It was the first time she had ever ridden, but the terror and unspeakable privations of the trip would not have seemed so bitter to her if it had not been for the certainty that she would never see Florentino Ariza again or have the consolation of his letters. She had not said a word to her father since the beginning of the trip, and he was so confounded that he hardly spoke to her even when it was an absolute necessity to do so, or he sent the mule drivers to her with messages. When their luck was good they found some roadside inn that served rustic food which she refused to eat, and rented them canvas cots stained with rancid perspiration and urine. But more often they spent the night in Indian settlements, in open-air public dormitories built at the side of the road, with their rows of wooden poles and roofs of bitter palm where every passerby had the right to stay until dawn. Fermina Daza could not sleep through a single night as she sweated in fear and listened in the darkness to the coming and going of silent travelers who tied their animals to the poles and hung their hammocks where they could.
At nightfall, when the first travelers would arrive, the place was uncrowded and peaceful, but by dawn it had been transformed into a fairground, with a mass of hammocks hanging at different levels and Aruac Indians from the mountains sleeping on their haunches, with the raging of the tethered goats, and the uproar of the fighting cocks in their pharaonic crates, and the panting silence of the mountain dogs, who had been taught not to bark because of the dangers of war. Those privations were familiar to Lorenzo Daza, who had trafficked through the region for half his life and almost always met up with old friends at dawn. For his daughter it was perpetual agony. The stench of the loads of salted catfish added to the loss of appetite caused by her grief, and eventually destroyed her habit of eating, and if she did not go mad with despair it was because she always found relief in the memory of Florentino Ariza. She did not doubt that this was the land of forgetting.
Another constant terror was the war. Since the start of the journey there had been talk of the danger of running into scattered patrols, and the mule drivers had instructed them in the various ways of recognizing the two sides so that they could act accordingly. They often encountered squads of mounted soldiers under the command of an officer, who rounded up new recruits by roping them as if they were cattle on the hoof. Overwhelmed by so many horrors, Fermina Daza had forgotten about the one that seemed more legendary than imminent, until one night when a patrol of unknown affiliation captured two travelers from the caravan and hanged them from a campano tree half a league from the settlement. Lorenzo Daza did not even know them, but he had them taken down and he gave them a Christian burial in thanksgiving for not having met a similar fate. And he had reason: the assailants had awakened him with a rifle in his stomach, and a commander in rags, his face smeared with charcoal, had shone a light on him and asked him if he was Liberal or Conservative.
“Neither one or the other,” said Lorenzo Daza. “I am a Spanish subject.”
“What luck!” said the commander, and he left with his hand raised in a salute. “Long live the King!”
Two days later they descended to the luminous plain where the joyful town of Valledupar was located. There were cockfights in the patios, accordion music on the street corners, riders on thorough-bred horses, rockets and bells. A pyrotechnical castle was being assembled. Fermina Daza did not even notice the festivities. They stayed in the home of Uncle Lisímaco Sánchez, her mother’s brother, who had come out to receive them on the King’s Highway at the head of a noisy troop of young relatives riding the best-bred horses in the entire province, and they were led through the streets of the town to the accompaniment of exploding fireworks. The house was on the Grand Plaza, next to the colonial church that had been repaired several times, and it seemed more like the main house on a hacienda because of its large, somber rooms and its gallery that faced an orchard of fruit trees and smelled of hot sugarcane juice.
No sooner had they dismounted in the stables than the reception rooms were overflowing with numerous unknown relatives whose unbearable effusiveness was a scourge to Fermina Daza, for she was incapable of ever loving anyone else in this world, she suffered from saddle burn, she was dying of fatigue and loose bowels, and all she longed for was a solitary and quiet place to cry. Her cousin Hildebranda Sánchez, two years older than she and with the same imperial haughtiness, was the only one who understood her condition as soon as she saw her, because she, too, was being consumed in the fiery coals of reckless love. When it grew dark she took her to the bedroom that she had prepared to share with her, and seeing the burning ulcers on her buttocks, she could not believe that she still lived. With the help of her mother, a very sweet woman who looked as much like her husband as if they were twins, she prepared a bath for her and cooled the burning with arnica compresses, while the thunder from the gunpowder castle shook the foundations of the house.
At midnight the visitors left, the public fiesta scattered into smoldering embers, and Cousin Hildebranda lent Fermina Daza a madapollam nightgown and helped her to lie down in a bed with smooth sheets and feather pillows, and without warning she was filled with the instantaneous panic of happiness. When at last they were alone in the bedroom, Cousin Hildebranda bolted the door with a crossbar and from under the straw matting of her bed took out a manila envelope sealed in wax with the emblem of the national telegraph. It was enough for Fermina Daza to see her cousin’s expression of radiant malice for the pensive scent of white gardenias to grow again in her heart’s memory, and then she tore the red sealing wax with her teeth and drenched the eleven forbidden telegrams in a shower of tears until dawn.
Then he knew. Before starting out on the journey, Lorenzo Daza had made the mistake of telegraphing the news to his brother-in-law Lisímaco Sánchez, and he in turn had sent the news to his vast and intricate network of kinfolk in numerous towns and villages throughout the province. So that Florentino Ariza not only learned the complete itinerary but also established an extensive brotherhood of telegraph operators who would follow the trail of Fermina Daza to the last settlement in Cabo de la Vela. This allowed him to maintain intensive communications with her from the time of her arrival in Valledupar, where she stayed three months, until the end of her journey in Riohacha, a year and a half later, when Lorenzo Daza took it for granted that his daughter had at last forgotten and he decided to return home. Perhaps he was not even aware of how much he had relaxed his vigilance, distracted as he was by the flattering words of the in-laws who after so many years had put aside their tribal prejudices and welcomed him with open arms as one of their own. The visit was a belated reconciliation, although that had not been its purpose. As a matter of fact, the family of Fermina Sánchez had been opposed in every way to her marrying an immigrant with no background who was a braggart and a boor and who was always traveling, trading his unbroken mules in a business that seemed too simple to be honest. Lorenzo Daza played for high stakes, because his sweetheart was the darling of a typical family of the region: an intricate tribe of wild women and softhearted men who were obsessed to the point of dementia with their sense of honor. Fermina Sánchez, however, settled on her desire with the blind determination of love when it is opposed, and she married him despite her family, with so much speed and so much secrecy that it seemed as if she had done so not for love but to cover over with a sacramental cloak some premature mistake.
Twenty-five years later, Lorenzo Daza did not realize that his intransigence in his daughter’s love affair was a vicious repetition of his own past, and he complained of his misfortune to the same in-laws who had opposed him, as they had complained in their day to their own kin. Still, the time he spent in lamentation was time his daughter gained for her love affair. So that while he went about castrating calves and taming mules on the prosperous lands of his in-laws, she was free to spend time with a troop of female cousins under the command of Hildebranda Sánchez, the most beautiful and obliging of them all, whose hopeless passion for a married man, a father who was twenty years older
than she, had to be satisfied with furtive glances.
After their prolonged stay in Valledupar they continued their journey through the foothills of the mountains, crossing flowering meadows and dreamlike mesas, and in all the villages they were received as they had been in the first, with music and fireworks and new conspiratorial cousins and punctual messages in the telegraph offices. Fermina Daza soon realized that the afternoon of their arrival in Valledupar had not been unusual, but rather that in this fertile province every day of the week was lived as if it were a holiday. The visitors slept wherever they happened to be at nightfall, and they ate wherever they happened to be hungry, for these were houses with open doors, where there was always a hammock hanging and a three-meat stew simmering on the stove in case guests arrived before the telegram announcing their arrival, as was almost always the case. Hildebranda Sánchez accompanied her cousin for the remainder of the trip, guiding her with joyful spirit through the tangled complexities of her blood to the very source of her origins. Fermina Daza learned about herself, she felt free for the first time, she felt herself befriended and protected, her lungs full of the air of liberty, which restored her tranquillity and her will to live. In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.
One night she came back from her daily walk stunned by the revelation that one could be happy not only without love, but despite it. The revelation alarmed her, because one of her cousins had surprised her parents in conversation with Lorenzo Daza, who had suggested the idea of arranging the marriage of his daughter to the only heir to the fabulous fortune of Cleofás Moscote. Fermina Daza knew who he was. She had seen him in the plazas, pirouetting his perfect horses with trappings so rich they seemed ornaments used for the Mass, and he was elegant and clever and had a dreamer’s eyelashes that could make the stones sigh, but she compared him to her memory of poor emaciated Florentino Ariza sitting under the almond trees in the little park, with the book of verses on his lap, and she did not find even the shadow of a doubt in her heart.
In those days Hildebranda Sánchez was delirious with hope after visiting a fortune-teller whose clairvoyance had astonished her. Dismayed by her father’s intentions, Fermina Daza also went to consult with her. The cards said there was no obstacle in her future to a long and happy marriage, and that prediction gave her back her courage because she could not conceive of such a fortunate destiny with any man other than the one she loved. Exalted by that certainty, she assumed command of her fate. That was how the telegraphic correspondence with Florentino Ariza stopped being a concerto of intentions and illusory promises and became methodical and practical and more intense than ever. They set dates, established means, pledged their lives to their mutual determination to marry without consulting anyone, wherever and however they could, as soon as they were together again. Fermina Daza considered this commitment so binding that the night her father gave her permission to attend her first adult dance in the town of Fonseca, she did not think it was decent to accept without the consent of her fiancé. Florentino Ariza was in the transient hotel that night, playing cards with Lotario Thugut, when he was told he had an urgent telegram on the line.
It was the telegraph operator from Fonseca, who had keyed in through seven intermediate stations so that Fermina Daza could ask permission to attend the dance. When she obtained it, however, she was not satisfied with the simple affirmative answer but asked for proof that in fact it was Florentino Ariza operating the telegraph key at the other end of the line. More astonished than flattered, he composed an identifying phrase: Tell her that I swear by the crowned goddess. Fermina Daza recognized the password and stayed at her first adult dance until seven in the morning, when she had to change in a rush in order not to be late for Mass. By then she had more letters and telegrams in the bottom of her trunk than her father had taken away from her, and she had learned to behave with the air of a married woman. Lorenzo Daza interpreted these changes in her manner as proof that distance and time had cured her of her juvenile fantasies, but he never spoke to her about his plans for the arranged marriage. Their relations had become fluid within the formal reserve that she had imposed since the expulsion of Aunt Escolástica, and this allowed them such a comfortable modus vivendi that no one would have doubted that it was based on affection.
It was at this time that Florentino Ariza decided to tell her in his letters of his determination to salvage the treasure of the sunken galleon for her. It was true, and it had come to him in a flash of inspiration one sunlit afternoon when the sea seemed paved with aluminum because of the numbers of fish brought to the surface by mullein. All the birds of the air were in an uproar because of the kill, and the fishermen had to drive them away with their oars so they would not have to fight with them for the fruits of that prohibited miracle. The use of the mullein plant to put the fish to sleep had been prohibited by law since colonial times, but it continued to be a common practice among the fishermen of the Caribbean until it was replaced by dynamite. One of Florentino Ariza’s pastimes during Fermina Daza’s journey was to watch from the jetties as the fishermen loaded their canoes with enormous nets filled with sleeping fish. At the same time, a gang of boys who swam like sharks asked curious bystanders to toss coins into the water so they could dive to the bottom for them. They were the same boys who swam out to meet the ocean liners for that purpose, and whose skill in the art of diving had been the subject of so many tourist accounts written in the United States and Europe. Florentino Ariza had always known about them, even before he knew about love, but it had never occurred to him that perhaps they might be able to bring up the fortune from the galleon. It occurred to him that afternoon, and from the following Sunday until Fermina Daza’s return almost a year later, he had an additional motive for delirium.
After talking to him for only ten minutes, Euclides, one of the boy swimmers, became as excited as he was at the idea of an underwater exploration. Florentino Ariza did not reveal the whole truth of the enterprise, but he informed himself thoroughly regarding his abilities as a diver and navigator. He asked him if he could descend without air to a depth of twenty meters, and Euclides told him yes. He asked him if he was prepared to sail a fisherman’s canoe by himself in the open sea in the middle of a storm with no instruments other than his instinct, and Euclides told him yes. He asked him if he could find a specific spot sixteen nautical miles to the northwest of the largest island in the Sotavento Archipelago, and Euclides told him yes. He asked him if he was capable of navigating by the stars at night, and Euclides told him yes. He asked him if he was prepared to do so for the same wages the fishermen paid him for helping them to fish, and Euclides told him yes, but with an additional five reales on Sundays. He asked him if he knew how to defend himself against sharks, and Euclides told him yes, for he had magic tricks to frighten them away. He asked him if he was able to keep a secret even if they put him in the torture chambers of the Inquisition, and Euclides told him yes, in fact he did not say no to anything, and he knew how to say yes with so much conviction that there was no way to doubt him. Then the boy reckoned expenses: renting the canoe, renting the canoe paddle, renting fishing equipment so that no one would suspect the truth behind their incursions. It was also necessary to take along food, a demijohn of fresh water, an oil lamp, a pack of tallow candles, and a hunter’s horn to call for help in case of emergency.
Euclides was about twelve years old, and he was fast and clever and an incessant talker, with an eel’s body that could slither through a bull’s-eye. The weather had tanned his skin to such a degree that it was impossible to imagine his original color, and this made his big yellow eyes seem more radiant. Florentino Ariza decided on the spot that he was the perfect companion for an adventure of such magnitude, and they embarked without further delay the following Sunday.
They sailed out of the fishermen’s port at dawn, well provisioned and better disposed, Euclides almost naked, with only the loincloth
that he always wore, and Florentino Ariza with his frock coat, his tenebrous hat, his patent-leather boots, the poet’s bow at his neck, and a book to pass the time during the crossing to the islands. From the very first Sunday he realized that Euclides was as good a navigator as he was a diver, and that he had astonishing knowledge of the character of the sea and the debris in the bay. He could recount in the most unexpected detail the history of each rusting hulk of a boat, he knew the age of each buoy, the origin of every piece of rubbish, the number of links in the chain with which the Spaniards closed off the entrance of the bay. Fearing that he might also know the real purpose of his expedition, Florentino Ariza asked him sly questions and in this way realized that Euclides did not have the slightest suspicion about the sunken galleon.
Ever since he had first heard the story of the treasure in the transient hotel, Florentino Ariza had learned all he could about the habits of galleons. He learned that the San José was not the only ship in the coral depths. It was, in fact, the flagship of the Terra Firma fleet, and had arrived here after May 1708, having sailed from the legendary fair of Portobello in Panama where it had taken on part of its fortune: three hundred trunks of silver from Peru and Veracruz, and one hundred ten trunks of pearls gathered and counted on the island of Contadora. During the long month it had remained here, the days and nights had been devoted to popular fiestas, and the rest of the treasure intended to save the Kingdom of Spain from poverty had been taken aboard: one hundred sixteen trunks of emeralds from Muzo and Somondoco and thirty million gold coins.
The Terra Firma fleet was composed of no less than twelve supply ships of varying sizes, and it set sail from this port traveling in a convoy with a French squadron that was heavily armed but still incapable of protecting the expedition from the accurate cannon shot of the English squadron under Commander Charles Wager, who waited for it in the Sotavento Archipelago, at the entrance to the bay. So the San José was not the only sunken vessel, although there was no reliable documented record of how many had succumbed and how many had managed to escape the English fire. What was certain was that the flagship had been among the first to sink, along with the entire crew and the commander standing straight on the quarterdeck, and that she alone carried most of the cargo.
Love in the Time of Cholera Page 11