,above all if they concerned the rich. But no one had any explanation for the disappearance ofFermina Daza. Florentino Ariza continued to patrol La Manga, continued to hear Mass withoutdevotion in the basilica of the seminary, continued to attend civic ceremonies that never wouldhave interested him in another state of mind, but the passage of time only increased the credibilityof the story he had heard. Everything seemed normal in the Urbino household, except for themother's absence.
As he carried on his investigation, he learned about other events he had not known of or intowhich he had made no enquiries, including the death of Lorenzo Daza in the Cantabrian villagewhere he had been born. He remembered seeing him for many years in the rowdy chess wars atthe Parish Caf? hoarse with so much talking, and growing fatter and rougher as he sank into thequicksand of an unfortunate old age. They had never exchanged another word since theirdisagreeable breakfast of anise in the previous century, and Florentino Ariza was certain that evenafter he had obtained for his daughter the successful marriage that had become his only reason forliving, Lorenzo Daza remembered him with as much rancour as he felt toward Lorenzo Daza. Buthe was so determined to find out the unequivocal facts regarding Fermina Daza's health that hereturned to the Parish Caf?to learn them from her father, just at the time of the historic tournamentin which Jeremiah de Saint-Amour alone confronted forty-two opponents. This was how hediscovered that Lorenzo Daza had died, and he rejoiced with all his heart, although the price of hisjoy might be having to live without the truth. At last he accepted as true the story of the hospitalfor the terminally ill, and his only consolation was the old saying: Sick women live forever. On thedays when he felt disheartened, he resigned himself to the notion that the news of Fermina Daza'sdeath, if it should occur, would find him without his having to look for it.
It never did, for Fermina Daza was alive and well on the ranch, half a league from the villageof Flores de Mar, where her Cousin Hildebranda S chez was living, forgotten by the world.
She had left with no scandal, by mutual agreement with her husband, both of them as entangled asadolescents in the only serious crisis they had suffered during so many years of stable matrimony.
It had taken them by surprise in the repose of their maturity, when they felt themselves safe frommisfortune's sneak attacks, their children grown and well-behaved, and the future ready for themto learn how to be old without bitterness. It had been something so unexpected for them both thatthey wanted to resolve it not with shouts, tears, and intermediaries, as was the custom in theCaribbean, but with the wisdom of the nations of Europe, and there was so much vacillation as towhether their loyalties lay here or over there that they ended up mired in a puerile situation thatdid not belong anywhere. At last she decided to leave, not even knowing why or to what purpose,out of sheer fury, and he, inhibited by his sense of guilt, had not been able to dissuade her.
Fermina Daza, in fact, had sailed at midnight in the greatest secrecy and with her facecovered by a black mantilla, not on a Cunard liner bound for Panama, however, but on the regularboat to San Juan de la Ci aga, the city where she had been born and had lived until heradolescence, and for which she felt a growing homesickness that became more and more difficultto bear as the years went by. In defiance of her husband's will, and of the customs of the day, heronly companion was a fifteen-year-old goddaughter who had been raised as a family servant, butthe ship captains and the officials at each port had been notified of her journey. When she madeher rash decision, she told her children that she was going to have a change of scene for threemonths or so with Aunt Hildebranda, but her determination was not to return. Dr. Juvenal Urbinoknew the strength of her character very well, and he was so troubled that he accepted her decisionwith humility as God's punishment for the gravity of his sins. But the lights on the boat had not yetbeen lost to view when they both repented of their weakness.
Although they maintained a formal correspondence concerning their children and otherhousehold matters, almost two years went by before either one could find a way back that was notmined with pride. During the second year, the children went to spend their school vacation inFlores de Mar, and Fermina Daza did the impossible and appeared content with her new life.
That at least was the conclusion drawn by Juvenal Urbino from his son's letters. Moreover, at thattime the Bishop of Riohacha went there on a pastoral visit, riding under the pallium on hiscelebrated white mule with the trappings embroidered in gold. Behind him came pilgrims fromremote regions, musicians playing accordions, peddlers selling food and amulets; and for threedays the ranch was overflowing with the crippled and the hopeless, who in reality did not come forthe learned sermons and the plenary indulgences but for the favours of the mule who, it was said,performed miracles behind his master's back. The Bishop had frequented the home of the Urbinode la Calle family ever since his days as an ordinary priest, and one afternoon he escaped from thepublic festivities to have lunch at Hildebranda's ranch. After the meal, during which they spokeonly of earthly matters, he took Fermina Daza aside and asked to hear her confession. She refusedin an amiable but firm manner, with the explicit argument that she had nothing to repent of.
Although it was not her purpose, at least not her conscious purpose, she was certain that heranswer would reach the appropriate ears.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino used to say, not without a certain cynicism, that it was not he who was toblame for those two bitter years of his life but his wife's bad habit of smelling the clothes herfamily took off, and the clothes that she herself took off, so that she could tell by the odour if theyneeded to be laundered even though they might appear to be clean. She had done this ever sinceshe was a girl, and she never thought it worthy of comment until her husband realised what shewas doing on their wedding night. He also knew that she locked herself in the bathroom at leastthree times a day to smoke, but this did not attract his attention because the women of his classwere in the habit of locking themselves away in groups to talk about men and smoke, and even todrink as much as two litres of aguardiente until they had passed out on the floor in a brickmason'sdrunken stupor. But her habit of sniffing at all the clothing she happened across seemed to him notonly inappropriate but unhealthy as well. She took it as a joke, which is what she did witheverything she did not care to discuss, and she said that God had not put that diligent oriole's beakon her face just for decoration. One morning, while she was at the market, the servants aroused theentire neighbourhood in their search for her three-year-old son, who was not to be found anywherein the house. She arrived in the middle of the panic, turned around two or three times like atracking mastiff, and found the boy asleep in an armoire where no one thought he could possiblybe hiding. When her astonished husband asked her how she had found him, she replied: "By thesmell of caca."The truth is that her sense of smell not only served her in regard to washing clothes or findinglost children: it was the sense that oriented her in all areas of life, above all in her social life.
Juvenal Urbino had observed this throughout his marriage, in particular at the beginning, when shewas the parvenu in a milieu that had been prejudiced against her for three hundred years, and yetshe had made her way through coral reefs as sharp as knives, not colliding with anyone, with apower over the world that could only be a supernatural instinct. That frightening faculty, whichcould just as well have had its origin in a millenarian wisdom as in a heart of stone, met itsmoment of misfortune one ill-fated Sunday before Mass when, out of simple habit, Fermina Dazasniffed the clothing her husband had worn the evening before and experienced the disturbingsensation that she had been in bed with another man.
First she smelled the jacket and the vest while she took the watch chain out of the buttonholeand removed the pencil holder and the billfold and the loose change from the pockets and placedeverything on the dresser, and then she smelled the hemmed shirt as she removed the tiepin andthe topaz cuff links and the gold collar button, and then she smelled the trousers as she removedthe keyholder with its eleven keys and the penknife with its mother-of-pearl handle, and finallyshe smelled the underwear and the socks and the linen handkerchief with the embroideredmonogram. Beyond any shadow of a doubt there was an odour in each of the articles that had notbeen there in all their years of life together, an odour impossible to define because it was not thescent of flowers or of artificial essences but of something peculiar to human nature. She saidnothing, and she did not notice the odour every day, but she now sniffed at her husband's clothingnot to decide if it was ready to launder but with an unbearable anxiety that gnawed at herinnermost being.
Fermina Daza did not know where to locate the odour of his clothing in her husband'sroutine. It could not be placed between his morning class and lunch, for she supposed that nowoman in her right mind would make hurried love at that time of day, least of all with a visitor,when the house still had to be cleaned, and the beds made, and the marketing done, and lunchprepared, and perhaps with the added worry that one of the children would be sent home earlyfrom school because somebody threw a stone at him and hurt his head and he would find her ateleven o'clock in the morning, naked in the unmade bed and, to make matters worse, with a doctoron top of her. She also knew that Dr. Juvenal Urbino made love only at night, better yet in absolutedarkness, and as a last resort before breakfast when the first birds began to chirp. After that time,as he would say, it was more work than the pleasure of daytime love was worth to take off one'sclothes and put them back on again. So that the contamination of his clothing could occur onlyduring one of his house calls or during some moment stolen from his nights of chess and films.
This last possibility was difficult to prove, because unlike so many of her friends, Fermina Dazawas too proud to spy on her husband or to ask someone else to do it for her. His schedule of housecalls, which seemed best suited to infidelity, was also the easiest to keep an eye on, because Dr.
Juvenal Urbino kept a detailed record of each of his patients, including the payment of his fees,from the first time he visited them until he ushered them out of this world with a final sign of thecross and some words for the salvation of their souls.
In the three weeks that followed, Fermina Daza did not find the odour in his clothing for afew days, she found it again when she least expected it, and then she found it, stronger than ever,for several days in a row, although one of those days was a Sunday when there had been a familygathering and the two of them had not been apart for even a moment. Contrary to her normalcustom and even her own desires, she found herself in her husband's office one afternoon as if shewere someone else, doing something that she would never do, deciphering with an exquisiteBengalese magnifying glass his intricate notes on the house calls he had made during the last fewmonths. It was the first time she had gone alone into that office, saturated with showers ofcreosote and crammed with books bound in the hides of unknown animals, blurred schoolpictures, honorary degrees, astrolabes, and elaborately worked daggers collected over the years: asecret sanctuary that she always considered the only part of her husband's private life to which shehad no access because it was not part of love, so that the few times she had been there she hadgone with him, and the visits had always been very brief. She did not feel she had the right to goin alone, much less to engage in what seemed to be indecent prying. But there she was. Shewanted to find the truth, and she searched for it with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fearof finding it, and she was driven by an irresistible wind even stronger than her innate haughtiness,even stronger than her dignity: an agony that bewitched her.
She was able to draw no conclusions, because her husband's patients, except for mutualfriends, were part of his private domain; they were people without identity, known not by theirfaces but by their pains, not by the colour of their eyes or the evasions of their hearts but by thesize of their livers, the coating on their tongues, the blood in their urine, the hallucinations of theirfeverish nights. They were people who believed in her husband, who believed they lived becauseof him when in reality they lived for him, and who in the end were reduced to a phrase written inhis own hand at the bottom of the medical file: Be calm. God awaits you at the door. FerminaDaza left his study after two fruitless hours, with the feeling that she had allowed herself to beseduced by indecency.
Urged on by her imagination, she began to discover changes in her husband. She found himevasive, without appetite at the table or in bed, prone to exasperation and ironic answers, andwhen he was at home he was no longer the tranquil man he had once been but a caged lion. Forthe first time since their marriage, she began to monitor the times he was late, to keep track ofthem to the minute, to tell him lies in order to learn the truth, but then she felt wounded to thequick by the contradictions. One night she awoke with a start, terrified by a vision of her husbandstaring at her in the darkness with eyes that seemed full of hatred. She had suffered a similar frightin her youth, when she had seen Florentino Ariza at the foot of her bed, but that apparition hadbeen full of love, not hate. Besides, this time it was not fantasy: her husband was awake at two inthe morning, sitting up in bed to watch her while she slept, but when she asked him why, hedenied it. He lay back on the pillow and said: "You must have been dreaming."After that night, and after similar episodes that occurred during that time, when FerminaDaza could not tell for certain where reality ended and where illusion began, she had theoverwhelming revelation that she was losing her mind. At last she realised that her husband hadnot taken Communion on the Thursday of Corpus Christi or on any Sunday in recent weeks, andhe had not found time for that year's retreats. When she asked him the reason for those unusualchanges in his spiritual health, she received an evasive answer. This was the decisive clue, becausehe had not failed to take Communion on an important feast day since he had made his firstCommunion, at the age of eight. In this way she realised not only that her husband was in a stateof mortal sin but that he had resolved to persist in it, since he did not go to his confessor for help.
She had never imagined that she could suffer so much for something that seemed to be theabsolute opposite of love, but she was suffering, and she resolved that the only way she couldkeep from dying was to burn out the nest of vipers that was poisoning her soul. And that is whatshe did. One afternoon she began to darn socks on the terrace while her husband was reading, ashe did every day after his siesta. Suddenly she interrupted her work, pushed her eyeglasses up ontoher forehead, and without any trace of harshness, she asked for an explanation: "Doctor."He was immersed in L'Ile des pingouins, the novel that everyone was reading in those days,and he answered without surfacing: "Oui." She insisted: "Look at me."He did so, looking without seeing her through the fog of his reading glasses, but he did nothave to take them off to feel burned by the raging fire in her eyes.
"What is going on?" he asked.
"You know better than I," she said.
That was all she said. She lowered her glasses and continued darning socks. Dr. JuvenalUrbino knew then that the long hours of anguish were over. The moment had not been as he hadforeseen it; rather than a seismic tremor in his heart, it was a calming blow, and a great relief thatwhat was bound to happen sooner or later had happened sooner rather than later: the ghost of MissBarbara Lynch had entered his house at last.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino had met her four months earlier as she waited her turn in the clinic ofMisericordia Hospital, and he knew immediately that something irreparable had just occurred inhis destiny. She was a tall, elegant, large-boned mulatta, with skin the colour and softness ofmolasses, and that morning she wore a red dress with white polka dots and a broad-brimmed hatof the same fabric, which shaded her face down to her eyelids. Her sex seemed more pronouncedthan that of other human beings. Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not attend patients in the clinic, butwhenever he passed by and had time to spare, he would go in to remind his more advancedstudents that there is no medicine better than a good diagnosis. So that he arranged to be present atthe examination of the unforeseen mulatta, making certain that his pupils would not notice anygesture of his that did not appear to be casual and barely looking at her, but fixing her name andaddress with care in his memory. That afternoon, after his last house call, he had his carriage passby the address that she had given in the consulting room, and in fact there she was, enjoying thecoolness on her terrace.
It was a typical Antillean house, painted yellow even to the tin roof, with burlap windows andpots of carnations and ferns hanging in the doorway. It rested on wooden pilings in the saltmarshes of Mala Crianza. A troupial sang in the cage that hung from the eaves. Across the streetwas a primary school, and the children rushing out obliged the coachman to keep a tight hold onthe reins so that the horse would not shy. It was a stroke of luck, for Miss Barbara Lynch had timeto recognise the Doctor. She waved to him as if they were old friends, she invited him to havecoffee while the confusion abated, and he was delighted to accept (although it was not his customto drink coffee) and to listen to her talk about herself, which was the only thing that had interestedhim since the morning and the only thing that was going to interest him, without a moment'srespite, during the months to follow. Once, soon after he had married, a friend told him, with hiswife present, that sooner or later he would have to confront a mad passion that could endanger thestability of his marriage. He, who thought he knew himself, knew the strength of his moral roots,had laughed at the prediction. And now it had come true.
Miss Barbara Lynch, Doctor of Theology, was the only child of the Reverend Jonathan B.
Lynch, a lean black Protestant minister who rode on a mule through the poverty-strickensettlements in the salt marshes, preaching the word of one of the many gods that Dr. JuvenalUrbino wrote with a small g to distinguish them from his. She spoke good Spanish, with a certainroughness in the syntax, and her frequent slips heightened her charm. She would be twenty-eightyears old in December, not long ago she had divorced another minister, who was a student of herfather's and to whom she had been unhappily married for two years, and she had no desire torepeat the offence. She said: "I have no more love than my troupial." But Dr. Urbino was tooserious to think that she said it with hidden intentions. On the contrary: he asked himself inbewilderment if so many opportunities coming together might not be one of God's pitfalls, whichhe would then have to pay for dearly, but he dismissed the thought without delay as a piece oftheological nonsense resulting from his state of confusion.
As he was about to leave, he made a casual remark about that morning's medicalconsultation, knowing that nothing pleases patients more than talking about their ailments, and shewas so splendid talking about hers that he promised he would return the next day, at four o'clocksharp, to examine her with greater care. She was dismayed: she knew that a doctor of hisqualifications was far above her ability to pay, but he reassured her: "In this profession we try tohave the rich pay for the poor. " Then he marked in his notebook: Miss Barbara Lynch, MalaCrianza Salt Marsh, Saturday, 4 p. m. Months later, Fermina Daza was to read that notation,augmented by details of the diagnosis, treatment, and evolution of the disease. The name attractedher attention, and it suddenly occurred to her that she was one of those dissolute artists from theNew Orleans fruit boats, but the address made her think that she must come from Jamaica, a blackwoman, of course, and she eliminated her without a second thought as not being to her husband'staste.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino came ten minutes early for the Saturday appointment, and Miss Lynchhad not finished dressing to receive him. He had not felt so much tension since his days in Pariswhen he had to present himself for an oral examination. As she lay on her canvas bed, wearing athin silk slip, Miss Lynch's beauty was endless. Everything about her was large and intense: hersiren's thighs, her slow-burning skin, her astonished breasts, her diaphanous gums with theirperfect teeth, her whole body radiating a vapour of good health that was the human odour FerminaDaza had discovered in her husband's clothing. She had gone to the clinic because she sufferedfrom something that she, with much charm, called "twisted colons," and Dr. Urbino thought that itwas a symptom that should not be ignored. So he palpated her internal organs with more intentionthan attention, and as he did so he discovered in amazement that this marvellous creature was asbeautiful inside as out, and then he gave himself over to the delights of touch, no longer the best-qualified physician along the Caribbean coastline but a poor soul tormented by his tumultuousinstincts. Only once before in his austere professional life had something similar happened to him,and that had been the day of his greatest shame, because the indignant patient had moved his handaway, sat up in bed, and said to him: "What you want may happen, but it will not be like this."Miss Lynch, on the other hand, abandoned herself to his hands, and when she was certain that theDoctor was no longer thinking about his science, she said: "I thought this not permitted by yourethics."He was as drenched by perspiration as if he had just stepped out of a pool wearing all hisclothes, and he dried his hands and face with a towel.
"Our code of ethics supposes," he said, "that we doctors are made of wood.""The fact I thought so does not mean you cannot do," she said. "Just think what it mean forpoor black woman like me to have such a famous man notice her.""I have not stopped thinking about you for an instant," he said.
It was so tremulous a confession that it might have inspired pity. But she saved him from allharm with a laugh that lit up the bedroom.
"I know since I saw you in hospital, Doctor," she said. "Black I am but not a fool."It was far from easy. Miss Lynch wanted her honour protected, she wanted security and love,in that order, and she believed that she deserved them. She gave Dr. Urbino the opportunity toseduce her but not to penetrate her inner sanctum, even when she was alone in the house. Shewould go no further than allowing him to repeat the ceremony of palpation and auscultation withall the ethical violations he could desire, but without taking off her clothes. For his part, he couldnot let go of the bait once he had bitten, and he continued his almost daily incursions. For reasonsof a practical nature, it was close to impossible for him to maintain a continuing relationship withMiss Lynch, but he was too weak to stop, as he would later be too weak to go any further. Thiswas his limit.
The Reverend Lynch did not lead a regular life, for he would ride away on his mule on thespur of the moment, carrying Bibles and evangelical pamphlets on one side and provisions on theother, and he would return when least expected. Another difficulty was the school across the street,for the children would recite their lessons as they looked out the windows, and what they saw withgreatest clarity was the house across the way, with its doors and windows open wide from sixo'clock in the morning, they saw Miss Lynch hanging the birdcage from the eaves so that thetroupial could learn the recited lessons, they saw her wearing a bright-coloured turban and goingabout her household tasks as she recited along with them in her brilliant Caribbean voice, and laterthey saw her sitting on the porch, reciting the afternoon psalms by herself in English.
They had to choose a time when the children were not there, and there were only twopossibilities: the afternoon recess for lunch, between twelve and two, which was also when theDoctor had his lunch, or late in the afternoon, after the children had gone home. This was alwaysthe best time, although by then the Doctor had made his rounds and had only a few minutes tospare before it was time for him to eat with his family. The third problem, and the most serious forhim, was his own situation. It was not possible for him to go there without his carriage, which wasvery well known and always had to wait outside her door. He could have made an accomplice ofhis coachman, as did most of his friends at the Social Club, but that was not in his nature. In fact,when his visits to Miss Lynch became too obvious, the liveried family coachman himself dared toask if it would not be better for him to come back later so that the carriage would not spend somuch time at her door. Dr. Urbino, in a sharp response that was not typical of him, cut him off.
"This is the first time since I know you that I have heard you say something you should nothave," he said. "Well, then: I will assume it was never said."There was no solution. In a city like this, it was impossible to hide an illness when theDoctor's carriage stood at the door. At times the Doctor himself took the initiative and went onfoot, if distance permitted, or in a hired carriage, to avoid malicious or premature assumptions.
Such deceptions, however, were to little avail. Since the prescriptions ordered in pharmaciesrevealed the truth, Dr. Urbino would always prescribe counterfeit medicines along with the correctones in order to preserve the sacred right of the sick to die in peace along with the secret of theirillness. Similarly, he was able in various truthful ways to account for the presence of his carriageoutside the house of Miss Lynch, but he could not allow it to stay there too long, least of all for theamount of time he would have desired, which was the rest of his life.
The world became a hell for him. For once the initial madness was sated, they both becameaware of the risks involved, and Dr. Juvenal Urbino never had the resolve to face a scandal. In thedeliriums of passion he promised everything, but when it was over, everything was left for later.
On the other hand, as his desire to be with her grew, so did his fear of losing her, so that theirmeetings became more and more hurried and problematic. He thought about nothing else. Hewaited for the afternoons with unbearable longing, he forgot his other commitments, he forgoteverything but her, but as his carriage approached the Mala Crianza salt marsh he prayed to Godthat an unforeseen obstacle would force it to drive past. He went to her in a state of such anguishthat at times as he turned the corner he was glad to catch a glimpse of the woolly head of theReverend Lynch, who read on the terrace while his daughter catechized neighbourhood children inthe living room with recited passages of scripture. Then he would go home relieved that he wasnot defying fate again, but later he would feel himself going mad with the desire for it to be fiveo'clock in the afternoon all day, every day.
So their love became impossible when the carriage at her door became too conspicuous, andafter three months it became nothing less than ridiculous. Without time to say anything, MissLynch would go to the bedroom as soon as she saw her agitated lover walk in the door. She tookthe precaution of wearing a full skirt on the days she expected him, a charming skirt from Jamaicawith red flowered ruffles, but with no underwear, nothing, in the belief that this convenience wasgoing to help him ward off his fear. But he squandered everything she did to make him happy.
Panting and drenched with perspiration, he rushed after her into the bedroom, throwing everythingon the floor, his walking stick, his medical bag, his Panama hat, and he made panic-stricken lovewith his trousers down around his knees, with his jacket buttoned so that it would not get in hisway, with his gold watch chain across his vest, with his shoes on, with everything on, and moreconcerned with leaving as soon as possible than with achieving pleasure. She was left dangling,barely at the entrance of her tunnel of solitude, while he was already buttoning up again, asexhausted as if he had made absolute love on the dividing line between life and death, when inreality he had accomplished no more than the physical act that is only a part of the feat of love.
But he had finished in time: the exact time needed to give an injection during a routine visit. Thenhe returned home ashamed of his weakness, longing for death, cursing himself for the lack ofcourage that kept him from asking Fermina Daza to pull down his trousers and burn his ass on thebrazier.
He did not eat, he said his prayers without conviction, in bed he pretended to continue hissiesta reading while his wife walked round and round the house putting the world in order beforegoing to bed. As he nodded over his book, he began to sink down into the inevitable mangroveswamp of Miss Lynch, into her air of a recumbent forest glade, his deathbed, and then he couldthink of nothing except tomorrow's five minutes to five o'clock in the afternoon and her waitingfor him in bed with nothing but the mound of her dark bush under her madwoman's skirt fromJamaica: the hellish circle.
In the past few years he had become conscious of the burden of his own body. He recognisedthe symptoms. He had read about them in textbooks, he had seen them confirmed in real life, inolder patients with no history of serious ailments who suddenly began to describe perfectsyndromes that seemed to come straight from medical texts and yet turned out to be imaginary.
His professor of children's clinical medicine at La Salp tri re had recommended paediatricsas the most honest specialisation, because children become sick only when in fact they are sick,and they cannot communicate with the physician using conventional words but only with concretesymptoms of real diseases. After a certain age, however, adults either had the symptoms withoutthe diseases or, what was worse, serious diseases with the symptoms of minor ones. He distractedthem with palliatives, giving time enough time to teach them not to feel their ailments, so that theycould live with them in the rubbish heap of old age. Dr. Juvenal Urbino never thought that aphysician his age, who believed he had seen everything, would not be able to overcome the uneasyfeeling that he was ill when he was not. Or what was worse, not believe he was, out of purescientific prejudice, when perhaps he really was. At the age of forty, half in earnest and half in jest,he had said in class: "All I need in life is someone who understands me." But when he foundhimself lost in the labyrinth of Miss Lynch, he no longer was jesting.
All the real or imaginary symptoms of his older patients made their appearance in his body.
He felt the shape of his liver with such clarity that he could tell its size without touching it. He feltthe dozing cat's purr of his kidneys, he felt the iridescent brilliance of his vesicles, he felt thehumming blood in his arteries. At times he awoke at dawn gasping for air, like a fish out of water.
He had fluid in his heart. He felt it lose the beat for a moment, he felt it syncopate like a schoolmarching band, once, twice, and then, because God is good, he felt it recover at last. But instead ofhaving recourse to the same distracting remedies he gave to his patients, he went mad with terror.
It was true: all he needed in life, even at the age of fifty-eight, was someone who understood him.
So he turned to Fermina Daza, the person who loved him best and whom he loved best in theworld, and with whom he had just eased his conscience.
For this occurred after she interrupted his afternoon reading to ask him to look at her, and hehad the first indication that his hellish circle had been discovered. But he did not know how,because it would have been impossible for him to conceive of Fermina Daza's learning the truthby smell alone. In any case, for a long time this had not been a good city for keeping secrets. Soonafter the first home telephones were installed, several marriages that seemed stable were destroyedby anonymous tale-bearing calls, and a number of frightened families either cancelled their serviceor refused to have a telephone for many years. Dr. Urbino knew that his wife had too much self-respect to allow so much as an attempt at anonymous betrayal by telephone, and he could notimagine anyone daring to try it under his own name. But he feared the old method: a note slippedunder the door by an unknown hand could be effective, not only because it guaranteed the doubleanonymity of sender and receiver, but because its time-honoured ancestry permitted one toattribute to it some kind of metaphysical connection to the designs of Divine Providence.
Jealousy was unknown in his house: during more than thirty years of conjugal peace, Dr.
Urbino had often boasted in public--and until now it had been true--that he was like those Swedishmatches that light only with their own box. But he did not know how a woman with as muchpride, dignity, and strength of character as his wife would react in the face of proven infidelity. Sothat after looking at her as she had asked, nothing occurred to him but to lower his eyes again inorder to hide his embarrassment and continue the pretence of being lost among the sweet,meandering rivers of Alca Island until he could think of something else. Fermina Daza, for herpart, said nothing more either. When she finished darning the socks, she tossed everything into thesewing basket in no particular order, gave instructions in the kitchen for supper, and went to thebedroom.
Then he reached the admirable decision not to go to Miss Lynch's house at five o'clock in theafternoon. The vows of eternal love, the dream of a discreet house for her alone where he couldvisit her with no unexpected interruptions, their unhurried happiness for as long as they lived-everythinghe had promised in the blazing heat of love was cancelled forever after. The last thingMiss Lynch received from him was an emerald tiara in a little box wrapped in paper from thepharmacy, so that the coachman himself thought it was an emergency prescription and handed it toher with no comment, no message, nothing in writing. Dr. Urbino never saw her again, not evenby accident, and God alone knows how much grief his heroic resolve cost him or how many bittertears he had to shed behind the locked lavatory door in order to survive this private catastrophe. Atfive o'clock, instead of going to see her, he made a profound act of contrition before his confessor,and on the following Sunday he took Communion, his heart broken but his soul at peace.
That night, following his renunciation, as he was undressing for bed, he recited for FerminaDaza the bitter litany of his early morning insomnia, his sudden stabbing pains, his desire to weepin the afternoon, the encoded symptoms of secret love, which he recounted as if they were themiseries of old age. He had to tell someone or die, or else tell the truth, and so the relief heobtained was sanctified within the domestic rituals of love. She listened to him with closeattention, but without looking at him, without saying anything as she picked up every article ofclothing he removed, sniffed it with no gesture or change of expression that might betray herwrath, then crumpled it and tossed it into the wicker basket for dirty clothes. She did not find theodour, but it was all the same: tomorrow was another day. Before he knelt down to pray before thealtar in the bedroom, he ended the recital of his misery with a sigh as mournful as it was sincere:
"I think I am going to die." She did not even blink when she replied.
"That would be best," she said. "Then we could both have some peace."Years before, during the crisis of a dangerous illness, he had spoken of the possibility ofdying, and she had made the same brutal reply. Dr. Urbino attributed it to the naturalhardheartedness of women, which allows the earth to continue revolving around the sun, becauseat that time he did not know that she always erected a barrier of wrath to hide her fear. And in thiscase it was the most terrible one of all, the fear of losing him.
That night, on the other hand, she wished him dead with all her heart, and this certaintyalarmed him. Then he heard her slow sobbing in the darkness as she bit the pillow so he would nothear. He was puzzled, because he knew that she did not cry easily for any affliction of body orsoul. She cried only in rage, above all if it had its origins in her terror of culpability, and then themore she cried the more enraged she became, because she could never forgive her weakness incrying. He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger runthrough by a spear, and he did not have the courage to tell her that the reason for her weeping haddisappeared that afternoon, had been pulled out by the roots, forever, even from his memory.
Fatigue overcame him for a few minutes. When he awoke, she had lit her dim bedside lampand lay there with her eyes open, but without crying. Something definitive had happened to herwhile he slept: the sediment that had accumulated at the bottom of her life over the course of somany years had been stirred up by the torment of her jealousy and had floated to the surface, and ithad aged her all at once. Shocked by her sudden wrinkles, her faded lips, the ashes in her hair, herisked telling her that she should try to sleep: it was after two o'clock. She spoke, not looking athim but with no trace of rage in her voice, almost with gentleness.
"I have a right to know who she is," she said.
And then he told her everything, feeling as if he were lifting the weight of the world from hisshoulders, because he was convinced that she already knew and only needed to confirm thedetails. But she did not, of course, so that as he spoke she began to cry again, not with her earliertimid sobs but with abundant salty tears that ran down her cheeks and burned her nightdress andinflamed her life, because he had not done what she, with her heart in her mouth, had hoped hewould do, which was to be a man: deny everything, and swear on his life it was not true, and growindignant at the false accusation, and shout curses at this ill-begotten society that did not hesitateto trample on one's honour, and remain imperturbable even when faced with crushing proofs of hisdisloyalty. Then, when he told her that he had been with his confessor that afternoon, she fearedshe would go blind with rage. Ever since her days at the Academy she had been convinced that themen and women of the Church lacked any virtue inspired by God. This was a discordant note inthe harmony of the house, which they had managed to overlook without mishap. But her husband'sallowing his confessor to be privy to an intimacy that was not only his but hers as well was morethan she could bear.
"You might as well have told a snake charmer in the market," she said.
For her it was the end of everything. She was sure that her honour was the subject of gossipeven before her husband had finished his penance, and the feeling of humiliation that thisproduced in her was much less tolerable than the shame and anger and injustice caused by hisinfidelity. And worst of all, damn it: with a black woman. He corrected her: "With a mulatta." Butby then it was too late for accuracy: she had finished.
"Just as bad," she said, "and only now I understand: it was the smell of a black woman."This happened on a Monday. On Friday at seven o'clock in the evening, Fermina Daza sailedaway on the regular boat to San Juan de la Ci aga with only one trunk, in the company of hergoddaughter, her face covered by a mantilla to avoid questions for herself and her husband. Dr.
Juvenal Urbino was not at the dock, by mutual agreement, following an exhausting three-daydiscussion in which they decided that she should go to Cousin Hildebranda Sanchez's ranch inFlores de Mar for as long a time as she needed to think before coming to a final decision.
Without knowing her reasons, the children understood it as a trip she had often put off and thatthey themselves had wanted her to make for a long time. Dr. Urbino arranged matters so that noone in his perfidious circle could engage in malicious speculation, and he did it so well that ifFlorentino Ariza could find no clue to Fermina Daza's disappearance it was because in fact therewas none, not because he lacked the means to investigate. Her husband had no doubts that shewould come home as soon as she got over her rage. But she left certain that her rage would neverend.
However, she was going to learn very soon that her drastic decision was not so much the fruitof resentment as of nostalgia. After their honeymoon she had returned several times to Europe,despite the ten days at sea, and she had always made the trip with more than enough time to enjoyit. She knew the world, she had learned to live and think in new ways, but she had never goneback to San Juan de la Ci aga after the aborted flight in the balloon. To her mind there was anelement of redemption in the return to Cousin Hildebranda's province, no matter how belated. Thiswas not her response to her marital catastrophe: the idea was much older than that. So the merethought of revisiting her adolescent haunts consoled her in her unhappiness.
When she disembarked with her goddaughter in San Juan de la Ci aga, she called on thegreat reserves of her character and recognised the town despite all the evidence to the contrary.
The Civil and Military Commander of the city, who had been advised of her arr
Chapter 5 (2)
K
Chapter 6
FERMINA DAZA could not have imagined that her letter, inspired by blind rage, would havebeen interpreted by Florentino Ariza as a love letter. She had put into it all the fury of which shewas capable, her crudest words, the most wounding, most unjust vilifications, which still seemedminuscule to her in light of the enormity of the offence. It was the final act in a bitter exorcismthrough which she was attempting to come to terms with her new situation. She wanted to beherself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude thathad doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even thevestiges of her identity. She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immenseand solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which ofthem was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.
She could not avoid a profound feeling of rancour toward her husband for having left heralone in the middle of the ocean. Everything of his made her cry: his pyjamas under the pillow, hisslippers that had always looked to her like an invalid's, the memory of his image in the back of themirror as he undressed while she combed her hair before bed, the odour of his skin, which was tolinger on hers for a long time after his death. She would stop in the middle of whatever she wasdoing and slap herself on the forehead because she suddenly remembered something she hadforgotten to tell him. At every moment countless ordinary questions would come to mind that healone could answer for her. Once he had told her something that she could not imagine: thatamputees suffer pains, cramps, itches, in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she feltwithout him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.
When she awoke on her first morning as a widow, she turned over in bed without opening hereyes, searching for a more comfortable position so that she could continue sleeping, and that wasthe moment when he died for her. For only then did it become clear that he had spent the nightaway from home for the first time in years. The other place where this struck her was at the table,not because she felt alone, which in fact she was, but because of her strange belief that she waseating with someone who no longer existed. It was not until her daughter Ofelia came from NewOrleans with her husband and the three girls that she sat at a table again to eat, but instead of theusual one, she ordered a smaller, improvised table set up in the corridor. Until then she did nottake a regular meal. She would walk through the kitchen at any hour, whenever she was hungry,and put her fork in the pots and eat a little of everything without placing anything on a plate,standing in front of the stove, talking to the serving women, who were the only ones with whomshe felt comfortable, the ones she got along with best. Still, no matter how hard she tried, shecould not elude the presence of her dead husband: wherever she went, wherever she turned, nomatter what she was doing, she would come across something of his that would remind her ofhim. For even though it seemed only decent and right to grieve for him, she also wanted to doeverything possible not to wallow in her grief. And so she made the drastic decision to empty thehouse of everything that would remind her of her dead husband, which was the only way shecould think of to go on living without him.
It was a ritual of eradication. Her son agreed to take his library so that she could replace hisoffice with the sewing room she had never had when she was married. And her daughter wouldtake some furniture and countless objects that she thought were just right for the antique auctionsin New Orleans. All of this was a relief for Fermina Daza, although she was not at all amused tolearn that the things she had bought on her honeymoon were now relics for antiquarians. To thesilent stupefaction of the servants, the neighbours, the women friends who came to visit her duringthat time, she had a bonfire built in a vacant lot behind the house, and there she burned everythingthat reminded her of her husband: the most expensive and elegant clothes seen in the city since thelast century, the finest shoes, the hats that resembled him more than his portraits, the siesta rockingchair from which he had arisen for the last time to die, innumerable objects so tied to her life thatby now they formed part of her identity. She did it without the shadow of a doubt, in the fullcertainty that her husband would have approved, and not only for reasons of hygiene. For he hadoften expressed his desire to be cremated and not shut away in the seamless dark of a cedar box.
His religion would not permit it, of course: he had dared to broach the subject with theArchbishop, just in case, and his answer had been a categorical no. It was pure illusion, becausethe Church did not permit the existence of crematoriums in our cemeteries, not even for the use ofreligions other than Catholic, and the advantage of building them would not have occurred toanyone but Juvenal Urbino. Fermina Daza did not forget her husband's terror, and even in theconfusion of the first hours she remembered to order the carpenter to leave a chink where lightcould come into the coffin as a consolation to him.
In any event, the holocaust was in vain. In a very short while Fermina Daza realised that thememory of her dead husband was as resistant to the fire as it seemed to be to the passage of time.
Even worse: after the incineration of his clothing, she continued to miss not only the many thingsshe had loved in him but also what had most annoyed her: the noises he made on arising. Thatmemory helped her to escape the mangrove swamps of grief. Above all else, she made the firmdecision to go on with her life, remembering her husband as if he had not died. She knew thatwaking each morning would continue to be difficult, but it would become less and less so.
At the end of the third week, in fact, she began to see the first light. But as it grew larger andbrighter, she became aware that there was an evil phantom in her life who did not give her amoment's peace. He was not the pitiable phantom who had haunted her in the Park of the Evangelsand whom she had evoked with a certain tenderness after she had grown old, but the hatefulphantom with his executioner's frock coat and his hat held against his chest, whose thoughtlessimpertinence had disturbed her so much that she found it impossible not to think about him. Eversince her rejection of him at the age of eighteen, she had been convinced that she had left behind aseed of hatred in him that could only grow larger with time. She had always counted on thathatred, she had felt it in the air when the phantom was near, and the mere sight of him had upsetand frightened her so that she never found a natural way to behave with him. On the night when hereiterated his love for her, while the flowers for her dead husband were still perfuming the house,she could not believe that his insolence was not the first step in God knows what sinister plan forrevenge.
Her persistent memory of him increased her rage. When she awoke thinking about him on theday after the funeral, she succeeded in removing him from her thoughts by a simple act of will.
But the rage always returned, and she realised very soon that the desire to forget him was thestrongest inducement for remembering him. Then, overcome by nostalgia, she dared to recall forthe first time the illusory days of that unreal love. She tried to remember just how the little parkwas then, and the shabby almond trees, and the bench where he had loved her, because none of itstill existed as it had been then. They had changed everything, they had removed the trees withtheir carpet of yellow leaves and replaced the statue of the decapitated hero with that of another,who wore his dress uniform but had no name or dates or reasons to justify him, and who stood onan ostentatious pedestal in which they had installed the electrical controls for the district. Herhouse, sold many years before, had fallen into total ruin at the hands of the ProvincialGovernment. It was not easy for her to imagine Florentino Ariza as he had been then, much less tobelieve that the taciturn boy, so vulnerable in the rain, was the moth-eaten old wreck who hadstood in front of her with no consideration for her situation, or the slightest respect for her grief,and had seared her soul with a flaming insult that still made it difficult for her to breathe.
Cousin Hildebranda S chez had come to visit a short while after Fermina Daza returnedfrom the ranch in Flores de Mar, where she had gone to recuperate from the misfortune of MissLynch. Old, fat, and contented, she had arrived in the company of her oldest son who, like hisfather, had been a colonel in the army but had been repudiated by him because of his contemptiblebehaviour during the massacre of the banana workers in San Juan de la Ciaga. The two cousinssaw each other often and spent endless hours feeling nostalgia for the time when they first met. Onher last visit, Hildebranda was more nostalgic than ever, and very affected by the burden of oldage. In order to add even greater poignancy to their memories, she had brought her copy of theportrait of them dressed as old-fashioned ladies, taken by the Belgian photographer on theafternoon that a young Juvenal Urbino had delivered the coup de grace to a willful Fermina Daza.
Her copy of the photograph had been lost, and Hildebranda's was almost invisible, but they couldboth recognise themselves through the mists of disenchantment: young and beautiful as theywould never be again.
For Hildebranda it was impossible not to speak of Florentino Ariza, because she alwaysidentified his fate with her own. She evoked him as she evoked the day she had sent her firsttelegram, and she could never erase from her heart the memory of the sad little bird condemned tooblivion. For her part, Fermina had often seen him without speaking to him, of course, and shecould not imagine that he had been her first love. She always heard news about him, as sooner orlater she heard news about anyone of any significance in the city. It was said that he had notmarried because of his unusual habits, but she paid no attention to this, in part because she neverpaid attention to rumours, and in part because such things were said in any event about men whowere above suspicion. On the other hand, it seemed strange to her that Florentino Ariza wouldpersist in his mystic attire and his rare lotions, and that he would continue to be so enigmatic aftermaking his way in life in so spectacular and honourable a manner. It was impossible for her tobelieve he was the same person, and she was always surprised when Hildebranda would sigh:
"Poor man, how he must have suffered!" For she had seen him without grief for a long time: ashadow that had been obliterated.
Nevertheless, on the night she met him in the movie theatre just after her return from Floresde Mar, something strange occurred in her heart. She was not surprised that he was with awoman, and a black woman at that. What did surprise her was that he was so well preserved, thathe behaved with the greatest self-assurance, and it did not occur to her that perhaps it was she, nothe, who had changed after the troubling explosion of Miss Lynch in her private life. From then on,and for more than twenty years, she saw him with more compassionate eyes. On the night of thevigil for her husband, it not only seemed reasonable for him to be there, but she even understood itas the natural end of rancour: an act of forgiving and forgetting. That was why she was so takenaback by his dramatic reiteration of a love that for her had never existed, at an age whenFlorentino Ariza and she could expect nothing more from life.
The mortal rage of the first shock remained intact after the symbolic cremation of herhusband, and it grew and spread as she felt herself less capable of controlling it. Even worse: thespaces in her mind where she managed to appease her memories of the dead man were slowly butinexorably being taken over by the field of poppies where she had buried her memories ofFlorentino Ariza. And so she thought about him without wanting to, and the more she thoughtabout him the angrier she became, and the angrier she became the more she thought about him,until it was something so unbearable that her mind could no longer contain it. Then she sat downat her dead husband's desk and wrote Florentino Ariza a letter consisting of three irrational pagesso full of insults and base provocations that it brought her the consolation of consciouslycommitting the vilest act of her long life.
Those weeks had been agonising for Florentino Ariza as well. The night he reiterated his loveto Fermina Daza he had wandered aimlessly through streets that had been devastated by theafternoon flood, asking himself in terror what he was going to do with the skin of the tiger he hadjust killed after having resisted its attacks for more than half a century. The city was in a state ofemergency because of the violent rains. In some houses, half-naked men and women were tryingto salvage whatever God willed from the flood, and Florentino Ariza had the impression thateveryone's calamity had something to do with his own. But the wind was calm and the stars of theCaribbean were quiet in their places. In the sudden silence of other voices, Florentino Arizarecognised the voice of the man whom Leona Cassiani and he had heard singing many yearsbefore, at the same hour and on the same corner: I came back from the bridge bathed in tears. Asong that in some way, on that night, for him alone, had something to do with death.
He needed Tr sito Ariza then as he never had before, he needed her wise words, her headof a mock queen adorned with paper flowers. He could not avoid it: whenever he found himself onthe edge of catastrophe, he needed the help of a woman. So that he passed by the Normal School,seeking out those who were within reach, and he saw a light in the long row of windows in Amica Vicu a's dormitory. He had to make a great effort not to fall into the grandfather's madnessof carrying her off at two o'clock in the morning, warm with sleep in her swaddling clothes andstill smelling of the cradle's tantrums.
At the other end of the city was Leona Cassiani, alone and free and doubtless ready toprovide him with the compassion he needed at two o'clock in the morning, at three o'clock, at anyhour and under any circumstances. It would not be the first time he had knocked at her door in thewasteland of his sleepless nights, but he knew that she was too intelligent, and that they lovedeach other too much, for him to come crying to her lap and not tell her the reason. After a gooddeal of thought as he sleepwalked through the deserted city, it occurred to him that he could do nobetter than Prudencia Pitre, the Widow of Two, who was younger than he. They had first met inthe last century, and if they stopped meeting it was because she refused to allow anyone to see heras she was, half blind and verging on decrepitude. As soon as he thought of her, Florentino Arizareturned to the Street of the Windows, put two bottles of port and a jar of pickles in a shoppingbag, and went to visit her, not even knowing if she was still in her old house, if she was alone, or ifshe was alive.
Prudencia Pitre had not forgotten his scratching signal at the door, the one he had used toidentify himself when they thought they were still young although they no longer were, and sheopened the door without any questions. The street was dark, he was barely visible in his black suit,his stiff hat, and his bat's umbrella hanging over his arm, and her eyes were too weak to see himexcept in full light, but she recognised him by the gleam of the streetlamp on the metal frame ofhis eyeglasses. He looked like a murderer with blood still on his hands.
"Sanctuary for a poor orphan," he said.
It was the only thing he could think of to say, just to say something. He was surprised at howmuch she had aged since the last time he saw her, and he was aware that she saw him the sameway. But he consoled himself by thinking that in a moment, when they had both recovered fromthe initial shock, they would notice fewer and fewer of the blows that life had dealt the other, andthey would again seem as young as they had been when they first met.
"You look as if you are going to a funeral," she said.
It was true. She, along with almost the entire city, had been at the window since eleveno'clock, watching the largest and most sumptuous funeral procession that had been seen here sincethe death of Archbishop De Luna. She had been awakened from her siesta by the thunderingartillery that made the earth tremble, by the dissonances of the marching bands, the confusion offuneral hymns over the clamouring bells in all the churches, which had been ringing without pausesince the previous day. From her balcony she had seen the cavalry in dress uniform, the religiouscommunities, the schools, the long black limousines of an invisible officialdom, the carriagedrawn by horses in feathered headdresses and gold trappings, the flag-draped yellow coffin on thegun carriage of a historic cannon, and at the very end a line of old open Victorias that keptthemselves alive in order to carry funeral wreaths. As soon as they had passed by Prudencia Pitre'sbalcony, a little after midday, the deluge came and the funeral procession dispersed in a wildstampede.
"What an absurd way to die," she said.
"Death has no sense of the ridiculous," he said, and added in sorrow: "above all at our age."They were seated on the terrace, facing the open sea, looking at the ringed moon that took uphalf the sky, looking at the coloured lights of the boats along the horizon, enjoying the mild,perfumed breeze after the storm. They drank port and ate pickles on slices of country bread thatPrudencia Pitre cut from a loaf in the kitchen. They had spent many nights like this after she hadbeen left a widow without children. Florentino Ariza had met her at a time when she would havereceived any man who wanted to be with her, even if he were hired by the hour, and they hadestablished a relationship that was more serious and longer-lived than would have seemedpossible.
Although she never even hinted at it, she would have sold her soul to the devil to marry him.
She knew that it would not be easy to submit to his miserliness, or the foolishness of his prematureappearance of age, or his maniacal sense of order, or his eagerness to ask for everything and givenothing at all in return, but despite all this, no man was better company because no other man inthe world was so in need of love. But no other man was as elusive either, so that their love neverwent beyond the point it always reached for him: the point where it would not interfere with hisdetermination to remain free for Fermina Daza. Nevertheless, it lasted many years, even after hehad arranged for Prudencia Pitre to marry a salesman who was home for three months andtravelled for the next three and with whom she had a daughter and four sons, one of whom, sheswore, was Florentino Ariza's.
They talked, not concerned about the hour, because both were accustomed to sharing thesleepless nights of their youth, and they had much less to lose in the sleeplessness of old age.
Although he almost never had more than two glasses of wine, Florentino Ariza still had not caughthis breath after the third. He was dripping with perspiration, and the Widow of Two told him totake off his jacket, his vest, his trousers, to take off everything if he liked, what the hell: after all,they knew each other better naked than dressed. He said he would if she did the same, but sherefused: some time ago she had looked at herself in the wardrobe mirror and suddenly realised thatshe would no longer have the courage to allow anyone--not him, not anyone--to see her undressed.
Florentino Ariza, in a state of agitation that he could not calm with four glasses of port, talkedat length about the same subject: the past, the good memories from the past, for he was desperateto find the hidden road in the past that would bring him relief. For that was what he needed: to lethis soul escape through his mouth. When he saw the first light of dawn on the horizon, heattempted an indirect approach. He asked, in a way that seemed casual: "What would you do ifsomeone proposed marriage to you, just as you are, a widow of your age?" She laughed with awrinkled old woman's laugh, and asked in turn: "Are you speaking of the Widow Urbino?"Florentino Ariza always forgot when he should not have that women, and Prudencia Pitremore than any other, always think about the hidden meanings of questions more than about thequestions themselves. Filled with sudden terror because of her chilling marksmanship, he slippedthrough the back door: "I am speaking of you." She laughed again: "Go make fun of your bitch ofa mother, may she rest in peace." Then she urged him to say what he meant to say, because sheknew that he, or any other man, would not have awakened her at three o'clock in the morning afterso many years of not seeing her just to drink port and eat country bread with pickles. She said:
"You do that only "when you are looking for someone to cry with." Florentino Ariza withdrew indefeat.
"For once you are wrong," he said. "My reasons tonight have more to do with singing.""Let's sing, then," she said.
And she began to sing, in a very good voice, the song that was popular then: Ramona, Icannot live without you. The night was over, for he did not dare to play forbidden games with awoman who had proven too many times that she knew the dark side of the moon. He walked outinto a different city, one that was perfumed by the last dahlias of June, and onto a street out of hisyouth, where the shadowy widows from five o'clock Mass were filing by. But now it was he, notthey, who crossed the street, so they would not see the tears he could no longer hold back, not hismidnight tears, as he thought, but other tears: the ones he had been swallowing for fifty-one years,nine months and four days.
He had lost all track of time, and did not know where he was when he awoke facing a large,dazzling window. The voice of Am ica Vicu a playing ball in the garden with the servantgirls brought him back to reality: he was in his mother's bed. He had kept her bedroom intact, andhe would sleep there to feel less alone on the few occasions when he was troubled by his solitude.
Across from the bed hung the large mirror from Don Sancho's Inn, and he had only to see it whenhe awoke to see Fermina Daza reflected in its depths. He knew that it was Saturday, because thatwas the day the chauffeur picked up Am ica Vicu a at her boarding school and brought herback to his house. He realised that he had slept without knowing it, dreaming that he could notsleep, in a dream that had been disturbed by the wrathful face of Fermina Daza. He bathed,wondering what his next step should be, he dressed very slowly in his best clothing, he dabbed oncologne and waxed the ends of his white moustache, he left the bedroom, and from the second-floor hallway he saw the beautiful child in her uniform catching the ball with the grace that hadmade him tremble on so many Saturdays but this morning did not disquiet him in the least. Heindicated that she should come with him, and before he climbed into the automobile he said,although it was not necessary: "Today we are not going to do our things." He took her to theAmerican Ice Cream Shop, filled at this hour with parents eating ice cream with their childrenunder the long blades of the fans that hung from the smooth ceiling. Am ica Vicu a orderedan enormous glass filled with layers of ice cream, each a different colour, her favourite dish andthe one that was the most popular because it gave off an aura of magic. Florentino Ariza drankblack coffee and looked at the girl without speaking, while she ate the ice cream with a spoon thathad a very long handle so that one could reach the bottom of the glass. Still looking at her, he saidwithout warning: "I am going to marry."She looked into his eyes with a flash of uncertainty, her spoon suspended in midair, but thenshe recovered and smiled.
"That's a lie," she said. "Old men don't marry."That afternoon he left her at her school under a steady downpour just as the Angelus wasringing, after the two of them had watched the puppet show in the park, had lunch at the fried-fishstands on the jetties, seen the caged animals in the circus that had just come to town, bought allkinds of candies at the outdoor stalls to take back to school, and driven around the city severaltimes with the top down, so that she could become accustomed to the idea that he was herguardian and no longer her lover. On Sunday he sent the automobile for her in the event shewanted to take a drive with her friends, but he did not want to see her, because since the previousweek he had come to full consciousness of both their ages. That night he decided to write a letterof apology to Fermina Daza, its only purpose to show that he had not given up, but he put it offuntil the next day. On Monday, after exactly three weeks of agony, he walked into his house,soaked by the rain, and found her letter.
It was eight o'clock at night. The two servant girls were in bed, and they had left on the lightin the hallway that lit Florentino Ariza's way to his bedroom. He knew that his Spartan, blandsupper was on the table in the dining room, but the slight hunger he felt after so many days ofhaphazard eating vanished with the emotional upheaval of the letter. His hands were shaking somuch that it was difficult for him to turn on the overhead light in the bedroom. He put the rain-soaked letter on the bed, lit the lamp on the night table, and with the feigned tranquillity that washis customary way of calming himself, he took off his wet jacket and hung it on the back of thechair, he took off his vest, folded it with care, and placed it on top of the jacket, he took off hisblack silk string tie and the celluloid collar that was no longer fashionable in the world, heunbuttoned his shirt down to his waist and loosened his belt so that he could breathe with greaterease, and at last he took off his hat and put it by the window to dry. Then he began to tremblebecause he did not know where the letter was, and his nervous excitement was so great that he wassurprised when he found it, for he did not remember placing it on the bed. Before opening it, hedried the envelope with his handkerchief, taking care not to smear the ink in which his name waswritten, and as he did so it occurred to him that the secret was no longer shared by two people butby three, at least, for whoever had delivered it must have noticed that only three weeks after thedeath of her husband, the Widow Urbino was writing to someone who did not belong to her world,and with so much urgency that she did not use the regular mails and so much secretiveness thatshe had ordered that it not be handed to anyone but slipped under the door instead, as if it were ananonymous letter. He did not have to tear open the envelope, for the water had dissolved the glue,but the letter was dry: three closely written pages with no salutation, and signed with the initials ofher married name.
He sat on the bed and read it through once as quickly as he could, more intrigued by the tonethan by the content, and before he reached the second page he knew that it was in fact the insultingletter he had expected to receive. He laid it, unfolded, in the light shed by the bed-lamp, he tookoff his shoes and his wet socks, he turned out the overhead light, using the switch next to the door,and at last he put on his chamois moustache cover and lay down without removing his trousersand shirt, his head supported by two large pillows that he used as a backrest for reading. Now heread it again, this time syllable by syllable, scrutinising each so that none of the letter's secretintentions would be hidden from him, and then he read it four more times, until he was so full ofthe written words that they began to lose all meaning. At last he placed it, without the envelope, inthe drawer of the night table, lay on his back with his hands behind his head, and for four hours hedid not blink, he hardly breathed, he was more dead than a dead man, as he stared into the space inthe mirror where she had been. Precisely at midnight he went to the kitchen and prepared athermos of coffee as thick as crude oil, then he took it to his room, put his false teeth into the glassof boric acid solution that he always found ready for him on the night table, and resumed theposture of a recumbent marble statue, with momentary shifts in position when he took a sip ofcoffee, until the maid came in at six o'clock with a fresh thermos.
Florentino Ariza knew by then what one of his next steps was going to be. In truth, the insultscaused him no pain, and he was not concerned with rectifying the unjust accusations that couldhave been worse, considering Fermina Daza's character and the gravity of the cause. All thatinterested him was that the letter, in and of itself, gave him the opportunity, and even recognisedhis right, to respond. Even more: it demanded that he respond. So that life was now at the pointwhere he had wanted it to be. Everything else depended on him, and he was convinced that hisprivate hell of over half a century's duration would still present him with many mortal challenges,which he was prepared to confront with more ardour and more sorrow and more love than he hadbrought to any of them before now, because these would be the last.
When he went to his office five days after receiving the letter from Fermina Daza, he felt as ifhe were floating in an abrupt and unusual absence of the noise of the typewriters, whose sound,like rain, had become less noticeable than silence. It was a moment of calm. When the soundbegan again, Florentino Ariza went to Leona Cas-siani's office and watched her as she sat in frontof her own personal typewriter, which responded to her fingertips as if it were human. She knewshe was being observed, and she looked toward the door with her awesome solar smile, but shedid not stop typing until the end of the paragraph.
"Tell me something, lionlady of my soul," asked Florentino Ariza. "How would you feel ifyou received a love letter written on that thing?"Her expression--she who was no longer surprised at anything--was one of genuine surprise.
"My God, man!" she exclaimed. "It never occurred to me."For that very reason she could make no other reply. Florentino Ariza had not thought of iteither until that moment, and he decided to risk it with no reservations. He took one of the officetypewriters home, his subordinates joking good-naturedly: "You can't teach an old dog newtricks." Leona Cassiani, enthusiastic about anything new, offered to give him typing lessons athome. But he had been opposed to methodical learning ever since Lotario Thugut had wanted toteach him to play the violin by reading notes and warned him that he would need at least a year tobegin, five more to qualify for a professional orchestra, and six hours a day for the rest of his lifein order to play well. And yet he had convinced his mother to buy him a blind man's violin, andwith the five basic rules given him by Lotario Thugut, in less than a year he had dared to play inthe choir of the Cathedral and to serenade Fermina Daza from the paupers' cemetery according tothe direction of the winds. If that had been the case at the age of twenty, with something asdifficult as the violin, he did not see why it could not also be the case at the age of seventy-six,with a one-finger instrument like the typewriter.
He was right. He needed three days to learn the position of the letters on the keyboard,another six to learn to think while he typed, and three more to complete the first letter withouterrors after tearing up half a ream of paper. He gave it a solemn salutation--Se ora--and signedit with his initial, as he had done in the perfumed love letters of his youth. He mailed it in anenvelope with the mourning vignettes that were de rigueur for a letter to a recent widow, and withno return address on the back.
It was a six-page letter, unlike any he had ever written before. It did not have the tone, or thestyle, or the rhetorical air of his early years of love, and his argument was so rational andmeasured that the scent of a gardenia would have been out of place. In a certain sense it was hisclosest approximation to the business letters he had never been able to write. Years later, a typedpersonal letter would be considered almost an insult, but at that time the typewriter was still anoffice animal without its own code of ethics, and its domestication for personal use was notforeseen in the books on etiquette. It seemed more like bold modernity, which was how FerminaDaza must have understood it, for in her second letter to Florentino Ariza, she began by begginghis pardon for any difficulties in reading her handwriting, since she did not have at her disposalany means more advanced than her steel pen.
Florentino Ariza did not even refer to the terrible letter that she had sent him, but from thevery beginning he attempted a new method of seduction, without any reference to past loves oreven to the past itself: a clean slate. Instead, he wrote an extensive meditation on life based on hisideas about, and experience of, relations between men and women, which at one time he hadintended to write as a complement to the Lovers' Companion. Only now he disguised it in thepatriarchal style of an old man's memories so that it would not be too obvious that it was really adocument of love. First he wrote many draughts in his old style, which took longer to read with acool head than to throw into the fire. But he knew that any conventional slip, the slightestnostalgic indiscretion, could revive the unpleasant taste of the past in her heart, and although heforesaw her returning a hundred letters to him before she dared open the first, he preferred that itnot happen even once. And so he planned everything down to the last detail, as if it were the finalbattle: new intrigues, new hopes in a woman who had already lived a full and complete life. It hadto be a mad dream, one that would give her the courage she would need to discard the prejudicesof a class that had not always been hers but had become hers more than anyone's. It had to teachher to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an endin itself.
He had the good sense not to expect an immediate reply, to be satisfied if the letter was notreturned to him. It was not, nor were any of the ones that followed, and as the days passed, hisexcitement grew, for the more days that passed without her letters being returned, the greater hishope of a reply. In the beginning, the frequency of his letters was conditioned by the dexterity ofhis fingers: first one a week, then two, and at last one a day. He was happy about the progressmade in the mail service since his days as a standard-bearer, for he would not have risked beingseen every day in the post office mailing a letter to the same person, or sending it with someonewho might talk. On the other hand, it was very easy to send an employee to buy enough stamps fora month, and then slip the letter into one of the three mailboxes located in the old city. He soonmade that ritual a part of his routine: he took advantage of his insomnia to write, and the next day,on his way to the office, he -would ask the driver to stop for a moment at a corner box, and hewould get out to mail the letter. He never allowed the chauffeur to do it for him, as he attempted todo one rainy morning, and at times he took the precaution of carrying several letters rather thanjust one, so that it would seem more natural. The chauffeur did not know, of course, that theadditional letters were blank pages that Florentino Ariza addressed to himself, for he had nevercarried on a private correspondence with anyone, with the exception of the guardian's report thathe sent at the end of each month to the parents of Am ica Vicu a, with his personalimpressions of the girl's conduct, her state of mind and health, and the progress she was making inher studies.
After the first month he began to number the letters and to head them with a synopsis of theprevious ones, as in the serialised novels in the newspapers, for fear that Fermina Daza would notrealise that they had a certain continuity. When they became daily letters, moreover, he replacedthe envelopes that had mourning vignettes with long white envelopes, and this gave them theadded impersonality of business letters. When he began, he was prepared to subject his patience toa crucial test, at least until he had proof that he was wasting his time with the only new approachhe could think of. He waited, in fact, not with the many kinds of suffering that waiting had causedhim in his youth, but with the stubbornness of an old man made of stone who had nothing else tothink about, nothing else to do in a riverboat company that by this time was sailing without hishelp before favourable winds, and who was also convinced that he would be alive and in perfectpossession of his male faculties the next day, or the day after that, or whenever Fermina Daza atlast was convinced that there was no other remedy for her solitary widow's yearnings than tolower the drawbridge for him.
Meanwhile, he continued with his normal life. In anticipation of a favourable reply, he begana second renovation of his house so that it would be worthy of the woman who could haveconsidered herself its lady and mistress from the day of its purchase. He visited Prudencia Pitreagain several times, as he had promised, in order to prove to her that he loved her despite thedevastation wrought by age, loved her in full sunlight and with the doors open, and not only on hisnights of desolation. He continued to pass by Andrea Varn's house until he found the bathroomlight turned off, and he tried to lose himself in the wildness of her bed even though it was only sohe would not lose the habit of love, in keeping with another of his superstitions, not disproved sofar, that the body carries on for as long as you do.
His relations with Am ica Vicu a were the only difficulty. He had repeated the order tohis chauffeur to pick her up on Saturdays at ten o'clock in the morning at the school, but he did notknow what to do with her during the weekends. For the first time he did not concern himself withher, and she resented the change. He placed her in the care of the servant girls and had them takeher to the afternoon film, to the band concerts in the children's park, to the charity bazaars, or hearranged Sunday activities for her and her classmates so that he would not have to take her to thehidden paradise behind his offices, to which she had always wanted to return after the first time hetook her there. In the fog of his new illusion, he did not realise that women can become adults inthree days, and that three years had gone by since he had met her boat from Puerto Padre. Nomatter how he tried to soften the blow, it was a brutal change for her, and she could not imaginethe reason for it. On the day in the ice cream parlour when he told her he was going to marry,when he revealed the truth to her, she had reeled with panic, but then the possibility seemed soabsurd that she forgot about it. In a very short while, however, she realised that he was behavingwith inexplicable evasiveness, as if it was true, as if he were not sixty years older than she, butsixty years younger.
One Saturday afternoon, Florentino Ariza found her trying to type in his bedroom, and shewas doing rather well, for she was studying typing at school. She had completed more than half apage of automatic writing, but it was not difficult to isolate an occasional phrase that revealed herstate of mind. Florentino Ariza leaned over her shoulder to read what she had written. She wasdisturbed by his man's heat, by his ragged breathing, by the scent on his clothes, which was thesame as the scent on his pillow. She was no longer the little girl, the newcomer, whom he hadundressed, one article of clothing at a time, with little baby games: first these little shoes for thelittle baby bear, then this little chemise for the little puppy dog, next these little flowered pantiesfor the little bunny rabbit, and a little kiss on her papa's delicious little dickey-bird. No: now shewas a full-fledged woman, who liked to take the initiative. She continued typing with just onefinger of her right hand, and with her left she felt for his leg, explored him, found him, felt himcome to life, grow, heard him sigh with excitement, and his old man's breathing became unevenand laboured. She knew him: from that point on he was going to lose control, his speech wouldbecome disjointed, he would be at her mercy, and he would not find his way back until he hadreached the end. She led him by the hand to the bed as if he were a blind beggar on the street, andshe cut him into pieces with malicious tenderness; she added salt to taste, pepper, a clove of garlic,chopped onion, lemon juice, bay leaf, until he was seasoned and on the platter, and the oven washeated to the right temperature. There was no one in the house. The servant girls had gone out, andthe masons and carpenters who were renovating the house did not work on Saturdays: they had thewhole world to themselves. But on the edge of the abyss he came out of his ecstasy, moved herhand away, sat up, and said in a tremulous voice: "Be careful, we have no rubbers."She lay on her back in bed for a long time, thinking, and when she returned to school an hourearly she was beyond all desire to cry, and she had sharpened her sense of smell along with herclaws so that she could track down the miserable whore who had ruined her life. Florentino Ariza,on the other hand, made another masculine mis-judgment: he believed that she had beenconvinced of the futility of her desires and had resolved to forget him.
He was back in his element. At the end of six months he had heard nothing at all, and hefound himself tossing and turning in bed until dawn, lost in the wasteland of a new kind ofinsomnia. He thought that Fermina Daza had opened the first letter because of its appearance, hadseen the initial she knew from the letters of long ago, and had thrown it out to be burned with therest of the trash without even taking the trouble to tear it up. Just seeing the envelopes of those thatfollowed would be enough for her to do the same thing without even opening them, and tocontinue to do so until the end of time, while he came at last to his final written meditation. He didnot believe that the woman existed who could resist her curiosity about half a year of almost dailyletters when she did not even know the colour of ink they were written in, but if such a womanexisted, it had to be her.
Florentino Ariza felt that his old age was not a rushing torrent but a bottomless cistern wherehis memory drained away. His ingenuity was wearing thin. After patrolling the villa in La Mangafor several days, he realised that this strategy from his youth would never break down the doorssealed by mourning. One morning, as he was looking for a number in the telephone directory, hehappened to come across hers. He called. It rang many times, and at last he recognised her grave,husky voice: "Hello?" He hung up without speaking, but the infinite distance of thatunapproachable voice weakened his morale.
It was at this time that Leona Cassiani celebrated her birthday and invited a small group offriends to her house. He was distracted and spilled chicken gravy on himself. She cleaned his lapelwith the corner of his napkin dampened in a glass of water, and then she tied it around his necklike a bib to avoid a more serious accident: he looked like an old baby. She noticed that severaltimes during dinner he took off his eyeglasses and dried them with his handkerchief because hiseyes were watering. During coffee he fell asleep holding his cup in his hand, and she tried to takeit away without waking him, but his embarrassed response was: "I was just resting my eyes."Leona Cassiani went to bed astounded at how his age was beginning to show.
On the first anniversary of the death of Juvenal Urbino, the family sent out invitations to amemorial Mass at the Cathedral. Florentino Ariza had still received no reply, and this was thedriving force behind his bold decision to attend the Mass although he had not been invited. It wasa social event more ostentatious than emotional. The first few rows of pews were reserved fortheir lifetime owners, whose names were engraved on copper nameplates on the backs of theirseats. Florentino Ariza was among the first to arrive so that he might sit where Fermina Dazacould not pass by without seeing him. He thought that the best seats would be in the central nave,behind the reserved pews, but there were so many people he could not find a seat there either, andhe had to sit in the nave for poor relations. From there he saw Fermina Daza walk in on her son'sarm, dressed in an unadorned long-sleeved black velvet dress buttoned all the way from her neckto the tips of her shoes, like a bishop's cassock, and a narrow scarf of Castilian lace instead of theveiled hat worn by other widows, and even by many other ladies who longed for that condition.
Her uncovered face shone like alabaster, her lanceolate eyes had a life of their own under theenormous chandeliers of the central nave, and as she walked she was so erect, so haughty, so selfpossessed, that she seemed no older than her son. As he stood, Florentino Ariza leaned the tips ofhis fingers against the back of the pew until his dizziness passed, for he felt that he and she werenot separated by seven paces, but existed in two different times.
Through almost the entire ceremony, Fermina Daza stood in the family pew in front of themain altar, as elegant as when she attended the opera. But when it was over, she broke withconvention and did not stay in her seat, according to the custom of the day, to receive the spiritualrenewal of condolences, but made her way instead through the crowd to thank each one of theguests: an innovative gesture that was very much in harmony with her style and character.
Greeting one guest after another, she at last reached the pews of the poor relations, and then shelooked around to make certain she had not missed anyone she knew. At that moment FlorentinoAriza felt a supernatural wind lifting him out of himself: she had seen him. Fermina Daza movedaway from her companions with the same assurance she brought to everything in society, held outher hand, and with a very sweet smile, said to him: "Thank you for coming."For she had not only received his letters, she had read them with great interest and had foundin them serious and thoughtful reasons to go on living. She had been at the table, having breakfastwith her daughter, when she received the first one. She opened it because of the novelty of itsbeing typewritten, and a sudden blush burned her face when she recognised the initial of thesignature. But she immediately regained her self-possession and put the letter in her apron pocket.
She said: "It is a condolence letter from the government." Her daughter was surprised: "All ofthem came already." She was imperturbable: "This is another one." Her intention was to burn theletter later, when she was away from her daughter's questions, but she could not resist thetemptation of looking it over first. She expected the reply that her insulting letter deserved, a letterthat she began to regret the very moment she sent it, but from the majestic salutation and thesubject of the first paragraph, she realised that something had changed in the world. She was sointrigued that she locked herself in her bedroom to read it at her ease before she burned it, and sheread it three times without pausing.
It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her headlike nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.
There they were, precise, simple, just as she would have liked to say them, and once again shegrieved that her husband was not alive to discuss them with her as they used to discuss certainevents of the day before going to sleep. In this way an unknown Florentino Ariza was revealed toher, one possessed of a clear-sightedness that in no way corresponded to the feverish love lettersof his youth or to the sombre conduct of his entire life. They were, rather, the words of a man who,in the opinion of Aunt Escol tica, was inspired by the Holy Spirit, and this thought astoundedher now as much as it had the first time. In any case, what most calmed her spirit was the certaintythat this letter from a wise old man was not an attempt to repeat the impertinence of the night ofthe vigil over the body but a very noble way of erasing the past.
The letters that followed brought her complete calm. Still, she burned them after readingthem with a growing interest, although burning them left her with a sense of guilt that she couldnot dissipate. So that when they began to be numbered, she found the moral justification she hadbeen seeking for not destroying them. At any rate, her initial intention was not to keep them forherself but to wait for an opportunity to return them to Florentino Ariza so that something thatseemed of such great human value would not be lost. The difficulty was that time passed and theletters continued to arrive, one every three or four days throughout the year, and she did not knowhow to return them without that appearing to be the rebuff she no longer wanted to give, andwithout having to explain everything in a letter that her pride would not permit her to write.
That first year had been enough time for her to adjust to her widowhood. The purifiedmemory of her husband, no longer an obstacle in her daily actions, in her private thoughts, in hersimplest intentions, became a watchful presence that guided but did not hinder her. On theoccasions when she truly needed him she would see him, not as an apparition but as flesh andblood. She was encouraged by the certainty that he was there, still alive but without his masculinewhims, his patriarchal demands, his consuming need for her to love him in the same ritual ofinopportune kisses and tender words with which he loved her. For now she understood him betterthan when he was alive, she understood the yearning of his love, the urgent need he felt to find inher the security that seemed to be the mainstay of his public life and that in reality he neverpossessed. One day, at the height of desperation, she had shouted at him: "You don't understandhow unhappy I am." Unperturbed, he took off his eyeglasses with a characteristic gesture, heflooded her with the transparent waters of his childlike eyes, and in a single phrase he burdenedher with the weight of his unbearable wisdom: "Always remember that the most important thing ina good marriage is not happiness, but stability." With the first loneliness of her widowhood shehad understood that the phrase did not conceal the miserable threat that she had attributed to it atthe time, but was the lodestone that had given them both so many happy hours.
On her many journeys through the world, Fermina Daza had bought every object thatattracted her attention because of its novelty. She desired these things with a primitive impulse thather husband was happy to rationalise, and they were beautiful, useful objects as long as theyremained in their original environment, in the show windows of Rome, Paris, London, or in theNew York, vibrating to the Charleston, where skyscrapers were beginning to grow, but they couldnot withstand the test of Strauss waltzes with pork cracklings or Poetic Festivals when it wasninety degrees in the shade. And so she would return with half a dozen enormous standing trunksmade of polished metal, with copper locks and corners like decorated coffins, lady and mistress ofthe world's latest marvels, which were worth their price not in gold but in the fleeting momentwhen someone from her local world would see them for the first time. For that is why they hadbeen bought: so that others could see them. She became aware of her frivolous public image longbefore she began to grow old, and in the house she was often heard to say: "We have to get rid ofall these trinkets; there's no room to turn around." Dr. Urbino would laugh at her fruitless efforts,for he knew that the emptied spaces were only going to be filled again. But she persisted, becauseit was true that there was no room for anything else and nothing anywhere served any purpose, notthe shirts hanging on the doorknobs or the overcoats for European winters squeezed into thekitchen cupboards. So that on a morning when she awoke in high spirits she would raze theclothes closets, empty the trunks, tear apart the attics, and wage a war of separation against thepiles of clothing that had been seen once too often, the hats she had never worn because there hadbeen no occasion to wear them while they were still in fashion, the shoes copied by Europeanartists from those used by empresses for their coronations, and which were scorned here byhighborn ladies because they were identical to the ones that black women bought at the market towear in the house. For the entire morning the interior terrace would be in a state of crisis, and inthe house it would be difficult to breathe because of bitter gusts from the mothballs. But in a fewhours order would be reestablished because she at last took pity on so much silk strewn on thefloor, so many leftover brocades and useless pieces of passementerie, so many silver fox tails, allcondemned to the fire.
"It is a sin to burn this," she would say, "when so many people do not even have enough toeat."And so the burning was postponed, it was always postponed, and things were only shiftedfrom their places of privilege to the stables that had been transformed into storage bins forremnants, while the spaces that had been cleared, just as he predicted, began to fill up again, tooverflow with things that lived for a moment and then went to die in the closets: until the nexttime. She would say: "Someone should invent something to do with things you cannot useanymore but that you still cannot throw out." That was true: she was dismayed by the voracitywith which objects kept invading living spaces, displacing the humans, forcing them back into thecorners, until Fermina Daza pushed the objects out of sight. For she was not as ordered as peoplethought, but she did have her own desperate method for appearing to be so: she hid the disorder.
The day that Juvenal Urbino died, they had to empty out half of his study and pile the things in thebedrooms so there would be space to lay out the body.
Death's passage through the house brought the solution. Once she had burned her husband'sclothes, Fermina Daza realised that her hand had not trembled, and on the same impulse shecontinued to light the fire at regular intervals, throwing everything on it, old and new, not thinkingabout the envy of the rich or the vengeance of the poor who were dying of hunger. Finally, she hadthe mango tree cut back at the roots until there was nothing left of that misfortune, and she gavethe live parrot to the new Museum of the City. Only then did she draw a free breath in the kind ofhouse she had always dreamed of: large, easy, and all hers.
Her daughter Ofelia spent three months with her and then returned to New Orleans. Her sonbrought his family to lunch on Sundays and as often as he could during the week. Fermina Daza'sclosest friends began to visit her once she had overcome the crisis of her mourning, they playedcards facing the bare patio, they tried out new recipes, they brought her up to date on the secretlife of the insatiable world that continued to exist without her. One of the most faithful wasLucrecia del Real del Obispo, an aristocrat of the old school who had always been a good friendand who drew even closer after the death of Juvenal Urbino. Stiff with arthritis and repenting herwayward life, in those days Lucrecia del Real not only provided her with the best company, shealso consulted with her regarding the civic and secular projects that were being arranged in thecity, and this made her feel useful for her own sake and not because of the protective shadow ofher husband. And yet she was never so closely identified with him as she was then, for she was nolonger called by her maiden name, and she became known as the Widow Urbino.
It seemed incredible, but as the first anniversary of her husband's death approached, FerminaDaza felt herself entering a place that was shady, cool, quiet: the grove of the irremediable. Shewas not yet aware, and would not be for several months, of how much the written meditations ofFlorentino Ariza had helped her to recover her peace of mind. Applied to her own experiences,they were what allowed her to understand her own life and to await the designs of old age withserenity. Their meeting at the memorial Mass was a providential opportunity for her to letFlorentino Ariza know that she, too, thanks to his letters of encouragement, was prepared to erasethe past.
Two days later she received a different kind of letter from him: handwritten on linen paperand his complete name inscribed with great clarity on the back of the envelope. It was the sameornate handwriting as in his earlier letters, the same will to lyricism, but applied to a simpleparagraph of gratitude for the courtesy of her greeting in the Cathedral. For several days after sheread the letter Fermina Daza continued to think about it with troubled memories, but with aconscience so clear that on the following Thursday she suddenly asked Lucrecia del Real delObispo if she happened to know Florentino Ariza, the, owner of the riverboats. Lucrecia repliedthat she did: "He seems to be a wandering succubus." She repeated the common gossip that he hadnever had a woman although he was such a good catch, and that he had a secret office where hetook the boys he pursued at night along the docks. Fermina Daza had heard that story for as longas she could remember, and she had never believed it or given it any importance. But when sheheard it repeated with so much conviction by Lucrecia del Real del Obispo, who had also beenrumoured at one time to have strange tastes, she could not resist the urge to clarify matters. Shesaid she had known Florentino Ariza since he was a boy. She reminded her that his mother hadowned a notions shop on the Street of Windows and also bought old shirts and sheets, which sheunravelled and sold as bandages during the civil wars. And she concluded with conviction: "He isan honourable man, and he is the soul of tact." She was so vehement that Lucrecia took back whatshe had said: "When all is said and done, they also say the same sort of thing about me." FerminaDaza was not curious enough to ask herself why she was making so passionate a defence of a manwho had been no more than a shadow in her life. She continued to think about him, above allwhen the mail arrived without another letter from him. Two weeks of silence had gone by whenone of the servant girls woke her during her siesta with a warning whisper: "Se ora," she said,"Don Florentino is here."He was there. Fermina Daza's first reaction was panic. She thought no, he should come backanother day at a more appropriate hour, she was in no condition to receive visitors, there wasnothing to talk about. But she recovered instantly and told her to show him into the drawing roomand bring him coffee, while she tidied herself before seeing him. Florentino Ariza had waited atthe street door, burning under the infernal three o'clock sun, but in full control of the situation. Hewas prepared not to be received, even with an amiable excuse, and that certainty kept him calm.
But the decisiveness of her message shook him to his very marrow, and when he walked into thecool shadows of the drawing room he did not have time to think about the miracle he wasexperiencing because his intestines suddenly filled in an explosion of painful foam. He sat down,holding his breath, hounded by the damnable memory of the bird droppings on his first love letter,and he remained motionless in the shadowy darkness until the first attack of shivering had passed,resolved to accept any mishap at that moment except this unjust misfortune.
He knew himself well: despite his congenital constipation, his belly had betrayed him inpublic three or four times in the course of his many years, and those three or four times he hadbeen obliged to give in. Only on those occasions, and on others of equal urgency, did he realise thetruth of the words that he liked to repeat in jest: "I do not believe in God, but I am afraid of Him."He did not have time for doubts: he tried to say any prayer he could remember, but he could notthink of a single one. When he was a boy, another boy had taught him magic words for hitting abird with a stone: "Aim, aim, got my aim--if I miss you I'm not to blame." He used it when hewent to the country for the first time with a new slingshot, and the bird fell down dead. In aconfused way he thought that one thing had something to do with the other, and he repeated theformula now with the fervour of a prayer, but it did not have the desired effect. A twisting in hisguts like the coil of a spring lifted him from his seat, the foaming in his belly grew thicker andmore painful, it grumbled a lament and left him covered with icy sweat. The maid who broughthim the coffee was frightened by his corpse's face. He sighed: "It's the heat." She opened thewindow, thinking she would make him more comfortable, but the afternoon sun hit him full in theface and she had to close it again. He knew he could not hold out another moment, and thenFermina Daza came in, almost invisible in the darkness, dismayed at seeing him in such a state.
"You can take off your jacket," she said to him.
He suffered less from the deadly griping of his bowels than from the thought that she mighthear them bubbling. But he managed to endure just an instant longer to say no, he had only passedby to ask her when he might visit. Still standing, she said to him in confusion: "Well, you are herenow." And she invited him to the terrace in the patio, where it was cooler. He refused in a voicethat seemed to her like a sigh of sorrow.
"I beg you, let it be tomorrow," he said.
She remembered that tomorrow was Thursday, the day when Lucrecia del Real del Obispomade her regular visit, but she had the perfect solution: "The day after tomorrow at five o'clock."Florentino Ariza thanked her, bid an urgent farewell with his hat, and left without tasting thecoffee. She stood in the middle of the drawing room, puzzled, not understanding what had justhappened, until the sound of his automobile's backfiring faded at the end of the street. ThenFlorentino Ariza shifted into a less painful position in the back seat, closed his eyes, relaxed hismuscles, and surrendered to the will of his body. It was like being reborn. The driver, who after somany years in his service was no longer surprised at anything, remained impassive. But when heopened the door for him in front of his house
Chapter 6 (2)
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