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《Love in the Time of Cholera》
CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS IABLE: the st of bitter almonds always re-minded him of the fate of ued love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he ehe 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. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic oppo in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold ide.
He found the corpse covered with a bla on the campaign cot where he had always slept, and beside it was a stool with the develop-ing tray he had used to vaporize the poison. On the floor, tied to a leg of the cot, lay the body of a black Great Dah a snow-white chest, ao him were the crutches. At one window the splendor of dawn was just beginning to illumihe stifling, crowded room that served as both bedroom and laboratory, but there was enough light for him t ohe authority of death. The other win-dows, as well as every other k in the room, were muffled with rags or sealed with black cardboard, whicreased the oppressive heavi-ness.
A ter was crammed with jars and bottles without labels and two crumblier trays under an ordinary light bulb covered with red paper. The third tray, the one for the fixative solution, was o the body. There were old magazines and neers every-where, piles of ives on glass plates, broken furniture, but everything was kept free of dust by a diligent hand. Although the air ing through the windourified the atmosphere, there still remained for the one who could identify it the dying embers of hapless love iter almonds. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had often thought, with no premonitory iion, that this would not be a propitious place for dying in a state of grace. But in time he came to suppose that perhaps its disorder obeyed an obscure determination of Divine Providence.
A polispector had e forward with a very young medical student who was pleting his forensic training at the municipal dispensary, and it was they who had ventilated the room and covered the body while waiting for Dr. Urbino to arrive. They greeted him with a solemnity that on this occasion had more of dolehan veion, for no one was unaware of the degree of his friendship with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour.
The emieacher shook hands with each of them, as he always did with every one of his pupils before beginning the daily class in general ical medie, and then, as if it were a flower, he grasped the hem of the bla with the tips of his index finger and his thumb, and slowly uncovered the body with sacramental circumspe. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was -pletely naked, stiff and twisted, eyes open, body blue, looking fifty 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 torso and arms as broad as a galley slave’s, but his defenseless legs looked like an orphan’s. Dr. Juvenal Urbino studied him for a moment, his heart ag as it rarely had in the long years of his futile struggle against death.
“Damn fool,” he said. “The worst was over.”
He covered him again with the bla and regained his academic dignity. His eightieth birthday had been celebrated the year before with an official three-day jubilee, and in his thank-you speech he had once agaied the temptation to retire. He had said: “I’ll have plenty of time to rest when I die, but this eventuality is not yet part of my plans.” Although he heard less and less with his right ear, and leaned on a silver-handled e to ceal his faltering steps, he -tio wear a linen suit, with a gold watch across his vest, as smartly as he had in his younger years.
His Pasteur beard, the color of mother-of-pearl, and his hair, the same color, carefully bed bad with a part in the middle, were faithful expressions of his character. He pensated as much as he could for an increas-ingly disturbing erosion of memory by scribbling hurried notes on scraps of paper that ended in fusion in each of his pockets, as did the instruments, the bottles of medie, and all the other things jumbled together in his crowded medical bag. He was not only the city’s oldest and most illustrious physi, he was also its most fastidious man. Still, his too obvious display of learning and the dis-ingenuous manner in which he used the power of his name had won him less affe than he deserved.
His instrus to the ior and the intern were precise and rapid. There was no need for an autopsy; the odor in the house was suffit proof that the cause of death had been the ide vapors activated iray by some photographic acid, and Jeremiah de Saint-Amour koo much about those matters for it to have been an act. When the ior showed some hesitatio him off with the kind of remark that was typical of his manner: “Don’t fet that I am the one who signs the death certificate.”
The young doctor was disappointed: he had never had the opportunity to study the effects of gold ide on a cadaver. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been surprised that he had not seen him at the Medical School, but he uood in an instant from the young man’s easy blush and Andean at that he robably a ret arrival to the city. He said: “There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the e of these days.” And only after he said it did he realize that among the tless suicides he could remember, this was the first with ide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something ged ione of his voice.
“And when you do find one, observe with care,” he said to the intern: “they almost always have crystals in their heart.”
Then he spoke to the ior as he would have to a subordinate. He ordered him to circumvent all the legal procedures so that the burial could take place that same afternoon and with the greatest discretion. He said: “I will speak to the Mayor later.” He khat Jeremiah de Saint-Amour lived in primitive austerity and that he earned much more with his art than he needed, so that in one of the drawers in the house there was bound to be more than enough money for 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 he thought the news would in no way ihem. He said: “If it is necessary, I will speak to the Gover-nor.” The ior, a serious and humble civil servant, khat the Doctor’s sense of civic duty exasperated even his closest friends, and he was surprised at the ease with which he skipped al formalities in order to expedite the burial. The only thing he was not willing to do eak to the Archbishop so that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour could be buried in holy ground. The ior, asto his own impertitempted to make excuses for him.
“I uood this man was a saint,” he said.
“Something even rarer,” said Dr. Urbino. “An atheistic saint. But those are matters fod to decide.”
In the distance, oher side of the ial city, the bells of the Cathedral were ringing fh Mass. Dr. Urbino put on his half-moon glasses with the gold rims and sulted the wat its , slim, elegant, with the cover that ope a touch: he was about to miss Pe Mass.
In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a mariwilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first union, the bunny e, the happy birthday. Year after year, during plative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual c over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future city, gov-erned and corrupted by those unknown children, where not even the ashes of his glory would remain.
On the desk, o a jar that held several old sea dog’s pipes, was the chessboard with an unfinished game. Despite his haste and his somber mood, Dr. Urbino could not resist the temptation to study it. He k was the previous night’s game, for Jeremiah de Saint-Amour played at dusk every day of the week with at least three dif-ferent oppos, but he always finished every game and then placed the board and chessmen in their box and stored the box in a desk drawer. The Doctor knew he played with the white pieces and that this time it was evident he was going to be defeated without mer four moves. “If there had been a crime, this would be a good 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, aced to fighting to the last drop of blood, had left the final battle of his life unfinished.
At six that m, as he was making his last rounds, the night wat had seee o the street door: e in without knog and inform the police. A short while later the ior arrived with the intern, and the two of them had searched the house for some evidehat might tradict the unmistakable breath of bitter almonds. But in the brief mihe Doctor o study the unfinished game, the ior discovered an envelope among the papers on the desk, addressed to Dr. Juvenal Urbino and sealed with so much sealing wax that it had to be ripped to pieces to get the letter out. The Doctor opehe black curtaihe window to have more light, gave a quick gla the eleves covered on both sides by a diligent handwriting, and when he had read the first paragraph he khat he would miss Pe union. He read with agitated breath, turning ba several pages to find the thread he had lost, and when he finished he seemed to return from very far away and very long ago. His despondency was obvious despite his effort to trol it: his lips were as blue as the corpse and he could not stop the trembling of his fingers as he refolded the letter and placed it in his vest pocket. Then he remembered the ior and the young doctor, and he smiled at them through the mists of grief.
“Nothing in particular,” he said. “His final instrus.”
It was a half-truth, but they thought it plete because he ordered them to lift a loose tile from the floor, where they found a worn at book that taihe bination to the strongbox. There was not as much money as they expected, but it was more than enough for the funeral expenses and to meet other minor obligations. Then Dr. Urbino realized that he could not get to the Cathedral be-fore 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 uands.”
So he chose to spend a few minutes more and attend to all the details, although he could hardly bear his intense longing to share the secrets of the letter with his wife. He promised to notify the numerous Caribbean refugees who lived iy in case they wao pay their last respects to the man who had ducted himself as if he were the most respectable of them all, the most active and the most radical, even after it had bee all too clear that he had been overwhelmed by the burden of disillusion. He would also inform his chess partners, whed from distinguished professional men to nameless laborers, as well as other, less intimate acquaintances who might perhaps wish to attend the funeral. Before he read the posthumous letter he 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 had repe the last moment. The burial would be at five, which was the most suitable hour during the hottest months. If they needed him, from noon on he would be at the try house of Dr. Lácides Olivella, his beloved disciple, who was celebrating his silver anniversary in the profession with a formal luhat day.
Ohe stormy years of his early struggles were over, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had followed a set routine and achieved a respectability and prestige that had no equal in the province. He arose at the crack of dawn, when he began to take his secret medies: potassium bromide to raise his spirits, salicylates for the ache in his bones when it rained, ergosterol drops for vertigo, belladonna for sound sleep. He took something every hour, always i, because in his long life as a doctor and teacher he had always opposed prescribing palliatives for old age: it was easier for him to bear other people’s pains than his own. In his pocket he always carried a little pad of camphor that he inhaled deeply when no one was watg to calm his fear of so many medi-es mixed together.
He would spend an hour in his study preparing for the class in general ical medie that he taught at the Medical School every m, Monday through Saturday, at eight o’clock, until the day before his death. He was also an avid reader of the latest books that his bookseller in Paris mailed to him, or the ones from Bara that his local bookseller ordered for him, although he did not follow Span-ish literature as closely as French. In any case, he never read them in the m, but only for an hour after his siesta and at night before he went to sleep. When he was finished iudy he did fifteen minutes of respiratory exercises in front of the open window ihroom, always breathing toward the side where the roosters were crowing, which was where the air was new.
Thehed, arranged his beard and waxed his mustache in an atmosphere saturated with genuine cologne from Farina Gegenüber, and dressed in white linen, with a vest and a soft hat and cordovan boots. At eighty-one years of age he preserved the same easygoing manner aive spirit that he had on his return from Paris soon after the great cholera epidemid except for the metallic color, his carefully bed hair with the ter part was the same as it had been in his youth. He breakfasted en famille but followed his own personal regimen of an infusion of wormwood blossoms for his stomad a head of garlic that he peeled and ate a clove at a time, chewing eae carefully with bread, to preve failure. After class it was rare for him not to have an appoi related to his civiitiatives, or his Catholic service, or his artistid social innovations.
He almost always ate lunch at home and had a ten-minute siesta oerra the patio, hearing in his sleep the songs of the servant girls uhe leaves of the mango trees, the cries of vendors oreet, the uproar of oil and motors from the bay whose exhaust fumes fluttered through the house on hot afternoons like an angel o putrefa. Then he read his new books for an hour, above all novels and works of history, and gave lessons in Frend singing to the tame parrot who had been a local attra for years. At four o’clock, after drinking a large glass of lemoh ice, he left to call on his patients. In spite of his age he would not see patients in his offid tio care for them in their homes as he always had, sihe city 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 goldenuts, but when this was no longer practical he ged it for a Victoria and a single horse, and he -tio use it, with a certain disdain for fashion, when carriages had already begun to disappear from the world and the only ones left iy were fiving rides to tourists and carrying wreaths at funerals. Although he refused to retire, he was aware that he was called in only for hopeless cases, but he sidered this a form of spe-cialization too. He could tell what was wrong with a patient just by looking at him, he grew more and more distrustful of patent medi-es, and he viewed with alarm the vulgarization of surgery.
He would say: “The scalpel is the greatest proof of the failure of medi-e.” He thought that, in a strict sense, all medication oison and that seventy pert of on foods hastened death. “In any case,” he would say in class, “the little medie we know is known only by a few doctors.” From youthful enthusiasm he had moved to a posi-tion that he himself defined as fatalistic humanism: “Each man is master of his owh, and all that we do wheime es is to help him die without fear of pain.” But despite these extreme ideas, which were already part of local medical folklore, his former pupils tio sult him even after they were established in the profession, for they reized in him what was called in those days a ical eye. In a, he was always an expensive and ex-clusive doctor, and his patients were trated in the aral homes in the District of the Viceroys.
His daily schedule was so methodical that his wife knew where to send him a message if an emergency arose in the course of the afternoon. When he was a young man he would stop in the Parish Café before ing home, and this was where he perfected his chess game with his father-in-law’s ies and some Caribbean refugees. But he had not returo the Parish Café sihe dawn of the new tury, and he had attempted taional tours uhe sponsorship of the Social Club. It was at this time that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour arrived, his knees already dead, not yet a photog-rapher of childre ihan three months everyone who knew how to move a bishop across a chessboard knew who he was, because no one had been able to defeat him in a game. For Dr. Juvenal Urbino it was a miraeeting, at the very moment when chess had bee an unquerable passion for him and he no longer had many oppos who could satisfy it.
Thanks to him, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour could bee what he was among us. Dr. Urbino made himself his unditional protector, his guarantor ihing, without even taking the trouble to learn who he was or what he did or what inglorious Avars he had e from in his crippled, broken state. He eventually lent him the moo set up his photography studio, and from the time he took his first picture of a child startled by the magnesium flash, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour paid back every last penny with religiularity.
It was all for chess. At first they played after supper at seven o’clock, with a reasonable handicap for Jeremiah de Saint-Amour because of his notable superiority, but the handicap was reduced until at last they played as equals. Later, when Don Galileo Date opehe first outdoor ema, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was one of his most dependable ers, and the games of chess were limited to the nights when a new film was not being shown. By then he and the Doctor had bee such good friends that they would go to see the films together, but never with the Doctor’s wife, in part because she did not have the patieo follow the plicated plot lines, and in part because it always seemed to her, through sheer intuition, that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was not a good panion for anyone.
His Sundays were different. He would attend High Mass at the Cathedral and theurn home to rest and read oerra the patio. He seldom visited a patient on a holy day of obligation unless it was of extreme urgency, and for many years he had not accepted a social e that was not obligatory. On this Pente-cost, in a rare ce, two extraordinary events had occurred: the death of a friend and the silver anniversary of an emi pupil. Yet instead of going straight home as he had intended after certifying the death of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, he allowed himself to be car-ried along by curiosity.
As soon as he was in his carriage, he again sulted the posthu-mous letter and told the an to take him to an obscure location in the old slave quarter. That decision was sn to his usual habits that the an wao make certain there was no mis-take. No, no mistake: the address was clear and the man who had written it had more than enough reason to know it very well. Then Dr. Urbiuro the first page of the letter and plunged once again into the flood of unsavory revelations that might have ged his life, even at his age, if he could have vinced 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, but there was no ce of rain before noon. In his effort to find a shorter route, the an braved the rough cobblestones of the ial city and had to stop often to keep the horse from being frightened by the rowdiness of the religious societies and fraternities ing back from the Pe liturgy. The streets were full of paper garlands, music, flowers, and girls with colored parasols and muslin ruffles who watched the celebration from their balies. In the Plaza of the Cathedral, where the statue of The Liberator was almost hidden among the Afri palm trees and the globes of the reetlights, traffic was gested because Mass had ended, and not a seat was empty in the venerable and noisy Parish Café.
Dr. Urbino’s was the only horse-drawn carriage; it was distinguishable from the handful left iy because the pateher roof was always kept polished, and it had fittings of brohat would not be corroded by salt, and wheels and poles painted red with gilt trimming like gala nights at the Vienna Opera. Furthermore, while the most demanding families were satisfied if their drivers had a shirt, he still required his an to wear livery of faded velvet and a top hat like a circus ringmaster’s, which, more than an ana, was thought to show a lack of pas-sion in the dog days of the Caribbean summer.
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 of the old slave quarter. The an had to make many turns and stop to ask dires several times in order to find the house. As they passed by the marshes, Dr. Urbinheir oppressive weight, their ominous sileheir suffog gases, whi so many insomniac dawns had risen to his bedroom, blending with the fragrance of jas-mine from the patio, and which he felt pass by him like a wind out of yesterday that had nothing to do with his life. But that pestilence so frequently idealized by nostalgia became an unbearable reality when the carriage began to lurch through the quagmire of the streets where buzzards fought over the slaughterhouse offal as it was swept along by the reg tide.
Uhe city of the Viceroys where the houses were made of masonry, here they were built of weathered boards and zinc roofs, and most of them rested on pilings to protect them from the flooding of the open sewers that had been ied from the Spaniards. Everything looked wretched and desolate, but out of the sordid taverns came the thunder of riotous music, the godless drunken celebration of Pe by the poor. By the time they found the house, gangs ed children were chasing the carriage and ridig the theatrical finery of the an, who had to drive them away with his whip. Dr. Urbino, prepared for a fidential visit, realized too late that there was no innoce more dangerous than the innoce of age.
The exterior of the unnumbered house was in no way distinguish-able from its less fortunate neighbors, except for the window with lace curtains and an imposing front door taken from some old church. The an pouhe door knocker, and only when he had made certain that it was 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 han forty, she was still a haughty mulatta with cruel golden eyes and hair tight to her skull like a helmet of steel wool. Dr. Urbino did nnize her, although he had seen her several times in the gloom of the chess games in the photographer’s studio, and he had once written her a prescription for tertian fever. He held out his hand and she took it between hers, less iing than to help him into the house. The parlor had the climate and invisible murmur of a forest glade and was crammed with furni-ture and exquisite objects, ea its natural place. Dr. Urbino re-called without bitterness an antiquarian’s shop, No. 26 rue Montmartre in Paris, on an autumn Monday in the last tury. The woman sat down across from him and spoke in ated Spanish.
“This is your house, Doctor,” she said. “I did not expect you so soon.”
Dr. Urbi betrayed. He stared at her openly, at her intense m, at the dignity of her grief, and then he uood that this was a useless visit because she knew more than he did about every-thing stated and explained in Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s posthumous letter. This was true. She had been with him until a very few hours before his death, as she had been with him for half his life, with a devotion and submissive tenderhat bore too close a resem-blao love, and without anyone knowing anything about it in this sleepy provincial capital where even state secrets were on knowledge.
They had met in a valest home in Port-au-Prince, where she had been born and where he had spent his early years as a fugitive, and she had followed him here a year later for a brief visit, although both of them knew without agreeing to anything that she had e to stay forever. She ed and straightehe laboratory once a week, but not even the most evil-minded neighbors fused appearah reality because they, like everyone else, 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 believed his friend had a woman if he himself had not revealed it iter. In a, it was difficult for him to prehend that two free adults without a past and living on the fringes of a closed society’s prejudices had chosen the hazards of illicit love. She explained: “It was his wish.” Moreover, a destine life shared with a man who was never -pletely hers, and in which they oftehe sudden explosion of happiness, did not seem to her a dition to be despised. On the trary: life had showhat perhaps it was exemplary.
On the previous night they had goo the ema, eae sepa-rately, and had sat apart as they had do least twice a month sihe Italian immigrant, Don Galileo Date, had installed his open-air theater in the ruins of a seveh-tury vent. They saw All Quiet on the 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 the lab-oratory, she found him brooding and nostalgid thought it was because of the brutal ses of wounded men dying in the mud. In an attempt to distract him, she invited him to play chess and he accepted to please her, but he played iively, with the white pieces, of course, until he discovered before she did that he was going to be defeated in four moves and surrendered without honor. Then the Doctor realized that she had been his oppo in the final game, and not General Jerónimote, as he had supposed. He murmured in astonishment:
“It was masterful!”
She insisted that she deserved no praise, but rather that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, already lost in the mists of death, had moved his pieces without love. Wheopped the game at about a quarter past eleven, for the musi the publices had ended, he asked her to leave him. He wao write a letter to Dr. Juvenal Urbino, whom he sidered the most honorable man he had ever known, and his soul’s friend, as he liked to say, despite the fact that the only affinity betweewo was their addi to chess uood as a dialogue of reason and not as a sce. And then she khat Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had e to the end of his suffering and 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 ehe suffering as lovingly as she 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, and said with such simplicity. He looked straight at her and tried with all his seo fix her in his memory 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 bea Haiti where the two of them lay naked after love, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had sighed: “I will never be old.” She interpreted this as a heroic determination tle without quarter against the ravages of time, but he was more specific: he had made the irrevocable decision to take his own life when he was seventy years old.
He had turned seventy, in fact, owenty-third of January of that year, and then he had set the date as the night before Pe, the most important holiday in a city secrated to the cult of the Holy Spirit. There was not a siail of the previous night that she had not known about ahead of time, and they spoke of it often, suffering together the irreparable rush of days that her of them could stop now. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour loved life with a senseless passion, he loved the sea and love, he loved his dog and her, and as the date approached he had gradually succumbed 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 wao 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 Woodrow Wilson is ing with me.” He asked her to tie him to the leg of the cot while he wrote, and she used a false knot so that he could free himself. That had been her only act of disloyalty, and it was justified by her desire to remem-ber the master in the wintry eyes of his dog. But Dr. Urbino inter-rupted her to say that the dog had not freed himself. She said: “Then it was because he did not want to.” And she was glad, because she preferred to evoke her dead lover as he had asked her to the night before, wheopped writing the letter he had already begun and looked at her for the last 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, to smoke one cigarette after another and give him time to finish what she knew was a long and difficult letter, and a little before three o’clock, when the dogs began to howl, she put the water for coffee oove, dressed in full m, and cut the first rose of dawn iio. Dr. Urbino already realized how -pletely he would repudiate the memory of that irredeemable woman, ahought he knew why: only a person without principles could be so plaisant trief.
And for the remainder of the visit she gave him even more justi-fication. She would not go to the funeral, for that is what she had promised her lover, although Dr. Urbino thought he had read just the opposite in one of the paragraphs of the letter. She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory, she would not bury herself alive ihese four walls to sew her shroud, as native ere expected to do. She inteo sell Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s house and all its tents, which, acc to the letter, now beloo her, and she would go on living as she always had, without plaining, in this 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.” It was not a gratuitous description. For the city, his city, stood unging on the edge of time: the same burning dry city of his noal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowers rusted and salt corroded, where nothing had happened for four turies except a slow aging among withered laurels and putrefying ss. In winter suddeating downpours flooded the latrines and turhe streets into siing bogs.
In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best-protected ers of the imagination by mad winds that took the roofs off the houses and carried away children through the air. On Satur-days the poor mulattoes, along with all their domestiimals and kit utensils, tumultuously abaheir hovels of cardboard and tin on the edges of the ss and in jubilant assault took over the rocky beaches of the ial district. Until a few years ago, some of the older oill bore the royal slave brand that had been burned onto their chests with flaming irons. During the weekend they danced without mercy, drank themselves blind on home-brewed alade wild love among the icaco plants, and on Sunday at midnight they broke up their own party with bloody free-for-alls. During the rest of the week the same impetuous mob swarmed into the plazas and alleys of the old neighborhoods with their stores of everything that could be bought and sold, and they ihe 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 pre-cipitated the ditions of honorable de 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 served so well in surprise attacks and bueer landings, weeds hung from the balies and opened cracks in the whitewashed walls of even the best-kept mansions, and the only signs of life at two o’clo the afternoon were languid piano exercises played in the dim light of siesta. Indoors, in the cool bedrooms saturated with in-se, women protected themselves from the sun as if it were a shameful iion, and even at early Mass they hid their faces in their mantillas. Their love affairs were slow and difficult and were often disturbed by sinister omens, and life seemed intermi nightfall, at the oppressive moment of transition, a storm of ivo-rous mosquitoes rose out of the ss, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirred the certainty of death in the depths of one’s soul.
And so the very life of the ial city, which the young Juvenal Urbino teo idealize in his Parisian melancholy, was an illusion of memory. In the eighteenth tury, the erce of the city had been the most prosperous in the Caribbean, owing in the main to the thankless privilege of its being the largest Afri slave market in the Americas. It was also the perma residence of the Viceroys of the New Kingdom of Granada, who preferred to govern here on the shores of the world’s o rather than in the distant freezing capital under a turies-old drizzle that disturbed their sense of reality. Sev-eral times a year, fleets of galleons carrying the treasures of Potosí, Quito, and Veracruz gathered in the bay, and the city lived its years of glory. On Friday, June 8, 1708, at four o’clo the afternoon, the galleon San José set sail for Cádiz with a cargo of precious stones aals valued at five hundred billion pesos in the currency of the day; it was sunk by an English squadron at the entrao the port, and two louries later it had not yet been salvaged. That trea-sure lying in its bed of coral, and the corpse of the ander floating sideways 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 in aime. Oory, spacious and cool, it had a portico with Dorins oside terrace, whianded a view of the still, miasmic water and the debris from sunken ships in the bay. From the entrance door to the kit, the floor was covered with blad white checkerboard tiles, a fact often attrib-uted to Dr. Urbino’s ruling passion without taking into at that this was a weakness on to the Catalonian craftsmen who built this district for the nouveaux riches at the beginning of the tury. The large drawing room had the very high ceilings found through-out the rest of the house, and six full-length windows fag the street, and it was separated from the dining room by an enormous, elaborate glass door covered with brang vines and bunches of grapes and maidens seduced by the pipes of fauns in a bronze grove.
The furnishings in the reception rooms, including the pendulum clock that stood like a liviinel in the drawing room, were all inal English pieces from the late eenth tury, and the lamps that hung from the walls were all teardrop crystal, and there were Sèvres vases and bowls everywhere and little alabaster statues of pagan idylls. But that European coherence vanished in the rest of the house, where wicker armchairs were jumbled together with Viennese rockers aher footstools made by local craftsmen. Splendid hammocks from San Jato, with multicolored fringe along the sides and the owner’s name embroidered in Gothic letters with silk thread, hung in the bedrooms along with the beds. o the dining room, the space that had inally been designed fala suppers was used as a small musi for intimate certs when famous performers came to the city. In order to enhahe silehe tiles had been covered with the Turkish rugs purchased at the World’s Fair in Paris; a ret model of a victrola stood o a stand that held records arranged with care, and in a er, draped with a Manila shawl, was the piano that Dr. Urbino had not played for many years. Throughout the house one could detect the good sense and care of a woman whose feet were planted firmly on the ground.
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 tufted leather easy chairs, he had lihe walls and even the windows with shelves be-hind glass doors, and had arranged in an almost demented order the three thousand volumes bound iical calfskin with his initials in gold on the spines. Uhe other rooms, which were at the mercy of noise and foul winds from the port, the library always en-joyed the tranquillity and fragrance of an abbey. Born and raised in the Caribbean superstition that one opened doors and windows to sum-mon a ess that in fact did , Dr. Urbino and his wife at first felt their hearts oppressed by enclosure.
But in the end they were -vinced of the merits of the Roman strategy against heat, which -sists of closing houses during the lethargy of August in order to keep out the burning air from the street, and then opening them up -pletely to the night breezes. And from that time on theirs was the coolest house uhe furious La Manga sun, and it was a delight to take a siesta in the darkened bedrooms and to sit on the porti the afternoon to watch the heavy, ash-gray freighters from New Orleans pass by, and at dusk to see the wooden paddles of the riverboats with their shining lights, purifying the stagnant garbage heap of the bay with the wake of their music. It was also the best protected from December through March, when the northern winds tore away roofs and spent the night cirg like hungry wolves looking for a crack where they could slip in. No one ever thought that a marriage rooted in such foundations could have any reason not to be happy.
In any case, Dr. Urbino was not wheurned home that m before ten o’clock, shaken by the two visits that not only had obliged him to miss Pe Mass but also threateo ge him at an age whehing had seemed plete. He wanted a short siesta until it was time for Dr. Lácides Olivella’s gala lun, but he found the servants in an uproar as they attempted to catch the parrot, who had flown to the highest branches of the mango tree wheook him from his cage to clip his wings. He was a de-plumed, maniacal parrot who did not speak when asked to but only when it was least expected, but then he did so with a clarity and rationality that were unong human beings. He had been tutored by Dr. Urbino himself, which afforded him privileges that no one else in the family ever had, not even the childrehey were young.
He had lived in the house for over twenty years, and no one knew how many years he had been alive before then. Every afternoon after his siesta, Dr. Urbino sat with him oerra the patio, the coolest spot in the house, and he had summohe most diligent reserves of his passion for pedagogy until the parrot learo speak French like an academi. Then, just for love of the labor, he taught him the Latin apao the Mass aed passages from the Gospel acc to St. Matthew, aried without success to inculcate in him a w notion of the four arithmetis.
On one of his last trips to Europe he brought back the first phonograph with a trumpet speaker, along with many of the latest popular records as well as those by his favorite classical posers. Day after day, over and ain for several months, he played the songs of Yvette Guilbert and Aristide Bruant, who had charmed France during the last tury, until the parrot learhem 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 master-ful imitation of the servant girls when they heard him singing in French. The fame of his aplishments was so widespread that on occasion distinguished visitors who had traveled from the interior on the riverboats would ask permission to see him, and one of the many English tourists, who in those days sailed the banana boats from New Orleans, would have bought him at any price.
But the day of his greatest glory was when the President of the Republiarco Fidel Suárez, with his ente of et ministers, visited the house in order to firm the truth of his reputation. They arrived at about three o’clo the afternoon, suffog iop hats and frock coats they had worn during three days of official visits uhe burning August sky, and they had to leave as curious as when they arrived, because for two desperate hours the parrot refused to say a single syllable, ign the pleas and threats and public humiliation of Dr. Urbino, who had insisted on that foolhardy invitatioe the sage warnings of his wife.
The fact that the parrot could maintain his privileges after that historic act of defiance was the ultimate proof of his sacred rights. No other animal ermitted in the house, with the exception of the land turtle who had reappeared i after three or four years, when everyohought he was lost forever. He, however, was not sidered a living being but rather a mineral good luck charm whose location one could never be certain of. Dr. Urbino was relut to fess his hatred of animals, which he disguised with all kinds of stifiventions and philosophical pretexts that -vinced many, but not his wife. He said that people who loved them to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportun-ists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyahat rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned be-cause they had been plicit ihree denials of Christ.
Oher hand, Fermina Daza, his wife, who at that time was seventy-two years old and had already lost the doe’s gait of her younger days, was an irrational idolater of tropical flowers and do-mestiimals, and early in her marriage she had taken advantage of the y of love to keep many more of them in the house than good sense would allow. The first were three Dalmatians named after Roman emperors, who fought for the favors of a female who did honor to her name of Messalina, for it took her loo give birth to nine pups than to ceive aen. Then there were Abyssinian cats with the profiles of eagles and the manners of pharaohs, cross-eyed Siamese and palace Persians with e eyes, who walked through the rooms like shadowy phantoms and shattered the night with the howling of their witches’ sabbaths of love. For several years an Amazonian monkey, ed by his waist to the mango tree iio, elicited a certain passion because he had the sorrowful face of Archbishop Obdulio y Rey, the same did eyes, the same elo-quent hands; that, however, was not the reason Fermina got rid of him, but because he had the bad habit of pleasuring himself in honor of the ladies.
There were all kinds of Guatemalan birds in cages along the passageways, and premonitory curlews, and s herons with long yellow legs, and a young stag who came in through the windows to eat the anthurium in the flowerpots. Shortly before the last civil war, when there was talk for the first time of a possible visit by the Pope, they had brought a bird of paradise from Guatemala, but it took loo arrive than to return to its homeland when it was learhat the annou of the pontifical visit had been a lie spread by the govero alarm the spiratorial Liberals.
Aime, on the smugglers’ ships from Cura?ao, they bought a wicker cage with six perfumed crows identical to the ohat Fermina Daza had kept as a girl in her father’s house and that she still wao have as a married woman. But no one could bear the tinual flapping of their wings that filled the house with the reek of funeral wreaths. They alsht in an anada, four meters long, whose insomniater’s sighs disturbed the darkness in the bedrooms although it aplished what they had wanted, which was thten with its mortal breath the bats and salamanders and tless species of harm-ful is that ihe house during the rainy months. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, so occupied at that time with his professional obli-gations and so absorbed in his civid cultural enterprises, was tent to assume that in the midst of so many abominable creatures his wife was not only the most beautiful woman in the Caribbean but also the happiest. But one rainy afternoon, at the end of an exhausting day, he entered a disaster in the house that brought him to his senses. Out of the drawing room, and for as far as the eye could see, a stream of dead animals floated in a marsh of blood. The servant girls had climbed on the chairs, not knowing what to do, and they had not yet recovered from the panic of the slaughter.
One of the German mastiffs, maddened by a sudden attack of rabies, had torn to pieces every animal of any kind that crossed its path, until the gardener from the house door found the ce to face him and hack him to pieces with his machete. No one knew how many creatures he had bitten or inated with his green slaverings, and so Dr. Urbino ordered the survivors killed and their bodies burned in an isolated field, and he requested the serviisericordia Hospital for a thh disiing of the house. The only animal to escape, because nobody remembered him, was the giant lucky charm tortoise.
Fermina Daza admitted for the first time that her husband was right in a domestic matter, and for a long while afterward she was careful to say no more about animals. She soled herself with color illustrations from Linnaeus’s Natural History, which she framed and hung on the drawing room walls, and perhaps she would eventually have lost all hope of ever seeing an animal in the house again if it had not been for the thieves who, early one m, forced a bathroom window and made off with the silver service that had been in the family for five geions. Dr. Urbino put double padlocks on the window frames, secured the doors on the ih iron crossbars, placed his most valuable possessions irongbox, aedly acquired the wartime habit of sleeping with a revolver under his pillow. But he opposed the purchase of a fierce dog, vaated or unvaated, running loose or ed up, even if thieves were to steal everything he owned.
“Nothing that does not speak will e into this house,” he said.
He said it to put ao the specious arguments of his wife, who was once agaiermio buy a dog, and he never imagihat his hasty generalization was to cost him his life. Fermina Daza, whose straightforward character had beore subtle with the years, seized on her husband’s casual words, and months after the robbery she returo the ships from Cura?ao and bought a royal Paramaribo parrot, who knew only the blasphemies of sailors but said them in a voian that he was well worth the extravagant price of twelve tavos.
He was a fine parrot, lighter than he seemed, with a yellow head and a black tohe only way to distinguish him from mangrove parrots who did not learn to speak even with turpentine supposi-tories. Dr. Urbino, a good loser, bowed to the iy of his wife and was even surprised at how amused he was by the advahe parrot made when he was excited by the servant girls. On rainy afternoons, his tongue loosened by the pleasure of having his feathers drenched, he uttered phrases from aime, which he could not have learned in the house and which led oo think that he was much older than he appeared.
The Doctor’s final doubts collapsed one night whehieves tried to get in again through a skylight iid the parrhtehem with a mastiff’s barking that could not have been more realistic if it had been real, and with shouts of stop thief stop thief stop thief, two saving graces he had not learned in the house. It was then that Dr. Urbino took charge of him and ordered the stru of a perder the mango tree with a tainer for water, another for ripe bananas, and a trapeze for acrobatics. From December through March, when the nights were cold and the north winds made living outdoors unbearable, he was taken io sleep in the bedrooms in a cage covered by a bla, although Dr. Urbino suspected that his ic swollen glands might be a threat to the healthy respiration of humans. For many years they clipped his wihers a him wander wherever he chose to walk with his hulking old horseman’s gait.
But one day he began to do acrobatic tricks on the beams i and fell into the pot of stew with a sailor’s shout of every man for himself, and with such good luck that the ao scoop him out with the ladle, scalded and deplumed but still alive. From then on he was kept in the cage even during the daytime, in defiance of the vulgar belief that caged parrots fet everything they have learned, a out only in the four o’clock ess for his classes with Dr. Urbino oerra the patio. No one realized in time that his wings were too long, and they were about to clip them that m when he 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 of other maids in the neighborhood, had used all kinds of tricks to lure him down, but he insisted on staying where he was, laughing madly as he shouted long live the Liberal Party, long live the Liberal Party damn it, a reckless cry that had any a carefree drunk his life. Dr. Urbino could barely see him amid the leaves, aried to cajole him in Spanish and Frend even in Latin, and the parrot responded in the same languages and with the same emphasis and timbre in his voice, but he did not move from his treetop. vihat no one was going to make him move voluntarily, Dr. Urbino had them send for the fire de-partment, his most ret 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, ahods so disorderly that they sometimes caused more damage than the fires. But for the past year, thanks to a fund- anized by the Society for Public Improve-ment, of which Juvenal Urbino was honorary president, there was a corps of professional firemen and a water truck with a siren and a bell and two high-pressure hoses.
They were so popular that classes were suspended when the church bells were heard sounding the alarm, so that children could watch them fight the fire. At first that was all they did. But Dr. Urbino told the municipal authorities that in Hamburg he had seen firemen revive a boy found frozen in a basement after a three-day snowstorm. He had also seen them in a Neapolitan alley l a corpse in his coffin from a tenth-floor baly because the stairway in the building had so many twists and turns that the family could not get him down to the street. That was how the local firemen learo reher emergency ser-vices, such as f locks or killing poisonous snakes, and the Medical School offered them a special course in first aid for minor acts.
So it was in no eculiar to ask them to please get a distinguished parrot, with all the qualities of a gentleman, out of a tree. Dr. Urbino said: “Tell them it’s for me.” And he went to his bedroom to dress for the gala lun. The truth was that at that moment, devastated by the letter 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 pearls with six long, uneven loops, and high-heeled satin shoes that she wore only on very solemn occasions, for by now she was too old for such abuses. Her stylish attire did not seem appropriate for a venerable grandmother, but it suited her figure--long-boned and still slender a, her resilient hands without a single age spot, her steel-blue hair bobbed on a slant at her cheek. Her clear almond eyes and her inborn haughtiness were all that were left to her from her wedding portrait, but what she had been deprived of by age she more than made up for in character and diligence. She felt very well: the time of iron corsets, bound waists, and bustles that exaggerated buttocks was reg into the past. Liberated bodies, breathing freely, showed themselves for what they were. Even at the age of seventy-two.
Dr. Urbino found her sitting at her dressing table uhe slow blades of the electri, putting on her bell-shaped hat decorated with felt violets. The bedroom was large and bright, with an English bed protected by mosquito ing embroidered in pink, and two windows open to the trees iio, where one could hear the clamor of cicadas, giddy with premonitions of rain. Ever siheir return from their honeymoon, Fermina Daza had chosen her hus-band’s clothes acc to the weather and the occasion, and laid them out for him on a chair the night before so they would be ready for him when he came out of the bathroom.
She could not remember when she had also begun to help him dress, and finally to dress him, and she was aware that at first she had do for love, but for the past five years or so she had been obliged to do it regardless of the reason because he could not dress himself. They had just celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, and they were not capable of living for even an instant without the other, or without thinking about the other, and that capacity diminished as their age increased. her could have said if their mutual dependence was based on love or venience, but they had never asked the question with their hands on their hearts because both had alreferred not to know the answer. Little by little she had been disc the uainty of her husband’s step, his mood ges, the gaps in his memory, his ret habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify 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 deception rovidential 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 it was easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes than trivial everyday miseries. But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom es to us when it o longer do any good. For years Fermina Daza had endured her hus-band’s jubilant dawns with a bitter heart. She g to the last threads of sleep in order to avoid fag the fatality of another m full of sinister premonitions, while he awoke with the innoce of a newborn: eaew day was one more day he had won.
She heard him awake with the roosters, and his first sign of life was a cough without rhyme or reason that seemed inteo awakeoo. She heard him grumble, just to annoy her, while he felt around for the slippers that were supposed to be o the bed. She heard him make his way to the bathroom, groping in the dark. After an hour in his study, when she had fallen asleep again, he would e back to dress, still without turning on the light. Once, during a party game, he had been asked how he defined himself, and he had said: “I am a man who dresses in the dark.” She heard him, knowing full well that not one of those noises was indispensable, and that he made them on purpose although he pretended not to, just as she was awake and pretended not to be. His motives were clear: he never needed her awake and lucid as much as he did during those fumbling moments.
There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dand her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was. Dr. Urbino knew she was waiting for his slightest sound, that she even would be grateful for it, just so she could blame someone for waki five o’clo the m, so that on the few occasions when he had to feel around in the dark because he could not find his slippers in their ary place, she would suddenly say in a sleepy voice: “You left them ihroom last night.” Then right after that, her voice fully awake with rage, she would curse: “The worst mis-fortune in this house is that nobody lets you sleep.”
Then she would roll over in bed and turn on the light without the least mercy for herself, tent with her first victory of the day. The truth was they both played a game, mythical and perverse, but for all that f: it was one of the many dangerous pleasures of domestic love. But one of those trivial games almost ehe first thirty years of their life together, because one day there was no soap ihroom.
It began with routine simplicity. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had re-turo the bedroom, in the days wheill bathed without help, and begun to dress without turning on the light. As usual she was in her warm fetal state, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow, that arm from a sacred dance above her head. But she was only half asleep, as usual, and he k. After a prolonged sound of starched linen in the darkness, Dr. Urbino said to himself:
“I’ve been bathing for almost a week without any soap.”
Then, fully awake, she remembered, and tossed and turned in fury with the world because in fact she had fotten to replace the soap ihroom. She had noticed its absehree days earlier when she was already uhe shower, and she had plao replace it afterward, but then she fot until the day, and ohird day the same thing happened again. The truth was that a week had not gone by, as he said to make her feel muilty, but three unpardonable days, and her a being found out in a mistake maddened her. As always, she defended herself by attag.
“Well I’ve bathed every day,” she shouted, beside herself with rage, “and there’s always been soap.”
Although he knew her battle tactics by heart, this time he could not abide them. On some professional pretext or other he went to live ierns’ quarters at Misericordia Hospital, returning home only to ge his clothes before making his evening house calls. She headed for the kit when she heard him e in, pretending that she had something to do, and stayed there until she heard his carriage ireet. For the hree months, each time they tried to resolve the flict they only inflamed their feelings even more. He was not ready to e back as long as she refused to admit there had been no soap ihroom, and she was not prepared to have him batil he reized that he had sciously lied to torment her.
The i, of course, gave them the opportunity to evoke many other trivial quarrels from many other dim and turbulent dawns. Reses stirred up other reses, reopened old scars, turhem into fresh wounds, and both were dismayed at the desolating proof that in so many years of jugal battling they had dotle more than nurture their rancor. At last he proposed that they both submit to an open fession, with the Archbishop himself if necessary, so that God could decide ond for all whether or not there had been soap in the soap dish ihroom. Thee all her self-trol, she lost her temper with a historic cry:
“To hell with the Archbishop!”
The impropriety shook the very foundations of the city, gave rise to slahat were not easy to disprove, and reserved in popular tradition as if it were a line from aa: “To hell with the Archbishop!” Realizing she had gooo far, she anticipated her husband’s predictable response and threateo move back to her father’s old house, which still beloo her although it had beeed out for public offices, and live there by herself. And it was not an idle threat: she really did want to leave and did not care about the sdal, and her husband realized this in time. He did not have the ce to defy his own prejudices, and he capitulated. Not in the sehat he admitted there had been soap ihroom, but insofar as he tio live in the same house with her, although they slept in separate rooms, and he did not say a word to her. They ate in silence, sparring with so much skill that they sent each other messages across the table through the children, and the children never realized that they were not speaking to each other.
Sihe study had no bathroom, the arra solved the problem of noise in the m, because he came in to bathe after preparing his class and made a sincere effort not to awaken his wife. They would often arrive at the bathroom at the same time, and theook turns brushing their teeth befoing to sleep. After four months had gone by, he lay down on their double bed one night to read until she came out of the bathroom, as he often did, and he fell asleep. She lay down beside him in a rather careless way so that he would wake up and leave. And in fact he did stir, but instead of getting up he turned out the light aled himself on the pillow. She shook him by the shoulder to remind him that he was supposed to go to the study, but it felt so fortable to be ba his great-grandparents’ featherbed that he preferred to capitulate.
“Let me stay here,” he said. “There was soap.”
When they recalled this episode, now they had rouhe er of old age, her could believe the astonishing truth that this had been the most serious argument in fifty years of living together, and the only ohat had made them both want to abandon their re-sponsibilities and begin a new life. Evehey were old and placid they were careful about bringing it up, for the barely healed wounds could begin to bleed again as if they had been inflicted only yesterday.
He was the first man that Fermina Daza heard urinate. She heard him on their wedding night, while she lay prostrate with seasiess iateroom on the ship that was carrying them to France, and the sound of his stallion’s stream seemed so potent, so replete with authority, that it increased her terror of the devastation to e. That memory ofteuro her as the years weakehe stream, for she never could resign herself to his wetting the rim of the toilet bowl each time he used it. Dr. Urbino tried to vince her, with arguments readily uandable to anyone who wished to uand them, that the mishap was not repeated every day through carelessness on his part, as she insisted, but because anic reasons: as a young man his stream was so defined and so direct that when he was at school he won tests for marksmanship in filling bottles, but with the ravages of age it was not only decreasing, it was also being oblique and scattered, and had at last turned into a .fan-tastic fountain, impossible to trol despite his many efforts to direct it.
He would say: “The toilet must have been ied by someone who knew nothing about men.” He tributed to domestic peace with a quotidian act that was more humiliating than humble: he wiped the rim of the bowl with toilet paper each time he used it. She knew, but never said anything as long as the ammoniac fumes were not to ihroom, and then she proclaimed, as if she had uncovered a crime: “This stinks like a rabbit hutch.” On the eve of old age this physical difficulty inspired Dr. Urbino with the ultimate solution: he urinated sitting down, as she did, which kept the bowl and him in a state of grace.
By this time he could do very little for himself, and the possibility of a fatal slip iub put him on his guard against the shower. The house was modern and did not have the pewter tub with lion’s-paw feet on in the mansions of the old city. He had had it removed fienic reasons: the bathtub was another piece of abominable junk ied by Europeans who bathed only on the last Friday of the month, and then in the same water made filthy by the very dirt they tried to remove from their bodies. So he had ordered an outsized washtub made of solid lignum vitae, in which Fermina Daza bathed her husband just as if he were a newborn child. Waters boiled with mallow leaves and e skins were mixed into the bath that lasted over an hour, and the effe him was so sedative that he sometimes fell asleep in the perfumed infusion. After bathing him, Fermina Daza helped him to dress: she sprialcum powder between his legs, she smoothed cocoa butter on his rashes, she helped him put on his undershorts with as much love as if they had been a diaper, and tinued dressing him, item by item, from his socks to the knot in his tie with the topaz pin. Their jugal dawns grew calm because he had returo the childhood his children had taken away from him. And she, in turn, at last accepted the domestic schedule because the years were passing for her too; she slept less and less, and by the time she was seventy she was awake before her husband.
Oecost Sunday, when he lifted the blao look at Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s body, Dr. Urbino experiehe revela-tion of something that had been denied him until then in his most lucid peregrinations as a physi and a believer. After so many years of familiarity with death, after battling it for so long, after so much turning it i and upside down, it was as if he had dared to look death in the face for the first time, and it had looked back at him. It was not the fear of death. No: that fear had been inside him for many years, it had lived with him, it had been another shadow cast over his own shadow ever sihe night he awoke, shaken by a bad dream, and realized that death was not only a perma probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality. What he had seen that day, however, was the physical presence of something that until that moment had been only an imagined certainty. He was very glad that the instrument used by Divine Providence for that overwhelming revelation had been Jere-miah de Saint-Amour, whom he had always sidered a saint un-aware of his own state of grace. But wheter revealed his true identity, his sinister past, his inceivable powers of deception, he felt that something definitive and irrevocable had occurred in his life.
heless Fermina Daza did not allow him to i her with his somber mood. He tried, of course, while she helped him put his legs into his trousers and worked the long row of buttons on his shirt. But he failed because Fermina Daza was not easy to impress, least of all by the death of a man she did not care for. All she knew about him was that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was a cripple on crutches whom she had never seen, that he had escaped the firing squad during one of many insurres on one of many islands iilles, that he had bee a photographer of children out of y and had bee the most successful one in the province, and that he had won a game of chess from someone she remembered as Torremolinos but iy was named Capablanca.
“But he was nothing more than a fugitive from ne, -demo life impriso for an atrocious crime,” said Dr. Urbino. “Imagine, he had eveen human flesh.”
He handed her the letter whose secrets he wao carry with him to the grave, but she put the folded sheets in her dressing table without reading them and locked the drawer with a key. She was aced to her husband’s unfathomable capacity for astonishment, his exaggerated opinions that became more inprehensible as the years went by, his narrowness of mind that was out of tuh his public image. But this time he had outdone himself. She had supposed that her husband held Jeremiah de Saint-Amour ieem not for what he had once been but for what he began to be after he arrived here with only his exile’s rucksack, and she could not uand why he was so distressed by the disclosure of his true identity at this late date. She did not prehend why he thought it an abomination that he had had a woman i, sihat was an atavistic of a certain kind of man, himself included, yes even he in a moment of ingratitude, and besides, it seemed to her a heartbreaking proof of love that she had helped him carry out his decision to die. She said: “If you also decided to do that for reasons as serious as his, my duty would be to do what she did.” Once again Dr. Urbino found himself face to face with the simple inprehension that had exas-perated him for a half a tury.
“You don’t uand anything,” he said. “What infuriates me is not what he was or what he did, but the deception he practiced on all of us for so many years.”
His eyes began to fill with easy tears, but she pretended not to see.
“He did the right thing,” she replied. “If he had told the truth, not you or that poor woman or anybody in this town would have loved him as much as they did.”
She threaded his watch through the buttonhole in his vest. She put the finishing touches to the knot in his tie and pinned on his topaz tiepin. Then she dried his eyes and wiped his teary beard with the handkerchief sprinkled with florida water and put that in his breast pocket, its ers spread open like a magnolia. The eleven strokes of the pendulum clock sounded in the depths of the house.
“Hurry,” she said, taking him by the arm. “We’ll be late.”
Aminta Dechamps, Dr. Lácides Olivella’s wife, and her seven equally diligent daughters, had arranged every detail so that the silver anniversary lun would be the social event of the year. The family home, in the very ter of the historic district, was the old mint, denatured by a Florentine architect who came through here like an ill wind blowing renovation and verted maeenth-tury relito Veian basilicas. It had six bedrooms and twe, well-ventilated dining aion rooms, but that was not enough space for the guests from the city, not to mention the very select few from out of town.
The patio was like an abbey cloister, with a stone fountain murmuring in the ter and pots of heliotrope that perfumed the house at dusk, but the space among the arcades was ie for so many grand family names. So it was decided to hold the lun in their try house that was ten minutes away by automobile along the King’s Highway and, had over an acre of patio, and enormous Indian laurels, and local water lilies in a gently flowing river. The men from Don Sancho’s Inn, uhe supervision of Se?ora de Olivella, hung colored vas awnings in the sunny areas and raised a platform uhe laurels with tables for one huwenty-two guests, with a liablecloth on each of them and bouquets of the day’s fresh roses for the table of honor. They also built a wooden dais for a woodwind band whose program was limited to tradances and national waltzes, and for a string quartet from the School of Fis, which was Se?ora de Olivella’s surprise for her husband’s venerable teacher, who would preside over the lun. Although the date did not correspoly to the anniversary of his graduation, they chose Pe Sunday in order to magnify the significe of the celebration.
The preparations had begun three months earlier, for fear that something indispensable would be left undone for lack of time. They brought in live chis from aga de Oro, famous all along the coast not only for their size and flavor but because in ial times they had scratched for food in alluvial deposits and little s of pure gold were found in their gizzards. Se?ora de Olivella herself, apanied by some of her daughters and her domestic staff, boarded the luxury o liners aed the best from everywhere to honor her husband’s achievements. She had anticipated everything except that the celebration would take pla a Sunday in June in a year when the rains were late. She realized the dahat very m when she went to High Mass and was horrified by the humidity and saw that the sky was heavy and low and that one could not see to the o’s horizoe these ominous signs, the Director of the Astronomical Observatory, whom she met at Mass, reminded her that in all the troubled history of the city, even during the crudest winters, it had never rained oecost. Still, when the clocks struck twelve and many of the guests were already having aif outdoors, a single crash of thunder made the earth tremble, and a turbulent wind from the sea knocked over the tables and blew down the opies, and the sky collapsed in a catastrophic downpour.
In the chaos of the storm Dr. Juvenal Urbino, along with the other late guests whom he had met on the road, had great difficulty reag the house, and like them he wao move from the carriage to the house by jumping from stoo stone across the muddy patio, but at last he had to accept the humiliation of being carried by Don Sanen under a yellow vas opy. They did the best they could to set up the separate tables again ihe house--even in the bedrooms--and the guests made no effort to disguise their surly, shipwrecked mood. It was as hot as a ship’s boiler room, for the windows had to be closed to keep out the wind-driven rain. Iio each place at the tables had been marked with a card bearing the name of the guest, one side reserved for men and the other for women, acc to .
But ihe house the name cards were in fusion and people sat where they could in an obligatory promiscuity that defied our social super-stitions on at least this one occasion. In the midst of the cataclysm Aminta de Olivella seemed to be everywhere at once, her hair soaki and her splendid dress spattered with mud, but bearing up uhe misfortuh the invincible smile, learned from her husband, that would give no quarter to adversity. With the help of her daughters, who were cut from the same cloth, she did everything possible to keep the places at the table of honor in order, with Dr. Juvenal Urbino in the ter and Archbishop Obdulio y Rey on his right.
Fermina Daza sat o her husband, as she always did, for fear he would fall asleep during the meal or spill soup on his lapel. Across from him sat Dr. Lácides Olivella, a well-preserved man of about fifty with an effeminate air, whose festive spirit seemed in no way related to his accurate diaghe rest of the table was occupied by provincial and municipal officials and last year’s beauty queen, whom the Governor escorted to the seat o him. Although it was not ary for invitations to request special attire, least of all for a lun in the try, the women wore evening gorecious jewels and most of the men were dressed in dinner jackets with black ties, and some even wore frock coats. Only the most sophisticated, Dr. Urbino among them, wore their ordinary clothes. At each place was a menu printed in French, with golden viges.
Se?ora de Olivella, horror-struck by the devastati, went through the house pleading with the men to take off their jackets during the lun, but no one dared to be the first. The Arch-bishop eo Dr. Urbino that in a sehis was a histori: there, together for the first time at the same table, their wounds healed and their anger dissipated, sat the two opposing sides in the civil wars that had bloodied the try ever sindepen-dehis thought accorded with the enthusiasm of the Liberals, especially the younger ones, who had succeeded iing a presi-dent from their party after forty-five years of servative he-gemony. Dr. Urbino did not agree: in his opinion a Liberal president was exactly the same as a servative president, but not as well dressed. But he did not want to tradict the Archbishop, although he would have liked to point out to him that guests were at that lun not because of what they thought but because of the merits of their lineage, which was something that had always stood over and above the hazards of politid the horrors of war. From this point of view, in faot a single person was missing.
The downpour ended as suddenly as it had begun, and the sun began to shine in a cloudless sky, but the storm had been so violent that several trees were uprooted and the overflowing stream had turhe patio into a s. The greatest disaster had occurred i. Wood fires had been built outdoors on bricks behind the house, and the cooks barely had time to rescue their pots from the rain. They lost precious time reanizing the flooded kit and improvising new fires in the back gallery. But by one o’clock the crisis had been resolved and only the dessert was missing: the Sisters of St. Clare were in charge of that, and they had promised to send it before eleven. It was feared that the ditch along the King’s Highway had flooded, as it did even in less severe winters, and in that case it would be at least two hours before the dessert arrived. As soon as the weather cleared they opehe windows, and the house was cooled by air that had been purified by the sulfurous storm. Then the band was told to play its program of waltzes oerrace of the portico, and that only heightehe fusion because everyone had to shout to be heard over the banging of copper pots ihe house. Tired of waiting, smiling even on the verge of tears, Aminta de Olivella ordered luo be served.
The group from the School of Fis began their cert in the formal silence achieved for the opening bars of Mozart’s “La Chasse.” Despite the voices that grew louder and more fused and the intrusions of Don Sancho’s black servants, who could barely squeeze past the tables with their steaming serving dishes, Dr. Urbino mao keep a el open to the musitil the program was over. His powers of tration had decreased so much with the passing years that he had to write down each chess move in order to remember what he had planned. Yet he could still engage in serious versation and follow a cert at the same time, although he never reached the masterful extremes of a German orchestra -ductor, a great friend of his during his time in Austria, who read the score of Don Giovanni while listening to Tannh?user.
He thought that the sed pie the program, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” layed with facile theatricality. While he straio listen through the clatter of covered dishes, he stared at a blushing boy who o him iing. He had seen him somewhere, no doubt about that, but he could not remember where. This often happeo him, above all with people’s names, even those he knew well, or with a melody from other times, and it caused him such dreadful anguish that one night he would have preferred to die rather than e until dawn. He was on the verge of reag that state now when a charitable flash illuminated his memory: the boy had been one of his students last year. He was surprised to see him there, in the kingdom of the elect, but Dr. Olivella reminded him that he was the son of the Minister of Health and reparing a thesis in forensic medie. Dr. Juvenal Urbino greeted him with a joyful wave of his hand and the young doctor stood up and responded with a bow. But not then, not ever, did he realize that this was the intern who had been with him that m in the house of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour.
forted by yet another victory over old age, he surreo the diaphanous and fluid lyricism of the final pie the program, which he could not identify. Later the young cellist, who had just returned from Fraold him it was a quartet for strings by Gabriel Fauré, whom Dr. Urbino had not even heard of, although he was always very alert to the latest trends in Europe. Fermina Daza, who was keeping an eye on him as she always did, but most of all when she saw him being introspective in public, stopped eating and put her earthly hand on his. She said: “Don’t think about it anymore.”
Dr. Urbino smiled at her from the far shore of ecstasy, and it was then that he began to think again about what she had feared. He remembered Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, o that hour in his coffin, in his bogus military uniform with his fake decorations, uhe acg eyes of the children in the portraits. He turo the Archbishop to tell him about the suicide, but he had already heard the news. There had been a good deal of talk after High Mass, and he had even received a request from General Jerónimote, on behalf of the Caribbean refugees, that he be buried in holy ground. He said: “The request itself, it seemed to me, showed a lack of respect.” Then, in a more humaone, he asked if anyone khe reason for the suicide. Dr. Urbino answered: “Gerontophobia,” the proper word although he thought he had just ied it. Dr. Olivella, atteo the guests who were sitting closest to him, stopped listening to them for a moment to take part in his teacher’s versation. He said: “It is a pity to still find a suicide that is not for love.” Dr. Urbino was not surprised tnize his own thoughts in those of his favorite disciple.
“And worse yet,” he said, “with gold ide.”
When he said that, he once agai passion prevailing over the bitterness caused by the letter, for which he thanked not his wife but rather a miracle of the music. Then he spoke to the Archbishop of the lay saint he had known in their long twilights of chess, he spoke of the dedication of his art to the happiness of children, his rare erudition in all things of this world, his Spartan habits, and he himself was surprised by the purity of soul with which Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had separated himself ond for all from his past. Then he spoke to the Mayor about the advantages of purchasing his files of photographic plates in order to preserve the images of a geion who might never again be happy outside their portraits and in whose hands lay the future of the city.
The Archbishop was sdalized that a militant and educated Catholic would dare to think that a suicide was saintly, but he agreed with the plan to create an archive of the ives. The Mayor wao know from whom they were to be purchased. Dr. Urbino’s tongue burned with the live coal of the secret. “I will take care of it.” And he felt redeemed by his own loyalty to the woman he had repudiated five hours earlier. Fermina Daza noticed it and in a low voice made him promise that he would attend the funeral. Relieved, he said that of course he would, that went without saying.
The speeches were brief and simple. The woodwind band began a popular tuhat had not been announced on the program, and the guests strolled along the terraces, waiting for the men from Don Sancho’s Inn to finish drying the patio in case anyo ined to dahe only guests who stayed in the drawing room were those at the table of honor, who were celebrating the fact that Dr. Urbino had drunk half a glass of brandy in one swallow in a final toast. No one recalled that he had already dohe same thing with a glass of grand cru wine as apao a very special dish, but his heart had dema of him that afternoon, and his self-indulgence was well repaid: once again, after so many long years, he felt like singing. And he would have, no doubt, on the urging of the young cellist who offered to apany him, if one of those new automobiles had not suddenly driven across the mudhole of the patio, splashing the musis and rousing the ducks in the barnyards with the quag of its horn.
It stopped in front of the portid Dr. Marco Aurelio Urbino Daza and his wife emerged, laughing for all they were worth and carrying a tray covered with lace cloths in each hand. Other trays just like them were on the jump seats and even on the floor o the chauffeur. It was the belated dessert. When the applause and the shouted cordial jokes had ended, Dr. Urbino Daza explained in all serioushat before the storm broke, the Sisters of St. Clare had asked him to please bring the dessert, but he had left the King’s Highway because someone said that his parents’ house was on fire. Dr. Juvenal Urbino became upset before his son could finish the story, but his wife reminded him in time that he himself had called for the firemen to rescue the parrot. Aminta de Olivella was radiant as she decided to serve the dessert oerraces even though they had already had their coffee. But Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his wife left without tasting it, for there was barely enough time for him to have his sacred siesta before the funeral.
And he did have it, although his sleep was brief aless be-cause he discovered wheurned home that the firemen had caused almost as much damage as a fire. In their efforts thten the parrot they had stripped a tree with the pressure hoses, and a misdirected jet of water through the windows of the master bedroom had caused irreparable damage to the furniture and to the portraits of unknown forebears hanging on the walls. Thinking that there really was a fire, the neighbors had hurried over when they heard the bell on the fire truck, and if the disturbance was no worse, it was because the schools were closed on Sundays. When they realized they could not reach the parrot even with their extension ladders, the firemen began to chop at the branches with machetes, and only the opportune arrival of Dr. Urbino Daza prevehem from mutilating the tree all the way to the trunk.
They left, saying they would return after five o’clock if they received permission to prune, and on their way out they muddied the interior terrad the drawing room and ripped Fermina Daza’s favorite Turkish rug. Needless disasters, all of them, because the general impression was that the parrot had taken advantage of the chaos to escape through neighb patios. And in fact Dr. Urbino looked for him in the foliage, but there was no response in any language, not even to whistles and songs, so he gave him up for lost ao sleep when it was almost three o’clock. But first he ehe immediate pleasure of smelling a secret garden in his urihat had been puri-fied by lukewarm asparagus.
He was awakened by sadness. Not the sadness he had felt that m wheood before the corpse of his friend, but the in-visible cloud that would saturate his soul after his siesta and which he interpreted as diviification that he was living his final afternoons. Until the age of fifty he had not been scious of the size a and dition of his ans. Little by little, as he lay with his eyes closed after his daily siesta, he had begun to feel them, one by one, inside his body, feel the shape of his insomniac heart, his mysterious liver, his hermeticreas, and he had slowly discovered that even the oldest people were youhan he was and that he had bee the only survivor of his geion’s legendary group portraits.
When he became aware of his first bouts of fetfulness, he had recourse to a tactic he had heard about from one of his teachers at the Medical School: “The man who has no memory makes o of paper.” But this was a short-lived illusion, for he had reached the stage where he would fet what the written reminders in his pockets meant, search the entire house for the eye-glasses he was wearing, turn the key again after log the doors, and lose the sense of what he was reading because he fot the premise of the argument or the relationships among the characters. But what disturbed him most was his lack of fiden his own power of reason: little by little, as in aable shipwreck, he felt himself losing his good judgment.
With no stific basis except his own experience, Dr. Juvenal Urbino khat most fatal diseases had their own specific odor, but that none ecific as old age. He detected it in the cadavers slit open from head to toe on the disseg table, he even reized it in patients who hid their age with the greatest success, he smelled it in the perspiration on his own clothing and in the unguarded breath-ing of his sleeping wife. If he had not been what he was--in essen old-style Christian--perhaps he would have agreed with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour that old age was an i state that had to be ended before it was too late. The only solation, even for someone like him who had been a good man in bed, was sexual peace: the slow, merciful extin of his venereal appetite. At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slehreads that could break painlessly with a simple ge of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.
Fermina Daza had been busy straightening the bedroom that had beeroyed by the firemen, and a little before four she sent for her husband’s daily glass of lemoh chipped id reminded him that he should dress for the funeral. That afternoon Dr. Urbino had two books by his hand: Man, the Unknown by Alexis Carrel and The Story of San Michele by Axel Muhe pages of the sed book were still uncut, and he asked Digna Pardo, the cook, t him the marble paper cutter he had left in the bedroom. But when it was brought to him he was already reading Man, the Un-known at the place he had marked with an envelope: there were only a few pages left till the end. He read slowly, making his way through the meanderings of a slight headache that he attributed to the half glass of brandy at the final toast. When he paused in his reading he sipped the lemonade or took his time chewing on a piece of ice. He was wearing his socks, and his shirt without its starched collar; his elastic suspenders with the green stripes hung down from his waist. The mere idea of having to ge for the funeral irritated him. Sooopped reading, placed one book on top of the other, and began to rock very slowly in the wicker rog chair, -templating with regret the banana plants in the mire of the patio, the stripped mango, the flying ants that came after the rain, the ephemeral splendor of another afternoon that would never return. He had fotten that he ever owned a parrot from Paramaribo whom he loved as if he were a human being, when suddenly he heard him say: “Royal parrot.” His voice sounded close by, almost o him, and then he saw him in the lowest branch of the mango tree.
“You sdrel!” he shouted.
The parrot answered in aical voice:
“You’re even more of a sdrel, Doctor.”
He tio talk to him, keeping him in view while he put on his boots with great care so as not thten him and pulled his suspenders up over his arms a down to the patio, which was still full of mud, testing the ground with his stick so that he would not trip ohree steps of the terrace. The parrot did not move, and perched so close to the ground that Dr. Urbino held out his walking stick for him so that he could sit on the silver handle, as was his , but the parrot sidestepped and jumped to the branch, a little higher up but easier to reach sihe house ladder had been leaning against it even before the arrival of the firemen.
Dr. Urbino calculated the height and thought that if he climbed tws he would be able to catch him. He stepped onto the first, singing a disarming, friendly song to distract the attention of the churlish bird, who repeated the words without the music but sidled still farther out on the branch. He climbed to the sed rung without difficulty, holding on to the ladder with both hands, and the parrot began to repeat the entire song without moving from the spot. He climbed to the third rung and then the fourth, for he had mis-calculated the height of the branch, and then he grasped the ladder with his left hand and tried to seize the parrot with his right. Digna Pardo, the old servant, who was ing to remind him that he would be late for the funeral, saw the back of a man standing on the ladder, and she would not have believed that he was who he was if it had not been for the green stripes on the elastic suspenders.
“Santísimo Sacramento!” she shrieked. “You’ll kill yourself!”
Dr. Urbino caught the parrot around the neck with a triumphant sigh: ?a y est. But he released him immediately because the ladder slipped from under his feet and for an instant he was suspended in air and then he realized that he had died without union, without time to repent of anything or to say goodbye to a seven minutes after four oecost Sunday.
Fermina Daza was i tasting the soup for supper when she heard Digna Pardo’s horrified shriek and the shouting of the servants and then of the entire neighborhood. She dropped the tasting spoon and tried her best to rue the invincible weight of her age, screaming like a madwoman without knowi what had happened uhe mango leaves, and her heart jumped inside her ribs when she saw her man lying on his ba the mud, dead to this life but still resistih’s final blow for one last minute so that she would have time to e to him. He reized her despite the uproar, through his tears of uable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, mrief-stri, mrateful than she had ever seen them in half a tury of a shared life, and he mao say to her with his last breath:
“Only God knows how much I loved you.”
It was a memorable death, and not without reason. Soon after he had pleted his course of specialized studies in France, Dr. Juvenal Urbino became known in his try for the drastiew methods he used to ward off the last cholera epidemic suffered by the province. While he was still in Europe, the previous one had caused the death of a quarter of the urban population ihan three months; among the victims was his father, who was also a highly esteemed physi. With his immediate prestige and a sizable tribution from his own iance, he fouhe Medical Society, the first and for many years the only one in the Caribbean provinces, of which he was lifetime President.
He ahe stru of the first aqueduct, the first sewer system, and the covered public market that permitted filth to be ed out of Las ánimas Bay. He was also President of the Academy of the Language and the Academy of History. For his service to the Church, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem made him a Knight of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher, and the French Gover ferred upon him the rank of ander in the Legion of Honor. He gave active encement to every religious and civic society iy and had a special i iriotita, posed of politically disied iial citizens whed govers and local busio adopt progressive ideas that were to for the time. The most memorable of them was the testing of aatic balloon that on its inaugural flight carried a letter to San Juan de la aga, long before anyone had thought of airmail as a rational possibility. The ter for the Arts, which was also his idea, estab-lished the School of Fis in the same house where it is still located, and for many years he atron of the Poetic Festival in April.
Only he achieved what had seemed impossible for at least a tury: the restoration of the Dramatic Theater, which had been used as a henhouse and a breeding farm fame cocks since ial times. It was the culmination of a spectacular civic campaign that involved every sector of the city in a multitudinous mobilization that many thought worthy of a better cause. In a, the new Dramatic Theater was inaugurated when it still lacked seats hts, and the audience had t their own chairs and their own lighting for the intermissions. The same protocol held sway as at the great performances in Europe, and the ladies used the occasion to show off their long dresses and their fur coats in the dog days of the Caribbean summer, but it was also necessary to authorize the ad-mission of servants to carry the chairs and lamps and all the things to eat that were deemed necessary to survive the interminable pro-grams, one of which did not end until it was time for early Mass.
The season opened with a French opera pany whose y was a harp in the orchestra and whose unfettable glory was the impeccable void dramatic talent of a Turkish soprano who sang barefoot and ws set with precious stones ooes. After the first act the stage could barely be seen and the singers lost their voices because of the smoke from so many palm oil lamps, but the iclers of the city were very careful to delete these minor inveniences and to magnify the memorable events. Without a doubt it was Dr. Urbino’s most tagious initiative, for opera fever ied the most surprising elements iy and gave rise to a whole geion of Isoldes and Otellos and A?das and Siegfrieds. But it never reached the extremes Dr. Urbino had hoped for, which was to see Italianizers and Wagnerians fronting each other with sticks and es during the intermissions.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino never accepted the public positions that were offered to him with frequend without ditions, and he itiless critic of those physis who used their professional prestige to attain political office. Although he was always sidered a Liberal and was in the habit of voting for that party’s didates, it was more a question of tradition than vi, and he erhaps the last member of the great families who still k ireet when the Archbishop’s carriage drove by. He defined himself as a natural pacifist, a partisan of definitive reciliatioween Liberals and servatives for the good of the nation. But his publiduct was so autonomous that no group claimed him for its own: the Liberals sidered him a Gothic troglodyte, the servatives said he was almost a Mason, and the Masons repudiated him as a secret cleri the service of the Holy See. His less savage critics thought he was just an aristocrat enraptured by the delights of the Poetic Festival while the natioo death in an endless civil war.
Only two of his as did not seem to to this image. The first was his leaving the former palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, which had been the family mansion for over a tury, and moving to a new house in a neighborhood of nouveaux riches. The other was his marriage to a beauty from the lower classes, without name or fortune, whom the ladies with long last names ridiculed i until they were forced to admit that she outshohem all in distin and character. Dr. Urbino was always acutely aware of these and many other cracks in his public image, and no one was as scious as he of being the last to bear a family name on its way to extin. His childrewo undistinguished ends of a line. After fifty years, his son, Marco Aurelio, a doctor like himself and like all the family’s firstborn sons in every geion, had dohing worthy of note--he had not even produced a child. Dr. Urbino’s only daughter, Ofelia, was married to a solid bank employee from New Orleans, and had reached the climacteric with three daughters and no son. But although stemming the flow of his blood into the tide of history caused him pain, what worried Dr. Urbino most about dying was the solitary life Fermina Daza would lead without him.
In a, the tragedy not only caused an uproar among his own household but spread to the on people as well. They throhe streets in the hope of seeing something, even if it was only the brilliance of the legend. Three days of m were pro-claimed, flags were flown at half mast in public buildings, and the bells in all the churches tolled without pause until the crypt in the family mausoleum was sealed. A group from the School of Fis made a death mask that was to be used as the mold for a life-size bust, but the project was celed because no ohought the faithful rendering of his final terror was det. A renowned artist who happeo be stopping here on his way to Europe painted, with pathos-laden realism, a gigantivas in which Dr. Urbino was depicted on the ladder at the fatal moment wheretched out his hand to capture the parrot.
The only element that tradicted the raw truth of the story was that in the painting he was wearing not the collarless shirt and the suspenders with green stripes, but rather a bowler hat and black frock coat copied from a rotogravure made during the years of the cholera epidemic. So that everyone would have the ce to see it, the painting was exhibited for a few months after the tragedy in the vast gallery of The Golden Wire, a shop that sold imported merdise, and the ey filed by. Then it was displayed on the walls of all the publid private institutions that felt obliged to pay tribute to the memory of their illustrious patron, and at last it was hung, after a sed funeral, in the School of Fis, where it ulled down many years later by art students who bur in the Plaza of the Uy as a symbol of ahetid a time they despised.
From her first..
moment as a widow, it was obvious that Fermina Daza was not as helpless as her husband had feared. She was adamant in her determination not to allow the body to be used for any cause, and she remained so even after the honorific telegram from the President of the Republic it to lie in state for public viewing in the Assembly Chamber of the Provincial Gover. With the same serenity she opposed a vigil ihedral, which the Archbishop himself had requested, and she agreed to the body’s lying there only during the funeral Mass. Even after the mediation of her son, who was dumbfounded by so many different requests, Fermina Daza was firm in her rustiotion that the dead belong only to the family, and that the vigil would be kept at home, with mountain coffee and fritters and everyone free to weep for him in any way they chose. There would be no traditional nine-night wake: the doors were closed after the funeral and did not open again except for visits from intimate friends.
The house was uhe rule of death. Every object of value had been locked away with care for safekeeping, and on the bare walls there were only the outlines of the pictures that had been taken down. Chairs from the house, and those lent by the neighbors, were lined up against the walls from the drawing room to the bedrooms, and the empty spaces seemed immense and the voices had a ghostly resonance because the large pieces of furniture had been moved to one side, except for the cert piano which stood in its er under a white sheet. In the middle of the library, on his father’s desk, what had once been Juvenal Urbino de la Calle was laid out with no coffin, with his final terror petrified on his face, and with the black cape and military sword of the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher. At his side, in plete m, tremulous, hardly moving, but very mu trol of herself, Fermina Daza received dolences with no great display of feeling until eleven the following m, when she bade farewell to her husband from the portico, waving goodbye with a handkerchief.
It had not been easy for her tain her self-trol after she heard Digna Pardo’s shriek iio and found the old man of her life dying in the mud. Her first rea was one of hope, be-cause his eyes were open and shining with a radiant light she had never seen there before. She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him ain so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death. Her grief exploded into a blind rage against the world, even against herself, and that is what filled her with the trol and the ce to face her solitude alone. From that time on she had no peace, but she was careful about aure that might seem to betray her grief.
The only moment of pathos, although it was involuntary, occurred at eleven o’clock Sunday night when they brought in the episcopal coffin, still smelling of ship’s wax, with its copper handles and tufted silk lining. Dr. Urbino Daza ordered it closed without delay sihe air in the house was already rarefied with the heady fragrance of so many flowers in the swelteri, ahought he had seen the first purplish shadows on his father’s neck. An absent-minded voice was heard in the silence: “At that age you’re half decayed while you’re still alive.” Before they closed the coffin Fermina Daza took off her wedding ring and put it on her dead husband’s finger, and then she covered his hand with hers, as she always did when she caught him digressing in public.
“We will see each other very soon,” she said to him.
Florentino Ariza, unseen in the crowd of notable personages, felt a pierg pain in his side. Fermina Daza had nnized him in the fusion of the first dolences, although no one would be more ready to serve or more useful during the night’s urgent business. It was he who imposed order in the crowded kits so that there would be enough coffee. He found additional chairs when the neigh-bors’ proved insuffit, and he ordered the extra wreaths to be put iio when there was no more room in the house. He made certain there was enough brandy for Dr. Lácides Olivella’s guests, who had heard the bad news at the height of the silver anni-versary celebration and had rushed in to tihe party, sitting in a circle uhe mango tree.
He was the only one who knew how to react when the fugitive parrot appeared in the dining room at midnight with his head high and his wings spread, which caused a stupefied shudder to run through the house, for it seemed a sign of repentance. Florentino Ariza seized him by the neck before he had time to shout any of his witless stock phrases, and he carried him to the stable in a covered cage. He did everything this way, with so much discretion and such efficy that it did not even occur to ahat it might be an intrusion in other people’s affairs; on the trary, it seemed a priceless service when evil times had fallen on the house.
He was what he seemed: a useful and serious old man. His body was bony a, his skin dark and -shaven, his eyes avid behind round spectacles in silver frames, and he wore a romantic, old-fashioned mustache with waxed tips. He bed the last tufts of hair at his temples upward and plastered them with brilliao the middle of his shining skull as a solution to total baldness. His natural gallantry and languid manner were immediately charming, but they were also sidered suspect virtues in a firmed bachelor. He had spent a great deal of money, iy, and willpower to disguise the seventy-six years he had pleted in March, and he was vinced in the solitude of his soul that he had loved in silence for a much loime than anyone else in this world ever had.
The night of Dr. Urbino’s death, he was dressed just as he had been when he first heard the news, which was how he always dressed, even in the infernal heat of June: a dark suit with a vest, a silk bow tie and a celluloid collar, a felt hat, and a shiny black umbrella that he also used a walking stick. But when it began to grow light he left the vigil for two hours aurned as fresh as the rising sun, carefully shaven and fragrant with lotions from his dressing table. He had ged into a black frock coat of the kind worn only for funerals and the offices of Holy Week, a wing collar with an artist’s bow instead of a tie, and a bowler hat. He also carried his umbrella, not just out of habit but because he was certain that it would rain before noon, and he informed Dr. Urbino Daza of this in case the funeral could be held earlier.
They tried to do so, in fact, because Florentino Ariza beloo a shipping family and was himself President of the River pany of the Caribbean, which allowed oo suppose that he knew something about predig the weather. But they could not alter the arras in time with the civil and military authorities, the publid private corporations, the military band, the School of Fis orchestra, and the schools and religious fraternities, which were prepared for eleven o’clock, so the funeral that had been anticipated as a historic event turned into a rout be-cause of a devastating downpour. Very few people splashed through the mud to the family mausoleum, protected by a ial ceiba tree whose branches spread over the cemetery wall. On the previous afternoon, uhose same branches but in the se oher side of the wall reserved for suicides, the Caribbean refugees had buried Jeremiah de Saint-Amour with his dog beside him, as he had requested.
Florentino Ariza was one of the few who stayed until the funeral was over. He was soaked to the skin aurned home terrified that he would cateumonia after so many years of meticulous care and excessive precautions. He prepared hot lemoh a shot of brandy, drank it in bed with tirin tablets, and, ed in a wool bla, sweated by the bucketful until the proper equi-librium had beeablished in his body. Wheuro the wake he felt his vitality pletely restored. Fermina Daza had once again assumed and of the house, which was ed and ready to receive visitors, and oar in the library she had placed a portrait in pastels of her dead husband, with a black border around the frame. By eight o’clock there were as many people and as intense a heat as the night before, but after the rosary someone circulated the request that everyone leave early so that the widow could rest for the first time since Sunday afternoon.
Fermina Daza said goodbye to most of them at the altar, but she apahe last group of intimate friends to the street door so that she could lock it herself, as she had always done, as she repared to do with her final breath, when she saw Florentino Ariza, dressed in m and standing in the middle of the deserted drawing room. She leased, because for many years she had erased him from her life, and this was the first time she saw him clearly, purified by fetfulness. But before she could thank him for the visit, he placed his hat over his heart, tremulous and dignified, and the abscess that had sustained his life finally burst.
“Fermina,” he said, “I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a tury, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.”
Fermina Daza would have thought she was fag a madman if she had not had reason to believe that at that moment Florentino Ariza was inspired by the grace of the Holy Spirit. Her first impulse was to curse him for profaning the house when the body of her husband was still warm in the grave. But the dignity of her fury held her back. “Get out of here,” she said. “And don’t show your face again for the years of life that are left to you.” She opehe street door, which she had begun to close, and cluded:
“And I hope there are very few of them.”
When she heard his steps fade away in the deserted street she closed the door very slowly with the crossbar and the locks, and faced her destiny alone. Until that moment she had never been fully scious of the weight and size of the drama that she had provoked when she was not yet eighteen, and that would pursue her until her death. She wept for the first time sihe afternoon of the disaster, without witnesses, which was the only way she wept. She wept for the death of her husband, for her solitude and rage, and when she went into the empty bedroom she wept for herself because she had rarely slept alone in that bed sihe loss of her virginity. Every-thing that beloo her husband made her weep again: his tasseled slippers, his pajamas uhe pillow, the space of his absen the dressing table mirror, his own odor on her skin.
A vague thought made her shudder: “The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.” She did not want anyone’s help to get ready for bed, she did not want to eat anything before she went to sleep. Crushed by grief, she prayed to God to send her death that night while she slept, and with that hope she lay down, barefoot but fully dressed, and fell asleep on the spot. She slept without realizing it, but she knew i??n her sleep that she was still alive, and that she had half a bed to spare, that she was lying on her left side on the left-hand side of the bed as she always did, but that she missed the weight of the other body oher side. Thinking as she slept, she thought that she would never again be able to sleep this way, and she began to sob in her sleep, and she slept, sobbing, without ging position on her side of the bed, until long after the roosters crowed and she was awakened by the despised sun of the m without him. Only then did she realize that she had slept a long time without dying, sobbing in her sleep, and that while she slept, sobbing, she had thought more about Florentino Ariza than about her dead husband.
CHAPTER TWO
FLORENTINO ARIZA, oher hand, had not stopped thinking of her for a single moment since Fermina Daza had re-jected him out of hand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months, and four days ago. He did not have to keep a run-ning tally, drawing a line for each day on the walls of a cell, because not a day had passed that something did not happen to remind him of her. At the time of their separation he lived with his mother, Tránsito Ariza, in one half of a rented house oreet of Windows, where she had kept a notions shop ever since she was a young woman, and where she also unraveled shirts and s to sell as bandages for the men wounded in the war. He was her only child, born of an occasional alliah the well-known shipowner Don Pius V Loayza, one of the three brothers who had fouhe River pany of the Caribbean and thereby given new impetus to steam navigation along the Magdalena River.
Don Pius V Loayza died when his son was ten years old. Although he always took care of his expenses i, he never reized him as his son before the law, nor did he leave him with his future secure, so that Florentino Ariza used only his mother’s name even though his true parentage was always on knowledge. Florentino Ariza had to leave school after his father’s death, and he went to work as an apprenti the Postal Agency, where he was in charge of opening sacks, s the letters, and notifying the public that mail had arrived by flying the flag of its try ihe office door.
His good seracted the attention of the telegraph operator, the German émigré Lotario Thugut, who also played the an for important ceremonies ihedral and gave music lessons in the home. Lotario Thugut taught him the Morse code and the ws of the telegraph system, and after only a few lessons on the violin Florentino Ariza could play by ear like a professional. Whe Fermina Daza he was the most sought-after young man in his social circle, the one who knew how to dahe latest dances ae seal poetry by heart, and who was always willing to play violin sereo his friends’ sweethearts. He was very thin, with Indian hair plastered down with sted pomade and eyeglasses for myopia, which added to his forlorn appearance. Aside from his defective vision, he suffered from istipation, which forced him to take enemas throughout his life. He had one black suit, ied from his dead father, but Tránsito Ariza took such good care of it that every Sunday it looked new. Despite his air of weakness, his reserve, and his somber clothes, the girls in his circle held secret lot-teries to determine who would spend time with him, and he gambled on spending time with them until the day he met Fermina Daza and his innoce came to an end.
He had seen her for the first time oernoon when Lotario Thugut told him to deliver a telegram to someone named Lorenzo Daza, with no known place of residence. He found him in one 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 uhe arches of the passageway, where unopened moving cartons and bricklayer’s tools lay amoover lime and stacks of t bags, for the house was undergoing drastiovation. At the far end of the patio was a temporary office where a very fat man, whose curly sideburns grew into his mustache, sat behind a desk, taking his siesta. In fact his name was Lorenzo Daza, and he was not very well known iy because he had arrived less than two years before and was not a man with many friends.
He received the telegram as if it were the tinuation of an ominous dream. Florentino Ariza observed his livid eyes with a kind of official passion, he observed his uain firying to break the seal, the heartfelt fear that he had seen so many times in so many addressees who still could not think about telegrams without eg them with death. After reading it he regained his -posure. He sighed: “Good news.” And he handed Florentino Ariza the obligatory five reales, letting him know with a relieved smile that he would not have giveo him if the news had been bad. Then he said goodbye with a handshake, which was not the usual thing to do with a telegraph messenger, and the maid apanied him to the street door, more to keep an eye on him than to lead the way.
They retraced their steps along the arcaded passageway, but this time Florentino Ariza khat there was someone else in the house, be-cause the brightness iio was filled with the voice of a womaing a reading lesson. As he passed the sewing room, he saw through the window an older woman and a young girl sitting very close together on two chairs and following the reading in the book that the woman held open on her lap. It seemed a strange sight: the daughter teag the mother to read. His interpretation was incor-rely in part, because the woman was the aunt, not the mother of the child, although she had raised her as if she were her own. The lesson was not interrupted, but the girl raised her eyes to see who assing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a tury later.
All that Florentino Ariza could learn about Lorenzo Daza was that he had e from San Juan de la aga with his only daughter and his unmarried sister soon after the cholera epidemid those who saw him disembark had no doubt that he had e to stay since he brought everything necessary for a well-furnished house. His wife had died when the girl was very young. His sister, named Escolástica, was forty years old, and she was fulfilling a vow to wear the habit of St. Francis when she went out oreet and the pe’s rope around her waist when 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 no known employment and had paid hard cash for the Park of the Evangels house, whose restoration must have cost him at least twice the purchase price of two hundred gold pesos. His daughter was studying at the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, where for two turies young ladies of society had learhe art and teique of being diligent and submissive wives. During the ial period and the early years of the Republic, the school had accepted only those students with great family names. But the old families, ruined by Independence, had to submit to the realities of a ime, and the Academy opes doors to all applits who could pay the tuitiardless of the color of their blood, on the essential dition that they were legitimate daughters of Catholic marriages. In a, it was an expensive school, and the fact that Fermina Daza studied there was suffit indication of her family’s eic situation, if not of its social position. This news enced Florentino Ariza, si indicated to him that the beau-tiful adolest with the almond-shaped eyes was within reach of his dreams. But her father’s strict regime soon provided an irremediable difficulty. Uhe other students, who walked to school in groups or apanied by an older servant, Fermina Daza always walked with her spinster aunt, and her behavior indicated that she er-mitted no distra.
It was in this i way that Florentino Ariza began his secret life as a solitary hunter. From seven o’clo the m, he sat on the most hidden ben the little park, pretending to read a book of verse in the shade of the almond trees, until he saw the impossible maiden walk by in her blue-striped uniform, stogs that reached to her knees, mase laced oxfords, and a sihick braid with a bow at the end, which hung down her back to her waist. She walked with natural haughtiness, her head high, her eyes unmoving, her step rapid, her nose pointing straight ahead, her bag of books held against her chest with crossed arms, her doe’s gait making her seem immuo gravity. At her side, struggling to keep up with her, the aunt with the brown habit and rope of St. Francis did not allow him the slightest opportunity to approach. Florentino Ariza saw them pass bad forth four times a day and on Sundays when they came out of High Mass, and just seeing the girl was enough for him. Little by little he idealized her, endowing her with improbable virtues and imaginary ses, and after two weeks he thought of nothing else but her. So he decided to send Fermina Daza a simple note written on both sides of the paper in his exquisite notary’s hand. But he kept it in his pocket for several days, thinking about how to hand it to her, and while he thought he wrote several more pages befoing to bed, so that the inal letter was turning into a diary of pliments, inspired by books he had learned by heart because he read them so often during his vigils in the park.
Searg for a way to give her the letter, he tried to make the acquaintance of some of the other students at Presentation Academy, but they were too distant from his world. Besides, after much thought, it did not seem prudent to let anyone else know of his iions. Still, he mao find out that Fermina Daza had been io a Saturday dance a few days after their arrival iy, and her father had not allowed her to go, with a clusive: “Everything in due course.” By the time the letter tained more than sixty pages written on both sides, Florentino Ariza could no longer ehe weight of his secret, and he unburdened himself to his mother, the only person with whom he allowed himself any fideránsito Ariza was moved to tears by her son’s inno matters of love, and she tried to guide him with her own knowledge. She began by ving him not to deliver the lyrical sheaf of papers, si would only frighten the girl of his 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 i so that his declaration would not take her so much by surprise 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. Iy, on the day when Fermina Daza let her mind wander for an instant from the reading lesson she was giving her aunt and raised her eyes to see alking along the passageway, Florentino Ariza had impressed her because of his air of vulnerability. That night, dur-ing supper, her father had mentiohe telegram, which was how she found out why Florentino Ariza had e to the house and what he did for a living. This information increased her i, because for her, as for so many other people at that time, the iion of the telegraph had something magical about it. So that she reized Florentino Ariza the first time she saw him reading uhe trees itle 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 -vihat all these meetings could not be casual. She said: “He is not going to all this trouble for me.” For despite her austere dud peial habit, Aunt Escolástica had an instinct for life and a vocation for plicity, which were her greatest virtues, and the mere idea that a man was ied in her niece awakened an irresist-ible emotion in her. Fermina Daza, however, was still safe from even simple curiosity about love, and the only feeling that Florentino Ariza inspired in her was a certain pity, because it seemed to her that he was sick. But her aunt told her that one had to live a long time to know a man’s true nature, and she was vihat the one who sat in the park to watch them walk by could only be sick with love.
Aunt Escolástica was a refuge of uanding and affe for the only child of a loveless marriage. She had raised her sihe death of her mother, and in her relations with Lorenzo Daza she behaved more like an aplice than an aunt. So that the appear-ance of Florentino Ariza was for them another of the many intimate diversions they ied 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 gla the thin, timid, unimpressive sentinel who was almost always dressed in black despite the heat and who preteo read uhe trees. “There he is,” said the one who saw him first, suppressing her laughter, before he raised his eyes and saw the twid, aloof women of his life as 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, but one day he will if his iions are seri-ous, and then he will give you a letter.”
Foreseeing all kinds of adversities, she taught her to unicate in sign language, an indispensable strategy in forbidden love. These ued, almost childish antics caused an unfamiliar curiosity in Fermina Daza, but for several months it did not occur to her that it could go any further. She never knew when the diversion became a preoccupation and her blood frothed with the o see him, and one night she awoke in terror because she saw him looking at her from the darkness at the foot of her bed. Then she longed with all her soul for her aunt’s predis to e true, and in her prayers she begged God to give him the ce to hahe letter just so she could know what it said.
But her prayers were not answered. On the trary. This oc-curred at the time that Florentino Ariza made his fession to his mother, who dissuaded him from handing Fermina Daza his seventy pages of pliments, so that she tio wait for the rest of the year. Her preoccupation turned into despair as the December vaca-tion approached, and she asked herself over and ain how she would see him a him see her during the three months when she would not be walking to school. Her doubts were still unresolved on Christmas Eve, when she was shaken by the presehat he was in the crowd at Midnight Mass, looking at her, and this uneasiness flooded her heart.
She did not dare to turn her head, because she was sittiween her father and her aunt, and she had to trol 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 power forced her to look over her shoulder as she walked along the tral nave and then, a hand’s breadth from her eyes, she saw those icy eyes, that livid face, those lips petrified by the terror of love. Dismayed by her own audacity, she seized Aunt Escolástica’s arm so she would not fall, and her auhe icy perspiration on her hand through the lace mitt, and she forted her with an imperceptible sign of un-ditional plicity. In the din of fireworks and native drums, of colored lights in the doorways and the clamor of the crowd yearning for peace, Florentino Ariza wandered like a sleepwalker until dawn, watg the fiesta through his tears, dazed by the halluation 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 despair at the siesta hour and saw that she and her aunt were sitting uhe almond trees at the doorway. It en-air repetition of the se he had withe first afternoon in the sewing room: the girl giving a reading lesson to her aunt. But Fermina Daza seemed different without the school uniform, for she wore a narrow tunic with many folds that fell from her shoul-ders in the Greek style, and on her head she wore a garland of fresh gardenias that made her look like a ed goddess. Florentino Ariza sat in the park where he was sure he would be seen, and then he did not have recourse to his feigned reading but sat with the book open and his eyes fixed on the illusory maiden, who did not even respond with a charitable glance.
At first he thought that the lesson uhe almond trees was a casual innovation due, perhaps, to the interminable repairs on the house, but in the days that followed he came to uand that Fermina Daza would be there, within view, every afternoon at the same time during the three months of vacation, and that certainty filled him with new hope. He did not have the impression that he was seen, he could not detey sign of i or reje, but in her indifferehere was a distinct radiahat enced him to persevere. Then, oernoon toward the end of January, the aunt put her work on the chair a her niece alone in the doorway uhe shower of yellow leaves falling from the almond trees. En-ced by the impetuous thought that this was an arranged oppor-tunity, Florentino Ariza crossed the street and stopped in front of Fermina Daza, so close to her that he could detect the catches in her breathing and the floral st that he would identify with her for the rest of his life. He spoke with his head high and with a determination that would be his again only half a tury later, and for the same reason.
“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 a trol that had nothing to do with his languid manner. Without lifting her eyes from her embroidery, she replied: “I ot accept it without my father’s permission.” Floren-tino Ariza shuddered at the warmth of that voice, whose hushed tones he was not tet for the rest of his life. But he held himself steady and replied without hesitation: “Get it.” Then he sweetehe and with a plea: “It is a matter of life ah.” Fermina Daza did not look at him, she did not interrupt her embr, but her decision opehe door a crack, wide enough for the entire world to pass through.
“e back every afternoon,” she said to him, “and wait until I ge my seat.”
Florentino Ariza did not uand what she meant until the following Monday when, from the ben the little park, he saw the same se with one variation: when Aunt Escolástica went into the house, Fermina Daza stood up and then sat iher chair. Florentino Ariza, with a white camellia in his lapel, crossed the street and stood in front of her. He said: “This is the greatest moment of my life.” Fermina Daza did not raise her eyes to him, but she looked all around her and saw the deserted streets in the heat of the dry season and a swirl of dead leaves pulled along by the wind.
“Give it to me,” she said.
Florentino Ariza had inteo give her the seventy sheets he could recite from memory after reading them so often, but then he decided on a sober and explicit half page in which he promised only what was essential: his perfect fidelity and his everlasting love. He took the letter out of his inside jacket pocket and held it before the eyes of the troubled embroiderer, who had still not dared to look at him. She saw the blue envelope trembling in a harified with terror, and she raised the embroidery frame so he could put the letter on it, for she could not admit that she had noticed the trembling of his fingers. Then it happened: a bird shook himself among the leaves of the almond trees, and his droppings fell right on the embroidery. Fermina Daza moved the 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 the letter in his hand and said: “It’s good luck.” She thanked him with her first smile and almost snatched the letter away from him, folded it, and hid it in her bodice. Then he offered her the camellia he wore in his lapel. She refused: “It is a flower of promises.” Then, scious that their time was almost over, she again te in her posure.
“Now go,” she said, “and don’t e batil I tell you to.”
After Florentino Ariza saw her for the first time, his mother knew before he told her because he lost his void his appetite and spent the entire night tossing and turning in his bed. But when he began to wait for the ao his first letter, his anguish was plicated by diarrhea and green vomit, he became disoriented and suffered from sudden fainting spells, and his mother was terrified because his -dition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera. Florentino Ariza’s godfather, an old homeopathic practi-tioner who had been Tránsito Ariza’s fidant ever since her days as a secret mistress, was also alarmed at first by the patient’s dition, because he had the ulse, the hoarse breathing, and the pale perspiration of a dying man. But his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only crete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother, to clude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera. He pre-scribed infusions of linden blossoms to calm the nerves and suggested a ge of air so he could find solation in distance, but Floren-tino Ariza longed for just the opposite: to enjoy his martyrdom.
Tránsito Ariza was a freed quadroon whose instinct for happiness had been frustrated by poverty, and she took pleasure in her son’s suffering as if it were her own. She made him drink the infusions when he became delirious, and she smothered him in wool blao keep away the chills, but at the same time she enced him to enjoy his prostration.
“Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you ,” 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 bee negligent, and he was so distracted that he fused the flags that annouhe arrival of the mail, and one Wednesday he hoisted the German flag when the ship was from the Leyland pany and carried the mail from Liverpool, and on another day he flew the flag of the Uates when the ship was from the -pagnie Générale Transatlantique and carried the mail from Saint-Nazaire. These fusions of love caused such chaos in the distribu-tion of the mail and provoked so many protests from the public that if Florentino Ariza did not lose his job it was because Lotario Thugut kept him at the telegraph and took him to play the violin ihedral choir. They had a friendship difficult to uand because of the differen their ages, for they might have been grandfather and grandson, but they got along at work as well as they did iaverns around the port, which were frequented by everyo for the evening regardless of social class, from drunken beggars to youlemen in tuxedos who fled the gala parties at the Social Club to eat fried mullet and ut rice.
Lotario Thugut was in the habit of going there after the last shift at the telegraph office, and dawn often found him drinking Jamai pund playing the accordion with the crews of madmen from the Antillean sers. 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 he needed was a string of bells to look like St. Nicholas. At least once a week he ehe evening with a little night bird, as he called them, one of the many who sold emergency love in a tra hotel for sailors. Whe Floren-tino Ariza, the first thing he did, with a certain magisterial delight, was to initiate him into the secrets of his paradise. He chose for him the little birds he thought best, he discussed their prid style with them and offered to pay in advah his own money for their services. But Florentino Ariza did not accept: he was a virgin, and he had decided not to lose his virginity unless it was for love.
The hotel was a ial palace that had seeer days, and its great marble salons and rooms were divided into plasterboard cubicles with peepholes, which were rented out as much for watg as for doing. There was talk of busybodies who had their eyes poked out with knitting needles, of a man whnized his own wife as the woman he ying on, of well-bred gentlemen who came dis-guised as tarts tet who they were with the boatswains on shore leave, and of so many other misadventures of observers and observed that the mere idea of going into the room terrified Florentino Ariza. And so Lotario Thugut could never persuade him that watg aing himself be watched were the refis of European princes.
As opposed to what his corpulence might suggest, Lotario Thugut had the rosebud genitals of a cherub, but this must have been a for-tunate defect, because the most tarnished birds argued over who would have the ce to go to bed with him, and then they shrieked as if their throats were being cut, shaking the buttresses of the palad making its ghosts tremble in fear. They said he used an oi made of snake venom that inflamed women’s loins, but he swore he had no resources other than those that God had given him. He would say with uproarious laughter: “It’s pure love.” Many years had to pass before Florentino Ariza would uand that perhaps he was right. He was vi last, at a more advaage of his sen-timental education, whe a man who lived like a king by exploiting three women at the same time. The three of them reheir ats at dawn, prostrate at his feet to beg fiveness for their meager profits, and the only gratification they sought was that he go to bed with the one whht him the most money. Floren-tino Ariza thought that terror alone could induce sudignities, but one of the three girls surprised him with the tradictory 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 Lotario Thugut had bee one of the most esteemed ts of the hotel. Florentino Ariza, because he was so quiet and elusive, also earhe esteem of the owner, and during the most arduous period of his grief he would lock himself in the suffog little rooms to read verses and tearful serialized love stories, and his reveries left s of dark swallows on the balies and the sound of kisses and the beating of wings iillness of siesta. At dusk, when it was cooler, it was impossible not to listen to the versa-tions of men who came to sole themselves at the end of their day with hurried love. So that Florentino Ariza heard about many acts of disloyalty, and even some state secrets, which important ts and even local officials fided to their ephemeral lovers, not g if they could be overheard in the adjoining rooms. This was also how he learhat four nautical leagues to the north of the Sotavento Archipelago, a Spanish galleon had been lying under water sihe eighteenth tury with its cargo of more than five hundred billion pesos in pure gold and precious stohe story astounded him, but he did not think of it again until a few months later, when his love awakened in him an overwhelming desire to salvage the surea-sure so that Fermina Daza could bathe in showers of gold.
Years later, wheried to remember what the maiden ideal-ized by the alchemy of poetry really was like, he could not distinguish her from the heartrending twilights of those times. Even when he observed her, unseen, during those days of longing when he waited for a reply to his first letter, he saw her transfigured iernoon shimmer of two o’clo a shower of blossoms from the almond trees where it was always April regardless of the season of the year. The only reason he was ied in apanying Lotario Thugut on his violin from the privileged vantage point in the choir was to see how her tunic fluttered in the breeze raised by the ticles. But his own delirium finally interfered with that pleasure, for the mystic music seemed so innocuous pared with the state of his soul that he attempted to make it more exg with love waltzes, and Lotario Thugut found himself obliged to ask that he leave the choir.
This was the time when he gave in to his desire to eat the gardenias that Trán-sito Ariza grew in pots iio, so that he could know the taste of Fermina Daza. It was also the time when he happeo find in one of his mother’s trunks a liter bottle of the cologhat the sailors from the Hamburg-Ameri Line sold as traband, and he could not resist the temptation to sample it in order to discover other tastes of his beloved. He tio drink from the bottle until dawn, and he became drunk on Fermina Daza in abrasive swallows, first iaverns around the port and then as he stared out to sea from the jetties where lovers without a roof over their heads made soling love, until at last he succumbed to unsciousness. Tránsito Ariza, who had waited for him until six o’clo the m with her heart in her mouth, searched for him in the most improbable hiding places, and a short while after noon she found him wallowing in a pool rant vomit in a cove of the bay where drowning victims washed ashore.
She took advantage of the hiatus of his valesce to reproach him for his passivity as he waited for the ao his letter. She re-minded him that the weak would never ehe kingdom of love, which is a harsh and ungenerous kingdom, and that women give them-selves only to men of resolute spirit, who provide the security they need in order to face life. Florentino Ariza learhe lesson, perhaps too well. Tránsito Ariza could not hide a feeling of pride, more al than maternal, when she saw him leave the notions shop in his black suit and stiff felt hat, his lyrical bow tie and celluloid collar, and she asked him as a joke if he was going to a funeral. He answered, his ears flaming: “It’s almost the same thing.” She realized that he could hardly breathe with 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 could celebrate his victory together.
He had given Fermina Daza the letter a month before, and sihen he had often broken his promise not to return to the little park, but he had been very careful not to be seen. Nothing had ged. The reading lesson uhe trees e about two o’clock, whey was waking from 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 a martial stride that allowed him to overe 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 have something important to tell her.”
“What impertinence!” her aunt said to him. “There is nothing that has to do with her that I ot hear.”
“Then I will not say anything to her,” he said, “but I warn you that you will be responsible for the sequences.”
That was not the manner Escolástica Daza expected from the ideal sweetheart, but she stood up in alarm because for the first time she had the overwhelming impression that Florentino Ariza eak-ing uhe inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So she went into the house to ge needles ahe two young people alone uhe almond trees in the doorway.
Iy, Fermina Daza knew very little about this taciturn suitor who had appeared in her life like a winter swallow and whose name she would not even have known if it had not been for his signature oter. She had learhat he was the fatherless son of an un-married woman who was hardw and serious but forever marked by the fiery stigma of her single youthful mistake. She had learhat he was not a messenger, as she had supposed, but a well-qualified assistant with a promising future, and she thought that he had delivered the telegram to her father only as a pretext for seeihis idea moved her. She also khat he was one of the musis 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 everyohe violin played for her alone. He was not the kind of man she would have chosen. His found-ling’s eyeglasses, his clerical garb, his mysterious resources had awak-ened in her a curiosity that was difficult to resist, but she had never imagihat curiosity was one of the many masks of love.
She herself could not explain why she had accepted the letter. She did not reproach herself for doing so, but the ever-increasing pressure to respond plicated her life. Her father’s every word, his casual glances, his most trivial gestures, seemed set with traps to uncover her secret. Her state 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 Escolástica, who heless shared her repressed ay as if it were her own. She would lock herself ihroom at odd hours and for no reason other than to reread the letter, attempting to discover a secret code, a magiula hidden in one of the three hundred fourteeers of its fifty-eight words, in the hope they would tell her more than they said. But all she found was what she had uood on first reading, when she ran to lock herself ihroom, her heart in a frenzy, and tore open the envelope hoping for a long, feverish letter, and found only a per-fumed note whose determinatihtened her.
At first she had not even thought seriously that she was obliged to respond, but the letter was so explicit that there was no way to avoid it. Meanwhile, iorment of her doubts, she was surprised to find herself thinking about Florentino Ariza with more frequend ihan she cared to allow, and she even asked herself i distress why he was not itle park at the usual hour, fetting that it was she who had asked him not to return while she repar-ing her reply. And so she thought about him as she never could have imagihinking about anyone, having premonitions that he would be where he was not, wanting him to be where he could not be, awak-ing with a start, with the physical sensation that he was looking at her in the darkness while she slept, so that oernoon when she heard his resolute steps on the yellow leaves itle park it was difficult for her not to think this was yet arick of her imagina-tion. But when he demanded her answer with an authority that was so different from his languor, she mao overe her fear and tried to dodge the issue with the truth: she did not know how to answer him. But Florentino Ariza had not leapt across an abyss only to be shooed away with such excuses.
“If you accepted the letter,” he said to her, “it shows a lack of courtesy not to a.”
That was the end of the labyrinth. Fermina Daza regained her self-trol, begged his pardon for the delay, and gave him her solemn word that he would have an answer before the end of the vacation. And he did. On the last Friday in February, three days before school reopened, Aunt Escolástica went to the telegraph office to ask how much it cost to send a telegram to Piedras de Moler, a village that did not even appear on the list of places served by the telegraph, and she allowed Florentino Ariza to attend her as if she had never seen him before, but when she left she preteet a breviary covered in lizard skin, leaving it on the ter, and in it there was an envelope made of linen paper with golden viges. Delirious with joy, Floren-tino Ariza spent the rest of the afternooing roses and reading the ter by letter, over and ain, and the more he read the more roses he ate, and by midnight he had read it so many times and had eaten so many roses that his mother had to hold his head as if he were a calf and force him to swallow a dose of castor oil.
It was the year they fell into devastating love. her one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatiehey felt when they an-swered them. Never in that delirious spring, or in the following year, did they have the opportunity to speak to each other. Moreover, from the moment they saw each other for the first time until he reiterated his determination a half tury later, they never had the opportunity to be alone or to talk of their love. But during the first three months not one day went by that they did not write to each other, and for a time they wrote twice a day, until Aunt Escolástica became frightened by the iy 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 against her owiny, she had allowed an almost daily exge of messages in peared to be casual enters oreet, but she did not have the ce to permit a versation, no matter how banal and fleeting it might be. Still, after three months she realized that her niece was not the victim of a girlish fancy, as it had seemed at first, and that her own life was threatened by the fire of love. The truth was that Escolástica Daza had no other means of support except her brother’s charity, and she khat his tyranniature would never five such a betrayal of his fidence.
But when it was time for the final decision, she did not have the heart to cause her he same irreparable grief that she had been obliged to nurture ever since her youth, and she permitted her to use a strategy that allowed her the illusion of innoce. The method was simple: Fermina Daza would leave her letter in some hiding place along her daily route from the house to the Academy, and in that letter she would indicate to Florentino Ariza where she ex-pected to find his answer. Florentino Ariza did the same. In this way, for the rest of the year, the flicts in Aunt Escolástica’s sce were transferred to baptisteries in churches, holes in trees, and -nies in ruined ial fortresses. Sometimes their letters were soaked by rain, soiled by mud, torn by adversity, and some were lost for a variety of other reasons, but they always found a way to be in touch with each ain.
Florentino Ariza wrote every night. Letter by letter, he had no mercy as he poisoned himself with the smoke from the palm oil lamps in the ba of the notions shop, and his letters became more discursive and more lunatic the more he tried to imitate his favorite poets from the Popular Library, which even at that time roag eighty volumes. His mother, who had urged him with so much fervor to enjoy his torment, became ed for his health. “Yoing to wear out your brains,” she shouted at him from the bedroom when she heard the first roosters crow. “No woman is worth all that.” She could not remember ever having known any-one in such a state of unbridled passion. But he paid no attention to her. Sometimes he went to the office without having slept, his hair in an uproar of love after leaving the letter in the prearranged hiding place so that Fermina Daza would find it on her way to school. She, oher hand, uhe watchful eye of her father and the vicious spying of the nuns, could barely mao fill half a page from her notebook when she locked herself ihroom or preteo take notes in class. But this was not only due to her limited time and the danger of being taken by surprise, it was also her nature that caused her letters to avoid emotional pitfalls and fihemselves to relating the events of her daily life iilitarian style of a ship’s log.
Iy they were distracted letters, inteo keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line. Desperate to i her with his own madness, he sent her miniaturist’s verses inscribed with the point of a pin on camellia petals. It was he, not she, who had the audacity to enclose a lock of his hair iter, but he never received the response he longed for, which was aire strand of Fermina Daza’s braid. He did move her at last to take oep further, and from that time on she began to send him the veins of leaves dried in diaries, the wings of butterflies, the feathers of magic birds, and for his birthday she gave him a square timeter of St. Peter Clavier’s habit, whi those days was being sold i at a price far beyond the reach of a schoolgirl her age. One night, without any warning, Fermina Daza awoke with a start: a solo violin was serenad-ing her, playing the same waltz over and ain. She shuddered when she realized that eaote was an act of thanksgiving for the petals from her herbarium, for the moments stolen from arithmetic to write her letters, for her fear of examinations when she was thinking more about him than about the natural sces, but she did not dare believe that Florentino Ariza was capable of such imprudence.
The m at breakfast Lorenzo Daza could not tain his curiosity--first because he did not knolaying a single piece meant in the language of serenades, and sed because, despite the attention with which he had listened, he could not determine which house it had been intended for. Aunt Escolástica, with a sang-froid that took her niece’s breath away, stated that she had seen through the bedroom curtains that the solitary violinist was standing oher side of the park, and she said that in a a single piece was notification of severed relations. In that day’s letter Floren-tino Ariza firmed that he had played the serehat he had -posed the waltz, and that it bore the name he called Fermina Daza in his heart: “The ed Goddess.” He did not play it in the park again, but on moonlit nights in places chosen so that she could listen without fear in her bedroom. One of his favored spots was the paupers’ cemetery, exposed to the sun and the rain on an i hill, where turkey buzzards dozed and the music achieved a supernatural reso-nance. Later he learhe dire of the winds, and in this way he was 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 beeating the try for over half a tury, threateo spread, and the gover imposed martial law and a six o’clock curfew in the provinces along the Caribbean coast. Although some disturbances had already occurred, and the troops had itted all kinds of retaliatory abuses, Florentino Ariza was so befuddled that he was unaware of the state of the world, and a military patrol sur-prised him one dawn as he disturbed the chastity of the dead with his amorous provocations. By some miracle he escaped summary execution after he was accused of being a spy who sent messages in the key of 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. But when he was released he felt defrauded by the brevity of his captivity, and even in the days of his old age, when so many other wars were fused in his memory, he still thought he was the only man iy, and perhaps the try, who had dragged five-pound leg irons for the sake of love.
Their freic correspondence was almost two years old when Florentino Ariza, in a letter of only one paragraph, made a formal proposal of marriage to Fermina Daza. On several occasions during the preg six months he had sent her a white camellia, but she would return it to him in her letter so that he would have no doubt that she was disposed to tinue writing to him, but without the seriousness of an e. The truth is that she had always taken the ings and goings of the camellia as a lame, and it had never occurred to her to sider it as a crossroads in her destiny. But when the formal proposal arrived she felt herself wounded for the first time by the clawings of death. Panic-stri, she told her Aunt Escolástica, who gave her advice with the ce and lucidity she had not had when she was twenty and was forced to decide her own fate.
“Tell him yes,” she said. “Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.”
Fermina Daza, however, was so fused that she asked for some time to think it over. First she asked for a month, then two, then three, and when the fourth month had ended and she had still not replied, she received a white camellia again, not alone in the envelope as on other occasions but with the peremptory notification that this was the last o was now or hen that same afternoon it was Florentino Ariza who saw the face of death when he received an envelope taining a strip of paper, torn from the margin of a school notebook, on which a one-line ansritten in pencil: Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.
Florentino Ariza was not prepared for that answer, but his mother was. Since he had first spoken to her six months earlier about his iion to marry, Tránsito Ariza had beguiations for renting the entire house which, until that time, she had shared with two other families. A two-story structure dating from the seveh tury, it was the building where the tobaonopoly had been located under Spanish rule, and its ruined owners had been obliged to rent it out in bits and pieces because they did not have the moo main-tain it. It had oion fag the street, where the retail tobacco shop had been, another se at the rear of a paved patio, where the factory had been located, and a very large stable that the curres used in on for washing and drying their clothes. Trán-sito Ariza occupied the first se, which was the most ve and the best preserved, although it was also the smallest.
The notions store was in the old tobacco shop, with a large door fag the street, and to one side was the former storeroom, with only a skylight for ventilation, where Tránsito Ariza slept. The sto took 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 when dawn did not find him writing. It was a good space for the two of them, but too small for a third perso of all a young lady from the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin whose father had restored a house in ruins until it was like new, while the families with seven titles went to bed with the fear that the roofs of their mansions would cave in on them while they slept. So Tránsito Ariza had arranged with the owo let her also occupy the gallery iio, and in exge she would keep the house in good dition for five years.
She had the resources to do so. In addition to the cash ine from the notions store and the hemostatic rags, which sufficed for her modest life, she had multiplied her savings by lending them to a tele made up of the embarrassed new poor, ted her excessive i rates for the sake of her discretion. Ladies with the airs of queens desded from their carriages at the entrao the notions shop, unencumbered by nursemaids or servants, and as they preteo buy Holland laces and passementerie trimmings, they pawned, between sobs, the last glittering ors of their lost para-dise.
Tránsito Ariza rescued them from difficulties with so much sideration for their lihat many of them left mrateful for the honor than for the favor they had received. Ihan ten years she khe jewels, so often redeemed and then tearfully pawned again, as if they had been her own, and at the time her son decided to marry, the profits, verted into gold, lay hidden in a clay jar under her bed. Then she did her ats and discovered not only that she could uake 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 received pro-visional appoi as First Assistant at the telegraph office, and Lotario Thugut wanted him to head the office when he left to direct the School of Telegraphy and Magism, which he expected to do the following year.
So the practical side of the marriage was resolved. Still, Tránsito Ariza thought that two final ditions were prudent. The first was to find out who Lorenzo Daza really was, for though his at left no doubt ing his ins, no one had aain information as to his identity and livelihood. The sed was that the e be a long one so that the fiancés could e to know each other person to person, and that the strictest reserve be maintained until both felt very certain of their affes. She suggested they wait until the war was over. Florentino Ariza agreed to absolute secreot only for his mother’s reasons but because of the hermeticism of his own character. He also agreed to the delay, but its terms seemed un-realisti, sin over half a tury of indepe life the nation had not had a single day of civil peace.
“We’ll grow old waiting,” he said.
His godfather, the homeopathic practitioner, who happeo be taking part in the versation, did not believe that the wars were an obstacle. He thought they were nothing more tharuggles of the poor, driven like oxen by the landowners, against barefoot sol-diers who were driven in turn by the gover.
“The war is in the mountains,” he said. “For as long as I remember, they have killed us iies with decrees, not with bullets.”
In any case, the details of the e were settled in their letters during the weeks that followed. Fermina Daza, on the advice of her Aunt Escolástica, accepted both the two-year extension and the dition of absolute secrecy, and suggested that Florentino Ariza ask for her hand when she finished sedary school, during the Christmas vacation. Wheime came they would decide on how the e was to be formalized, depending on the degree of approval she obtained from her father. In the meahey -tio write to each other with the same ardor and frequency, but free of the turmoil they had felt before, and their letters teoward a domestie that seemed appropriate to husband and wife. Nothing disturbed their dreams.
Florentino Ariza’s life had ged. Requited love had given him a fidend strength he had never known before, and he was so effit in his work that Lotario Thugut had no trouble having him named his perma assistant. By that time his plans for the School of Telegraphy and Magism had failed, and the German dedicated his free time to the only thing he really enjoyed: going to the port to play the accordion and drink beer with the sailors, finishing the eve-ning at the tra hotel. It was a long time before Florentino Ariza, realized that Lotario Thugut’s influen the palace of pleasure was due to the fact that he had bee the owner of the establishment as well as impresario for the birds in the port. He had bought it gradu-ally with his savings of many years, but the person who ran it for him was a lean, one-eyed little man with a polished head and a heart so kind that no one uood how he could be such a good manager. But he was. At least it seemed that way to Florentino Ariza when the maold him, without his requesting it, that he had the perma use of a room iel, not only to resolve problems of the lower belly whenever he decided to do so, but so that he could have at his disposal a quiet place for his reading and his love letters. And as the long months passed until the formalizing of the e, he spent more time there than at the office or his house, and there were periods when Tránsito Ariza saw him only when he came home to ge his clothes.
Reading had bee his insatiable vice. Ever since she had taught him to read, his mother had bought him illustrated books by Nordic authors which were sold as stories for children but iy were the crudest and most perverse that one could read at any age. When he was five years old, Florentino Ariza would recite them from memory, both in his classes and at literary evenings at school, but his familiarity with them did not alleviate the terror they caused. On the trary, it became acute. So that when he began to read poetry, by parison it was like finding an oasis. Even during his adolesce he had de-voured, in the order of their appearance, all the volumes of the Popular Library that Tránsito Ariza bought from the bargain booksellers at the Arcade of the Scribes, where one could find everything from Homer to the least meritorious of the local poets. But he made no distins: he read whatever came his way, as if it had been ordained by fate, ae his many years of reading, he still could not judge what was good and what was not in all that he had read. The only thing clear to him was that he preferred verse to prose, and in verse he preferred love poems that he memorized without even intending to after the sed reading, and the better rhymed aered they were, and the more heartrending, the more easily he learhem.
They were the inal source of his first letters to Fermina Daza, those half-baked endearments taken whole from the Spanish romantics, and his letters tinued in that vein until real life obliged him to himself with matters more muhaache. By that time he had moved on to tearful serialized novels and other, even more profane prose of the day. He had learo cry with his mother as they read the pamphlets by local poets that were sold in plazas and arcades for two tavos each. But at the same time he was able to recite from memory the most exquisite Castiliary of the Golden Age. In general, he read everything that fell into his hands in the order in which it fell, so that long after those hard years of his first love, when he was no longer young, he would read from first page to last the twenty volumes of the Young People’s Treasury, the plete catalogue of the Gamier Bros. Classi translation, and the sim-plest works that Don Vite Blasco Ibá?ez published in the Pro-meteo colle.
In a, his youthful adventures ira hotel were not limited to reading and posing feverish letters but also included his initiation into the secrets of loveless love. Life in the house began after noon, when his friends the birds got up as bare as the day they were born, so that when Florentino Ariza arrived after work he found a palace populated by naked nymphs who shouted their entaries on the secrets of the city, which they knew because of the faithlessness of the protagonists. Many displayed in their nudity traces of their past: scars of khrusts in the belly, starbursts of gunshot wounds, ridges of the razor cuts of love, Caesareaions sewn up by butchers. Some of them had their young children with them dur-ing the day, those unfortunate fruits of youthful defiance or careless-ness, and they took off their children’s clothes as soon as they were brought in so they would not feel different in that paradise of nudity. Eae cooked her own food, and no oe better than Florentino Ariza when they invited him for a meal, because he chose the best from each. It was a daily fiesta that lasted until dusk, when the naked women marched, singing, toward the bathrooms, asked to borro, toothbrushes, scissors, cut each other’s hair, dressed in borrowed clothes, paihemselves like lugubrious s, a out to hunt the first prey of the night. Then life in the house became imper-sonal and dehumanized, 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 at ease, because it was the only place where he felt that he was with her. Perhaps it was for similar reasons that a older woman with beautiful silvery hair lived there but did not participate in the uninhibited life of the naked women, who professed sacramental respect for her. A premature sweetheart had takehere when she was young, and after enjoying her for a time, abandoned her to her fate. heless, despite the stigma, she had made a good marriage. When she was quite old and alowo sons and three daughters argued over who would have the pleasure of takio live with them, but she could not think of a better place to live than that hotel of her youthful debaucheries. Her perma- room was her only home, and this made for immediate union with Florentino Ariza, who, she said, would bee a wise man known throughout the world because he could enrich his soul with reading in a paradise of salaciousness. Florentino Ariza, for his part, developed so much affe for her that he helped her with her shopping and would spend the afternoons in versation with her. He thought she was a woman wise in the ways of love, since she of-fered many insights into his affair without his having to reveal as to her.
If he had not given in to the maations at hand before he experienced Fermina Daza’s love, he certainly would not succumb now that she was his official betrothed. So Florentino Ariza lived with the girls and shared their pleasures and miseries, but it did not occur to him or them to go any further. An unforesee demonstrated the severity of his determination. Oernoon at six o’clock, when the girls were dressing to receive that evening’s ts, the woman who ed the rooms on his floor iel came into his cubicle. She was young, but haggard and old before her time, like a fully dressed pe surrounded by glorious nakedness. He saw her every day without feeling himself observed: she walked through the rooms with her brooms, a bucket for the trash, and a special rag for pig up used s from the floor. She came into the room where Florentino Ariza lay reading, and as always she ed with great care so as not to disturb him. Then she passed close to the bed, and he felt a warm and tender hand low on his belly, he felt it searg, he felt it finding, he felt it unbuttoning his trousers while her breath-ing filled the room. He preteo read until he could not bear it any longer and had to move his body out of the way.
She was dismayed, for the first thing they warned her about when they gave her the ing job was that she should not try to sleep with the ts. They did not have to tell her that, because she was one of those women who thought that prostitution did not mean going to bed for money but going to bed with a stranger. She had two children, each by a different father, not because they were casual adventures but because she could never love any man who came back after the third visit.
Until that time she had been a woman without a sense ency, a woman whose nature prepared her to wait with-out despair, but life in that house proved strohan her virtue. She came to work at six iernoon, and she spent the whole night going through the rooms, sweeping them out, pig up -doms, ging the sheets. It was difficult to imagihe number of things that me after love. They left vomit and tears, which seemed uandable to her, but they also left many enigmas of intimacy: puddles of blood, patches of excrement, glass eyes, gold watches, false teeth, lockets with golden curls, love letters, business letters, doleters--all kinds of letters. Some came back for the items they had lost, but most were unclaimed, and Lotario Thugut kept them under lod key and thought that sooner or later the palace that had seeer days, with its thousands of fotten be-longings, would bee a museum of love.
The work was hard and the pay was low, but she did it well. What she could not endure were the sobs, the laments, the creaking of the bedsprings, which filled her blood with so much ardor and so much sorrow that by dawn she could not bear the desire to go to bed with the first beggar she met oreet, with any miserable drunk who would give her what she wanted with no pretensions and no questions. The appearance of a man like Florentino Ariza, young, , and without a woman, was for her a gift from heaven, because from the first moment she realized that he was just like her: someone in need of love. But he was unaware of her pelling desire. He had kept his virginity for Fermina Daza, and there was no force u-ment in this world that could turn him from his purpose.
That was his life, four months before the date set for formalizing the e, when Lorenzo Daza showed up at the telegraph offi at seven o’clod asked for him. Since he had not yet arrived, Lorenzo Daza waited on the bentil ten minutes after eight, slipping a heavy g with its noble opal stone from one fio another, and as soon as Florentino Ariza came in, he reized him as the employee who had delivered the telegram, aook him by the arm.
“e 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 this meeting, because Fermina Daza had not fouher the occasion or the means to warn him. The fact was that on the previous Saturday, Sister Franca de la Luz, Superior of the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, had e into the class on Ideas of ogony with the stealth of a serpent, and spying oudents over their shoulders, she discovered that Fermina Daza retending to take notes in her notebook when iy she was writing a love letter. Acc to the rules of the Academy, that error was reason for expulsion. Lorenzo Daza received an urgent summons to the rectory, where he discovered the leak through which his irime was trig.
Fermina Daza, with her innate fortitude, fessed to the error of the letter, but refused to reveal the identity of her secret sweetheart and refused again before the Tribunal of the Order which, therefore, firmed the verdict of expulsion. Her father, however, searched her room, until then an inviolate sanctuary, and in the false bottom of her trunk he found the packets of three years’ worth of letters hidden away with as much love as had inspired their writing. The signature was unequivocal, but Lorenzo Daza could not believe--not then, not ever--that his daughter knew nothing about her secret lover except that he worked as a telegraph operator and that he loved the violin.
Certain that su intricate relationship was uandable only with the plicity of his sister, he did not grahe grace of an excuse or the right of appeal, but shipped her on the ser to San Juan de la aga. Fermina Daza never found relief from her last memory of her aunt oernoon when she said goodbye in the doorway, burning with fever inside her brown habit, bony and ashen, and then disappeared into the drizzle itle park, carrying all that she owned in life: her spinster’s sleeping mat and enough money for a month, ed in a handkerchief that she clutched in her fist.
As soon as she had freed herself from her father’s authority, Fermina Daza began a search for her in the Caribbean provinces, asking for information from everyone who might know her, and she could not find a trace of her until almost thirty years later when she received a letter that had taken a long time to pass through many hands, inform-ihat she had died ier of God leprosarium. Lorenzo Daza did not foresee the ferocity with which his daughter would react to the unjust punishment of her Aunt Escolástica, whom she had always identified with the mother she could barely remember. She locked herself in her room, refused to eat or drink, and when at last he persuaded her to open the door, first with threats and then with poorly dissimulated pleading, he found a wounded panther who would never be fifteen years old again.
He tried to seduce her with all kinds of flattery. He tried to make her uand that love at her age was an illusioried to vince her to send back the letters aurn to the Academy and beg fiveness on her knees, and he gave his word of honor that he would be the first to help her find happiness with a worthy suitor. But it was like talking to a corpse. Defeated, he at last lost his temper at lunonday, and while he choked basults and blasphemies and was about to explode, she put the meat ko her throat, without dramatics but with a steady hand and eyes so aghast that he did not dare to challenge her. That was wheook the risk of talking for five minutes, man to man, with the accursed upstart whom he did not remember ever having seen, and who had e into his life to his great sorrow. By force of habit he picked up his revolver before he went out, but he was careful to hide it under his shirt.
Florentino Ariza still had not recovered when Lorenzo Daza held him by the arm and steered him across the Plaza of the Cathedral to the arcaded gallery of the Parish Café and invited him to sit oerrace. There were no other ers at that hour: a blaan was scrubbing the tiles in the enormous salon with its chipped and dusty stained-glass windows, and the chairs were still upside down on the marble tables. Florentino Ariza had often seen Lorenzo Daza gambling and drinking cask wihere with the Asturians from the public market, while they shouted and argued about other long-standing wars that had nothing to do with our own. scious of the fatality of love, he had often wondered how the meeting would be that 藏书网he was bound to have with Lorenzo Daza sooner or later, the meeting that no human power could forestall because it had been in-scribed in both their destinies forever.
He had supposed it would be an unequal dispute, not only because Fermina Daza had warned him in her letters of her father’s stormy character, but because he himself had hat his eyes seemed angry even when he was laughing at the gaming table. Everything about him was a testimony to crudeness: his ignoble belly, his emphatic speech, his lynx’s side-whiskers, his rough hands, the ring finger smothered by the opal setting. His only endearing trait, which Florentino Ariza reized the first time he saw him walking, was that he had the same doe’s gait as his daughter. However, when he showed him the chair so that he could sit down, he did not find Lorenzo Daza as harsh as he appeared to be, and his ce revived when he invited him to have a glass of ae. Florentino Ariza had never had a drink at eight o’clo the morn-ing, but he accepted with gratitude because his need for one was urgent.
Lorenzo Daza, in fact, took no more than five mio say what he had to say, and he did so with a disarming siy that -founded Florentino Ariza. When his wife died he had set only one goal for himself: to turn his daughter into a great lady. The road was long and uain for a mule trader who did not know how to read or write and whose reputation as a horse thief was not so much proven as widespread in the province of San Juan de la aga. He lit a mule driver’s cigar and lamented: “The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.” He said, however, that the real secret of his fortune was that none of his mules worked as hard and with so much determination as he did himself, even during the bitterest days of the wars when the villages awoke in ashes and the fields in ruins.
Although his daughter was never aware of the premeditation in her destiny, she behaved as if she were ahusiastic aplice. She was intelligent ahodical, to the point where she taught her father to read as soon as she herself learo, and at the age of twelve she had a mastery of reality that would have allowed her to run the house without the help of her Aunt Escolástica. He sighed: “She’s a mule worth her weight in gold.” When his daughter finished primary school with highest marks in every subjed honorable mention at graduation, he uood that San Juan de la aga was too narrow for his dreams. Then he liquidated lands and animals and moved with new impetus ay thousand gold pesos to this ruined city and its moth-eaten glories, where a beautiful woman with an old-fashioned upbringing still had the possibility of being reborn through a fortunate marriage. The sudden appearance of Florentino Ariza had been an unforeseen obstacle in his hard-fought plan. “So I have e to make a request of you,” said Lorenzo Daza. He dipped the end of his cigar in the ae, pulled on it and drew no smoke, then cluded in a sorrowful voice:
“Get out of our way.”
Florentino Ariza had listeo him as he sipped his ae, and was so absorbed in the disclosure of Fermina Daza’s past that he did not even ask himself what he was going to say when it was his turn to speak. But when the moment arrived, he realized that anything he might say would promise his destiny.
“Have you spoken to her?” he asked.
“That doesn’t you,” said Lorenzo Daza.
“I ask you the question,” said Florentino Ariza, “because it seems to me that she is the one who has to decide.”
“None of that,” said Lorenzo Daza. “This is a matter for men and it will be decided by men.”
His tone had bee threatening, and a er who had just sat down at a nearby table turo look at them. Florentino Ariza spoke in a most tenuous voice, but with the most imperious resolution of which he was capable:
“Be that as it may, I ot answer without knowing what she thinks. It would be a betrayal.”
Then Lorenzo Daza leaned ba his chair, his eyelids reddened and damp, and his left eye spun in its orbit and stayed twisted toward the outside. He, too, lowered his voice.
“Don’t force me to shoot you,” he said.
Florentino Ariza felt his iines filling with cold froth. But his voice did not tremble because he felt himself illuminated by the Holy Spirit.
“Shoot me,” he said, with his hand on his chest. “There is no greater glory than to die for love.”
Lorenzo Daza had to look at him sideways, like a parrot, to see him with his twisted eye. He did not pronouhe four words so much as spit them out, one by one:
“Son of a bitch!”
That same week he took his daughter away on the jourhat would make her fet. He gave her no explanation at all, but burst into her bedroom, his mustache stained with fury and his chewed cigar, and ordered her to pack. She asked him where they were going, and he answered: “To our death.” Frightened by a respohat seemed too close to the truth, she tried to face him with the ce of a few days before, but he took off his belt with its hammered cop-per buckle, twisted it around his fist, and hit the table with a blow that resouhrough the house like a rifle shot. Fermina Daza knew very well the extent and occasion of her own strength, and so she packed a bedroll with two straw mats and a hammock, and twe trunks with all her clothes, certain that this was a trip from which she would never return. Before she dressed, she locked herself ih-room and wrote a brief farewell letter to Florentino Ariza on a sheet torn from the pack of toilet paper. The off her entire braid at the nape of her neck with cuticle scissors, rolled it inside a velvet box embroidered with gold thread, a it along with the letter.
It was a demerip. The first stage along the ridges of the Sierra Nevada, riding muleba a caravan of Andean mule drivers, lasted eleven days, during which time they were stupefied by the naked sun or drenched by the horizontal October rains and almost aletrified by the numbing vapors rising from the precipices. Ohird day a mule maddened by gadflies fell into a ravih its rider, dragging along the entire line, and the screams of the man and his pack of seven animals tied to one another tio rebound along the cliffs and gullies for several hours after the disaster, and tio resound for years and years in the memory of Fermina Daza. All her baggage plunged over the side with the mules, but in the turies-long instant of the fall until the scream of terror was extinguished at the bottom, she did not think of the poor dead mule driver or his mangled pack but of how unfortu was that the mule she was riding had not beeo the others as well.
It was the first time she had ever ridden, but the terror and un-speakable privations of the trip would not have seemed so bitter to her if it had not been for the certainty that she would never see Florentino Ariza again or have the solation of his letters. She had not said a word to her father sihe beginning of the trip, and he was so fouhat he hardly spoke to her eve was an absolute y to do so, or he sent the mule drivers to her with messages. When their luck was good they found some roadside inn that served rustic food which she refused to eat, aed them vas cots stained with rancid perspiration and urine. But more often they spent the night in Indialements, in open-air publii-tories built at the side of the road, with their rows of wooden poles and roofs of bitter palm where every passerby had the right to stay until dawn. Fermina Daza could not sleep through a single night as she sweated in fear and listened in the darko the ing and going of silent travelers who tied their animals to the poles and hung their hammocks where they could.
At nightfall, when the first travelers would arrive, the place was uncrowded and peaceful, but by dawn it had been transformed into a fairground, with a mass of hammocks hanging at different levels and Aruadians from the mountains sleeping on their haunches, with the raging of the tethered goats, and the uproar of the fighting cocks in their pharaonic crates, and the panting silence of the mountain dogs, who had been taught not to bark because of the dangers of war. Those privations were familiar to Lorenzo Daza, who had trafficked through the region for half his life and almost always met up with old friends at dawn. For his daughter it erpetual agony. The stench of the loads of salted catfish added to the loss of appetite caused by her grief, aually destroyed her habit of eating, and if she did not go mad with despair it was because she always found relief in the memory of Florentino Ariza. She did not doubt that this was the land of fetting.
Another stant terror was the war. Sihe start of the jour-here had been talk of the danger of running into scattered patrols, and the mule drivers had instructed them in the various ways nizing the two sides so that they could act accly. They often entered squads of mounted soldiers uhe and of an officer, who rounded up new recruits by roping them as if they were cattle on the hoof. Overwhelmed by so many horrors, Fermina Daza had fotten about the ohat seemed more legendary than immi, until one night when a patrol of unknown affiliation cap-tured two travelers from the caravan and hahem from a campano tree half a league from the settlement. Lorenzo Daza did not even know them, but he had them taken down and he gave them a Chris-tian burial in thanksgiving for not havi a similar fate. And he had reason: the assailants had awakened him with a rifle in his stomach, and a ander in rags, his face smeared with charcoal, had shone a light on him and asked him if he was Liberal or servative.
“her one or the other,” said Lorenzo Daza. “I am a Spanish subject.”
“What luck!” said the ander, and he left with his hand raised in a salute. “Long live the King!”
Two days later they desded to the luminous plaihe joyful town of Valledupar was located. There were cockfights iios, accordion musi the street ers, riders on thh-bred horses, rockets and bells. A pyroteical castle was being assembled. Fermina Daza did not even notice the festivities. They stayed in the home of Uncle Lisímaco Sánchez, her mother’s brother, who had e out to receive them on the King’s Highway at the head of a noisy troop of youives riding the best-bred horses iire province, and they were led through the streets of the town to the apa of exploding fireworks. The house was on the Grand Plaza, o the ial church that had been re-paired several times, and it seemed more like the main house on a hada because of its large, somber rooms and its gallery that faced an orchard of fruit trees and smelled of hot sugare juice.
No sooner had they dismounted iables than the reception rooms were overflowing with numerous unknowives whose unbearable effusiveness was a sce to Fermina Daza, for she was incapable of ever loving anyone else in this world, she suffered from saddle burn, she was dying of fatigue and loose bowels, and all she longed for was a solitary and quiet place to cry. Her cousin Hildebranda Sáwo years older than she and with the same imperial haughtiness, was the only one who uood her dition as soon as she saw her, because she, too, was being ed in the fiery coals of reckless love. When it grew dark she took her to the bedroom that she had prepared to share with her, and seeing the burning ulcers on her buttocks, she could not believe that she still lived. With the help of her mother, a very sweet woman who looked as much like her husband as if they were twins, she prepared a bath for her and cooled the burning with arnipresses, while the thunder from the gun-powder castle shook the foundations of the house.
At midnight the visitors left, the public fiesta scattered into sm embers, and Cousin Hildebranda lent Fermina Daza a madapollam nightgown and helped her to lie down in a bed with smooth sheets aher pillows, and without warning she was filled with the instantaneous panic of happiness. When at last they were alone in the bedroom, Cousin Hildebranda bolted the door with a crossbar and from uhe straw matting of her bed took out a manila envelope sealed in wax with the emblem of the national tele-graph. It was enough for Fermina Daza to see her cousin’s expression of radiant malice for the pensive st of white gardenias to grow again in her heart’s memory, and theore the red sealing wax with her teeth and drehe eleven forbidden telegrams in a shower of tears until dawn.
Then he knew. Before starting out on the journey, Lorenzo Daza had made the mistake of telegraphing the o his brother-in-law Lisímaco Sánchez, and he in turn had sent the o his vast and intricate work of kinfolk in numerous towns and villages throughout the province. So that Florentino Ariza not only learhe -plete itinerary but also established aensive brotherhood of telegraph operators who would follow the trail of Fermina Daza to the last settlement in Cabo de la Vela. This allowed him to maintain intensive unications with her from the time of her arrival in Valledupar, where she stayed three months, until the end of her journey in Riohacha, a year and a half later, when Lorenzo Daza took it frahat his daughter had at last fotten and he decided to return home. Perhaps he was not even aware of how much he had relaxed his vigilance, distracted as he was by the flattering words of the in-laws who after so many years had put aside their tribal prejudices and weled him with open arms as one of their own.
The visit was a belated reciliation, although that had not been its purpose. As a matter of fact, the family of Fermina Sánchez had been opposed in every way to her marrying an immigrant with no background who was a braggart and a boor and who was always traveling, trading his unbroken mules in a busihat seemed too simple to be ho. Lorenzo Daza played fh stakes, be-cause his sweetheart was the darling of a typical family of the region: an intricate tribe of wild women and softhearted men who were obsessed to the point of dementia with their sense of honor. Fermina Sánchez, however, settled on her desire with the bliermination of love when it is opposed, and she married him despite her family, with so much speed and so much secrecy that it seemed as if she had done so not for love but to cover over with a sacramental cloak some premature mistake.
Twenty-five years later, Lorenzo Daza did not realize that his intransigen his daughter’s love affair was a vicious repetition of his own past, and he plained of his misfortuo the same in-laws who had opposed him, as they had plained in their day to their own kin. Still, the time he spent in lamentation was time his daughter gained for her love affair. So that while he went about castrating calves and taming mules on the prosperous lands of his in-laws, she was free to spend time with a troop of female cousins uhe and of Hildebranda Sáhe most beautiful and obliging of them all, whose hopeless passion for a married man, a father who was twenty years older than she, had to be satisfied with furtive glances.
After their proloay in Valledupar they tiheir jourhrough the foothills of the mountains, crossing fl meadows and dreamlike mesas, and in all the villages they were re-ceived as they had been in the first, with musid fireworks and new spiratorial cousins and punctual messages ielegraph offices. Fermina Daza soon realized that the afternoon of their arrival in Valledupar had not been unusual, but rather that in this fertile province every day of the week was lived as if it were a holiday. The visitors slept wherever they happeo be at nightfall, and they ate wherever they happeo be hungry, for these were houses with open doors, where there was always a hammock hanging and a three-meat stew simmering oove in case guests arrived before the telegram announg their arrival, as was almost always the case. Hildebranda Sánchez apanied her cousin for the remainder of the trip, guiding her with joyful spirit through the tangled plex-ities of her blood to the very source of her ins. Fermina Daza learned about herself, she felt free for the first time, she felt herself befriended and protected, her lungs full of the air of liberty, which restored her tranquillity and her will to live. In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more ret in her memory.
One night she came back from her daily walk stunned by the revelation that one could be happy not only without love, but despite it. The revelation alarmed her, because one of her cousins had sur-prised her parents in versation with Lorenzo Daza, who had sug-gested the idea ing the marriage of his daughter to the only heir to the fabulous fortune of Cleofás Moscote. Fermina Daza knew who he was. She had seen him in the plazas, pirouetting his perfect horses with trappings so rich they seemed ors used for the Mass, and he was elegant and clever and had a dreamer’s eyelashes that could make the stones sigh, but she pared him to her memory of poor emaciated Florentino Ariza sitting uhe almond trees itle park, with the book of verses on his lap, and she did not find even the shadow of a doubt in her heart.
In those days Hildebranda Sánchez was delirious with hope after visiting a fortueller whose clairvoyance had astonished her. Dis-mayed by her father’s iions, Fermina Daza also went to sult with her. The cards said there was no obstacle in her future to a long and happy marriage, and that predi gave her back her ce because she could not ceive of such a fortunate destiny with any man other than the one she loved. Exalted by that certainty, she assumed and of her fate. That was how the telegraphic cor-respondeh Florentino Ariza stopped being a certo of iions and illusory promises and became methodical and practical and more intehahey set dates, established means, pledged their lives to their mutual determination to marry without sulting anyone, wherever and however they could, as soon as they were together again. Fermina Daza sidered this itment so binding that the night her father gave her permission to attend her first adult dan the town of Fonseca, she did not think it was det to accept without the sent of her fiancé. Florentino Ariza was ira hotel that night, playing cards with Lotario Thugut, when he was told he had an urgent telegram on the line.
It was the telegraph operator from Fonseca, who had keyed in through seven intermediate stations so that Fermina Daza could ask permission to attend the dance. Wheai, however, she was not satisfied with the simple affirmative answer but asked for proof that in fact it was Florentino Ariza operating the telegraph key at the other end of the line. More astohan flattered, he -posed aifying phrase: Tell her that I swear by the ed goddess. Fermina Daza reized the password and stayed at her first adult dail seven in the m, when she had to ge in a rush in order not to be late for Mass. By then she had more letters and telegrams itom of her trunk than her father had taken away from her, and she had learo behave with the air of a mar-ried woman. Lorenzo Daza interpreted these ges in her manner as proof that distand time had cured her of her juvenile fan-tasies, but he never spoke to her about his plans for the arranged mar-riage. Their relations had bee fluid within the formal reserve that she had imposed sihe expulsion of Aunt Escolástica, and this allowed them such a fortable modus vivendi that no one would have doubted that it was based on affe.
It was at this time that Florentino Ariza decided to tell her in his letters of his determination to salvage the treasure of the sunken galleon for her. It was true, and it had e to him in a flash of inspiration one sunlit afternoohe sea seemed paved with aluminum because of the numbers of fish brought to the surface by mullein. All the birds of the air were in an uproar because of the kill, and the fishermen had to drive them away with their oars so they would not have to fight with them for the fruits of that pro-hibited miracle. The use of the mullein plant to put the fish to sleep had been prohibited by law since ial times, but it tio be a on practice- among the fishermen of the Caribbean until it was replaced by dynamite.
One of Florentino Ariza’s pastimes during Fermina Daza’s journey was to watch from the jetties as the fishermen loaded their oes with enormous s filled with sleeping fish. At the same time, a gang of boys who swam like sharks asked curious bystao toss s into the water so they could dive to the bottom for them. They were the same boys who swam out to meet the o liners for that purpose, and whose skill i of diving had been the subject of so many tourist ats written in the Uates and Europe. Florentino Ariza had always known about them, even before he knew about love, but it had never oc-curred to him that perhaps they might be able t up the fortune from the galleon. It occurred to him that afternoon, and from the following Sunday until Fermina Daza’s return almost a year later, he had an additional motive for delirium.
After talking to him for only ten minutes, Euclides, one of the boy swimmers, became as excited as he was at the idea of an under-water exploration. Florentino Ariza did not reveal the whole truth of the enterprise, but he informed himself thhly regarding his abilities as a diver and navigator. He asked him if he could desd without air to a depth of twenty meters, and Euclides told him yes. He asked him if he repared to sail a fisherman’s oe by himself in the open sea in the middle of a storm with no instruments other than his instinct, and Euclides told him yes.
He asked him if he could find a specific spot sixteen nautical miles to the northwest of the largest island iavento Archipelago, and Euclides told him yes. He asked him if he was capable of navigating by the stars at night, and Euclides told him yes. He asked him if he repared to do so for the same wages the fishermen paid him for helping them to fish, and Euclides told him yes, but with an additional five reales on Sundays. He asked him if he knew how to defend himself against sharks, and Euclides told him yes, for he had magic tricks thten them away. He asked him if he was able to keep a secret even if they put him iorture chambers of the Inquisition, and Euclides told him yes, in fact he did not say no to anything, and he knew how to say yes with so much vi that there was no way to doubt him. Then the boy reed expenses: renting the oe, renting the oe paddle, renting fishing equipment so that no one would suspect the truth behind their incursions. It was also necessary to take along food, a demijohn of fresh water, an oil lamp, a pack of tallow dles, and a hunter’s horn to call for help in case of emergency.
Euclides was about twelve years old, and he was fast and clever and an incessant talker, with an eel’s body that could slither through a bull’s-eye. The weather had tanned his skin to such a degree that it was impossible to imagine his inal color, and this made his big yellow eyes seem more radiant. Florentino Ariza decided on the spot that he was the perfepanion for an adventure of such magni-tude, and they embarked without further delay the following Sunday.
They sailed out of the fishermen’s port at dawn, well provisioned aer disposed, Euclides almost naked, with only the loincloth that he always wore, and Florentino Ariza with his frock coat, his tenebrous hat, his pateher boots, the poet’s bow at his neck, and a book to pass the time during the crossing to the islands. From the very first Sunday he realized that Euclides was as good a navigator as he was a diver, and that he had astonishing knowledge of the character of the sea and the debris in the bay. He could ret in the most ued detail the history of each rusting hulk of a boat, he khe age of each buoy, the in of every piece of rubbish, the number of links in the with which the Spaniards closed off the entrance of the bay. Fearing that he might also know the real purpose of his expedition, Florentino Ariza asked him sly questions and in this way realized that Euclides did not have the slightest suspi about the sunken galleon.
Ever since he had first heard the story of the treasure ira hotel, Florentino Ariza had learned all he could about the habits of galleons. He learhat the San José was not the only ship in the coral depths. It was, in fact, the flagship of the Terra Firma fleet, and had arrived here after May 1708, having sailed from the legendary fair of Portobello in Panama where it had taken on part of its fortuhree hurunks of silver from Peru and Veracruz, and one huen trunks of pearls gathered and ted on the island of tadora. During the long month it had remained here, the days and nights had beeed to popular fiestas, and the rest of the treasure inteo save the Kingdom of Spain from poverty had been taken aboard: one hundred sixteen trunks of emeralds from Muzo and Somondod thirty million gold s.
The Terra Firma fleet was posed of han twelve supply ships of varying sizes, and it set sail from this port traveling in a voy with a French squadron that was heavily armed but still incapable of proteg the expedition from the accurate on shot of the English squadron under ander Charles Wager, who waited for it iavento Archipelago, at the entrao the bay. So the San José was not the only sunken vessel, although there was no reliable doted record of how many had succumbed and how many had mao escape the English fire. What was certain was that the flagship had been among the first to sink, along with the entire crew and the aanding straight on the quarterdeck, and that she alone carried most of the cargo.
Florentino Ariza had learhe route of the galleons from the navigation charts of the period, ahought he had determihe site of the shipwreck. They left the bay betweewo fortresses of Boca Chica, and after four hours of sailing they ehe interior still waters of the archipelago in whose coral depths they could pick up sleeping lobsters with their hands. The air was so soft and the sea so calm and clear that Florentino Ariza felt as if he were his own refle ier. At the far end of the backwater, two hours from the largest island, was the site of the shipwreck.
Suffog in his formal clothes uhe infernal sun, Floren-tino Ariza indicated to Euclides that he should try to dive to a depth of twenty meters and bring baything he might find at the bottom. The water was so clear that he saw him moving below like a tarnished shark among the blue ohat crossed his path without toug him. Then he saw him disappear into a thicket of coral, and just whehought that he could not possibly have any more air in his lungs, he heard his voice at his back. Euclides was standing otom, with his arms raised and the water up to his waist. And so they tinued expl deeper sites, always moving toward the north, sailing over the indifferent manta rays, the timid squid, the rosebushes in the shadows, until Euclides cluded that they were wasting their time.
“If you don’t tell me what you wao find, I don’t know how I am going to find it,” he said.
But he did not tell him. Then Euclides proposed to him that he take off his clothes and dive with him, even if it was only to see that other sky below the world, the coral depths. But Florentino Ariza always said that God had made the sea to look at through the window, and he had never learo swim. A short while later, the afternoon grew cloudy and the air turned cold and damp, and it grew dark with so little warning that they had to navigate by the lighthouse to find the port. Before they ehe bay, the enormous white o liner from France passed very close to them, all its lights blazing as it trailed a wake of teew and boiled cauliflower.
They wasted three Sundays in this way, and they would have tio waste them all if Florentino Ariza had not decided to share his secret with Euclides, who then modified the entire search plan, and they sailed along the old el of the galleons, more thay nautical leagues to the east of the spot Florentino Ariza had decided ohan two months had gone by when, one rainy afternoon out at sea, Euclides spent siderable time down otom and the oe drifted so much that he had to swim almost half an hour to reach it because Florentino Ariza could not row it closer to him. When at last he climbed on board, he took two pieces of woman’s jewelry out of his mouth and displayed them as if they were the prize for his perseverance.
What he reted then was so fasating that Florentino Ariza promised himself that he would learn to swim and dive as far under water as possible just so he could see it with his own eyes. He said that in that spot, oeeers down, there were so many old sailing ships lying among the coral reefs that it was impossible to even calculate the number, and they were spread over so extensive ahat you could not see to the end of them. He said that the most surprising thing was that none of the old wrecks afloat in the bay was in such good dition as the sunken vessels. He said that there were several caravelles with their sails still intact, and that the sunken ships were visible even otom, for it seemed as if they had sunk along with their own spad time, so that they were still illumined by the same eleven o’clock sun that was shining on Saturday, June 9, when they went down.
Choking on the driving force of his imagination, he said that the easiest oo distinguish was the galleon San José, for its name could be seen on the poop in gold letters, but it was also the ship most damaged by English artillery. He said he had seen an octopus inside, more than three turies old, whose tentacles emerged through the openings in the on and who had grown to such a size in the dining room that one would have to destroy the ship to free him. He said he had seen the body of the ander, dressed for battle and floating sideways ihe aquarium of the forecastle, and that if he had not dived down to the hold with all its treasure, it was because he did not have enough air in his lungs. There were the proofs: an emerald earring and a medal of the Virgin, the corroded by salt.
That was when Florentino Ariza first mentiohe treasure to Fermina Daza in a letter he sent to Fonseca a short while before her return. The history of the sunken galleon was familiar to her be-cause she had heard it many times from Lorenzo Daza, who had lost both time and morying to vince a pany of German divers to join with him in salvaging the sureasure. He would have persevered ierprise if several members of the Academy of History had not vinced him that the legend of the ship-wrecked galleon had been ied by some brigand of a viceroy to hide his theft of the treasures of the . In any case, Fermina Daza khat the galleon lay beyond the reach of any human being, at a depth of two hundred meters, not the twenty claimed by Florentino Ariza. But she was so aced to his poetic excesses that she celebrated the adventure of the galleon as one of his most successful. Still, when she tio receive other letters with still more fantastic details, written with as much seriousness as his promises of love, she had to fess to Hildebranda Sánchez her fear that her bedazzled sweetheart must have lost his mind.
During this time Euclides had surfaced with so many proofs of his tale that it was no longer a question of playing with earrings and rings scattered amid the coral but of finang a major enterprise to salvage the fifty ships with their cargo of Babylonian treasure. Then what had to happen sooner or later happened: Florentino Ariza asked his mother for help in bringing his adveo a successful clusion. All she had to do was bite the metal settings and look at the gems made of glass against the light to realize that someone was taking advantage of her son’s innoce. Euclides went down on his knees and swore to Florentino Ariza that he had dohing wrong, but he was not seen the following Sunday in the fishermen’s port, or anywhere else ever again.
The only thing Florentino Ariza salvaged from that disaster was the loving shelter of the lighthouse. He had gohere in Euclides’ oe one night when a storm at sea took them by surprise, and from that time on he would go there iernoons to talk to the lighthouse keeper about the innumerable marvels on land and water that the keeper had knowledge of. It was the beginning of a friendship that survived the many ges in the world. Florentino Ariza learo feed the fire, first with loads of wood and then with large earthen jars of oil, before electrical energy came to us. He learo direct the light and augment it with mirrors, and orí several occasions, when the lighthouse keeper could not do so, he stayed to keep watch over the night at sea from the tower. He learo know the ships by their voices, by the size of their lights on the horizon, and to sehat something of them came ba in the flashing bea of the lighthouse.
During the day, above all on Sundays, there was another kind of pleasure. In the District of the Viceroys, where the wealthy people of the old city lived, the women’s beaches were separated from those of the men by a plaster wall: one lay to the right and the other to the left of the lighthouse. And so the lighthouse keeper installed a spyglass through whie could plate the women’s beach by paying a tavo. Without knowing they were being observed, the young society ladies displayed themselves to the best of their ability in ruffled bathing suits and slippers and hats that hid their bodies almost as much as their street clothes did and were less attrac-tive besides. Their mothers, sitting out in the sun in wicker rog chairs, wearing the same dresses, the same feathered hats, and holding the same andy parasols as they had at High Mass, watched over them from the shore, for fear the men from the neighb beaches would seduce their daughters uhe water. The reality was that one could not see anything more, or anything more exg, through the spyglass than one could see oreet, but there were many ts who came every Sunday tle over the telescope for the pure delight of tasting the insipid forbidden fruits of the walled area that was dehem.
Florentino Ariza was one of them, more from boredom than for pleasure, but it was not because of that additional attra that he became a good friend of the lighthouse keeper. The real reason was that after Fermina Daza rejected him, when he tracted the fever of many disparate loves in his effort to replace her, it was in the lighthouse and nowhere else that he lived his happiest hours and found the best solation for his misfortunes. It was the place he loved most, so much so that for years he tried to vince his mother, and later his Uncle Leo XII, to help him buy it. For in those days the lighthouses in the Caribbean were private property, and their owners charged ships acc to their size for the right to ehe port. Florentino Ariza thought that it was the only honorable way to make a profit out of poetry, but her his mother nor his uncle agreed with him, and by the time he had the resources to do it on his own, the lighthouses had bee the property of the state.
None of these dreams was in vain, however. The tale of the galleon and the y of the lighthouse helped to alleviate the absence of Fermina Daza, and then, when he least expected it, he received the news of her return. And in fact, after a proloay in Riohacha, Lorenzo Daza had decided to e home. It was not the most benign season on the o, due to the December trade winds, and the historic ser, the only ohat would risk the crossing, might find itself blown by a trary wind back to the port where it had started. And that is what happened. Fermina Daza spent an agonized night vomiting bile, strapped to her bunk in a that resembled a tavern latri only because of its oppressive narrow-ness but also because of the pestilential stend the heat.
The motion was s that she had the impression several times that the straps on the bed would fly apart; on the deck she heard frag-ments of shouted lamentations that sounded like a shipwreck, and her father’s tigerish sn in the bunk added yet anredient to her terror. For the first time in almost three years she spent aire night awake without thinking for even one moment of Florentino Ariza, while he, oher hand, lay sleepless in his hammo the ba, ting the eternal minutes one by oil her return. At dawn the wind suddenly died down and the sea grew calm, and Fermina Daza realized that she had slept despite her devastating seasiess, because the noise of the anchor s awakened her. Then she loosehe straps ao the port-hole, hoping to see Florentino Ariza iumult of the port, but all she saw were the s sheds among the palm trees gilded by the first rays of the sun and the rotting boards of the do Riohacha, where the ser had set sail the night before.
The rest of the day was like a halluation: she was in the same house where she had been until yesterday, receiving the same visitors who had said goodbye to her, talking about the same things, be-wildered by the impression that she was reliving a piece of life she had already lived. It was such a faithful repetition that Fermina Daza trembled at the thought that the ser trip would be a repetition, too, for the mere memory of it terrified her. However, the only other possible means of returning home was two weeks on muleback over the mountains in circumstances even more dangerous than the first time, since a new civil war that had begun in the Andean state of Cauca reading throughout the Caribbean provinces.
And so at eight o’clock that night she was once again apao the port by the same troop of noisy relatives shedding the same tears of farewell and with the same jumble of last-minute gifts and packages that did not fit in the s. When it was time to sail, the men in the family saluted the ser with a volley of shots fired into the air, and Lorenzo Daza responded from the deck with five shots from his revolver. Fermina Daza’s fears dissipated because the wind was favorable all night, and there was a st of flowers at sea that helped her to sleep soundly without the safety straps. She dreamed that she was seeing Florentino Ariza again, and that he took off the face that she had always seen on him because in fact it was a mask, but his real face was identical to the false one. She got up very early, intrigued by the enigma of the dream, and she found her father drinking mountain coffee with brandy in the captain’s bar, his eye twisted by alcohol, but he did not show the slightest hint of uainty regarding their return.
They were ing into port. The ser slipped in silehrough the labyrinth of sailing ships anchored in the cove of the public market whose stench could be smelled several leagues out to sea, and the dawn was saturated by a steady drizzle that soon broke into a full-fledged downpour. Standing wat the baly of the telegraph office, Florentino Ariza reized the ser, its sails disheartened by the rain, as it crossed Las ánimas Bay and anchored at the market pier. The m before, he had waited until eleven o’clock, when he learhrough a casual telegram of the trary winds that had delayed the ser, and on this day he had returo his vigil at four o’clo the m. He -tio wait, not taking his eyes off the launch that carried ashore the few passengers who had decided to disembark despite the storm. Halfway across, the launch ran aground, and most of them had to abandon ship and splash through the mud to the pier. At eight o’clock, after they had waited in vain for the rain to stop, a black stevedore in water up to his waist received Fermina Daza at the rail of the ser and carried her ashore in his arms, but she was so drehat Florentino Ariza did nnize her.
She herself was not aware of how much she had matured during the trip until she walked into her closed house and at ondertook the heroic task of making it livable again with the help of Gala Placidia, the black servant who came back from her old slave quarters as soon as she was told of their return. Fermina Daza was no lohe only child, both spoiled and tyrannized by her father, but the lady and mistress of an empire of dust and cobwebs that could be saved only by the strength of invincible love. She was not intimi-dated because she felt herself inspired by aed ce that would have enabled her to move the world. The very night of their return, while they were having hot chocolate and crullers at the large kit table, her father delegated to her the authority to run the house, and he did so with as muality as if it were a sacred rite.
“I turo you the keys to your life,” he said.
She, with all of her seventeen years behind her, accepted with a firm hand, scious that every inch of liberty she won was for the sake of love. The day, after a night of bad dreams, she suffered her first sense of displeasure at being home when she opehe baly window and saw again the sad drizzle itle park, the statue of the decapitated hero, the marble bench where Florentino Ariza used to sit with his book of verses. She no lohought of him as the impossible sweetheart but as the certain husband to whom she belonged heart and soul. She felt the heavy weight of the time they had lost while she was away, she felt how hard it was to be alive and how much love she was going to o love her man as God demanded. She was surprised that he was not itle park, as he had been so many times despite the rain, and that she had received no sign of any kind from him, not even a premonition, and she was shaken by the suddehat he had died. But she put aside the evil thought at once, for in the ret frenzy of telegrams regarding her immi return they had fotten to agree on a way to tinue unig once she was home.
The truth is that Florentino Ariza was sure she had not returned, until the telegraph operator in Riohacha firmed that they had embarked on Friday aboard the very same ser that did not arrive the day before because of trary winds, so that during the weekeched for any sign of life in her house, and at dusk on Monday he saw through the windows a light that moved through the house and was extinguished, a little after nine, in the bedroom with the baly. He did not sleep, victim to the same fearful hat had disturbed his first nights of love. Tránsito Ariza arose with the first roosters, alarmed that her son had go to the patio at midnight and had not yet e baside, and she did not find him in the house. He had goo wander along the jetties, reg love poetry into the wind and g with joy until daybreak. At eight o’clock he was sitting uhe arches of the Parish Café, delirious with fatigue, trying to think of how to send his wele to Fermina Daza, when he felt himself shaken by a seismic tremor that tore his heart.
It was she, crossing the Plaza of the Cathedral, apanied by Gala Placidia who was carrying the baskets for their marketing, and for the first time she was not wearing her school uniform. She was taller than when she had left, more polished and intense, her beauty purified by the restraint of maturity. Her braid had grown in, but instead of letting it hang down her back she wore it twisted over her left shoulder, and that simple ge had erased all girlish traces from her. Florentino Ariza sat bedazzled until the child of his vision had crossed the plaza, looking to her the left nor the right. But then the same irresistible power that had paralyzed him obliged him to hurry after her wheurhe er of the Cathedral and was lost in the deafening noise of the market’s rough cobblestones.
He followed her without letting himself be seen, watg the ordinary gestures, the grace, the premature maturity of the being he loved most in the world and whom he was seeing for the first time in her natural state. He was amazed by the fluidity with which she made her way through the crowd. While Gala Placidia bumped into people and became entangled in her baskets and had to run to keep up with her, she navigated the disorder of the street in her own time and spaot colliding with anyone, like a bat in the darkness. She had ofteo the market with her Aunt Escolástica, but they made only minor purchases, since her father himself took charge of provisioning the household, not only with furniture and food but even with women’s clothing. So this first excursion was for her a fasating adventure idealized in her girlhood dreams.
She paid no attention to the urgings of the snake charmers who offered her a syrup for eternal love, or to the pleas of the beggars lying in doorways with their running sores, or to the false Indian who tried to sell her a trained alligator. She made a long aailed tour with no plainerary, stopping with no other motive than her unhurried delight in the spirit of things. She entered every doorway where there was something for sale, and everywhere she found something that increased her desire to live. She relished the aroma of vetiver in the cloth in the great chests, she ed herself in embossed silks, she laughed at her own laughter when she saw herself in the full-length mirror in The Golden Wire disguised as a woman fro?９９lｉb.t>m Madrid, with a b in her hair and a fan painted with flowers.
Iore that sold imported foods she lifted the lid of a barrel of pickled herring that reminded her of nights in the northeast when she was a very little girl in San Juan de la aga. She sampled an Alite sausage that tasted of licorice, and she bought two for Saturday’s breakfast, as well as some slices of cod and a jar of red currants in aguardiente. In the spice shop she crushed leaves of sage and ano in the palms of her hands for the pure pleasure of smelling them, and bought a handful of cloves, another of star anise, and one each of ginger root and juniper, and she walked away with tears of laughter in her eyes because the smell of the ne pepper made her sneeze so much. In the Frenetics shop, as she was buyier soaps and balsam water, they put a touch of the latest perfume from Paris behind her ear and gave her a breath tablet to use after smoking.
She played at buying, it is true, but what she really needed she bought without hesitation, with an authority that allowed no oo think that she was doing so for the first time, for she was scious that she was buying not only for herself but for him as well: twelve yards of linen for their table, percale for the marriage sheets that by dawn would be damp with moisture from both their bodies, the most exquisite of everything for both of them to enjoy in the house of love. She asked for dists and she got them, she argued with grad dignity until she obtaihe best, and she paid with pieces of gold that the shopkeepers tested for the sheer pleasure of hearing them sing against the marble ters.
Florentino Ariza spied on her in astonishment, he pursued her breathlessly, he tripped several times over the baskets of the maid who respoo his excuses with a smile, and she passed so close to him that he could smell her st, and if she did not see him then it was not because she could not but because of the haughty manner in which she walked. To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not uand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clig of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell. heless, wheered the riotous noise of the Arcade of the Scribes, he realized that he might lose the moment he had craved for so many years.
Fermina Daza shared with her sates the singular idea that the Arcade of the Scribes lace of perdition that was forbidden, of course, to det young ladies. It was an arcaded gallery across from a little plaza where carriages and freight carts drawn by donkeys were for hire, where popular erce became noisier and more dehe ed from ial times, wheaciturn scribes in their vests and false cuffs first began to sit there, waiting for a poor man’s fee to write all kinds of dots: memoranda of plaints or petition, legal testimony, cards of gratulation or dolence, love letters appropriate to any stage in an affair. They, of course, were not the ones who had given that thundering market its bad reputation but more ret peddlers who made illegal sales of all kinds of questionable merdise smuggled in on European ships, from obse postcards and aphrodisiat-ments to the famous Catalonian s with iguana crests that fluttered when circumstances required or with flowers at the tip that would open their petals at the will of the user. Fermina Daza, somewhat unskilled in the s of the street, went through the Arcade without notig where she was going as she searched for a shady refuge from the fierce eleven o’clock sun.
She sank into the hot clamor of the shoeshine boys and the bird sellers, the hawkers of cheap books and the witch doctors and the sellers of sweets who shouted over the din of the crowd: pineapple sweets for your sweetie, ut dy is dandy, brown-sugar loaf for yar. But, indifferent to the uproar, she was captivated on the spot by a paper seller who was demonstrating magiks, red inks with an ambience of blood, inks of sad aspeessages of dolence, phosphorest inks for reading in the dark, invisible inks that revealed themselves in the light. She wanted all of them so she could amuse Florentino Ariza and astound him with her wit, but after several trials she decided on a bottle of gold ink.
Then she went to the dy sellers sitting behind their big round jars and she bought six of each kind, pointing at the glass because she could not make herself heard over all the shouting: six angel hair, six tinned milk, six sesame seed bars, six cassava pastries, six chocolate bars, six blanges, six tidbits of the queen, six of this and six of that, six of everything, and she tossed them into the maid’s baskets with an irresistible grad a plete detat from the stormclouds of flies on the syrup, from the tinual hullabaloo and the vapor of rancid sweat that reverberated in the deadly heat. She was awakened from the spell by a good-natured blaan with a colored cloth around her head who was round and handsome and offered her a triangle of pineapple speared oip of a butcher’s knife. She took it, she put it whole into her mouth, she tasted it, and was chewing it as her eyes wandered over the crowd, when a sudden shock rooted her on the spot. Behind her, so close to her ear that only she could hear it iumult, she heard his voice:
“This is not the place for a ed goddess.”
She turned her head and saw, a hand’s breadth from her eyes, those lacial eyes, that livid face, those lips petrified with fear, just as she had seen them in the crowd at Midnight Mass the first time he was so close to her, but now, instead of the otion of love, she felt the abyss of disentment. In an instant the magnitude of her own mistake was revealed to her, and she asked herself, appalled, how she could have nurtured such a chimera in her heart for so long and with so much ferocity. She just mao think: My God, poor man! Florentino Ariza smiled, tried to say something, tried to follow her, but she erased him from her life with a wave of her hand.
“No, please,” she said to him. “Fet it.”
That afternoon, while her father was taking his siesta, she sent Gala Placidia with a two-lier: “Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.” The maid also returned his telegrams, his verses, his dry camellias, and asked him to send back her letters and gifts, Aunt Escolástica’s missal, the veins of leaves from her herbariums, the square ti-meter of the habit of St. Peter Clavier, the saints’ medals, the braid of her fifteenth year tied with the silk ribbon of her school uniform. In the days that followed, on the verge of madness, he wrote her tless desperate letters and besieged the maid to take them to her, but she obeyed her unequivocal instrus not to accept any-thing but the returned gifts. She insisted with so much zeal that Florentino Ariza sent them all back except the braid, which he would return only to Fermina Daza in person so they could talk, if just for a moment.
But she refused. Fearing a decision fatal to her son, Tránsito Ariza swallowed her pride and asked Fermina Daza to grahe favor of five minutes of her time, and Fermina Daza received her for a moment in the doorway of her house, not askio sit down, not askio e in, and without the slightest trace of weakening. Two days later, after an argument with his mother, Florentino Ariza took down from the wall of his room the stained-glass case where he displayed the braid as if it were a holy relid Tránsito Ariza herself retur in the velvet box embroidered with gold thread. Florentino Ariza never had another opportunity to see or talk to Fermina Daza alone in the many ters of their very long lives until fifty-one years and nine months and four days later, when he repeated his vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love on her first night as a widow.
CHAPTER THREE
AT THE AGE of twe, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been the most desirable of bachelors. He had returned from a long stay in Paris, where he had pleted advaudies in medie and surgery, and from the time he set foot on solid ground he gave over-whelming indications that he had not wasted a minute of his time. He returned more fastidious than when he left, more in trol of his nature, and none of his poraries seemed as rigorous and as learned as he in his sce, and none could dater 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 fortuhe girls in his circle held secret lotteries to determine who would spend time with him, and he gambled, too, on being with them, but he mao keep himself in a state of grace, intad tempting, until he succumbed without resistao the plebeian charms of Fermina Daza.
He liked to say that this love was the result of a ical error. He himself could not believe that it had happened, least of all at that time in his life when all his reserves of passion were trated on the destiny of his city which, he said with great frequend no sed thoughts, had no equal in the world. In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happihan those golden after-noons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lovers kissing on the open terraces, and still he had told himself with his hand on his heart that he was not prepared to exge all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory elimihe bad and maghe good, and that thanks to this artifice we mao ehe burden of the past. But wheood at the railing of the ship and saw the white promontory of the ial district again, the motionless buzzards on the roofs, the washing of the poor hung out to dry on the balies, only then did he uand to what extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.
The ship made its way across the bay through a floating bla of drowned animals, and most of the passee in their s to escape the stench. The young doctor walked down the gangplank dressed in perfect alpaca, wearing a vest and dustcoat, with the beard of a young Pasteur and his hair divided by a , pale part, and with enough self-trol to hide the lump in his throat caused not by terror but by sadness. On the nearly deserted dock guarded by barefoot soldiers without uniforms, his sisters and mother were waiting for him, along with his closest friends, whom he found insipid and without expectatioe their sophisticated airs; they spoke about the crisis of the civil war as if it were remote and fn, but they all had an evasive tremor in their voices and an uainty in their eyes that belied their words. His mother moved him most of all. She was still young, a woman who had made a mark on life with her elegand social drive, but who was now slowly withering in the aroma of camphor that rose from her widow’s crepe. She must have seen herself in her son’s fusion, and she asked in immediate self-defense why his skin ale as wax.
“It’s life over there, Mother,” he said. “You turn green in Paris.”
A short while later, suffog with the heat as he sat o her in the closed carriage, he could no longer ehe unmerciful reality that came p in through the window. The o looked like ashes, the old palaces of the marquises were about to succumb to a proliferation of beggars, and it was impossible to dis the ardent st of jasmine behind the vapors of death from the open sewers. Everything seemed smaller to him than when he left, poorer and sadder, and there were so many hungry rats in the rubbish heaps of the streets that the carriage horses stumbled in fright. On the long trip from the port to his house, located in the heart of the District of the Viceroys, he found nothing that seemed worthy of his nostalgia. Defeated, he turned his head away so that his mother would not see, and he began to cry in silence.
The former palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, historic resi-dence of the Urbino de la Calle family, had not escaped the surround-ing wreckage. Dr. Juvenal Urbino discovered this with a broke wheered the house through the gloomy portid saw the dusty fountain ieriarden and the wild brambles in flower beds where iguanas wandered, and he realized that many marble flagstones were missing and others were broken on the huge stairway with its copper railings that led to the principal rooms. His father, a physi who was more self-sacrifig than emi, had died in the epidemic of Asian cholera that had devastated the population six years earlier, and with him had died the spirit of the house. Do?a Blanca, his mother, smothered by m that was sidered eternal, had substituted evening novenas for her dead husband’s celebrated lyrical soirées and chamber certs. His two sisters, despite their natural inations aive vocation, were fodder for the vent.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not sleep at all on the night of his return; he was frightened by the darkness and the silence, and he said three rosaries to the Holy Spirit and all the prayers he could remember to ward off calamities and shipwrecks and all manner of night terrors, while a curlew that had e in through a half-closed door sang every hour on the hour in his bedroom. He was tormented by the halluating screams of the madwomen in the Divine Shepherdess Asylum door, the harsh dripping from the water jar into the washbasin which resohroughout the house, the long-legged steps of the curlew wandering in his bedroom, his genital fear of the dark, and the invisible presence of his dead father in the vast, sleeping mansion.
When the curlew sang five o’clock along with the local roosters, Dr. Juvenal Urbino ended himself body and soul to Divine Providence because he did not have the heart to live another day in his rubble-strewn homeland. But in time the affe of his family, the Sundays in the try, and the covetous attentions of the unmarried women of his class mitigated the bitterness of his first impression. Little by little he grew aced to the sultry heat of October, to the excessive odors, to the hasty judgments of his friends, to the We’ll see tomorrow, Doctor, don’t worry, and at last he gave in to the spell of habit. It did not take him long to i an easy justification for his surrehis was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for 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, slish furniture made of wood that sighed in the icy cold of dawn, but he sigo the attic the treatises on viceregal sd romantic medie and filled the bookshelves behind their glass doors with the writings of the new French school. He took down the faded pictures, except for the one of the physi arguing with Death for the nude body of a female patient, and the Hippocratic Oath printed in Gothic letters, and he hung in their plaext to his father’s only diploma, the many diverse ones he himself had received with highest honors from various schools in Europe.
He tried to impose the latest ideas at Misericordia Hospital, but this was not as easy as it had seemed in his youthful enthusiasm, for the antiquated house of health was stubborn in its attat to atavistic superstitions, such as standing beds in pots of water to prevent disease from climbing up the legs, or requiring evening wear and chamois gloves in the operating room because it was taken frahat elegance was an essential dition for asepsis. They could not tolerate the young newer’s tasting a patient’s urio determihe presence of sugar, quoting Charcot and Trousseau as if they were his roommates, issuing severe warnings in class against the mortal risks of vaes while maintaining a suspicious faith in the ret iion of suppositories. He was in flict with every-thing: his renovating spirit, his maniacal sense of civic duty, his slow humor in a land of immortal pranksters--everything, in fact, that stituted his most estimable virtues provoked the rese of his older colleagues and the sly jokes of the younger ones.
His obsession was the dangerous lack of sanitation iy. He appealed to the highest authorities to fill in the Spanish sewers that were an immense breeding ground for rats, and to build in their place a closed sewage system whose tents would y into the cove at the market, as had always been the case, but into some distant drainage area instead. The well-equipped ial houses had latrines with septiks, but two thirds of the population lived in sha the edge of the ss and relieved themselves in the open air. The excrement dried in the sun, turo 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 cil to impose an obligatory training course so that the poor could learn how to build their own latrines. He fought in vain to stop them from tossing garbage into the mangrove thickets that over the turies had bee ss of putrefa, and to have them collect it instead at least twice a week and ie it in some uninhabited area.
He was aware of the mortal threat of the drinking water. The mere idea of building an aqueduct seemed fantastic, sihose who might have supported it had underground cisterns at their disposal, where water rained dowhe years was collected under a thick layer of scum. Among the most valued household articles of the time were carved wooden water collectors whose stone filters dripped day and night inte earthen water jars. To prevent anyone from drinking from the aluminum cup used to dip out the water, its edges were as jagged as the of a mock king.
The water was crystalline and cool in the dark clay, and it tasted of the forest. But Dr. Juvenal Urbino was not taken in by these appearances of purity, for he khat despite all precautions, the bottom of each earthen jar was a sanctuary for waterworms. He had spent the slow hours of his childhood watg them with an almost mystical astonish-ment, vinced along with so many other people at the time that waterworms were animes, supernatural creatures who, from the sedi-ment in still water, courted young maidens and could inflict furious vengeance because of love. As a boy he had seen the havoc they had wreaked in the house of Lázara de, a schoolteacher who dared to rebuff the animes, and he had seeery trail of glass ireet and the mountain of stohey had thrown at her windows for three days and three nights. And so it was a long while before he learhat waterworms were iy the larvae of mosquitoes, but once he lear he never fot it, because from that moment on he realized that they and many other evil animes could pass through our simple stone filters intact.
For a long time the water in the cisterns had been honored as the cause of the scrotal hernia that so many men iy endured not only without embarrassment but with a certain patriotisolence. When Juvenal Urbino was iary school, he could not avoid a spasm of horror at the sight of men with ruptures sitting in their doorways on hot afternoons, fanning their enormous testicle as if it were a child sleepiween their legs. It was said that the hernia whistled like a lugubrious bird on stormy nights and twisted in unbearable pain when a buzzard feather was burned nearby, but no one plained about those disforts because a large, well-carried rupture was, more than anything else, a display of mase honor. When Dr. Juvenal Urbiurned from Europe he was already well aware of the stific falla these beliefs, but they were so rooted in local superstition that many people opposed the mineral enrit of the water in the cisterns for fear of destroying its ability to cause an honorable rupture.
Impure water was not all that alarmed Dr. Juvenal Urbino. He was just as ed with the lack of hygie the public market, a vast extension of cleared land along Las ánimas Bay where the sailing ships from the Antilles would dock. An illustrious traveler of the period described the market 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 capricious tides, it was the spot where the bay belched filth from the sewers bato land. The offal from the adjoining slaughterhouse was also thrown away there--severed heads, rotting viscera, animal refuse that floated, in sunshine and starshine, in a s of blood. The buzzards fought for it with the rats and the dogs in a perpetual scramble among the deer and suct s from Sotavento hanging from the eaves of the market stalls, and the spriables from Arjona displayed on straw mats spread over the ground. Dr. Urbino wao make the place sanitary, he wanted a slaughterhouse built somewhere else and a covered market structed with stained-glass turrets, like the one he had seen in the old boquerías in Bara, where the provisions looked so splendid and that it seemed a shame to eat them. But even the most plaisant of his notable friends pitied his illusory passion. That is how they were: they spent their lives proclaiming their proud ins, 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, oher hand, loved it enough to see it with the eyes of truth.
“How his city must be,” he would say, “for we have spent four hundred years trying to finish it off aill have not succeeded,”
They almost had, however. The epidemic of cholera morbus, whose first victims were struck down ianding water of the market, had, in eleven weeks, been responsible for the greatest death toll in our history. Until that time the emi dead were interred uhe flagstones in the churches, in the exclusive viity of archbishops and capitulars, while the less wealthy were buried iios of vents. The poor were sent to the ial cemetery, located on a windy hill that was separated from the city by a dry al whose mortar bridge bore the legend carved there by order of some clairvoyant mayor: Lasciate ogni speranza voi trate.
After the first two weeks of the cholera epidemic, the cemetery was overflowing and there was no room left in the churches despite the fact that they had dispatched the decayed remains of many nameless civic heroes to the unal ossuary. The air ihedral grew thin with the vapors from badly sealed crypts, and its doors did not open again until three years later, at the time that Fermina Daza saw Florentino Ariza at close quarters as she left Midnight Mass. By the third week the cloister of the vent of St. Clare was full all the way to its poplar-lined walks, and it was necessary to use the unity’s orchard, which was twice as large, as a cemetery. There graves were dug deep enough to bury the dead on three levels, without delay and without coffins, but this had to be stopped because the brimming ground turned into a spohat oozed siing, ied blood at every step. Then arras were made to tinue burying in The Hand of God, a cattle ranch less than a league from the city, which was later secrated as the Universal Cemetery.
From the time the cholera proclamation was issued, the local garrison shot a on from the fortress every quarter hour, day and night, in accordah the local superstition that gunpowder purified the atmosphere. The cholera was much more devastating to the black population, which was larger and poorer, but iy it had nard for color or background. It ended as suddenly as it had begun, and the extent of its ravages was never known, not be-cause this was impossible to establish but because one of our most widespread virtues was a certaiice ing personal misfortune.
Dr. Marco Aurelio Urbino, the father of Juvenal, was a civic her that dreadful time, as well as its most distinguished victim. By official decree he personally designed and directed public health measures, but on his own initiative he interveo su extent in every social question that during the most critical moments of the plague no higher authority seemed to exist. Years later, re-viewing the icle of those days, Dr. Juvenal Urbino firmed that his father’s methodology had been more charitable than stifid, in many ways, trary to reason, so that in large measure it had fostered the voraciousness of the plague. He firmed this with the passion of sons whom life has turned, little by little, into the fathers of their fathers, and for the first time he regretted not having stood with his father in the solitude of his errors. But he did not dispute his merits: his diligend his self-sacrifid above all his personal ce deserved the many honors rendered him whey recovered from the disaster, and it was with justice that his name was found among those of so many other heroes of less honor-able wars.
He did not live to see his own glory. When he reized in himself the irreversible symptoms that he had seen and pitied in others, he did not even attempt a useless struggle but withdrew from the world so as not to i anyone else. Locked in a utility room at Misericordia Hospital, deaf to the calls of his colleagues and the pleas of his family, removed from the horror of the plague victims dying on the floor in the packed corridors, he wrote a letter of feverish love to his wife and children, a letter of gratitude for his existen which he revealed how mud with how much fervor he had loved life. It was a farewell of twenty heartrending pages in which the progress of the disease could be observed ieriorating script, and it was not necessary to know the writer to realize that he had signed his h his last breath. In accordah his instrus, his ashen body was mingled with others in the unal cemetery and was not seen by anyone who loved him.
Three days later, in Paris, Dr. Juvenal Urbino received a telegram during supper with friends, aoasted the memory of his father with champagne. He said: “He was a good man.” Later he would reproach himself for his laaturity: he had avoided reality in order not to cry. But three weeks later he received a copy of the posthumous letter, and then he surreo the truth. All at ohe image of the man he had known before he knew any other was revealed to him in all its profundity, the man who had raised him and taught him and had slept and fornicated with his mother for thirty-two years a who, before that letter, had never revealed himself body and soul because of timidity, pure and simple.
Until then Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his family had ceived of death as a misfor-tuhat befell others, other people’s fathers and mothers, other people’s brothers and sisters and husbands and wives, but not theirs. They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion. His father’s posthumous letter, more thaelegram with the bad news, hurled him headlong against the certainty of death. A one of his oldest memories, when he was nine years old perhaps, perhaps when he was eleven, was in a way an early sign of death in the person of his father.
One rainy afternoowo of them were in the office his father kept in the house; he was drawing larks and sunflowers with colored chalk oiled floor, and his father was reading by the light shining through the window, his vest unbuttoned aic armbands 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 spot that itched, he asked his son to scratch him with his nails, and as the boy did so he had the strange sensation of not feeling his own body. At last his father looked at him over his shoulder with a sad smile.
“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 cool shadows of the offid flew out again through the window, leaving a trail of feathers fluttering in his wake, but the boy did not see them. More thay years had gone by sihen, and Juvenal Urbino would very soon be as old as his father was that afternoon. He knew he was identical to him, and to that awareness had now been added the awful scioushat he was also as mortal.
Cholera became an obsession for him. He did not know much more about it than he had learned in a routine manner in some marginal course, when he had found it difficult to believe that only thirty years before, it had been responsible for more than one hundred forty thousahs in France, including Paris. But after the death of his father he learned all there was to know about the different forms of cholera, almost as a peo appease his memory, audied with the most outstanding epidemiologist of his time and the creator of the cordons sanitaires, Professor Adrien Proust, father of the great . So that wheuro his try and smelled the stench of the market while he was still out at sea and saw the rats in the sewers and the children rolling naked in the puddles oreets, he not only uood how the tragedy had occurred but was certain that it would be repeated at any moment.
The moment was not long in ing. Ihan a year his students at Misericordia Hospital asked for his help iing a charity patient with a strange blue coloration all over his body. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had only to see him from the doorway the enemy. But they were in luck: the patient had arrived three days earlier on a ser from Cura?ao and had e to the hospital ic by himself, and it did not seem probable that he had ied anyone else. In a, Dr. Juvenal Urbino alerted his colleagues and had the authorities warn the neighb ports so that they could locate and quarahe inated ser, and he had to restrain the military ander of the city who wao declare martial law and initiate the therapeutic strategy of firing the on every quarter hour.
“Save that powder for when the Liberals e,” he said with good humor. “We are no longer in the Middle Ages.”
The patient died in four days, choked by a grainy white vomit, but in the following weeks no other case was discovered despite stant vigilance. A short while later, The ercial Daily pub-lished the hat two children had died of cholera in different locations iy. It was learhat one of them had had on dysentery, but the other, a girl of five, appeared to have been, in fact, a victim of cholera. Her parents and three brothers were sepa-rated and placed under individual quarantine, and the entire neighbor-hood was subjected to strict medical supervision. One of the children tracted cholera but recovered very soon, and the entire family returned home when the danger was over. Eleven more cases were reported in the hree months, and in the fifth there was an alarming outbreak, but by the end of the year it was believed that the danger of an epidemic had beeed.
No one doubted that the sanitary rigor of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, more than the efficacy of his pronous, had made the miracle possible. From that time on, and well into this tury, cholera was endemiot only iy but along most of the Caribbean coast and the valley of the Magda-lena, but it never again flared into an epidemic. The crisis meant that Dr. Juvenal Urbino’s warnings were heard with greater serious-ness by public officials. They established an obligatory Chair of Cholera and Yellow Fever in the Medical School, and realized the urgency of closing up the sewers and building a market far from the garbage dump. By that time, however, Dr. Urbino was not -ed with proclaiming victory, nor was 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 tet everything else in life, because he had been struck by the lightning of his love for Fermina Daza.
It was, in fact, the result of a ical error. A physi who was a friend of his thought he detected the warning symptoms of cholera in aeen-year-old patient, and he asked Dr. Juvenal Urbino to see her. He called that very afternoon, alarmed at the possibility that the plague had ehe sanctuary of the old city, for all the cases until that time had occurred in the poor neighborhoods, and almost all of those among the black population. He entered other, less unpleasant, surprises. From the outside, the house, shaded by the almond trees in the Park of the Evangels, appeared to be in ruins, as did the others in the ial district, but ihere was a harmony of beauty and an astonishing light that seemed to e from ane. The entrance opened directly into a square Sevillian patio that was white with a ret coat of lime and had fl e trees and the same tiles on the floor as on the walls. There was an in-visible sound of running water, and pots with ations on the ices, and cages of strange birds in the arcades. The stra of all were three crows in a very large cage, who filled the patio with an ambiguous perfume every time they flapped their wings. Several dogs, ed elsewhere in the house, began to bark, maddened by the st of a stranger, but a woman’s shout stopped them dead, and numerous cats leapt all around the patio and hid among the flowers, frightened by the authority in the voice. Then there was such a diaphanous silehat despite the disorder of the birds and the syllables of water on stone, one could hear the desolate breath of the sea.
Shaken by the vi that God resent, Dr. Juvenal Urbino thought that such a house was immuo the plague. He followed Gala Placidia along the arcaded corridor, passed by the window of the sewing room where Florentino Ariza had seen Fermina Daza for the first time, wheio was still a shambles, climbed the new marble stairs to the sed floor, and waited to be announced befoing into the patient’s bedroom. But Gala Pla-cidia came out again with a message:
“The se?orita says you ot e in now because her papa is not at home.”
And so he retur five iernoon, in accordah the maid’s instrus, and Lorenzo Daza himself opehe street door and led him to his daughter’s bedroom. There he remained, sitting in a dark er with his arms folded, and making futile efforts to trol his ragged breathing during the examination. It was not easy to knoas more straihe doctor with his chaste touch or the patient in the silk chemise with her virgin’s modesty, but her one looked the other in the eye; instead, he asked questions in an impersonal void she responded in a tremulous voice, both of them very scious of the man sitting in the shadows. At last Dr. Juvenal Urbino asked the patient to sit up, and with exquisite care he opened her nightdress down to the waist; her pure high breasts with the childish nipples shone for an instant in the darkness of the bedroom, like a flash of gunpowder, before she hurried to cover them with crossed arms. Imperturbable, the physi opened her arms without looking at her and examined her by direct ausculta-tion, his ear against her skin, first the chest and then the back.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino used to say that he experieno emotion whe the woman with whom he would live until the day of his death. He remembered the sky-blue chemise edged in lace, the feverish eyes, the long hair hanging loose over her shoulders, but he was so ed with the outbreak of cholera in the ial district that he took no notice of her fl adolesce: he had eyes only for the slightest hint that she might be a victim of the plague. She was more explicit: the young doctor she had heard so much about in e with the cholera epidemic seemed a pedant incapable of loving a himself. The diagnosis was an iinal iion of alimentary in, which was cured by three days of treatment at home. Relieved by this proof that his daughter had not tracted cholera, Lorenzo Daza apanied Dr. Juvenal Urbino to the door of his carriage, paid him a gold peso for the visit, a fee that seemed excessive even for a physi to the rich, and he said goodbye with immoderate expressions of gratitude. He was overwhelmed by the splendor of the Doctor’s family names, a only did not hide it but would have done anything to see him again, under less formal circumstances.
The case should have been sidered closed. But on Tuesday of the following week, without being called and with no prior annou, Dr. Juvenal Urbiuro the house at the inve hour of three iernoon. Fermina Daza was in the sewing room, having a lesson in oil painting with two of her friends, when he appeared at the window in his spotless white frock coat and his white top hat and sigo her to e over to him. She put her palette down on a chair and tiptoed to the window, her ruffled skirt raised to keep it fring on the floor. She wore a diadem with a jewel that hung on her forehead, and the luminous stone was the same aloof color as her eyes, and everything in her breathed an aura of ess. The Doctor was struck by the fact that she was dressed for painting at home as if she were going to a party. He took her pulse through the open window, he had her stick out her tongue, he examined her throat with an aluminum tongue de-pressor, he looked inside her lower eyelids, and each time he nodded in approval. He was less inhibited than on the previous visit, but she was more so, because she could not uand the reason for the ued examination if he himself had said that he would not e baless they called him because of some ge. And even more important: she did not ever want to see him again. When he finished his examination, the Doctor put the tongue depressor bato his bag, crowded with instruments and bottles of medie, and closed it with a resounding snap.
“You are like a new-sprung rose,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Thank God,” he said, and he misquoted St. Thomas: “Remem-ber that everything that is good, whatever its in, es 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 topiusic was almost a magiula that he used to propose friendship, but at that moment she interpreted it as a joke. Besides, her two friends, who had pre-teo paint while she and Dr. Juvenal Urbialking at the window, tittered and hid their faces behind their palettes, and this made Fermina Daza lose her self-trol. Blind with fury, she slammed the window shut. The Doctor stared at the sheer lace curtains in bewilderment, he tried to find the street door but lost his way, and in his fusion he knocked into the cage with the perfumed crows. They broke into sordid shrieking, flapped their wings in fright, and saturated the Doctor’s clothing with a feminine fragrahe thundering voice of Lorenzo Daza rooted him to the spot:
“Doctor--wait for me there.”
He had seehing from the upper floor and, swollen and livid, he came dowairs buttoning his shirt, his side-whiskers still in an uproar after a restless siesta. The Doctor tried to overe his embarrassment.
“I told your daughter that she is like a rose.”
“True enough,” said Lorenzo Daza, “but oh too many thorns.”
He walked past Dr. Urbino without greeting him. He pushed open the sewing room window and shouted a rough and to his daughter:
“e here ahe Doctor’s pardon.”
The Doctor tried to intervene and stop him, but Lorenzo Daza paid no attention to him. He insisted: “Hurry up.” She looked at her friends with a secret plea for uanding, and she said to her father that she had nothing to beg pardon for, she had only closed the window to keep out the sun. Dr. Urbino, with good humor, tried to firm her words, but Lorenzo Daza insisted that he be obeyed. Then Fermina Daza, pale with rage, turoward the window, aending her right foot as she raised her skirt with her fiips, 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 humor, making a cavalier’s flourish with his top hat, but he did not win the pas-sionate smile he had hoped for. Then Lorenzo Daza invited him to have a cup of coffee in his office to set things right, and he accepted with pleasure so that there would be no doubt whatsoever that he did not harbor a shred of rese in his heart.
The truth was that Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not drink coffee, except for a cup first thing in the m. He did not drink alcohol either, except flass of wih meals on solemn occasions, but he not only drank down the coffee that Lorenzo Daza offered him, he also accepted a glass of ae. Then he accepted another coffee with another ae, and then another and another, even though he still had to make a few more calls. At first he listened with attention to the excuses that Lorenzo Daza tio offer in the name of his daughter, whom he defined as an intelligent 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 sed ae, the Doctor thought he heard Fermina Daza’s voice at the other end of the patio, and his imaginatio after her, followed her through the night that had just desded in the house as she lit the lights in the corridor, fumigated the bedrooms with the iicide bomb, uncovered the pot of soup oove, which she was going to share that night with her father, the two of them alo the table, she not raising her eyes, not tasting the soup, not breaking the rancorous spell, until he was forced to give in and ask her tive his severity that afternoon.
Dr. Urbino knew enough about women to realize that Fermina Daza would not pass by the offitil he left, but he stayed heless because he felt that wounded pride would give him no 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 indomitable eloquence. 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 fortable position in the swivel chair, whose springs wailed like an animal i. He had drunk three glasses of ae to eae drunk by his guest, and he paused only when he realized that they could no longer see each other, aood 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 the movement of his lips, ahought these were halluations brought on by his abuse of alcohol. Theood up, with the fasatiion that he was inside a body that belonged not to him but to someone who was still in the chair where he had been sitting, and he had to make a great effort not to lose his mind.
It was after seven o’clock when he left the office, preceded by Lorenzo Daza. There was a full moon. The patio, idealized by ae, floated at the bottom of an aquarium, and the cages covered with cloths looked like ghosts sleeping uhe hot st of new e blossoms. The sewing room windoen, there was a lighted lamp on the worktable, and the unfinished paintings 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 g with rage in her bedroom, lying face down on the bed and waiting for her father so that she could make him pay for the afternoon’s humiliation. The Doctor did not renounce his hope of saying goodbye to her, but Lorenzo Daza did not suggest it. He yearned for the innoce of her pulse, her cat’s tongue, her teonsils, but he was disheartened by the idea that she never wao see him again and would never permit him to try to see her. When Lorenzo Daza walked into the entryway, the crows, awake uheir sheets, emitted a funereal shriek. “They will peck out your eyes,” the Doctor said aloud, thinking of her, and Lorenzo Daza turned around to ask him what he had said.
“It was not me,” he said. “It was the ae.”
Lorenzo Daza apanied him to his carriage, trying to force him to accept a gold peso for the sed visit, but he would not take it. He gave the correstrus to the driver for taking him to the houses of the two patients he still had to see, and he climbed into the carriage without help. But he began to feel sick as they bounced along the cobbled streets, so that he ordered the driver to take a different route. He looked at himself for a moment in the carriage mirror and saw that his image, too, was still thinking about Fermina Daza. He shrugged his shoulders. Then he belched, lowered his head to his chest, and fell asleep, and in his dream he began to hear funeral bells. First he heard those of the Cathedral and then he heard those of all the other churches, oer 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 having café leche and crullers for supper at the formal table in the large dining room when they saw him appear in the door, his face haggard and his entire being dishonored by the whorish perfume of the crows. The largest bell of the adjat Cathedral resounded in the immey space of the house. His mother asked him in alarm where in the world he had been, for they had looked everywhere for him so that he could attend General Ignaaría, the last grandson of the Marquis de Jaraíz de la Vera, who had been struck down that afternoon by a cerebral heme: it was for him that the bells were tolling. Dr. Juvenal Urbino listeo his mother without hearing her as he clutched the doorframe, and then he gave a half turn, trying to reach his bedroom, but he fell flat on his fa an explosion of star anise vomit.
“Mother of God,” shouted his mother. “Something very strange must have happened for you to show up in your own house in this state.”
The strahing, however, had not yet occurred. Taking advantage of the visit of the famous pianist Romeo Lussich, who played a cyozart sonatas as soon as the city had recovered from m the death of General Ignaaría, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had the piano from the Music School placed in a mule-drawn wagon and brought a history-making sereo Fermina Daza. She was awakened by the first measures, and she did not have to look out the grating on the baly to knoas the sponsor of that unon tribute. The only thing she regretted was not having the ce of other harassed maidens, who emptied their chamber pots on the heads of unwanted suitors. Lorenzo Daza, oher hand, dressed without delay as the serenade laying, and when it was over he had Dr. Juvenal Urbino and the pianist, still wearing their formal cert clothes, e in to the visitors’ parlor, where he thahem for the sereh a glass of good brandy.
Fermina Daza soon realized that her father was trying to soften her heart. The day after the serenade, he said to her in a casual manner: “Imagine how your mother would feel if she knew you were being courted by an Urbino de la Calle.” Her dry response was: “She would turn over in her grave.” The friends who painted with her told her that Lorenzo Daza had been io lunch at the Social Club by Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who had received a severe reprimand for breaking club rules.
It was only then that she learhat her father had applied for membership in the Social Club on several occasions, and that each time he had beeed with such a large number of black balls that atempt was not possible. But Lorenzo Daza had an infinite capacity for assimilating humilia-tions, and he tinued his ingenious strategies fing casual enters with Juvenal Urbino, not realizing that it was Juvenal Urbino who went out of his way to let himself be entered. At times they spent hours chatting in the office, while the house seemed suspe the edge of time because Fermina Daza would not permit anything to run its normal course until he left. The Parish Café was a good intermediate haven. It was there that Lorenzo Daza gave Juvenal Urbino his first lessons in chess, and he was such a diligent pupil that chess became an incurable addi that tor-mented 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, iryway to his house. It was addressed to his daughter and the monogram “J.U.C.” was imprinted on the seal. He slipped it uhe door as he passed Fermina’s bedroom, and she never uood how it had e there, si was inceivable to her that her father had ged so much that he would bring her a letter from a suitor. She left it on 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 Juvenal Urbino had returo the house to give her the tongue depressor he had used to examihroat. In the dream, the tongue depressor was made not of aluminum but of a delietal that she had tasted with pleasure in other dreams, so that she broke it in two unequal pieces and gave him the smaller one.
When she awoke she opehe letter. It was brief and proper, and all that Juvenal Urbino asked ermission to request her father’s permission to visit her. She was impressed by its simplicity and seriousness, and the rage she had cultivated with so much love for so many days faded away on the spot. She kept the letter itom of her trunk, but she remembered that she had also kept Florentino Ariza’s perfumed letters there, and she took it out of the chest to find another place for it, shaken by a rush of shame. Then it seemed that the most det thing to do was to pretend she had not received it, and she bur in the lamp, watg how the drops of wax exploded into blue bubbles above the flame. She sighed: “Poor man.” And then she realized that it was the sed time she had said those words in little more than a year, and for a moment she thought about Florentino Ariza, and even she was surprised at how removed he was from her life: poor man.
Three more letters arrived with the last rains in October, the first of them apanied by a little box of violet pastilles from Flavigny Abbey. Two had been delivered at the door by Dr. Juvenal Urbino’s an, 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 sed so that no one could tell him they had not been received. Moreover, both of them were sealed with his monogram in wax and written in the cryptic scrawl that Fermina Daza already reized as a physi’s handwriting. Both of them said in substance what had been said in the first, and were ceived in the same submissive spirit, but underh their propriety one could begin to dete impatiehat was never evident in the parsimonious letters of Florentino Ariza. Fermina Daza read them as soon as they were delivered, two weeks apart, and without knowing why, she ged her mind as she was about to throw them into the fire. But she hought of answering them.
The third letter in October had been slipped uhe street door, and was in every way different from the previous ohe handwriting was so childish that there was no doubt it had been scrawled with the left hand, but Fermina Daza did not realize that until the text itself proved to be a poison peer. Whoever had written it took frahat Fermina Daza had bewitched Dr. Juvenal Urbino with her love potions, and from that supposition sinister clusions had been drawn. It ended with a threat: if Fermina Daza did not renounce her efforts to move up in the world by means of the most desirable man iy, she would be exposed to public disgrace.
She felt herself the victim of a grave injustice, but her rea was not vindictive. On the trary: she would have liked to discover who the author of the anonymous letter was in order to vince him of his error with all the perti explanations, for she felt certain that never, for any reason, would she respond to the wooing of Juvenal Urbino. In the days that followed she received two more unsigned letters, as perfidious as the first, but none of the three seemed to be written by the same persoher she was the victim of a plot, or the false version of her secret love affair had gone further than anyone could imagine. She was disturbed by the idea that it was all the result of a simple indiscretion on the part of Juvenal Urbino.
It occurred to her that perhaps he was different from his worthy appearahat perhaps he talked too much when he was making house calls and boasted of imaginary quests, as did so many other men of his class. She thought about writing him a letter to reproach him for the insult to her honor, but then she decided against the idea because that might be just what he wanted. She tried to learn more from the friends who painted with her in the sewing room, but they had heard only benign ents ing the serenade by solo piano. She felt furious, impotent, humiliated. In trast to her initial feeling that she wao meet with her invisible enemy in order to vince him of his errors, now she only wao cut him to ribbons with the pruning shears. She spent sleepless nights analyziails and phrases in the anonymous letters in the hope of finding some shred of fort. It was a vain hope: Fermina Daza was, by nature, alien to the inner world of the Urbino de la Calle family, and she had ons for defending herself from their good as but not from their evil ones.
This vi became even more bitter after the fear caused by the black doll that was sent to her without aer, but whose in seemed easy to imagine: only Dr. Juvenal Urbino could have sent it. It had been bought in Martinique, acc to the inal tag, and it was dressed in an 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 pillow during the day and grew aced to sleeping with it at night. After a time, however, she discovered when she awoke from an exhausting dream that the doll was growing: the inal exquisite dress she had arrived in above her thighs, and her shoes had burst from the pressure of her feet. Fermina Daza had heard of Afri spells, but none as frightening as this. Oher hand, she could not imagihat a man like Juvenal Urbino would be capable of su atrocity. She was right: the doll had been brought not by his an but by an iti shrimpmonger whom no one krying to solve the enigma, Fermina Daza thought for a moment of Florentino Ariza, whose depressed dition caused her dismay, but life vinced her of her error. The mystery was never clarified, and just thinking about it made her shudder with fear long after she was married and had children and thought of herself as destiny’s darling: the happiest woman in the world.
Dr. Urbino’s last resort was the mediation of Sister Franca de la Luz, Superior of the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, who could not deny the request of a family that had sup-ported her unity sis establishment in the Americas. She appeared one m at nine o’clo the pany of a novice, and for half an hour the two of them had to amuse themselves with the birdcages while Fermina Daza finished her bath. She was a mase German with a metallic at and an imperious gaze that had ionship to her puerile passions. Fermina Daza hated her and everything that had to do with her more than anything in this world, and the mere memory of her false piety made scorpions crawl in her belly. Just the sight of her from the bathroom door was enough to revive the torture of school, the unbearable boredom of daily Mass, the terror of examinations, the servile diligence of the novices, all of that life distorted by the prism of spiritual poverty.
Sister Franca de la Luz, oher hand, greeted her 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 mahe house, the good taste evident iio, the brazier filled with e blossoms. She ordered the novice to wait for her without getting too close to the crows, who in a careless moment might peck out her eyes, and she looked for a private spot where she could sit down and talk aloh Fermina, who invited her into the drawing room.
It was a brief and bitter visit. Sister Franca de la Luz, wasting no time on formalities, offered honorable reinstatement to Fermina Daza. The reason for her expulsion would be erased not only from the records but also from the memory of the unity, and this would allow her to finish her studies and receive her baccalaureate degree. Fermina Daza erplexed and wao know why.
“It is the request of someone who deserves everything he desires and whose only wish is to make you happy,” said the nun. “Do you know who that is?”
Then she uood. She asked herself with what authority a woman who had made her life miserable because of an i letter served as the emissary of love, but she did not dare to speak of it. Instead she said yes, she khat man, and by the same token she also khat he had nht to interfere in her life.
“All he asks is that you allow him to speak with you for five minutes,” said the nun. “I am certain your father will agree.”
Fermina Daza’s anger grew more inte the idea that her father was an accessory to the visit.
“We saw each other twice when I was sick,” she said. “Now there is no reason for us to see each ain.”
“For any woman with a shred of sehat man is a gift from Divine Providence,” said the nun.
She tio speak of his virtues, of his devotion, of his dedication t those in pain. As she spoke she pulled from her sleeve a gold rosary with Christ carved in marble, and da in front of Fermina Daza’s eyes. It was a family heirloom, more than a hundred years old, 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 uand how you lend yourself to this,” she said, “if you think that love is a sin.”
Sister Franca de la Luz pretended not to notice the remark, but her eyelids flamed. She tio dahe rosary in front of Fermina Daza’s eyes.
“It would be better for you to e to an uanding with me,” she said, “because after me es His Grace the Archbishop, and it is a different story with him.”
“Let him e,” said Fermina Daza.
Sister Franca de la Luz tucked the gold rosary into her sleeve. Then from the other she took a well-used handkerchief squeezed into a ball and held it tight in her fist, looking at Fermina Daza from a great distand with a smile of iseration.
“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, looked her straight in the eye without speak-ing, chewing in silence, until she saw with infiisfa that those mase eyes had filled with tears. Sister Franca de la Luz dried them with the ball of the handkerchief and stood up.
“Your father is right when he says that you are a mule,” she said.
The Archbishop did not e. So the siege might have ehat day if Hildebranda Sánchez had not arrived to spend Christmas with her cousin, and life ged for both of them. They met her on the ser from Riohacha at five o’clo the m, surrounded by a crowd of passengers half dead from seasiess, but she walked off the boat radiant, very much a woman, aed after the bad night at sea. She arrived with crates of live turkeys and all the fruits of her fertile lands so that no one would lack for food during her visit. Lisímaco Sánchez, her father, sent a message asking if they needed musis for their holiday parties, because he had the best at his disposal, and he promised to send a load of fireworks later on. He also annouhat he could not e for his daughter before March, so there lenty of time for them to enjoy life.
The two cousins began at once. From the first afternoon they bathed together, he two of them making their reciprocal ablutions with water from the cistern. They soaped each other, they removed each other’s nits, they pared their buttocks, their quiet breasts, each looking at herself iher’s mirror to judge with what cruelty time had treated them sihe last occasiohey had seen each other undressed. Hildebranda was large and solid, with golden skin, but all the hair on her body was like a mulatta’s, as short and curly as steel wool. Fermina Daza, oher hand, had a pale nakedness, with long lines, serene skin, and straight hair. Gala Placidia had two identical beds placed in the bedroom, but at times they lay together in one and talked in the dark until dawn. They smoked long, thin highwaymen’s cigars that Hildebranda had hidden in the lining of her trunk, and afterward they had to burn Armenian paper to purify the rank smell they left behind in the bedroom. Fermina Daza had smoked for the first time in Valledupar, and had tinued in Fonsed Riohacha, where as many as ten cousins would lock themselves in a room to talk about men and to smoke.
She learo smoke backward, with the lit end in her mouth, the way men smoked at night during the wars so that the glow of their cigarettes would not betray them. But she had never smoked alone. With Hildebranda in her house, she smoked every night befoing 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 to smoke 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 distaween her and her impossible love, although they wanted her to think that it was to help Fermina decide on a good match. Hildebranda had accepted, hoping to mock fetfulness as her cousin had done before her, and she had arranged with the telegraph operator in Foo send her messages with the greatest prudence. And that is why her disillusion was so bitter when she learhat Fermina Daza had rejected Florentino Ariza. Moreover, Hildebranda had a universal ception of love, and she believed that whatever happeo 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 Fermina Daza, she went to the telegraph office alone, intending to win the favor of Florentino Ariza.
She would not have reized him, for there was nothing about him that correspoo the image she had formed from Fermina Daza. At first gla seemed impossible that her cousin could have been on the verge of madness because of that almost invisible clerk with his air of a whipped dog, whose clothing, worthy of a rabbi in disgrace, and whose solemn manner could not perturb anyone’s heart. But she sooed of her first impression, for Florentino Ariza placed himself at her unditional service without knowing who she was: he never found out. No one could have uood her as he did, so that he did not ask for identification or even for her address. His solution was very simple: she would pass by the telegraph offi Wednesday afternoons so that he could place her lover’s answers in her hand, and nothing more. A when he read the written message that Hildebranda brought him, he asked if she would accept a suggestion, and she agreed. Florentino Ariza first made some cor-res between the lines, erased them, rewrote them, had no more room, and at last tore up the page and wrote a pletely new message that she thought very toug. When she left the telegraph office, Hildebranda was on the verge of tears.
“He is ugly and sad,” she said to Fermina Daza, “but he is all love.”
What most struck Hildebranda was her cousin’s solitude. She seemed, she told her, an old maid of twenty. Aced te scattered families in houses where no one was certain hoeople were living or eating at any given time, Hildebranda could not imagine a girl her age reduced to the cloister of a private life. That was true: from the time she awoke at six in the m until she turned out the light in the bedroom, Fermina Daza devoted herself to killing time. Life was imposed on her from outside. First, at the final rooster crow, the milkman woke her with his rapping on the door khen came the knock of the fishwife with her box of red snappers dying on a bed of algae, the sumptuous fruit sellers with vegetables from María la Baja and fruit from San Jato.
And then, for the rest of the day, everyone k the door: beggars, girls with lottery tickets, the Sisters of Charity, the knife grinder with the gossip, the man who bought bottles, the man who bought old gold, the man who bought neers, the fake gypsies who offered to read one’s destiny in cards, in the lines of one’s palm, in coffee grounds, ier in washbasins. Gala Placidia spent the week opening and closing the street door to say no, another day, or shouting from the baly in a foul humor to stop b us, damn it, we already bought everything we need. She had replaced Aunt Escolástica with so much fervor and so much grace that Fermina fused them to the point of loving her. She had the obsessions of a slave. Whenever she had free time she would go to the work-room to iron the linens; she kept them perfect, she kept them in cupboards with lavender, and she ironed and folded not only what she had just washed but also what might have lost its brighthrough disuse. With the same care she tio maintain the wardrobe of Fermina Sánchez, Fermina’s mother, who had died fourteen years before.
But Fermina Daza was the one who made the decisions. She ordered what they would eat, what they would buy, what had to be done in every circumstance, and in that way she determihe life in a house where iy nothing had to be determined. When she finished washing the cages and feeding the birds, and makiain that the flowers wanted for nothing, she was at a loss. Often, after she was expelled from school, she would fall asleep at siesta and not wake up until the day. The painting classes were only a more amusing way to kill time.
Her relationship with her father had lacked affe sihe expulsion of Aunt Escolástica, although they had found the way to live together without b each other. When she awoke, he had already goo his business. He rarely missed the ritual of lunch, although he almost e, for the aperitifs and Gali appetizers at the Parish Café satisfied him. He did supper either: they left his meal oable, everything on one plate covered by another, although they khat he would it until the day when it was reheated for his breakfast. Once a week he gave his daughter money for expenses, which he calculated with care and she administered with rigor, but he listened with pleasure to any request she might make for unforeseen expenses. He never questioned a penny she spent, he never asked her for any explanations, but she behaved as if she had to make an ating before the Tribunal of the Holy Office.
He had never spoken to her about the nature or dition of his business, and he had akeo his offices in the port, which were in a location forbidden to det young ladies even if apanied by their fathers. Lorenzo Daza did not e home before ten o’clock at night, which was the curfew hour during the less critical periods of the wars. Until that time he would stay at the Parish Café, playing one game or another, for he was an expert in all salon games and a good teacher as well. He always came home sober, not disturbing his daughter, despite the fact that he had his first ae when he awoke and tinued chewing the end of his unlit cigar and drinking at regular intervals throughout the day. One night, however, Fermina heard him e in. She heard his cossack’s step oair, his heavy breathing in the sed-floor hallway, his pounding with the flat of his hand on her bedroom door. She ope, and for the first time she was 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 happeo indicate whether he had told the truth, but after that night Fermina Daza khat she was alone in the world. She lived in a social limbo. Her former sates were in a heaven that was closed to her, above all after the dishonor of her expulsion, and she was not a neighbor to her neighbors, because they had known her without a past, in the uniform of the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin. Her father’s world was one of traders and stevedores, of war refugees in the public shelter of the Parish Café, of solitary men. In the last year the painting classes had alleviated her seclusion somewhat, for the teacher preferred group classes and would bring the other pupils to the sewing room. But they were girls of varying and undefined social circumstances, and for Fermina Daza they were no more than borrowed friends whose affe ended with each class. Hildebranda wao open the house, air it, bring in her father’s musis and fireworks and castles of gun-powder, and have a ival dance whose gale winds would clear out her cousin’s moth-eaten spirit, but she soon realized that her proposals were to no avail, and for a very simple reason: there was no oo invite.
In any case, it was she who thrust Fermina Daza into life. Iernoon, after the painting classes, she allowed herself to be taken out to see the city. Fermina Daza showed her the route she had taken every day with Aunt Escolástica, the ben the little park where Florentino Ariza preteo read while he waited for her, the narrow streets along which he followed her, the hiding places for their letters, the sinister palace where the prison of the Holy Office had been located, later restored and verted into the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, which she hated with all her soul. They climbed the hill of the paupers’ cemetery, where Florentino Ariza played the violin acc to the dire of the winds so that she could listen to him in bed, and from there they viewed the entire historic city, the broken roofs and the deg walls, the rubble of fortresses among the brambles, the trail of islands in the bay, the hovels of the poor around the ss, the immense Caribbean.
On Christmas Eve they went to Midnight Mass ihedral. Fermina sat where she used to hear Florentino Ariza’s fidential music with greatest clarity, and she showed her cousin the exact spot where, on a night like this, she had seen his frightened eyes up close for the first time. They ventured alone as far as the Arcade of the Scribes, they bought sweets, they were amused in the shop that sold fancy paper, and Fermina Daza showed her cousin the place where she suddenly discovered that her love was nothing more than an illusion. She herself had not realized that every step she took from her house to school, every spot iy, every moment of her ret past, did not seem to exist except by the grace of Florentino Ariza. Hildebranda poihis out to her, but she did not admit it because she never would have admitted that Florentino Ariza, for better or for worse, was the only thing that had ever happeo her in her life.
It was during this time that a Belgian photographer came to the city a up his studio at the end of the Arcade of the Scribes, and all those with the moo pay took advantage of the oppor-tunity to have their pictures taken. Fermina and Hildebranda were among the first. They emptied Fermina Sanchez’s clothes closet, they shared the fi dresses, the parasols, the party shoes, the hats, and they dressed as midtury ladies. Gala Placidia helped them lace up the corsets, she showed them how to move ihe wire frames of the hoop skirts, how to wear the gloves, how to button the high-heeled boots. Hildebranda preferred a broad-brimmed hat with ostrich feathers that hung down over her shoulder. Fermina wore a more ret model decorated with painted plaster fruit and oline flowers. At last they giggled when they looked in the mirror and saw the resemblao the daguerreotypes of their grandmothers, and they went off happy, laughing for all they were worth, to have the photograph of their lives taken. Gala Placidia watched from the baly as they crossed the park with their parasols open, t on their high heels and pushing against the hoop skirts with their bodies as if they were children’s walkers, and she gave them her blessing so that God would help them in their portraits.
There was a mob in front of the Belgian’s studio because photo-graphs were being taken of Beeno, who had won the boxing championship in Panama. He wore his boxing trunks and his boxing gloves and his , and it was not easy to photograph him because he had to hold a fighting stance for a whole minute and breathe as little as possible, but as soon as he put up his guard, his fans burst into cheers and he could not resist the temptation to please them by showing off his skill. When it was the cousins’ turn, the sky had clouded over and rain seemed immi, but they allowed their faces to be powdered with stard they leaned against an ala-baster n with such ease that they remained motionless for more time than seemed reaso was an immortal portrait. When Hildebranda died on her ranch at Flores de María, when she was almost one hundred years old, they found her copy locked in the bedroom closet, hidden among the folds of the perfumed sheets along with the fossil of a thought in a letter that had faded with time. For many years Fermina Daza kept hers on the first page of a family album, then it disappeared without anyone’s knowing how, or when, and came into the possession of Florentino Ariza, through a series of unbelievable ces, when they were both over sixty years old.
When Fermina and Hildebranda came out of the Belgian’s studio, there were so many people in the plaza across from the Arcade of the Scribes that even the balies were crowded. They had fotten that their faces were white with stard that their lips were painted with a chocolate-colored salve and that their clothes were not appro-priate to the time of day or the age. The street greeted them with cat-calls and mockery. They were ered, trying to escape public derision, when the landau drawn by the goldenuts opened a path through the crowd. The catcalls ceased and the hostile groups dispersed. Hildebranda was et her first sight of the man eared on the footboard: his satin top hat, his brocaded vest, his knowiures, the sweetness in his eyes, the authority of his presence.
Although she had never seen him before, she reized him immediately. The previous month, Fermina Daza had spoken about him, in an offhand way and with no sign of i, oernoon when she did not want to pass by the house of the Marquis de Casalduero because the landau with the golden horses was stopped in front of the door. She told her who the owner was and attempted to explain the reasons for her antipathy, although she did not say a word about his c her. Hildebranda thought no more about him. But when she identified him as a vision out of legend, standing in the carriage door with one foot on the ground and the other on the footboard, she could not uand her cousin’s motives.
“Please get in,” said Dr. Juvenal Urbino. “I will take you wherever you want to go.”
Fermina Daza began a gesture of refusal, but Hildebranda had already accepted. Dr. Juvenal Urbino jumped down, and with his fiips, almost without toug her, he helped her into the carriage. Fermina had no alternative but to climb in after her, her face blazing with embarrassment.
The house was only three blocks away. The cousins did not real-ize that Dr. Urbino had given instrus to the an, but he must have done so, because it took the carriage almost half an hour to reach its destination. The girls were on the principal seat a opposite them, fag, the back of the carriage. Fermina turned her head toward the window and was lost in the void. Hildebranda, oher hand, was delighted, and Dr. Urbino was even more delighted by her delight. As soon as the carriage began to move, she sehe warm odor of the leather seats, the intimacy of the padded interior, and she said that it seemed a nice place to spend the rest of one’s life. Very soon they began to laugh, to exge jokes as if they were old friends, and they began to match wits in a simple wame that -sisted of plag a nonsense syllable after every other syllable. They pretehat Fermina did not uand them, although they knew she not only uood but was listening as well, which is why they did it. After much laughter, Hildebranda fessed that she could no longer ehe torture of her boots.
“Nothing could be simpler,” said Dr. Urbino. “Let us see who finishes first.”
He began to unlace his own boots, and Hildebranda accepted the challe was not easy for her to do because the stays in the corset did not allow her to bend, but Dr. Urbino dallied until she took her boots out from under her skirt with a triumphant laugh, as if she had just fished them out of a pond. Then both of them looked at Fermina and saw her magnifit golden oriole’s profile sharper than ever against the blaze of the setting sun. She was furious for three reasons: because of the undeserved situation in which she found herself, be-cause of Hildebranda’s libertine behavior, and because she was certain that the carriage was driving in circles in order to postpoheir arrival. But Hildebranda had lost all restraint.
“Now I realize,” she said, “that what bothered me was not my shoes but this wire cage.”
Dr. Urbino uood that she was referring to her hoop skirt, and he seized the opportunity as it flew by. “Nothing could be sim-pler,” he said. “Take it off.” With the rapid movements of a prestidigitator, he removed his handkerchief from his pocket and covered his eyes with it.
“I won’t look,” he said.
The blindfold emphasized the purity of his lips surrounded by his round black beard and his mustache with the waxed tips, and she felt herself shaken by a sudden surge of panic. She looked at Fermina, and now she saw that she was not furious but terrified that she might be capable of taking off her skirt. Hildebranda became serious and asked her in sign language: “What shall we do?” Fermina answered in the same code that if they did not ght home she would throw herself out of the moving carriage.
“I am waiting,” said the Doctor.
“You look now,” said Hildebranda.
When Dr. Juvenal Urbino removed the blindfold he found her ged, and he uood that the game had ended, and had not ended well. At a sign from him, the an turhe carriage around and drove into the Park of the Evangels, just as the lamplighter was making his rounds. All the churches were ringing the Angelus. Hildebranda hurried out of the carriage, somewhat disturbed at the idea that she had offended her cousin, and she said goodbye to the Doctor with a perfunctory handshake. Fermina did the same, but wheried to withdraw her hand in its satin glove, Dr. Urbino squeezed her ring finger.
“I am waiting for your answer,” he said.
Then Fermina pulled harder and her empty glove was left dan-gling in the Doctor’s hand, but she did not wait to retrieve it. She went to bed without eating. Hildebranda, as if nothing had happened, came into the bedroom after her supper with Gala Placidia i, and with her inborn wit, ented on the events of the afternoon. She did not attempt to hide her enthusiasm for Dr. Urbino, for his elegand charm, and Fermina refused to ent, but was brim-ming with anger. At one point Hildebranda fessed that when Dr. Juvenal Urbino covered his eyes and she saw the splendor of his perfect teeth between his rosy lips, she had felt an irresistible desire to devour him with kisses. Fermina Daza turo the wall and with no wish to offend, but smiling and with all her heart, put ao the versation:
“What a whore you are!” she said.
Her sleep was restless; she saw Dr. Juvenal Urbino everywhere, she saw him laughing, singiing sulfurous sparks from between his teeth with his eyes blindfolded, mog her with a wame that had no fixed rules, driving up to the paupers’ cemetery in a different carriage. She awoke long before dawn and lay exhausted and wakeful, with her eyes closed, thinking of the tless years she still had to live. Later, while Hildebranda was bathing, she wrote a letter as quickly as possible, folded it as quickly as possible, put it in an envelope as quickly as possible, and before Hildebranda came out of the bathroom she had Gala Placidia deliver it to Dr. Juvenal Urbino. It was one of her typical letters, not a syllable too many or too few, in which she told the Doctor yes, he could speak to her father.
When Florentino Ariza learhat Fermina Daza was going to marry a physi with family and fortune, educated in Europe and with araordinary reputation for a man of his years, there was no power oh that could raise him from his prostration. Tránsito Ariza did all she could and more, using all the stratagems of a sweet-heart to sole him when she realized that he had lost his speed his appetite and ending nights on end in stant weeping, and by the end of the week he was eating again. Then she spoke to Don Leo XII Loayza, the only one of the three brothers who was still alive, and without telling him the reason, she pleaded with him to give his nephew any job at all in the navigation pany, as long as it was in a port lost in the jungle of the Magdalena, where there was no mail and no telegraph and no one who would tell him anything about this damy. His uncle did not give him the job out of defereo his brother’s widow, for she could not bear the very existence of her husband’s illegitimate son, but he did find him employment as a telegraph operator in Villa de Leyva, a dreamy city more thay days’ journey away and almost three thousaers above the level of the Street of Windows.
Florentino Ariza was never very scious of that curative jour-ney. He would remember it always, as he remembered everything that happened during that period, through the rarefied lenses of his misfortune. When he received the telegram inf him of his appoi, it did not even occur to him to sider it, but Lotario Thugut vinced him with Germanic arguments that a brilliant career awaited him in public administratioold him: “The telegraph is the profession of the future.” He gave him a pair of gloves lined with rabbit fur, a hat worthy of the steppes, and an overcoat with a plush collar, tried and proven in the icy winters of Bavaria.
Uncle Leo XII gave him twe suits and a pair of roof boots that had beloo his older brother, and he also gave him passage on the boat. Tránsito Ariza altered the clothing and made it smaller for her son, who was less corpulent than his father and much shorter than the German, and she bought him woolen socks and long underwear so that he would have everything he o resist the rigors of the mountain wastelands. Florentino Ariza, hardened by so much suffering, atteo the preparations for his journey as if he were a dead man attending to the preparations for his own funeral. The same iroicism with which he had revealed to no o his mother the secret of his repressed passio that he did not tell anyone he was going away and did not say goodbye to anyone, but on the eve of his departure he itted, with full awareness, a final mad act of the heart that might well have cost him his life.
At midnight he put on his Sunday suit ao stand alone under Fermina Daza’s baly to play the love waltz he had posed for her, which was known only to the two of them and which for three years had been the emblem of their frustrated -plicity. He played, murmuring the words, his violin bathed in tears, with an inspiration so intehat with the first measures the dogs oreet and then the dogs all over the city began to howl, but then, little by little, they were quieted by the spell of the musid the waltz ended in supernatural silehe baly did not open, and no one appeared oreet, not even the night wat, who almost always came running with his oil lamp in an effort to profit in some small way from serehe act was an exorcism of relief for Florentino Ariza, for whe the violin bato its case and walked down the dead streets without looking back, he no longer felt that he was leaving the m but that he had gone away many years before with the irrevocable determination o return.
The boat, one of three identical vessels belonging to the River pany of the Caribbean, had been renamed in honor of the founder: Pius V Loayza. It was a floating two-story wooden house on a wide, level iron hull, and its maximum draft of five feet allowed it to iate the variable depths of the river. The older boats had been built in ati in midtury on the legendary model of the vessels that traveled the Ohio and the Mississippi, with a wheel on each side powered by a wood-fed boiler. Like them, the boats of the River pany of the Caribbean had a lower deck almost level with the water, with the steam engines and the galleys and the sleeping quar-ters like henhouses where the crew hung their hammocks criss-crossed at differes.
On the upper deck were the bridge, the s of the Captain and his officers, and a recreation and dining room, where notable passengers were i least oo have dinner and play cards. On the middle deck were six first-class s oher side of a passage that served as a on dining room, and in the prow was a sitting room open to the river, with carved wood railings and iron ns, where most of the passengers hung their hammocks at night. Uhe older boats, these did not have paddle wheels at the sides; instead, there was an enormous wheel with horizontal paddles at the stern, just underh the suffog toilets on the passenger deck. Florentino Ariza had not takerouble to explore the boat when he came aboard on a Sunday in July at seven o’clo the m, as those traveling for the first time did almost by instinct. He became aware of his new milieu only at dusk, as they were sailing past the hamlet of Calamar, when he went to the stern to urinate and saw, through the opening ioilet, the gigantic paddle wheel turning under his feet with a volic display of foam and steam.
He had raveled before. He had with him a tin trunk with his clothes for the mountain wastelands, the illustrated hat he bought in pamphlet form every month and that he himself sewed into cardboard covers, and the books of love poetry that he recited from memory and that were about to crumble into dust with so much reading. He had left behind his violin, for he identified it too closely with his misfortune, but his mother had obliged him to take his petate, a very popular and practical bedroll, with its pillow, sheet, small pewter chamber pot, and mosquito ing, all of this ed in straw matting tied with two hemp ropes for hanging a hammo an emergency.
Florentino Ariza had not wao take it, for he thought it would be useless in a that provided bed and bed-clothes, but from the very first night he had reason once again to be grateful for his mood se the last moment, a passenger dressed in evening clothes boarded the boat; he had arrived early that m on a ship from Europe and was apanied by the Pro-vincial Governor himself. He wao tinue his journey without delay, along with his wife and daughter and liveried servant and seven trunks with gold fittings, which were almost too bulky for the stair-way. To aodate the ued travelers, the Captain, a giant from Cura?ao, called on the passengers’ indigenous sense of patrio-tism. In a jumble of Spanish and Cura?ao patois, he explaio Floren-tino Ariza that the man in evening dress was the new plenipotentiary from England, on his way to the capital of the Republic; he reminded him of how that kingdom had provided us with decisive resources in our struggle for independence from Spanish rule, and that as a -sequeno sacrifice was too great if it would allow a family of such distin to feel more at home in our try than in their own. Florentino Ariza, of course, gave up his .
At first he did nret it, for the river was high at that time of year and the boat navigated without any difficulty for the first two nights. After dinner, at five o’clock, the crew distributed folding vas cots to the passengers, and each person opened his bed wherever he could find room, arra with the bedclothes from his petate, ahe mosquito ing over that. Those with hammocks hung them in the salon, and those who had nothing slept oables in the dining room, ed iablecloths that were not ged more than twice during the trip. Florentino Ariza was awake most of the night, thinking that he heard the voice of Fermina Daza in the fresh river breeze, ministering to his solitude with her memory, hear-ing her sing in the respiration of the boat as it moved like a great animal through the darkness, until the first rosy streaks appeared on the horizon and the new day suddenly broke over deserted pastureland and misty ss. Then his journey seemed yet another proof of his mother’s wisdom, and he felt that he had the fortitude to endure fetting.
After three days of favorable water, however, it became more difficult to navigate between inopportune sandbanks aive rapids. The river turned muddy and grew narrower and narrower in a tangled jungle of colossal trees where there was only an occasional straw hut o the piles of wood for the ship’s boilers. The screeg of the parrots and the chattering of the invisible monkeys seemed to intensify the midday heat. At night it was necessary to anchor the boat in order to sleep, and then the simple fact of being alive became unendurable. To the heat and the mosquitoes was added the reek of strips of salted meat hung to dry on the railings. Most of the pas-sengers, above all the Europeans, abahe pestilential stench of their s and spent the night walking the decks, brushing away all sorts of predatory creatures with the same towel they used to dry their incessant perspiration, and at dawn they were exhausted and swollen with bites.
Moreover, another episode of the itent civil war between Liberals and servatives had broken out that year, and the Captain had taken very strict precautions to maintain internal order and pro-tect the safety of the passengers. Trying to avoid misuandings and provocations, he prohibited the favorite pastime during river voyages in those days, which was to shoot the alligators sunning themselves on the broad sandy banks. Later on, when some of the pas-sengers divided into two opposing camps during an argument, he -fiscated everyone’s ons and gave his word of honor that they would be retur the end of the journey. He was inflexible even with the British minister who, on the m following their de-parture, appeared in a hunting outfit, with a precision carbine and a double-barreled rifle for killing tigers.
The restris became even more drastic above the port of Tenerife, where they passed a boat flying the yellow plague flag. The Captain could not obtain any fur-ther informatiarding that alarming sign because the other vessel did not respond to his signals. But that same day they entered another boat, with a cargo of cattle for Jamaica, and were informed that the vessel with the plague flag was carrying two people sick with cholera, and that the epidemic was wreaking havoc along the portion of the river they still had to travel. Then the passengers were pro-hibited from leaving the boat, not only in the ports but even in the uninhabited places where they stopped to take on wood. So that until they reached the final port, a trip of six days, the passengers acquired the habits of prisoners, including the pernicious plation of a packet of praphic Dutch postcards that circulated from hand to hand without anyone’s knowing where it came from, although eran of the river was unaware that this was only a tiny sampling of the Captain’s legendary colle. But, in the end, even that dis-tra with no expectation only increased the tedium.
Florentino Ariza ehe hardships of the journey -with the mineral patiehat had brought sorrow to his mother and exaspera-tion to his friends. He spoke to no ohe days were easy for him as he sat at the rail, watg the motionless alligators sunning them-selves on sandy banks, their mouths open to catch butterflies, watg the flocks of startled herons that rose without warning from the marshes, the mahat heir young at large maternal teats and startled the passengers with their woman’s cries. On a single day he saw three bloated, green, human corpses float past, with buzzards sitting on them. First the bodies of two me by, one of them without a head, and then a very young girl, whose medusan locks undulated in the boat’s wake. He never knew, because no one ever knew, if they were victims of the cholera or the war, but the -ing steninated his memory of Fermina Daza.
That was always the case: a, good or bad, had some rela-tionship to her. At night, when the boat was anchored and most of the passengers walked the decks in despair, he perused the illustrated novels he knew almost by heart uhe carbide lamp in the dining room, which was the only o burning until dawn, and the dramas he had read so often regaiheir inal magic when he replaced the imaginary protagonists with people he knew in real life, reserving for himself and Fermina Daza the roles of star-crossed lovers. On hts he wrote anguished letters and then scattered their fragments over the water that flowed toward her without pause. And so the most difficult hours passed for him, at times in the person of a timid prince or a paladin of love, at other times in his own scalded hide of a lover in the middle of fetting, until the first breezes began to blow and he went to doze in the lounge chairs by the railing.
One night wheopped his reading earlier than usual and was walking, distracted, toward the toilets, a door opened as he passed through the dining room, and a hand like the talon of a hawk seized him by the shirt sleeve and pulled him into a . In the darkness he could barely see the naked woman, her ageless body soaked in hot perspiration, her breathing heavy, who pushed him onto the bunk face up, unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his trousers, impaled herself on him as if she were riding horseback, and stripped him, without glory, of his virginity. Both of them fell, in an agony of desire, into the void of a bottomless pit that smelled of a salt marsh full of prawns. Then she lay for a moment on top of him, gasping for breath, and she ceased to exist in the darkness.
“Now go and fet all about it,” she said. “This never happened.”
The assault had been so rapid and so triumphant that it could only be uood not as a sudden madness caused by boredom but as the fruit of a plan elaborated over time and down to its smallest detail. This gratifyiainty increased Florentino Ariza’s eagerness, for at the height of pleasure he had experienced a revelation that he could not believe, that he even refused to admit, which was that his illusory love for Fermina Daza could be replaced by ahly passion. And so it was that he felt pelled to discover the identity of the mistress of violation in whose panther’s instincts he might find the cure for his misfortune. But he was not successful. On the trary, the more he delved into the search the further he felt from the truth.
The assault had taken pla the last , but this uni-cated with the oo it by a door, so that the two rooms had been verted into family sleeping quarters with four bunks. The octs were two young women, another who was rather mature but very attractive, and an infant a few months old. They had boarded in Barranco de Loba, the port where cargo and passengers from Mompox were picked up ever sihat city had been excluded from the itineraries of the steamboats because of the river’s caprices, and Florentino Ariza had noticed them only because they carried the sleeping child in a large birdcage.
They dressed as if they were traveling on a fashionable o liner, with bustles uheir silk skirts and lace gets and broad-brimmed hats trimmed with oline flowers, and the two younger women ged their efits several times a day, so that they seemed to carry with them their own springlike ambience while the other passengers were suffog in the heat. All three were skilled in the use of parasols ahered fans, but their iions were as indecipherable as those of other women from Mompox. Florentino Anza could not eveermiheir relationship to one another, although he had no doubt they came from the same family. At first he thought that the older one might be the mother of the other two, but then he realized she was not old enough for that, and that she also wore partial m that the others did not share. He could not imagihat one of them would have dared to do what she did while the others were sleeping in the nearby bunks, and the only reasonable supposition was that she had taken advantage of a for-tuitous, or perhaps prearranged, moment when she was alone in the . He observed that at times two of them stayed out for a breath of cool air until very late, while the third remained behind, g for the infant, but one night when it was very hot all three of them left the , carrying the baby, who was asleep in the wicker cage covered with gauze.
Despite the tangle of clues, Florentino Ariza sooed the possibility that the oldest had been the perpetrator of the assault, and with as much dispatch he also absolved the you, who was the most beautiful and the boldest of the three. He did so without valid reasons, but only because his avid observations of the three women had persuaded him to accept as truth the profound hope that his sudden lover was in fact the mother of the caged infant. That supposition was so seductive that he began to think about her with more iy thahought about Fermina Daza, ign the evidehat this ret mother lived only for her child. She was no more thay-five, she was slender and golden, she had Puese eyelids that made her seem even more aloof, and any man would have been satisfied with only the crumbs of the tenderhat she lavished on her son.
From breakfast until bedtime she was busy with him in the salon, while the other two played ese checkers, and when at last she mao put him to sleep she would hang the wicker cage from the ceiling on the cooler side of the railing. She did not ignore him, however, even when he was asleep, but would rock the cage, singing love songs under her breath while her thoughts flew high above the miseries of the journey. Florentino Ariza g to the illusion that sooner or later she would betray herself, if only with a gesture. He even observed the ges in her breathing, watg the reliquary that hung on her batiste blouse as he looked at her without dissimulatiohe book he preteo read, and he itted the calculated imperti-nence of ging his seat in the dining room so that he would face her. But he could not find the slightest hint that she was in fact the repository of the other half of his secret. The only thing of hers he had, and that only because her younger panion called to her, was her first name: Rosalba.
On the eighth day, the boat navigated with great difficulty through a turbulent strait squeezed between marble cliffs, and after lunch it anchored io his was the disembarkation point for those passengers who would tiheir journey into Antioquia, one of the provinces most affected by the new civil war. The port sisted of half a dozen palm huts and a store made of wood, with a zinc roof, and it rotected by several squads of barefoot and ill-armed soldiers because there-had been rumors of a plan by the insurre-ists to pluhe boats. Behind the houses, reag to the sky, rose a promontory of uncultivated highland with a wrought-iron ice at the edge of the precipio one on board slept well that night, but the attack did not materialize, and in the m the port was transformed into a Sunday fair, with Indians selling Tagua amulets and love potions amid packs of animals ready to begin the six-day ast to the orchid jungles of the tral mountain range.
Florentino Ariza passed the time watg black men unload the boat onto their backs, he watched them carry off crates of a, and pianos for the spinsters of Envigado, and he did not realize until it was too late that Rosalba and her party were among the passengers who had stayed on shore. He saw them when they were already sitting sidesaddle, with their Amazons’ boots and their parasols iorial colors, and theook the step he had not dared to take during, the preg days: he waved goodbye to Rosalba, and the three women responded in kind, with a familiarity that cut him to the quick be-cause his boldness came too late. He saw them round the er of the store, followed by the mules carrying their trunks, their hatboxes, and the baby’s cage, and soon afterward he saw them asd along the edge of the precipice like a line of ants and disappear from his life. Then he felt alone in the world, and the memory of Fermina Daza, lying in ambush i days, dealt him a mortal blow.
He khat she was to have an elaborate wedding, and then the being who loved her most, who would love her forever, would not even have the right to die for her. Jealousy, whitil that time had been drowned in weeping, took possession of his soul. He prayed to God that the lightning of divine justice would strike Fermina Daza as she was about to give her vow of love and obedieo a man who wanted her for his wife only as a social ador, and he went into rapture at the vision of the bride, his bride or no one’s, lying face up on the flagstones of the Cathedral, her e blossoms laden with the dew of death, and the foaming torrent of her veil c the funerary marbles of the fourteen bishops who were buried in front of the main altar. Once his revenge was mated, however, he repented of his own wiess, and then he saw Fermina Daza rising from the ground, her spirit intact, distant but alive, because it was not possible for him to imagihe world without her.
He did not sleep again, and if at times he sat down to pick at food, it was in the hope that Fermina Daza would be at the table or, versely, to dehe homage of fasting for her sake. At times his solace was the certainty that during the intoxication of her wedding celebration, even during the feverish nights of her honeymoon, Fermina Daza would suffer one moment, o least but one in a, when the phantom of the sweet-heart she had sed, humiliated, and insulted would appear ihoughts, and all her happiness would be destroyed.
The night before they reached the port of Caracolí, which was the end of the jourhe Captain gave the traditional farewell party, with a woodwind orchestra posed of crew members, and fireworks from the bridge. The minister from Great Britain had sur-vived the odyssey with exemplary stoicism, shooting with his camera the animals they would not allow him to kill with his rifles, and not a night went by that he was not seen in evening dress in the din-ing room. But he came to the final party wearing the tartans of the MacTavish , and he played the bagpipe for everyone’s eai and taught those who were ied how to dance his national dances, and before daybreak he almost had to be carried to his . Florentino Ariza, prostrate with grief, had goo the farthest er of the deck where the noise of the revelry could not reach him, a on Lotario Thugut’s overcoat in an effort to overe the shiv-ering in his bones. He had awake five that m, as the -demned man awakens at dawn on the day of his execution, and for that entire day he had dohing but imagine, minute by minute, each of the events at Fermina Daza’s wedding. Later, wheurned home, he realized that he had made a mistake iime and that everything had been different from what he had imagined, and he even had the good seo laugh at his fantasy.
But in any case, it was a Saturday of passion, which culminated in a new crisis of fever whehought the moment had e for the newlyweds to flee i through a false door to give themselves over to the delights of their first night. Someone saw him shivering with fever and informed the Captain, who, fearing a case of cholera, left the party with the ship’s doctor, and the doctor took the precau-tion of sending Florentino to the quarantine with a dose of bromides. The day, however, when they sighted the cliffs of Caracolí, his fever had disappeared and his spirits were elated, be-cause in the marasmus of the sedatives he had resolved ond for all that he did not give a damn about the brilliant future of the telegraph and that he would take this very same boat back to his old Street of Windows.
It was not difficult to persuade them to give him return passage in exge for the he had surreo the representative of Queen Victoria. The Captain also attempted to dissuade him, arguing that the telegraph was the sce of the future. So much so, he said, that they were already devising a system for installing it on boats. But he resisted all arguments, and in the end the Captain took him home, not because he owed him the price of the but because he knew of his excellent es to the River pany of the Caribbean.
The trip dowook less than six days, and Florentino Ariza felt that he was home again from the moment they entered Mercedes Lagoon at dawn and he saw the trail of lights on the fishing oes undulating in the wake of the boat. It was still dark when they docked in Ni?o Perdido Cove, nine leagues from the bay and the last port for riverboats until the old Spanish el was dredged and put bato service. The passengers would have to wait until six o’clo the m to board the fleet of sloops for hire that would carry them to their final destination. But Florentino Ariza was so eager that he sailed much earlier on the mail sloop, whose crew aowl-edged him as one of their own. Before he left the boat he succumbed to the temptation of a symbolic act: he threw his petate into the water, and followed it with his eyes as it floated past the bea lights of the invisible fishermehe lagoon, and disappeared in the o. He was sure he would not again for all the rest of his days. Never again, because never again would he abandoy of Fermina Daza.
The bay was calm at daybreak. Above the floating mist Florentino Ariza saw the dome of the Cathedral, gilded by the first light of dawn, he saw the dovecotes on the flat roofs, and orienting himself by them, he located the baly of the palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, where he supposed that the lady of his misfortune was still dozing, her head on the shoulder of her satiated husband. That idea broke his heart, but he did nothing to suppress it; on the -trary, he took pleasure in his pain. The sun was beginning to grow hot as the mail sloop made its way through the labyrinth of sailing ships that lay at anchor where the tless odors from the public market and the deg matter otom of the bay blended into oilential stench. The ser from Riohacha had just arrived, and gangs of stevedores in water up to their waists lifted the passengers over the side and carried them to shore. Florentino Ariza was the first to jump on land from the mail sloop, and from that time on he no longer detected the fetid reek of the bay iy, but was aware only of the personal fragrance of Fermina Daza. Everything smelled of her.
He did not return to the telegraph office. His only i seemed to be the serialized love novels and the volumes of the Popular Library that his mother tio buy for him and that he tio read again and again, lying in his hammock, until he learhem by heart. He did not even ask for his violin. He reestablished relations with his closest friends, and sometimes they played billiards or -versed idoor cafés uhe arches around the Plaza of the Cathedral, but he did not go back to the Saturday night dances: he could not ceive of them without her.
On the m of his return from his inclusive journey, he learhat Fermina Daza ending her honeymoon in Europe, and his agitated heart took it frahat she would live there, if not forever then for many years to e. This certainty filled him with his first hope of fetting. He thought of Rosalba, whose memory burned brighter as the other’s dimmed. It was during this time that he grew the mustache with the waxed tips that he would keep for the rest of his life and that ged his entire being, and the idea of substituting one love for another carried him along surpris-ing paths. Little by little the fragrance of Fermina Daza became less frequent and less intense, and at last it remained only in white gardenias.
One night during the war, when he was drifting, not knowing what dire his life should take, the celebrated Widow Nazaret te in his house because hers had beeroyed by on fire during the siege by the rebel general Ricardo Gaitán Obeso. It was Tránsito Ariza who took trol of the situation ahe widow to her son’s bedroom on the pretext that there was no spa hers, but actually in the hope that another love would cure him of the ohat did not allow him to live. Florentino Ariza had not made love since he lost his virginity to Rosalba in the on the boat, and in this emergency it seemed natural to him that the widow should sleep in the bed and he in the hammock. But she had already made the decision for him. She sat on the edge of the bed where Florentino Ariza was lying, not knowing what to do, and she began to speak to him of her insolable grief for the husband who had died three years earlier, and in the meantime she removed her eeds and tossed them in the air until she was not even wearing her wedding ring.
She took off the taffeta blouse with the beaded embroidery and threw it across the room onto the easy chair in the er, she tossed her bodice over her shoulder to the other side of the bed, with one pull she removed her long ruffled skirt, her satin garter belt and funereal stogs, and she threw everything on the floor until the room was carpeted with the last remnants of her m. She did it with so much joy, and with such well-measured pauses, that each of her gestures seemed to be saluted by the on of the attag troops, which shook the city down to its foundations. Florentino Ariza tried to help her unfasteays, but she anticipated him with a deft maneuver, for in five years of matrimonial devotion she learo depend on hersebbr>9９ｌｉb?lf in all phases of love, even the preliminary stages, with no help from ahen she removed her lace panties, sliding them down her legs with the rapid movements of a swimmer, and at last she was naked.
She was twe years old and had given birth three times, but her naked body preserved intact the giddy excitement of an un-married woman. Florentino Ariza was o uand how a few articles of peial clothing could have hidden the drives of that wild mare who, choking on her own feverish desire, undressed him as she had never been able to undress her husband, who would have thought her perverse, and tried, with the fusion and innoce of five years of jugal fidelity, to satisfy in a single assault the iron abstinence of her m. Before that night, and from the hour of grace when her mave birth to her, she had never even been in the same bed with any man other than her dead husband.
She did not permit herself the vulgarity of remorse. On the -trary. Kept awake by the gunfire whizzing over the roofs, she -tio evoke her husband’s excellent qualities until daybreak, not reproag him for any disloyalty other than his having died without her, which was mitigated by her vi that he had never beloo her as much as he did now that he was in the coffin nailed shut with a dozen three-inails and two meters uhe ground.
“I am happy,” she said, “because only now do I know for certain where he is when he is not at home.”
That night she stopped wearing m ond for all, with-out passing through the useless intermediate stage of blouses with little gray flowers, and her life was filled with love songs and pro-vocative dresses decorated with macaws and spotted butterflies, and she began to share her body with anyone who cared to ask for it. Wheroops of General Gaitán Obeso were defeated after a sixty-three-day siege, she rebuilt the house that had been damaged by on fire, adding a beautiful sea terrace that overlooked the breakwater where the surf would vent its fury during the stormy season. That was her love , as she called it without irony, where she would receive only men she liked, when she liked, how she liked, and without charg-ing one red t, because in her opinion it was the men who were doihe favor. In a very few cases she would accept a gift, as long as it was not made of gold, and she managed everything with so much skill that no one could have presented clusive evidenproper duct. On only one occasion did she hover on the edge of public sdal, when the rumor circulated that Archbishop Dante de Luna had not died by act after eating a plate of poisonous mushrooms but had eaten them iionally because she threateo expose him if he persisted in his sacrilegious solicitations. As she used to say between peals of laughter, she was the only free woman in the province.
The Widow Nazaret never missed her occasional appois with Florentino Ariza, not even during her busiest times, and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved, although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love. Sometimes he went to her house, and then they liked to sit on the sea terrace, drenched by salt spray, watg the dawn of the whole world on the horizon. With all his perseverance, he tried to teach her the tricks he had seen others perform through the peepholes ira hotel, along with the theoretical formulations preached by Lotario Thugut on his nights of debauchery.
He per-suaded her to let themselves be observed while they made love, to replace the ventional missionary position with the bicycle on the sea, or the chi on the grill, or the drawn-and-quartered angel, and they almost broke their necks when the cords snapped as they were trying to devise something new in a hammock. The lessoo no avail. The truth is that she was a fearless appre lacked all talent fuided fornication. She never uood the charm of serenity in bed, never had a moment of iion, and her asms were inopportune and epidermi uninspired lay. For a long time Florentino Ariza lived with the deception that he was the only one, and she humored him in that belief until she had the bad luck to talk in her sleep. Little by little, listening to her sleep, he pieced together the navigation chart of her dreams and sailed among the tless islands of her secret life. In this way he learhat she did not want to marry him, but did feel joio his life because of her immense gratitude to him for having corrupted her. She often said to him:
“I adore you because you made me a whore.”
Said in another way, she was right. Florentino Ariza had stripped her of the virginity of a ventional marriage, more pernicious than genital virginity or the abstinence of widowhood. He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love. And something else that from that time on would be her reason for living: he vinced her that one es into the world with a predetermined allotment of lays, and whoever does not use them for whatever reason, one’s own or someone else’s, willingly or unwillingly, loses them forever. It was to her credit that she took him at his word. Still, because he thought he knew her better than anyone else, Floren-tino Ariza could not uand why a woman of such puerile re-sources should be so popular--a woman, moreover, who opped talking in bed about the grief she felt for her dead husband. The only explanation he could think of, ohat could not be denied, was that the Widow Nazaret had enough tendero make up for what she lacked in the marital arts. They began to see each other with less frequency as she widened her horizons and he exploited his, trying to find sola other hearts for his pain, and at last, with no sorrow, they fot each other.
That was Florentino Ariza’s first bedroom love. But instead of their f a perma union, of the kind his mother dreamed about, both used it to embark on a profligate way of life. Florentino Ariza developed methods that seemed incredible in someone like him, taciturn and thin and dressed like an old man from aime. He had two advantages w in his favor, however. One was an unerrihat promptly spotted the woman, even in a croas waiting for him, though even then he courted her with caution, for he felt that nothing was more embarrassing or more demeaning than a refusal. The other was that women promptly identified him as a solitary man in need of love, a street beggar as humble as a whipped dog, who made them yield without ditions, without asking him for anything, without hoping for anything from him except the tranquillity of knowing they had done him a favor. These were his only ons, and with them he joined in historic battles of absolute secrecy, which he recorded with the rigor of a notary in a coded bonizable among many others by the title that said everything: Women. His first notation was the Widow Nazaret. Fifty years later, when Fermina Daza was freed from her sacramental sentence, he had some twenty-five notebooks, with six huwenty-two entries of long-term liaisons, apart from the tless fleeting advehat did not even deserve a charitable note.
After six months of furious lovemaking with the Widow Nazaret, Florentino Ariza himself was vihat he had survived the torment of Fermina Daza. He not only believed it, he also discussed it several times with Tránsito Ariza during the two years of Fermina Daza’s wedding trip, and he tio believe it with a feeling of boundless freedom until oeful Sunday when, with n and no preses, he saw her leaving High Mass on her husband’s arm, besieged by the curiosity and flattery of her new world. The same ladies from fine families who at first had sed and ridiculed her for being an upstart without a name went out of their way to make her feel like one of them, and she intoxicated them with her charm. She had assumed the dition of woman of the world to such per-fe that Florentino Ariza needed a moment of refle t-nize her.
She was another person: the posure of an older woman, the high boots, the hat with the veil and colored plume from some Oriental bird--everything about her was distinctive and fident, as if it had been hers from birth. He found her more beautiful and youthful than ever, but more lost to him than she had ever been, although he did not uand why until he saw the curve of her belly uhe silk tunic: she was in her sixth month nancy. But what impressed him most was that she and her husband made an admirable couple, and both of them iated the world with so much fluidity that they seemed to float above the pitfalls of reality. Flor-entino Ariza did not feel either jealousy e--only great -tempt for himself. He felt ply, inferior, and unworthy not only of her but of any other woman on the face of the earth.
So she had returned. She came back without any reason to repent of the sudden ge she had made in her life. On the trary, she had fewer and fewer such reasons, above all after surviving the diffi-culties of the early years, which was especially admirable in her case, for she had e to her wedding night still trailing clouds of inno-ce. She had begun to lose them during her jourhrough Cousin Hildebranda’s province. In Valledupar she realized at last why the roosters chase the hens, she withe brutal ceremony of the burros, she watched the birth of calves, and she listeo her cousins talking with great naturalness about which couples in the family still made love and whies had stopped, and when, and why, even though they tio live together.
That was when she was initiated into solitary love, with the strange sensation of disc something that her instincts had always known, first in bed, holding her breath so she would not give herself away in the bedroom she shared with half a dozen cousins, and then, with eagerness and un-, sprawling ohroom floor, her hair loose, smoking her first mule drivers’ cigarette. She always did it with certain pangs of sce, which she could overe only after she was married, and always in absolute secrecy, although her cousins boasted to each other not only about the number asms they had in one day but even about their form and size. But despite those bewitg first rites, she was still burdened by the belief that the loss of virginity was a bloody sacrifice.
So that her wedding, one of the most spectacular of the final years of the last tury, was for her the prelude to horror. The anguish of the honeymoon affected her much more than the social uproar caused by her marriage to the most inparably elegant young man of the day. When the banns were annou High Mass ihedral, Fermina Daza received anonymous letters again, some of them -tainih threats, but she took st notice of them because all the fear of which she was capable was tered on her immi violation. Although that was not her iion, it was the correct way to respond to anonymous letters from a class aced by the affronts of his-tory to bow before faits aplis. So that little by little they swal-lowed their opposition as it became clear that the marriage was irrevocable. She noticed the gradual ges iention paid her by livid women, degraded by arthritis ament, who one day were vinced of the uselessness of their intrigues and appeared unannounced itle Park of the Evangels as if it were their own home, bearing recipes and e gifts.
Tránsito Ariza khat world, although this was the only time it caused her suffering in her own person, and she khat her ts always reappeared on the eve of great parties to ask her please to dig down into her jars ahem their pawned jewels for only twenty-four hours in exge for the payment of additional i. It had been a long while sihis had occurred to the extent it did now, the jars emp-tied so that the ladies with long last names could emerge from their shadowy sanctuaries and, radiant in their own borrowed jewels, appear at a wedding more splendid than any that would be seen for the rest of the tury and whose ultimate glory was the sponsorship of Dr. Rafael hree times President of the Republic, philoso-pher, poet, and author of the words to the national anthem, as anyone could learn, from that time on, in some of the more ret diaries. Fermina Daza came to the main altar of the Cathedral on the arm of her father, whose formal dress lent him, for the day, an ambiguous air of respectability.
She was married forever after at the main altar of the Cathedral, with a Mass at which three bishops officiated, at eleven o’clo the m on the day of the Holy Trinity, and with-out a single charitable thought for Florentino Ariza, who at that hour was delirious with fever, dying because of her, lying without shelter on a boat that was not to carry him tetting. During the ceremony, and later at the reception, she wore a smile that seemed painted on with white lead, a soulless grimace that some interpreted as a mog smile of victory, but iy was her poor attempt at disguising the terror of a virgin bride.
It was fortuhat unforeseen circumstances, bined with her husband’s uanding, resolved the first three nights without pain. It rovidential. The ship of the pagnie Générale Trans-atlantique, its itinerary upset by bad weather in the Caribbean, an-nounced only three days in advahat its departure had been moved ahead by twenty-four hours, so that it would not sail for La Rochelle on the day following the wedding, as had been planned for the past six months, but on that same night. No one believed that the ge was not another of the many elegant surprises the wedding had to offer, for the reception ended after midnight on board the brightly lit o liner, with a Viennese orchestra that remiering the most ret waltzes by Johann Strauss on this voyage. So that various members of the wedding party, soggy with champagne, had to be dragged ashore by their long-suffering wives when they began to ask the stewards if there were any free s so they could tihe celebration all the way to Paris. The last to leave saw Lorenzo Daza outside the port taverns, sitting on the ground in the middle of the street, his tuxedo in ruins. He was g with tremendous loud wails, the way Arabs cry for their dead, sitting in a trickle of fouled water that might well have been a pool of tears.
Not on the first night h seas, or on the following nights of smooth sailing, or ever in her very long married life did the barbarous acts occur that Fermina Daza had feared. Despite the size of the ship and the luxuries of their stateroom, the first night was a horrible repe-tition of the ser trip from Riohacha, and her husband, a diligent physi, did not sleep at all so he could fort her, which was all that an overly distinguished physi knew how to do for seasiess. But the storm abated ohird day, after the port of Guayra, and by that time they had spent so much time together and had talked so much that they felt like old friends. On the fourth night, when both resumed their ordinary habits, Dr. Juvenal Urbino was surprised that his young wife did not pray befoing to sleep. She was frank with him: the duplicity of the nuns had provoked in her a certaiao rituals, but her faith was intact, and she had learo maintain it in silence. She said: “I prefer direunication with God.”
He uood her reasoning, and from then on they each prac-ticed the same religion in their own way. They had had a brief engage-ment, but a rather informal one for that time: Dr. Urbino had visited her in her house, without a chaperone, every day at su. She would not have permitted him to touch even her fiips before the episcopal blessing, but he had not attempted to. It was on the first calm night, when they were in bed but still dressed, that he began his first caresses with so much care that his suggestion that she put on her nightdress seemed natural to her. She went into the bathroom to ge, but first she turned out the lights iateroom, and when she came out in her chemise she covered the cracks around the door with articles of clothing so she could return to bed in absolute dark-ness. As she did so, she said with good humor:
“What do you expect, Doctor? This is the first time I have slept with a stranger.”
Dr. Urbi her slide io him like a startled little animal, trying to keep as far aossible in a bunk where it was difficult for two people to be together without toug. He took her hand, cold and twitg with terror, he entwined his fingers with hers, and almost in a whisper he began to ret his recolles of other o voyages. She was tense again because when she came back to bed she realized that he had taken off all his clothes while she was ihroom, which revived her terror of what was to e. But what was to e took several hours, for Dr. Urbino tialking very slowly as he won her body’s fidence millimeter by millimeter.
He spoke to her of Paris, of love in Paris, of the lovers in Paris who kissed oreet, on the omnibus, on the fl ter-races of the cafés opeo the burning winds and languid accordions of summer, who made love standing up on the quays of the Seihout anyone disturbing them. As he spoke in the darkness he caressed the curve of her neck with his fiips, he caressed the fine silky hair on her arms, her evasive belly, and when he felt that her tension had given way he made his first attempt to raise her nightgown, but she stopped him with an impulse typical of her character. She said: “I know how to do it myself.” She took it off, in fact, and then she was so still that Dr. Urbino might have thought she was no lohere if it had not been for the glint of her body in the darkness.
After a while he took her hand again, and this time it was warm and relaxed but still moist with a tender dew. They were silent and unmoving for a while longer, he looking for the opportunity to take the step and she waiting for it without knowing where it would e from, while the darkness expanded as their breathing grew more and more intense. Without warni go of her hand and made his leap into the void: he wet the tip of his forefinger with his tongue and grazed her nipple when it was caught off guard, and she felt a mortal explosion as if he had touched a raw nerve. She was glad of the darkness so he could not see the searing blush that shook her all the way to the base of her skull. “Don’t worry,” he said with great calm. “Don’t fet that I’ve met them already.” He felt her smile, and her voice was sweet and new in the darkness.
“I remember it very well,” she said, “and I’m still angry.” Then he khat they had rouhe cape of good hope, aook her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, dising fingers, the diaphanous nails, and then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm. She never knew how her hand came to his chest a something it could not decipher. He said: “It is a scapular.” She caressed the hairs on his chest one by one and then seized all the hair in her fist to pull it out by the roots. “Harder,” he said. She tried, until she knew she was not hurting him, and then it was her hand that sought his, lost in the darkness. But he did not allow their fio iwine; instead he grasped her by the wrist and moved her hand along his body with an invisible but well-directed strength until she felt the ardent breath of a naked animal without bodily form, but eager a.
trary to what he had imagined, even trary to what she herself had imagined, she did.. not withdraw her hand or let it lie i where he placed it, but instead she ended herself body and soul to the Blessed Virgin, ched her teeth for fear she would laugh out loud at her own madness, and began to identify her rearing adversary by touch, disc its size, the strength of its shaft, the extension of its wings, amazed by its determination but pitying its solitude, making it her own with a detailed curiosity that someone less experiehan her husband might have fused with caresses. He summoned all his reserves of strength to overe the vertigo of her implacable scrutiny, until she released it with childish un as if she were tossing it into the trash.
“I have never been able to uand how that thing works,” she said.
Then, with authoritative methodology, he explai to her in all seriousness while he moved her hand to the places he mentioned and she allowed it to be moved with the obedience of an exemplary pupil. At a propitious moment he suggested that all of this was easier in the light. He was going to turn it on, but she held his arm, saying: “I see better with my hands.” Iy she wao turn on the light as well, but she wao be the oo do it, without anyone’s her to, and she had her way. Then he saw her in the sudden brightness, huddled ial positioh the sheet.
But he watched as she grasped the animal uudy without hesitation, tur this way and that, observed it with an ihat was beginning to seem more than stifid said when she was finished: “How ugly it is, even uglier than a woman’s thing.” He agreed, and pointed out other disadvantages more serious than ugliness. He said: “It is like a firstborn son: you spend your life w for him, sacri-fig everything for him, and at the moment of truth he does just as he pleases.” She tio exami, asking what this was for and what that was for, and when she felt satisfied with her information she hefted it in both hands to firm that it did not weigh enough to bother with, a drop with a gesture of disdain.
“Besides, I think it has too many things on it,” she said.
He was astouhe inal thesis of his dissertation had been just that: the advantage of simplifying the human anism. It seemed antiquated to him, with many useless or duplicated funs that had been essential in other stages of the human race but were not in ours. Yes: it could be more simple and by the same token less vulnerable. He cluded: “It is something that only God do, of course, but in a it would be good to have it established iical terms.” She laughed with amusement and so muaturalhat he took advantage of the opportunity to embrace her and kiss her for the first time on the mouth. She responded, and he tinued giving her very soft kisses on her cheeks, her nose, her eyelids, while he slipped his hand uhe sheet and caressed her flat, straight pubic hair: the pubic hair of a Japanese. She did not move his hand away, but she kept hers on the alert in the event that he took oep further.
“Let’s not go on with the medical lesson,” she said.
“No,” he said. “This is going to be a lesson in love.”
Then he pulled down the sheet and she not only did not object but kicked it away from the bunk with a rapid movement of her feet because she could no longer bear the heat. Her body was undulant aic, much more serious than it appeared when dressed, with its ow of a forest animal, which distinguished her from all the other women in the world. Defenseless in the light, she felt a rush of blood surge up to her face, and the only way she could think of to hide it was to throw her arms around her husband’s ned give him a hard, thh kiss that lasted until they were both gasping for breath.
He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her be-cause he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their iing true love. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long ruher of them had made a mistake.
At dawn, when they fell asleep, she was still a virgin, but she would not be one much lohe following night, in fact, after he taught her how to dance Viennese waltzes uhe starry Caribbean sky, he went to the bathroom after she did, and wheuro the stateroom he found her waiting for him naked in the bed. Then it was she who took the initiative, and gave herself without fear, with-ret, with the joy of an adventure on the high seas, and with no traces of bloody ceremony except for the rose of honor on the sheet. They both made love well, almost as if by miracle, and they tio make love well, night and day aer each time for the rest of the voyage, and when they reached La Rochelle they got along as if they were old lovers.
They stayed in Europe, with Paris as their base, and made short trips to neighb tries. During that time they made love every day, more than on winter Sundays when they frolicked in bed until it was time for lunch. He was a man of strong impulses, and well disciplined besides, and she was not oo let aake advantage of her, so they had to be tent with sharing power in bed. After three months of feverish lovemaking he cluded that one of them was sterile, and they both submitted torous examinations at the H?pital de la Salpêtrière, where he had been an intern. It was an arduous but fruitless effort. However, when they least expected it, and with no stifitervention, the miracle occurred. When they returned home, Fermina was in the sixth month of her pregnand thought herself the happiest woman oh. The child they had both longed for was born without i uhe sign of Aquarius and baptized in honor of the grandfather who had died of cholera.
It was impossible to know if it was Europe or love that ged them, for both occurred at the same time. They were, in essenot only between themselves but with everyone else, just as Florentino Ariza perceived them when he saw them leaving Mass two weeks after their return on that Sunday of his misfortuhey came back with a new ception of life, bringing with them the latest trends in the world and ready to lead, he with the most ret developments in literature, musid above all in his sce. He had a subscription to Le Figaro, so he would not lose touch with reality, and ao the Revue des Deux Mondes, so that he would not lose touch with poetry. He had alsed with his bookseller in Paris to receive works by the most widely read authors, among them Anatole Frand Pierre Loti, and by those he liked best, including Rémy de Gourmont and Paul Bet, but under no circumstances anything by Emile Zola, whom he found intolerable despite his valiant intervention in the Dreyfus affair. The same bookseller agreed to mail him the most attractive scores from the Ricordi catalogue, chamber music above all, so that he could maintain the well-deserved title earned by his father as the greatest friend of certs iy.
Fermina Daza, always resistant to the demands of fashion, brought back six trunks of clothing from different periods, for the great labels did not vince her. She had been iuileries in the middle of winter for the laung of the colle by Worth, the indisputable tyrant of haute couture, and the only thing she got was a case of bron-chitis that kept her in bed for five days. Laferrière seemed less pre-tentious and voracious to her, but her wise decision was to buy her fill of what she liked best in the sedhand shops, although her hus-band swore in dismay that it was corpses’ clothing. In the same way she brought back quantities of Italian shoes without brand names, which she preferred to the renowned and famous shoes by Ferry, and she brought back a parasol from Dupuy, as red as the fires of hell, which gave our alarmed social iclers much to write about.
She bought only o from Madame Reboux, but oher hand she filled a trunk with sprigs of artificial cherries, stalks of all the felt flowers she could find, branches of ostrich plumes, crests of peacocks, tailfeathers of Asiatic roosters, entire pheasants, hummingbirds, and a tless variety of exotic birds preserved in midflight, midcall, midagony: everything that had been used in the past twenty years to ge the appearance of hats. She brought back a colle of fans from tries all over the world, eae appropriate to a different occasion. She brought back a disturbing fragrance chosen from many at the perfume shop in the Bazar de la Charité, before the spring winds leveled everything with ashes, but she used it only once because she did nnize herself in the new st. She alsht back a etic case that was the latest thing iiveness, and she took it to parties at a time when the simple act of cheg one’s makeup in public was sidered i.
They alsht back three indelible memories: the unprece-dented opening of The Tales of Hoffmann in Paris, the terrifying blaze that destroyed almost all the gondolas off St. Mark’s Square in Venice, which they witnessed with grievis from the window of their hotel, and their fleeting glimpse of Oscar Wilde during the first snow-fall in January. But amid these and so many other memories, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had ohat he always regretted not sharing with his wife, for it came from his days as a bachelor student in Paris. It was the memory of Victo, who enjoyed an impassioned fame here that had nothing to do with his books, because someone said that he had said, although no oually heard him say it, that our stitution was meant for a nation not of men but of angels. From that time on, special homage aid to him, and most of our many -patriots who traveled to France went out of their way to see him. A half-dozen students, among them Juvenal Urbino, stood guard for a time outside his residen Avenue Eylau, and at the cafés where it was said he came without fail and never came, and at last they sent a written request for a private audien the name of the angels of the stitution of Rionegro.
They never received a reply. One day, when Juvenal Urbino happeo be passing the Luxembar-dens, he saw him e out of the Seh a young woman on his arm. He seemed very old, he walked with difficulty, his beard and hair were less brilliant than in his pictures, and he wore an overcoat that seemed to belong to a larger man. He did not want to ruin the memory with an imperti greeting: he was satisfied with the almost unreal vision that he would keep for the rest of his life. Wheuro Paris as a married man, in a position to see him under more formal circumstances, Victo had already died.
As a solation, Juvenal Urbino and Fermina Daza brought back the shared memory of a snowy afternoohey were intrigued by a crowd that defied the storm outside a small bookshop on the Boulevard des Capues because Oscar Wilde was inside. When he came out at last, elegant indeed but perhaps too scious of being so, the group surrounded him, asking that he sign their books. Dr. Urbino had stopped just to watch him, but his impulsive wife wao cross the boulevard so that he could sign the only thing she thought appropriate, given the fact that she did not have a book: her beautiful gazelle-skin glove, long, smooth, soft, the same color as her newlywed’s skin. She was sure that a man as refined as he would appreciate the gesture. But her husband objected with firmness, and wheried to go despite his arguments, he did not feel he could survive the embarrassment.
“If you cross that street,” he said to her, “when you get back here you will find me dead.”
It was something natural in her. Before she had been married a year, she moved through the world with the same assurahat had been hers as a little girl in the wilds of San Juan de la aga, as if she had been born with it, and she had a facility for dealing with strahat left her husband dumbfounded, and a mysterious talent for making herself uood in Spanish with anyone, anywhere. “You have to know languages when you go to sell something,” she said with mog laughter. “But when you go to buy, everyone does what he must to uand you.” It was difficult to imagine anyone who could have assimilated the daily life of Paris with so much speed and so much joy, and who learo love her memory of it despite the eternal raiheless, wheurned home overwhelmed by so many experieired of traveling, drowsy with her preg-nancy, the first thing she was asked in the port was what she thought of the marvels of Europe, and she summed up many months of bliss with four words of Caribbean slang:
“It’s not so much.”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE DAY THAT Florentino Ariza saw Fermina Daza irium of the Cathedral, in the sixth month of her pregnand in full and of her new dition as a woman of the world, he made a fierce decision to win fame and fortune in order to deserve her. He did not even stop to think about the obstacle of her being married, because at the same time he decided, as if it depended on himself alohat Dr. Juvenal Urbino had to die. He did not know when or how, but he sidered it aable event that he was resolved to wait for without impatience or violence, even till the end of time.
He began at the beginning. He presented himself unannounced in the office of Uncle Leo XII, President of the Board of Directors and General Manager of the River pany of the Caribbean, and ex-pressed his willio yield to his plans. His uncle was angry with him because of the manner in which he had thrown away the good position of telegraph operator in Villa de Leyva, but he allowed him-self to be swayed by his vi that human beings are not born ond for all on the day their mive birth to them, but that life obliges them over and ain to give birth to themselves. Besides, his brother’s widow had died the year before, still smarting from rancor but without any heirs. And so he gave the job to his errant nephew.
It was a decision typical of Don Leo XII Loayza. Ihe shell of a soulless mert was hidden a genial lunatic, as willing t forth a spring of lemonade in the Guajira Desert as to flood a solemn funeral with weeping at his heartbreakiion of “Ia Tomba Oscura.” His head was covered with curls, he had the lips of a faun, and all he needed was a lyre and a laurel wreath to be the image of the indiary Nero of Christian mythology. When he was not occupied with the administration of his decrepit vessels, still afloat out of sheer distra on the part of fate, or with the problems of river navigation, which grew more and more critical every day, he devoted his free time to the enrit of his lyric repertoire. He liked nothier than to sing at funerals. He had the voice of a galley slave, untrained but capable of impressive registers.
Someone had told him that Enrico Caruso could shatter a vase with the power of his voice, and he had spent years trying to imitate him, even with the windowpanes. His friends brought him the most delicate vases they had e across iravels through the world, and they anized special parties so that he might at last achieve the culmina-tion of his dream. He never succeeded. Still, in the depth of his thun-dering there was a glimmer of tenderhat broke the hearts of his listeners as if they were the crystal vases of the great Caruso, and it was this that made him so revered at funerals. Except at one, whehought it a good idea to sing “When I Wake Up in Glory,” a beauti-ful and moving funeral song from Louisiana, and he was told to be quiet by the priest, who could not uand that Protestant intru-sion in his church.
And so, betweeicores and Neapolitan serenades, his creative talent and his invincible entrepreneurial spirit made him the hero of river navigation during the time of its greatest splendor. He had e from nothing, like his dead brothers, and all of them went as far as they wished despite the stigma of being illegitimate children and, even worse, illegitimate children who had never been reized. They were the cream of what in those days was called the “shop-ter aristocracy,” whose sanctuary was the ercial Club. A, even when he had the resources to live like the Roman emperor he resembled, Uncle Leo XII lived in the old city because it was veo his business, in su austere manner and in such a plain house that he could never shake off an ued reputation for miserliness. His only luxury was even simpler: a house by the sea, two leagues from his offices, furnished only with six handmade stools, a stand for earthenware jars, and a hammo the terrace where he could lie down to think on Sundays. No one described him better than he did when someone accused him of being rich.
“No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”
His straure, whieone once praised in a speech as lucid dementia, allowed him to see in an instant what no one else ever saw in Florentino Ariza. From the day he came to his office to ask for work, with his doleful appearand his twenty-six useless years behind him, he had tested him with the severity of a barracks train-ing that could have broken the hardest man. But he did not intimidate him. What Uncle Leo XII never suspected was that his nephew’s ce did not e from the o survive or from a brute indif-ferenherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, whio obstacle in this world or the would ever break.
The worst years were the early ones, when he ointed clerk to the Board of Directors, which seemed a position made to order for him. Lotario Thugut, Uncle Leo XII’s old music teacher, was the one who advised him to give his nephew a writing job be-cause he was a voracious wholesale er of literature, although he preferred the worst to the best. Uncle Leo XII disregarded what he said ing his nephew’s bad taste in reading, for Lotario Thugut would also say of him that he had been his worst voice student, and still he could make even tombstones cry. In any case, the German was corre regard to what he had thought about least, which was that Florentino Ariza wrote everything with so much passion that even official dots seemed to be about love. His bills of lading were rhymed no matter how he tried to avoid it, and routine busi-ness letters had a lyrical spirit that dimiheir authority. His uncle himself came to his offie day with a packet of correspon-dehat he had not dared put his o, and he gave him his last ce to save his soul.
“If you ot 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 mundane simplicity of mertile prose, imitating models from notarial files with the same diligence he had once used for popular poets. This was the period when he spent his free time in the Arcade of the Scribes, helping uered lovers to write their sted love notes, in order to unburden his heart of all the words of love that he could not use in s reports. But at the end of six months, no matter how hard he twisted, he could n the neck of his die-hard swan. So that when Uncle Leo XII reproached him a sed time, he admitted defeat, but with a certain haughtiness.
“Love is the only thing that is me,” he said.
“The trouble,” his uncle said to him, “is that without river navi-gation there is no love.”
He kept his threat to have him pick up trash on the dock, but he gave him his word that he would promote him, step by step, up the ladder of faithful servitil he found his place. And he did. No work could defeat him, no matter how hard or humiliating it was, no salary, no matter how miserable, could demoralize him, and he never lost his essential fearlessness when faced with the insolence of his superiors. But he was not an i, either: everyone who crossed his path suffered the sequences of the overwhelmiermina-tion, capable of anything, that lay behind his helpless appearance. Just as Uncle Leo XII had foreseen, and acc to his desire that his nephew not be ignorant of a in the business, Florentino Ariza moved through every post during thirty years of dedication and tenacity in the face of every trial.
He fulfilled all his duties with admirable skill, studying every thread in that mysterious that had so much to do with the offices of poetry, but he never won the honor he most desired, which was to write one, just one, acceptable business letter. Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no oh more on sense, no stoer more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet. That, at least, is what he was told by Uncle Leo XII, who talked to him about his father during moments of seal leisure and created an image that resembled a dreamer more than it did a businessman.
He told him that Pius V Loayza used the offices for matters more pleasant than work, and that he always arrao leave the house on Sundays, with the excuse that he had to meet or dispatch a boat. What is more, he had an old boiler installed in the warehouse patio, with a steam whistle that someone would sound with navigation signals in the event his wife became suspicious. Acc to his calculations, Uncle Leo XII was certain that Florentino Ariza had been ceived on a desk in some unlocked offi a hot Sunday afternoon, while from her house his father’s wife heard the farewells of a boat that never sailed. By the time she learhe truth it was too late to accuse him of infamy because her husband was already dead. She survived him by many years, destroyed by the bitterness of not having a child and asking God in her prayers for the eternal damnation of his bastard son.
The image of his father disturbed Florentino Ariza. His mother had spoken of him as a great man with no ercial vocation, who had at last goo the river business because his older brother had been a very close collaborator of the German odore Johann B. Elbers, the father of river navigation. They were the illegitimate sons of the same mother, a cook by trade, who had them by different men, and all bore her surname and the name of a pope chosen at random from the dar of saints’ days, except for Uncle Leo XII, named after the Pope in office when he was born. The man called Florentino was their maternal grandfather, so that the name had e down to the son of Tránsito Ariza after skipping over aire geion of pontiffs.
Florentino always kept the notebook in which his father wrote love poems, some of them inspired by Tránsito Ariza, its pages decorated with drawings of brokes. Two things surprised him. One was the character of his father’s handwriting, identical to his own although he had chosen his because it was the one he liked best of the many he saw in a manual. The other was finding a sentehat he thought he had posed but that his father had written iebook long 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 he was 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 he was leaning against a pedestal that supported the decapitated gaiters of a statue. The little boy beside him was Uncle Leo XII, wearing a ship captain’s hat. Iher photograph, his father was with a group of soldiers in God knows which of so many wars, and he held the lo rifle, and his mustache had a gunpowder smell that wafted out of the picture. He was a Liberal and a Mason, just like his brothers, a he wanted his son to go to the seminary. Florentino Ariza did not see the resemblahat people observed, but acc to his Uncle Leo XII, Pius V was also reprimanded for the lyricism of his dots. In any case, he did not resemble him in the pictures, 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. heless, Florentino Ariza discovered the resemblance many years later, as he was bing his hair in front of the mirror, and only then did he uand that a man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.
He had no memory of him oreet of Windows. He thought he khat at oime his father slept there, very early in his love affair with Tránsito Ariza, but that he did not visit her again after the birth of Florentino. For many years the baptismal certificate was our only valid means of identification, and Florentino Ariza’s, recorded in the parish church of St. Tiburtius, said only that he was the natural son of an unwed natural daughter called Tránsito Ariza. The name of his father did not appear on it, although Pius V took care of his son’s needs i until the day he died. This social dition closed the doors of the seminary to Florentino Ariza, but he also escaped military service during the bloodiest period of our wars because he was the only son of an unmarried woman.
Every Friday after school he sat across from the offices of the River pany of the Caribbean, looking at pictures of animals in a book that was falling apart because he had looked at it so often. His father would walk into the building without looking at him, wearing the frock coats that Tránsito Ariza later had to alter for him, and with a face identical to that of St. John the Eva oars. When he came out, many hours later, he would make cer-tain that no one saw him, not even his an, and he would give him money for the week’s expehey did not speak, not only because his father made no effort to, but because he was terrified of him. One day, after he waited much lohan usual, his father gave him the s and said:
“Take them and do not e back again.”
It was the last time he saw him. But in time he was to learn that Uncle Leo XII, who was some ten years younger, ti moo Tránsito Ariza, and was the one who took care of her after Pius V died of an ued colic without leaving anything in writ-ing and without the 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 pany of the Caribbean was that he could not avoid lyricism be-cause he was always thinking about Fermina Daza, and he had never learo write without thinking about her. Later, when he was moved to other posts, he had so much love left over ihat he did not know what to do with it, and he offered it to uered 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 gestures and hang it over the back of the chair, he would put on the cuffs so he would not dirty his shirt sleeves, he would unbutton his vest so he could thier, and sometimes until very late at night he would ence the hopeless with letters of mad adoration.
From time to time he would be ap-proached by a poor woman who had a problem with one of her chil-dren, a war veteran who persisted in demanding payment of his pension, someone who had been robbed and wao file a plaint with the gover, but no matter how he tried, he could not satisfy them, because the only ving dot he could write was a love letter. He did not even ask his new ts any questions, because all he had to do was look at the whites of their eyes to know what their problem was, and he would write page after page of un-trolled love, following the infallible formula of writing as he thought about Fermina Daza and nothing but Fermina Daza. After the first month he had to establish a system of appois made in advance so that he would not be sed by yearning lovers.
His most pleasant memory of that time was of a very timid young girl, almost a child, who trembled as she asked him to write an ao an irresistible letter that she had just received, and that Florentino Ariza reized as one he had written on the previous afternoon. He answered it in a different style, ohat was in tuh the emotions and the age of the girl, and in a hand that also seemed to be hers, for he knew how to create a handwriting for every occasion, acc to the character of each person. He wrote, imagining to himself what Fermina Daza would have said to him if she had loved him as much as that helpless child loved her suitor. Two days later, of course, he had to write the boy’s reply with the same hand, style, and kind of love that he had attributed to him in the first letter, and so it was that he became involved in a feverish correspondeh himself. Before a month had passed, each came to him separately to thank him for what he himself had proposed in the boy’s letter and accepted with devotion in the girl’s respohey were going to marry.
Only when they had their first child did they realize, after a casual versation, that their letters had been written by the same scribe, and for the first time they went together to the Arcade to ask him to be the child’s godfather. Florentino Ariza was so enraptured by the practical evidence of his dreams that he used time he did not have to write a Lovers’ panion that was more poetid extehan the one sold in doorways for twenty tavos and that half the city knew by heart. He categorized all the imagiuations in which he and Fermina Daza might find themselves, and for all of them he wrote as many models and alternatives as he could think of. When he finished, he had some thousaers in three volumes as plete as the Covarrubias Diary, but no printer iy would take the risk of publishing them, and they ended up in an attic along with other papers from the past, for Tránsito Ariza flatly refused to dig out the earthenware jars and squahe savings of a lifetime on a mad publishiure. Years later, when Florentino Ariza had the re-sources to publish the book himself, it was difficult for him to accept the reality that love letters had go of fashion.
As he was starting out in the River pany of the Caribbean and writiers free of charge in the Arcade of the Scribes, the friends of Florentino Ariza’s youth were certain that they were slowly losing him beyond recall. And they were right. Wheurned from his voyage along the river, he still saw some of them in the hope of dim-ming the memory of Fermina Daza, he played billiards with them, he went to their dances, he allowed himself to be raffled off among the girls, he allowed himself to do everythihought would help him to bee the man he had once been. Later, when Uncle Leo XII took him on as an employee, he played dominoes with his officemates in the ercial Club, and they began to accept him as one of their own when he spoke to them of nothing but the navigation pany, which he did not call by its plete by its initials: the R C.C. He even ged the way he ate. As indifferent and irregular as he had been until then regarding food, that was how habitual and austere he became until the end of his days: a large cup of black coffee for breakfast, a slice of poached fish with white rice for lunch, a cup of café leche and a piece of cheese befoing to bed. He drank black coffee at any hour, anywhere, under any circumstances, as many as thirty little cups a day: a brew like crude oil which he preferred to prepare himself and which he always kept near at hand in a thermos. He was another persoe his firm decision and anguished efforts to tio be the same man he had been before his mortal en-ter with love.
The truth is that he was he same again. Winning back Fermina Daza was the sole purpose of his life, and he was so certain of achieving it sooner or later that he viránsito Ariza to tih the restoration of the house so that it would be ready to receive her whehe miracle took place. In trast to her rea to the proposed publication of the Lovers’ panion, Trán-sito Ariza went much further: she bought the house at ond uook a plete renovation. They made a reception room where the bedroom had been, on the upper floor they built two spacious, bright bedrooms, one for the married couple and another for the children they were going to have, and in the space where the old tobacco fac-tory had been they put in aensive garden with all kinds of roses, which Florentino Ariza himself tended during his free time at dawn.
The only thing they left intact, as a kind of testimony of gratitude to the past, was the notions shop. The ba where Florentino Ariza had slept they left as it had always been, with the hammock hanging and the writing table covered with untidy piles of books, but he moved to the room planned as the jugal bedroom on the upper floor. This was the largest and airiest in the house, and it had an interior terrace where it leasant to sit at night because of the sea breeze and the st of the rosebushes, but it was also the room that best reflected Florentino Ariza’s Trappist severity. The plain whitewashed walls were rough and unadorned, and the only furni-ture rison cot, a night table with a dle in a bottle, an old wardrobe, and a washstand with its basin and bowl.
The work took almost three years, and it cided with a brief civic revival owing to the boom in river navigation and trade, the same factors that had maintaihe city’s greatness during ial times and for more than two turies had made her the gateway to America. But that was also the period when Tránsito Ariza maed the first symptoms of her incurable disease. Her regular ts were older, paler, and more faded each time they came to the notions shop, and she did nhem after dealing with them for half a lifetime, or she fused the affairs of oh those of another, which was a very grave matter in a business like hers, in whio papers were sigo protect her honor or theirs, and one’s word of honor was given and accepted as suffit guara first it seemed she was growing deaf, but it soon became evident that her memory was trig away. And so she liquidated her pawn busi-ness, the treasure in the jars paid for pleting and furnishing the house, and still left over were many of the most valuable old jewels iy, whose owners did not have funds to redeem them.
During this period Florentino Ariza had to attend to too many responsibilities at the same time, but his spirits never flagged as he sought to expand his work as a furtive hunter. After his erratic experieh the Widow Nazaret, which opehe door to street love, he tio hunt the abandoned little birds of the night for several years, still hoping to find a cure for the pain of Fermina Daza. But by then he could no loell if his habit of fornig without hope was a mental y or a simple vice of the body. His visits to the tra hotel became less frequent, not only because his is lay elsewhere but because he did not like them to see him there under circumstahat were different from the chaste domes-ticity of the past.
heless, in three emergency situations he had recourse to the simple strategy of an era before his time: he dis-guised his friends, who were afraid of being reized, as men, and they walked into the hotel together as if they were two gentlemen out oow on two of these occasions someone realized that he and his presumptive male panion did not go to the bar but to a room, and the already tarnished reputation of Florentino Ariza re-ceived the coup de grace. At last he stopped going there, except for the very few times he did so not to catch up on what he had missed but for just the opposite reason: to find a refuge where he could recuperate from his excesses.
And it was just as well. No sooner did he leave his office at five iernoon than he began to hunt like a chi hawk. At first he was tent with what the night provided. He picked up serving girls in the parks, blaen in the market, sophisticated young ladies from the interior on the beaches, gringas on the boats from New Orleans. He took them to the jetties where half the city also went after nightfall, he took them wherever he could, and sometimes even where he 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 the dawn of his old age when he had every-thiled, because it was a good place to be happy, above all at night, ahought that something of his loves from that time flashed out to the sailors with every turn of the light. So that he tio go there more than to any other spot, while his friend the lighthouse keeper was delighted to receive him with a simpleminded expression 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 the cliffs, where love was more intense because it seemed like a shipwreck. But Floren-tino Ariza preferred the light tower itself, late at night, because one could see the ey and the trail of lights on the fishing boats at sea, and even in the distant ss.
It was in those days that he devised his rather simplistic theories ing the relationship between a woman’s appearand her aptitude for love. He distrusted the sensual type, the ones who looked as if they could eat an alligator raw and teo be the most passive ihe type he preferred was just the opposite: those skinny little tadpoles that no ohered to turn around and look at ireet, who seemed to disappear wheook off their clothes, who made you feel sorry for them when their bones cracked at the first impact, a who could leave the man whed the most about his virility ready for the trash. He had made notes of these premature observations, intending to write a practical supplement to the Lovers’ panion, but the project met the same fate as the previous oer Ausencia Santander sent him tumbling with her old dog’s wis-dom, stood him on his head, tossed him up and threw him down, made him as good as new, shattered all his virtuous theories, and taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody teaches life anything.
Ausencia Santander had had a ventional marriage for twenty years, which left her with three children who had married and had children in turn, so that she boasted of being the grandmother with the best bed iy. It was never clear if she had abandoned her husband, or if he had abandoned her, or if they had abandoned each other at the same time, but he went to live with his regular mistress, and then she felt free, in the middle of the day and at the front door, to receive Rosendo de la Rosa, a riverboat captain whom she had often received in the middle of the night at the back door. Without giving the matter a sed thought, he brought Florentino Ariza to meet her.
He brought him for lunch. He alsht a demijohn of home-made aguardiente and ingredients of the highest quality for an epicocho, the kind that ossible only with chis from the patio, meat with tender bones, rubbish-heap pork, and greens aables from the towns along the river. heless, from the very first, Florentino Ariza was not as enthusiastic about the excellence of the cuisine or the exuberance of the lady of the house as he was about the beauty of the house itself. He liked her because of her house, bright and cool, with four large windows fag the sea and beyond that a plete view of the old city. He liked the quantity and the splendor of the things that gave the living room a fused and at the same time rigorous appearance, with all kinds of handcrafted objects that Captain Rosendo de la Rosa brought 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 unbe-lievable white plumage and a peranquillity that gave one much to think about: it was the most beautiful animal that Florentino Ariza had ever seen.
Captain Rosendo de la Rosa was enthusiastic about his guest’s enthusiasm, aold him iail the history of each object. As he spoke he sipped aguardiehout pause. He seemed to be made of reinforced crete: he was enormous, with hair all over his body except on his head, a mustache 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 sat down to the table he had finished half of the demijohn, and he fell forward onto the tray of glasses and bottles with a slow sound of demolition. Ausencia Santander had to ask Florentino Ariza to help her drag the i body of the beached whale to bed and undress him as he slept. Then, in a flash of inspiration that they attributed to a jun of their stars, the two of them undressed in the room without agreeing to, without even suggesting it or proposing it to each other, and for more than seven years they tinued undressing wherever they could while the Captain was on a trip. There was no danger of his surprising them, because he had the good sailor’s habit of advising the port of his arrival by sounding the ship’s horn, even at dawn, first with three long howls for his wife 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 personal instinct for love that no homegrown or stific theories could interfere with it. Florentino Ariza knew from the ship’s itineraries when he could visit her, and he always went un-announced, whenever he wao, at any hour of the day ht, and never once was she not waiting for him. She would open the door as her mother had raised her until she was seven years old: stark naked, with an andy ribbon in her hair. She would not let him take an-other step until she had undressed him, because she thought it was bad luck to have a clothed man in the house. This was the cause of stant discord with Captain Rosendo de la Rosa, because he had the super-stitious belief that smoking naked brought bad luck, and at times he preferred to put off love rather than put out his iable cigar.
Oher hand, Florentino Ariza was very taken with the charms of nudity, and she removed his clothes with sure delight as soon as she closed the door, not even giving him time to greet her, or to take off his hat or his glasses, kissing him aing him kiss her with sharp-toothed kisses, unfastening his clothes from bottom to top, first the buttons of his fly, one by oer each kiss, then his belt buckle, and at the last his vest and shirt, until he was like a live fish that had been slit open from head to tail. The him in the living room and took off his boots, pulled on his trouser cuffs so that she could take off his pants while she removed his long under-wear, and at last she undid the garters around his calves and took off his socks. Then Florentino Ariza stopped kissing her aing her kiss him so that he could do the only thing he was responsible for in that precise ceremony: he took his watd out of the button-hole in his vest and took off his glasses and put them in his boots so he would be sure not tet them. He always took that precaution, always without fail, whenever he undressed in someone else’s house.
As soon as he had dohat, she attacked him without giving him time for anything else, there on the same sofa where she had just un-dressed him, and only on rare occasions in the bed. She mounted him and took trol of all of him for all of her, absorbed in herself, her eyes closed, gauging the situation in her absolute inner darkness, ad-vang here, retreating there, correg her invisible route, trying another, more inteh, another means of proceeding without drowning in the slimy marsh that flowed from her womb, droning like a horsefly as she asked herself questions and answered in her native jargon; where was that something in the shadows that only she knew about and that she longed for just for herself, until she suc-cumbed without waiting for anybody, she fell aloo her abyss with a jubilant explosion of total victory that made the world tremble.
Florentino Ariza was left exhausted, inplete, floating in a puddle of their perspiration, but with the impression of being no more than an instrument of pleasure. He would say: “You treat me as if I were just anybody.” She would roar with the laughter of a free female and say: “Not at all: as if you were nobody.” He was left with the impression that she took away everything with mean-spirited greed, and his pride would rebel and he would leave the house determined o return. But then he would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love of Ausencia Santander was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happihat he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.
One Sunday, two years after they met, the first thing she did when he arrived was to take off his glasses instead of undressing him, so that she could kiss him with greater ease, and this was how Florentino Ariza learhat she had begun to love him. Despite the fact that from the first day he had felt very fortable in the house that he now loved as if it were his own, he had ayed lohan two hours, and he had never slept there, and he had eaten there only once because she had given him a formal invitation. He went there, in fact, only for what he had e for, always bringing his only gift, a single rose, and then he would disappear until the unforeseeable time. But on the Sunday wheook off his glasses to kiss him, in part because of that and in part because they fell asleep after gentle love-making, they spent the afternoon naked in the Captain’s enormous bed.
?９9liｂ. he awoke from his nap, Florentino Ariza still remembered the shrieking of the cockatoo, whose strident calls belied his beauty. But the silence was diaphanous in the four o’clock heat, and through the bedroom window one could see the outline of the old city with the afternoon sun at its back, its golden domes, its sea in flames all the way to Jamaica. Ausencia Santaretched out an adventurous hand, seeking the sleepi, but Florentino Ariza moved it away. He said: “Not now. I feel something strange, as if someone were watg us.” She aroused the cockatoo again with her joyous laughter. She said: “Not even Jonah’s wife would swallow that story.” her did she, of course, but she admitted it was a good one, and the two of them loved each other for a long time in silehout making love again. At five o’clock, with the sun still high, she jumped out of bed, naked as always and with the andy ribbon in her hair, ao find something to drink i. But she had not taken a siep 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 the walls. All the rest, the signed furniture, the Indian rugs, the statues and the hand-woven tapestries, the tless tris made of precious stones aals, everything that had made hers one of the most pleasant a decorated houses iy, everything, even the sacred cockatoo, everything had vanished. It had been carried out through the sea terrace without disturbing their love. All that was left were empty rooms with the four open windows, and a message painted on the rear wall: This is what you get for fug around. Captain Rosendo de la Rosa could never uand why Ausencia Santander did not report the robbery, or try to get in touch with the dealers in stolen goods, or permit her misfortuo be mentioned again.
Florentino Ariza tio visit her in the looted house, whose furnishings were reduced to three leather stools that the thieves fot i, and the tents of the bedroom where the two of them had been. But he did not visit her as often as before, not because of the desolation in the house, as she supposed and as she said to him, but because of the y of a mule-drawn trolley at the turn of the new tury, which proved to be a prodigious and inal of free-flying little birds. He rode it four times a day, twice to go to the office, twice to return home, and sometimes when his reading was real, and most of the time when it retense, he would take the first steps, at least, toward a future tryst. Later, when Uncle Leo XII put at his disposal a carriage drawn by two little gray mules with golden trappings, just like the ohat beloo President Rafael Nú?ez, he would long for those times orolley as the most fruitful of all his adventures in falry.
He was right: there is no worse enemy of secret love than a carriage waiting at the door. In fact, he almost always left it hidden at his house and made his hawkish rounds On foot so that he would not leave wheel marks in the dust. That is why he evoked with such great nostalgia the old trolley with its emaciated mules covered with sores, in which a sideways glance was all one o know where love was. However, in the midst of so many tender memories, he could not elude his recolle of a helpless little bird whose name he never knew and with whom he spent no more than half a freiight, but that had been enough to ruin the in- rowdiness of ival for him for the rest of his life.
She had attracted his attention orolley for the fearlessness with which she traveled through the riotous public celebration. She could not have been more thay years old, and she did not seem to share the spirit of ival, unless she was disguised as an invalid: her hair was very light, long, and straight, hanging loose over her shoulders, and she wore a tunic of plain, unadorned linen. She was pletely removed from the fusion of musi the streets, the handfuls of rice powder, the showers of anilihrown at the passen-gers orolley, whose mules were whitened with stard wore flowered hats during those three days of madness. Taking ad-vantage of the fusion, Florentino Ariza invited her to have ah him, because he did not think he could ask for anything more. She looked at him without surprise. She said: “I am happy to accept, but I warn you that I am crazy.” He laughed at her witticism, and took her to see the parade of floats from the baly of the ice cream shop. The on a rented cape, and the two of them joihe dang in the Plaza of the house, and ehemselves l99lｉｂ?ike newborhearts, for her indifference went to the opposite extreme in the uproar of the night: she danced like a professional, she was imagina-tive and daring in her revelry, and she had devastating charm.
“You don’t know the trouble you’ve gotten into with me,” she shouted, laughing in the fever of ival. “I’m a crazy woman from the insane asylum.”
For Florentino Ariza, that night was a return to the i unruliness of adolesce, when he had not yet been wounded by love. But he knew, more from hearsay than from personal experiehat such easy happiness could not last very long. And so before the night began to degee, as it always did after prizes were distributed for the best es, he suggested to the girl that they go to the lighthouse to watch the sunrise. She accepted with pleasure, but she wao 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 him that they should leave for the lighthouse, when she was seized by two guards and a nurse from Divine Shep-herdess Asylum. They had been looking for her since her escape at three o’clock that afternoon--they and the entire police force. She had decapitated a guard and seriously wouwo others with a machete that she had snatched away from the gardener because she wao go dang at ival. It had not occurred to ahat she might be dang ireets; they thought 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 that she had hidden in her bodice, and six men were o put her irait jacket while the crowd jammed into the Plaza of the house applauded and whistled with glee in the belief that the bloody capture was one of many ival farces. Florentino Ariza was heartbroken, and beginning on Ash Wednesday he would walk down Divine Shepherdess Street with a box of English chocolates for her. He would stand and look at the inmates, who shouted all kinds of profanities and pliments at him through the windows, and he would show them the box of chocolates 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 girl walking with her father asked him for a piece of chocolate from the box he was carrying in his hand. Her father reprimanded her and begged Florentino Ariza’s pardon. But he gave the whole box to the child, thinking that the a would redeem him from all bitterness, and he soothed the father with a pat on the back.
“They were for a love that has gone all to hell,” he said.
As a kind of pensation from fate, it was also in the mule-drawn trolley that Florentino Ariza met Leona Cassiani, who was the true woman in his life although her of them ever k and they never made love. He had sensed her before he saw her as he was going home orolley at five o’clock; it was a tangible look that touched him as if it were a finger. He raised his eyes and saw her, at the far end of the trolley, but standing out with great clarity from the other passengers. She did not look away. On the trary: she tio look at him with such boldhat he could not help thinking what he thought: black, young, pretty, but a whore beyond the shadow of a doubt. He rejected her from his life, because he could not ceive of anything more ptible than paying for love: he had never do.
Florentino Ariza got off at the Plaza of the Carriages, which was the end of the line, hurried through the labyrinth of erce be-cause his mother was expeg him at six, and when he emerged oher side of the crowd, he heard the tapping heels of a loose woman on the paving 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 a dancer wheepped over the puddles ireets, a low-cut top that left her shoulders bare, a handful of colored necklaces, and a white turban. He khem from the tra hotel. It often happehat at six iernoon they were still eating breakfast, and then all they could do was to use sex as if it were a bandit’s knife and put it to the throat of the first man they passed oreet: your prick or your life. As a final test, Florentino Ariza ged direc-tion a down the deserted Oil Lamp Alley, and she followed, ing closer and closer to him. Theopped, turned around, blocked her way on the sidewalk, and leaned on his umbrella with both hands. She stood fag him.
“You made a mistake, good-looking,” he said. “I don’t do that.”
“Of course you do,” she said. “One see it in your face.”
Florentino Ariza remembered a phrase from his childhood, some-thing that the family doctor, his godfather, had said regarding his istipation: “The world is divided into those who shit and those who ot.” On the basis of this dogma the Doctor had elaborated aire theory of character, which he sidered more accurate than astrology. But with what he had learned over the years, Florentino Ariza stated it another way: “The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not.” He distrusted those who did not: wherayed from the straight and narrow, it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just ied it. Those who did it often, oher hand, lived for that alohey felt so good that their lips were sealed as if they were tombs, because they khat their lives depended on their discre-tion. They never spoke of their exploits, they fided in no ohey feigned indiffereo the point where they earhe reputation of being impotent, id, or above all timid fairies, as in the case of Florentino Ariza. But they took pleasure in the error because the error protected them. They formed a secret society, whose members reized each other all over the world without need of a on language, which is why Florentino Ariza was not surprised by the girl’s reply: she was one of them, and therefore she khat he khat she knew.
It was the great mistake of his life, as his sce was to remind him every hour of every day until the final day of his life. What she wanted from him was not love, least of all love that aid for, but a job, any kind of job, at any salary, in the River pany of the Caribbean. Florentino Ariza felt so ashamed of his own duct that he took her to the head of Personnel, who gave her the lowest-level job in the General Se, which she performed with seriousness, modesty, and dedication for three years.
Ever sis founding, the R.C.C. had had its offices across from the river dock, and it had nothing in on with the port for o liners on the opposite side of the bay, or with the market pier on Las ánimas Bay. The building was of wood, with a sloping tin roof, a single long baly with ns at the front, and windows, covered with wire mesh, on all four sides through whie had plete views of the boats at the dock as if they were paintings hanging on the wall. When the German founders built it, they paihe tin roof red and the wooden walls a brilliant white, so that the building itself bore some resemblao a riverboat. Later it ainted all blue, and at the time that Florentino Ariza began to work for the pany it was a dusty shed of no definite color, and on the rusting roof there were patches of in plates over the inal ones.
Behind the building, in a gravel patio surrounded by chi wire, stood twe warehouses of more ret stru, and at the back there was a closed sewer pipe, dirty and foul-smelling, where the refuse of a half a tury of river navigation lay rotting: the debris of historic boats, from the early oh a single smokestack, christened by Simón Bolívar, to some so ret that they had electris in the s. Most of them had been dismantled for materials to be used in building other boats, but many were in such good dition that it seemed possible to give them a coat of paint and launch them without frightening away the iguanas or disturbing the foliage of the large yellow flowers that made them even more nostalgic.
The Administrative Se was on the upper floor of the building, in small but fortable and well-appointed offices similar to the s on the boats, for they had been built not by civil architects but by naval engineers. At the end of the corridor, like any employee, Uncle Leo XII dispatched his business in an office similar to all the others, the one exception being that every m he found a glass vase filled with sweet-smelling flowers on his desk. On the ground floor was the Passenger Se, with a waiting room that had rustiches and a ter for selling tickets and handling baggage.
Last of all was the fusing General Se, its name alone suggesting the vagueness of its funs, where problems that had not been solved elsewhere in the pao die an ignominious death. There sat Leona Cassiani, lost behind a student’s desk surrounded by stacked for shipping and unresolved papers, on the day that Uncle Leo XII himself went to see what the devil he could think of to make the General Se good for something. After three hours of questions, theoretical assumptions, and crete evidence, with all the employees in the middle of the room, he returo his offiented by the certainty that instead of a solution to so many prob-lems, he had found just the opposite: new and different problems with no solution.
The day, when Florentino Ariza came into his office, he found a memorandum from Leona Cassiani, with the request that he study it and then show it to his uncle if he thought it appropriate. She was the only one who had not said a word during the iion the previous afternoon. She had remained silent in full awareness of the worth of her position as a charity employee, but in the memorandum she hat she had said nothing not because of neglige out of respect for the hierarchies in the se. It had an alarming simplicity. Uncle Leo XII had proposed a thh reanization, but Leona Cassiani did not agree, for the simple reason that iy the General Se did : it was the dumping ground for annoying but minor problems that the other ses wao get rid of. As a se-quehe solution was to elimihe General Se aurn the problems to the ses where they had inat.9９ｌｉb.ed, to be solved there.
Uncle Leo XII did not have the slightest idea who Leona Cassiani was, and he could not remember having seen anyone who could be Leona Cassiani at the meeting on the previous afternoon, but when he read the memorandum he called her to his offid talked with her behind closed doors for two hours. They spoke about everything, in accordah the method he used to learn about people. The memorandum showed simple on sense, and her suggestion, in fact, would produce the desired result. But Uncle Leo XII was not ied in that: he was ied in her. What most attracted his attention was that her only education after elementary school had been in the School of Millinery. Moreover, she was learning English at home, using an accelerated method with no teacher, and for the past three months she had been taking evening classes in typing, a new kind of work with a wonderful future, as they used to say about the telegraph and before that the steam engine.
When she left the meeting, Uncle Leo XII had already begun to call her what he would always call her: my namesake Leona. He had decided to elimih the stroke of a peroublesome se and distribute the problems so that they could be solved by the people who had created them, in accordah Leona Cassiani’s suggestion, and he had created a new position for her, which had no title or specific duties but in effect was his Personal Assistant. That afternoon, after the inglorious burial of the General Se, Uncle Leo XII asked Florentino Ariza where 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 uncle said. “With two or three more, we’ll sal-vage yalleon.”
Florentino Ariza took this as one of Uncle Leo XII’s typical jokes, but the day he found himself without the carriage that had been assigo him six months earlier, and that was taken baow so that he could tio look for hidden talent orolleys. Leona Cas-siani, for her part, soon overcame her initial scruples, and she revealed what she had kept hidden with so much astuteness during her first three years. In three more years she had taken trol of everything, and in the four she stood ohreshold of the General Secre-taryship, but she refused to cross it because it was only oep below Florentino Ariza. Until then she had taken orders from him, and she wao tio do so, although the fact of the matter was that Florentino himself did not realize that he took orders from her. In-deed, he had dohing more on the Board of Directors than fol-low her suggestions, which helped him to move up despite the traps set by his secret enemies.
Leona Cassiani had a diabolical talent for handlis, and she always knew how to be where she had to be at the right time. She was dynamid quiet, with a wise sweetness. But when it was indispensable she would, with sorrow in her heart, give free rein to a character of solid iron. However, she never did that for herself. Her only objective was to clear the ladder at any cost, with blood if necessary, so that Florentino Ariza could move up to the position he had proposed for himself without calculating his own strength very well. She would have dohis in a, of course, because she had an indomitable will to power, but the truth was that she did it sciously, out of simple gratitude. Her determination was so great that Florentino Ariza himself lost his way in her schemes, and on one unfortunate occasioempted 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, but think it over carefully.”
Florentino Ariza, who in fact had hought about it, thought about it then, as well as he could, and he surrendered his ons. The truth is that in the midst of that sordid internee battle in a -pany iual crisis, in the midst of his disasters as a tireless faler and the more and more uain dream of Fermina Daza, the impassive Florentino Ariza had not had a moment of inner peace as he frohe fasating spectacle of that fierce blaan smeared with shit and love in the fever of battle. Many times he re-gretted i that she had not been in fact what he thought she was oernoo her, so that he could wipe his ass with his principles and make love to her even if it cost s of shining gold.
For Leona Cassiani was still the woman she had been that after-noon orolley, 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 ireets. The years had ged her appearance very little, and that little became her very well. She moved in splendid maturity, her feminine charms were even more exg, and her ardent Afri body was being more pact. Florentino Ariza had made no propositions to her in ten years, a hard penance for his i-nal error, and she had helped him ihing 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. He opehe door without knog, and there she was: alo her desk, absorbed, serious, with the new eyeglasses that gave her an academic air. Florentino Ariza realized with joyful fear that the two of them were alone in the building, the piers were deserted, the city asleep, the night eternal 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 when he 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-trol, and dazzled him with her 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 ask me that.”
It was too late: the opportunity had been there with her in the mule-drawn trolley, it had always been with her there on the chair where she was sitting, but now it was gone forever. The truth was that after all the dirty tricks she had done for him, after so much sordidness endured for him, she had moved on in life and was far beyond his twenty-year advantage in age: she had grown too old for him. She loved him so much that instead of deceiving him she preferred to tinue 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 suspi that this was not her last word. He believed 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 with-out protest, and even with a certain grace, which was not easy for him. From that night on, any cloud there might have beeween them was dissipated without bitterness, and Florentino Ariza uood at last that 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 reveal the secret of Fermina Daza. The few peo-ple who had known were beginning tet for reasons over which they had no trol. Three of them were, beyond the shadow of any doubt, in the grave: his mother, whose memory had been erased long before she died; Gala Placidia, who had died of old age in the service of one who had been like a daughter to her; and the unfettable Escolástica Daza, the woman who had brought him the first love letter he had ever received in his life, hidden in her prayerbook, and who could not still be alive after so many years. Lorenzo Daza (no one knew if he was alive or dead) might have revealed the secret to Sister Franca de la Luz when he was trying to stop Fermina Daza’s expul-sion, but it was uhat it had gone any further. That left the eleven telegraph operators in Hildebranda Sanchez’s province who had haelegrams with their plete names a addresses, and Hildebranda Sánchez herself, and her court of indomitable cousins.
What Florentino Ariza did not know was that Dr. Juvenal Urbino should have been included on the list. Hildebranda Sánchez had re-vealed the secret to him during one of her many visits in the early years. But she did so in such a casual way and at su inopportune moment that it did not go in one of Dr. Urbino’s ears and out the other, as she thought; it did not go in at all. Hildebranda had men-tioned Florentino Ariza as one of the secret poets who, in her opinion, might win the Poetic Festival. Dr. Urbino could not remember who he was, and she told him--she did not o, but there was no hint of mali it--that he was Fermina Daza’s only sweetheart before she married. She told him, vihat it had been something so i and ephemeral that in fact it was rather toug. Dr. Urbino replied without looking at her: “I did not know that fellow oet.” And then he wiped him from his memory, because among other things, his profession had aced him to the ethical ma of fetfulness.
Florentino Ariza observed that, with the exception of his mother, the keepers of the secret beloo Fermina Daza’s world. In his, he was aloh the crushi of a burden that he had often o share, but until then there had been no one worthy of so much trust. Leona Cassiani was the only one, and all he needed was the opportunity and the means. This was what he was thinking o summer afternoon when Dr. Juvenal Urbino climbed the steep stairs of the R.C.C., paused on each step in order to survive the three o’clock heat, appeared in Florentino Ariza’s office, panting and soaked with perspiration down to his trousers, and gasped with his last breath: “I believe a cye is ing.” Florentino Ariza had seen him there many times, asking for Uncle Leo XII, but never until now had it seemed so clear to him that this uninvited guest had something to do with his life.
This was during the time that Dr. Juvenal Urbino had overe the pitfalls of his profession, and was going from door to door, almost like a beggar with his hat in his hand, asking for tributions to his artistiterprises. Uncle Leo XII had always been one of his most faithful and generous tributors, but just at that moment he had begun his daily ten-minute siesta, sitting in the swivel chair at his desk. Florentino Ariza asked Dr. Juvenal Urbino to please wait in his office, which was o 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 as they were now, and once again Florentino Ariza experiehe nausea of feeling himself inferior. The ten minutes were ay, during which he stood up three times in the hope that his uncle had awakened early, and he drank aire thermos of black coffee. Dr. Urbino refused to drink even a single cup. He said: “Coffee is poison.” And he tio chat about ohing and another and did not even care if anyone was listening to him. Florentino Ariza could not bear his natural distin, the fluidity and precision of his words, his faint st of camphor, his personal charm, the easy and elegant manner in which he made his most frivo-lous sentences seem essential only because he had said them. Then, without warning, the Doctor ged the subject.
“Do you like music?”
He was taken by surprise. Iy, Florentino Ariza attended every cert and opera performed iy, but he did not feel capable of engaging in a critical or well-informed discussion. He had a weakness for popular music, above all seal waltzes, whose similarity to the ones he had posed as an adolest, or to his secret verses, could not be denied. He had only to hear them once, and then fhts ohere was no power in heaven or earth that could shake the melody out of his head. But that would not be a serious ao a serious question put to him by a specialist.
“I like Gardel,” he said.
Dr. Urbino uood. “I see,” he said. “He is popular.” And he slipped into a reting of his many new projects which, as always, had to be realized without official bag. He called to his attention the disheartening inferiority of the performahat could be heard here now, pared with the splendid ones of the previous tury. That was true: he had spent a year selling subscriptions t the Cortot-Casals-Thibaud trio to the Dramatic Theater, and there was no one in the gover who even knew who they were, while this very month there were s left for the Ramón Caralt pany that performed detective dramas, for the Operetta and Zarzuela pany of Don Manolo de la Presa, for the Santanelas, ineffable mimics, illusionists, and artistes, who could ge their clothes on stage in the wink of an eye, for Danyse D’Altaine, adver-tised as a former dancer with the Folies-Bergère, and even for the abominable Ursus, a Basque madman who took on a fighting bull all by himself.
There was no reason to plain, however, if the Europeans themselves were once agaiing the bad example of a barbaric war when we had begun to live in peace after nine civil wars in half a tury, which, if the truth were told, were all one war: always the same war. What most attracted Florentino Ariza’s attention in that intriguing speech was the possibility of reviving the Poetic Festival, the most renowned and long-lasting of the enter-prises that Dr. Juvenal Urbino had ceived in the past. He had to bite his too keep from telling him that he had been an assiduous partit in the annual petition that had eventually ied famous poets, not only in the rest of the try but in other nations of the Caribbean as well.
No sooner had the versation begun tha, steamy air suddenly cooled and a storm of crosswinds shook doors and windows with great blasts, while the office groaned down to its foundations like a sailing ship set adrift. Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not seem to notice. He made some casual refereo the lunatic cyes of June and then, out of the blue, he began to speak of his wife. He sidered her not only his most enthusiastic collaborator, but the very soul of his endeavors. He said: “Without her I would be nothing.” Floren-tino Ariza listeo him, impassive, nodding his agreement with a slight motion of his head, not daring to say anything for fear his voice would betray him.
Two or three sentences more, however, were enough for him to uand that Dr. Juvenal Urbino, in the midst of so many abs itments, still had more than enough time to adore his wife almost as much as he did, and that truth stunned him. But he could not respond as he would have liked, because then his heart played one of those whorish tricks that only hearts play: it revealed to him that he and this man, whom he had always -sidered his personal enemy, were victims of the same fate and shared the hazards of a on passion; they were two animals yoked to-gether. For the first time iermiwenty-seven years that he had been waiting, Florentino Ariza could not ehe pangs of grief at the thought that this admirable man would have to die in order for him to be happy.
The cye passed by at last, but in fifteen mis gusting northwest winds had devastated the neighborhoods by the ss and caused severe damage in half the city. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, grati-fied once again by the generosity of Uncle Leo XII, did not wait for the weather to clear, and without thinking he accepted the umbrella that Florentino Ariza lent him for walking to his carriage. But he did not mind. On the trary: he was happy thinking about what Fer-mina Daza would think when she learned who the owner of the umbrella was. He was still troubled by the uling interview when Leona Cassiani came into his office, and this seemed to him a unique opportunity to stop beating about the bush and to reveal his secret, as if he were squeezing a boil that would not leave him in peace: it was now or never. He began by asking her what she thought of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. She answered almost without thinking: “He is a man who does many things, too many perhaps, but I believe that no one knows what he thinks.” Then she reflected, shredding the eraser on a pencil with her long, sharp, blaan’s teeth, and at last she shrugged her shoulders to put ao a matter that did not her.
“That may be the reason he does so many things,” she said, “so that he will not have to think.”
Florentino Ariza tried to keep her with him.
“What hurts me is that he has to die,” he said.
“Everybody has to die,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, “but he more than anyone else.”
She uood none of it: she shrugged her shoulders again without speaking a. Then Florentino Ariza khat some night, sometime iure, in a joyous bed with Fermina Daza, he was going to tell her that he had not revealed the secret of his love, not even to the one person who had earhe right to know it. No: he would never reveal it, not even to Leona Cassiani, not because he did not want to open the chest where he had kept it so carefully hidden for half his life, but because he realized only then that he had lost the key.
That, however, was not the most staggeri of the afternooill had the nostalgic memory of his youth, his vivid recol-le of the Poetic Festival, whose thunder souhroughout the Antilles every April 15. He was always one of the protagonists, but always, as in almost everything he did, a secret protagonist. He had participated several times sihe inaugural petition, and he had never received even honorable mention. But that did not matter to him, for he did pete not out of ambition for the prize but because the test held an additional attra for him: in the first session Fermina Daza had opehe sealed envelopes and annouhe names of the winners, and then it was established that she would tio do so in the years that followed.
Hidden in the darkness of an orchestra seat, a fresh camellia itonhole of his lapel throbbing with the strength of his desire, Florentino Ariza saw Fermina Daza opehree sealed envelopes oage of the old National Theater on the night of the first Festival. He asked himself what was going to happen in her heart when she discovered that he was the winner of the Golden Orchid. He was certain she would reize his handwriting, and that then she would evoke the afternoons of embroidery uhe almond trees itle park, the st of faded gardenias in his letters, the private Waltz of the ed Goddess at windblown daybreak. It did not happen. Even worse, the Golden Orchid, the most sought-after prize among the nation’s poets, was awarded to a ese immigrant. The public sdal provoked by that unheard-of decision threw doubts on the seriousness of the petition. But the decision was correct, and the unanimity of the judges had its justification in the excellence of the so.
No one believed that the author was the ese who received the prize. At the end of the last tury, fleeing the sce of yellow fever that devastated Panama during the stru of the rail-road betweewo os, he had arrived along with many others who stayed here until they died, living in ese, reprodug in ese, and looking so much alike that no one could tell one from the other. At first there were no more than ten, some of them with their wives and children and edible dogs, but in a few years four narrow streets in the slums along the port were overflowing with other, ued ese, who came into the try without leaving a tra the s records.
Some of the young ourned into venerable patriarchs with so much haste that no one could explain how they had time to grow old. In the popular view they were divided into two kinds: bad ese and good ese. The bad ones were those in the lugubrious restaurants along the waterfront, where one was as likely to eat like a king as to die a suddeh at the table, sitting before a plate of rat meat with sunflowers, and which were thought to be nothing more than fronts for white slavery and many other kinds of traffic. The good ones were the ese in the laun-dries, heirs of a sacred knowledge, who returned one’s shirts er than new, with collars and cuffs like retly ironed union wafers. The man who defeated seventy-two well-prepared rivals in the Poetic Festival was one of these good ese.
When a bewildered Fermina Daza read out the name, no one uood it, not only because it was an unusual because no one knew for certain what ese were called. But it was not necessary to think about it very much, because the victorious ese walked from the back of the theater with that celestial smile ese wear when they e home early. He had been so sure of victory that he had put on a yellow silk robe, appropriate to the rites of spring, in order to accept the prize. He received the eighteen-carat Golden Orchid and kissed it with joy in the midst of the thundering jeers of the incredulous.
He did not react. He waited in the middle of the stage, as imperturbable as the apostle of a Divine Providence less dramatic than ours, and as soon as it was quiet he read the winning poem. No one uood him. But when the new round of jeers and whistles was over, an impassive Fermina Daza read it again, in her hoarse, suggestive voice, and amazement reigned after the first li erfect so in the purest Parnassian tradition, and through it there wafted a breath of inspiration that revealed the involvement of a master hand. The only possible explanation was that one of the great poets had devised the joke in order to ridicule the Poetic Festi-val, and that the ese had been a party to it and was determio keep the secret until the day he died. The ercial Daily, our traditional neer, tried to save our civior with an erudite and rather fused essay ing the antiquity and cultural influence of the ese in the Caribbean, and the right they had earo participate iic Festivals.
The author of the essay did not doubt that the writer of the so was in fact who he said he was, and he defended him in a straightforward manner, beginning with the title itself: “All ese Are Poets.” The instigators of the plot, if there was one, rotted in their graves along with the secret. For his part, the ese who had won died without fession at an Oriental age and was buried with the Golden Orchid in his coffin, but also with the bitterness of never having achieved the only thing he wanted in his life, which was reition as a poet. On his death, the press recalled the fotten i of the Poetic Festival and reprihe so with a Modernist vige of fleshy maidens and gold ucopias, and the guardian angels of poetry took advan-tage of the opportunity to clarify matters: the so seemed so bad to the younger geion that no one could doubt any lohat it had, in fact, been posed by the dead ese.
Florentino Ariza always associated that sdalous event with the memory of an opulent stranger who sat beside him. He had noticed her at the beginning of the ceremony, but then he had fotten her in the frightful suspense of anticipation. She attracted his attention because of her mother-of-pearl whiteness, her happy plump woman’s st, her immense soprano’s bosom ed by an artificial mag-nolia. She wore a very close-fitting black velvet dress, as black as her eager warm eyes, and her hair, caught at the nape of her neck with a gypsy b, was blacker still. She wore pendant earrings, a matg necklace, and identical rings, shaped like sparkling roses, on sev-eral fingers. A beauty mark had been drawn with pencil on her right cheek. In the din of the final applause, she looked at Florentino Ariza with sincere grief.
“Believe me, my heart goes out to you,” she said to him.
Florentino Ariza was amazed, not because of the dolences, which he in fact deserved, but because of his overwhelming aston-ishment that anyone knew his secret. She explained: “I knew because of how the flower trembled in your lapel as they opehe enve-lopes.” She showed him the velvet magnolia in her hand, and she opened her heart to him.
“That is why I took off mine,” she said.
She was on the verge of tears because of his defeat, but Florentino Ariza raised her spirits with his instincts of a noal hunter.
“Let us go someplace where we cry together,” he said.
He apanied her to her house. At the door, si was almost midnight and there was no one oreet, he persuaded her to invite him in for a brandy while they looked at the scrapbooks and photograph albums, taining over ten years of public events, which she had told him she owned. It was an old trick even then, but this time it was guileless, because she was the one who had talked about her albums as they walked from the National Theater. They went in. The first thing Florentino Ariza observed in the living room was that the door to the only bedroom en, and that the bed was huge and luxurious with a brocaded quilt and a headboard with brass foliage.
That disturbed him. She must have realized it, for she crossed the living room and closed the bedroom door. Then she invited him to sit down on a flowered cretonne sofa where a sleeping cat was lying, and she placed her colle of albums on the coffee table. Florentino Ariza began to leaf through them in an unhurried way, thinking more about his step than about what he was seeing, and then he looked up and saw that her eyes were full of tears. He advised her to cry to her heart’s tent, and to feel no shame, for there was no greater relief than weeping, but he suggested that she loosen her bodice first. He hurried to help her, because her bodice was tightly fastened in the back with a long closure of crossed laces. He did not have to uhem all, for the bodice burst open from sheer internal pressure, and her astronomical bosom was able to breathe freely.
Florentino Ariza, who had never lost the timidity of a novice even in fortable circumstances, risked a superficial caress on her neck with the tips of his fingers, and she writhed and moaned like a spoiled child and did not st. Then he kissed her on the same spot, just as softly, and he could not kiss her a sed time because she turoward him with all her moal body, eager and warm, and they rolled in an embra the floor. The cat on the sofa awoke with a screed jumped on top of them. They groped like desper-ate virgins and found each other any way they could, wallowing iorn albums, fully dressed, soaked with sweat, and more ed with avoiding the furious claws of the cat than with the disastrous love they were making. But beginning the following night, their scratches still bleeding, they tio make love for several years.
When he realized that he had begun to love her, she was in the fullness of her years, and he roag his thirtieth birthday. Her name was Sara Na, and she had enjoyed fifteen minutes of fame in her youth when she won a petition with a colle of poems about love among the poor, a book that was never published. She was a teacher of deportment and civi the public schools, and she lived on her salary in a rented flat iley Sweethearts’ Mews in the old Gethsemane District. She had had several occasional lovers, but h iions of matrimony, because it was difficult for a man of her time and plaarry a woman he had taken to bed. Nor did she cherish that dream again after her first formal fiancé, whom she loved with the almost demented passion of whie is capable at the age of eighteen, broke the e one week before the date they had set for the wedding, a her to wahe limbo of abandoned brides.
Or of used goods, as they used to say in those days. Ahat first experience, although cruel and short--lived, did not leave her bitter; rather, she had the overwhelming vi that with or without marriage, od, or the law, life was not worth living without a man in her bed. What Florentino Ariza liked best about her was that in order to reach the heights of glory, she had to su an infant’s pacifier while they made love. Eventually they had a string of them, in every size, shape, and color they could find in the market, and Sara Na hung them on the headboard so she could reach them without looking in her moments of extreme urgency.
Although she was as free as he was, and perhaps would not have been opposed to making their relationship public, from the very first Florentino Ariza sidered it a destine adventure. He would slip in by the back door, almost always very late at night, and sneak away on tiptoe just before dawn. He knew as well as she that in a crowded and subdivided building like hers the neighbors had to know more than they pretended. But although it was a mere formality, that was how Florentino Ariza was, how he would be with all women for the rest of his life. He never made a slip, with her or with any other woman; he never betrayed their fidence. He did not exaggerate: on only one occasion did he leave a promising trace or written evidence, and this might have cost him his life. In truth, he always behaved as if he were the eternal husband of Fermina Daza, an un-faithful husband but a tenacious one, who fought endlessly to free himself from his servitude without causihe displeasure of a betrayal.
Such secretiveness could not flourish without misapprehensions. Tránsito Ariza died in the vi that the son she had ceived in love and raised for love was immuo any kind of love because of his first youthful misfortune. But many less benevolent people who were very close to him, who were familiar with his mysterious char-acter and his fondness for mystic ceremonies and straions, shared the suspi that he was immu to love but only to women. Florentino Ariza k and never did anything to dis-prove it. It did not worry Sara Na either. Like the tless other women who loved him, and even those who gave and received pleasure without loving him, she accepted him for what he really was: a man passing through.
He eventually showed up at her house at any hour, above all on Sunday ms, the most peaceful time. She would leave whatever she was doing, no matter what it was, ae her entire body t to make him happy in the enormous mythic bed that was always ready for him, and in which she never permitted the invocation of liturgical formalisms. Florentino Ariza did not uand how a single woman without a past could be so wise in the ways of men, or how she could move her sweet porpoise body with as much light-ness and tenderness as if she were moving under water. She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: “You are either born knowing how, or you never know.” Florentino Ariza writhed with retrogressive jealousy, thinking that perhaps she had more of a past than she pre-tended, but he had to swallow everything she said because he told her, as he told them all, that she had been his only lover. Among many other things that he did not like, he had tn himself to having the furious cat in bed with them, although Sara Na had his claws removed so he would not tear them apart while they made love.
However, almost as much as rolling in bed until they were ex-hausted, she liked to devote the aftermath of love to the cult of poetry. She had an astonishing memory for the seal verses of her own time, which were sold ireet in pamphlet form for two tavos as soon as they were written, and she also pinned on the walls the poems she liked most, so that she could read them aloud whenever she wished. She had written versions of the deportment and civics texts in hendecasyllabic couplets, like those used for spelling, but she could not obtain official approval for them. Her declamatory passion was such that at times she tio shout her recitation as they made love, and Florentino Ariza had to force a pacifier into her mouth, as one did with children to make them st.
In the plenitude of their relationship, Florentino Ariza had asked himself which of the two was love: the turbulent bed or the peaceful Sunday afternoons, and Sara Na calmed him with the simple argument that love was everything they did naked. She said: “Spiritual love from the waist up and physical love from the waist down.” Sara hought this definition would be good for a poem about divided love, which they wrote together and which she submitted to the Fifth Poetic Festival, vihat no partit had ever presented su inal poem. But she lost again.
She was in a rage as Florentino Ariza apanied her to her house. For some reason she could not explain, she was vihat Fermina Daza had plotted against her so that her poem would not win first prize. Florentino Ariza paid no attention to her. He had been in a somber mood ever sihe awarding of the prizes, for he had not seen Fermina Daza in a long time, and that night he had the impres-sion that she had undergone a profound ge: for the first time one could tell just by looking at her that she was a mother. This came as no surprise to him, for he khat her son was already in school. However, her maternal age had never seemed so apparent to him as it did that night, as much for the size of her waist and the slight shortness of breath when she walked as for the break in her voice when she read the list of prizewinners.
In an attempt to dot his memories, he leafed through the albums of the Poetic Festivals while Sara Na prepared something to eat. He saw magazine photographs in color, yellowing postcards of the sort sold in arcades for souvenirs, and it was a kind of ghostly review of the fallacy of his own life. Until that time he had main-taihe fi that it was the world that was ging, and its s and styles: everything but her. But that night he saw for the first time in a scious way how Fermina Daza’s life assing, and how his assing, while he did nothing more than wait. He had never spoken about her to anyone, because he knew he was incapable or saying her hout everyone’s notig the pallor of his lips. But that night, as he looked through the albums as he had done on so many other evenings of Sunday tedium, Sara Na made one of those casual observations that freeze the blood.
“She’s a whore,” she said.
She said it as she walked past him and sarint of Fermina Daza disguised as a black pa a masquerade ball, and she did not have to mention anyone by name for Florentino Ariza to know whom she was talking about. Fearing a revelation that would shake his very life, he hurried to a cautious defense. He objected that he knew Fermina Daza only from a distahat they had never gone further than formal greetings, that he had no information about her private life, but was certain she was an admirable woman who had e out of nowhere and risen to the top by virtue of her ows.
“By virtue of marrying a man she does not love for money,” in-terrupted Sara Na. “That’s the lowest kind of whore.” His mother had told Florentino Ariza the same thing, with less crudeness but with the same moral rigidity, wheried to sole him for his misfortunes. Shaken to the very core, he could find no appro-priate respoo Sara Na’s harshness, aempted to ge the subject. But Sara Na would not allow that to happen until she had giveo her feelings. In a flash of inspiration that she could not have explained, she was vihat Fermina Daza had been the one behind the spiracy to cheat her of the prize. There was no reason to think so: they did not know each other, they had never met, and Fermina Daza had nothing to do with the decision of the judges even though she rivy to their secrets. Sara Na said in a categorical manner: “We women intuit these things.” And that ehe discussion.
From that moment on, Florentino Ariza began to see her with dif-ferent eyes. The years were passing for her too. Her abundant sex-uality was withering without glory, her lovemaking was slowed by her sobbing, and her eyelids were beginning to darken with old bitterness. She was yesterday’s flower. Besides, in her fury at the defeat, she had lost t of her brandies. It was not her night: while they were eating their reheated ut rice, she tried to establish how much each of them had tributed to the losing poem, in order to determine hoetals of the Golden Orchid would have goo eae. This was not the first time they had amused themselves with Byzantine petitions, but he took advantage of the opportunity to speak through his own newly opened wound, and they became entangled in a mean-spirited argument that stirred up in both of them the rancor of almost five years of divided love.
At ten minutes before twelve, Sara Na climbed up on a chair to wind the pendulum clock, and she reset it on the hour, perhaps try-ing to tell him without saying so that it was time to leave. Then Florentino Ariza felt an urgeo put a definitive end to that loveless relationship, and he looked for the opportunity to be the oo take the initiative: as he would always do. Praying that Sara Na would let him into her bed so that he could tell her no, that everything was over, he asked her to sit o him when she fin-ished winding the clock. But she preferred to keep her distan the visitor’s easy chair. Then Florentino Ariza extended his index finger, wet with brandy, so that she could suck it, as she had liked to do in the past during their preambles to love. She refused.
“Not now,” she said. “I’m expeg someone.”
Ever since his reje by Fermina Daza, Florentino Ariza had learo always keep the final decision for himself. In less bitter circumstances he would have persisted in his pursuit of Sara Na, certain of ending the evening rolling in bed with her, for he was vihat once a womao bed with a man, she will -tio go to bed with him whenever he desires, as long as he knows how to move her to passion each time. He had endured everything because of that vi, he had overlooked everything, even the dirtiest dealings in love, so that he would not have to grant to any woman born of woman the opportunity to make the final decision. But that night he felt so humiliated that he gulped down the brandy in a single swallow, doing all he could to display anger, a without saying goodbye. They never saw each ain.
The relationship with Sara Na was one of Florentino Ariza’s lo and most stable affairs, although it was not his only one dur-ing those five years. When he realized that he felt happy with her, above all in bed, but that she would never replace Fermina Daza, he had another outbreak of his nights as a solitary hunter, and he arranged matters so that he could portion out his time and strength as far as they would go. Sara Na, however, achieved the miracle of g him for a time. At least now he could live without seeing Fermina Daza, instead of interrupting whatever he was doing at any hour of the day to search for her along the uain pathways of his pre-ses, on the most unlikely streets, in unreal places where she could not possibly be, wandering without reason, with a longing in his breast that gave him until he saw her, even for an instant. The break with Sara Na, however, revived his dormant grief, and once again he felt as he did on those afternoons of endless read-ing itle park, but this time it was exacerbated by his urgent need for Dr. Juvenal Urbino to die.
He had known for a long time that he redestio make a widoy, and that she would make him happy, and that did not worry him. On the trary: he repared. After having known so many of them during his incursions as a solitary hunter, Florentino Ariza had e to realize that the world was full of happy widows. He had seen them go mad with grief at the sight of their husband’s corpse, pleading to be buried alive in the same coffin so they would not have to face the future without him, but as they grew reciled to the reality of their new dition he had seen them rise up from the ashes with renewed vitality.
They began by living like parasites of gloom in their big empty houses, they became the fidantes of their servants, lovers of their pillows, with nothing to do after so many years of sterile captivity. They wasted their overabundant hours doing what they had not had time for before, sewing the buttons on the dead man’s clothes, ironing and reironing the shirts with stiff collar and cuffs so that they would always be in perfect dition. They tio put his soap ihroom, his monogrammed pillow-case on the bed; his place was always set at the table, in case he returned from the dead without warning, as he teo do in life. But in those solitary Masses they began to be aware that once again they were mistresses of their fate, after having renounot only their family their owy in exge for a security that was no more than another of a bride’s many illusions.
They alone knew how tiresome was the man they loved to distra, who per-haps loved them but whom they had to tinue nurturing until his last breath as if he were a child, sug him, ging his soiled diapers, distrag him with a mother’s tricks to ease his terror at going out each m to face reality. Aheless, when they watched him leave the house, this mahemselves had urged to quer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return. That was their life. Love, if it existed, was something separate: another life.
In the restorative idleness of solitude, oher hand, the wid-ows discovered that the honorable way to live was at the body’s biddiing only when one was hungry, loving without lies, sleeping without having to feign sleep in order to escape the inde-cy of official love, possessed at last of the right to aire bed to themselves, where no one fought them for half of the sheet, half of the air they breathed, half of their night, until their bodies were satis-fied with dreaming their own dreams, and they woke alone. In the dawns of his furtive hunting, Florentino Ariza would see them -ing out of five o’ass, shrouded in blad with the raven of destiny on their shoulder. As soon as they spotted him in the light of dawn, they would cross the street to walk oher side with their small, hesitant steps, the steps of a little bird, for just walking near a man might stain their honor. A he was vihat a dis-solate widow, more than any other woman, might carry withihe seed of happiness.
So many widows in his life, sihe Widow Nazaret, had made it possible for him to dis hoy they were after the death of their husbands. What had been only a dream until then was ged, thanks to them, into a possibility that he could seize with both hands. He saw no reason why Fermina Daza should not be a widow like them, prepared by life to accept him just as he was, with-out fantasies of guilt because of her dead husband, resolved to dis-cover with him the other happiness of being happy twice, with one love for everyday use which would bee, more and more, a miracle of being alive, and the other love that beloo her alohe love immunized by death against all tagion.
Perhaps he would not have been as enthusiastic if he had even suspected how far Fermina Daza was from those illusory calcula-tions, at a time when she was just beginning to perceive the horizon of a world in which everything was foreseen except adversity. In those days, being rich had many advantages, and many disadvantages as well, of course, but half the world longed for it as the most probable way to live forever.
Fermina Daza had rejected Florentino Ariza in a lightning flash of maturity which she paid for immediately with a crisis of pity, but she never doubted that her decision had been correct. At the time she could not explain what hidden impulses of her reason had allowed her that clairvoyance, but many years later, on the eve of old age, she uncovered them suddenly and without knowing how during a casual versation about Florentino Ariza. Everyone khat he was heir apparent to the River pany of the Caribbean during its greatest period; they were all sure they had seen him many times, and had even had dealings with him, but no one could remem-ber what he was like. It was then that Fermina Daza experiehe revelation of the unsotives that had kept her from loving him. She said: “It is as if he were not a person but only a shadow.”
That is what he was: the shadow of someone whom no one had ever known. But while she resisted the siege of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who was just the opposite, she felt herself tormented by the phantom of guilt: the oion she could not bear. When she felt it ing on, a kind of panic overtook her which she could trol only if she found someoo soothe her sce. Ever since she was a little girl, when a plate broke i, when someone fell, when she herself caught her finger in the door, she would turn in dismay to the adult and make her accusation: “It was your fault.” Although iy she was not ed with who was responsible or with ving herself of her own innoce: she was satisfied at haviablished it.
The specter was so notorious that Dr. Urbino realized how much it threatehe harmony of his home, and as soon as he detected it he hasteo tell his wife: “Don’t worry, my love, it was my fault.” For he feared nothing so much as his wife’s sudden categorical deci-sions, and he was vihat they always inated in a feeling of guilt. The fusion caused by her reje of Florentino Ariza, however, had not been resolved with f words. For several months Fermina Daza tio open up the baly in the m, and she always missed the solitary phantom watg her from the deserted little park; she saw the tree that had been his, the most obscure bench where he would sit to read as he thought about her, suffered for her, and she would have to close the window again, sighing: “Poor man.”
When it was already too late to make up for the past, she even suffered the disillusio of knowing that he was not as tenacious as she had supposed, and from time to time she would still feel a belated longing for a letter that never arrived. But when she had to face the decision of marrying Juvenal Urbino, she suc-cumbed, in a major crisis, when she realized that she had no valid reasons for preferring him after she had rejected Florentino Ariza without valid reasons. In fact, she loved him as little as she had loved the other one, but knew much less about him, and his letters did not have the fervor of the other one’s, nor had he given her so many moving proofs of his determination. The truth is that Juvenal Urbino’s suit had never been uaken in the name of love, and it was curious, to say the least, that a militant Catholic like him would offer her only worldly goods: security, order, happiness, tiguous hat, ohey were added together, might resemble love, almost be love. But they were not love, and these doubts increased her fusion, because she was also not vihat love was really what she most o live.
In any case, the principal factor operating against Dr. Juvenal Urbino was his more than suspect resemblao the ideal man that Lorenzo Daza had so wanted for his daughter. It was impossible not to see him as the creature of a paternal plot, even if iy he was not, but Fermina Daza became vihat he was from the time she saw him e to her house for a sed, unsolicited medical call. In the end, her versations with Cousin Hildebranda only -fused her.
Because of Cousin Hildebranda’s own situation as a victim, she teo identify with Florentino Ariza, fetting that perhaps Lorenzo Daza had arranged her visit so that she could use her influ-en favor of Dr. Urbino. God alone knows what it cost Fermina Daza not to apany her cousin when she went to meet Florentino Ariza ielegraph office. She would have liked to see him again to present him with her doubts, to speak with him aloo learn to know him well so that she could be certain that her impulsive decision would not precipitate her into another, more serious one: capitulation in her personal war against her father. But that is what she did at a crucial moment in her life, giving no importance what-soever to the handsomeness of her suitor, or his legendary wealth, or his youthful glory, or any of his numerous virtues; rather, she was stunned by the fear of an opportunity slipping away, and by the imminence of her twenty-first birthday, which was her private time limit for surrendering to fate. That one moment was enough for her to make the decision that was foreseen in the laws of God and man: until death do you part.
Then all her doubts vanished, and she could aplish without remorse what reason indicated as the most det thing to do: with no tears, she wiped away the memory of Florentino Ariza, she erased him pletely, and in the space that he had occu-pied in her memory she allowed a field of poppies to bloom. All that she permitted herself was one final sigh that was deeper than usual: “Poor man!”
The most fearful doubts began, however, wheurned from her honeymoon. As soon as they opehe trunks, unpacked the furniture, aied the eleves she had brought in order to take possession as lady and mistress of the former palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, she realized with mortal vertigo that she risoner in the wrong house and, even worse, with a man who was not. It took her six years to leave, the worst years of her life, when she was in despair because of the bitterness of Do?a Blanca, her mother-in-law, and the mental lethargy of her sisters-in-law, who did not go to rot in a vent cell only because they already carried one ihem-selves.
Dr. Urbino paying homage to his liurned a deaf ear to her pleas, fident that the wisdom of God and his wife’s infinite capacity to adapt would resolve the situation. He ained by the deterioration of his mother, whose joy in living had, at oime, sparked the desire to live ihe most skeptical. It was true: that beautiful, intelligent woman, with a human sensibility not at all on in her milieu, had been the soul and body of her social paradise for almost forty years. Widowhood had so embittered her that she did not seem the same person; it had made her flabby and sour and the enemy of the world. The only possible explanation for her dee was the rancor she felt because her husband had know-ingly sacrificed himself for a black rabble, as she used to say, when the only fitting sacrifice would have been to survive for her sake. In any case, Fermina Daza’s happy marriage lasted as long as the honey-moon, and the only person who could help her to prevent its final wreckage aralyzed by terror in the presence of his mother’s power. It was he, and not her imbecilic sisters-in-law and her half-mad mother-in-law, whom Fermina Daza blamed for the death trap that held her. She suspected too late that behind his professional authority and worldly charm, the man she had married eless weakling: a poor devil made bold by the social weight of his family names.
She te in her newborn son. She had felt him leave her body with a sensation of relief at freeing herself from something that did not belong to her, and she had been horrified at herself when she firmed that she did not feel the slightest affe for that calf from her womb the midwife showed her in the raw, smeared with grease and blood and with the umbilical cord rolled around his neck. But in her loneliness in the palace she learo know him, they learo know each other, and she discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s chil-dren but because of the friendship formed while raising them. She came to despise anything and anyone who was not him in the house of her misfortune. She was depressed by the solitude, the cemetery garden, the squandering of time in the enormous, windowless rooms.
During the endless nights she felt herself losing her mind, as the mad-women screamed in the asylum door. She was ashamed of their of setting the baable every day with embroidered table-cloths, silver service, and funereal delabra so that five phantoms could dine on café leche and crullers. She detested the rosary at dusk, the affected table etiquette, the stant criticism of the way she held her silverware, the way she walked in mystical strides like a woman of the streets, the way she dressed as if she were in the circus, and even the rustic way she treated her husband and nursed her child without c her breast with her mantilla. When she issued her first invitations to five o’clock tea, with little imperial cakes and died flowers, in accordah ret English fashion, Do?a Blanca objected t remedies for sweating out a fever in her house instead of chocolate with aged cheese and rounded loaves of cassava bread. Not even dreams escaped her noti when Fermina Daza said she had dreamed about a ranger who walked through the salons of the palace scattering fistfuls of ashes, Do?a Blanca cut her off:
“A det woman ot have that kind of dream.”
Along with the feeling of always being in someone else’s house came two eveer misfortunes. One was the almost daily diet of eggplant in all its forms, which Do?a Blanca refused to vary out of respect for her dead husband, and which Fermina Daza refused to eat. She had despised eggplants ever since she was a little girl, even before she had tasted them, because it always seemed to her that they were the color of poison. Only now she had to admit that in this case something had ged for the better in her life, because at the age of five she had said the same thing at the table, and her father had forced her to eat the entire casserole intended for six people. She thought she was going to die, first because she vomited pulverized eggplant and then because of the cupful of castor oil she had to take as a cure for the punishment. Both things were fused in her memory as a single purgative, as much for the taste as for her terror of the poison, and at the abominable lunches in the palace of the Marquis de Casalduero she had to look away so as not to repay their kindness with the iausea of castor oil.
The other misfortune was the harp. One day, very scious of what she meant, Do?a Blanca had said: “I do not believe i women who do not know how to play the piano.” It was an order that even her son tried to dispute, for the best years of his childhood had bee in the galley slavery of piano lessons, although as an adult he would be grateful for them. He could not imagine his wife, with her character, subjected to the same punishment at the age of twenty-five. But the only cession he could wring from his mother, with the puerile argument that it was the instrument of the angels, was to substitute the harp for the piano. And so it was that they brought a magnifit harp from Vienna that seemed to be gold and sounded as if it were, and that was one of the most valued heirlooms in the Museum of the City until it and all it tained were ed in flames. Fermina Daza submitted to this deluxe prisoen an attempt to avoid catastrophe with one final sacrifice. She began to study with a teacher of teachers, whom they brought for that pur-pose from the city of Mompox, and who died uedly two weeks later, and she tinued for several years with the best musi at the seminary, whose gravedigger’s breath distorted her arpeggios.
She herself was surprised at her obedience. For although she did not admit it in her innermost thoughts, or in the silent arguments she had with her husband during the hours they had once devoted to love, she had been caught up more quickly than she had believed iangle of ventions and prejudices of her new world. At first she had a ritual phrase that affirmed her freedom of thought: “To hell with a fahe wind is blowing.” But later, jealous of her care-fully won privileges, fearful of embarrassment and s, she demon-strated her willio endure even humiliation in the hope that God would at last take pity on Do?a Blanca, who ired of begging Him in her prayers to send her death.
Dr. Urbino justified his own weakness with grave arguments, not even asking himself if they were in flict with the Church. He would not admit that the difficulties with his wife had their in in the rarefied air of the house, but blamed them on the very nature of matrimony: an absurd iion that could exist only by the infinite grace of God. It was against all stific reason for two people who hardly knew each other, with no ties at all between them, with dif-ferent characters, different upbringings, and even different genders, to suddenly find themselves itted to living together, to sleeping in the same bed, to sharing two destihat perhaps were fated to go in opposite dires. He would say: “The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every m before breakfast.” And worst of all was theirs, arising out of two opposing classes, in a city that still dreamed of the return of the Viceroys. The only possible bond was something as improba-ble and fickle as love, if there was any, and in their case there was none when they married, and when they were on the verge of i-ing it, fate had dohing more than front them with reality.
That was the dition of their lives during the period of the harp. They had left behind the delicious ces of her ing in while he was taking a bath, whee the arguments and the poisonous eggplant, ae his demented sisters and the mother who bore them, he still had enough love to ask her to soap him. She began to do it with the crumbs of love that still remained from Europe, and both allowed themselves to be betrayed by memories, softening without wanting to, desiring each other without saying so, and at last they would die of love on the floor, spattered with fragrant suds, as they heard the maids talking about them in the laundry room: “If they don’t have more children it’s because they don’t fuck.” From time to time, when they came home from a wild fiesta, the nostalgia croug behind the door would knock them down with one blow of its paw, and then there would be a marvelous explosion in which everything was the way it used to be and for five mihey were once again the uninhibited lovers of their honeymoon.
But except for those rare occasions, one of them was always more tired thaher when it was time to go to bed. She would dawdle ihroom, rolling her cigarettes in perfumed paper, smoking alone, relapsing into her solatory love as she did when she was young and free in her own house, mistress of her own body. She always had a headache, or it was too hot, always, or she preteo be asleep, or she had her period again, her period, always her period. So much so that Dr. Urbino had dared to say in class, only for the relief of unburdening himself without fession, that after ten years of marriage women had their periods as often as three times a week.
Misfortune piled on misfortune, and in the worst of those years Fermina Daza had to face what was bound to e sooner or later: the truth of her father’s fabulous and always mysterious dealings. The Governor of the Province made an appoi with Juvenal Urbino in his office t him up to date on the excesses of his father-in-law, which he summed up in a single sentehere is no law, human or divihat this man has not ignored.” Some of his most serious schemes had been carried out in the shadow of his son-in-law’s prestige, and it would have been difficult to believe that he and his wife knew nothing about them. Realizing that the only repu-tation to protect was his own, because it was the only oill stand-ing, Dr. Juvenal Urbino intervened with all the weight of his prestige, and he succeeded in c up the sdal with his word of honor.
So that Lorenzo Daza left the try on the first boat, o return. He went back to his native try as if it were one of those little trips oakes from time to time to ward off nostalgia, and at the bottom of that appearahere was some truth: for a long time he had boarded ships from his try just to drink a glass of water from the cisterns filled with the rains of the village where he was born. He left without having his arm twisted, protesting his inno-ce, and still trying to vince his son-in-law that he had been the victim of a political spiracy. He left g for his girl, as he had called Fermina Daza since her marriage, g for his grandson, for the land in which he had bee rid free and where, on the basis of his shady dealings, he had won the power to turn his daughter into an exquisite lady. He left old and sick, but still he lived much lohan any of his victims might have desired. Fermina Daza could not repress a sigh of relief when she received the news of his death, and in order to avoid questions she did not wear m, but for sev-eral months she wept with mute fury without knowing why when she locked herself ihroom to smoke, and it was because she was g for him.
The most absurd element in their situation was that they never seemed so happy in public as during those years of misery. For this was the time of their greatest victories over the subterranean hostility of a milieu that resisted accepting them as they were: different and modern, and for that reasressainst the traditional order. That, however, had been the easy part for Fermina Daza. Life in the world, which had caused her so mucertainty before she was familiar with it, was nothing more than a system of atavisti-tracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people eained each other in society in order not to it murder. The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown.
She had defi in a simpler way: “The problem in public life is learning to overe terror; the problem in married life is learning to overe boredom.” She had made this sudden dis-covery with the clarity of a revelatiorailing her endless bridal train behind her, she had ehe vast salon of the Social Club, where the air was thin with the mingled st of so many flowers, the brilliance of the waltzes, the tumult of perspiring men and tremulous women who looked at her not knowing how they were going to exorcise the dazzling mehat had e to them from the outside world. She had just turwenty-one and had dotle more than leave her house to go to school, but with one look around her she uood that her adversaries were not -vulsed with hatred but paralyzed by fear. Instead htening them even more, as she was already doing, she had the passion to help them learn to know her.
They were no different from what she wahem to be, just as in the case of cities, which did not seem better or worse to her, but only as she made them in her heart. Despite the perpetual rain, the sordid merts, and the Homeric vulgarity of its carriage drivers, she would always remember Paris as the most beautiful city in the world, not because of what it was or was not iy, but because it was lio the memory of her happiest years. Dr. Urbino, for his part, anded respect with the same ons that were used against him, except that his were wielded with more intelligend with calculated solemnity. Nothing hap-pened without them: civic exhibitions, the Poetic Festival, artistic events, charity raffles, patriotic ceremohe first journey in a balloon. They were there for everything, and almost always from its iion and at the forefront. During those unfortunate years no one could have imagined anyone happier than they or a marriage more harmonious than theirs.
The house left by her father gave Fermina Daza a refuge from the asphyxiation of the family palace. As soon as she could escape from public view, she would go i to the Park of the Evangels, and there she would visit with new friends and some old ones from school or the painting classes: an i substitute for iy. She spent tranquil hours as a siher, surrounded by what remained of her girlhood memories. She replaced the perfumed crows, found cats oreet and placed them in the care of Gala Placidia, who by this time was old and somewhat slowed by rheumatism but still willing t the house back to life. She opehe sewing room where Florentino Ariza saw her for the first time, where Dr. Juvenal Urbino had her stick out her tongue so that he could try to read her heart, and she tur into a sanctuary of the past.
One winter afternoon she went to close the baly because a heavy storm was threatening, and she saw Florentino Ariza on his bender the almond trees itle park, with his father’s suit altered to fit him and his book open on his lap, but this time she did not see him as she had seen him by act on various occasions, but at the age at which he remained in her memory. She was afraid that the vision was an omen of death, and she was grief-stri. She dared to tell herself that perhaps she would have been happier with him, aloh him in that house she had restored for him with as much love as he had felt when he re-stored his house for her, and that simple hypothesis dismayed her because it permitted her to realize the extreme of unhappiness she had reached. Then she summoned her last strength and obliged her husband to talk to her without evasion, to froue with her, to cry with her in rage at the loss of paradise, until they heard the last rooster crow, and the light filtered in through the lace curtains of the palace, and the sun rose, and her husband, puffy with so much talk, exhausted with lack of sleep, his heart fortified with so much weeping, laced his shoes, tightened his belt, fastened everything that remaio him of his manhood, and told her yes, my love, they were going to look for the love they had lost in Europe: starting tomor-row and forever after.
It was such a firm decision that he arranged with the Treasury Bank, his general administrator, for the immediate liquidation of the vast family fortune, which was dispersed, and had been from the very beginning, in all kinds of businesses, iments, and long-term, sacred bonds, and whily he knew was not as excessive as legend would have it: just large enough so one did not o think about it. What there was of it was verted into stamped gold, to be ied little by little in his fn bank ac-ts until he and his wife would own nothing in this harsh try, not even a plot of ground to die on.
A Florentino Ariza actually existed, trary to what she had decided to believe. He was on the pier where the French o liner was docked when she arrived with her husband and child in the landau drawn by the golden horses, and he saw them emerge as he had so oftehem at public ceremonies: perfect. They were leaving with their son, raised in such a way that one could already see what he would be like as an adult: and so he was. Juvenal Urbino greeted Florentino Ariza with a joyous wave of his hat: “We’re off to quer Flanders.” Fermina Daza nodded, and Florentino Ariza took off his hat and made a slight bow, and she looked at him without the slightest passion for the premature ravages of baldness. There he was, just as she saw him: the shadow of someone she had never met.
These were not the best times for Florentino Ariza either. In addi-tion to his work, which grew more and more intense, and the tedium of his furtive hunting, and the dead calm of the years, there was also the final crisis of Tránsito Ariza, whose mind had bee almost without memories, almost a blank, to the point where she would turn to him at times, see him reading in the armchair he always sat in, and ask him in surprise: “And whose son are you?” He would always reply with the truth, but she would interrupt him again without delay:
“And tell me something, my boy,” she would ask. “Who am I?”
She had grown so fat that she could not move, and she spent the day iions shop, where there was no longer anything to sell, primping and dressing in finery from the time she awoke with the first roosters until the following dawn, for she slept very little. She would put garlands of flowers on her head, paint her lips, powder her fad arms, and at last she would ask whoever was with her, “Who am I now?” The neighbors khat she always expected the same reply: “You are Little Roachie Martínez.” This identity, stolen from a character in a children’s story, was the only ohat satisfied her. She tio rod to fan herself with long pihers, until she began all ain: the of paper flowers, violet on her eyelids, red on her lips, dead white on her face. And again the question to whoever was nearby: “Who am I now?” When she became the laughingstock of the neighborhood, Florentino Ariza had the ter and the ste drawers of the old notions shop dismantled in one night, and the street door sealed, and the space arranged just as he had heard her describe Roachie Martínez’s bedroom, and she never asked again who she was.
At the suggestion of Uncle Leo XII, he found an older woman to take care of her, but the poor thing was always more asleep than awake, and at times she gave the impression that she, too, fot who she was. So that Florentino Ariza would stay home from the time he left the offitil he mao put his mother to sleep. He no longer played domi the ercial Club, and for a long time he did not visit the few women friends he had tio see, for some-thing very profound had ged in his heart after his dreadful meeting with Olimpia Zuleta.
It was as if he had been struck by lightning. Florentino Ariza had just taken Uncle Leo XII home during one of those October storms that would leave us reeling, when he saw from his carriage a slight, very agile girl in a dress covered with anza ruffles that looked like a bridal gown. He saw her running in alarm from one side of the street to the other, because the wind had snatched away her parasol and was blowing it out to sea. He rescued her in his carriage a out of his way to take her to her house, an old verted hermitage that faced the open sea and whose patio, visible from the street, was full of pigeon coops.
On the way, she told him that she had been married less than a year to a man who sold tris in the market, whom Florentino Ariza had often seen on his pany’s boats un-loading cartons of all kinds of salable merdise and with a multi-tude of pigeons in a wicker cage of the sort mothers used on riverboats for carrying infants. Olimpia Zuleta seemed to belong to the family, not only because of her high buttocks and meager bosom, but because of everything about her: her hair like copper wire, her freckles, her round, animated eyes that were farther apart than normal, and her melodious voice that she used only for saying intelligent and amusing things. Florentino Ariza thought she was more witty than attractive, and he fot her as soon as he left her at her house, where she lived with her husband, his father, and other members of his family.
A few days later he saw her husband at the port, loading mer-dise instead of unloading it, and when the ship weighed anchor Florentino heard, with great clarity, the voice of the devil in his ear. That afternoon, after taking Uncle Leo XII home, he passed by Olimpia Zuleta’s house as if by act, and he saw her over the fence, feeding the noisy pigeons. He called to her from his carriage: “How much for a pigeon?” She reized him and answered in a merry voice: “They are not for sale.” He asked: “Then what must I do to get one?” Still feeding the pigeons, she replied: “You drive her back to the coop when you find her lost in a storm.” So that Florentino Ariza arrived home that night with a thank-you gift from Olimpia Zuleta: a carrier pigeon with a metal ring around its leg.
The afternoon, just at diime, the beautiful pigeon fancier saw the gift carrier pigeon in the dovecote and thought it had escaped. But when she picked it up to exami, she realized that there was a slip of paper ihe ring: a declaration of love. It was the first time that Florentino Ariza had left a written trace, and it would not be the last, although on this occasion he had been prudent enough not to sign his name. He was going into his house the following afternoon, a Wednesday, when a street boy handed him the same pigeon in a cage, with a memorized message that the pigeon lady hereby sends you this, and says to tell you to please keep the cage locked because if not it will fly away again and this is the last time she will send it back. He had no idea how to interpret this: either the pigeon had lost the note en route, or the pigeonkeeper had decided to play i, or she had returhe pigeon so that he could send it back tain. If that was true, however, the natural thing would have been for her to return the pigeon with a reply.
On Saturday m, after much thought, Florentino Ariza sent back the pigeon with another unsigned letter. This time he did not have to wait until the day. Iernoon the same bht it ba ane, with a message that said she hereby sends back the pigeon that flew away again, and that the day before yester-day she retur out of courtesy and this time she returns it out of pity, but that now it is really true that she will not return it again if it flies away aime. Tránsito Ariza played with the pigeon until very late, she took it out of the cage, she rocked it in her arms, she tried to lull it to sleep with children’s songs, and then suddenly Florentino Ariza realized that in the ring around its leg was a little piece of paper with one line written on it: I do not accept anonymous letters. Florentino Ariza read it, his heart wild with joy as if this were the culmination of his first adventure, and he did not sleep a wink that night as he tossed and turned with impatience. Very early the day, before he left for the office, he once agaihe pigeon free, carrying a love hat bore his clear signature, and he also put in the ring the freshest, reddest, and most fragrant rose from his garden.
It was not that easy. After three months of pursuit, the beautiful pigeon fancier was still sending the same answer: I am not one of those women. But she never refused to accept his messages or broke any of the dates that Florentino Ariza arranged so that they would seem to be casual enters. He was a different person: the lover who never showed his face, the man most avid for love as well as most niggardly with it, the man who gave nothing and wanted every-thing, the man who did not allow ao leave a trace of her pass-ing in his heart, the hunter lying in ambush--this ma out oreet in the midst of ecstatic signed letters, gallant gifts, im-prudent vigils at the pigeonkeeper’s house, even on two occasions when her husband was not on a trip or at the market. It was the only time, since his you days, when he felt himself run through by the lance of love.
Six months after their first meeting, they found themselves at last in a on a riverboat that was being pai the docks. It was a marvelous afternoon. Olimpia Zuleta had the joyous love of a startled pigeon fancier, and she preferred to remain naked for several hours in a slow-moving repose that was, for her, as loving as love itself. The was dismantled, half painted, and they would take the odor of turpentine away with them in the memory of a happy afternoon. In a sudden inspiration, Florentino Ariza opened a of red paint that was within reach of the bunk, wet his index finger, and paihe pubis of the beautiful pigeon fancier with an arrow of blood pointing south, and on her belly the words: This pussy is mihat same night, Olimpia Zuleta undressed in front of her husband, hav-ing fotten what was scrawled there, and he did not say a word, his breathing did not even ge, nothing, but he went to the bathroom for his razor while she utting on her nightgown, and in a single slash he cut her throat.
Florentino did not find out until many days later, when the fugitive husband was captured and told the neers the reasons for the crime and how he had itted it. For many years he thought with terror about the signed letters, he kept track of the prison term of the murderer, who knew him because of his dealings with the boat -pany, but it was not so much fear of a k his throat or a public sdal as the misfortune of Fermina Daza’s learning about his iy. One day during his years of waiting, the woman who took care of Tránsito Ariza had to stay at the market lohan expected because of an unseasonable downpour, and wheuro the house she found her sitting in the rog chair, painted and bedecked as always, and with eyes so animated and a smile so mischievous that her caretaker did not realize she was dead until two hours later. Shortly before her death she had distributed to the neighborhood children the fortune in gold and jewels hidden in the jars buried under her bed, saying they could eat them like dy, and some of the most valuable were impossible to recover. Florentino Ariza buried her in the former Hand of God ranch, which was still known as the Cholera Cemetery, and he planted a rosebush on her grave.
After his first few visits to the cemetery, Florentino Ariza dis-covered that Olimpia Zuleta was buried very close by, without a tombsto with her name and the date scrawled in the fresh t of the crypt, ahought in horror that this was one of her husband’s sanguinary jokes. When the roses bloomed he would place a flower on her grave if there was no one in sight, and later he planted a cutting taken from his mother’s rosebush. Both bloomed in such profusion that Florentino Ariza had t shears and arden tools to keep them under trol. But the task was beyond him: after a few years the two rosebushes had spread like weeds among the graves, and from then on, the unadorned cemetery of the plague was called the Cemetery of Roses, until some mayor who was less realistic than popular wisdom cleared out the roses one night and hung a republi sign from the arch of the entrae: Universal Cemetery.
The death of his mother left Florentino Ariza ned once again to his maniacal pursuits: the office, his meetings in strict rotation with his regular mistresses, the domino games at the ercial Club, the same books of love, the Sunday visits to the cemetery. It was the rust of routine, which he had despised and feared so much, but which had protected him from an awareness of his age. However, one Sun-day in December, when the rosebushes oombs had already defeated the garden shears, he saw the swallows on the retly in-stalled electric wires and he suddenly realized how much time had gone by sihe death of his mother, and how much sihe murder of Olimpia Zuleta, and how very much sihat other distant De-cember afternoon when Fermina Daza sent him a letter saying yes, she would love him always.
Until then he had behaved as if time would not pass for him but only for others. Just the week before, he hap-peo meet oreet one of the many couples who had married because of the letters he had written, and he did nheir oldest child, who was his godson. He smoothed over his embarrass-ment with the ventional exclamation: “I’ll be damned, he’s a man already!” And he tinued in the same way even after his body began sending him the first warning signals, because he had always had the iron stitution of the sickly. Tránsito Ariza used to say: “The only disease my son ever had was cholera.” She had fused cholera with love, of course, long before her memory failed. But in a she was mistaken, because her son had suffered from six blennias, although the doctor had said they were not six but the same ohat reappeared after each lost battle. He had also had a swollen lymph gland, four warts, and six cases of impetigo in the groin, but it would not have occurred to him or any man to think of these as diseases; they were only the spoils of war.
When he had just turned forty, he had goo the doctor because of vague pains in various parts of his body. After mas, the doctor had said: “It’s age.” He had returned home without even w if any of that had anything to do with him. For his only point of referen his own past was the ephemeral love affair with Fermina Daza, and only what ed her had anything to do with reing his life. So that oernoon when he saw the swallows on the electric wires, he reviewed the past from his earliest memory, he reviewed his ce loves, the tless pitfalls he had been obliged to avoid in order to reach a position of authority, the events without hat had given rise to his bitter determination that Fermina Daza would be his and he would be hers despite everything, in the face of everything, and only then did he realize that his life assing. He was shaken by a visceral shudder that left his mind blank, and he had to drop the garden tools and lean against the cemetery wall so that the first blow of old age would not knock him down.
“Damn it,” he said, appalled, “that all happehirty years ago!”
And it had. Thirty years that had also gone by for Fermina Daza, of course, but had been for her the most pleasant and exhilarating years of her life. The days of horror in the Palace of Casalduero were relegated to the trash heap of memory. She was living in her new house in La Manga, absolute mistress of her owiny, with a hus-band she would have preferred to all the men in the world if she had to choose again, a son who was tinuing the family tradi-tion in the Medical School, and a daughter so much like her when she was her age that at times she was disturbed by the impression of feel-ing herself duplicated. She had returo Europe three times after the unforturip from which she had intended o return so that she would not have to live iual turmoil.
God must have finally listeo someone’s prayers: after two years in Paris, when Fermina Daza and Juvenal Urbino were just beginning to find what remained of their love in the ruins, a midnight telegram awoke them with the hat Do?a Blanca de Urbino was gravely ill, and almost on its heels came another with the news of her death. They returned without delay. Fermina Daza walked off the ship wearing a black tunic whose fullness could not hide her di-tion. In fact she regnant again, and this news gave rise to a popular song, more mischievous than malicious, whose chorus was heard for the rest of the year: What d’you think she does over there, this beauty from our earth? Whenever she es back from Paris, she’s ready to give birth. Despite the vulgarity of the words, for many years afterward Dr. Juvenal Urbino would request it at Social Club dao prove he was a good sport.
The noble palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, whose existend coat of arms had never been doted, was sold to the munici-pal treasury for a det price, and then resold for a fortuo the tral gover when a Dutch researcher began excavations to prove that the real grave of Christopher bus was located there: the fifth one so far. The sisters of Dr. Urbino, without taking vows, went to live in seclusion in the vent of the Salesians, and Fermina Daza stayed in her father’s old house until the villa in La Manga was pleted. She walked in with a firm step, she walked in prepared to and, with the English furniture brought ba their honey-moon and the plementary furnishings they sent for after their reciliation trip, and from the first day she began to fill it with exotiimals that she herself went to buy on the sers from the Antilles.
She walked in with the husband she had won back, the son she had raised with propriety, the daughter who was born four months after their return and whom they baptized Ofelia. Dr. Urbino, for his part, uood that it was impossible to possess his wife as pletely as he had on their honeymoon, because the part of love he wanted was what she had given, along with her best hours, to her children, but he learo live and be happy with what was left over. The harmony they had longed for reached its culminatiohey least expected it, at a gala di which a delicious food was served that Fermina Daza could not identify. She began with a good portion, but she liked it so much that she took another of the same size, and she was lamenting the fact that urbaiquette did not permit her to help herself to a third, when she learhat she had just eaten, with unsuspected pleasure, two heaping plates of pureed eggplant. She accepted defeat with good grace, and from that time on, eggplant in all its forms was served at the villa in La Manga with almost as much frequency as at the Palace of Casalduero, and it was enjoyed so much by everyohat Dr. Juvenal Urbino would lighten the idle hours of his old age by insisting that he wao have another daughter so that he could give her the best-loved word in the house as a name: Eggplant Urbino.
Fermina Daza khen that private life, unlike public life, was fickle and uable. It was not easy for her to establish real dif-ferences between children and adults, but in the last analysis she preferred children, because their judgment was more reliable. She had barely turhe er into maturity, free at last of illusions, when she began to detect the disillusio of never having been what she had dreamed of being when she was young, in the Park of the Evangels. Instead, she was something she never dared admit even to herself: a deluxe servant. In society she came to be the woman most loved, most catered to, and by the same token most feared, but in nothing was she more demanding or less fiving than in the ma of her house. She always felt as if her life had beeo her by her husband: she was absolute monarch of a vast empire of happiness, which had been built by him and for him alone. She khat he loved her above all else, more than anyone else in the world, but only for his own sake: she was in his holy service.
If anything vexed her, it was the perpetual of daily meals. For they not only had to be served on time: they had to be perfect, and they had to be just what he wao eat, without his having to be asked. If she ever did ask, in one of the innumerable useless cere-monies of their domestic ritual, he would not even look up from the neer and would reply: “Anything.” In his amiable way he was telling the truth, because one could not imagine a less despotic hus-band. But when it was time to eat, it could not be anything, but just what he wanted, and with s: the meat should not taste of meat, and the fish should not taste of fish, and the pork should not taste of mange, and the chi should not taste of feathers.
Eve was not the season for asparagus, it had to be found regard-less of cost, so that he could take pleasure in the vapors of his own fragrant urine. She did not blame him: she blamed life. But he was an implacable protagonist in that life. At the mere hint of a doubt, he would push aside his plate and say: “This meal has been prepared without love.” In that sphere he would achieve moments of fantastispiration. Once he tasted some ile tea a it back, saying only: “This stuff tastes of window.” Both she and the servants were surprised because they had never heard of anyone who had drunk boiled window, but wheried the tea in an effort to uand, they uood: it did taste of window.
He erfect husband: he never picked up anything from the floor, or turned out a light, or closed a door. In the m dark-ness, when he found a button missing from his clothes, she would hear him say: “A man should have two wives: oo love and oo sew on his buttons.” Every day, at his first swallow of coffee and at his first spoonful of soup, he would break into a heartrending howl that no longer frightened anyone, and then unburden himself: “The day I leave this house, you will know it is because I grew tired of always having a burned mouth.” He would say that they never pre-pared lunches as appetizing and unusual as on the days when he could because he had taken a laxative, and he was so vihat this was treachery on the part of his wife that in the end he refused to take a purgative unless she took oh him.
Tired of his lack of uanding, she asked him for an unusual birthday gift: that for one day he would take care of the domestic chores. He accepted in amusement, and iook charge of the house at dawn. He served a splendid breakfast, but he fot that fried eggs did not agree with her and that she did not drink café leche. Then he ordered a birthday lun fht guests and gave instrus for tidying the house, aried so hard to mater than she did that before noon he had to capitulate without a trabar-rassment. From the first moment he realized he did not have the slightest idea where anything was, above all i, and the servants let him upset everything to find each item, for they were play-ing the game too.
At ten o’cloo decisions had been made regard-ing lunch because the houseing was not finished yet, the bedroom was not straightehe bathroom was not scrubbed; he fot to replace the toilet paper, ge the sheets, ahe en for the children, and he fused the servants’ duties: he told the cook to make the beds ahe chambermaids to cooking. At eleven o’clock, when the guests were about to arrive, the chaos in the house was such that Fermina Daza resumed and, laughing out loud, not with the triumphant attitude she would have liked but shaken instead with passion for the domestic helplessness of her husband. He was bitter as he offered the argument he always used: “Things did not go as badly for me as they would for you if you tried to cure the sick.” But it was a useful lesson, and not for him alone. Over the years they both reached the same wise clusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.
In the fullness of her new life, Fermina Daza would see Florentino Ariza on various public occasions, with more frequency as he im-proved his position, but she learo see him with so muatural-hat more than once, in sheer distra, she fot to greet him. She heard about him often, because in the world of business his cautious but inexorable advan the R.C.C. was a stant topic of versation. She saw him improve his manners, his timidity assed off as a certain enigmatic distance, a slight increase i suited him, as did the slowness of age, and he had known how to handle his absolute baldness with dignity. The only area in which he persisted in defying time and fashion was in his somber attire, his anaistic frock coats, his u, the poet’s string ties from his mother’s notions shop, his sinister umbrella. Fermina Daza grew aced to seeing him with other eyes, and in the end she did not ect him to the languid adolest who would sit and sigh for her uhe gusts of yellow leaves in the Park of the Evangels. In any case, she never saw him with indifference, and she was alleased by the good news she heard about him, because that helped to alleviate her guilt.
However, whehought he was pletely erased from her memory, he reappeared where she least expected him, a phantom of her nostalgia. It was during the first glimmering of old age, when she began to feel that something irreparable had occurred in her life when-ever she heard thunder before the rain. It was the incurable wound of solitary, stony, punctual thuhat would sound every after-noon in October at three o’clo the Sierra Villanueva, a memory that was being more vivid as the years went by.
While more ret events blurred in just a few days, the memories of her legendary jourhrough Cousin Hildebranda’s province were as sharp as if they had happened yesterday, and they had the perverse clarity of nostalgia. She remembered Manaure, in the mountains, its oraight, green street, its birds of good omen, the haunted house where she would wake to find her nightgown soaked by the eears of Petra Morales, who had died of love many years before in the same bed where she lay sleeping. She remembered the taste of the guavas, which had never been the same again, the warning thunder, which had been so intehat its sound was fused with the sound of rain, the topaz afternoons in San Juan del César when she would go walking with her court of excited cousins and ch her teeth so that her heart would not leap out of her mouth as they approached the telegraph office.
She had to sell her father’s house because she could not bear the pain of her adolesce, the view of the desolate little park from the baly, the sibylline fragrance of gardenias on hot nights, the frightening face of an old lady on the February after-noon when her fate was decided, and regardless of where she turned her memory of those times, she would find herself face to face with Florentino Ariza. But she always had enough serenity to know that they were not memories of love or repentance, but the image of a sorrow that left a trail of tears on her cheeks. Without realizing it, she was menaced by the same trap of pity that had been the downfall of so many of Florentino Ariza’s defenseless victims.
She g to her husband. And it was just at the time when he needed her most, because he suffered the disadvantage of being ten years ahead of her as he stumbled alohrough the mists of old age, with the eveer disadvantage of being a man and weaker than she was. In the end they knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divided being, and they felt unfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other’s thoughts without intending to, or the ridiculous act of one of them anticipating in public what the other was going to say. Together they had overe the daily inprehension, the instan-taneous hatred, the reciproastiness and fabulous flashes of glory in the jugal spiracy. It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most scious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were oher shore.
CHAPTER FIVE
ON THE OCCASION of the celebration of the new tury, there was an innovative program of public ceremohe most memorable of which was the first journey in a balloon, the fruit of the boundless initiative of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Half the city gathered on the Arsenal Beach to express their wonderment at the ast of the enormous balloon made of taffeta in the colors of the flag, which carried the first airmail to San Juan de la aga, some thirty leagues to the northeast as the crow flies. Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his wife, who had experiehe excitement of flight at the World’s Fair in Paris, were the first to climb into the wicker basket, followed by the pilot and six distinguished guests. They were carrying a letter from the Governor of the Provio the municipal officials of San Juan de la aga, in which it was doted for all time that this was the first mail transported through the air. A journalist from the ercial Daily asked Dr. Juvenal Urbino for his final words in the event he perished during the adventure, and he did not even take the time to think about the ahat would earn him so much abuse.
“In my opinion,” he said, “the eenth tury 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 ents he heard over the din, to the effect that this was not a suitable exploit for a woma of all one as old as Fermina Daza. But it was not so dangerous after all. Or at least not so much dangerous as depressing. The balloon reached its destination without i after a peaceful trip through an incredible blue sky. They flew well and very low, with a calm, favorable wind, first along the spurs of the snow-covered mountains and thehe vastness of the Great S.
From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the cholera panic after three turies of resistao the sieges of the English and the atrocities of the bueers. They saw the walls still intact, the brambles ireets, the fortifications devoured by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the Viceroys rotting with plague iheir armor.
They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted in lunatic colors, with pens holding iguanas raised for food and balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrine gardeed 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 oes that they handled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to recover the bundles of clothing, the bottles of cough syrup, the benefit food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to them from the basket of the balloon.
They flew over the dark o of the banana plantations, whose silence reached them like a lethal vapor, and Fermina Daza remem-bered herself at the age of three, perhaps four, walking through 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 hats made of gauze. The pilot, who was the world through a spyglass, said: “They seem dead.” 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 he saw human bodies. Someone said that the cholera was ravaging the villages of the Great S. Dr. Urbino, as he spoke, tio look through the spyglass.
“Well, it must be a very special form of cholera,” he said, “because every single corpse has received the coup de grace through the back of the neck.”
A short while later they flew over a foaming sea, and they landed without i on a broad, hot beach whose surface, cracked with niter burned like fire. The officials were there with no more protec-tion against the sun than ordinary umbrellas, the elementary schools were there waving little flags in time to the musid the beauty queens with scorched flowers and s made of gold cardboard, and the brass band of the prosperous town of Gayra, whi those days was the best along the Caribbean coast. All that Fermina Daza wanted was to see her birthplace again, to front it with her earliest memories, but no one was allowed to go there because of the dangers of the plague. Dr. Juvenal Urbino delivered the historic letter, which was then mislaid among other papers and never seen again, and the entire delegation almost suffocated iedium of the speeches. The pilot could not make the balloon asd again, and at last they were led on muleback to the dock at Pueblo Viejo, where the s met the sea. Fermina Daza was sure she had passed through there with her mother when she was very young, in a cart drawn by a team of oxen. When she was older, she had repeated the story several times to her father, who died insisting that she could not possibly recall that.
“I remember the trip very well, and what you say is accurate,” he told her, “but it happe least five years before you were born.”
Three days later the members of the balloon expedition, devas-tated by a bad night of storms, returo their port in, where they received a heroes’ wele. Lost in the crowd, of course, was Florentino Ariza, whhe traces of terror on Fermina Daza’s faevertheless he saw her again that same afternoon in a cyg exhibition that was also sponsored by her husband, and she showed no sign of fatigue. She rode an unon velocipede that resembled something from a circus, with a very high front wheel, over which she was seated, and a very small back wheel that gave almost no support. She wore a pair of loose trousers trimmed in red, which sdalized the older ladies and discerted the gentlemen, but no one was indifferent to her skill.
That, along with so many other ephemeral images in the course of so many years, would suddenly 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 experiehe cruelty of time not so mu his own flesh as in the imperceptible ges he dised in Fermina Daza each time he saw her.
One night he went to Don Sancho’s Inn, a ial restaurant, and sat in the most remote er, as was his whee his frugal meals alone. All at once, in the large mirror on the back wall, he caught a glimpse of Fermina Daza sitting at a table with her husband and two other couples, at an ahat allowed him to see her reflected in all her splendor. She was unguarded, she engaged in versation with grad laughter that exploded like fireworks, and her beauty was more radiant uhe enormous teardrop deliers: once again, Alice had gohrough the looking glass.
Holding his breath, Florentino Ariza observed her at his pleasure: he saw her eat, he saw her hardly touch her wine, he saw her joke with the fourth in the line of Don Sanchos; from his solitary table he shared a moment of her life, and for more than an hour he lingered, unseen, in the forbidden prects of her intimacy. Then he drank four more cups of coffee to pass the time until he saw her leave with the rest of the group. They passed so close to him that he could distinguish her st among the clouds of other perfumes worn by her panions.
From that night on, and for almost a year afterward, he laid uing siege to the owner of the inn, him whatever he wanted, money or favors or whatever he desired most in life, if he would sell him the mirror. It was not easy, because old Don Sancho believed the legend that the beautiful frame, carved by Viennese etmakers, was the twin of another, which had beloo Marie Antoie and had disappeared without a trace: a pair of unique jewels. When at last he surrendered, Florentino Ariza hung the mirror in his house, not for the exquisite frame but because of the plaside that for two hours had been occupied by her beloved refle.
When he saw Fermina Daza she was almost always on her husband’s arm, the two of them in perfect harmony, moving through their own space with the astonishing fluidity of Siamese cats, which was broken only wheopped to greet him. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, in fact, shook his hand with warm cordiality, and on occa-sion eveted himself a pat on the shoulder. She, oher hand, kept him relegated to an impersonal regime of formalities and never made the slightest gesture that might allow him to suspect that she remembered him from her unmarried days. They lived in two different worlds, but while he made every effort to reduce the distaween them, every step she took was in the opposite dire. It was a long time before he dared to think that her in-difference was no more than a shield for her timidity. This occurred to him suddenly, at the christening of the first freshwater vessel built in the local shipyards, which was also the first official occasion at which Florentino Ariza, as First Vice President of the R.C.C., repre-sented Uncle Leo XII. This ce imbued the ceremony with special solemnity, and everyone of any signifi the life of the city resent.
Florentino Ariza was looking after his guests in the main salon of the ship, still redolent of fresh paint and tar, when there was a burst of applause on the docks, and the band struck up a triumphal march. He had to repress the trembling that was almost as old as he was when he saw the beautiful woman of his dreams on her husband’s arm, splendid in her maturity, striding like a queen from aime past the huard in parade uniform, uhe shower of paper streamers and flower petals tossed at them from the windows. Both respoo the ovation with a wave of the hand, but she was so dazzling, dressed in imperial gold from her high-heeled slippers and the foxtails at her throat to her bell-shaped hat, that she seemed to be alone in the midst of the crowd.
Florentino Ariza waited for them on the bridge with the provin-cial officials, surrounded by the crash of the musid the fireworks and the three heavy screams from the ship, whiveloped the do steam. Juvenal Urbino greeted the members of the reception lih that naturalness so typical of him, which made everyohink the Doctor bore him a special fondness: first the ship’s captain in his dress uniform, then the Archbishop, then the Governor with his and the Mayor with his, and then the military ander, who was a newer from the Andes. Beyond the officials stood Floren-tino Ariza, dressed in dark clothing and almost invisible among so many emi people. After greeting the military ander, Fermina seemed to hesitate before Florentino Ariza’s outstretched hand. The military man, prepared to introduce them, asked her if they did not know each other. She did not say yes and she did not say no, but she held out her hand to Florentino Ariza with a salon smile. The same thing had occurred twi the past, and would ain, and Florentino Ariza always accepted these occasions with a strength of character worthy of Fermina Daza. But that after-noon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for 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 itle Park of the Evangels, but his calculated iion was not that she see him, but rather that he see her and know that she was still in the world. Now, however, it was difficult for him to escape notice. The District of La Manga was on a semi-deserted island, separated from the historic city by a al of green water and covered by thickets of icaco plum, which had sheltered Sunday lovers in ial times. I years, the old stone bridge built by the Spaniards had been torn down, and in its stead was one made of brid lined with streetlamps for the new mule-drawn trolleys. At first the residents of La Manga had to eorture that had not been anticipated during stru, which was sleeping so close to the city’s first electrical plant whose vibration was a stahquake.
Not even Dr. Juvenal Urbino, with all his prestige, could persuade them to move it where it would not disturb anyone, until his proven plicity with Divine Provideer-ceded on his behalf. One night the boiler in the plant blew up in a fearful explosion, flew over the new houses, sailed across half the city, aroyed the largest gallery in the former vent of St. Julian the Hospitaler. The old ruined building had been aba the beginning of the year, but the boiler caused the deaths of four prisoners who had escaped from the local jail earlier that night and were hiding in the chapel.
The peaceful suburb with its beautiful tradition of love was, however, not the most propitious for ued love when it became a luxury neighborhood. The streets were dusty in summer, s-like in winter, and desolate all year round, and the scattered houses were hidden behind leafy gardens and had mosaic tile terraces instead of old-fashioned projeg balies, as if they had been built for the purpose of discing furtive lovers. It was just as well that at this time it became fashioo drive out iernoon in hired old Victorias that had been verted to one-horse carriages, and that the excursion ended on a hill where one could appreciate the heart-breaking twilights of October better than from the lighthouse, and observe the watchful sharks lurking at the seminarians’ beach, ahe Thursday o liner, huge and white, that could almost be touched with one’s hands as it passed through the harbor el.
Florentino Ariza would hire a Victoria after a hard day at the office, but instead of folding dowop, as was ary during the hot months, he would stay hidden in the depths of the seat, invisible in the darkness, always alone, and requesting ued routes so as not to arouse the evil thoughts of the driver. Iy, the only thing that ied him on the drive was the pink marble Parthenon half hidden among leafy banana and mango trees, a luckless replica of the idyllisions on Louisiana cotton plantations. Fermina Daza’s childreurned home a little before five. 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 even caught the glimpse he so desired.
Oernoon when he insisted on his solitary drive despite the first devastating rains of Juhe horse slipped and fell in the mud. Florentino Ariza realized with horror that they were just in front of Fermina Daza’s villa, and he pleaded with the driver, not thinking that his sternation 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, and the axle of the carriage broke. Floren-tino Ariza mao climb out of the coa the driving rain 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 oerrace. In the wildest of his deliriums Florentino Ariza had never dreamed of such good fortune, but on that afternoon he would have died rather than allow Fermina Daza to see him in that dition.
When they lived in the old city, Juvenal Urbino and his family would walk on Sundays from their house to the Cathedral fht o’ass, which for them was more a secular ceremony than a religious ohen, when they moved, they tio drive there for several years, and at times they visited with friends uhe palm trees in the park. But wheemple of the theological seminary was built in La Manga, with a private bead its owery, they no longer went to the Cathedral except on very solemn occasions. Ignorant of these ges, Florentino Ariza waited Sunday after Sunday oerrace of the Parish Café, watg the people ing out of all three Masses.
Then he realized his mistake ao the new church, which was fashioil just a few years ago, and there, at eight o’clock sharp on four Sundays in August, he saw Dr. Juvenal Urbino with his children, but Fermina Daza was not with them. On one of those Sundays he visited the new cemetery adjat to the church, where the residents of La Manga were build-ing their sumptuous pantheons, and his heart skipped a beat when he discovered the most sumptuous of all in the shade of the great ceiba trees. It was already plete, with Gothic stained-glass windows and marble angels and gravestones with gold lettering for the entire family. Among them, of course, was that of Do?a Fermina Daza de Urbino de la Calle, ao it her husband’s, with a oaph: 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 even the 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, be-yond any doubt, was discussing her without mentioning her hey said that one midnight the previous June someone had seen her b the ard o liner en route to Panama, and that she wore a dark veil to hide the ravages of the shameful disease that was -suming her. Someone asked what terrible illness would dare to attack a woman with so much power, and the answer he received was saturated with black bile:
“A lady so distinguished could suffer only from ption.”
Florentino Ariza khat the wealthy of his try did not tract short-term diseases. Either they died without warning, almost always on the eve of a major holiday that could not be celebrated because of the period of m, or they faded away in long, abominable illnesses whose most intimate details eventually became publiowledge. Seclusion in Panama was almost an obligatory penan the life of the rich. They submitted to God’s will in the Adventist Hospital, an immense white warehouse lost in the pre-historic downpours of Darién, where the sick lost track of the little life that was left to them, and in whose solitary rooms with their burlap windows no one could tell with certainty if the smell of carbolic acid was the odor of health or of death.
Those who recovered came back bearing splendid gifts that they would distribute with a free hand and a kind of agonized longing to be pardoned for their indiscretion in still being alive. Some returned with their abdomens crisscrossed by barbarous stitches that seemed to have been sewn with cobbler’s hemp; they would raise their shirts to display them when people came to visit, they pared them with those of others who had suffocated from excesses of joy, and for the rest of their days they would describe and describe again the angelic visions they had seen uhe influence of chloroform. Oher hand, no one ever learned about the visions of those who did not return, including the saddest of them all: those who had died as exiles iuberculosis pavilion, more from the sadness of the rain than because of the plications of their disease.
If he had been forced to choose, Florentino Ariza did not know which fate he would have wanted for Fermina Daza. More than any-thing else he wahe truth, but no matter how unbearable, and regardless of how he searched, he could not find it. It was in-ceivable to him that no one could even give him a hint that would firm the story he had heard. In the world of riverboats, which was his world, no mystery could be maintained, could be kept. A no one had heard anything about the woman in the black veil. No one knew anything in a city where everything was known, and where many things were known even before they hap-pened, above all if they ed the rich. But no one had any explanation for the disappearance of Fermina Daza. Florentino Ariza tio patrol La Manga, tio hear Mass without de-votion in the basilica of the seminary, tio attend civic ceremohat never would have ied him in aate of mind, but the passage of time only increased the credibility of the story he had heard. Everything seemed normal in the Urbino house-hold, except for the mother’s absence.
As he carried on his iigation, he learned about other events he had not known of or into which he had made no inquiries, including the death of Lorenzo Daza in the tabrian village where he had been born. He remembered seeing him for many years in the rowdy chess wars at the Parish Café, hoarse with so much talking, and growing fatter and rougher as he sank into the quid of an un-fortunate old age. They had never exged another word siheir disagreeable breakfast of anise in the previous tury, and Florentino Ariza was certain that even after he had obtained for his daughter the successful marriage that had bee his only reason for living, Lorenzo Daza remembered him with as much rancor as he felt toward Lorenzo Daza. But he was so determio find out the unequivocal facts regarding Fermina Daza’s health that he re-turo the Parish Café to learn them from her father, just at the time of the historic tour in which Jeremiah de Saint-Amour alone fronted forty-two oppos. This was how he discovered that Lorenzo Daza had died, and he rejoiced with all his heart, although the price of his joy might be having to live without the truth. At last he accepted as true the story of the hospital for the terminally ill, and his only solation was the old saying: Sien live forever. On the days when he felt disheartened, he re-signed himself to the notion that the news of Fermina Daza’s death, 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 village of Flores de María, where her Cousin Hildebranda Sánchez was living, fotten by the world. She had left with no sdal, by mutual agreement with her husband, both of them as entangled as adolests 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 from misfortune’s sneak attacks, their children grown and well-behaved, and the future ready for them to learn how to be old without bitterness. It had been something so ued for them both that they wao resolve it not with shouts, tears, and intermediaries, as was the in the Caribbean, but with the wisdom of the nations of Europe, and there was so much vacillation as to whether their loyalties lay here or over there that they ended up mired in a puerile situation that did not belong anywhere. At last she decided to leave, not even knowing why or to urpose, 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 secred with her face covered by a black mantilla, not on a ard liner bound for Panama, however, but on the regular boat to San Juan de la aga, the city where she had been born and had lived until her adolesce, and for which she felt a growing home-siess that became more and more difficult to bear as the years went by. In defiance of her husband’s will, and of the s of the day, her only panion was a fifteen-year-old goddaughter who had been raised as a family servant, but the ship captains and the officials at each port had been notified of her journey. When she made her rash decision, she told her children that she was going to have a ge of se for three months or so with Aunt Hildebranda, but her determination was not to return. Dr. Juvenal Urbino khe strength of her character very well, and he was so troubled that he accepted her decision with humility as God’s punishment for the gravity of his sins. But the lights on the boat had not yet been lost to view when they both repented of their weakness.
Although they maintained a formal correspondence ing their children and other household matters, almost two years went by before either one could find a way back that was not mined with pride. During the sed year, the childreo spend their school vacation in Flores de María, and Fermina Daza did the impossible and appeared tent with her new life. That at least was the clusion drawn by Juvenal Urbino from his son’s letters. Moreover, at that time the Bishop of Riohacha went there on a pastoral visit, riding uhe pallium on his celebrated white mule with the trappings embroidered in gold.
Behind him came pilgrims from remions, musis playing accordions, peddlers selling food and amulets; and for three days the ranch was overflowing with the crippled and the hopeless, who iy did not e for the learned sermons and the plenary indulgences but for the favors of the mule who, it was said, performed miracles behind his master’s back. The Bishop had frequehe home of the Urbino de la Calle family ever since his days as an ordinary priest, and oernoon he escaped from the public festivities to have lunch at Hildebranda’s ranch. After the meal, during which they spoke only of earthly matters, he took Fermina Daza aside and asked to hear her fession. She refused in 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 -scious purpose, she was certain that her answer would reach the appropriate ears.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino used to say, not without a certain icism, that it was not he who was to blame for those two bitter years of his life but his wife’s bad habit of smelling the clothes her family took off, and the clothes that she herself took off, so that she could tell by the odor if they o be laundered even though they might appear to be . She had dohis ever since she was a girl, and she hought it worthy of ent until her husband realized what she was doing on their wedding night. He also khat she locked herself ihroom at least three times a day to smoke, but this did not attract his attention because the women of his class were in the habit of log themselves away in groups to talk about men and smoke, and even to drink as much as two liters of aguardieil they had passed out on the floor in a brickmason’s druupor.
But her habit of sniffing at all the clothing she hap-pened across seemed to him not only inappropriate but uhy as well. She took it as a joke, which is what she did with everything she did not care to discuss, and she said that God had not put that diligent oriole’s beak on her face just for decoration. One m, while she was at the market, the servants aroused the entire neighbor-hood in their search for her three-year-old son, who was not to be found anywhere in the house. She arrived in the middle of the panic, turned around two or three times like a trag mastiff, and found the boy asleep in an armoire where no ohought he could possibly be hiding. When her astonished husband asked her how she had found him, she replied:
“By the smell of caca.”
The truth is that her sense of smell not only served her in regard to washing clothes or finding lost children: it was the sehat 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 she was the parvenu in a milieu that had been prejudiced against her for three hundred years, a she had made her way through coral reefs as sharp as knives, not colliding with anyone, with a power over the world that could only be a super-natural instinct. That frightening faculty, which could just as well have had its in in a millenarian wisdom as in a heart of stone, met its moment of misfortune one ill-fated Sunday before Mass when, out of simple habit, Fermina Daza she clothing her husband had worn the evening before and experiehe disturbiion that she had been in bed with another man.
First she smelled the jacket and the vest while she took the watch out of the buttonhole and removed the pencil holder and the billfold and the loose ge from the pockets and placed everything on the dresser, and then she smelled the hemmed shirt as she removed the tiepin and the topaz cuff links and the gold collar button, and then she smelled the trousers as she removed the keyholder with its eleven keys and the penkh its mother-of-pearl handle, and finally she smelled the underwear and the socks and the linen handkerchief with the embroidered monogram. Beyond any shadow of a doubt there was an odor in each of the articles that had not been there in all their years of life together, an odor impossible to define because it was not the st of flowers or of artificial essences but of something peculiar to human nature. She said nothing, and she did not notice the odor every day, but she now s her husband’s clothing not to decide if it was ready to launder but with an un-bearable ahat g her innermost being.
Fermina Daza did not know where to locate the odor of his clothing in her husband’s routi could not be placed between his m class and lunch, for she supposed that no woman 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 ed, and the beds made, and the marketing done, and lunch prepared, and perhaps with the added worry that one of the children would be sent home early from school because somebody threw a sto him and hurt his head and he would fi eleven o’clo the m, naked in the unmade bed and, to make matters worse, with a doctor on top of her. She also khat Dr. Juvenal Urbino made love only at night, better yet in absolute darkness, 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’s clothes and put them ba again. So that the ination of his clothing could occur only during 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 Daza was too proud to spy on her husband or to ask someone else to do it for her. His schedule of house calls, which seemed best suited to iy, was also the easiest to keep an eye on, because Dr. Juvenal Urbi 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 the cross and some words for the salvation of their souls.
Ihree weeks that followed, Fermina Daza did not find the odor in his clothing for a few days, she found it again when she least expected it, and then she found it, strohan ever, for several days in a row, although one of those days was a Sunday when there had been a family gathering and the two of them had not been apart for even a moment. trary to her normal and even her own desires, she found herself in her husband’s offie after-noon as if she were someone else, doing something that she would never do, deciphering with an exquisite Bengalese magnifying glass his intricate notes on the house calls he had made during the last few months.
It was the first time she had gone aloo that office, saturated with showers of creosote and crammed with books bound in the hides of unknown animals, blurred school pictures, honorary degrees, astrolabes, and elaborately worked daggers collected over the years: a secret sanctuary that she always sidered the only part of her husband’s private life to which she had no access because it was not part of love, so that the few times she had been there she had goh him, and the visits had always been very brief. She did not feel she had the right to go in alone, much less to engage in what seemed to be i prying. But there she was. She wao find the truth, and she searched for it with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fear of finding it, and she was driven by an irresistible wind even strohan her innate haughtiness, even strohan her dignity: an agony that bewitched her.
She was able to draw no clusions, because her husband’s patients, except for mutual friends, were part of his private domain; they were people without identity, known not by their faces but by their pains, not by the color of their eyes or the evasions of their hearts but by the size of their livers, the coating oohe blood in their urihe halluations of their feverish nights. They were people who believed in her husband, who believed they lived because of him when iy they lived for him, and who in the end were reduced to a phrase written in his own hand at the bottom of the medical file: Be calm. God awaits you at the door. Fermina Daza left his study after two fruitless hours, with the feeling that she had allowed herself to be seduced by indecy.
Urged on by her imagination, she began to discover ges in her husband. She found him evasive, without appetite at the table or in bed, proo exasperation and ironiswers, and when he was at home he was no lohe tranquil man he had once been but a caged lion. For the first time siheir marriage, she began to monitor the times he was late, to keep track of them to the mio tell him lies in order to learruth, but then she felt wouo the quick by the tradis. One night she awoke with a start, terrified by a vision of her husband staring at her in the darkness with eyes that seemed full of hatred. She had suffered a similar fright in her youth, when she had seen Florentino Ariza at the foot of her bed, but that apparition had been full of love, not hate. Besides, this time it was not fantasy: her husband was awake at two in the m, sitting up io watch her while she slept, but when she asked him why, he de. He lay ba the pillow and said:
“You must have been dreaming.”
After that night, and after similar episodes that occurred during that time, when Fermina Daza could not tell for certain where reality ended and where illusion began, she had the overwhelming revelation that she was losing her mind. At last she realized that her husband had not taken union ohursday of Corpus Christi or on any Sunday i weeks, and he had not found time for that year’s retreats. When she asked him the reason for those unusual ges in his spiritual health, she received an evasive ahis was the decisive clue, because he had not failed to take union on an importa day since he had made his first union, at the age of eight. In this way she realized not only that her husband was in a state of mortal sin but that he had resolved to persist in it, since he did not go to his fessor for help. She had never imagihat she could suffer so much for something that seemed to be the absolute opposite of love, but she was suffering, and she resolved that the only way she could keep from dying was to burn out the of vipers that oisoning her soul. And that is what she did. Oernoon she began to darn socks oerrace while her husband was reading, as he did every day after his siesta. Suddenly she interrupted her work, pushed her eyeglasses up onto her forehead, and without any trace of harshness, she asked for an explanation:
“Doctor.”
He was immersed in L’Ile des pingouins, the hat everyone was reading in those days, and he answered without surfag: “Oui.” She insisted:
“Look at me.”
He did so, looking without seeihrough the fog of his reading glasses, but he did not have 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 tinued darning socks. Dr. Juvenal Urbino khen that the long hours of anguish were over. The moment had not been as he had foreseen it; rather than a seismic tremor in his heart, it was a calming blow, and a great relief that what was bound to happen sooner or later had happened sooner rather than later: the ghost of Miss Barbara Lynch had entered his house at last.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino had met her four months earlier as she waited her turn in the iisericordia Hospital, and he knew im-mediately that something irreparable had just occurred in his destiny. She was a tall, elegant, large-boned mulatta, with skin the color and softness of molasses, and that m she wore a red dress with white polka dots and a broad-brimmed hat of the same fabric, which shaded her face down to her eyelids. Her sex seemed more pronouhan that of other human beings. Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not attend patients in the ic, but whenever he passed by and had time to spare, he would go in to remind his more advaudents that there is no medie better than a good diagnosis. So that he arrao be present at the examination of the unforeseen mulatta, makiain that his pupils would not notiy gesture of his that did not appear to be casual and barely looking at her, but fixing her name and address with care in his memory. That afternoon, after his last house call, he had his carriage pass by the address that she had given in the sulting room, and in fact there she was, enjoying the ess oerrace.
It ical Antillean house, painted yellow even to the tin roof, with burlap windoots of ations and ferns hanging in the doorway. It rested on wooden pilings in the salt marshes of Mala za. A troupial sang in the cage that hung from the eaves. Across the street rimary school, and the children rushing out obliged the an to keep a tight hold on the reins so that the horse would not shy. It was a stroke of luck, for Miss Barbara Lynch had time the Doctor. She waved to him as if they were old friends, she invited him to have coffee while the fusion abated, and he was delighted to accept (although it was not his to drink coffee) and to listen to her talk about herself, which was the only thing that had ied him sihe m and the only thing that was going to i him, without a moment’s respite, during the months to follow. Once, soon after he had married, a friend told him, with his wife present, that sooner or later he would have to front a mad passion that could endahe stability of his marriage. He, who thought he knew himself, khe strength of his moral roots, had laughed at the predi. And now it had e 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-stri settlements in the salt marshes, preag the word of one of the many gods that Dr. Juvenal Urbino wrote with a small g to distinguish them from his. She spoke good Spanish, with a certain roughness in the syntax, and her frequent slips heightened her charm. She would be twe years old in December, not long ago she had divorced another minister, who was a student of her father’s and to whom she had been unhappily married for two years, and she had no desire to repeat the offense. She said: “I have no more love than my troupial.” But Dr. Urbino was too serious to think that she said it with hidden iions. On the trary: he asked himself in bewilderment if so many opportunities ing together might not be one of God’s pitfalls, which he would then have to pay for dearly, but he dis-missed the thought without delay as a piece of theologionsense resulting from his state of fusion.
As he was about to leave, he made a casual remark about that m’s medical sultation, knowing that nothing pleases pa-tients more than talking about their ailments, and she was so splendid talking about hers that he promised he would return the day, at four o’clock sharp, to examine her with greater care. She was dis-mayed: she khat a doctor of his qualifications was far above her ability to pay, but he reassured her: “In this professiory to have the rich pay for the poor.” Then he marked in his notebook: Miss Barbara Lynch, Mala za 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 racted her attention, and it suddenly occurred to her that she was one of those dissolute artists from the New Orleans fruit boats, but the address made her think that she must e from Jamaica, a blaan, of course, and she eliminated her without a sed thought as not being to her husband’s taste.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino came ten minutes early for the Saturday appoi, and Miss Lynch had not finished dressing to receive him. He had not felt so much tension since his days in Paris when he had to present himself for an oral examination. As she lay on her vas bed, wearing a thin silk slip, Miss Lynch’s beauty was endless. Everything about her was large and intense: her siren’s thighs, her slow-burning skin, her astonished breasts, her diaphanous gums with their perfect teeth, her whole body radiating a vapor of good health that was the human odor Fermina Daza had discovered in her hus-band’s clothing. She had goo the ic because she suffered from something that she, with much charm, called “twisted s,” and Dr. Urbino thought that it was a symptom that should not be ignored.
So he palpated her internal ans with more iion than attention, and as he did so he discovered in amazement that this marvelous creature was as beautiful inside as out, and then he gave himself over to the delights of touo lohe best-qualified physi along the Caribbean coastli a poor soul tormented by his tumultuous instincts. Only once before in his austere professional life had some-thing similar happeo him, and that had been the day of his greatest shame, because the indignant patient had moved his hand away, sat up in bed, and said to him: “What you want may happen, but it will not be like this.” Miss Lynch, oher hand, aban-doned herself to his hands, and when she was certain that the Doctor was no lohinking about his sce, she said:
“I thought this not permitted by your ethics.”
He was as drenched by perspiration as if he had just stepped out of a pool wearing all his clothes, 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 ot do,” she said. “Just think what it mean for poor blaan 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 fession that it might have inspired pity. But she saved him from all harm 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 honor protected, she wanted security and love, in that order, and she believed that she deserved them. She gave Dr. Urbino the opportunity to seduce her but not to pee her inner sanctum, even when she was alone in the house. She would go no further than allowing him to repeat the ceremony of palpation and auscultation with all the ethical violations he could desire, but without taking off her clothes. For his part, he could not let go of the bait once he had bitten, and he tinued his almost daily incursions. For reasons of a practiature, it was close to impossible for him to maintain a tinuiionship with Miss Lynch, but he was too weak to stop, as he would later be too weak to go any further. This was his limit.
The Reverend Lynch did not lead a regular life, for he would ride away on his mule on the spur of the moment, carrying Bibles and evangelical pamphlets on one side and provisions oher, and he would return whe 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 with greatest clarity was the house across the way, with its doors and windows open wide from six o’clo the m, they saw Miss Lynch hanging the birdcage from the eaves so that the troupial could learn the recited lessons, they saw her wearing a bright-colored turban and going about her household tasks as she recited along with them in her brilliant Caribbean voice, and later they saw her sitting on the porch, reg the afternoon psalms by herself in English.
They had to choose a time when the children were not there, and there were only two possibilities: the afternoon recess for lunch, between twelve and two, which was also when the Doctor had his lunch, or late iernoon, after the children had gone home. This was always the best time, although by then the Doctor had made his rounds and had only a few mio spare before it was time for him to eat with his family. The third problem, and the most serious for him, was his own situation. It was not possible for him to go there without his carriage, which was very well known and always had to wait outside her door. He could have made an aplice of his an, 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 an himself dared to ask if it would not be better for him to e back later so that the carriage would not spend so much time at her door. Dr. Urbino, in a sharp respohat 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 not have,” 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 the Doctor’s carriage stood at the door. At times the Doctor himself took the initiative a on foot, if distance permitted, or in a hired carriage, to avoid malicious or premature assumptions. Such deceptions, however, were to little avail. Sihe prescriptions ordered in pharmacies revealed the truth, Dr. Urbino would alrescribe terfeit medies along with the correes in order to preserve the sacred right of the sick to die in peace along with the secret of their illness. Similarly, he was able in various truthful ways to at for the presence of his carriage outside the house of Miss Lynch, but he could not allow it to stay there too long, least of all for the amount of time he would have desired, which was the rest of his life.
The world became a hell for him. For ohe initial madness was sated, they both became aware of the risks involved, and Dr. Juvenal Urbino never had the resolve to face a sdal. In the deliriums of passion he promised everything, but when it was over, everything was left for later. Oher hand, as his desire to be with her grew, so did his fear of losing her, so that their meetings became more and more hurried and problematic. He thought about nothing else. He waited for the afternoons with unbearable longing, he fot his other itments, he fot everything but her, but as his carriage approached the Mala za salt marsh he prayed to God that an unforeseen obstacle would force it to drive past. He went to her in a state of suguish that at times as he turhe er he was glad to catch a glimpse of the woolly head of the Reverend Lynch, who read oerrace while his daughter cate-chized neighborhood children in the living room with recited passages of scripture. Then he would go home relieved that he was not defying fate again, but later he would feel himself going mad with the desire for it to be five o’clo the afternoon all day, every day.
So their love became impossible when the carriage at her door became too spicuous, and after three months it became nothihan ridiculous. Without time to say anything, Miss Lynch would go to the bedroom as soon as she saw her agitated lover walk in the door. She took the precaution of wearing a full skirt on the days she expected him, a charming skirt from Jamaica with red flowered ruffles, but with no underwear, nothing, in the belief that this venience was going to help him ward off his fear. But he squandered every-thing she did to make him happy. Panting and drenched with perspiration, he rushed after her into the bedroom, throwing everything on the floor, his walking stick, his medical bag, his Panama hat, and he made panic-stri love with his trousers down around his knees, with his jacket buttoned so that it would not get in his way, with his gold watch across his vest, with his shoes on, with every-thing on, and more ed 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, as exhausted as if he had made absolute love on the dividing liween life ah, when iy he had aplished 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 o give an iion during a routine visit. Theurned home ashamed of his weakness, longing for death, cursing himself for the lack of ce that kept him from asking Fermina Daza to pull down his trousers and burn his ass on the brazier.
He did , he said his prayers without vi, in bed he preteo tinue his siesta reading while his wife walked round and round the house putting the world in order befoing to bed. As he nodded over his book, he began to sink down into the iable mangrove s of Miss Lynch, into her air of a recumbent forest glade, his deathbed, and then he could think of nothing ex-cept tomorrow’s five mio five o’clo the afternoon and her waiting for him in bed with nothing but the mound of her dark bush under her madwoman’s skirt from Jamaica: the hellish circle.
In the past few years he had bee scious of the burden of his own body. He reized the symptoms. He had read about them ibooks, he had seen them firmed in real life, in older patients with no history of serious ailments who suddenly began to describe perfect syndromes that seemed to e straight from medical texts aurned out to be imaginary. His professor of children’s ical medie at La Salpêtrière had reended pediatrics as the most ho specialization, because children bee sily when in fact they are sick, and they ot unicate with the physi using ventional words but only with crete symptoms of real diseases. After a certain age, however, adults either had the symptoms without the diseases or, what was worse, serious diseases with the symptoms of minor ones. He distracted them with palliatives, giving time enough time to teach them not to feel their ailments, so that they could live with them in the rubbish heap of old age. Dr. Juvenal Urbino hought that a physi his age, who believed he had seehing, would not be able to overe the uneasy feeling that he was ill when he was not. Or what was worse, not believe he was, out of pure stific prejudice, when perhaps he really was. At the age of forty, half in ear and half i, he had said in class: “All I need in life is someone who uands me.” But when he found himself lost in the labyrinth of Miss Lynch, he no longer was jesting.
All the real or imaginary symptoms of his older patients made their appearan his body. He felt the shape of his liver with such clarity that he could tell its size without toug it. He felt the dozing cat’s purr of his kidneys, he felt the iridest brilliance of his vesicles, he felt the humming blood in his arteries. At times he awoke at daing 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 sarg band, owice, and then, because God is good, he felt it recover at last. But instead of having recourse to the same distrag 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 uood him. So he turo Fermina Daza, the person who loved him best and whom he loved best in the world, and with whom he had just eased his sce.
For this occurred after she interrupted his afternoon reading to ask him to look at her, and he had 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 ceive of Fermina Daza’s learning the truth by smell alone. In any case, for a long time this had not been a good city for keepis. Soon after the first home telephones were installed, several marriages that seemed stable were destroyed by anonymous tale-bearing calls, and a number htened families either celed their service or refused to have a telephone for many years. Dr. Urbino khat his wife had too much self-respect to allow so much as an attempt at anonymous betrayal by telephone, and he could not imagine anyone daring to try it under his own name. But he feared the old method: a note slipped uhe door by an unknown hand could be effective, not only because it guarahe double anonymity of sender and receiver, but be-cause its time-honored ary permitted oo attribute to it some kind of metaphysical e to the designs of Divine Providence.
Jealousy was unknown in his house: during more than thirty years of jugal peace, Dr. Urbino had often boasted in publid until now it had been true--that he was like those Swedish matches that light only with their own box. But he did not knooman with as much pride, dignity, and strength of character as his wife would rea the face of proven iy. So that after looking at her as she had asked, nothing occurred to him but to lower his eyes again in order to hide his embarrassment and tihe pretense of being lost among the sweet, meandering rivers of Alca Island until he could think of something else. Fermina Daza, for her part, said nothing more either. When she finished darning the socks, she tossed everything into the sewing basket in no par-ticular ave instrus i for supper, ao the bedroom.
Then he reached the admirable decision not to go to Miss Lynch’s house at five o’clo the afternoon. The vows of eternal love, the dream of a discreet house for her alone where he could visit her with no ued interruptions, their unhurried happiness for as long as they lived--everything he had promised in the blazi of love was celed forever after. The last thing Miss Lynch received from him was an emerald tiara in a little box ed in paper from the pharmacy, so that the an himself thought it was an emergency prescription and ha to her with no ent, no message, nothing in writing. Dr. Urbino never saw her again, not even by act, and God alone knows how much grief his heroic resolve cost him or how many bitter tears he had to shed behind the locked lavatory door in order to survive this private catastrophe. At five o’clock, instead of going to see her, he made a profound act of trition before his fessor, and on the following Sunday he took union, his heart broken but his soul at peace.
That night, following his renunciation, as he was undressing for bed, he recited for Fermina Daza the bitter litany of his early morn-ing insomnia, his sudden stabbing pains, his desire to weep iernoon, the encoded symptoms of secret love, which he reted as if they were the miseries of old age. He had to tell someone or die, or else tell the truth, and so the relief he obtained was sanctified within the domestic rituals of love. She listeo him with close attention, but without looking at him, without saying anything as she picked up every article of clothing he removed, s with ure or ge of expression that might betray her wrath, then crumpled it and tossed it into the wicker basket for dirty clothes. She did not find the odor, but it was all the same: tomorrow was another day. Before he k down to pray before the altar in the bedroom, he ehe 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 of dying, and she had made the same brutal reply. Dr. Urbino attributed it to the natural hardheartedness of women, which allows the earth to tinue revolving around the sun, because at that time he did not know that she always erected a barrier of wrath to hide her fear. And in this case it was the most terrible one of all, the fear of losing him.
That night, oher hand, she wished him dead with all her heart, and this certainty alarmed him. Then he heard her slow sobbing in the darkness as she bit the pillow so he would not hear. He uzzled, because he khat she did not cry easily for any affli of body or soul. She cried only in rage, above all if it had its ins ierror of culpability, and then the more she cried the more enraged she became, because she could never five her weakness in g. He did not dare to sole her, knowing that it would have been like soling a tiger run through by a spear, and he did not have the ce to tell her that the reason for her weeping had disappeared 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 lamp and lay there with her eyes open, but without g. Something definitive had happeo her while he slept: the sediment that had accumulated at the bottom of her life over the course of so many years had been stirred up by the torment of her jealousy and had floated to the surface, and it had aged her all at once. Shocked by her sudden wrinkles, her faded lips, the ashes in her hair, he risked tellihat she should try to sleep: it was after two o’clock. She spoke, not looking at him but with no trace e in her voice, almost with gentleness.
“I have a right to know who she is,” she said.
And theold her everything, feeling as if he were lifting the weight of the world from his shoulders, because he was vihat she already knew and only o firm the details. But she did not, of course, so that as he spoke she began tain, not with her earlier timid sobs but with abundant salty tears that ran down her cheeks and burned her nightdress and inflamed her life, because he had not done what she, with her heart in her mouth, had hoped he would do, which was to be a man: deny everything, and swear on his life it was not true, and grow indignant at the false accusation, and shout curses at this ill-begotten society that did not hesitate to trample on one’s honor, and remain imperturbable even when faced with crushing proofs of his disloyalty. Then, wheold her that he had been with his fessor that afternoon, she feared she would go blind with rage. Ever since her days at the Academy she had been vihat the men and women of the Church lacked any virtue inspired by God. This was a discordant note in the harmony of the house, which they had mao over-look without mishap. But her husband’s allowing his fessor to be privy to an intimacy that was not only his but hers as well was more than 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 honor was the subject of gossip even before her husband had finished his penance, and the feeling of humiliation that this produced in her was much less tolerable than the shame and anger and injustice caused by his iy. And worst of all, damn it: with a blaan. He corrected her: “With a mulatta.” But by then it was too late for accuracy: she had finished.
“Just as bad,” she said, “and only now I uand: it was the smell of a blaan.”
This happened on a Monday. On Friday at seven o’clo the evening, Fermina Daza sailed away on the regular boat to San Juan de la aga with only orunk, in the pany of her god-daughter, 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-day discussion in which they decided that she should go to Cousin Hildebranda San-chez’s ran Flores de María for as long a time as she o think before ing to a final decision. Without knowing her reasons, the children uood it as a trip she had often put off and that they themselves had wanted her to make for a long time. Dr. Urbined matters so that no one in his perfidious circle could engage in malicious speculation, and he did it so well that if Florentino Ariza could find no clue to Fermina Daza’s disappeara was because in fact there was none, not because he lacked the means to iigate. Her husband had no doubts that she would e home as soon as she got over her rage. But she left certain that her rage would never end.
However, she was going to learn very soon that her drastic de-cision was not so much the fruit of rese 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 enjoy it. She khe world, she had learo live and think in new ways, but she had never gone back to San Juan de la aga after the aborted flight in the balloon. To her mind there was a of redemption iurn to Cousin Hildebranda’s provino matter how belated. This was not her respoo her marital catastrophe: the idea was much older than that. So the mere thought of revisiting her adolest haunts -soled her in her unhappiness.
When she disembarked with her goddaughter in San Juan de la aga, she called on the great reserves of her character and reized the towe all the evideo the trary. The Civil and Military ander of the city, who had been advised of her arrival, invited her for a drive in the official Victoria while the train reparing to leave for San Pedro Alejandrino, which she wao visit in order to see for herself if what they said was true, that the bed in which The Liberator had died was as small as a child’s. Then Fermina Daza saw her town again in the somnolence of two o’clo the afternoon. She saw the streets that seemed more like beaches with scum-covered pools, and she saw the mansions of the Puese, with their coats of arms carved over the entrand bronze jalousies at the windows, where the same hesitant, sad piano exercises that her retly married mother had taught to the daughters of the wealthy houses were repeated without mer the gloom of the salons.
She saw the deserted plaza, with no trees growing in the burning lumps of sodium nitrate, the line of carriages with their fuops and their horses asleep where they stood, the yellow train to San Pedro Alejandrino, and on the er o the largest church she saw the biggest and most beautiful of the houses, with an arcaded passageway of greenish stone, and its great monastery door, and the window of the bedroom where álvaro would be born many years later when she no longer had the memory to remember it. She thought of Aunt Escolástica, for whom she tinued her hopeless sear heaven and oh, and thinking of her, she found herself thinking of Florentino Ariza with his literary clothes and his book of poems uhe almond trees itle park, as she did on rare occasions when she recalled her unpleasant days at the Academy. She drove around and around, but she could n-he old family house, for where she supposed it to be she found only a pigsty, and around the er was a street lined with brothels where whores from all over the world took their siestas in the doorways in case there was something for them in the mail. It was not the same town.
When they began their drive, Fermina Daza had covered the lower half of her face with her mantilla, not for fear of being reized in a place where no one could know her but because of the dead bodies she saw everywhere, from the railroad station to the cemetery, bloating in the sun. The Civil and Military ander of the city told her: “It’s cholera.” She k was, because she had seen the white lumps in the mouths of the sweltering corpses, but she hat none of them had the coup de gra the back of the neck as they had at the time of the balloon.
“That is true,” said the officer. “Even God improves His methods.”
The distance from San Juan de la aga to the old plantation of San Pedro Alejandrino was only nine leagues, but the yellow train took the entire day to make the trip because the engineer was a friend of the regular passengers, who were always asking him to please stop so they could stretch their legs by strolling across the golf courses of the banana pany, and the men bathed naked in the clear cold rivers that rushed down from the mountains, and when they were hungry they got off the train to milk the cows wandering in the pastures. Fermina Daza was terrified when they reached their destination, and she just had time to marvel at the Homeric tamarinds where The Liberator had hung his dying man’s hammod to firm that the bed where he had died, just as they had said, was small not only for so glorious a man but even for a seven-month-old infant.
Another visitor, however, who seemed very well informed, said that the bed was a false relic, for the truth was that the father of his try had beeo die on the floor. Fermina Daza was so depressed by what she had seen and heard since she left her house that for the rest of the trip she took no pleasure in the memory of her earlier trip, as she had loo do, but in-stead she avoided passing through the villages of her nostalgia. In this way she could still keep them, and keep herself from disillusio. She heard the accordions in her detours around disentment, she heard the shouts from the cockfighting pits, the bursts of guhat could just as well signal war as revelry, and when she had no other recourse and had to pass through a village, she covered her face with her mantilla so that she could remember it as it once had been.
One night, after so much avoidance of the past, she arrived at Cousin Hildebranda’s ranch, and when she saw her waiting at the door she almost fainted: it was as if she were seeing herself in the mirror of truth. She was fat and old, burdened with unruly children whose father was not the maill loved without hope but a soldier living on his pension whom she had married out of spite and who loved her to distra. But she was still the same person inside her ruined body. Fermina Daza recovered from her shock after just a few days of try living and pleasant memories, but she did not leave the ranch except to go to Mass on Sundays with the grand-children of her wayward spirators of long ago, cowboys on magnifit horses aiful, well-dressed girls who were just like their mothers at their age and who rode standing in oxcarts and singing in chorus until they reached the mission church at the end of the valley. She only passed through the village of Flores de María, where she had not gone on her earlier trip because she had not thought she would like it, but when she saw it she was fasated. Her mis-fortune, or the village’s, was that she could never remember it after-ward as it was iy, but only as she had imagi before she had been there.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino made the decision to e for her after receiving a report from the Bishop of Riohacha, who had cluded that his wife’s long stay was caused not by her unwillio return but by her inability to find a way around her pride. So he went without notifying her after an exge of letters with Hildebranda, in which it was made clear that his wife was filled with nostalgia: now she thought only of home. At eleven o’clo the m, Fermina Daza was i preparing stuffed eggplant when she heard the shouts of the peons, the neighing of the horses, the shooting of guns into the air, then the resolute steps in the courtyard and the man’s voice:
“It is better to arrive in time than to be invited.”
She thought she would die of joy. Without time to think about it, she washed her hands as well as she could while she murmured: “Thank you, God, thank you, how good you are,” thinking that she had not yet bathed because of the damned eggplant that Hildebranda had asked her to prepare without telling her who was ing to lunch, thinking that she looked so old and ugly and that her face was so raw from the sun that he would regret having e when he saw her like this, damn it. But she dried her hands the best she could on her apron, arranged her appearahe best she could, called on all the haughtiness she had been born with to calm her maddened heart, ao meet the man with her sweet doe’s gait, her head high, her eyes shining, her nose ready for battle, and grateful to her fate for the immense relief of going home, but not as pliant as he thought, of course, because she would be happy to leave with him, of course, but she was also determio make him pay with her silence for the bitter suffering that had ended her life.
Almost two years after the disappearance of Fermina Daza, an impossible ce occurred, the sort that Tránsito Ariza would have characterized as one of God’s jokes. Florentino Ariza had not been impressed in any special way by the iion of moving pic-tures, but Leona Cassiani took him, uing, to the spectacular opening of Cabiria, whose reputation was based on the dialogues written by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. The great open-air patio of Don Galileo Date, where on some nights one ehe splendor of the stars more than the silent lovemaking on the s, was filled to overflowing with a select public. Leona Cassiani fol-lowed the wandering plot with her heart in her mouth. Florentino Ariza, oher hand, was nodding his head in sleep because of the overwhelming tedium of the drama. At his back, a woman’s voice seemed to read his thoughts:
“My God, this is lohan sorrow!”
That was all she said, inhibited perhaps by the resonance of her voi the darkness, for the of embellishing silent films with piano apa had not yet beeablished here, and in the darkened enclosure all that one could hear was the projeur-muring like rain. Florentino Ariza did not think of God except in the most extreme circumstances, but now he thanked Him with all his heart. For evey fathoms underground he would instantly have reized the husky voice he had carried in his soul ever sihe afternoon when he heard her say in a swirl of yellow leaves in a solitary park: “Now go, and don’t e batil I tell you to.”
He khat she was sitting in the seat behind his, o her iable husband, and he could detect her warm, evehing, and he inhaled with love the air purified by the health of her breath. Instead of imagining her utack by the dev worms of death, as he had in his despondency of ret months, he recalled her at a radiant and joyful age, her belly rounded uhe Minervan tunic with the seed of her first child. In utter detat from the historical disasters that were crowding the s, he did not o turn around to see her in his imagination. He delighted in the st of almonds that came wafting ba from his innermost being, and he loo know how she thought women in films should fall in love so that their loves would cause less pain than they did in life. Just before the film ended, he realized in a flash of exultation that he had never been so close, so long, to the one he loved so much.
When the lights went on, he waited for the others to stand up. Theood, unhurried, and turned around in a distracted way as he buttoned his vest that he always opened during a performance, and the four of them found themselves so close to one ahat they would have been obliged to exge greetings even if one of them had not wao. First Juvenal Urbino greeted Leona Cassiani, whom he knew well, and then he shook Florentino Ariza’s hand with his ary gallantry. Fermina Daza smiled at both of them with courtesy, only courtesy, but in a with the smile of someone who had seen them often, who knew who they were, and who therefore did not need an introdu. Leona Cassiani re-sponded with her mulatta grace. But Florentino Ariza did not know what to do, because he was flabbergasted at the sight of her.
She was another person. There was no sign in her face of the terrible disease that was in fashion, or of any other illness, and her body had kept the proportion and slenderness of her better days, but it was evident that the last two years had been as hard on her as ten difficult ones. Her short hair was being, with a curved wing on each cheek, but it was the color of aluminum, not honey, and behind her grandmother’s spectacles her beautiful lae eyes had lost half a lifetime of light. Florentino Ariza saw her move away from her husband’s arm in the crowd that was leaving the theater, and he was surprised that she was in a public place wearing a poor woman’s mantilla and house slippers. But what moved him most was that her husband had to take her arm to help her at the exit, and even then she miscalculated the height of the step and almost tripped oairs at the door.
Florentino Ariza was very sensitive to the faltering steps of age. Even as a young man he would interrupt his reading of poetry in the park to observe elderly couples who helped each other across the street, and they were lessons in life that had aided him iing the laws of his own aging. At Dr. Juvenal Urbino’s time of life, that night at the film, men blossomed in a kind of autumnal youth, they seemed more dignified with their first gray hairs, they became witty aive, above all in the eyes of young women, while their withered wives had to clutch at their arms so as not to trip over their own shadows.
A few years later, however, the husbands fell without warning down the precipice of a humiliating aging in body and soul, and then it was their wives who recovered and had to lead them by the arm as if they were blind men on charity, whisper-ing in their ear, in order not to wound their mase pride, that they should be careful, that there were three steps, not two, that there uddle in the middle of the street, that the shape lying across the sidewalk was a dead beggar, and with great difficulty helped them to cross the street as if it were the only ford across the last of life’s rivers. Florentino Ariza had seen himself reflected so often in that mirror that he was never as afraid of death as he was of reag that humiliating age when he would have to be led on a woman’s arm. On that day, and only on that day, he knew he would have to renounce his hope of Fermina Daza.
The meeting frightened away sleep. Instead of driving Leona Cassiani in the carriage, he walked with her through the old city, where their footsteps echoed like horses’ hooves on the cobblestones. From time to time, fragments of fugitive voices escaped through the open balies, bedroom fidences, sobs of love magnified by phantasmal acoustid the hrance of jasmine in the narrow, sleeping streets. Once again Florentino Ariza had to summon all his strength not to reveal to Leona Cassiani his repressed love for Fermina Daza.
They walked together with measured steps, loving each other like unhurried old sweethearts, she thinking about the charms of Cabiria ahinking about his own misfortune. A man was singing on a baly in the Plaza of the house, and his song was re-peated throughout the area in a of echoes: When I was sailing across the immense waves of the sea. On Saints of Storeet, just when he should have said good night at her door, Florentino Ariza asked Leona Cassiani to invite him in for a brandy. It was the sed time he had made such a request to her under parable circum-stahe first time, ten years before, she had said to him: “If you e in at this hour you will have to stay forever.” He did not go in. But he would do so now, even if he had to break his word afterward. heless, Leona Cassiani invited him in and asked for no promises.
That was how he found himself, when he least expected it, in the sanctuary of a love that had beeinguished before it was born. Her parents had died, her only brother had made his fortune in Cura?ao, and she was living alone in the old family house. Years before, when he had still not renouhe hope of making her his lover, with the sent of her parents Florentino Ariza would visit her on Sundays, and sometimes until very late at night, and he had tributed so much to the household that he came to sider it his own. But that night after the film he had the feeling that his memory had been erased from the drawing room. The furniture had been moved, there were new prints hanging on the walls, ahought that so maless ges had been made in order to perpetuate the certainty that he had never lived. The cat did nnize him. Dismayed by the cruelty of oblivion, he said: “He does not remember me anymore.” But she replied over her shoulder, as she was fixing the brahat if he was bothered by that he could rest easy, because cats do not remember anyone.
Leaning back as they sat close together on the sofa, they spoke about themselves, about what they had been before they met oernoon who knows how long ago on the mule-drawn trolley. Their lives were spent in adjat offices, and until now they had never spoken of anything except their daily work. As they talked, Florentino Ariza put his hand ohigh, he began to caress her with the geouch of an experienced seducer, and she did not stop him, but she did not respoher, not even with a shudder for courtesy’s sake. Only wheried to go further did she grasp his exploratory hand and kiss him on the palm.
“Behave yourself,” she said. “I realized a long time ago that you are not the man I am looking for.”
While she was still very young, a strong, able man whose face she never saw took her by surprise, threw her down oty, ripped her clothes off, and made instantaneous and freic love to her. Lying there on the rocks, her body covered with cuts and bruises, she had wahat man to stay forever so that she could die of love in his arms. She had not seen his face, she had not heard his voice, but she was sure she would have known him in a crowd of a thousand men because of his shape and size and his way of making love. From that time on, she would say to anyone who would listen to her: “If you ever hear of a big, strong fellow who raped a poor black girl from the street on Drowned Men’s Jetty, oober fifteenth at about half-past eleven at night, tell him where he find me.” She said it out of habit, and she had said it to so many people that she no longer had any hope. Florentino Ariza had heard the story as many times as he had heard a boat sailing away in the night. By two o’clo the m they had each drunk three brandies and he knew, in truth, that he was not the man she was waiting for, and he was glad to know it.
“Bravo, lionlady,” he said when he left. “We have killed the tiger.”
It was not the only thing that came to ahat night. The evil lie about the pavilion of ptives had ruined his sleep, for it had instilled in him the inceivable idea that Fermina Daza was mortal and as a sequence might die before her husband. But when he saw her stumble at the door of the movie theater, by his own volitioook aep toward the abyss with the sudden realization that he, and not she, might be the oo die first. It was the most fearful kind of prese, because it was based oy.
The years of immobilized waiting, of hoping food luck, were behind him, but on the horizon he could see nothing more than the unfathomable sea of imaginary illhe drop-by-drop urinations of sleepless nights, the daily death at twilight. He thought that all the moments in the day, which had once been his allies and sworn aplices, were beginning to spire against him. A few years before he had goo a dangerous assignation, his heart heavy with terror of what might happen, and he had found the door unlocked and the hinges retly oiled so that he could e in without a sound, but he repe the last moment for fear of causing a det married woman irreparable harm by dying in her bed. So that it was reasoo think that the woman he loved most oh, the one he had waited for from oury to the without a sigh of disentment, might not have the opportunity to lead him by the arm across a street full of lunar grave mounds and beds of wind-blown poppies in order to help him reach the other side of death in safety.
The truth is that by the standards of his time, Florentino Ariza had crossed the lio old age. He was fifty-six well-preserved years old, ahought them well lived because they were years of love. But no man of the time would have braved the ridicule of looking young at his age, even if he did or thought he did, and none would have dared to fess without shame that he still wept i over a rebuff received in the previous tury. It was a bad time for being young: there was a style of dress for each age, but the style of old age began soon after adolesce, and lasted until the grave.
More tha was a matter of social dignity. The young men dressed like their grandfathers, they made themselves more respectable with premature spectacles, and a walking stick was looked upon with favor after the age of thirty. For women there were only two ages: the age for marrying, which did not go past twenty-two, and the age for beiernal spinsters: the ones left behind. The others, the married women, the mothers, the widows, the grandmothers, were a race apart who tallied their age not iion to the number of years they had lived but iion to the time left to them before they died.
Florentino Ariza, oher hand, faced the insidious snares of old age with savage temerity, even though he khat his peculiar fate had been to look like an old man from the time he was a boy. At first it was a matter of y. Tránsito Ariza pulled apart and then sewed together again for him the clothes that his father decided to discard, so that he went to primary school wearing frock coats that dragged on the ground whe down, and ministerial hats that came down over his ears despite the cotton batting on the io make them smaller. Since he had alslasses for myopia from the age of five, and had his mother’s Indian hair, as bristly and coarse as horsehair, his appearance clarified nothing.
It was for-tuhat after so much goveral instability because of so many superimposed civil wars, academic standards were less selective than they had been, and there was a jumble of backgrounds and social positions in the public schools. Half-grown children would e to class from the barricades, smelling of gunpowder, wearing the in-signias and uniforms of rebel officers captured at gunpoint in in-clusive battles, and carrying their regulation ons in full view at their waists. They shot each other over disagreements in the play-ground, they threatehe teachers if they received low grades on examinations, and one of them, a third-year student at La Salle Academy and a retired el in the militia, shot and killed Brother Juaa, Prefect of the unity, because he said in catechism class that God was a full-fledged member of the servative Party.
Oher hand, the sons of the great ruined families were dressed like old-fashioned princes, and some very poor boys went barefoot. Among so many oddities inating in so many places, Florentino Ariza was certainly among the oddest, but not to the point of attrag uention. The harshest thing he heard was when someone shouted to him oreet: “When yly and poor, you only want more.” In a, the apparel imposed by y became, from that time on and for the rest of his life, the ki suited to his enigmatiature and solemn character.
When he romoted to his first important position in the R.C.C., he had clothes made to order in the same style as those of his father, whom he recalled as an old man who had died at Christ’s venerable age of thirty-three. So that Florentino Ariza always looked much older than he was. As a matter of fact, the loose-tongued Brígida Zuleta, a brief love who dished up unwashed truths, told him on the very first day that she liked him better without his clothes because he looked twenty years younger when he was naked. However, he never knew how to remedy that, first because his personal taste would not allow him to dress in any other way, and sed because at the age of twenty no one knew how to dress like a younger man, unless he were to take his short pants and sailor hat out of the closet again. Oher hand, he himself could not escape the notion of old age current in his day, so it was to be expected that when he saw Fermina Daza stumble at the door of the movie theater he would be shaken by a thunderbolt of panic that death, the son of a bitch, would win an irreparable victory in his fierce war of love.
Until that time his greatest battle, fought tooth and nail and lost without glory, was against baldness. From the moment he saw the first hairs tangled in his b, he khat he was o a hell whose torments ot be imagined by those who do not suffer them. He struggled for years. There was not a pomade or lotion he did not try, a belief he did not accept, a sacrifice he did not endure, in order to defend every inch of his head against the ravages of that devastation. He memorized the agricultural informa-tion in the Bristol Almanac because he had heard that there was a direct relationship between the growth of hair and the harvesting cycles. He left the totally bald barber he had used all his life for a fn newer who cut hair only when the moon was in the first quarter. The new barber had begun to demonstrate that in fact he had a fertile hand, when it was discovered that he was wanted by several Antillean police forces for raping novices, and he was taken away in s.
By then Florentino Ariza had cut out every advertisement -ing baldhat he found in the neers of the Caribbean basin, the ones in which they priwo pictures of the same man, first as bald as a melon and then with more hair than a lion: before and after using the infallible cure. After six years he had tried one hundred seventy-two of them, in addition to plementary treat-ments that appeared on the labels of the bottles, and all that he achieved was an itg, foul-smelling eczema of the scalp called ringworm borealis by the medie men of Martinique because it emitted a phosphorest glow in the dark. As a last resort he had recourse to all the herbs that the Indians hawked in the public market and to all the magical specifid Oriental potions sold in the Arcade of the Scribes, but by the time he realized that he had been swindled, he already had the tonsure of a saint.
In the year 1900, while the Civil War of a Thousand Days bled the try, an Italian who made -fitted wigs of human hair came to the city. The wigs cost a fortune, and the manufacturer took no responsibility after three months of use, but there were few solvent bald men who did not succumb to the temptation. Florentino Ariza was one of the first. He tried on a wig that was so similar to his own hair that he was afraid it would stand on end with his ges in mood, but he could not accept the idea of wearing a dead man’s hair on his head. His only solation was that his raging baldness meant that he would not have to watch his hair turn gray. One day, one of the genial drunks on the river docks embraced him with more enthusiasm than usual when he saw him leave the office, and then he removed Florentino Ariza’s hat, to the mog laughter of the stevedores, and gave him a resounding kiss on the head.
“Hairless wonder!” he shouted.
That night, at the age of forty-eight, he had the few downy strands left at his temples and the nape of his neck cut off, and he embraced with all his heart his destiny of total baldness. Every m before his bath he lathered not only his but the areas on his scalp where stubble was beginning to reappear, and with a barber’s razor he left everything as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Until then he would not remove his hat even in the office, for his baldness produced a sensation of nakedhat seemed io him. But when he accepted his baldness with all his heart, he attributed to it the mase virtues that he had heard about and sed as nothing but the fantasies of bald men. Later he te in the new of bing long hairs from his part on the right all the way across his head, and this he never abandoned. But even so, he tio wear his hat, always the same funereal style, even after the tartarita, the loame for the straw skimmer, came into fashion.
The loss of his teeth, oher hand, did not result from a natural calamity but from the shoddy work of an iti dentist who decided to eradicate a simple iion by drastic means. His terror of the drill had prevented Florentino Ariza from visiting a dentist, despite his stant toothaches, until the pain became un-bearable. His mother was alarmed by a night of insolable moaning from the room o hers, because these moans seemed to be the same as the ones from aime, which had almost disappeared in the mists of her memory, but when she made him open his mouth to see where love was hurting him, she discovered that he had fallen victim to abscesses.
Uncle Leo XII sent him to Dr. Francis Adonay, a black giant in gaiters and jodhpurs who traveled the river boats with plete dental equipment that he carried in a steward’s saddlebag, and who seemed to be more like a traveling salesman of terror in the villages along the river. With just one glan his mouth, he decided that Florentino Ariza had to have even his healthy teeth and molars extracted in order to protect him ond for all from further misfortunes. In trast to baldness, this radical treatment caused him no alarm at all, except for his natural fear of a bloodbath without ahesia. The idea of false teeth did not disturb him either, first because one of his fo childhood memories was of a ival magi who removed his upper and lower teeth ahem chattering by themselves on a table, and sed because it would end the toothaches that had tormented him, ever since he was a boy, with almost as much cruelty as the pains of love. Unlike baldness, it did not seem to him an under-hatack by old age, because he was vihat despite the bitter breath of vulized rubber, his appearance would be er with an orthopedic smile. So he submitted without resistao the red-hot forceps of Dr. Adonay, and he endured his valesce with the stoicism of a pack mule.
Uncle Leo XII atteo the details of the operation as if it were being performed on his own flesh. His singular i in false teeth had developed on one of his first trips along the