CHAPTER ONE

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    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<u></u> 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<q>..</q> 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 s<var></var>uicides, 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<cite>??</cite>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.

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