Love in the Time of Cholera (23 page)

She was twenty-eight years old and had given birth three times, but her naked body preserved intact the giddy excitement of an unmarried woman. Florentino Ariza was never to understand how a few articles of penitential
clothing could have hidden the drives of that wild mare who, choking on her own feverish desire, undressed him as she had never been able to undress her husband, who would have thought her perverse, and tried, with the confusion and innocence of
five years of conjugal fidelity, to satisfy in a single assault the iron abstinence of her mourning. Before that night, and from the hour of grace when
her mother gave birth to her, she had never even been in the same bed with any man other than her dead husband.

She did not permit herself the vulgarity of remorse. On the contrary. Kept awake by the gunfire whizzing over the roofs, she continued to evoke her husband’s excellent qualities until daybreak, not reproaching him for any disloyalty other than his having died without her, which was
mitigated by her conviction that he had never belonged to her as much as he did now that he was in the coffin nailed shut with a dozen three-inch nails and two meters under the ground.

“I am happy,” she said, “because only now do I know for certain where he is when he is not at home.”

That night she stopped wearing mourning once and for all, without passing through the useless intermediate stage
of blouses with little gray flowers, and her life was filled with love songs and provocative dresses decorated with macaws and spotted butterflies, and she began to share her body with anyone who cared to ask for it. When the troops of General Gaitán Obeso were defeated after a sixty-three-day siege, she rebuilt the house that had been damaged by cannon fire, adding a beautiful sea terrace that
overlooked the breakwater where the surf would vent its fury during the stormy season. That was her love nest, as she called it without irony, where she would receive only men she liked, when she liked, how she liked, and without charging one red cent, because in her opinion it was the men who were doing her the favor. In a very few cases she would accept a gift, as long as it was not made of gold,
and she managed everything with so much skill that no one could have presented conclusive evidence of improper conduct. On only one occasion did she hover on the edge of public scandal, when the rumor circulated that Archbishop Dante de Luna had not died by accident after eating a plate of poisonous mushrooms but had eaten them intentionally because she threatened to expose him if he persisted
in his sacrilegious solicitations. As she used to say between peals of laughter, she was the only free woman in the province.

The Widow Nazaret never missed her occasional appointments with Florentino Ariza, not even during her busiest times, and it was
always without pretensions of loving or being loved, although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems
of love. Sometimes he went to her house, and then they liked to sit on the sea terrace, drenched by salt spray, watching the dawn of the whole world on the horizon. With all his perseverance, he tried to teach her the tricks he had seen others perform through the peepholes in the transient hotel, along with the theoretical formulations preached by Lotario Thugut on his nights of debauchery.
He persuaded her to let themselves be observed while they made love, to replace the conventional missionary position with the bicycle on the sea, or the chicken on the grill, or the drawn-and-quartered angel, and they almost broke their necks when the cords snapped as they were trying to devise something new in a hammock. The lessons were to no avail. The truth is that she was a fearless apprentice
but lacked all talent for guided fornication. She never understood the charm of serenity in bed, never had a moment of invention, and her orgasms were inopportune and epidermic: an uninspired lay. For a long time Florentino Ariza lived with the deception that he was the only one, and she humored him in that belief until she had the bad luck to talk in her sleep. Little by little, listening to her
sleep, he pieced together the navigation chart of her dreams and sailed among the countless islands of her secret life. In this way he learned that she did not want to marry him, but did feel joined to his life because of her immense gratitude to him for having corrupted her. She often said to him:

“I adore you because you made me a whore.”

Said in another way, she was right. Florentino Ariza
had stripped her of the virginity of a conventional marriage, more pernicious than congenital virginity or the abstinence of widowhood. He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love. And something else that from that time on would be her reason for living: he convinced her that one comes into the world with a predetermined allotment of lays, and whoever
does not use them for whatever reason, one’s own or someone else’s, willingly or unwillingly, loses them forever. It was to her credit that she took him at his word. Still, because he thought he knew her better than anyone else, Florentino Ariza could not understand why a woman of such puerile resources should be so popular—a woman, moreover, who never stopped
talking in bed about the grief she
felt for her dead husband. The only explanation he could think of, one that could not be denied, was that the Widow Nazaret had enough tenderness to make up for what she lacked in the marital arts. They began to see each other with less frequency as she widened her horizons and he exploited his, trying to find solace in other hearts for his pain, and at last, with no sorrow, they forgot each other.

That was Florentino Ariza’s first bedroom love. But instead of their forming a permanent union, of the kind his mother dreamed about, both used it to embark on a profligate way of life. Florentino Ariza developed methods that seemed incredible in someone like him, taciturn and thin and dressed like an old man from another time. He had two advantages working in his favor, however. One was an unerring
eye that promptly spotted the woman, even in a crowd, who was waiting for him, though even then he courted her with caution, for he felt that nothing was more embarrassing or more demeaning than a refusal. The other was that women promptly identified him as a solitary man in need of love, a street beggar as humble as a whipped dog, who made them yield without conditions, without asking him
for anything, without hoping for anything from him except the tranquillity of knowing they had done him a favor. These were his only weapons, and with them he joined in historic battles of absolute secrecy, which he recorded with the rigor of a notary in a coded book, recognizable among many others by the title that said everything:
Women
. His first notation was the Widow Nazaret. Fifty years
later, when Fermina Daza was freed from her sacramental sentence, he had some twenty-five notebooks, with six hundred twenty-two entries of long-term liaisons, apart from the countless fleeting adventures that did not even deserve a charitable note.

After six months of furious lovemaking with the Widow Nazaret, Florentino Ariza himself was convinced that he had survived the torment of Fermina
Daza. He not only believed it, he also discussed it several times with Tránsito Ariza during the two years of Fermina Daza’s wedding trip, and he continued to believe it with a feeling of boundless freedom until one fateful Sunday when, with no warning and no presentiments, he saw her leaving High Mass on her husband’s
arm, besieged by the curiosity and flattery of her new world. The same ladies
from fine families who at first had scorned and ridiculed her for being an upstart without a name went out of their way to make her feel like one of them, and she intoxicated them with her charm. She had assumed the condition of woman of the world to such perfection that Florentino Ariza needed a moment of reflection to recognize her. She was another person: the composure of an older woman, the
high boots, the hat with the veil and colored plume from some Oriental bird—everything about her was distinctive and confident, as if it had been hers from birth. He found her more beautiful and youthful than ever, but more lost to him than she had ever been, although he did not understand why until he saw the curve of her belly under the silk tunic: she was in her sixth month of pregnancy. But what
impressed him most was that she and her husband made an admirable couple, and both of them negotiated the world with so much fluidity that they seemed to float above the pitfalls of reality. Florentino Ariza did not feel either jealousy or rage—only great contempt for himself. He felt poor, ugly, inferior, and unworthy not only of her but of any other woman on the face of the earth.

So she had
returned. She came back without any reason to repent of the sudden change she had made in her life. On the contrary, she had fewer and fewer such reasons, above all after surviving the difficulties of the early years, which was especially admirable in her case, for she had come to her wedding night still trailing clouds of innocence. She had begun to lose them during her journey through Cousin Hildebranda’s
province. In Valledupar she realized at last why the roosters chase the hens, she witnessed the brutal ceremony of the burros, she watched the birth of calves, and she listened to her cousins talking with great naturalness about which couples in the family still made love and which ones had stopped, and when, and why, even though they continued to live together. That was when she was
initiated into solitary love, with the strange sensation of discovering something that her instincts had always known, first in bed, holding her breath so she would not give herself away in the bedroom she shared with half a dozen cousins, and then, with eagerness and unconcern, sprawling on the bathroom floor, her hair loose, smoking her first mule drivers’ cigarette. She always did it with certain
pangs
of conscience, which she could overcome only after she was married, and always in absolute secrecy, although her cousins boasted to each other not only about the number of orgasms they had in one day but even about their form and size. But despite those bewitching first rites, she was still burdened by the belief that the loss of virginity was a bloody sacrifice.

So that her wedding, one
of the most spectacular of the final years of the last century, was for her the prelude to horror. The anguish of the honeymoon affected her much more than the social uproar caused by her marriage to the most incomparably elegant young man of the day. When the banns were announced at High Mass in the Cathedral, Fermina Daza received anonymous letters again, some of them containing death threats,
but she took scant notice of them because all the fear of which she was capable was centered on her imminent violation. Although that was not her intention, it was the correct way to respond to anonymous letters from a class accustomed by the affronts of history to bow before faits accomplis. So that little by little they swallowed their opposition as it became clear that the marriage was irrevocable.
She noticed the gradual changes in the attention paid her by livid women, degraded by arthritis and resentment, who one day were convinced of the uselessness of their intrigues and appeared unannounced in the little Park of the Evangels as if it were their own home, bearing recipes and engagement gifts. Tránsito Ariza knew that world, although this was the only time it caused her suffering in
her own person, and she knew that her clients always reappeared on the eve of great parties to ask her please to dig down into her jars and lend them their pawned jewels for only twenty-four hours in exchange for the payment of additional interest. It had been a long while since this had occurred to the extent it did now, the jars emptied so that the ladies with long last names could emerge from
their shadowy sanctuaries and, radiant in their own borrowed jewels, appear at a wedding more splendid than any that would be seen for the rest of the century and whose ultimate glory was the sponsorship of Dr. Rafael Núñez, three times President of the Republic, philosopher, poet, and author of the words to the national anthem, as anyone could learn, from that time on, in some of the more recent
dictionaries. Fermina Daza came to the main altar of the Cathedral on the arm of
her father, whose formal dress lent him, for the day, an ambiguous air of respectability. She was married forever after at the main altar of the Cathedral, with a Mass at which three bishops officiated, at eleven o’clock in the morning on the day of the Holy Trinity, and without a single charitable thought for Florentino
Ariza, who at that hour was delirious with fever, dying because of her, lying without shelter on a boat that was not to carry him to forgetting. During the ceremony, and later at the reception, she wore a smile that seemed painted on with white lead, a soulless grimace that some interpreted as a mocking smile of victory, but in reality was her poor attempt at disguising the terror of a virgin
bride.

It was fortunate that unforeseen circumstances, combined with her husband’s understanding, resolved the first three nights without pain. It was providential. The ship of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, its itinerary upset by bad weather in the Caribbean, announced only three days in advance that its departure had been moved ahead by twenty-four hours, so that it would not sail
for La Rochelle on the day following the wedding, as had been planned for the past six months, but on that same night. No one believed that the change was not another of the many elegant surprises the wedding had to offer, for the reception ended after midnight on board the brightly lit ocean liner, with a Viennese orchestra that was premiering the most recent waltzes by Johann Strauss on this voyage.
So that various members of the wedding party, soggy with champagne, had to be dragged ashore by their long-suffering wives when they began to ask the stewards if there were any free cabins so they could continue the celebration all the way to Paris. The last to leave saw Lorenzo Daza outside the port taverns, sitting on the ground in the middle of the street, his tuxedo in ruins. He was crying
with tremendous loud wails, the way Arabs cry for their dead, sitting in a trickle of fouled water that might well have been a pool of tears.