Love in the Time of Cholera (16 page)

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

That afternoon, while her father was taking his siesta, she sent Gala Placidia with a two-line letter: “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 centimeter 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 countless desperate letters and besieged the maid to take them to her, but she obeyed her unequivocal instructions not to accept anything 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 grant her the favor of five minutes of her time, and Fermina Daza received her for a moment in the
doorway of her house, not asking her to sit down, not asking her to come 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
relic, and Tránsito Ariza herself returned it 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 chance encounters 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.

A
T THE AGE
of
twenty-eight, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been the most desirable of bachelors. He had returned from a long stay in Paris, where he had completed advanced studies in medicine and surgery, and from the time he set foot on solid ground he gave overwhelming indications that he had not wasted a minute of his time. He returned more fastidious than when he left, more in control of his nature,
and none of his contemporaries seemed as rigorous and as learned as he in his science, and none could dance better to the music of the day or improvise as well on the piano. Seduced by his personal charms and by the certainty of his family fortune, the girls in his circle held secret lotteries to determine who would spend time with him, and he gambled, too, on being with them, but he managed
to keep himself in a state of grace, intact and tempting, until he succumbed without resistance to the plebeian charms of Fermina Daza.

He liked to say that this love was the result of a clinical error. He himself could not believe that it had happened, least of all at that time in his life when all his reserves of passion were concentrated on the destiny of his city which, he said with great
frequency and no second thoughts, had no equal in the world. In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lovers kissing on the open terraces, and
still he had told himself with his hand on his
heart that he was not prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he stood at the railing of the ship and saw the white promontory of the colonial district again, the motionless buzzards
on the roofs, the washing of the poor hung out to dry on the balconies, only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.

The ship made its way across the bay through a floating blanket of drowned animals, and most of the passengers took refuge in their cabins to escape the stench. The young doctor walked down the gangplank dressed
in perfect alpaca, wearing a vest and dustcoat, with the beard of a young Pasteur and his hair divided by a neat, pale part, and with enough self-control to hide the lump in his throat caused not by terror but by sadness. On the nearly deserted dock guarded by barefoot soldiers without uniforms, his sisters and mother were waiting for him, along with his closest friends, whom he found insipid and
without expectations despite their sophisticated airs; they spoke about the crisis of the civil war as if it were remote and foreign, but they all had an evasive tremor in their voices and an uncertainty in their eyes that belied their words. His mother moved him most of all. She was still young, a woman who had made a mark on life with her elegance and social drive, but who was now slowly withering
in the aroma of camphor that rose from her widow’s crepe. She must have seen herself in her son’s confusion, and she asked in immediate self-defense why his skin was as pale as wax.

“It’s life over there, Mother,” he said. “You turn green in Paris.”

A short while later, suffocating with the heat as he sat next to her in the closed carriage, he could no longer endure the unmerciful reality that
came pouring in through the window. The ocean looked like ashes, the old palaces of the marquises were about to succumb to a proliferation of beggars, and it was impossible to discern the ardent scent of jasmine behind the vapors of death from the open sewers. Everything seemed smaller to him than when he left, poorer and sadder, and there were so many hungry rats in the rubbish heaps
of the streets
that the carriage horses stumbled in fright. On the long trip from the port to his house, located in the heart of the District of the Viceroys, he found nothing that seemed worthy of his nostalgia. Defeated, he turned his head away so that his mother would not see, and he began to cry in silence.

The former palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, historic residence of the Urbino de la Calle family,
had not escaped the surrounding wreckage. Dr. Juvenal Urbino discovered this with a broken heart when he entered the house through the gloomy portico and saw the dusty fountain in the interior garden and the wild brambles in flower beds where iguanas wandered, and he realized that many marble flagstones were missing and others were broken on the huge stairway with its copper railings that led
to the principal rooms. His father, a physician who was more self-sacrificing than eminent, had died in the epidemic of Asian cholera that had devastated the population six years earlier, and with him had died the spirit of the house. Doña Blanca, his mother, smothered by mourning that was considered eternal, had substituted evening novenas for her dead husband’s celebrated lyrical soirées and chamber
concerts. His two sisters, despite their natural inclinations and festive vocation, were fodder for the convent.

Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not sleep at all on the night of his return; he was frightened by the darkness and the silence, and he said three rosaries to the Holy Spirit and all the prayers he could remember to ward off calamities and shipwrecks and all manner of night terrors, while a
curlew that had come in through a half-closed door sang every hour on the hour in his bedroom. He was tormented by the hallucinating screams of the madwomen in the Divine Shepherdess Asylum next door, the harsh dripping from the water jar into the washbasin which resonated throughout the house, the long-legged steps of the curlew wandering in his bedroom, his congenital fear of the dark, and the invisible
presence of his dead father in the vast, sleeping mansion. When the curlew sang five o’clock along with the local roosters, Dr. Juvenal Urbino commended himself body and soul to Divine Providence because he did not have the heart to live another day in his rubble-strewn homeland. But in time the affection of his family, the Sundays in the country, and the covetous attentions
of the unmarried women
of his class mitigated the bitterness of his first impression. Little by little he grew accustomed to the sultry heat of October, to the excessive odors, to the hasty judgments of his friends, to the We’ll see tomorrow, Doctor, don’t worry, and at last he gave in to the spell of habit. It did not take him long to invent an easy justification for his surrender. This was his world, he said to himself,
the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.

The first thing he did was to take possession of his father’s office. He kept in place the hard, somber English furniture made of wood that sighed in the icy cold of dawn, but he consigned to the attic the treatises on viceregal science and romantic medicine and filled the bookshelves behind their glass doors
with the writings of the new French school. He took down the faded pictures, except for the one of the physician arguing with Death for the nude body of a female patient, and the Hippocratic Oath printed in Gothic letters, and he hung in their place, next to his father’s only diploma, the many diverse ones he himself had received with highest honors from various schools in Europe.

He tried to
impose the latest ideas at Misericordia Hospital, but this was not as easy as it had seemed in his youthful enthusiasm, for the antiquated house of health was stubborn in its attachment to atavistic superstitions, such as standing beds in pots of water to prevent disease from climbing up the legs, or requiring evening wear and chamois gloves in the operating room because it was taken for granted
that elegance was an essential condition for asepsis. They could not tolerate the young newcomer’s tasting a patient’s urine to determine the presence of sugar, quoting Charcot and Trousseau as if they were his roommates, issuing severe warnings in class against the mortal risks of vaccines while maintaining a suspicious faith in the recent invention of suppositories. He was in conflict with everything:
his renovating spirit, his maniacal sense of civic duty, his slow humor in a land of immortal pranksters—everything, in fact, that constituted his most estimable virtues provoked the resentment of his older colleagues and the sly jokes of the younger ones.

His obsession was the dangerous lack of sanitation in the city. He appealed to the highest authorities to fill in the Spanish sewers
that
were an immense breeding ground for rats, and to build in their place a closed sewage system whose contents would not empty into the cove at the market, as had always been the case, but into some distant drainage area instead. The well-equipped colonial houses had latrines with septic tanks, but two thirds of the population lived in shanties at the edge of the swamps and relieved themselves in the
open air. The excrement dried in the sun, turned to dust, and was inhaled by everyone along with the joys of Christmas in the cool, gentle breezes of December. Dr. Juvenal Urbino attempted to force the City Council to impose an obligatory training course so that the poor could learn how to build their own latrines. He fought in vain to stop them from tossing garbage into the mangrove thickets that
over the centuries had become swamps of putrefaction, and to have them collect it instead at least twice a week and incinerate it in some uninhabited area.

He was aware of the mortal threat of the drinking water. The mere idea of building an aqueduct seemed fantastic, since those who might have supported it had underground cisterns at their disposal, where water rained down over the years was
collected under a thick layer of scum. Among the most valued household articles of the time were carved wooden water collectors whose stone filters dripped day and night into large earthen water jars. To prevent anyone from drinking from the aluminum cup used to dip out the water, its edges were as jagged as the crown of a mock king. The water was crystalline and cool in the dark clay, and it tasted
of the forest. But Dr. Juvenal Urbino was not taken in by these appearances of purity, for he knew that despite all precautions, the bottom of each earthen jar was a sanctuary for waterworms. He had spent the slow hours of his childhood watching them with an almost mystical astonishment, convinced along with so many other people at the time that waterworms were
animes
, supernatural creatures who,
from the sediment in still water, courted young maidens and could inflict furious vengeance because of love. As a boy he had seen the havoc they had wreaked in the house of Lázara Conde, a schoolteacher who dared to rebuff the
animes
, and he had seen the watery trail of glass in the street and the mountain of stones they had thrown at her windows for three days and three nights. And so it was
a long while before he
learned that waterworms were in reality the larvae of mosquitoes, but once he learned it he never forgot it, because from that moment on he realized that they and many other evil
animes
could pass through our simple stone filters intact.

For a long time the water in the cisterns had been honored as the cause of the scrotal hernia that so many men in the city endured not
only without embarrassment but with a certain patriotic insolence. When Juvenal Urbino was in elementary school, he could not avoid a spasm of horror at the sight of men with ruptures sitting in their doorways on hot afternoons, fanning their enormous testicle as if it were a child sleeping between their legs. It was said that the hernia whistled like a lugubrious bird on stormy nights and twisted
in unbearable pain when a buzzard feather was burned nearby, but no one complained about those discomforts because a large, well-carried rupture was, more than anything else, a display of masculine honor. When Dr. Juvenal Urbino returned from Europe he was already well aware of the scientific fallacy in these beliefs, but they were so rooted in local superstition that many people opposed the mineral
enrichment of the water in the cisterns for fear of destroying its ability to cause an honorable rupture.

Impure water was not all that alarmed Dr. Juvenal Urbino. He was just as concerned with the lack of hygiene at the public market, a vast extension of cleared land along Las Animas Bay where the sailing ships from the Antilles would dock. An illustrious traveler of the period described the
market as one of the most varied in the world. It was rich, in fact, and profuse and noisy, but also, perhaps, the most alarming of markets. Set on its own garbage heap, at the mercy of capricious tides, it was the spot where the bay belched filth from the sewers back onto land. The offal from the adjoining slaughterhouse was also thrown away there—severed heads, rotting viscera, animal refuse that
floated, in sunshine and starshine, in a swamp of blood. The buzzards fought for it with the rats and the dogs in a perpetual scramble among the deer and succulent capons from Sotavento hanging from the eaves of the market stalls, and the spring vegetables from Arjona displayed on straw mats spread over the ground. Dr. Urbino wanted to make the place sanitary, he wanted a slaughterhouse built somewhere
else and a covered market constructed with stained-glass turrets, like the one he had seen in
the old
boquerías
in Barcelona, where the provisions looked so splendid and clean that it seemed a shame to eat them. But even the most complaisant of his notable friends pitied his illusory passion. That is how they were: they spent their lives proclaiming their proud origins, the historic merits of
the city, the value of its relics, its heroism, its beauty, but they were blind to the decay of the years. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, on the other hand, loved it enough to see it with the eyes of truth.

“How noble this city must be,” he would say, “for we have spent four hundred years trying to finish it off and we still have not succeeded.”

They almost had, however. The epidemic of
cholera morbus
, whose first victims were struck down in the standing water of the market, had, in eleven weeks, been responsible for the greatest death toll in our history. Until that time the eminent dead were interred under the flagstones in the churches, in the exclusive vicinity of archbishops and capitulars, while the less wealthy were buried in the patios of convents. The poor were sent to the colonial cemetery,
located on a windy hill that was separated from the city by a dry canal whose mortar bridge bore the legend carved there by order of some clairvoyant mayor:
Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate
. After the first two weeks of the cholera epidemic, the cemetery was overflowing and there was no room left in the churches despite the fact that they had dispatched the decayed remains of many nameless
civic heroes to the communal ossuary. The air in the Cathedral grew thin with the vapors from badly sealed crypts, and its doors did not open again until three years later, at the time that Fermina Daza saw Florentino Ariza at close quarters as she left Midnight Mass. By the third week the cloister of the Convent of St. Clare was full all the way to its poplar-lined walks, and it was necessary to
use the Community’s orchard, which was twice as large, as a cemetery. There graves were dug deep enough to bury the dead on three levels, without delay and without coffins, but this had to be stopped because the brimming ground turned into a sponge that oozed sickening, infected blood at every step. Then arrangements were made to continue burying in The Hand of God, a cattle ranch less than a league
from the city, which was later consecrated as the Universal Cemetery.