They were the original source of his first letters to Fermina Daza, those half-baked endearments taken whole from the Spanish romantics, and his letters continued in that vein until real life obliged him to concern himself with matters more mundane than heartache. By that time he had moved on to tearful serialized novels and other, even more profane prose of the day. He had learned to cry with his mother as they read the pamphlets by local poets that were sold in plazas and arcades for two centavos each. But at the same time he was able to recite from memory the most exquisite Castilian poetry of the Golden Age. In general, he read everything that fell into his hands in the order in which it fell, so that long after those hard years of his first love, when he was no longer young, he would read from first page to last the twenty volumes of the Young People’s Treasury, the complete catalogue of the Garnier Bros. Classics in translation, and the simplest works that Don Vicente Blasco Ibáñez published in the Prometeo collection.
In any event, his youthful adventures in the transient hotel were not limited to reading and composing feverish letters but also included his initiation into the secrets of loveless love. Life in the house began after noon, when his friends the birds got up as bare as the day they were born, so that when Florentino Ariza arrived after work he found a palace populated by naked nymphs who shouted their commentaries on the secrets of the city, which they knew because of the faithlessness of the protagonists. Many displayed in their nudity traces of their past: scars of knife thrusts in the belly, starbursts of gunshot wounds, ridges of the razor cuts of love, Caesarean sections sewn up by butchers. Some of them had their young children with them during the day, those unfortunate fruits of youthful defiance or carelessness, and they took off their children’s clothes as soon as they were brought in so they would not feel different in that paradise of nudity. Each one cooked her own food, and no one ate better than Florentino Ariza when they invited him for a meal, because he chose the best from each. It was a daily fiesta that lasted until dusk, when the naked women marched, singing, toward the bathrooms, asked to borrow soap, toothbrushes, scissors, cut each other’s hair, dressed in borrowed clothes, painted themselves like lugubrious clowns, and went out to hunt the first prey of the night. Then life in the house became impersonal and dehumanized, and it was impossible to share in it without paying.
Since he had known Fermina Daza, there was no place where Florentino Ariza felt more at ease, because it was the only place where he felt that he was with her. Perhaps it was for similar reasons that an elegant older woman with beautiful silvery hair lived there but did not participate in the uninhibited life of the naked women, who professed sacramental respect for her. A premature sweetheart had taken her there when she was young, and after enjoying her for a time, abandoned her to her fate. Nevertheless, despite the stigma, she had made a good marriage. When she was quite old and alone, two sons and three daughters argued over who would have the pleasure of taking her to live with them, but she could not think of a better place to live than that hotel of her youthful debaucheries. Her permanent room was her only home, and this made for immediate communion with Florentino Ariza, who, she said, would become a wise man known throughout the world because he could enrich his soul with reading in a paradise of salaciousness. Florentino Ariza, for his part, developed so much affection for her that he helped her with her shopping and would spend the afternoons in conversation with her. He thought she was a woman wise in the ways of love, since she offered many insights into his affair without his having to reveal any secrets to her.
If he had not given in to the many temptations at hand before he experienced Fermina Daza’s love, he certainly would not succumb now that she was his official betrothed. So Florentino Ariza lived with the girls and shared their pleasures and miseries, but it did not occur to him or them to go any further. An unforeseen event demonstrated the severity of his determination. One afternoon at six o’clock, when the girls were dressing to receive that evening’s clients, the woman who cleaned the rooms on his floor in the hotel came into his cubicle. She was young, but haggard and old before her time, like a fully dressed penitent surrounded by glorious nakedness. He saw her every day without feeling himself observed: she walked through the rooms with her brooms, a bucket for the trash, and a special rag for picking up used condoms from the floor. She came into the room where Florentino Ariza lay reading, and as always she cleaned with great care so as not to disturb him. Then she passed close to the bed, and he felt a warm and tender hand low on his belly, he felt it searching, he felt it finding, he felt it unbuttoning his trousers while her breathing filled the room. He pretended to read until he could not bear it any longer and had to move his body out of the way.
She was dismayed, for the first thing they warned her about when they gave her the cleaning job was that she should not try to sleep with the clients. They did not have to tell her that, because she was one of those women who thought that prostitution did not mean going to bed for money but going to bed with a stranger. She had two children, each by a different father, not because they were casual adventures but because she could never love any man who came back after the third visit. Until that time she had been a woman without a sense of urgency, a woman whose nature prepared her to wait without despair, but life in that house proved stronger than her virtue. She came to work at six in the afternoon, and she spent the whole night going through the rooms, sweeping them out, picking up condoms, changing the sheets. It was difficult to imagine the number of things that men left after love. They left vomit and tears, which seemed understandable to her, but they also left many enigmas of intimacy: puddles of blood, patches of excrement, glass eyes, gold watches, false teeth, lockets with golden curls, love letters, business letters, condolence letters—all kinds of letters. Some came back for the items they had lost, but most were unclaimed, and Lotario Thugut kept them under lock and key and thought that sooner or later the palace that had seen better days, with its thousands of forgotten belongings, would become a museum of love.
The work was hard and the pay was low, but she did it well. What she could not endure were the sobs, the laments, the creaking of the bedsprings, which filled her blood with so much ardor and so much sorrow that by dawn she could not bear the desire to go to bed with the first beggar she met on the street, with any miserable drunk who would give her what she wanted with no pretensions and no questions. The appearance of a man like Florentino Ariza, young, clean, and without a woman, was for her a gift from heaven, because from the first moment she realized that he was just like her: someone in need of love. But he was unaware of her compelling desire. He had kept his virginity for Fermina Daza, and there was no force or argument in this world that could turn him from his purpose.
That was his life, four months before the date set for formalizing the engagement, when Lorenzo Daza showed up at the telegraph office one morning at seven o’clock and asked for him. Since he had not yet arrived, Lorenzo Daza waited on the bench until ten minutes after eight, slipping a heavy gold ring with its noble opal stone from one finger to another, and as soon as Florentino Ariza came in, he recognized him as the employee who had delivered the telegram, and he took him by the arm.
“Come with me, my boy,” he said. “You and I have to talk for five minutes, man to man.”
Florentino Ariza, as green as a corpse, let himself be led. He was not prepared for this meeting, because Fermina Daza had not found either the occasion or the means to warn him. The fact was that on the previous Saturday, Sister Franca de la Luz, Superior of the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, had come into the class on Ideas of Cosmogony with the stealth of a serpent, and spying on the students over their shoulders, she discovered that Fermina Daza was pretending to take notes in her notebook when in reality she was writing a love letter. According to the rules of the Academy, that error was reason for expulsion. Lorenzo Daza received an urgent summons to the rectory, where he discovered the leak through which his iron regime was trickling. Fermina Daz
a, with her innate fortitude, confessed to the error of the letter, but refused to reveal the identity of her secret sweetheart and refused again before the Tribunal of the Order which, therefore, confirmed the verdict of expulsion. Her father, however, searched her room, until then an inviolate sanctuary, and in the false bottom of her trunk he found the packets of three years’ worth of letters hidden away with as much love as had inspired their writing. The signature was unequivocal, but Lorenzo Daza could not believe—not then, not ever—that his daughter knew nothing about her secret lover except that he worked as a telegraph operator and that he loved the violin.
Certain that such an intricate relationship was understandable only with the complicity of his sister, he did not grant her the grace of an excuse or the right of appeal, but shipped her on the schooner to San Juan de la Ciénaga. Fermina Daza never found relief from her last memory of her aunt on the afternoon when she said goodbye in the doorway, burning with fever inside her brown habit, bony and ashen, and then disappeared into the drizzle in the little park, carrying all that she owned in life: her spinster’s sleeping mat and enough money for a month, wrapped in a handkerchief that she clutched in her fist. As soon as she had freed herself from her father’s authority, Fermina Daza began a search for her in the Caribbean provinces, asking for information from everyone who might know her, and she could not find a trace of her until almost thirty years later when she received a letter that had taken a long time to pass through many hands, informing her that she had died in the Water of God leprosarium. Lorenzo Daza did not foresee the ferocity with which his daughter would react to the unjust punishment of her Aunt Escolástica, whom she had always identified with the mother she could barely remember. She locked herself in her room, refused to eat or drink, and when at last he persuaded her to open the door, first with threats and then with poorly dissimulated pleading, he found a wounded panther who would never be fifteen years old again.
He tried to seduce her with all kinds of flattery. He tried to make her understand that love at her age was an illusion, he tried to convince her to send back the letters and return to the Academy and beg forgiveness on her knees, and he gave his word of honor that he would be the first to help her find happiness with a worthy suitor. But it was like talking to a corpse. Defeated, he at last lost his temper at lunch on Monday, and while he choked back insults and blasphemies and was about to explode, she put the meat knife to her throat, without dramatics but with a steady hand and eyes so aghast that he did not dare to challenge her. That was when he took the risk of talking for five minutes, man to man, with the accursed upstart whom he did not remember ever having seen, and who had come into his life to his great sorrow. By force of habit he picked up his revolver before he went out, but he was careful to hide it under his shirt.
Florentino Ariza still had not recovered when Lorenzo Daza held him by the arm and steered him across the Plaza of the Cathedral to the arcaded gallery of the Parish Café and invited him to sit on the terrace. There were no other customers at that hour: a black woman was scrubbing the tiles in the enormous salon with its chipped and dusty stained-glass windows, and the chairs were still upside down on the marble tables. Florentino Ariza had often seen Lorenzo Daza gambling and drinking cask wine there with the Asturians from the public market, while they shouted and argued about other longstanding wars that had nothing to do with our own. Conscious of the fatality of love, he had often wondered how the meeting would be that he was bound to have with Lorenzo Daza sooner or later, the meeting that no human power could forestall because it had been inscribed in both their destinies forever. He had supposed it would be an unequal dispute, not only because Fermina Daza had warned him in her letters of her father’s stormy character, but because he himself had noted that his eyes seemed angry even when he was laughing at the gaming table. Everything about him was a testimony to crudeness: his ignoble belly, his emphatic speech, his lynx’s side-whiskers, his rough hands, the ring finger smothered by the opal setting. His only endearing trait, which Florentino Ariza recognized the first time he saw him walking, was that he had the same doe’s gait as his daughter. However, when he showed him the chair so that he could sit down, he did not find Lorenzo Daza as harsh as he appeared to be, and his courage revived when he invited him to have a glass of anisette. Florentino Ariza had never had a drink at eight o’clock in the morning, but he accepted with gratitude because his need for one was urgent.
Lorenzo Daza, in fact, took no more than five minutes to say what he had to say, and he did so with a disarming sincerity that confounded Florentino Ariza. When his wife died he had set only one goal for himself: to turn his daughter into a great lady. The road was long and uncertain for a mule trader who did not know how to read or write and whose reputation as a horse thief was not so much proven as widespread in the province of San Juan de la Ciénaga. He lit a mule driver’s cigar and lamented: “The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.” He said, however, that the real secret of his fortune was that none of his mules worked as hard and with so much determination as he did himself, even during the bitterest days of the wars when the villages awoke in ashes and the fields in ruins. Although his daughter was never aware of the premeditation in her destiny, she behaved as if she were an enthusiastic accomplice. She was intelligent and methodical, to the point where she taught her father to read as soon as she herself learned to, and at the age of twelve she had a mastery of reality that would have allowed her to run the house without the help of her Aunt Escolástica. He sighed: “She’s a mule worth her weight in gold.” When his daughter finished primary school with highest marks in every subject and honorable mention at graduation, he understood that San Juan de la Ciénaga was too narrow for his dreams. Then he liquidated lands and animals and moved with new impetus and seventy thousand gold pesos to this ruined city and its moth-eaten glories, where a beautiful woman with an old-fashioned upbringing still had the possibility of being reborn through a fortunate marriage. The sudden appearance of Florentino Ariza had been an unforeseen obstacle in his hard-fought plan. “So I have come to make a request of you,” said Lorenzo Daza. He dipped the end of his cigar in the anisette, pulled on it and drew no smoke, then concluded in a sorrowful voice:
“Get out of our way.”
Florentino Ariza had listened to him as he sipped his anisette, and was so absorbed in the disclosure of Fermina Daza’s past that he did not even ask himself what he was going to say when it was his turn to speak. But when the moment arrived, he realized that anything he might say would compromise his destiny.
“Have you spoken to her?” he asked.
“That doesn’t concern you,” said Lorenzo Daza.
“I ask you the question,” said Florentino Ariza, “because it seems to me that she is the one who has to decide.”
“None of that,” said Lorenzo Daza. “This is a matter for men and it will be decided by men.”
His tone had become threatening, and a customer who had just sat down at a nearby table turned to look at them. Florentino Ariza spoke in a most tenuous voice, but with the most imperious resolution of which he was capable:
“Be that as it may, I cannot answer without knowing what she thinks. It would be a betrayal.”
Then Lorenzo Daza leaned back in his chair, his eyelids reddened and damp, and his left eye spun in its orbit and stayed twisted toward the outside. He, too, lowered his voice.
“Don’t force me to shoot you,” he said.
Florentino Ariza felt his intestines filling with cold froth. But his voice did not tremble because he felt himself illuminated by the Holy Spirit.
“Shoot me,” he said, with his hand on his chest. “There is no greater glory than to die for love.”
Lorenzo Daza had to look at him sideways, like a parrot, to see him with his twisted eye. He did not pronounce the four words so much as spit them out, one by one:
“Son of a bitch!”
That same week he took his daughter away on the journey that would mak
e her forget. He gave her no explanation at all, but burst into her bedroom, his mustache stained with fury and his chewed cigar, and ordered her to pack. She asked him where they were going, and he answered: “To our death.” Frightened by a response that seemed too close to the truth, she tried to face him with the courage of a few days before, but he took off his belt with its hammered copper buckle, twisted it around his fist, and hit the table with a blow that resounded through the house like a rifle shot. Fermina Daza knew very well the extent and occasion of her own strength, and so she packed a bedroll with two straw mats and a hammock, and two large trunks with all her clothes, certain that this was a trip from which she would never return. Before she dressed, she locked herself in the bathroom and wrote a brief farewell letter to Florentino Ariza on a sheet torn from the pack of toilet paper. Then she cut off her entire braid at the nape of her neck with cuticle scissors, rolled it inside a velvet box embroidered with gold thread, and sent it along with the letter.
It was a demented trip. The first stage along the ridges of the Sierra Nevada, riding muleback in a caravan of Andean mule drivers, lasted eleven days, during which time they were stupefied by the naked sun or drenched by the horizontal October rains and almost always petrified by the numbing vapors rising from the precipices. On the third day a mule maddened by gadflies fell into a ravine with its rider, dragging along the entire line, and the screams of the man and his pack of seven animals tied to one another continued to rebound along the cliffs and gullies for several hours after the disaster, and continued to resound for years and years in the memory of Fermina Daza. All her baggage plunged over the side with the mules, but in the centuries-long instant of the fall until the scream of terror was extinguished at the bottom, she did not think of the poor dead mule driver or his mangled pack but of how unfortunate it was that the mule she was riding had not been tied to the others as well.
Love in the Time of Cholera Page 10