CHAPTER TWO

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    FLORENTINO ARIZA, oher hand, had not stopped thinking of her for a single moment since Fermina Daza had re-jected him out of hand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months, and four days ago. He did not have to keep a run-ning tally, drawing a line for each day on the walls of a cell, because not a day had passed that something did not happen to remind him of her. At the time of their separation he lived with his mother, Tránsito Ariza, in one half of a rented house oreet of Windows, where she had kept a notions shop ever since she was a young woman, and where she also unraveled shirts and s to sell as bandages for the men wounded in the war. He was her only child, born of an occasional alliah the well-known shipowner Don Pius V Loayza, one of the three brothers who had fouhe River pany of the Caribbean and thereby given new impetus to steam navigation along the Magdalena River.

    Don Pius V Loayza died when his son was ten years old. Although he always took care of his expenses i, he never reized him as his son before the law, nor did he leave him with his future secure, so that Florentino Ariza used only his mother’s name even though his true parentage was always on knowledge. Florentino Ariza had to leave school after his father’s death, and he went to work as an apprenti the Postal Agency, where he was in charge of opening sacks, s the letters, and notifying the public that mail had arrived by flying the flag of its try ihe office door.

    His good seracted the attention of the telegraph operator, the German émigré Lotario Thugut, who also played the an for important ceremonies ihedral and gave music lessons in the home. Lotario Thugut taught him the Morse code and the ws of the telegraph system, and after only a few lessons on the violin Florentino Ariza could play by ear like a professional. Whe Fermina Daza he was the most sought-after young man in his social circle, the one who knew how to dahe latest dances ae seal poetry by heart, and who was always willing to play violin sereo his friends’ sweethearts. He was very thin, with Indian hair plastered down with sted pomade and eyeglasses for myopia, which added to his forlorn appearance. Aside from his defective vision, he suffered from istipation, which forced him to take enemas throughout his life. He had one black suit, ied from his dead father, but Tránsito Ariza took such good care of it that every Sunday it looked new. Despite his air of weakness, his reserve, and his somber clothes, the girls in his circle held secret lot-teries to determine who would spend time with him, and he gambled on spending time with them until the day he met Fermina Daza and his innoce came to an end.

    He had seen her for the first time oernoon when Lotario Thugut told him to deliver a telegram to someone named Lorenzo Daza, with no known place of residence. He found him in one of the oldest houses on the Park of the Evangels; it was half in ruins, and its interior patio, with weeds in the flowerpots and a stone fountain with no water, resembled an abbey cloister. Florentino Ariza heard no human sound as he followed the barefoot maid uhe arches of the passageway, where unopened moving cartons and bricklayer’s tools lay amoover lime and stacks of t bags, for the house was undergoing drastiovation. At the far end of the patio was a temporary office where a very fat man, whose curly sideburns grew into his mustache, sat behind a desk, taking his siesta. In fact his name was Lorenzo Daza, and he was not very well known iy because he had arrived less than two years before and was not a man with many friends.

    He received the telegram as if it were the tinuation of an ominous dream. Florentino Ariza observed his livid eyes with a kind of official passion, he observed his uain firying to break the seal, the heartfelt fear that he had seen so many times in so many addressees who still could not think about telegrams without eg them with death. After reading it he regained his -posure. He sighed: “Good news.” And he handed Florentino Ariza the obligatory five reales, letting him know with a relieved smile that he would not have giveo him if the news had been bad. Then he said goodbye with a handshake, which was not the usual thing to do with a telegraph messenger, and the maid apanied him to the street door, more to keep an eye on him than to lead the way.

    They retraced their steps along the arcaded passageway, but this time Florentino Ariza khat there was someone else in the house, be-cause the brightness iio was filled with the voice of a womaing a reading lesson. As he passed the sewing room, he saw through the window an older woman and a young girl sitting very close together on two chairs and following the reading in the book that the woman held open on her lap. It seemed a strange sight: the daughter teag the mother to read. His interpretation was incor-rely in part, because the woman was the aunt, not the mother of the child, although she had raised her as if she were her own. The lesson was not interrupted, but the girl raised her eyes to see who assing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a tury later.

    All that Florentino Ariza could learn about Lorenzo Daza was that he had e from San Juan de la aga with his only daughter and his unmarried sister soon after the cholera epidemid those who saw him disembark had no doubt that he had e to stay since he brought everything necessary for a well-furnished house. His wife had died when the girl was very young. His sister, named Escolástica, was forty years old, and she was fulfilling a vow to wear the habit of St. Francis when she went out oreet and the pe’s rope around her waist when she was at home. The girl was thirteen years old and had the same name as her dead mother: Fermina.

    It was supposed that Lorenzo Daza was a man of means, because he lived well with no known employment and had paid hard cash for the Park of the Evangels house, whose restoration must have cost him at least twice the purchase price of two hundred gold pesos. His daughter was studying at the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, where for two turies young ladies of society had learhe art and teique of being diligent and submissive wives. During the ial period and the early years of the Republic, the school had accepted only those students with great family names. But the old families, ruined by Independence, had to submit to the realities of a ime, and the Academy opes doors to all applits who could pay the tuitiardless of the color of their blood, on the essential dition that they were legitimate daughters of Catholic marriages. In a, it was an expensive school, and the fact that Fermina Daza studied there was suffit indication of her family’s eic situation, if not of its social position. This news enced Florentino Ariza, si indicated to him that the beau-tiful adolest with the almond-shaped eyes was within reach of his dreams. But her father’s strict regime soon provided an irremediable difficulty. Uhe other students, who walked to school in groups or apanied by an older servant, Fermina Daza always walked with her spinster aunt, and her behavior indicated that she er-mitted no distra.

    It was in this i way that Florentino Ariza began his secret life as a solitary hunter. From seven o’clo the m, he sat on the most hidden ben the little park, pretending to read a book of verse in the shade of the almond trees, until he saw the impossible maiden walk by in her blue-striped uniform, stogs that reached to her knees, mase laced oxfords, and a sihick braid with a bow at the end, which hung down her back to her waist. She walked with natural haughtiness, her head high, her eyes unmoving, her step rapid, her nose pointing straight ahead, her bag of books held against her chest with crossed arms, her doe’s gait making her seem immuo gravity. At her side, struggling to keep up with her, the aunt with the brown habit and rope of St. Francis did not allow him the slightest opportunity to approach. Florentino Ariza saw them pass bad forth four times a day and on Sundays when they came out of High Mass, and just seeing the girl was enough for him. Little by little he idealized her, endowing her with improbable virtues and imaginary ses, and after two weeks he thought of nothing else but her. So he decided to send Fermina Daza a simple note written on both sides of the paper in his exquisite notary’s hand. But he kept it in his pocket for several days, thinking about how to hand it to her, and while he thought he wrote several more pages befoing to bed, so that the inal letter was turning into a diary of pliments, inspired by books he had learned by heart because he read them so often during his vigils in the park.

    Searg for a way to give her the letter, he tried to make the acquaintance of some of the other students at Presentation Academy, but they were too distant from his world. Besides, after much thought, it did not seem prudent to let anyone else know of his iions. Still, he mao find out that Fermina Daza had been io a Saturday dance a few days after their arrival iy, and her father had not allowed her to go, with a clusive: “Everything in due course.” By the time the letter tained more than sixty pages written on both sides, Florentino Ariza could no longer ehe weight of his secret, and he unburdened himself to his mother, the only person with whom he allowed himself any fideránsito Ariza was moved to tears by her son’s inno matters of love, and she tried to guide him with her own knowledge. She began by ving him not to deliver the lyrical sheaf of papers, si would only frighten the girl of his dreams, who she supposed was as green as he in matters of the heart. The first step, she said, was to make her aware of his i so that his declaration would not take her so much by surprise and she would have time to think.

    “But above all,” she said, “the first person you have to win over is not the girl but her aunt.”

    Both pieces of advice were wise, no doubt, but they came too late. Iy, on the day when Fermina Daza let her mind wander for an instant from the reading lesson she was giving her aunt and raised her eyes to see alking along the passageway, Florentino Ariza had impressed her because of his air of vulnerability. That night, dur-ing supper, her father had mentiohe telegram, which was how she found out why Florentino Ariza had e to the house and what he did for a living. This information increased her i, because for her, as for so many other people at that time, the iion of the telegraph had something magical about it. So that she reized Florentino Ariza the first time she saw him reading uhe trees itle park, although it in no way disquieted her until her aunt told her he had been there for several weeks.

    Then, when they also saw him on Sundays as they came out of Mass, her aunt was -vihat all these meetings could not be casual. She said: “He is not going to all this trouble for me.” For despite her austere dud peial habit, Aunt Escolástica had an instinct for life and a vocation for plicity, which were her greatest virtues, and the mere idea that a man was ied in her niece awakened an irresist-ible emotion in her. Fermina Daza, however, was still safe from even simple curiosity about love, and the only feeling that Florentino Ariza inspired in her was a certain pity, because it seemed to her that he was sick. But her aunt told her that one had to live a long time to know a man’s true nature, and she was vihat the one who sat in the park to watch them walk by could only be sick with love.

    Aunt Escolástica was a refuge of uanding and affe for the only child of a loveless marriage. She had raised her sihe death of her mother, and in her relations with Lorenzo Daza she behaved more like an aplice than an aunt. So that the appear-ance of Florentino Ariza was for them another of the many intimate diversions they ied to pass the time. Four times a day, when they walked through the little Park of the Evangels, both hurried to look with a rapid gla the thin, timid, unimpressive sentinel who was almost always dressed in black despite the heat and who preteo read uhe trees. “There he is,” said the one who saw him first, suppressing her laughter, before he raised his eyes and saw the twid, aloof women of his life as they crossed the park without looking at him.

    “Poor thing,” her aunt had said. “He does not dare approach you because I am with you, but one day he will if his iions are seri-ous, and then he will give you a letter.”

    Foreseeing all kinds of adversities, she taught her to unicate in sign language, an indispensable strategy in forbidden love. These ued, almost childish antics caused an unfamiliar curiosity in Fermina Daza, but for several months it did not occur to her that it could go any further. She never knew when the diversion became a preoccupation and her blood frothed with the o see him, and one night she awoke in terror because she saw him looking at her from the darkness at the foot of her bed. Then she longed with all her soul for her aunt’s predis to e true, and in her prayers she begged God to give him the ce to hahe letter just so she could know what it said.

    But her prayers were not answered. On the trary. This oc-curred at the time that Florentino Ariza made his fession to his mother, who dissuaded him from handing Fermina Daza his seventy pages of pliments, so that she tio wait for the rest of the year. Her preoccupation turned into despair as the December vaca-tion approached, and she asked herself over and ain how she would see him a him see her during the three months when she would not be walking to school. Her doubts were still unresolved on Christmas Eve, when she was shaken by the presehat he was in the crowd at Midnight Mass, looking at her, and this uneasiness flooded her heart.

    She did not dare to turn her head, because she was sittiween her father and her aunt, and she had to trol herself so that they would not notice her agitation. But in the crowd leaving the church she felt him so close, so clearly, that an irresistible power forced her to look over her shoulder as she walked along the tral nave and then, a hand’s breadth from her eyes, she saw those icy eyes, that livid face, those lips petrified by the terror of love. Dismayed by her own audacity, she seized Aunt Escolástica’s arm so she would not fall, and her auhe icy perspiration on her hand through the lace mitt, and she forted her with an imperceptible sign of un-ditional plicity. In the din of fireworks and native drums, of colored lights in the doorways and the clamor of the crowd yearning for peace, Florentino Ariza wandered like a sleepwalker until dawn, watg the fiesta through his tears, dazed by the halluation that it was he and not God who had been born that night.

    His delirium increased the following week, when he passed Fermina Daza’s house in despair at the siesta hour and saw that she and her aunt were sitting uhe almond trees at the doorway. It en-air repetition of the se he had withe first afternoon in the sewing room: the girl giving a reading lesson to her aunt. But Fermina Daza seemed different without the school uniform, for she wore a narrow tunic with many folds that fell from her shoul-ders in the Greek style, and on her head she wore a garland of fresh gardenias that made her look like a ed goddess. Florentino Ariza sat in the park where he was sure he would be seen, and then he did not have recourse to his feigned reading but sat with the book open and his eyes fixed on the illusory maiden, who did not even respond with a charitable glance.

    At first he thought that the lesson uhe almond trees was a casual innovation due, perhaps, to the interminable repairs on the house, but in the days that followed he came to uand that Fermina Daza would be there, within view, every afternoon at the same time during the three months of vacation, and that certainty filled him with new hope. He did not have the impression that he was seen, he could not detey sign of i or reje, but in her indifferehere was a distinct radiahat enced him to persevere. Then, oernoon toward the end of January, the aunt put her work on the chair a her niece alone in the doorway uhe shower of yellow leaves falling from the almond trees. En-ced by the impetuous thought that this was an arranged oppor-tunity, Florentino Ariza crossed the street and stopped in front of Fermina Daza, so close to her that he could detect the catches in her breathing and the floral st that he would identify with her for the rest of his life. He spoke with his head high and with a determination that would be his again only half a tury later, and for the same reason.

    “All I ask is that you accept a letter from me,” he said.

    It was not the voice that Fermina Daza had expected from him: it was sharp and clear, with a trol that had nothing to do with his languid manner. Without lifting her eyes from her embroidery, she replied: “I ot accept it without my father’s permission.” Floren-tino Ariza shuddered at the warmth of that voice, whose hushed tones he was not tet for the rest of his life. But he held himself steady and replied without hesitation: “Get it.” Then he sweetehe and with a plea: “It is a matter of life ah.” Fermina Daza did not look at him, she did not interrupt her embr, but her decision opehe door a crack, wide enough for the entire world to pass through.

    “e back every afternoon,” she said to him, “and wait until I ge my seat.”

    Florentino Ariza did not uand what she meant until the following Monday when, from the ben the little park, he saw the same se with one variation: when Aunt Escolástica went into the house, Fermina Daza stood up and then sat iher chair. Florentino Ariza, with a white camellia in his lapel, crossed the street and stood in front of her. He said: “This is the greatest moment of my life.” Fermina Daza did not raise her eyes to him, but she looked all around her and saw the deserted streets in the heat of the dry season and a swirl of dead leaves pulled along by the wind.

    “Give it to me,” she said.

    Florentino Ariza had inteo give her the seventy sheets he could recite from memory after reading them so often, but then he decided on a sober and explicit half page in which he promised only what was essential: his perfect fidelity and his everlasting love. He took the letter out of his inside jacket pocket and held it before the eyes of the troubled embroiderer, who had still not dared to look at him. She saw the blue envelope trembling in a harified with terror, and she raised the embroidery frame so he could put the letter on it, for she could not admit that she had noticed the trembling of his fingers. Then it happened: a bird shook himself among the leaves of the almond trees, and his droppings fell right on the embroidery. Fermina Daza moved the frame out of the way, hid it behind the chair so that he would not notice what had happened, and looked at him for the first time, her face aflame. Florentino Ariza was impassive as he held the letter in his hand and said: “It’s good luck.” She thanked him with her first smile and almost snatched the letter away from him, folded it, and hid it in her bodice. Then he offered her the camellia he wore in his lapel. She refused: “It is a flower of promises.” Then, scious that their time was almost over, she again te in her posure.

    “Now go,” she said, “and don’t e batil I tell you to.”

    After Florentino Ariza saw her for the first time, his mother knew before he told her because he lost his void his appetite and spent the entire night tossing and turning in his bed. But when he began to wait for the ao his first letter, his anguish was plicated by diarrhea and green vomit, he became disoriented and suffered from sudden fainting spells, and his mother was terrified because his -dition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera. Florentino Ariza’s godfather, an old homeopathic practi-tioner who had been Tránsito Ariza’s fidant ever since her days as a secret mistress, was also alarmed at first by the patient’s dition, because he had the ulse, the hoarse breathing, and the pale perspiration of a dying man. But his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only crete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother, to clude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera. He pre-scribed infusions of linden blossoms to calm the nerves and suggested a ge of air so he could find solation in distance, but Floren-tino Ariza longed for just the opposite: to enjoy his martyrdom.

    Tránsito Ariza was a freed quadroon whose instinct for happiness had been frustrated by poverty, and she took pleasure in her son’s suffering as if it were her own. She made him drink the infusions when he became delirious, and she smothered him in wool blao keep away the chills, but at the same time she enced him to enjoy his prostration.

    “Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you ,” she said to him, “because these things don’t last your whole life.”

    In the Postal Agency, of course, they did not agree. Florentino Ariza had bee negligent, and he was so distracted that he fused the flags that annouhe arrival of the mail, and one Wednesday he hoisted the German flag when the ship was from the Leyland pany and carried the mail from Liverpool, and on another day he flew the flag of the Uates when the ship was from the -pagnie Générale Transatlantique and carried the mail from Saint-Nazaire. These fusions of love caused such chaos in the distribu-tion of the mail and provoked so many protests from the public that if Florentino Ariza did not lose his job it was because Lotario Thugut kept him at the telegraph and took him to play the violin ihedral choir. They had a friendship difficult to uand because of the differen their ages, for they might have been grandfather and grandson, but they got along at work as well as they did iaverns around the port, which were frequented by everyo for the evening regardless of social class, from drunken beggars to youlemen in tuxedos who fled the gala parties at the Social Club to eat fried mullet and ut rice.

    Lotario Thugut was in the habit of going there after the last shift at the telegraph office, and dawn often found him drinking Jamai pund playing the accordion with the crews of madmen from the Antillean sers. He was corpulent and bull-necked, with a golden beard and a liberty cap that he wore when he went out at night, and all he needed was a string of bells to look like St. Nicholas. At least once a week he ehe evening with a little night bird, as he called them, one of the many who sold emergency love in a tra hotel for sailors. Whe Floren-tino Ariza, the first thing he did, with a certain magisterial delight, was to initiate him into the secrets of his paradise. He chose for him the little birds he thought best, he discussed their prid style with them and offered to pay in advah his own money for their services. But Florentino Ariza did not accept: he was a virgin, and he had decided not to lose his virginity unless it was for love.

    The hotel was a ial palace that had seeer days, and its great marble salons and rooms were divided into plasterboard cubicles with peepholes, which were rented out as much for watg as for doing. There was talk of busybodies who had their eyes poked out with knitting needles, of a man whnized his own wife as the woman he ying on, of well-bred gentlemen who came dis-guised as tarts tet who they were with the boatswains on shore leave, and of so many other misadventures of observers and observed that the mere idea of going into the  room terrified Florentino Ariza. And so Lotario Thugut could never persuade him that watg aing himself be watched were the refis of European princes.

    As opposed to what his corpulence might suggest, Lotario Thugut had the rosebud genitals of a cherub, but this must have been a for-tunate defect, because the most tarnished birds argued over who would have the ce to go to bed with him, and then they shrieked as if their throats were being cut, shaking the buttresses of the palad making its ghosts tremble in fear. They said he used an oi made of snake venom that inflamed women’s loins, but he swore he had no resources other than those that God had given him. He would say with uproarious laughter: “It’s pure love.” Many years had to pass before Florentino Ariza would uand that perhaps he was right. He was vi last, at a more advaage of his sen-timental education, whe a man who lived like a king by exploiting three women at the same time. The three of them reheir ats at dawn, prostrate at his feet to beg fiveness for their meager profits, and the only gratification they sought was that he go to bed with the one whht him the most money. Floren-tino Ariza thought that terror alone could induce sudignities, but one of the three girls surprised him with the tradictory truth.

    “These are things,” she said, “you do only for love.”

    It was not so much for his talents as a fornicator as for his personal charm that Lotario Thugut had bee one of the most esteemed ts of the hotel. Florentino Ariza, because he was so quiet and elusive, also earhe esteem of the owner, and during the most arduous period of his grief he would lock himself in the suffog little rooms to read verses and tearful serialized love stories, and his reveries left s of dark swallows on the balies and the sound of kisses and the beating of wings iillness of siesta. At dusk, when it was cooler, it was impossible not to listen to the versa-tions of men who came to sole themselves at the end of their day with hurried love. So that Florentino Ariza heard about many acts of disloyalty, and even some state secrets, which important ts and even local officials fided to their ephemeral lovers, not g if they could be overheard in the adjoining rooms. This was also how he learhat four nautical leagues to the north of the Sotavento Archipelago, a Spanish galleon had been lying under water sihe eighteenth tury with its cargo of more than five hundred billion pesos in pure gold and precious stohe story astounded him, but he did not think of it again until a few months later, when his love awakened in him an overwhelming desire to salvage the surea-sure so that Fermina Daza could bathe in showers of gold.

    Years later, wheried to remember what the maiden ideal-ized by the alchemy of poetry really was like, he could not distinguish her from the heartrending twilights of those times. Even when he observed her, unseen, during those days of longing when he waited for a reply to his first letter, he saw her transfigured iernoon shimmer of two o’clo a shower of blossoms from the almond trees where it was always April regardless of the season of the year. The only reason he was ied in apanying Lotario Thugut on his violin from the privileged vantage point in the choir was to see how her tunic fluttered in the breeze raised by the ticles. But his own delirium finally interfered with that pleasure, for the mystic music seemed so innocuous pared with the state of his soul that he attempted to make it more exg with love waltzes, and Lotario Thugut found himself obliged to ask that he leave the choir.

    This was the time when he gave in to his desire to eat the gardenias that Trán-sito Ariza grew in pots iio, so that he could know the taste of Fermina Daza. It was also the time when he happeo find in one of his mother’s trunks a liter bottle of the cologhat the sailors from the Hamburg-Ameri Line sold as traband, and he could not resist the temptation to sample it in order to discover other tastes of his beloved. He tio drink from the bottle until dawn, and he became drunk on Fermina Daza in abrasive swallows, first iaverns around the port and then as he stared out to sea from the jetties where lovers without a roof over their heads made soling love, until at last he succumbed to unsciousness. Tránsito Ariza, who had waited for him until six o’clo the m with her heart in her mouth, searched for him in the most improbable hiding places, and a short while after noon she found him wallowing in a pool rant vomit in a cove of the bay where drowning victims washed ashore.

    She took advantage of the hiatus of his valesce to reproach him for his passivity as he waited for the ao his letter. She re-minded him that the weak would never ehe kingdom of love, which is a harsh and ungenerous kingdom, and that women give them-selves only to men of resolute spirit, who provide the security they need in order to face life. Florentino Ariza learhe lesson, perhaps too well. Tránsito Ariza could not hide a feeling of pride, more al than maternal, when she saw him leave the notions shop in his black suit and stiff felt hat, his lyrical bow tie and celluloid collar, and she asked him as a joke if he was going to a funeral. He answered, his ears flaming: “It’s almost the same thing.” She realized that he could hardly breathe with fear, but his determination was invincible. She gave him her final warnings and her blessing, and laughing for all she was worth, she promised him another bottle of cologne so they could celebrate his victory together.

    He had given Fermina Daza the letter a month before, and sihen he had often broken his promise not to return to the little park, but he had been very careful not to be seen. Nothing had ged. The reading lesson uhe trees e about two o’clock, whey was waking from its siesta, and Fermina Daza embroidered with her aunt until the day began to cool. Florentino Ariza did not wait for the aunt to go into the house, and he crossed the street with a martial stride that allowed him to overe the weakness in his knees, but he spoke to her aunt, not to Fermina Daza.

    “Please be so kind as to leave me alone for a moment with the young lady,” he said. “I have something important to tell her.”

    “What impertinence!” her aunt said to him. “There is nothing that has to do with her that I ot hear.”

    “Then I will not say anything to her,” he said, “but I warn you that you will be responsible for the sequences.”

    That was not the manner Escolástica Daza expected from the ideal sweetheart, but she stood up in alarm because for the first time she had the overwhelming impression that Florentino Ariza eak-ing uhe inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So she went into the house to ge needles ahe two young people alone uhe almond trees in the doorway.

    Iy, Fermina Daza knew very little about this taciturn suitor who had appeared in her life like a winter swallow and whose name she would not even have known if it had not been for his signature oter. She had learhat he was the fatherless son of an un-married woman who was hardw and serious but forever marked by the fiery stigma of her single youthful mistake. She had learhat he was not a messenger, as she had supposed, but a well-qualified assistant with a promising future, and she thought that he had delivered the telegram to her father only as a pretext for seeihis idea moved her. She also khat he was one of the musis in the choir, and although she never dared raise her eyes to look at him during Mass, she had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyohe violin played for her alone. He was not the kind of man she would have chosen. His found-ling’s eyeglasses, his clerical garb, his mysterious resources had awak-ened in her a curiosity that was difficult to resist, but she had never imagihat curiosity was one of the many masks of love.

    She herself could not explain why she had accepted the letter. She did not reproach herself for doing so, but the ever-increasing pressure to respond plicated her life. Her father’s every word, his casual glances, his most trivial gestures, seemed set with traps to uncover her secret. Her state of alarm was such that she avoided speaking at the table for fear some slip might betray her, and she became evasive even with her Aunt Escolástica, who heless shared her repressed ay as if it were her own. She would lock herself ihroom at odd hours and for no reason other than to reread the letter, attempting to discover a secret code, a magiula hidden in one of the three hundred fourteeers of its fifty-eight words, in the hope they would tell her more than they said. But all she found was what she had uood on first reading, when she ran to lock herself ihroom, her heart in a frenzy, and tore open the envelope hoping for a long, feverish letter, and found only a per-fumed note whose determinatihtened her.

    At first she had not even thought seriously that she was obliged to respond, but the letter was so explicit that there was no way to avoid it. Meanwhile, iorment of her doubts, she was surprised to find herself thinking about Florentino Ariza with more frequend ihan she cared to allow, and she even asked herself i distress why he was not itle park at the usual hour, fetting that it was she who had asked him not to return while she repar-ing her reply. And so she thought about him as she never could have imagihinking about anyone, having premonitions that he would be where he was not, wanting him to be where he could not be, awak-ing with a start, with the physical sensation that he was looking at her in the darkness while she slept, so that oernoon when she heard his resolute steps on the yellow leaves itle park it was difficult for her not to think this was yet arick of her imagina-tion. But when he demanded her answer with an authority that was so different from his languor, she mao overe her fear and tried to dodge the issue with the truth: she did not know how to answer him. But Florentino Ariza had not leapt across an abyss only to be shooed away with such excuses.

    “If you accepted the letter,” he said to her, “it shows a lack of courtesy not to a.”

    That was the end of the labyrinth. Fermina Daza regained her self-trol, begged his pardon for the delay, and gave him her solemn word that he would have an answer before the end of the vacation. And he did. On the last Friday in February, three days before school reopened, Aunt Escolástica went to the telegraph office to ask how much it cost to send a telegram to Piedras de Moler, a village that did not even appear on the list of places served by the telegraph, and she allowed Florentino Ariza to attend her as if she had never seen him before, but when she left she preteet a breviary covered in lizard skin, leaving it on the ter, and in it there was an envelope made of linen paper with golden viges. Delirious with joy, Floren-tino Ariza spent the rest of the afternooing roses and reading the ter by letter, over and ain, and the more he read the more roses he ate, and by midnight he had read it so many times and had eaten so many roses that his mother had to hold his head as if he were a calf and force him to swallow a dose of castor oil.

    It was the year they fell into devastating love. her one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatiehey felt when they an-swered them. Never in that delirious spring, or in the following year, did they have the opportunity to speak to each other. Moreover, from the moment they saw each other for the first time until he reiterated his determination a half tury later, they never had the opportunity to be alone or to talk of their love. But during the first three months not one day went by that they did not write to each other, and for a time they wrote twice a day, until Aunt Escolástica became frightened by the iy of the blaze that she herself had helped to ignite.

    After the first letter that she carried to the telegraph office with an ember of revenge against her owiny, she had allowed an almost daily exge of messages in peared to be casual enters oreet, but she did not have the ce to permit a versation, no matter how banal and fleeting it might be. Still, after three months she realized that her niece was not the victim of a girlish fancy, as it had seemed at first, and that her own life was threatened by the fire of love. The truth was that Escolástica Daza had no other means of support except her brother’s charity, and she khat his tyranniature would never five such a betrayal of his fidence.

    But when it was time for the final decision, she did not have the heart to cause her he same irreparable grief that she had been obliged to nurture ever since her youth, and she permitted her to use a strategy that allowed her the illusion of innoce. The method was simple: Fermina Daza would leave her letter in some hiding place along her daily route from the house to the Academy, and in that letter she would indicate to Florentino Ariza where she ex-pected to find his answer. Florentino Ariza did the same. In this way, for the rest of the year, the flicts in Aunt Escolástica’s sce were transferred to baptisteries in churches, holes in trees, and -nies in ruined ial fortresses. Sometimes their letters were soaked by rain, soiled by mud, torn by adversity, and some were lost for a variety of other reasons, but they always found a way to be in touch with each ain.

    Florentino Ariza wrote every night. Letter by letter, he had no mercy as he poisoned himself with the smoke from the palm oil lamps in the ba of the notions shop, and his letters became more discursive and more lunatic the more he tried to imitate his favorite poets from the Popular Library, which even at that time roag eighty volumes. His mother, who had urged him with so much fervor to enjoy his torment, became ed for his health. “Yoing to wear out your brains,” she shouted at him from the bedroom when she heard the first roosters crow. “No woman is worth all that.” She could not remember ever having known any-one in such a state of unbridled passion. But he paid no attention to her. Sometimes he went to the office without having slept, his hair in an uproar of love after leaving the letter in the prearranged hiding place so that Fermina Daza would find it on her way to school. She, oher hand, uhe watchful eye of her father and the vicious spying of the nuns, could barely mao fill half a page from her notebook when she locked herself ihroom or preteo take notes in class. But this was not only due to her limited time and the danger of being taken by surprise, it was also her nature that caused her letters to avoid emotional pitfalls and fihemselves to relating the events of her daily life iilitarian style of a ship’s log.

    Iy they were distracted letters, inteo keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line. Desperate to i her with his own madness, he sent her miniaturist’s verses inscribed with the point of a pin on camellia petals. It was he, not she, who had the audacity to enclose a lock of his hair iter, but he never received the response he longed for, which was aire strand of Fermina Daza’s braid. He did move her at last to take oep further, and from that time on she began to send him the veins of leaves dried in diaries, the wings of butterflies, the feathers of magic birds, and for his birthday she gave him a square timeter of St. Peter Clavier’s habit, whi those days was being sold i at a price far beyond the reach of a schoolgirl her age. One night, without any warning, Fermina Daza awoke with a start: a solo violin was serenad-ing her, playing the same waltz over and ain. She shuddered when she realized that eaote was an act of thanksgiving for the petals from her herbarium, for the moments stolen from arithmetic to write her letters, for her fear of examinations when she was thinking more about him than about the natural sces, but she did not dare believe that Florentino Ariza was capable of such imprudence.

    The  m at breakfast Lorenzo Daza could not tain his curiosity--first because he did not knolaying a single piece meant in the language of serenades, and sed because, despite the attention with which he had listened, he could not determine which house it had been intended for. Aunt Escolástica, with a sang-froid that took her niece’s breath away, stated that she had seen through the bedroom curtains that the solitary violinist was standing oher side of the park, and she said that in a a single piece was notification of severed relations. In that day’s letter Floren-tino Ariza firmed that he had played the serehat he had -posed the waltz, and that it bore the name he called Fermina Daza in his heart: “The ed Goddess.” He did not play it in the park again, but on moonlit nights in places chosen so that she could listen without fear in her bedroom. One of his favored spots was the paupers’ cemetery, exposed to the sun and the rain on an i hill, where turkey buzzards dozed and the music achieved a supernatural reso-nance. Later he learhe dire of the winds, and in this way he was certain that his melody carried as far as it had to.

    In August of that year a new civil war, one of the many that had beeating the try for over half a tury, threateo spread, and the gover imposed martial law and a six o’clock curfew in the provinces along the Caribbean coast. Although some disturbances had already occurred, and the troops had itted all kinds of retaliatory abuses, Florentino Ariza was so befuddled that he was unaware of the state of the world, and a military patrol sur-prised him one dawn as he disturbed the chastity of the dead with his amorous provocations. By some miracle he escaped summary execution after he was accused of being a spy who sent messages in the key of G to the Liberal ships marauding in nearby waters.

    “What the hell do you mean, a spy?” said Florentino Ariza. “I’m nothing but a poor lover.”

    For three nights he slept with irons around his ankles in the cells of the local garrison. But when he was released he felt defrauded by the brevity of his captivity, and even in the days of his old age, when so many other wars were fused in his memory, he still thought he was the only man iy, and perhaps the try, who had dragged five-pound leg irons for the sake of love.

    Their freic correspondence was almost two years old when Florentino Ariza, in a letter of only one paragraph, made a formal proposal of marriage to Fermina Daza. On several occasions during the preg six months he had sent her a white camellia, but she would return it to him in her  letter so that he would have no doubt that she was disposed to tinue writing to him, but without the seriousness of an e. The truth is that she had always taken the ings and goings of the camellia as a lame, and it had never occurred to her to sider it as a crossroads in her destiny. But when the formal proposal arrived she felt herself wounded for the first time by the clawings of death. Panic-stri, she told her Aunt Escolástica, who gave her advice with the ce and lucidity she had not had when she was twenty and was forced to decide her own fate.

    “Tell him yes,” she said. “Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.”

    Fermina Daza, however, was so fused that she asked for some time to think it over. First she asked for a month, then two, then three, and when the fourth month had ended and she had still not replied, she received a white camellia again, not alone in the envelope as on other occasions but with the peremptory notification that this was the last o was now or hen that same afternoon it was Florentino Ariza who saw the face of death when he received an envelope taining a strip of paper, torn from the margin of a school notebook, on which a one-line ansritten in pencil: Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.

    Florentino Ariza was not prepared for that answer, but his mother was. Since he had first spoken to her six months earlier about his iion to marry, Tránsito Ariza had beguiations for renting the entire house which, until that time, she had shared with two other families. A two-story structure dating from the seveh tury, it was the building where the tobaonopoly had been located under Spanish rule, and its ruined owners had been obliged to rent it out in bits and pieces because they did not have the moo main-tain it. It had oion fag the street, where the retail tobacco shop had been, another se at the rear of a paved patio, where the factory had been located, and a very large stable that the curres used in on for washing and drying their clothes. Trán-sito Ariza occupied the first se, which was the most ve and the best preserved, although it was also the smallest.

    The notions store was in the old tobacco shop, with a large door fag the street, and to one side was the former storeroom, with only a skylight for ventilation, where Tránsito Ariza slept. The sto took up half the space that was divided by a wooden partition. In it were a table and four chairs, used for both eating and writing, and it was there that Florentino Ariza hung his hammock when dawn did not find him writing. It was a good space for the two of them, but too small for a third perso of all a young lady from the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin whose father had restored a house in ruins until it was like new, while the families with seven titles went to bed with the fear that the roofs of their mansions would cave in on them while they slept. So Tránsito Ariza had arranged with the owo let her also occupy the gallery iio, and in exge she would keep the house in good dition for five years.

    She had the resources to do so. In addition to the cash ine from the notions store and the hemostatic rags, which sufficed for her modest life, she had multiplied her savings by lending them to a tele made up of the embarrassed new poor, ted her excessive i rates for the sake of her discretion. Ladies with the airs of queens desded from their carriages at the entrao the notions shop, unencumbered by nursemaids or servants, and as they preteo buy Holland laces and passementerie trimmings, they pawned, between sobs, the last glittering ors of their lost para-dise.

    Tránsito Ariza rescued them from difficulties with so much sideration for their lihat many of them left mrateful for the honor than for the favor they had received. Ihan ten years she khe jewels, so often redeemed and then tearfully pawned again, as if they had been her own, and at the time her son decided to marry, the profits, verted into gold, lay hidden in a clay jar under her bed. Then she did her ats and discovered not only that she could uake to keep the rented house standing for five years, but that with the same shrewdness and a little more luck she could perhaps buy it, before she died, for the twelve grandchildren she hoped to have. Florentino Ariza, for his part, had received pro-visional appoi as First Assistant at the telegraph office, and Lotario Thugut wanted him to head the office when he left to direct the School of Telegraphy and Magism, which he expected to do the following year.

    So the practical side of the marriage was resolved. Still, Tránsito Ariza thought that two final ditions were prudent. The first was to find out who Lorenzo Daza really was, for though his at left no doubt ing his ins, no one had aain information as to his identity and livelihood. The sed was that the e be a long one so that the fiancés could e to know each other person to person, and that the strictest reserve be maintained until both felt very certain of their affes. She suggested they wait until the war was over. Florentino Ariza agreed to absolute secreot only for his mother’s reasons but because of the hermeticism of his own character. He also agreed to the delay, but its terms seemed un-realisti, sin over half a tury of indepe life the nation had not had a single day of civil peace.

    “We’ll grow old waiting,” he said.

    His godfather, the homeopathic practitioner, who happeo be taking part in the versation, did not believe that the wars were an obstacle. He thought they were nothing more tharuggles of the poor, driven like oxen by the landowners, against barefoot sol-diers who were driven in turn by the gover.

    “The war is in the mountains,” he said. “For as long as I  remember, they have killed us iies with decrees, not with bullets.”

    In any case, the details of the e were settled in their letters during the weeks that followed. Fermina Daza, on the advice of her Aunt Escolástica, accepted both the two-year extension and the dition of absolute secrecy, and suggested that Florentino Ariza ask for her hand when she finished sedary school, during the Christmas vacation. Wheime came they would decide on how the e was to be formalized, depending on the degree of approval she obtained from her father. In the meahey -tio write to each other with the same ardor and frequency, but free of the turmoil they had felt before, and their letters teoward a domestie that seemed appropriate to husband and wife. Nothing disturbed their dreams.

    Florentino Ariza’s life had ged. Requited love had given him a fidend strength he had never known before, and he was so effit in his work that Lotario Thugut had no trouble having him named his perma assistant. By that time his plans for the School of Telegraphy and Magism had failed, and the German dedicated his free time to the only thing he really enjoyed: going to the port to play the accordion and drink beer with the sailors, finishing the eve-ning at the tra hotel. It was a long time before Florentino Ariza, realized that Lotario Thugut’s influen the palace of pleasure was due to the fact that he had bee the owner of the establishment as well as impresario for the birds in the port. He had bought it gradu-ally with his savings of many years, but the person who ran it for him was a lean, one-eyed little man with a polished head and a heart so kind that no one uood how he could be such a good manager. But he was. At least it seemed that way to Florentino Ariza when the maold him, without his requesting it, that he had the perma use of a room iel, not only to resolve problems of the lower belly whenever he decided to do so, but so that he could have at his disposal a quiet place for his reading and his love letters. And as the long months passed until the formalizing of the e, he spent more time there than at the office or his house, and there were periods when Tránsito Ariza saw him only when he came home to ge his clothes.

    Reading had bee his insatiable vice. Ever since she had taught him to read, his mother had bought him illustrated books by Nordic authors which were sold as stories for children but iy were the crudest and most perverse that one could read at any age. When he was five years old, Florentino Ariza would recite them from memory, both in his classes and at literary evenings at school, but his familiarity with them did not alleviate the terror they caused. On the trary, it became acute. So that when he began to read poetry, by parison it was like finding an oasis. Even during his adolesce he had de-voured, in the order of their appearance, all the volumes of the Popular Library that Tránsito Ariza bought from the bargain booksellers at the Arcade of the Scribes, where one could find everything from Homer to the least meritorious of the local poets. But he made no distins: he read whatever came his way, as if it had been ordained by fate, ae his many years of reading, he still could not judge what was good and what was not in all that he had read. The only thing clear to him was that he preferred verse to prose, and in verse he preferred love poems that he memorized without even intending to after the sed reading, and the better rhymed aered they were, and the more heartrending, the more easily he learhem.

    They were the inal source of his first letters to Fermina Daza, those half-baked endearments taken whole from the Spanish romantics, and his letters tinued in that vein until real life obliged him to  himself with matters more muhaache. By that time he had moved on to tearful serialized novels and other, even more profane prose of the day. He had learo cry with his mother as they read the pamphlets by local poets that were sold in plazas and arcades for two tavos each. But at the same time he was able to recite from memory the most exquisite Castiliary of the Golden Age. In general, he read everything that fell into his hands in the order in which it fell, so that long after those hard years of his first love, when he was no longer young, he would read from first page to last the twenty volumes of the Young People’s Treasury, the plete catalogue of the Gamier Bros. Classi translation, and the sim-plest works that Don Vite Blasco Ibá?ez published in the Pro-meteo colle.

    In a, his youthful adventures ira hotel were not limited to reading and posing feverish letters but also included his initiation into the secrets of loveless love. Life in the house began after noon, when his friends the birds got up as bare as the day they were born, so that when Florentino Ariza arrived after work he found a palace populated by naked nymphs who shouted their entaries on the secrets of the city, which they knew because of the faithlessness of the protagonists. Many displayed in their nudity traces of their past: scars of khrusts in the belly, starbursts of gunshot wounds, ridges of the razor cuts of love, Caesareaions sewn up by butchers. Some of them had their young children with them dur-ing the day, those unfortunate fruits of youthful defiance or careless-ness, and they took off their children’s clothes as soon as they were brought in so they would not feel different in that paradise of nudity. Eae cooked her own food, and no oe better than Florentino Ariza when they invited him for a meal, because he chose the best from each. It was a daily fiesta that lasted until dusk, when the naked women marched, singing, toward the bathrooms, asked to borro, toothbrushes, scissors, cut each other’s hair, dressed in borrowed clothes, paihemselves like lugubrious s, a out to hunt the first prey of the night. Then life in the house became imper-sonal and dehumanized, and it was impossible to share in it without paying.

    Since he had known Fermina Daza, there was no place where Florentino Ariza felt more at ease, because it was the only place where he felt that he was with her. Perhaps it was for similar reasons that a older woman with beautiful silvery hair lived there but did not participate in the uninhibited life of the naked women, who professed sacramental respect for her. A premature sweetheart had takehere when she was young, and after enjoying her for a time, abandoned her to her fate. heless, despite the stigma, she had made a good marriage. When she was quite old and alowo sons and three daughters argued over who would have the pleasure of takio live with them, but she could not think of a better place to live than that hotel of her youthful debaucheries. Her perma- room was her only home, and this made for immediate union with Florentino Ariza, who, she said, would bee a wise man known throughout the world because he could enrich his soul with reading in a paradise of salaciousness. Florentino Ariza, for his part, developed so much affe for her that he helped her with her shopping and would spend the afternoons in versation with her. He thought she was a woman wise in the ways of love, since she of-fered many insights into his affair without his having to reveal as to her.

    If he had not given in to the maations at hand before he experienced Fermina Daza’s love, he certainly would not succumb now that she was his official betrothed. So Florentino Ariza lived with the girls and shared their pleasures and miseries, but it did not occur to him or them to go any further. An unforesee demonstrated the severity of his determination. Oernoon at six o’clock, when the girls were dressing to receive that evening’s ts, the woman who ed the rooms on his floor iel came into his cubicle. She was young, but haggard and old before her time, like a fully dressed pe surrounded by glorious nakedness. He saw her every day without feeling himself observed: she walked through the rooms with her brooms, a bucket for the trash, and a special rag for pig up used s from the floor. She came into the room where Florentino Ariza lay reading, and as always she ed with great care so as not to disturb him. Then she passed close to the bed, and he felt a warm and tender hand low on his belly, he felt it searg, he felt it finding, he felt it unbuttoning his trousers while her breath-ing filled the room. He preteo read until he could not bear it any longer and had to move his body out of the way.

    She was dismayed, for the first thing they warned her about when they gave her the ing job was that she should not try to sleep with the ts. They did not have to tell her that, because she was one of those women who thought that prostitution did not mean going to bed for money but going to bed with a stranger. She had two children, each by a different father, not because they were casual adventures but because she could never love any man who came back after the third visit.

    Until that time she had been a woman without a sense ency, a woman whose nature prepared her to wait with-out despair, but life in that house proved strohan her virtue. She came to work at six iernoon, and she spent the whole night going through the rooms, sweeping them out, pig up -doms, ging the sheets. It was difficult to imagihe number of things that me after love. They left vomit and tears, which seemed uandable to her, but they also left many enigmas of intimacy: puddles of blood, patches of excrement, glass eyes, gold watches, false teeth, lockets with golden curls, love letters, business letters, doleters--all kinds of letters. Some came back for the items they had lost, but most were unclaimed, and Lotario Thugut kept them under lod key and thought that sooner or later the palace that had seeer days, with its thousands of fotten be-longings, would bee a museum of love.

    The work was hard and the pay was low, but she did it well. What she could not endure were the sobs, the laments, the creaking of the bedsprings, which filled her blood with so much ardor and so much sorrow that by dawn she could not bear the desire to go to bed with the first beggar she met oreet, with any miserable drunk who would give her what she wanted with no pretensions and no questions. The appearance of a man like Florentino Ariza, young, , and without a woman, was for her a gift from heaven, because from the first moment she realized that he was just like her: someone in need of love. But he was unaware of her pelling desire. He had kept his virginity for Fermina Daza, and there was no force u-ment in this world that could turn him from his purpose.

    That was his life, four months before the date set for formalizing the e, when Lorenzo Daza showed up at the telegraph offi at seven o’clod asked for him. Since he had not yet arrived, Lorenzo Daza waited on the bentil ten minutes after eight, slipping a heavy g with its noble opal stone from one fio another, and as soon as Florentino Ariza came in, he reized him as the employee who had delivered the telegram, aook him by the arm.

    “e with me, my boy,” he said. “You and I have to talk for five minutes, man to man.”

    Florentino Ariza, as green as a corpse, let himself be led. He was not prepared for this meeting, because Fermina Daza had not fouher the occasion or the means to warn him. The fact was that on the previous Saturday, Sister Franca de la Luz, Superior of the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, had e into the class on Ideas of ogony with the stealth of a serpent, and spying oudents over their shoulders, she discovered that Fermina Daza retending to take notes in her notebook when iy she was writing a love letter. Acc to the rules of the Academy, that error was reason for expulsion. Lorenzo Daza received an urgent summons to the rectory, where he discovered the leak through which his irime was trig.

    Fermina Daza, with her innate fortitude, fessed to the error of the letter, but refused to reveal the identity of her secret sweetheart and refused again before the Tribunal of the Order which, therefore, firmed the verdict of expulsion. Her father, however, searched her room, until then an inviolate sanctuary, and in the false bottom of her trunk he found the packets of three years’ worth of letters hidden away with as much love as had inspired their writing. The signature was unequivocal, but Lorenzo Daza could not believe--not then, not ever--that his daughter knew nothing about her secret lover except that he worked as a telegraph operator and that he loved the violin.

    Certain that su intricate relationship was uandable only with the plicity of his sister, he did not grahe grace of an excuse or the right of appeal, but shipped her on the ser to San Juan de la aga. Fermina Daza never found relief from her last memory of her aunt oernoon when she said goodbye in the doorway, burning with fever inside her brown habit, bony and ashen, and then disappeared into the drizzle itle park, carrying all that she owned in life: her spinster’s sleeping mat and enough money for a month, ed in a handkerchief that she clutched in her fist.

    As soon as she had freed herself from her father’s authority, Fermina Daza began a search for her in the Caribbean provinces, asking for information from everyone who might know her, and she could not find a trace of her until almost thirty years later when she received a letter that had taken a long time to pass through many hands, inform-ihat she had died ier of God leprosarium. Lorenzo Daza did not foresee the ferocity with which his daughter would react to the unjust punishment of her Aunt Escolástica, whom she had always identified with the mother she could barely remember. She locked herself in her room, refused to eat or drink, and when at last he persuaded her to open the door, first with threats and then with poorly dissimulated pleading, he found a wounded panther who would never be fifteen years old again.

    He tried to seduce her with all kinds of flattery. He tried to make her uand that love at her age was an illusioried to vince her to send back the letters aurn to the Academy and beg fiveness on her knees, and he gave his word of honor that he would be t<big></big>he first to help her find happiness with a worthy suitor. But it was like talking to a corpse. Defeated, he at last lost his temper at lunonday, and while he choked basults and blasphemies and was about to explode, she put the meat ko her throat, without dramatics but with a steady hand and eyes so aghast that he did not dare to challenge her. That was wheook the risk of talking for five minutes, man to man, with the accursed upstart whom he did not remember ever having seen, and who had e into his life to his great sorrow. By force of habit he picked up his revolver before he went out, but he was careful to hide it under his shirt.

    Florentino Ariza still had not recovered when Lorenzo Daza held him by the arm and steered him across the Plaza of the Cathedral to the arcaded gallery of the Parish Café and invited him to sit oerrace. There were no other ers at that hour: a blaan was scrubbing the tiles in the enormous salon with its chipped and dusty stained-glass windows, and the chairs were still upside down on the marble tables. Florentino Ariza had often seen Lorenzo Daza gambling and drinking cask wihere with the Asturians from the public market, while they shouted and argued about other long-standing wars that had nothing to do with our own. scious of the fatality of love, he had often wondered how the meeting would be that <s>藏书网</s>he was bound to have with Lorenzo Daza sooner or later, the meeting that no human power could forestall because it had been in-scribed in both their destinies forever.

    He had supposed it would be an unequal dispute, not only because Fermina Daza had warned him in her letters of her father’s stormy character, but because he himself had hat his eyes seemed angry even when he was laughing at the gaming table. Everything about him was a testimony to crudeness: his ignoble belly, his emphatic speech, his lynx’s side-whiskers, his rough hands, the ring finger smothered by the opal setting. His only endearing trait, which Florentino Ariza reized the first time he saw him walking, was that he had the same doe’s gait as his daughter. However, when he showed him the chair so that he could sit down, he did not find Lorenzo Daza as harsh as he appeared to be, and his ce revived when he invited him to have a glass of ae. Florentino Ariza had never had a drink at eight o’clo the morn-ing, but he accepted with gratitude because his need for one was urgent.

    Lorenzo Daza, in fact, took no more than five mio say what he had to say, and he did so with a disarming siy that -founded Florentino Ariza. When his wife died he had set only one goal for himself: to turn his daughter into a great lady. The road was long and uain for a mule trader who did not know how to read or write and whose reputation as a horse thief was not so much proven as widespread in the province of San Juan de la aga. He lit a mule driver’s cigar and lamented: “The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.” He said, however, that the real secret of his fortune was that none of his mules worked as hard and with so much determination as he did himself, even during the bitterest days of the wars when the villages awoke in ashes and the fields in ruins.

    Although his daughter was never aware of the premeditation in her destiny, she behaved as if she were ahusiastic aplice. She was intelligent ahodical, to the point where she taught her father to read as soon as she herself learo, and at the age of twelve she had a mastery of reality that would have allowed her to run the house without the help of her Aunt Escolástica. He sighed: “She’s a mule worth her weight in gold.” When his daughter finished primary school with highest marks in every subjed honorable mention at graduation, he uood that San Juan de la aga was too narrow for his dreams. Then he liquidated lands and animals and moved with new impetus ay thousand gold pesos to this ruined city and its moth-eaten glories, where a beautiful woman with an old-fashioned upbringing still had the possibility of being reborn through a fortunate marriage. The sudden appearance of Florentino Ariza had been an unforeseen obstacle in his hard-fought plan. “So I have e to make a request of you,” said Lorenzo Daza. He dipped the end of his cigar in the ae, pulled on it and drew no smoke, then cluded in a sorrowful voice:

    “Get out of our way.”

    Florentino Ariza had listeo him as he sipped his ae, and was so absorbed in the disclosure of Fermina Daza’s past that he did not even ask himself what he was going to say when it was his turn to speak. But when the moment arrived, he realized that anything he might say would promise his destiny.

    “Have you spoken to her?” he asked.

    “That doesn’t  you,” said Lorenzo Daza.

    “I ask you the question,” said Florentino Ariza, “because it seems to me that she is the one who has to decide.”

    “None of that,” said Lorenzo Daza. “This is a matter for men and it will be decided by men.”

    His tone had bee threatening, and a er who had just sat down at a nearby table turo look at them. Florentino Ariza spoke in a most tenuous voice, but with the most imperious resolution of which he was capable:

    “Be that as it may, I ot answer without knowing what she thinks. It would be a betrayal.”

    Then Lorenzo Daza leaned ba his chair, his eyelids reddened and damp, and his left eye spun in its orbit and stayed twisted toward the outside. He, too, lowered his voice.

    “Don’t force me to shoot you,” he said.

    Florentino Ariza felt his iines filling with cold froth. But his voice did not tremble because he felt himself illuminated by the Holy Spirit.

    “Shoot me,” he said, with his hand on his chest. “There is no greater glory than to die for love.”

    Lorenzo Daza had to look at him sideways, like a parrot, to see him with his twisted eye. He did not pronouhe four words so much as spit them out, one by one:

    “Son of a bitch!”

    That same week he took his daughter away on the jourhat would make her fet. He gave her no explanation at all, but burst into her bedroom, his mustache stained with fury and his chewed cigar, and ordered her to pack. She asked him where they were going, and he answered: “To our death.” Frightened by a respohat seemed too close to the truth, she tried to face him with the ce of a few days before, but he took off his belt with its hammered cop-per buckle, twisted it around his fist, and hit the table with a blow that resouhrough the house like a rifle shot. Fermina Daza knew very well the extent and occasion of her own strength, and so she packed a bedroll with two straw mats and a hammock, and twe trunks with all her clothes, certain that this was a trip from which she would never return. Before she dressed, she locked herself ih-room and wrote a brief farewell letter to Florentino Ariza on a sheet torn from the pack of toilet paper. The off her entire braid at the nape of her neck with cuticle scissors, rolled it inside a velvet box embroidered with gold thread, a it along with the letter.

    It was a demerip. The first stage along the ridges of the Sierra Nevada, riding muleba a caravan of Andean mule drivers, lasted eleven days, during which time they were stupefied by the naked sun or drenched by the horizontal October rains and almost aletrified by the numbing vapors rising from the precipices. Ohird day a mule maddened by gadflies fell into a ravih its rider, dragging along the entire line, and the screams of the man and his pack of seven animals tied to one another tio rebound along the cliffs and gullies for several hours after the disaster, and tio resound for years and years in the memory of Fermina Daza. All her baggage plunged over the side with the mules, but in the turies-long instant of the fall until the scream of terror was extinguished at the bottom, she did not think of the poor dead mule driver or his mangled pack but of how unfortu was that the mule she was riding had not beeo the others as well.

    It was the first time she had ever ridden, but the terror and un-speakable privations of the trip would not have seemed so bitter to her if it had not been for the certainty that she would never see Florentino Ariza again or have the solation of his letters. She had not said a word to her father sihe beginning of the trip, and he was so fouhat he hardly spoke to her eve was an absolute y to do so, or he sent the mule drivers to her with messages. When their luck was good they found some roadside inn that served rustic food which she refused to eat, aed them vas cots stained with rancid perspiration and urine. But more often they spent the night in Indialements, in open-air publii-tories built at the side of the road, with their rows of wooden poles and roofs of bitter palm where every passerby had the right to stay until dawn. Fermina Daza could not sleep through a single night as she sweated in fear and listened in the darko the ing and going of silent travelers who tied their animals to the poles and hung their hammocks where they could.

    At nightfall, when the first travelers would arrive, the place was uncrowded and peaceful, but by dawn it had been transformed into a fairground, with a mass of hammocks hanging at different levels and Aruadians from the mountains sleeping on their haunches, with the raging of the tethered goats, and the uproar of the fighting cocks in their pharaonic crates, and the panting silence of the mountain dogs, who had been taught not to bark because of the dangers of war. Those privations were familiar to Lorenzo Daza, who had trafficked through the region for half his life and almost always met up with old friends at dawn. For his daughter it erpetual agony. The stench of the loads of salted catfish added to the loss of appetite caused by her grief, aually destroyed her habit of eating, and if she did not go mad with despair it was because she always found relief in the memory of Florentino Ariza. She did not doubt that this was the land of fetting.

    Another stant terror was the war. Sihe start of the jour-here had been talk of the danger of running into scattered patrols, and the mule drivers had instructed them in the various ways nizing the two sides so that they could act accly. They often entered squads of mounted soldiers uhe and of an officer, who rounded up new recruits by roping them as if they were cattle on the hoof. Overwhelmed by so many horrors, Fermina Daza had fotten about the ohat seemed more legendary than immi, until one night when a patrol of unknown affiliation cap-tured two travelers from the caravan and hahem from a campano tree half a league from the settlement. Lorenzo Daza did not even know them, but he had them taken down and he gave them a Chris-tian burial in thanksgiving for not havi a similar fate. And he had reason: the assailants had awakened him with a rifle in his stomach, and a ander in rags, his face smeared with charcoal, had shone a light on him and asked him if he was Liberal or servative.

    “her one or the other,” said Lorenzo Daza. “I am a Spanish subject.”

    “What luck!” said the ander, and he left with his hand raised in a salute. “Long live the King!”

    Two days later they desded to the luminous plaihe joyful town of Valledupar was located. There were cockfights iios, accordion musi the street ers, riders on thh-bred horses, rockets and bells. A pyroteical castle was being assembled. Fermina Daza did not even notice the festivities. They stayed in the home of Uncle Lisímaco Sánchez, her mother’s brother, who had e out to receive them on the King’s Highway at the head of a noisy troop of youives riding the best-bred horses iire province, and they were led through the streets of the town to the apa of exploding fireworks. The house was on the Grand Plaza, o the ial church that had been re-paired several times, and it seemed more like the main house on a hada because of its large, somber rooms and its gallery that faced an orchard of fruit trees and smelled of hot sugare juice.

    No sooner had they dismounted iables than the reception rooms were overflowing with numerous unknowives whose unbearable effusiveness was a sce to Fermina Daza, for she was incapable of ever loving anyone else in this world, she suffered from saddle burn, she was dying of fatigue and loose bowels, and all she longed for was a solitary and quiet place to cry. Her cousin Hildebranda Sáwo years older than she and with the same imperial haughtiness, was the only one who uood her dition as soon as she saw her, because she, too, was being ed in the fiery coals of reckless love. When it grew dark she took her to the bedroom that she had prepared to share with her, and seeing the burning ulcers on her buttocks, she could not believe that she still lived. With the help of her mother, a very sweet woman who looked as much like her husband as if they were twins, she prepared a bath for her and cooled the burning with arnipresses, while the thunder from the gun-powder castle shook the foundations of the house.

    At midnight the visitors left, the public fiesta scattered into sm embers, and Cousin Hildebranda lent Fermina Daza a madapollam night<df</dfn>gown and helped her to lie down in a bed with smooth sheets aher pillows, and without warning she was filled with the instantaneous panic of happiness. When at last they were alone in the bedroom, Cousin Hildebranda bolted the door with a crossbar and from uhe straw matting of her bed took out a manila envelope sealed in wax with the emblem of the national tele-graph. It was enough for Fermina Daza to see her cousin’s expression of radiant malice for the pensive st of white gardenias to grow again in her heart’s memory, and theore the red sealing wax with her teeth and drehe eleven forbidden telegrams in a shower of tears until dawn.

    Then he knew. Before starting out on the journey, Lorenzo Daza had made the mistake of telegraphing the o his brother-in-law Lisímaco Sánchez, and he in turn had sent the o his vast and intricate work of kinfolk in numerous towns and villages throughout the province. So that Florentino Ariza not only learhe -plete itinerary but also established aensive brotherhood of telegraph operators who would follow the trail of Fermina Daza to the last settlement in Cabo de la Vela. This allowed him to maintain intensive unications with her from the time of her arrival in Valledupar, where she stayed three months, until the end of her journey in Riohacha, a year and a half later, when Lorenzo Daza took it frahat his daughter had at last fotten and he decided to return home. Perhaps he was not even aware of how much he had relaxed his vigilance, distracted as he was by the flattering words of the in-laws who after so many years had put aside their tribal prejudices and weled him with open arms as one of their own.

    The visit was a belated reciliation, although that had not been its purpose. As a matter of fact, the family of Fermina Sánchez had been opposed in every way to her marrying an immigrant with no background who was a braggart and a boor and who was always traveling, trading his unbroken mules in a busihat seemed too simple to be ho. Lorenzo Daza played fh stakes, be-cause his sweetheart was the darling of a typical family of the region: an intricate tribe of wild women and softhearted men who were obsessed to the point of dementia with their sense of honor. Fermina Sánchez, however, settled on her desire with the bliermination of love when it is opposed, and she married him despite her family, with so much speed and so much secrecy that it seemed as if she had done so not for love but to cover over with a sacramental cloak some premature mistake.

    Twenty-five years later, Lorenzo Daza did not realize that his intransigen his daughter’s love affair was a vicious repetition of his own past, and he plained of his misfortuo the same in-laws who had opposed him, as they had plained in their day to their own kin. Still, the time he spent in lamentation was time his daughter gained for her love affair. So that while he went about castrating calves and taming mules on the prosperous lands of his in-laws, she was free to spend time with a troop of female cousins uhe and of Hildebranda Sáhe most beautiful and obliging of them all, whose hopeless passion for a married man, a father who was twenty years older than she, had to be satisfied with furtive glances.

    After their proloay in Valledupar they tiheir jourhrough the foothills of the mountains, crossing fl meadows and dreamlike mesas, and in all the villages they were re-ceived as they had been in the first, with musid fireworks and new spiratorial cousins and punctual messages ielegraph offices. Fermina Daza soon realized that the afternoon of their arrival in Valledupar had not been unusual, but rather that in this fertile province every day of the week was lived as if it were a holiday. The visitors slept wherever they happeo be at nightfall, and they ate wherever they happeo be hungry, for these were houses with open doors, where there was always a hammock hanging and a three-meat stew simmering oove in case guests arrived before the telegram announg their arrival, as was almost always the case. Hildebranda Sánchez apanied her cousin for the remainder of the trip, guiding her with joyful spirit through the tangled plex-ities of her blood to the very source of her ins. Fermina Daza learned about herself, she felt free for the first time, she felt herself befriended and protected, her lungs full of the air of liberty, which restored her tranquillity and her will to live. In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more ret in her memory.

    One night she came back from her daily walk stunned by the revelation that one could be happy not only without love, but despite it. The revelation alarmed her, because one of her cousins had sur-prised her parents in versation with Lorenzo Daza, who had sug-gested the idea ing the marriage of his daughter to the only heir to the fabulous fortune of Cleofás Moscote. Fermina Daza knew who he was. She had seen him in the plazas, pirouetting his perfect horses with trappings so rich they seemed ors used for the Mass, and he was elegant and clever and had a dreamer’s eyelashes that could make the stones sigh, but she pared him to her memory of poor emaciated Florentino Ariza sitting uhe almond trees itle park, with the book of verses on his lap, and she did not find even the shadow of a doubt in her heart.

    In those days Hildebranda Sánchez was delirious with hope after visiting a fortueller whose clairvoyance had astonished her. Dis-mayed by her father’s iions, Fermina Daza also went to sult with her. The cards said there was no obstacle in her future to a long and happy marriage, and that predi gave her back her ce because she could not ceive of such a fortunate destiny with any man other than the one she loved. Exalted by that certainty, she assumed and of her fate. That was how the telegraphic cor-respondeh Florentino Ariza stopped being a certo of iions and illusory promises and became methodical and practical and more intehahey set dates, established means, pledged their lives to their mutual determination to marry without sulting anyone, wherever and however they could, as soon as they were together again. Fermina Daza sidered this itment so binding that the night her father gave her permission to attend her first adult dan the town of Fonseca, she did not think it was det to accept without the sent of her fiancé. Florentino Ariza was ira hotel that night, playing cards with Lotario Thugut, when he was told he had an urgent telegram on the line.

    It was the telegraph operator from Fonseca, who had keyed in through seven intermediate stations so that Fermina Daza could ask permission to attend the dance. Wheai, however, she was not satisfied with the simple affirmative answer but asked for proof that in fact it was Florentino Ariza operating the telegraph key at the other end of the line. More astohan flattered, he -posed aifying phrase: Tell her that I swear by the ed goddess. Fermina Daza reized the password and stayed at her first adult dail seven in the m, when she had to ge in a rush in order not to be late for Mass. By then she had more letters and telegrams itom of her trunk than her father had taken away from her, and she had learo behave with the air of a mar-ried woman. Lorenzo Daza interpreted these ges in her manner as proof that distand time had cured her of her juvenile fan-tasies, but he never spoke to her about his plans for the arranged mar-riage. Their relations had bee fluid within the formal reserve that she had imposed sihe expulsion of Aunt Escolástica, and this allowed them such a fortable modus vivendi that no one would have doubted that it was based on affe.

    It was at this time that Florentino Ariza decided to tell her in his letters of his determination to salvage the treasure of the sunken galleon for her. It was true, and it had e to him in a flash of inspiration one sunlit afternoohe sea seemed paved with aluminum because of the numbers of fish brought to the surface by mullein. All the birds of the air were in an uproar because of the kill, and the fishermen had to drive them away with their oars so they would not have to fight with them for the fruits of that pro-hibited miracle. The use of the mullein plant to put the fish to sleep had been prohibited by law since ial times, but it tio be a on practice- among the fishermen of the Caribbean until it was replaced by dynamite.

    One of Florentino Ariza’s pastimes during Fermina Daza’s journey was to watch from the jetties as the fishermen loaded their oes with enormous s filled with sleeping fish. At the same time, a gang of boys who swam like sharks asked curious bystao toss s into the water so they could dive to the bottom for them. They were the same boys who swam out to meet the o liners for that purpose, and whose skill i of diving had been the subject of so many tourist ats written in the Uates and Europe. Florentino Ariza had always known about them, even before he knew about love, but it had never oc-curred to him that perhaps they might be able t up the fortune from the galleon. It occurred to him that afternoon, and from the following Sunday until Fermina Daza’s return almost a year later, he had an additional motive for delirium.

    After talking to him for only ten minutes, Euclides, one of the boy swimmers, became as excited as he was at the idea of an under-water exploration. Florentino Ariza did not reveal the whole truth of the enterprise, but he informed himself thhly regarding his abilities as a diver and navigator. He asked him if he could desd without air to a depth of twenty meters, and Euclides told him yes. He asked him if he repared to sail a fisherman’s oe by himself in the open sea in the middle of a storm with no instruments other than his instinct, and Euclides told him yes.

    He asked him if he could find a specific spot sixteen nautical miles to the northwest of the largest island iavento Archipelago, and Euclides told him yes. He asked him if he was capable of navigating by the stars at night, and Euclides told him yes. He asked him if he repared to do so for the same wages the fishermen paid him for helping them to fish, and Euclides told him yes, but with an additional five reales on Sundays. He asked him if he knew how to defend himself against sharks, and Euclides told him yes, for he had magic tricks thten them away. He asked him if he was able to keep a secret even if they put him iorture chambers of the Inquisition, and Euclides told him yes, in fact he did not say no to anything, and he knew how to say yes with so much vi that there was no way to doubt him. Then the boy reed expenses: renting the oe, renting the oe paddle, renting fishing equipment so that no one would suspect the truth behind their incursions. It was also necessary to take along food, a demijohn of fresh water, an oil lamp, a pack of tallow dles, and a hunter’s horn to call for help in case of emergency.

    Euclides was about twelve years old, and he was fast and clever and an incessant talker, with an eel’s body that could slither through a bull’s-eye. The weather had tanned his skin to such a degree that it was impossible to imagine his inal color, and this made his big yellow eyes seem more radiant. Florentino Ariza decided on the spot that he was the perfepanion for an adventure of such magni-tude, and they embarked without further delay the following Sunday.

    They sailed out of the fishermen’s port at dawn, well provisioned aer disposed, Euclides almost naked, with only the loincloth that he always wore, and Florentino Ariza with his frock coat, his tenebrous hat, his pateher boots, the poet’s bow at his neck, and a book to pass the time during the crossing to the islands. From the very first Sunday he realized that Euclides was as good a navigator as he was a diver, and that he had astonishing knowledge of the character of the sea and the debris in the bay. He could ret in the most ued detail the history of each rusting hulk of a boat, he khe age of each buoy, the in of every piece of rubbish, the number of links in the  with which the Spaniards closed off the entrance of the bay. Fearing that he might also know the real purpose of his expedition, Florentino Ariza asked him sly questions and in this way realized that Euclides did not have the slightest suspi about the sunken galleon.

    Ever since he had first heard the story of the treasure ira hotel, Florentino Ariza had learned all he could about the habits of galleons. He learhat the San José was not the only ship in the coral depths. It was, in fact, the flagship of the Terra Firma fleet, and had arrived here after May 1708, having sailed from the legendary fair of Portobello in Panama where it had taken on part of its fortuhree hurunks of silver from Peru and Veracruz, and one huen trunks of pearls gathered and ted on the island of tadora. During the long month it had remained here, the days and nights had beeed to popular fiestas, and the rest of the treasure inteo save the Kingdom of Spain from poverty had been taken aboard: one hundred sixteen trunks of emeralds from Muzo and Somondod thirty million gold s.

    The Terra Firma fleet was posed of han twelve supply ships of varying sizes, and it set sail from this port traveling in a voy with a French squadron that was heavily armed but still incapable of proteg the expedition from the accurate on shot of the English squadron under ander Charles Wager, who waited for it iavento Archipelago, at the entrao the bay. So the San José was not the only sunken vessel, although there was no reliable doted record of how many had succumbed and how many had mao escape the English fire. What was certain was that the flagship had been among the first to sink, along with the entire crew and the aanding straight on the quarterdeck, and that she alone carried most of the cargo.

    Florentino Ariza had learhe route of the galleons from the navigation charts of the period, ahought he had determihe site of the shipwreck. They left the bay betweewo fortresses of Boca Chica, and after four hours of sailing they ehe interior still waters of the archipelago in whose coral depths they could pick up sleeping lobsters with their hands. The air was so soft and the sea so calm and clear that Florentino Ariza felt as if he were his own refle ier. At the far end of the backwater, two hours from the largest island, was the site of the shipwreck.

    Suffog in his formal clothes uhe infernal sun, Floren-tino Ariza indicated to Euclides that he should try to dive to a depth of twenty meters and bring baything he might find at the bottom. The water was so clear that he saw him moving below like a tarnished shark among the blue ohat crossed his path without toug him. Then he saw him disappear into a thicket of coral, and just whehought that he could not possibly have any more air in his lungs, he heard his voice at his back. Euclides was standing otom, with his arms raised and the water up to his waist. And so they tinued expl deeper sites, always moving toward the north, sailing over the indifferent manta rays, the timid squid, the rosebushes in the shadows, until Euclides cluded that they were wasting their time.

    “If you don’t tell me what you wao find, I don’t know how I am going to find it,” he said.

    But he did not tell him. Then Euclides proposed to him that he take off his clothes and dive with him, even if it was only to see that other sky below the world, the coral depths. But Florentino Ariza always said that God had made the sea to look at through the window, and he had never learo swim. A short while later, the afternoon grew cloudy and the air turned cold and damp, and it grew dark with so little warning that they had to navigate by the lighthouse to find the port. Before they ehe bay, the enormous white o liner from France passed very close to them, all its lights blazing as it trailed a wake of teew and boiled cauliflower.

    They wasted three Sundays in this way, and they would have tio waste them all if Florentino Ariza had not decided to share his secret with Euclides, who then modified the entire search plan, and they sailed along the old el of the galleons, more thay nautical leagues to the east of the spot Florentino Ariza had decided ohan two months had gone by when, one rainy afternoon out at sea, Euclides spent siderable time down otom and the oe drifted so much that he had to swim almost half an hour to reach it because Florentino Ariza could not row it closer to him. When at last he climbed on board, he took two pieces of woman’s jewelry out of his mouth and displayed them as if they were the prize for his perseverance.

    What he reted then was so fasating that Florentino Ariza promised himself that he would learn to swim and dive as far under water as possible just so he could see it with his own eyes. He said that in that spot, oeeers down, there were so many old sailing ships lying among the coral reefs that it was impossible to even calculate the number, and they were spread over so extensive ahat you could not see to the end of them. He said that the most surprising thing was that none of the old wrecks afloat in the bay was in such good dition as the sunken vessels. He said that there were several caravelles with their sails still intact, and that the sunken ships were visible even otom, for it seemed as if they had sunk along with their own spad time, so that they were still illumined by the same eleven o’clock sun that was shining on Saturday, June 9, when they went down.

    Choking on the driving force of his imagination, he said that the easiest oo distinguish was the galleon San José, for its name could be seen on the poop in gold letters, but it was also the ship most damaged by English artillery. He said he had seen an octopus inside, more than three turies old, whose tentacles emerged through the openings in the on and who had grown to such a size in the dining room that one would have to destroy the ship to free him. He said he had seen the body of the ander, dressed for battle and floating sideways ihe aquarium of the forecastle, and that if he had not dived down to the hold with all its treasure, it was because he did not have enough air in his lungs. There were the proofs: an emerald earring and a medal of the Virgin, the  corroded by salt.

    That was when Florentino Ariza first mentiohe treasure to Fermina Daza in a letter he sent to Fonseca a short while before her return. The history of the sunken galleon was familiar to her be-cause she had heard it many times from Lorenzo Daza, who had lost both time and morying to vince a pany of German divers to join with him in salvaging the sureasure. He would have persevered ierprise if several members of the Academy of History had not vinced him that the legend of the ship-wrecked galleon had been ied by some brigand of a viceroy to hide his theft of the treasures of the . In any case, Fermina Daza khat the galleon lay beyond the reach of any human being, at a depth of two hundred meters, not the twenty claimed by Florentino Ariza. But she was so aced to his poetic excesses that she celebrated the adventure of the galleon as one of his most successful. Still, when she tio receive other letters with still more fantastic details, written with as much seriousness as his promises of love, she had to fess to Hildebranda Sánchez her fear that her bedazzled sweetheart must have lost his mind.

    During this time Euclides had surfaced with so many proofs of his tale that it was no longer a question of playing with earrings and rings scattered amid the coral but of finang a major enterprise to salvage the fifty ships with their cargo of Babylonian treasure. Then what had to happen sooner or later happened: Florentino Ariza asked his mother for help in bringing his adveo a successful clusion. All she had to do was bite the metal settings and look at the gems made of glass against the light to realize that someone was taking advantage of her son’s innoce. Euclides went down on his knees and swore to Florentino Ariza that he had dohing wrong, but he was not seen the following Sunday in the fishermen’s port, or anywhere else ever again.

    The only thing Florentino Ariza salvaged from that disaster was the loving shelter of the lighthouse. He had gohere in Euclides’ oe one night when a storm at sea took them by surprise, and from that time on he would go there iernoons to talk to the lighthouse keeper about the innumerable marvels on land and water that the keeper had knowledge of. It was the beginning of a friendship that survived the many ges in the world. Florentino Ariza learo feed the fire, first with loads of wood and then with large earthen jars of oil, before electrical energy came to us. He learo direct the light and <bdi></bdi>augment it with mirrors, and orí several occasions, when the lighthouse keeper could not do so, he stayed to keep watch over the night at sea from the tower. He learo know the ships by their voices, by the size of their lights on the horizon, and to sehat something of them came ba in the flashing bea of the lighthouse.

    During the day, above all on Sundays, there was another kind of pleasure. In the District of the Viceroys, where the wealthy people of the old city lived, the women’s beaches were separated from those of the men by a plaster wall: one lay to the right and the other to the left of the lighthouse. And so the lighthouse keeper installed a spyglass through whie could plate the women’s beach by paying a tavo. Without knowing they were being observed, the young society ladies displayed themselves to the best of their ability in ruffled bathing suits and slippers and hats that hid their bodies almost as much as their street clothes did and were less attrac-tive besides. Their mothers, sitting out in the sun in wicker rog chairs, wearing the same dresses, the same feathered hats, and holding the same andy parasols as they had at High Mass, watched over them from the shore, for fear the men from the neighb beaches would seduce their daughters uhe water. The reality was that one could not see anything more, or anything more exg, through the spyglass than one could see oreet, but there were many ts who came every Sunday tle over the telescope for the pure delight of tasting the insipid forbidden fruits of the walled area that was dehem.

    Florentino Ariza was one of them, more from boredom than for pleasure, but it was not because of that additional attra that he became a good friend of the lighthouse keeper. The real reason was that after Fermina Daza rejected him, when he tracted the fever of many disparate loves in his effort to replace her, it was in the lighthouse and nowhere else that he lived his happiest hours and found the best solation for his misfortunes. It was the place he loved most, so much so that for years he tried to vince his mother, and later his Uncle Leo XII, to help him buy it. For in those days the lighthouses in the Caribbean were private property, and their owners charged ships acc to their size for the right to ehe port. Florentino Ariza thought that it was the only honorable way to make a profit out of poetry, but her his mother nor his uncle agreed with him, and by the time he had the resources to do it on his own, the lighthouses had bee the property of the state.

    None of these dreams was in vain, however. The tale of the galleon and the y of the lighthouse helped to alleviate the absence of Fermina Daza, and then, when he least expected it, he received the news of her return. And in fact, after a proloay in Riohacha, Lorenzo Daza had decided to e home. It was not the most benign season on the o, due to the December trade winds, and the historic ser, the only ohat would risk the crossing, might find itself blown by a trary wind back to the port where it had started. And that is what happened. Fermina Daza spent an agonized night vomiting bile, strapped to her bunk in a  that resembled a tavern latri only because of its oppressive narrow-ness but also because of the pestilential stend the heat.

    The motion was s that she had the impression several times that the straps on the bed would fly apart; on the deck she heard frag-ments of shouted lamentations that sounded like a shipwreck, and her father’s tigerish sn in the  bunk added yet anredient to her terror. For the first time in almost three years she spent aire night awake without thinking for even one moment of Florentino Ariza, while he, oher hand, lay sleepless in his hammo the ba, ting the eternal minutes one by oil her return. At dawn the wind suddenly died down and the sea grew calm, and Fermina Daza realized that she had slept despite her devastating seasiess, because the noise of the anchor s awakened her. Then she loosehe straps ao the port-hole, hoping to see Florentino Ariza iumult of the port, but all she saw were the s sheds among the palm trees gilded by the first rays of the sun and the rotting boards of the do Riohacha, where the ser had set sail the night before.

    The rest of the day was like a halluation: she was in the same house where she had been until yesterday, receiving the same visitors who had said goodbye to her, talking about the same things, be-wildered by the impression that she was reliving a piece of life she had already lived. It was such a faithful repetition that Fermina Daza trembled at the thought that the ser trip would be a repetition, too, for the mere memory of it terrified her. However, the only other possible means of returning home was two weeks on muleback over the mountains in circumstances even more dangerous than the first time, since a new civil war that had begun in the Andean state of Cauca reading throughout the Caribbean provinces.

    And so at eight o’clock that night she was once again apao the port by the same troop of noisy relatives shedding the same tears of farewell and with the same jumble of last-minute gifts and packages that did not fit in the s. When it was time to sail, the men in the family saluted the ser with a volley of shots fired into the air, and Lorenzo Daza responded from the deck with five shots from his revolver. Fermina Daza’s fears dissipated because the wind was favorable all night, and there was a st of flowers at sea that helped her to sleep soundly without the safety straps. She dreamed that she was seeing Florentino Ariza again, and that he took off the face that she had always seen on him because in fact it was a mask, but his real face was identical to the false one. She got up very early, intrigued by the enigma of the dream, and she found her father drinking mountain coffee with brandy in the captain’s bar, his eye twisted by alcohol, but he did not show the slightest hint of uainty regarding their return.

    They were ing into port. The ser slipped in silehrough the labyrinth of sailing ships anchored in the cove of the public market whose stench could be smelled several leagues out to sea, and the dawn was saturated by a steady drizzle that soon broke into a full-fledged downpour. Standing wat the baly of the telegraph office, Florentino Ariza reized the ser, its sails disheartened by the rain, as it crossed Las ánimas Bay and anchored at the market pier. The m before, he had waited until eleven o’clock, when he learhrough a casual telegram of the trary winds that had delayed the ser, and on this day he had returo his vigil at four o’clo the m. He -tio wait, not taking his eyes off the launch that carried ashore the few passengers who had decided to disembark despite the storm. Halfway across, the launch ran aground, and most of them had to abandon ship and splash through the mud to the pier. At eight o’clock, after they had waited in vain for the rain to stop, a black stevedore in water up to his waist received Fermina Daza at the rail of the ser and carried her ashore in his arms, but she was so drehat Florentino Ariza did nnize her.

    She herself was not aware of how much she had matured during the trip until she walked into her closed house and at ondertook the heroic task of making it livable again with the help of Gala Placidia, the black servant who came back from her old slave quarters as soon as she was told of their return. Fermina Daza was no lohe only child, both spoiled and tyrannized by her father, but the lady and mistress of an empire of dust and cobwebs that could be saved only by the strength of invincible love. She was not intimi-dated because she felt herself inspired by aed ce that would have enabled her to move the world. The very night of their return, while they were having hot chocolate and crullers at the large kit table, her father delegated to her the authority to run the house, and he did so with as muality as if it were a sacred rite.

    “I turo you the keys to your life,” he said.

    She, with all of her seventeen years behind her, accepted with a firm hand, scious that every inch of liberty she won was for the sake of love. The  day, after a night of bad dreams, she suffered her first sense of displeasure at being home when she opehe baly window and saw again the sad drizzle itle park, the statue of the decapitated hero, the marble bench where Florentino Ariza used to sit with his book of verses. She no lohought of him as the impossible sweetheart but as the certain husband to whom she belonged heart and soul. She felt the heavy weight of the time they had lost while she was away, she felt how hard it was to be alive and how much love she was going to o love her man as God demanded. She was surprised that he was not itle park, as he had been so many times despite the rain, and that she had received no sign of any kind from him, not even a premonition, and she was shaken by the suddehat he had died. But she put aside the evil thought at once, for in the ret frenzy of telegrams regarding her immi return they had fotten to agree on a way to tinue unig once she was home.

    The truth is that Florentino Ariza was sure she had not returned, until the telegraph operator in Riohacha firmed that they had embarked on Friday aboard the very same ser that did not arrive the day before because of trary winds, so that during the weekeched for any sign of life in her house, and at dusk on Monday he saw through the windows a light that moved through the house and was extinguished, a little after nine, in the bedroom with the baly. He did not sleep, victim to the same fearful hat had disturbed his first nights of love. Tránsito Ariza arose with the first roosters, alarmed that her son had go to the patio at midnight and had not yet e baside, and she did not find him in the house. He had goo wander along the jetties, reg love poetry into the wind and g with joy until daybreak. At eight o’clock he was sitting uhe arches of the Parish Café, delirious with fatigue, trying to think of how to send his wele to Fermina Daza, when he felt himself shaken by a seismic tremor that tore his heart.

    It was she, crossing the Plaza of the Cathedral, apanied by Gala Placidia who was carrying the baskets for their marketing, and for the first time she was not wearing her school uniform. She was taller than when she had left, more polished and intense, her beauty purified by the restraint of maturity. Her braid had grown in, but instead of letting it hang down her back she wore it twisted over her left shoulder, and that simple ge had erased all girlish traces from her. Florentino Ariza sat bedazzled until the child of his vision had crossed the plaza, looking to her the left nor the right. But then the same irresistible power that had paralyzed him obliged him to hurry after her wheurhe er of the Cathedral and was lost in the deafening noise of the market’s rough cobblestones.

    He followed her without letting himself be seen, watg the ordinary gestures, the grace, the premature maturity of the being he loved most in the world and whom he was seeing for the first time in her natural state. He was amazed by the fluidity with which she made her way through the crowd. While Gala Placidia bumped into people and became entangled in her baskets and had to run to keep up with her, she navigated the disorder of the street in her own time and spaot colliding with anyone, like a bat in the darkness. She had ofteo the market with her Aunt Escolástica, but they made only minor purchases, since her father himself took charge of provisioning the household, not only with furniture and food but even with women’s clothing. So this first excursion was for her a fasating adventure idealized in her girlhood dreams.

    She paid no attention to the urgings of the snake charmers who offered her a syrup for eternal love, or to the pleas of the beggars lying in doorways with their running sores, or to the false Indian who tried to sell her a trained alligator. She made a long aailed tour with no plainerary, stopping with no other motive than her unhurried delight in the spirit of things. She entered every doorway where there was something for sale, and everywhere she found something that increased her desire to live. She relished the aroma of vetiver in the cloth in the great chests, she ed herself in embossed silks, she laughed at her own laughter when she saw herself in the full-length mirror in The Golden Wire disguised as a woman fro<tt>?９９lｉb.t>m Madrid, with a b in her hair and a fan painted with flowers.

    Iore that sold imported foods she lifted the lid of a barrel of pickled herring that reminded her of nights in the northeast when she was a very little girl in San Juan de la aga. She sampled an Alite sausage that tasted of licorice, and she bought two for Saturday’s breakfast, as well as some slices of cod and a jar of red currants in aguardiente. In the spice shop she crushed leaves of sage and ano in the palms of her hands for the pure pleasure of smelling them, and bought a handful of cloves, another of star anise, and one each of ginger root and juniper, and she walked away with tears of laughter in her eyes because the smell of the ne pepper made her sneeze so much. In the Frenetics shop, as she was buyier soaps and balsam water, they put a touch of the latest perfume from Paris behind her ear and gave her a breath tablet to use after smoking.

    She played at buying, it is true, but what she really needed she bought without hesitation, with an authority that allowed no oo think that she was doing so for the first time, for she was scious that she was buying not only for herself but for him as well: twelve yards of linen for their table, percale for the marriage sheets that by dawn would be damp with moisture from both their bodies, the most exquisite of everything for both of them to enjoy in the house of love. She asked for dists and she got them, she argued with grad dignity until she obtaihe best, and she paid with pieces of gold that the shopkeepers tested for the sheer pleasure of hearing them sing against the marble ters.

    Florentino Ariza spied on her in astonishment, he pursued her breathlessly, he tripped several times over the baskets of the maid who respoo his excuses with a smile, and she passed so close to him that he could smell her st, and if she did not see him then it was not because she could not but because of the haughty manner in which she walked. To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not uand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clig of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell. heless, wheered the riotous noise of the Arcade of the Scribes, he realized that he might lose the moment he had craved for so many years.

    Fermina Daza shared with her sates the singular idea that the Arcade of the Scribes lace of perdition that was forbidden, of course, to det young ladies. It was an arcaded gallery across from a little plaza where carriages and freight carts drawn by donkeys were for hire, where popular erce became noisier and more dehe ed from ial times, wheaciturn scribes in their vests and false cuffs first began to sit there, waiting for a poor man’s fee to write all kinds of dots: memoranda of plaints or petition, legal testimony, cards of gratulation or dolence, love letters appropriate to any stage in an affair. They, of course, were not the ones who had given that thundering market its bad reputation but more ret peddlers who made illegal sales of all kinds of questionable merdise smuggled in on European ships, from obse postcards and aphrodisiat-ments to the famous Catalonian s with iguana crests that fluttered when circumstances required or with flowers at the tip that would open their petals at the will of the user. Fermina Daza, somewhat unskilled in the s of the street, went through the Arcade without notig where she was going as she searched for a shady refuge from the fierce eleven o’clock sun.

    She sank into the hot clamor of the shoeshine boys and the bird sellers, the hawkers of cheap books and the witch doctors and the sellers of sweets who shouted over the din of the crowd: pineapple sweets for your sweetie, ut dy is dandy, brown-sugar loaf for yar. But, indifferent to the uproar, she was captivated on the spot by a paper seller who was demonstrating magiks, red inks with an ambience of blood, inks of sad aspeessages of dolence, phosphorest inks for reading in the dark, invisible inks that revealed themselves in the light. She wanted all of them so she could amuse Florentino Ariza and astound him with her wit, but after several trials she decided on a bottle of gold ink.

    Then she went to the dy sellers sitting behind their big round jars and she bought six of each kind, pointing at the glass because she could not make herself heard over all the shouting: six angel hair, six tinned milk, six sesame seed bars, six cassava pastries, six chocolate bars, six blanges, six tidbits of the queen, six of this and six of that, six of everything, and she tossed them into the maid’s baskets with an irresistible grad a plete detat from the stormclouds of flies on the syrup, from the tinual hullabaloo and the vapor of rancid sweat that reverberated in the deadly heat. She was awakened from the spell by a good-natured blaan with a colored cloth around her head who was round and handsome and offered her a triangle of pineapple speared oip of a butcher’s knife. She took it, she put it whole into her mouth, she tasted it, and was chewing it as her eyes wandered over the crowd, when a sudden shock rooted her on the spot. Behind her, so close to her ear that only she could hear it iumult, she heard his voice:

    “This is not the place for a ed goddess.”

    She turned her head and saw, a hand’s breadth from her eyes, those lacial eyes, that livid face, those lips petrified with fear, just as she had seen them in the crowd at Midnight Mass the first time he was so close to her, but now, instead of the otion of love, she felt the abyss of disentment. In an instant the magnitude of her own mistake was revealed to her, and she asked herself, appalled, how she could have nurtured such a chimera in her heart for so long and with so much ferocity. She just mao think: My God, poor man! Florentino Ariza smiled, tried to say something, tried to follow her, but she erased him from her life with a wave of her hand.

    “No, please,” she said to him. “Fet it.”

    That afternoon, while her father was taking his siesta, she sent Gala Placidia with a two-lier: “Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.” The maid also returned his telegrams, his verses, his dry camellias, and asked him to send back her letters and gifts, Aunt Escolástica’s missal, the veins of leaves from her herbariums, the square ti-meter of the habit of St. Peter Clavier, the saints’ medals, the braid of her fifteenth year tied with the silk ribbon of her school uniform. In the days that followed, on the verge of madness, he wrote her tless desperate letters and besieged the maid to take them to her, but she obeyed her unequivocal instrus not to accept any-thing but the returned gifts. She insisted with so much zeal that Florentino Ariza sent them all back except the braid, which he would return only to Fermina Daza in person so they could talk, if just for a moment.

    But she refused. Fearing a decision fatal to her son, Tránsito Ariza swallowed her pride and asked Fermina Daza to grahe favor of five minutes of her time, and Fermina Daza received her for a moment in the doorway of her house, not askio sit down, not askio e in, and without the slightest trace of weakening. Two days later, after an argument with his mother, Florentino Ariza took down from the wall of his room the stained-glass case where he displayed the braid as if it were a holy relid Tránsito Ariza herself retur in the velvet box embroidered with gold thread. Florentino Ariza never had another opportunity to see or talk to Fermina Daza alone in the many ters of their very long lives until fifty-one years and nine months and four days later, when he repeated his vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love on her first night as a widow.

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