Love in the Time of Cholera (3 page)

He had turned sixty, in fact, on the twenty-third of January of that year, and then he had set the date as the night before Pentecost, the most important holiday in a city
consecrated to the cult of the Holy Spirit. There was not a single detail of the previous night that she had not known about ahead of time, and they spoke of it often, suffering together the irreparable rush of days that neither of them could stop now. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour loved life with a senseless passion, he loved the sea and love, he loved his dog and her, and as the date approached he
had gradually succumbed to despair as if his death had been not his own decision but an inexorable destiny.

“Last night, when I left him, he was no longer of this world,” she said.

She had wanted to take the dog with her, but he looked at the animal dozing beside the crutches and caressed him with the tips of his
fingers. He said: “I’m sorry, but Mister Woodrow Wilson is coming with me.” He
asked her to tie him to the leg of the cot while he wrote, and she used a false knot so that he could free himself. That had been her only act of disloyalty, and it was justified by her desire to remember the master in the wintry eyes of his dog. But Dr. Urbino interrupted her to say that the dog had not freed himself. She said: “Then it was because he did not want to.” And she was glad, because she
preferred to evoke her dead lover as he had asked her to the night before, when he stopped writing the letter he had already begun and looked at her for the last time.

“Remember me with a rose,” he said to her.

She had returned home a little after midnight. She lay down fully dressed on her bed, to smoke one cigarette after another and give him time to finish what she knew was a long and difficult
letter, and a little before three o’clock, when the dogs began to howl, she put the water for coffee on the stove, dressed in full mourning, and cut the first rose of dawn in the patio. Dr. Urbino already realized how completely he would repudiate the memory of that irredeemable woman, and he thought he knew why: only a person without principles could be so complaisant toward grief.

And for the
remainder of the visit she gave him even more justification. She would not go to the funeral, for that is what she had promised her lover, although Dr. Urbino thought he had read just the opposite in one of the paragraphs of the letter. She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory, she would not bury herself alive inside these four
walls to sew her shroud, as native widows were expected to do. She intended to sell Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s house and all its contents, which, according to the letter, now belonged to her, and she would go on living as she always had, without complaining, in this death trap of the poor where she had been happy.

The words pursued Dr. Juvenal Urbino on the drive home: “this death trap of the
poor.” It was not a gratuitous description. For the city, his city, stood unchanging on the edge of time: the same burning dry city of his nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowers rusted and salt corroded, where nothing had happened for four centuries except a slow aging among withered laurels and putrefying swamps. In winter sudden devastating downpours flooded
the latrines and turned the streets into sickening bogs. In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best-protected corners of the imagination by mad winds that took the roofs off the houses and carried away children through the air. On Saturdays the poor mulattoes, along with all their domestic animals and kitchen utensils, tumultuously abandoned their hovels of cardboard
and tin on the edges of the swamps and in jubilant assault took over the rocky beaches of the colonial district. Until a few years ago, some of the older ones still bore the royal slave brand that had been burned onto their chests with flaming irons. During the weekend they danced without mercy, drank themselves blind on home-brewed alcohol, made wild love among the icaco plants, and on Sunday
at midnight they broke up their own party with bloody free-for-alls. During the rest of the week the same impetuous mob swarmed into the plazas and alleys of the old neighborhoods with their stores of everything that could be bought and sold, and they infused the dead city with the frenzy of a human fair reeking of fried fish: a new life.

Independence from Spain and then the abolition of slavery
precipitated the conditions of honorable decadence in which Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been born and raised. The great old families sank into their ruined palaces in silence. Along the rough cobbled streets that had served so well in surprise attacks and buccaneer landings, weeds hung from the balconies and opened cracks in the whitewashed walls of even the best-kept mansions, and the only signs of
life at two o’clock in the afternoon were languid piano exercises played in the dim light of siesta. Indoors, in the cool bedrooms saturated with incense, women protected themselves from the sun as if it were a shameful infection, and even at early Mass they hid their faces in their mantillas. Their love affairs were slow and difficult and were often disturbed by sinister omens, and life seemed
interminable. At nightfall, at the oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorous mosquitoes rose out of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirred the certainty of death in the depths of one’s soul.

And so the very life of the colonial city, which the young Juvenal Urbino tended to idealize in his Parisian melancholy, was an illusion of memory. In the eighteenth
century, the commerce of the city had been the most prosperous in the Caribbean, owing in the main to the
thankless privilege of its being the largest African slave market in the Americas. It was also the permanent residence of the Viceroys of the New Kingdom of Granada, who preferred to govern here on the shores of the world’s ocean rather than in the distant freezing capital under a centuries-old
drizzle that disturbed their sense of reality. Several times a year, fleets of galleons carrying the treasures of Potosí, Quito, and Veracruz gathered in the bay, and the city lived its years of glory. On Friday, June 8, 1708, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the galleon 
San José
 set sail for Cádiz with a cargo of precious stones and metals valued at five hundred billion pesos in the currency
of the day; it was sunk by an English squadron at the entrance to the port, and two long centuries later it had not yet been salvaged. That treasure lying in its bed of coral, and the corpse of the commander floating sideways on the bridge, were evoked by historians as an emblem of the city drowned in memories.

Across the bay, in the residential district of La Manga, Dr. Juvenal Urbino’s house
stood in another time. One-story, spacious and cool, it had a portico with Doric columns on the outside terrace, which commanded a view of the still, miasmic water and the debris from sunken ships in the bay. From the entrance door to the kitchen, the floor was covered with black and white checkerboard tiles, a fact often attributed to Dr. Urbino’s ruling passion without taking into account that
this was a weakness common to the Catalonian craftsmen who built this district for the 
nouveaux riches
 at the beginning of the century. The large drawing room had the very high ceilings found throughout the rest of the house, and six full-length windows facing the street, and it was separated from the dining room by an enormous, elaborate glass door covered with branching vines and bunches of
grapes and maidens seduced by the pipes of fauns in a bronze grove. The furnishings in the reception rooms, including the pendulum clock that stood like a living sentinel in the drawing room, were all original English pieces from the late nineteenth century, and the lamps that hung from the walls were all teardrop crystal, and there were Sèvres vases and bowls everywhere and little alabaster statues
of pagan idylls. But that European coherence vanished in the rest of the house, where wicker armchairs were jumbled together with Viennese rockers and leather footstools made by local craftsmen. Splendid hammocks from San Jacinto, with multicolored fringe along the sides
and the owner’s name embroidered in Gothic letters with silk thread, hung in the bedrooms along with the beds. Next to the dining
room, the space that had originally been designed for gala suppers was used as a small music room for intimate concerts when famous performers came to the city. In order to enhance the silence, the tiles had been covered with the Turkish rugs purchased at the World’s Fair in Paris; a recent model of a victrola stood next to a stand that held records arranged with care, and in a corner, draped
with a Manila shawl, was the piano that Dr. Urbino had not played for many years. Throughout the house one could detect the good sense and care of a woman whose feet were planted firmly on the ground.

But no other room displayed the meticulous solemnity of the library, the sanctuary of Dr. Urbino until old age carried him off. There, all around his father’s walnut desk and the tufted leather
easy chairs, he had lined the walls and even the windows with shelves behind glass doors, and had arranged in an almost demented order the three thousand volumes bound in identical calfskin with his initials in gold on the spines. Unlike the other rooms, which were at the mercy of noise and foul winds from the port, the library always enjoyed the tranquillity and fragrance of an abbey. Born and raised
in the Caribbean superstition that one opened doors and windows to summon a coolness that in fact did not exist, Dr. Urbino and his wife at first felt their hearts oppressed by enclosure. But in the end they were convinced of the merits of the Roman strategy against heat, which consists of closing houses during the lethargy of August in order to keep out the burning air from the street, and then
opening them up completely to the night breezes. And from that time on theirs was the coolest house under the furious La Manga sun, and it was a delight to take a siesta in the darkened bedrooms and to sit on the portico in the afternoon to watch the heavy, ash-gray freighters from New Orleans pass by, and at dusk to see the wooden paddles of the riverboats with their shining lights, purifying
the stagnant garbage heap of the bay with the wake of their music. It was also the best protected from December through March, when the northern winds tore away roofs and spent the night circling like hungry wolves looking for a crack where they could slip in. No one ever thought that a marriage rooted in such foundations could have any reason not to be happy.

In any case, Dr. Urbino was not
when he returned home that
morning before ten o’clock, shaken by the two visits that not only had obliged him to miss Pentecost Mass but also threatened to change him at an age when everything had seemed complete. He wanted a short siesta until it was time for Dr. Lácides Olivella’s gala luncheon, but he found the servants in an uproar as they attempted to catch the parrot, who had flown to the
highest branches of the mango tree when they took him from his cage to clip his wings. He was a deplumed, maniacal parrot who did not speak when asked to but only when it was least expected, but then he did so with a clarity and rationality that were uncommon among human beings. He had been tutored by Dr. Urbino himself, which afforded him privileges that no one else in the family ever had, not
even the children when they were young.

He had lived in the house for over twenty years, and no one knew how many years he had been alive before then. Every afternoon after his siesta, Dr. Urbino sat with him on the terrace in the patio, the coolest spot in the house, and he had summoned the most diligent reserves of his passion for pedagogy until the parrot learned to speak French like an academician.
Then, just for love of the labor, he taught him the Latin accompaniment to the Mass and selected passages from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, and he tried without success to inculcate in him a working notion of the four arithmetic functions. On one of his last trips to Europe he brought back the first phonograph with a trumpet speaker, along with many of the latest popular records
as well as those by his favorite classical composers. Day after day, over and over again for several months, he played the songs of Yvette Guilbert and Aristide Bruant, who had charmed France during the last century, until the parrot learned them by heart. He sang them in a woman’s voice if they were hers, in a tenor’s voice if they were his, and ended with impudent laughter that was a masterful
imitation of the servant girls when they heard him singing in French. The fame of his accomplishments was so widespread that on occasion distinguished visitors who had traveled from the interior on the riverboats would ask permission to see him, and once some of the many English tourists, who in those days sailed the banana boats from New Orleans, would have bought him at any price. But the day of
his greatest glory was when the President of the Republic, Don Marco Fidel Suárez, with his entourage of cabinet ministers, visited the house
in order to confirm the truth of his reputation. They arrived at about three o’clock in the afternoon, suffocating in the top hats and frock coats they had worn during three days of official visits under the burning August sky, and they had to leave as curious
as when they arrived, because for two desperate hours the parrot refused to say a single syllable, ignoring the pleas and threats and public humiliation of Dr. Urbino, who had insisted on that foolhardy invitation despite the sage warnings of his wife.

The fact that the parrot could maintain his privileges after that historic act of defiance was the ultimate proof of his sacred rights. No other
animal was permitted in the house, with the exception of the land turtle who had reappeared in the kitchen after three or four years, when everyone thought he was lost forever. He, however, was not considered a living being but rather a mineral good luck charm whose location one could never be certain of. Dr. Urbino was reluctant to confess his hatred of animals, which he disguised with all kinds
of scientific inventions and philosophical pretexts that convinced many, but not his wife. He said that people who loved them to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that
monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.