Love in the Time of Cholera (36 page)

Fermina Daza did not know where to locate the odor of his clothing in her husband’s
routine. It could not be placed between his morning class and lunch, for she supposed that no woman in her right mind would make hurried love at that time of day, least of all with a visitor, when the house still had to be cleaned, and the beds made, and the marketing done, and lunch prepared, and perhaps with the added worry that one of the children would be sent home early from school because
somebody threw a stone at him and hurt
his head and he would find her at eleven o’clock in the morning, naked in the unmade bed and, to make matters worse, with a doctor on top of her. She also knew that Dr. Juvenal Urbino made love only at night, better yet in absolute darkness, and as a last resort before breakfast when the first birds began to chirp. After that time, as he would say, it was
more work than the pleasure of daytime love was worth to take off one’s clothes and put them back on again. So that the contamination of his clothing could occur only during one of his house calls or during some moment stolen from his nights of chess and films. This last possibility was difficult to prove, because unlike so many of her friends, Fermina Daza was too proud to spy on her husband or
to ask someone else to do it for her. His schedule of house calls, which seemed best suited to infidelity, was also the easiest to keep an eye on, because Dr. Juvenal Urbino kept a detailed record of each of his patients, including the payment of his fees, from the first time he visited them until he ushered them out of this world with a final sign of the cross and some words for the salvation of
their souls.

In the three weeks that followed, Fermina Daza did not find the odor in his clothing for a few days, she found it again when she least expected it, and then she found it, stronger than ever, for several days in a row, although one of those days was a Sunday when there had been a family gathering and the two of them had not been apart for even a moment. Contrary to her normal custom
and even her own desires, she found herself in her husband’s office one afternoon as if she were someone else, doing something that she would never do, deciphering with an exquisite Bengalese magnifying glass his intricate notes on the house calls he had made during the last few months. It was the first time she had gone alone into that office, saturated with showers of creosote and crammed with
books bound in the hides of unknown animals, blurred school pictures, honorary degrees, astrolabes, and elaborately worked daggers collected over the years: a secret sanctuary that she always considered the only part of her husband’s private life to which she had no access because it was not part of love, so that the few times she had been there she had gone with him, and the visits had always been
very brief. She did not feel she had the right to go in alone, much less to engage in what seemed to be indecent prying. But there she was. She wanted
to find the truth, and she searched for it with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fear of finding it, and she was driven by an irresistible wind even stronger than her innate haughtiness, even stronger than her dignity: an agony that bewitched
her.

She was able to draw no conclusions, because her husband’s patients, except for mutual friends, were part of his private domain; they were people without identity, known not by their faces but by their pains, not by the color of their eyes or the evasions of their hearts but by the size of their livers, the coating on their tongues, the blood in their urine, the hallucinations of their feverish
nights. They were people who believed in her husband, who believed they lived because of him when in reality they lived for him, and who in the end were reduced to a phrase written in his own hand at the bottom of the medical file:
Be calm. God awaits you at the door
. Fermina Daza left his study after two fruitless hours, with the feeling that she had allowed herself to be seduced by indecency.

Urged on by her imagination, she began to discover changes in her husband. She found him evasive, without appetite at the table or in bed, prone to exasperation and ironic answers, and when he was at home he was no longer the tranquil man he had once been but a caged lion. For the first time since their marriage, she began to monitor the times he was late, to keep track of them to the minute,
to tell him lies in order to learn the truth, but then she felt wounded to the quick by the contradictions. One night she awoke with a start, terrified by a vision of her husband staring at her in the darkness with eyes that seemed full of hatred. She had suffered a similar fright in her youth, when she had seen Florentino Ariza at the foot of her bed, but that apparition had been full of love, not
hate. Besides, this time it was not fantasy: her husband was awake at two in the morning, sitting up in bed to watch her while she slept, but when she asked him why, he denied it. He lay back on the pillow and said:

“You must have been dreaming.”

After that night, and after similar episodes that occurred during that time, when Fermina Daza could not tell for certain where reality ended and where
illusion began, she had the overwhelming revelation that she was losing her mind. At last she realized that her husband had not taken Communion on the Thursday of Corpus Christi or on
any Sunday in recent weeks, and he had not found time for that year’s retreats. When she asked him the reason for those unusual changes in his spiritual health, she received an evasive answer. This was the decisive
clue, because he had not failed to take Communion on an important feast day since he had made his first Communion, at the age of eight. In this way she realized not only that her husband was in a state of mortal sin but that he had resolved to persist in it, since he did not go to his confessor for help. She had never imagined that she could suffer so much for something that seemed to be the absolute
opposite of love, but she was suffering, and she resolved that the only way she could keep from dying was to burn out the nest of vipers that was poisoning her soul. And that is what she did. One afternoon she began to darn socks on the terrace while her husband was reading, as he did every day after his siesta. Suddenly she interrupted her work, pushed her eyeglasses up onto her forehead,
and without any trace of harshness, she asked for an explanation:

“Doctor.”

He was immersed in
L’Ile des pingouins
, the novel that everyone was reading in those days, and he answered without surfacing: “
Oui
.” She insisted:

“Look at me.”

He did so, looking without seeing her through the fog of his reading glasses, but he did not have to take them off to feel burned by the raging fire in her
eyes.

“What is going on?” he asked.

“You know better than I,” she said.

That was all she said. She lowered her glasses and continued darning socks. Dr. Juvenal Urbino knew then that the long hours of anguish were over. The moment had not been as he had foreseen it; rather than a seismic tremor in his heart, it was a calming blow, and a great relief that what was bound to happen sooner or later
had happened sooner rather than later: the ghost of Miss Barbara Lynch had entered his house at last.

Dr. Juvenal Urbino had met her four months earlier as she waited her turn in the clinic of Misericordia Hospital, and he knew immediately that something irreparable had just occurred in his destiny. She was a tall, elegant, large-boned mulatta, with skin the color and softness of molasses, and
that morning she wore a red dress with
white polka dots and a broad-brimmed hat of the same fabric, which shaded her face down to her eyelids. Her sex seemed more pronounced than that of other human beings. Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not attend patients in the clinic, but whenever he passed by and had time to spare, he would go in to remind his more advanced students that there is no medicine better
than a good diagnosis. So that he arranged to be present at the examination of the unforeseen mulatta, making certain that his pupils would not notice any gesture of his that did not appear to be casual and barely looking at her, but fixing her name and address with care in his memory. That afternoon, after his last house call, he had his carriage pass by the address that she had given in the consulting
room, and in fact there she was, enjoying the coolness on her terrace.

It was a typical Antillean house, painted yellow even to the tin roof, with burlap windows and pots of carnations and ferns hanging in the doorway. It rested on wooden pilings in the salt marshes of Mala Crianza. A troupial sang in the cage that hung from the eaves. Across the street was a primary school, and the children
rushing out obliged the coachman to keep a tight hold on the reins so that the horse would not shy. It was a stroke of luck, for Miss Barbara Lynch had time to recognize the Doctor. She waved to him as if they were old friends, she invited him to have coffee while the confusion abated, and he was delighted to accept (although it was not his custom to drink coffee) and to listen to her talk about herself,
which was the only thing that had interested him since the morning and the only thing that was going to interest him, without a moment’s respite, during the months to follow. Once, soon after he had married, a friend told him, with his wife present, that sooner or later he would have to confront a mad passion that could endanger the stability of his marriage. He, who thought he knew himself,
knew the strength of his moral roots, had laughed at the prediction. And now it had come true.

Miss Barbara Lynch, Doctor of Theology, was the only child of the Reverend Jonathan B. Lynch, a lean black Protestant minister who rode on a mule through the poverty-stricken settlements in the salt marshes, preaching the word of one of the many gods that Dr. Juvenal Urbino wrote with a small
g
to distinguish
them from his own. She spoke good Spanish, with a certain roughness in the syntax,
and her frequent slips heightened her charm. She would be twenty-eight years old in December, not long ago she had divorced another minister, who was a student of her father’s and to whom she had been unhappily married for two years, and she had no desire to repeat the offense. She said: “I have no more love than
my troupial.” But Dr. Urbino was too serious to think that she said it with hidden intentions. On the contrary: he asked himself in bewilderment if so many opportunities coming together might not be one of God’s pitfalls, which he would then have to pay for dearly, but he dismissed the thought without delay as a piece of theological nonsense resulting from his state of confusion.

As he was about
to leave, he made a casual remark about that morning’s medical consultation, knowing that nothing pleases patients more than talking about their ailments, and she was so splendid talking about hers that he promised he would return the next day, at four o’clock sharp, to examine her with greater care. She was dismayed: she knew that a doctor of his qualifications was far above her ability to pay,
but he reassured her: “In this profession we try to have the rich pay for the poor.” Then he marked in his notebook:
Miss Barbara Lynch, Mala Crianza Salt Marsh, Saturday, 4 p.m
. Months later, Fermina Daza was to read that notation, augmented by details of the diagnosis, treatment, and evolution of the disease. The name attracted her attention, and it suddenly occurred to her that she was one
of those dissolute artists from the New Orleans fruit boats, but the address made her think that she must come from Jamaica, a black woman, of course, and she eliminated her without a second thought as not being to her husband’s taste.

Dr. Juvenal Urbino came ten minutes early for the Saturday appointment, and Miss Lynch had not finished dressing to receive him. He had not felt so much tension
since his days in Paris when he had to present himself for an oral examination. As she lay on her canvas bed, wearing a thin silk slip, Miss Lynch’s beauty was endless. Everything about her was large and intense: her siren’s thighs, her slow-burning skin, her astonished breasts, her diaphanous gums with their perfect teeth, her whole body radiating a vapor of good health that was the human odor
Fermina Daza had discovered in her husband’s clothing. She had gone to the clinic because she suffered from
something that she, with much charm, called “twisted colons,” and Dr. Urbino thought that it was a symptom that should not be ignored. So he palpated her internal organs with more intention than attention, and as he did so he discovered in amazement that this marvelous creature was as beautiful
inside as out, and then he gave himself over to the delights of touch, no longer the best-qualified physician along the Caribbean coastline but a poor soul tormented by his tumultuous instincts. Only once before in his austere professional life had something similar happened to him, and that had been the day of his greatest shame, because the indignant patient had moved his hand away, sat
up in bed, and said to him: “What you want may happen, but it will not be like this.” Miss Lynch, on the other hand, abandoned herself to his hands, and when she was certain that the Doctor was no longer thinking about his science, she said:

“I thought this not permitted by your ethics.”

He was as drenched by perspiration as if he had just stepped out of a pool wearing all his clothes, and he
dried his hands and face with a towel.

“Our code of ethics supposes,” he said, “that we doctors are made of wood.”

“The fact I thought so does not mean you cannot do,” she said. “Just think what it mean for poor black woman like me to have such a famous man notice her.”

“I have not stopped thinking about you for an instant,” he said.

It was so tremulous a confession that it might have inspired
pity. But she saved him from all harm with a laugh that lit up the bedroom.

“I know since I saw you in hospital, Doctor,” she said. “Black I am but not a fool.”

It was far from easy. Miss Lynch wanted her honor protected, she wanted security and love, in that order, and she believed that she deserved them. She gave Dr. Urbino the opportunity to seduce her but not to penetrate her inner sanctum,
even when she was alone in the house. She would go no further than allowing him to repeat the ceremony of palpation and auscultation with all the ethical violations he could desire, but without taking off her clothes. For his part, he could not let go of the bait once he had bitten, and he continued his almost daily incursions. For reasons of a practical nature, it was close
to impossible for
him to maintain a continuing relationship with Miss Lynch, but he was too weak to stop, as he would later be too weak to go any further. This was his limit.