Love in the Time of Cholera (48 page)

The two women who took care of him, and Florentino Ariza himself, were surprised at how much he had changed. Less than ten years before, he had assaulted one of the maids behind the main staircase in the house, dressed and standing as she was, and in less time than a Filipino
rooster he had left her in a family way. He had to give her a furnished house in exchange for her swearing that the author of her dishonor was a part-time, Sunday sweetheart who had never even kissed her, and her father and uncles, who were proficient sugarcane cutters, forced them to marry. It did not seem possible that this could be the same man, this man handled front and back by two women who
just a few months earlier had made him tremble with love and who now soaped him above his waist and below, dried him with towels of Egyptian cotton, and massaged his entire body, while he did not emit a single sigh of passion. Each of them had a different explanation for his lack of desire. Leona Cassiani thought it was the prelude to death. América Vicuña attributed it to a hidden cause whose intricacies
she could not decipher.
He alone knew the truth, and it had its own name. In any case, it was unfair: they suffered more in serving him than he did in being so well served.

Fermina Daza needed no more than three Tuesdays to realize how much she missed Florentino Ariza’s visits. She enjoyed the friends who were frequent visitors, and she enjoyed them even more as time distanced her from her husband’s
habits. Lucrecia del Real del Obispo had gone to Panama to have her ear examined because of a pain that nothing could ease, and after a month she came back feeling much better, but hearing less than she had before and using an ear trumpet. Fermina Daza was the friend who was most tolerant of her confusions of questions and answers, and this was so encouraging to Lucrecia that hardly a day
went by that she did not stop in at any hour. But for Fermina Daza no one could take the place of her calming afternoons with Florentino Ariza.

The memory of the past did not redeem the future, as he insisted on believing. On the contrary, it strengthened the conviction that Fermina Daza had always had, that the feverish excitement of twenty had been something very noble, very beautiful, but
it had not been love. Despite her rough honesty she did not intend to disclose that to him, either by mail or in person, nor did she have it in her heart to tell him how false the sentimentalities of his letters sounded after the miraculous consolation of his written meditations, how his lyrical lies cheapened him, how detrimental his maniacal insistence on recapturing the past was to his cause. No:
not one line of his letters of long ago, not a single moment of her own despised youth, had made her feel that Tuesday afternoons without him could be as tedious, as lonely, and as repetitious as they really were.

In one of her attacks of simplification, she had relegated to the stables the radioconsole that her husband had given her as an anniversary gift, and which both of them had intended
to present to the Museum as the first in the city. In the gloom of her mourning she had resolved not to use it again, for a widow bearing her family names could not listen to any kind of music without offending the memory of the dead, even if she did so in private. But after her third solitary Tuesday she had it brought back to the drawing room, not to enjoy the sentimental song on the Riobamba station,
as she had done before, but to fill her idle hours with the soap operas from Santiago de Cuba.
It was a good idea, for after the birth of her daughter she had begun to lose the habit of reading that her husband had inculcated with so much diligence ever since their honeymoon, and with the progressive fatigue of her eyes she had stopped altogether, so that months would go by without her knowing
where she had left her reading glasses.

She took such a liking to the soap operas from Santiago de Cuba that she waited with impatience for each day’s new episode. From time to time she listened to the news to find out what was going on in the world, and on the few occasions when she was alone in the house she would turn the volume very low and listen to distant, clear merengues from Santo Domingo
and plenas from Puerto Rico. One night, on an unknown station that suddenly came in as strong and clear as if it were next door, she heard heartbreaking news: an elderly couple, who for forty years had been repeating their honeymoon every year in the same spot, had been murdered, bludgeoned to death with oars by the skipper of the boat they were riding in, who then robbed them of all the money
they were carrying: fourteen dollars. The effect on her was even more devastating when Lucrecia del Real told her the complete story, which had been published in a local newspaper. The police had discovered that the elderly couple beaten to death were clandestine lovers who had taken their vacations together for forty years, but who each had a stable and happy marriage as well as very large families.
Fermina Daza, who never cried over the soap operas on the radio, had to hold back the knot of tears that choked her. In his next letter, without any comment, Florentino Ariza sent her the news item that he had cut out of the paper.

These were not the last tears that Fermina Daza was going to hold back. Florentino Ariza had not yet finished his sixty days of seclusion when
Justice
published a
front-page story, complete with photographs of the two protagonists, about the alleged secret love affair between Dr. Juvenal Urbino and Lucrecia del Real del Obispo. There was speculation on the details of their relationship, the frequency of their meetings and how they were arranged, and the complicity of her husband, who was given to excesses of sodomy with the blacks on his sugar plantation. The
story, published in enormous block letters in an ink the color of blood, fell like a thundering
cataclysm on the enfeebled local aristocracy. Not a line of it was true: Juvenal Urbino and Lucrecia del Real had been close friends in the days when they were both single, and they had continued their friendship after their marriages, but they had never been lovers. In any case, it did not seem that
the purpose of the story was to sully the name of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, whose memory enjoyed universal respect, but to injure the husband of Lucrecia del Real, who had been elected President of the Social Club the week before. The scandalous story was suppressed in a few hours. But Lucrecia del Real did not visit Fermina Daza again, and Fermina Daza interpreted this as a confession of guilt.

It
was soon obvious, however, that Fermina Daza was not immune to the hazards of her class.
Justice
attacked her one weak flank: her father’s business. When he was forced into exile, she knew of only one instance of his shady dealings, which had been told to her by Gala Placidia. Later, when Dr. Urbino confirmed the story after his interview with the Governor, she was convinced that her father had
been the victim of slander. The facts were that two government agents had come to the house on the Park of the Evangels with a warrant, searched it from top to bottom without finding what they were looking for, and at last ordered the wardrobe with the mirrored doors in Fermina Daza’s old bedroom to be opened. Gala Placidia, who was alone in the house and lacked the means to stop anyone from doing
anything, refused to open it, with the excuse that she did not have the keys. Then one of the agents broke the mirror on the door with the butt of his revolver and found the space between the glass and the wood stuffed with counterfeit hundred-dollar bills. This was the last in a chain of clues that led to Lorenzo Daza as the final link in a vast international operation. It was a masterful fraud,
for the bills had the watermarks of the original paper: one-dollar bills had been erased by a chemical process that seemed to be magic, and reprinted as hundred-dollar notes. Lorenzo Daza claimed that the wardrobe had been purchased long after his daughter’s wedding, and that it must have come into the house with the bills already in it, but the police proved that it had been there since the days
when Fermina Daza had been in school. He was the only one who could have hidden the counterfeit fortune behind the mirrors.
This was all Dr. Urbino told his wife when he promised the Governor that he would send his father-in-law back to his own country in order to cover up the scandal. But the newspaper told much more.

It said that during one of the many civil wars of the last century, Lorenzo
Daza had been the intermediary between the government of the Liberal President Aquileo Parra and one Joseph T. K. Korzeniowski, a native of Poland and a member of the crew of the merchant ship
Saint Antoine
, sailing under the French flag, who had spent several months here trying to conclude a complicated arms deal. Korzeniowski, who later became famous as Joseph Conrad, made contact somehow with
Lorenzo Daza, who bought the shipment of arms from him on behalf of the government, with his credentials and his receipts in order and the purchase price in gold. According to the story in the newspaper, Lorenzo Daza claimed that the arms had been stolen in an improbable raid, and then he sold them again, for twice their value, to the Conservatives who were at war with the government.

Justice
also said that at the time that General Rafael Reyes founded the navy, Lorenzo Daza bought a shipment of surplus boots at a very low price from the English army, and with that one deal he doubled his fortune in six months. According to the newspaper, when the shipment reached this port, Lorenzo Daza refused to accept it because it contained only boots for the right foot, but he was the sole bidder
when Customs auctioned it according to the law, and he bought it for the token sum of one hundred pesos. At the same time, under similar circumstances, an accomplice purchased the shipment of boots for the left foot that had reached Riohacha. Once they were in pairs, Lorenzo Daza took advantage of his relationship by marriage to the Urbino de la Calle family and sold the boots to the new navy at
a profit of two thousand percent.

The story in
Justice
concluded by saying that Lorenzo Daza did not leave San Juan de la Ciénaga at the end of the last century in search of better opportunities for his daughter’s future, as he liked to say, but because he had been found out in his prosperous business of adulterating imported tobacco with shredded paper, which he did with so much skill that not
even the most sophisticated smokers
noticed the deception. They also uncovered his links to a clandestine international enterprise whose most profitable business at the end of the last century had been the illegal smuggling of Chinese from Panama. On the other hand, his suspect mule trading, which had done so much harm to his reputation, seemed to be the only honest business he had ever engaged
in.

When Florentino Ariza left his bed, with his back on fire and carrying a walking stick for the first time instead of his umbrella, his first excursion was to Fermina Daza’s house. She was like a stranger, ravaged by age, whose resentment had destroyed her desire to live. Dr. Urbino Daza, in the two visits he had made to Florentino Ariza during his exile, had spoken to him of how disturbed
his mother was by the two stories in
Justice
. The first provoked her to such irrational anger at her husband’s infidelity and her friend’s disloyalty that she renounced the custom of visiting the family mausoleum one Sunday each month, for it infuriated her that he, inside his coffin, could not hear the insults she wanted to shout at him: she had a quarrel with a dead man. She let Lucrecia del
Real know, through anyone who would repeat it to her, that she should take comfort in having had at least one real man in the crowd of people who had passed through her bed. As for the story about Lorenzo Daza, there was no way to know which affected her more, the story itself or her belated discovery of her father’s true character. But one or the other, or both, had annihilated her. Her hair, the
color of stainless steel, had ennobled her face, but now it looked like ragged yellow strands of corn silk, and her beautiful panther eyes did not recover their old sparkle even in the brilliant heat of her anger. Her decision not to go on living was evident in every gesture. She had long ago given up smoking, whether locked in the bathroom or anywhere else, but she took it up again, for the first
time in public, and with an uncontrolled voracity, at first with cigarettes she rolled herself, as she had always liked to do, and then with ordinary ones sold in stores because she no longer had time or patience to do it herself. Anyone else would have asked himself what the future could hold for a lame old man whose back burned with a burro’s saddle sores and a woman who longed for no other happiness
but death. But not Florentino Ariza. He found a glimmer of hope in the ruins of disaster,
for it seemed to him that Fermina Daza’s misfortune glorified her, that her anger beautified her, and that her rancor with the world had given her back the untamed character she had displayed at the age of twenty.

She had new reasons for being grateful to Florentino Ariza, because in response to the infamous
stories, he had written
Justice
an exemplary letter concerning the ethical responsibilities of the press and respect for other people’s honor. They did not publish it, but the author sent a copy to the
Commercial Daily
, the oldest and most serious newspaper along the Caribbean coast, which featured the letter on the front page. Signed with the pseudonym “Jupiter,” it was so reasoned, incisive,
and well written that it was attributed to some of the most notable writers in the province. It was a lone voice in the middle of the ocean, but it was heard at great depth and great distance. Fermina Daza knew who the author was without having to be told, because she recognized some of the ideas and even a sentence taken directly from Florentino Ariza’s moral reflections. And so she received him
with renewed affection in the disarray of her solitude. It was at this time that América Vicuña found herself alone one Saturday afternoon in the bedroom on the Street of Windows, and without looking for them, by sheer accident, she found the typed copies of the meditations of Florentino Ariza and the handwritten letters of Fermina Daza, in a wardrobe without a key.