Love in the Time of Cholera (27 page)

As soon as he had done that,
she attacked him without giving him time for anything else, there on the same sofa where she had just undressed him, and only on rare occasions in the bed. She mounted him and took control of all of him for all of her, absorbed in herself, her eyes closed, gauging the situation in her absolute inner darkness, advancing here, retreating there, correcting her invisible route, trying another, more intense
path, another means of proceeding without drowning in the slimy marsh that flowed from her womb, droning like a horsefly as she asked herself questions and answered in her native jargon; where was that something in the shadows that only she knew about and that she longed for just for herself, until she succumbed without waiting for anybody, she fell alone into her abyss with a jubilant explosion
of total victory that made the world tremble. Florentino Ariza was left exhausted, incomplete, floating in a puddle of their perspiration, but with the impression of being no more than an instrument of pleasure. He would say: “You treat me as if I were just anybody.” She would roar with the laughter of a free female and say: “Not at all: as if you were nobody.” He was left with the impression
that she took away everything with mean-spirited greed, and his pride would rebel and he would leave the house determined never to return. But then he would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love of Ausencia Santander was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible
to escape.

One Sunday, two years after they met, the first thing she did when he arrived was to take off his glasses instead of undressing him, so that she could kiss him with greater ease, and this was how Florentino Ariza learned that she had begun to love him. Despite the fact that
from the first day he had felt very comfortable in the house that he now loved as if it were his own, he had
never stayed longer than two hours, and he had never slept there, and he had eaten there only once because she had given him a formal invitation. He went there, in fact, only for what he had come for, always bringing his only gift, a single rose, and then he would disappear until the next unforeseeable time. But on the Sunday when she took off his glasses to kiss him, in part because of that and in
part because they fell asleep after gentle lovemaking, they spent the afternoon naked in the Captain’s enormous bed. When he awoke from his nap, Florentino Ariza still remembered the shrieking of the cockatoo, whose strident calls belied his beauty. But the silence was diaphanous in the four o’clock heat, and through the bedroom window one could see the outline of the old city with the afternoon
sun at its back, its golden domes, its sea in flames all the way to Jamaica. Ausencia Santander stretched out an adventurous hand, seeking the sleeping beast, but Florentino Ariza moved it away. He said: “Not now. I feel something strange, as if someone were watching us.” She aroused the cockatoo again with her joyous laughter. She said: “Not even Jonah’s wife would swallow that story.” Neither did
she, of course, but she admitted it was a good one, and the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again. At five o’clock, with the sun still high, she jumped out of bed, naked as always and with the organdy ribbon in her hair, and went to find something to drink in the kitchen. But she had not taken a single step out of the bedroom when she screamed in horror.

She could not believe it. The only objects left in the house were the lamps attached to the walls. All the rest, the signed furniture, the Indian rugs, the statues and the hand-woven tapestries, the countless trinkets made of precious stones and metals, everything that had made hers one of the most pleasant and best decorated houses in the city, everything, even the sacred cockatoo, everything
had vanished. It had been carried out through the sea terrace without disturbing their love. All that was left were empty rooms with the four open windows, and a message painted on the rear wall:
This is what you get for fucking around
. Captain Rosendo de la Rosa could never understand why Ausencia Santander did not report the robbery, or try to get in touch with the dealers in stolen goods, or
permit her misfortune to be mentioned again.

Florentino Ariza continued to visit her in the looted house, whose furnishings were reduced to three leather stools that the thieves forgot in the kitchen, and the contents of the bedroom where the two of them had been. But he did not visit her as often as before, not because of the desolation in the house, as she supposed and as she said to him, but
because of the novelty of a mule-drawn trolley at the turn of the new century, which proved to be a prodigious and original nest of free-flying little birds. He rode it four times a day, twice to go to the office, twice to return home, and sometimes when his reading was real, and most of the time when it was pretense, he would take the first steps, at least, toward a future tryst. Later, when Uncle
Leo XII put at his disposal a carriage drawn by two little gray mules with golden trappings, just like the one that belonged to President Rafael Núñez, he would long for those times on the trolley as the most fruitful of all his adventures in falconry. He was right: there is no worse enemy of secret love than a carriage waiting at the door. In fact, he almost always left it hidden at his house
and made his hawkish rounds on foot so that he would not leave wheel marks in the dust. That is why he evoked with such great nostalgia the old trolley with its emaciated mules covered with sores, in which a sideways glance was all one needed to know where love was. However, in the midst of so many tender memories, he could not elude his recollection of a helpless little bird whose name he never
knew and with whom he spent no more than half a frenetic night, but that had been enough to ruin the innocent rowdiness of Carnival for him for the rest of his life.

She had attracted his attention on the trolley for the fearlessness with which she traveled through the riotous public celebration. She could not have been more than twenty years old, and she did not seem to share the spirit of Carnival,
unless she was disguised as an invalid: her hair was very light, long, and straight, hanging loose over her shoulders, and she wore a tunic of plain, unadorned linen. She was completely removed from the confusion of music in the streets, the handfuls of rice powder, the showers of aniline thrown at the passengers on the trolley, whose mules were whitened with cornstarch and wore flowered
hats during those three days of madness. Taking advantage of the confusion, Florentino Ariza invited her to have an ice with him, because he did not think he could ask for anything more. She looked at him without surprise. She said: “I am happy to accept, but I
warn you that I am crazy.” He laughed at her witticism, and took her to see the parade of floats from the balcony of the ice cream shop.
Then he put on a rented cape, and the two of them joined the dancing in the Plaza of the Customhouse, and enjoyed themselves like newborn sweethearts, for her indifference went to the opposite extreme in the uproar of the night: she danced like a professional, she was imaginative and daring in her revelry, and she had devastating charm.

“You don’t know the trouble you’ve gotten into with me,”
she shouted, laughing in the fever of Carnival. “I’m a crazy woman from the insane asylum.”

For Florentino Ariza, that night was a return to the innocent unruliness of adolescence, when he had not yet been wounded by love. But he knew, more from hearsay than from personal experience, that such easy happiness could not last very long. And so before the night began to degenerate, as it always did
after prizes were distributed for the best costumes, he suggested to the girl that they go to the lighthouse to watch the sunrise. She accepted with pleasure, but she wanted to wait until after they had given out the prizes.

Florentino Ariza was certain that the delay saved his life. In fact, the girl had indicated to him that they should leave for the lighthouse, when she was seized by two guards
and a nurse from Divine Shepherdess Asylum. They had been looking for her since her escape at three o’clock that afternoon—they and the entire police force. She had decapitated a guard and seriously wounded two others with a machete that she had snatched away from the gardener because she wanted to go dancing at Carnival. It had not occurred to anyone that she might be dancing in the streets;
they thought she would be hiding in one of the many houses where they had searched even the cisterns.

It was not easy to take her away. She defended herself with a pair of gardening shears that she had hidden in her bodice, and six men were needed to put her in the straitjacket while the crowd jammed into the Plaza of the Customhouse applauded and whistled with glee in the belief that the bloody
capture was one of many Carnival farces. Florentino Ariza was heartbroken, and beginning on Ash Wednesday he would walk down Divine Shepherdess Street with a box of English chocolates for her. He would stand and look at the inmates, who shouted all kinds of profanities and compliments at him through the windows, and he would show them the box of
chocolates in case luck would have it that she,
too, might look out at him through the iron bars. But he never saw her. Months later, as he was getting off the mule-drawn trolley, a little girl walking with her father asked him for a piece of chocolate from the box he was carrying in his hand. Her father reprimanded her and begged Florentino Ariza’s pardon. But he gave the whole box to the child, thinking that the action would redeem him from all
bitterness, and he soothed the father with a pat on the back.

“They were for a love that has gone all to hell,” he said.

As a kind of compensation from fate, it was also in the mule-drawn trolley that Florentino Ariza met Leona Cassiani, who was the true woman in his life although neither of them ever knew it and they never made love. He had sensed her before he saw her as he was going home
on the trolley at five o’clock; it was a tangible look that touched him as if it were a finger. He raised his eyes and saw her, at the far end of the trolley, but standing out with great clarity from the other passengers. She did not look away. On the contrary: she continued to look at him with such boldness that he could not help thinking what he thought: black, young, pretty, but a whore beyond
the shadow of a doubt. He rejected her from his life, because he could not conceive of anything more contemptible than paying for love: he had never done it.

Florentino Ariza got off at the Plaza of the Carriages, which was the end of the line, hurried through the labyrinth of commerce because his mother was expecting him at six, and when he emerged on the other side of the crowd, he heard the
tapping heels of a loose woman on the paying stones and turned around so that he would be certain of what he already knew: it was she, dressed like the slave girls in engravings, with a skirt of veils that was raised with the gesture of a dancer when she stepped over the puddles in the streets, a low-cut top that left her shoulders bare, a handful of colored necklaces, and a white turban. He knew
them from the transient hotel. It often happened that at six in the afternoon they were still eating breakfast, and then all they could do was to use sex as if it were a bandit’s knife and put it to the throat of the first man they passed on the street: your prick or your life. As a final test, Florentino Ariza changed direction and went down the deserted Oil Lamp Alley, and she followed, coming
closer and closer to him. Then he stopped, turned around,
blocked her way on the sidewalk, and leaned on his umbrella with both hands. She stood facing him.

“You made a mistake, good-looking,” he said. “I don’t do that.”

“Of course you do,” she said. “One can see it in your face.”

Florentino Ariza remembered a phrase from his childhood, something that the family doctor, his godfather, had said
regarding his chronic constipation: “The world is divided into those who can shit and those who cannot.” On the basis of this dogma the Doctor had elaborated an entire theory of character, which he considered more accurate than astrology. But with what he had learned over the years, Florentino Ariza stated it another way: “The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not.” He distrusted
those who did not: when they strayed from the straight and narrow, it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it. Those who did it often, on the other hand, lived for that alone. They felt so good that their lips were sealed as if they were tombs, because they knew that their lives depended on their discretion. They never spoke of their exploits,
they confided in no one, they feigned indifference to the point where they earned the reputation of being impotent, or frigid, or above all timid fairies, as in the case of Florentino Ariza. But they took pleasure in the error because the error protected them. They formed a secret society, whose members recognized each other all over the world without need of a common language, which is why
Florentino Ariza was not surprised by the girl’s reply: she was one of them, and therefore she knew that he knew that she knew.

It was the great mistake of his life, as his conscience was to remind him every hour of every day until the final day of his life. What she wanted from him was not love, least of all love that was paid for, but a job, any kind of job, at any salary, in the River Company
of the Caribbean. Florentino Ariza felt so ashamed of his own conduct that he took her to the head of Personnel, who gave her the lowest-level job in the General Section, which she performed with seriousness, modesty, and dedication for three years.

Ever since its founding, the R.C.C. had had its offices across from the river dock, and it had nothing in common with the port for ocean liners on
the opposite side of the bay, or with the market pier on Las Animas Bay. The building was of wood, with a sloping tin roof, a
single long balcony with columns at the front, and windows, covered with wire mesh, on all four sides through which one had complete views of the boats at the dock as if they were paintings hanging on the wall. When the German founders built it, they painted the tin roof
red and the wooden walls a brilliant white, so that the building itself bore some resemblance to a riverboat. Later it was painted all blue, and at the time that Florentino Ariza began to work for the company it was a dusty shed of no definite color, and on the rusting roof there were patches of new tin plates over the original ones. Behind the building, in a gravel patio surrounded by chicken wire,
stood two large warehouses of more recent construction, and at the back there was a closed sewer pipe, dirty and foul-smelling, where the refuse of a half a century of river navigation lay rotting: the debris of historic boats, from the early one with a single smokestack, christened by Simón Bolívar, to some so recent that they had electric fans in the cabins. Most of them had been dismantled
for materials to be used in building other boats, but many were in such good condition that it seemed possible to give them a coat of paint and launch them without frightening away the iguanas or disturbing the foliage of the large yellow flowers that made them even more nostalgic.