Love in the Time of Cholera (24 page)

Not on the first night on rough seas, or on the following nights of smooth sailing, or ever in her very long married life did the barbarous acts occur that Fermina Daza had feared. Despite the size of the ship and the luxuries of their stateroom, the first
night was a horrible repetition of the schooner trip from Riohacha, and her husband, a diligent physician, did not sleep at all so he could comfort her, which was all
that an overly distinguished physician knew how to do for seasickness. But the storm abated on the third day, after the port of Guayra, and by that time they had spent so much time together and had talked so much that they felt like
old friends. On the fourth night, when both resumed their ordinary habits, Dr. Juvenal Urbino was surprised that his young wife did not pray before going to sleep. She was frank with him: the duplicity of the nuns had provoked in her a certain resistance to rituals, but her faith was intact, and she had learned to maintain it in silence. She said: “I prefer direct communication with God.” He understood
her reasoning, and from then on they each practiced the same religion in their own way. They had had a brief engagement, but a rather informal one for that time: Dr. Urbino had visited her in her house, without a chaperone, every day at sunset. She would not have permitted him to touch even her fingertips before the episcopal blessing, but he had not attempted to. It was on the first calm
night, when they were in bed but still dressed, that he began his first caresses with so much care that his suggestion that she put on her nightdress seemed natural to her. She went into the bathroom to change, but first she turned out the lights in the stateroom, and when she came out in her chemise she covered the cracks around the door with articles of clothing so she could return to bed in absolute
darkness. As she did so, she said with good humor:

“What do you expect, Doctor? This is the first time I have slept with a stranger.”

Dr. Urbino felt her slide in next to him like a startled little animal, trying to keep as far away as possible in a bunk where it was difficult for two people to be together without touching. He took her hand, cold and twitching with terror, he entwined his fingers
with hers, and almost in a whisper he began to recount his recollections of other ocean voyages. She was tense again because when she came back to bed she realized that he had taken off all his clothes while she was in the bathroom, which revived her terror of what was to come. But what was to come took several hours, for Dr. Urbino continued talking very slowly as he won her body’s confidence
millimeter by millimeter. He spoke to her of Paris, of love in Paris, of the lovers in Paris who kissed on the street, on the omnibus, on the flowering terraces of the cafés opened to the burning winds and languid accordions of summer, who made love standing up on the quays of the Seine without
anyone disturbing them. As he spoke in the darkness he caressed the curve of her neck with his fingertips,
he caressed the fine silky hair on her arms, her evasive belly, and when he felt that her tension had given way he made his first attempt to raise her nightgown, but she stopped him with an impulse typical of her character. She said: “I know how to do it myself.” She took it off, in fact, and then she was so still that Dr. Urbino might have thought she was no longer there if it had not been
for the glint of her body in the darkness.

After a while he took her hand again, and this time it was warm and relaxed but still moist with a tender dew. They were silent and unmoving for a while longer, he looking for the opportunity to take the next step and she waiting for it without knowing where it would come from, while the darkness expanded as their breathing grew more and more intense.
Without warning he let go of her hand and made his leap into the void: he wet the tip of his forefinger with his tongue and grazed her nipple when it was caught off guard, and she felt a mortal explosion as if he had touched a raw nerve. She was glad of the darkness so he could not see the searing blush that shook her all the way to the base of her skull. “Don’t worry,” he said with great calm.
“Don’t forget that I’ve met them already.” He felt her smile, and her voice was sweet and new in the darkness.

“I remember it very well,” she said, “and I’m still angry.”

Then he knew that they had rounded the cape of good hope, and he took her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, discerning fingers, the diaphanous nails, and
then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm. She never knew how her hand came to his chest and felt something it could not decipher. He said: “It is a scapular.” She caressed the hairs on his chest one by one and then seized all the hair in her fist to pull it out by the roots. “Harder,” he said. She tried, until she knew she was not hurting him, and then it was her hand that sought
his, lost in the darkness. But he did not allow their fingers to intertwine; instead he grasped her by the wrist and moved her hand along his body with an invisible but well-directed strength until she felt the ardent breath of a naked animal without bodily form, but eager and erect. Contrary to what he had imagined, even contrary to what she herself had imagined, she did not withdraw her hand
or let it lie inert where he placed it, but instead she commended herself body
and soul to the Blessed Virgin, clenched her teeth for fear she would laugh out loud at her own madness, and began to identify her rearing adversary by touch, discovering its size, the strength of its shaft, the extension of its wings, amazed by its determination but pitying its solitude, making it her own with a detailed
curiosity that someone less experienced than her husband might have confused with caresses. He summoned all his reserves of strength to overcome the vertigo of her implacable scrutiny, until she released it with childish unconcern as if she were tossing it into the trash.

“I have never been able to understand how that thing works,” she said.

Then, with authoritative methodology, he explained
it to her in all seriousness while he moved her hand to the places he mentioned and she allowed it to be moved with the obedience of an exemplary pupil. At a propitious moment he suggested that all of this was easier in the light. He was going to turn it on, but she held his arm, saying: “I see better with my hands.” In reality she wanted to turn on the light as well, but she wanted to be the one
to do it, without anyone’s ordering her to, and she had her way. Then he saw her in the sudden brightness, huddled in the fetal position beneath the sheet. But he watched as she grasped the animal under study without hesitation, turned it this way and that, observed it with an interest that was beginning to seem more than scientific, and said when she was finished: “How ugly it is, even uglier than
a woman’s thing.” He agreed, and pointed out other disadvantages more serious than ugliness. He said: “It is like a firstborn son: you spend your life working for him, sacrificing everything for him, and at the moment of truth he does just as he pleases.” She continued to examine it, asking what this was for and what that was for, and when she felt satisfied with her information she hefted it in
both hands to confirm that it did not weigh enough to bother with, and let it drop with a gesture of disdain.

“Besides, I think it has too many things on it,” she said.

He was astounded. The original thesis of his dissertation had been just that: the advantage of simplifying the human organism. It seemed antiquated to him, with many useless or duplicated functions that had been essential in
other stages of the human race but were not in ours. Yes: it could be more simple and by the same token less
vulnerable. He concluded: “It is something that only God can do, of course, but in any event it would be good to have it established in theoretical terms.” She laughed with amusement and so much naturalness that he took advantage of the opportunity to embrace her and kiss her for the first
time on the mouth. She responded, and he continued giving her very soft kisses on her cheeks, her nose, her eyelids, while he slipped his hand under the sheet and caressed her flat, straight pubic hair: the pubic hair of a Japanese. She did not move his hand away, but she kept hers on the alert in the event that he took one step further.

“Let’s not go on with the medical lesson,” she said.

“No,” he said. “This is going to be a lesson in love.”

Then he pulled down the sheet and she not only did not object but kicked it away from the bunk with a rapid movement of her feet because she could no longer bear the heat. Her body was undulant and elastic, much more serious than it appeared when dressed, with its own scent of a forest animal, which distinguished her from all the other women
in the world. Defenseless in the light, she felt a rush of blood surge up to her face, and the only way she could think of to hide it was to throw her arms around her husband’s neck and give him a hard, thorough kiss that lasted until they were both gasping for breath.

He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and
also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake.

At dawn, when they fell asleep, she was still a virgin, but she would
not be one much longer. The following night, in fact, after he taught her how to dance Viennese waltzes under the starry Caribbean sky, he went to the bathroom after she did, and when he returned to the stateroom he found her waiting for him naked in the bed. Then it was she who took the initiative, and gave herself without fear, without regret, with the joy of an adventure on the high seas, and
with no traces of bloody ceremony except for the rose of honor on the sheet. They both made love well, almost as if by miracle, and they
continued to make love well, night and day and better each time for the rest of the voyage, and when they reached La Rochelle they got along as if they were old lovers.

They stayed in Europe, with Paris as their base, and made short trips to neighboring countries.
During that time they made love every day, more than once on winter Sundays when they frolicked in bed until it was time for lunch. He was a man of strong impulses, and well disciplined besides, and she was not one to let anyone take advantage of her, so they had to be content with sharing power in bed. After three months of feverish lovemaking he concluded that one of them was sterile, and
they both submitted to rigorous examinations at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, where he had been an intern. It was an arduous but fruitless effort. However, when they least expected it, and with no scientific intervention, the miracle occurred. When they returned home, Fermina was in the sixth month of her pregnancy and thought herself the happiest woman on earth. The child they had both longed for
was born without incident under the sign of Aquarius and baptized in honor of the grandfather who had died of cholera.

It was impossible to know if it was Europe or love that changed them, for both occurred at the same time. They were, in essence, not only between themselves but with everyone else, just as Florentino Ariza perceived them when he saw them leaving Mass two weeks after their return
on that Sunday of his misfortune. They came back with a new conception of life, bringing with them the latest trends in the world and ready to lead, he with the most recent developments in literature, music, and above all in his science. He had a subscription to
Le Figaro
, so he would not lose touch with reality, and another to the
Revue des Deux Mondes
, so that he would not lose touch with poetry.
He had also arranged with his bookseller in Paris to receive works by the most widely read authors, among them Anatole France and Pierre Loti, and by those he liked best, including Rémy de Gourmont and Paul Bourget, but under no circumstances anything by Émile Zola, whom he found intolerable despite his valiant intervention in the Dreyfus affair. The same bookseller agreed to mail him the most
attractive scores from the Ricordi catalogue, chamber music above all, so that he could maintain the well-deserved title earned by his father as the greatest friend of concerts in the city.

Fermina Daza, always resistant to the demands of fashion, brought
back six trunks of clothing from different periods, for the great labels did not convince her. She had been in the Tuileries in the middle
of winter for the launching of the collection by Worth, the indisputable tyrant of
haute couture
, and the only thing she got was a case of bronchitis that kept her in bed for five days. Laferrière seemed less pretentious and voracious to her, but her wise decision was to buy her fill of what she liked best in the secondhand shops, although her husband swore in dismay that it was corpses’ clothing.
In the same way she brought back quantities of Italian shoes without brand names, which she preferred to the renowned and famous shoes by Ferry, and she brought back a parasol from Dupuy, as red as the fires of hell, which gave our alarmed social chroniclers much to write about. She bought only one hat from Madame Reboux, but on the other hand she filled a trunk with sprigs of artificial cherries,
stalks of all the felt flowers she could find, branches of ostrich plumes, crests of peacocks, tailfeathers of Asiatic roosters, entire pheasants, hummingbirds, and a countless variety of exotic birds preserved in midflight, midcall, midagony: everything that had been used in the past twenty years to change the appearance of hats. She brought back a collection of fans from countries all over
the world, each one appropriate to a different occasion. She brought back a disturbing fragrance chosen from many at the perfume shop in the Bazar de la Charité, before the spring winds leveled everything with ashes, but she used it only once because she did not recognize herself in the new scent. She also brought back a cosmetic case that was the latest thing in seductiveness, and she took it to
parties at a time when the simple act of checking one’s makeup in public was considered indecent.