Love in the Time of Cholera (29 page)

“I like Gardel,” he said.

Dr. Urbino understood. “I see,” he said. “He is popular.” And he slipped into a recounting of his many new projects which, as always, had to be realized without official backing. He called to his attention the disheartening inferiority of the performances that could be heard here now, compared
with the splendid ones of the previous century. That was true: he had spent a year selling subscriptions to bring the Cortot-Casals-Thibaud trio to the Dramatic Theater, and there was no one in the government who even knew who they were, while this very month there were no seats left for the Ramón Caralt company that performed detective dramas, for the Operetta and
Zarzuela Company of Don Manolo
de la Presa, for the Santanelas, ineffable mimics, illusionists, and artistes, who could change their clothes on stage in the wink of an eye, for Danyse D’Altaine, advertised as a former dancer with the Folies-Bergère, and even for the abominable Ursus, a Basque madman who took on a fighting bull all by himself. There was no reason to complain, however, if the Europeans themselves were once again
setting the bad example of a barbaric war when we had begun to live in peace after nine civil wars in half a century, which, if the truth were told, were all one war: always the same war. What most attracted Florentino Ariza’s attention in that intriguing speech was the possibility of reviving the Poetic Festival, the most renowned and long-lasting of the enterprises that Dr. Juvenal Urbino had
conceived in the past. He had to bite his tongue to keep from telling him that he had been an assiduous participant in the annual competition that had eventually interested famous poets, not only in the rest of the country but in other nations of the Caribbean as well.

No sooner had the conversation begun than the hot, steamy air suddenly cooled and a storm of crosswinds shook doors and windows
with great blasts, while the office groaned down to its foundations like a sailing ship set adrift. Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not seem to notice. He made some casual reference to the lunatic cyclones of June and then, out of the blue, he began to speak of his wife. He considered her not only his most enthusiastic collaborator, but the very soul of his endeavors. He said: “Without her I would be nothing.”
Florentino Ariza listened to him, impassive, nodding his agreement with a slight motion of his head, not daring to say anything for fear his voice would betray him. Two or three sentences more, however, were enough for him to understand that Dr. Juvenal Urbino, in the midst of so many absorbing commitments, still had more than enough time to adore his wife almost as much as he did, and that
truth stunned him. But he could not respond as he would have liked, because then his heart played one of those whorish tricks that only hearts can play: it revealed to him that he and this man, whom he had always considered his personal enemy, were victims of the same fate and shared the hazards of a common passion; they were two animals yoked together. For the first time in the interminable twenty-seven
years
that he had been waiting, Florentino Ariza could not endure the pangs of grief at the thought that this admirable man would have to die in order for him to be happy.

The cyclone passed by at last, but in fifteen minutes its gusting northwest winds had devastated the neighborhoods by the swamps and caused severe damage in half the city. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, gratified once again by the generosity
of Uncle Leo XII, did not wait for the weather to clear, and without thinking he accepted the umbrella that Florentino Ariza lent him for walking to his carriage. But he did not mind. On the contrary: he was happy thinking about what Fermina Daza would think when she learned who the owner of the umbrella was. He was still troubled by the unsettling interview when Leona Cassiani came into his
office, and this seemed to him a unique opportunity to stop beating about the bush and to reveal his secret, as if he were squeezing a boil that would not leave him in peace: it was now or never. He began by asking her what she thought of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. She answered almost without thinking: “He is a man who does many things, too many perhaps, but I believe that no one knows what he thinks.”
Then she reflected, shredding the eraser on a pencil with her long, sharp, black woman’s teeth, and at last she shrugged her shoulders to put an end to a matter that did not concern her.

“That may be the reason he does so many things,” she said, “so that he will not have to think.”

Florentino Ariza tried to keep her with him.

“What hurts me is that he has to die,” he said.

“Everybody has to
die,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, “but he more than anyone else.”

She understood none of it: she shrugged her shoulders again without speaking and left. Then Florentino Ariza knew that some night, sometime in the future, in a joyous bed with Fermina Daza, he was going to tell her that he had not revealed the secret of his love, not even to the one person who had earned the right to know it. No:
he would never reveal it, not even to Leona Cassiani, not because he did not want to open the chest where he had kept it so carefully hidden for half his life, but because he realized only then that he had lost the key.

That, however, was not the most staggering event of the afternoon.
He still had the nostalgic memory of his youth, his vivid recollection of the Poetic Festival, whose thunder
sounded throughout the Antilles every April 15. He was always one of the protagonists, but always, as in almost everything he did, a secret protagonist. He had participated several times since the inaugural competition, and he had never received even honorable mention. But that did not matter to him, for he did compete not out of ambition for the prize but because the contest held an additional attraction
for him: in the first session Fermina Daza had opened the sealed envelopes and announced the names of the winners, and then it was established that she would continue to do so in the years that followed.

Hidden in the darkness of an orchestra seat, a fresh camellia in the buttonhole of his lapel throbbing with the strength of his desire, Florentino Ariza saw Fermina Daza open the three sealed
envelopes on the stage of the old National Theater on the night of the first Festival. He asked himself what was going to happen in her heart when she discovered that he was the winner of the Golden Orchid. He was certain she would recognize his handwriting, and that then she would evoke the afternoons of embroidery under the almond trees in the little park, the scent of faded gardenias in his letters,
the private Waltz of the Crowned Goddess at windblown daybreak. It did not happen. Even worse, the Golden Orchid, the most sought-after prize among the nation’s poets, was awarded to a Chinese immigrant. The public scandal provoked by that unheard-of decision threw doubts on the seriousness of the competition. But the decision was correct, and the unanimity of the judges had its justification
in the excellence of the sonnet.

No one believed that the author was the Chinese who received the prize. At the end of the last century, fleeing the scourge of yellow fever that devastated Panama during the construction of the railroad between the two oceans, he had arrived along with many others who stayed here until they died, living in Chinese, reproducing in Chinese, and looking so much alike
that no one could tell one from the other. At first there were no more than ten, some of them with their wives and children and edible dogs, but in a few years four narrow streets in the slums along the port were overflowing with other, unexpected Chinese, who came into the country without leaving a trace in the customs records. Some of the young ones turned
into venerable patriarchs with so much
haste that no one could explain how they had time to grow old. In the popular view they were divided into two kinds: bad Chinese and good Chinese. The bad ones were those in the lugubrious restaurants along the waterfront, where one was as likely to eat like a king as to die a sudden death at the table, sitting before a plate of rat meat with sunflowers, and which were thought to be nothing more
than fronts for white slavery and many other kinds of traffic. The good ones were the Chinese in the laundries, heirs of a sacred knowledge, who returned one’s shirts cleaner than new, with collars and cuffs like recently ironed Communion wafers. The man who defeated seventy-two well-prepared rivals in the Poetic Festival was one of these good Chinese.

When a bewildered Fermina Daza read out
the name, no one understood it, not only because it was an unusual name but because no one knew for certain what Chinese were called. But it was not necessary to think about it very much, because the victorious Chinese walked from the back of the theater with that celestial smile Chinese wear when they come home early. He had been so sure of victory that he had put on a yellow silk robe, appropriate
to the rites of spring, in order to accept the prize. He received the eighteen-carat Golden Orchid and kissed it with joy in the midst of the thundering jeers of the incredulous. He did not react. He waited in the middle of the stage, as imperturbable as the apostle of a Divine Providence less dramatic than ours, and as soon as it was quiet he read the winning poem. No one understood him. But when
the new round of jeers and whistles was over, an impassive Fermina Daza read it again, in her hoarse, suggestive voice, and amazement reigned after the first line. It was a perfect sonnet in the purest Parnassian tradition, and through it there wafted a breath of inspiration that revealed the involvement of a master hand. The only possible explanation was that one of the great poets had devised
the joke in order to ridicule the Poetic Festival, and that the Chinese had been a party to it and was determined to keep the secret until the day he died. The
Commercial Daily
, our traditional newspaper, tried to save our civic honor with an erudite and rather confused essay concerning the antiquity and cultural influence of the Chinese in the Caribbean, and the right they had earned to participate
in Poetic Festivals. The author of the essay did not doubt that the writer of the sonnet was in fact who he said
he was, and he defended him in a straightforward manner, beginning with the title itself: “All Chinese Are Poets.” The instigators of the plot, if there was one, rotted in their graves along with the secret. For his part, the Chinese who had won died without confession at an Oriental
age and was buried with the Golden Orchid in his coffin, but also with the bitterness of never having achieved the only thing he wanted in his life, which was recognition as a poet. On his death, the press recalled the forgotten incident of the Poetic Festival and reprinted the sonnet with a Modernist vignette of fleshy maidens and gold cornucopias, and the guardian angels of poetry took advantage
of the opportunity to clarify matters: the sonnet seemed so bad to the younger generation that no one could doubt any longer that it had, in fact, been composed by the dead Chinese.

Florentino Ariza always associated that scandalous event with the memory of an opulent stranger who sat beside him. He had noticed her at the beginning of the ceremony, but then he had forgotten her in the frightful
suspense of anticipation. She attracted his attention because of her mother-of-pearl whiteness, her happy plump woman’s scent, her immense soprano’s bosom crowned by an artificial magnolia. She wore a very close-fitting black velvet dress, as black as her eager warm eyes, and her hair, caught at the nape of her neck with a gypsy comb, was blacker still. She wore pendant earrings, a matching necklace,
and identical rings, shaped like sparkling roses, on several fingers. A beauty mark had been drawn with pencil on her right cheek. In the din of the final applause, she looked at Florentino Ariza with sincere grief.

“Believe me, my heart goes out to you,” she said to him.

Florentino Ariza was amazed, not because of the condolences, which he in fact deserved, but because of his overwhelming astonishment
that anyone knew his secret. She explained: “I knew because of how the flower trembled in your lapel as they opened the envelopes.” She showed him the velvet magnolia in her hand, and she opened her heart to him.

“That is why I took off mine,” she said.

She was on the verge of tears because of his defeat, but Florentino Ariza raised her spirits with his instincts of a nocturnal hunter.

“Let
us go someplace where we can cry together,” he said.

He accompanied her to her house. At the door, since it was almost
midnight and there was no one on the street, he persuaded her to invite him in for a brandy while they looked at the scrapbooks and photograph albums, containing over ten years of public events, which she had told him she owned. It was an old trick even then, but this time it
was guileless, because she was the one who had talked about her albums as they walked from the National Theater. They went in. The first thing Florentino Ariza observed in the living room was that the door to the only bedroom was open, and that the bed was huge and luxurious with a brocaded quilt and a headboard with brass foliage. That disturbed him. She must have realized it, for she crossed the
living room and closed the bedroom door. Then she invited him to sit down on a flowered cretonne sofa where a sleeping cat was lying, and she placed her collection of albums on the coffee table. Florentino Ariza began to leaf through them in an unhurried way, thinking more about his next step than about what he was seeing, and then he looked up and saw that her eyes were full of tears. He advised
her to cry to her heart’s content, and to feel no shame, for there was no greater relief than weeping, but he suggested that she loosen her bodice first. He hurried to help her, because her bodice was tightly fastened in the back with a long closure of crossed laces. He did not have to unlace them all, for the bodice burst open from sheer internal pressure, and her astronomical bosom was able to
breathe freely.

Florentino Ariza, who had never lost the timidity of a novice even in comfortable circumstances, risked a superficial caress on her neck with the tips of his fingers, and she writhed and moaned like a spoiled child and did not stop crying. Then he kissed her on the same spot, just as softly, and he could not kiss her a second time because she turned toward him with all her monumental
body, eager and warm, and they rolled in an embrace on the floor. The cat on the sofa awoke with a screech and jumped on top of them. They groped like desperate virgins and found each other any way they could, wallowing in the torn albums, fully dressed, soaked with sweat, and more concerned with avoiding the furious claws of the cat than with the disastrous love they were making. But beginning
the following night, their scratches still bleeding, they continued to make love for several years.