Love in the Time of Cholera (12 page)

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 on the street, 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, clean, 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 compelling desire. He had kept his virginity for Fermina Daza, and there was no force or argument in this world that could turn him from his purpose.

That was his life, four months before the date set for formalizing
the engagement, when Lorenzo Daza showed up at the telegraph office one morning at seven o’clock and asked for him. Since he had not yet arrived, Lorenzo Daza waited on the bench until ten minutes after eight, slipping a heavy gold ring with its noble opal stone from one finger to another, and as soon as Florentino Ariza came in, he recognized him as the employee who had delivered the telegram,
and he took him by the arm.

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

Florentino Ariza, as green as a corpse, let himself be led. He was not prepared for this meeting, because Fermina Daza had not found either 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 come into the class on Ideas of Cosmogony with the stealth of a serpent, and spying on the students over their shoulders, she discovered that Fermina Daza was pretending to take notes in her notebook when in reality she was writing a love letter. According to the rules of the Academy, that error was reason for expulsion. Lorenzo Daza received an urgent summons
to the rectory, where he discovered the leak through which his iron regime was trickling. Fermina Daza, with her innate fortitude, confessed to the error of the letter, but refused to reveal the identity of her secret sweetheart and refused again before the Tribunal of the
Order which, therefore, confirmed 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 such
an intricate relationship was understandable only with the complicity of his sister, he did not grant her the grace of an excuse or the right of appeal, but shipped her on the schooner to San Juan de la Ciénaga. Fermina Daza never found relief from her last memory of her aunt on the afternoon when she said goodbye in the doorway, burning with fever inside her brown habit, bony and ashen, and then
disappeared into the drizzle in the little park, carrying all that she owned in life: her spinster’s sleeping mat and enough money for a month, wrapped 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, informing her that she had died in the Water 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 understand that love at her age was an illusion, he tried to convince her to send
back the letters and return to the Academy and beg forgiveness on her knees, and he gave his word of honor that he would be the first to help her find happiness with a worthy suitor. But it was like talking to a corpse. Defeated, he at last lost his temper at lunch on Monday, and while he choked back insults and blasphemies and was about to explode, she put the meat knife to her throat, without
dramatics but with a steady hand and eyes so aghast that he did not dare to challenge her. That was when he took 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 come 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 on the terrace. There were no other customers at that hour: a black woman 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 wine there with the Asturians from the public market, while they shouted and argued about other longstanding wars that had nothing to do with our own. Conscious of the fatality of love, he had often wondered how the meeting would be that he was bound to have with Lorenzo Daza sooner or later, the meeting
that no human power could forestall because it had been inscribed 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 noted that 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 recognized 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 courage revived when he invited him to have a glass of anisette. Florentino Ariza had never had a drink at eight o’clock in the morning, but he accepted with gratitude because his need for one was urgent.

Lorenzo Daza, in fact, took no more than five minutes to say what he had to say, and he did so with a disarming sincerity that confounded 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 uncertain 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 Ciénaga. 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 an enthusiastic accomplice. She was intelligent and methodical, to the
point where she taught her father to read as soon as she herself learned to, 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 subject and honorable mention at graduation, he understood
that San Juan de la Ciénaga was too narrow for his dreams. Then he liquidated lands and animals and moved with new impetus and seventy 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 come to make a request of you,” said Lorenzo Daza. He dipped the end of his cigar in the anisette, pulled on it and drew no smoke, then concluded in a sorrowful voice:

“Get out of our way.”

Florentino Ariza had listened to him as he sipped his anisette, 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 compromise his destiny.

“Have you spoken to her?” he asked.

“That doesn’t concern 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 become threatening, and a customer who had just sat down at a nearby table turned to 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 cannot answer without knowing what she thinks. It would be a betrayal.”

Then Lorenzo Daza leaned back in 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 intestines 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 pronounce the 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 journey that would make her forget. 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 response that seemed too close to the truth, she tried to face him with the courage of a few days before, but he took off his belt with its hammered copper buckle, twisted it around his fist, and hit the table with a blow that resounded through 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 two large trunks with all her clothes, certain that this was a trip from which she would never return. Before she dressed, she locked herself in the bathroom and wrote a brief farewell letter to Florentino Ariza on a sheet torn from the pack of toilet paper. Then
she cut off her entire braid at the nape of her neck with cuticle scissors, rolled it inside a velvet box embroidered with gold thread, and sent it along with the letter.

It
was a demented trip. The first stage along the ridges of the Sierra Nevada, riding muleback in 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 always petrified by the numbing vapors rising from the precipices. On the third day a mule maddened by gadflies fell into a ravine with its rider, dragging along the entire line, and the screams of the man and his pack of seven animals tied to one another continued to rebound along the cliffs and gullies for several hours after the disaster, and continued to resound
for years and years in the memory of Fermina Daza. All her baggage plunged over the side with the mules, but in the centuries-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 unfortunate it was that the mule she was riding had not been tied to the others as well.

It was the first time
she had ever ridden, but the terror and unspeakable 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 consolation of his letters. She had not said a word to her father since the beginning of the trip, and he was so confounded that he hardly spoke to her even when it was an absolute necessity
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, and rented them canvas cots stained with rancid perspiration and urine. But more often they spent the night in Indian settlements, in open-air public dormitories 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 darkness to the coming 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 Aruac Indians 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 was perpetual agony. The stench of the loads of salted catfish added to the loss of appetite caused by her grief, and eventually 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 forgetting.