In the fullness of her new life, Fermina Daza would see Florentino Ariza on various public occasions, with more frequency as he improved his position, but she learned to see him with so much naturalness that more than once, in sheer distraction, she forgot to greet him. She heard about him often, because in the world of business his cautious but inexorable advance in the R.C.C. was a constant topic of conversation. She saw him improve his manners, his timidity was passed off as a certain enigmatic distance, a slight increase in weight suited him, as did the slowness of age, and he had known how to handle his absolute baldness with dignity. The only area in which he persisted in defying time and fashion was in his somber attire, his anachronistic frock coats, his unique hat, the poet’s string ties from his mother’s notions shop, his sinister umbrella. Fermina Daza grew accustomed to seeing him with other eyes, and in the end she did not connect him to the languid adolescent who would sit and sigh for her under the gusts of yellow leaves in the Park of the Evangels. In any case, she never saw him with indifference, and she was always pleased by the good news she heard about him, because that helped to alleviate her guilt.
However, when she thought he was completely erased from her memory, he reappeared where she least expected him, a phantom of her nostalgia. It was during the first glimmering of old age, when she began to feel that something irreparable had occurred in her life whenever she heard thunder before the rain. It was the incurable wound of solitary, stony, punctual thunder that would sound every afternoon in October at three o’clock in the Sierra Villanueva, a memory that was becoming more vivid as the years went by. While more recent events blurred in just a few days, the memories of her legendary journey through Cousin Hildebranda’s province were as sharp as if they had happened yesterday, and they had the perverse clarity of nostalgia. She remembered Manaure, in the mountains, its one straight, green street, its birds of good omen, the haunted house where she would wake to find her nightgown soaked by the endless tears of Petra Morales, who had died of love many years before in the same bed where she lay sleeping. She remembered the taste of the guavas, which had never been the same again, the warning thunder, which had been so intense that its sound was confused with the sound of rain, the topaz afternoons in San Juan del César when she would go walking with her court of excited cousins and clench her teeth so that her heart would not leap out of her mouth as they approached the telegraph office. She had to sell her father’s house because she could not bear the pain of her adolescence, the view of the desolate little park from the balcony, the sibylline fragrance of gardenias on hot nights, the frightening face of an old lady on the February afternoon when her fate was decided, and regardless of where she turned her memory of those times, she would find herself face to face with Florentino Ariza. But she always had enough serenity to know that they were not memories of love or repentance, but the image of a sorrow that left a trail of tears on her cheeks. Without realizing it, she was menaced by the same trap of pity that had been the downfall of so many of Florentino Ariza’s defenseless victims.
She clung to her husband. And it was just at the time when he needed her most, because he suffered the disadvantage of being ten years ahead of her as he stumbled alone through the mists of old age, with the even greater disadvantage of being a man and weaker than she was. In the end they knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divided being, and they felt uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other’s thoughts without intending to, or the ridiculous accident of one of them anticipating in public what the other was going to say. Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.
ON THE OCCASION of the celebration of the new century, there was an innovative program of public ceremonies, the most memorable of which was the first journey in a balloon, the fruit of the boundless initiative of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Half the city gathered on the Arsenal Beach to express their wonderment at the ascent of the enormous balloon made of taffeta in the colors of the flag, which carried the first airmail to San Juan de la Ciénaga, some thirty leagues to the northeast as the crow flies. Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his wife, who had experienced the excitement of flight at the World’s Fair in Paris, were the first to climb into the wicker basket, followed by the pilot and six distinguished guests. They were carrying a letter from the Governor of the Province to the municipal officials of San Juan de la Ciénaga, in which it was documented for all time that this was the first mail transported through the air. A journalist from the Commercial Daily asked Dr. Juvenal Urbino for his final words in the event he perished during the adventure, and he did not even take the time to think about the answer that would earn him so much abuse.
“In my opinion,” he said, “the nineteenth century is passing for everyone except us.”
Lost in the guileless crowd that sang the national anthem as the balloon gained altitude, Florentino Ariza felt himself in agreement with the person whose comments he heard over the din, to the effect that this was not a suitable exploit for a woman, least of all one as old as Fermina Daza. But it was not so dangerous after all. Or at least not so much dangerous as depressing. The balloon reached its destination without incident after a peaceful trip through an incredible blue sky. They flew well and very low, with a calm, favorable wind, first along the spurs of the snow-covered mountains and then over the vastness of the Great Swamp.
From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the cholera panic after three centuries of resistance to the sieges of the English and the atrocities of the buccaneers. They saw the walls still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortifications devoured by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the Viceroys rotting with plague inside their armor.
They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted in lunatic colors, with pens holding iguanas raised for food and balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrine gardens. Excited by everyone’s shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water, jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the houses and from the canoes that they handled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to recover the bundles of clothing, the bottles of cough syrup, the beneficent food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to them from the basket of the balloon.
They flew over the dark ocean of the banana plantations, whose silence reached them like a lethal vapor, and Fermina Daza remembered herself at the age of three, perhaps four, walking through the shadowy forest holding the hand of her mother, who was almost a girl herself, surrounded by other women dressed in muslin, just like her mother, with white parasols and hats made of gauze. The pilot, who was observing the world through a spyglass, said: “They seem dead.” He passed the spyglass to Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who saw the oxcarts in the cultivated fields, the boundary lines of the railroad tracks, the blighted irrigation ditches, and wherever he looked he saw human bodies. Someone said that the cholera was ravaging the villages of the Great Swamp. Dr. Urbino, as he spoke, continued to look through the spyglass.
“Well, it must be a very special form of cholera,” he said, “because every single corpse has received the coup de grace through the back of the neck.”
A short while later they flew over a foaming sea, and they landed without incident on a broad, hot beach whose surface, cracked with niter, burned like fire. The officials were there with no more protection against the sun than ordinary umbrellas, the elementary schools were there waving little flags in time to the music, and the b
eauty queens with scorched flowers and crowns made of gold cardboard, and the brass band of the prosperous town of Gayra, which in those days was the best along the Caribbean coast. All that Fermina Daza wanted was to see her birthplace again, to confront it with her earliest memories, but no one was allowed to go there because of the dangers of the plague. Dr. Juvenal Urbino delivered the historic letter, which was then mislaid among other papers and never seen again, and the entire delegation almost suffocated in the tedium of the speeches. The pilot could not make the balloon ascend again, and at last they were led on muleback to the dock at Pueblo Viejo, where the swamp met the sea. Fermina Daza was sure she had passed through there with her mother when she was very young, in a cart drawn by a team of oxen. When she was older, she had repeated the story several times to her father, who died insisting that she could not possibly recall that.
“I remember the trip very well, and what you say is accurate,” he told her, “but it happened at least five years before you were born.”
Three days later the members of the balloon expedition, devastated by a bad night of storms, returned to their port of origin, where they received a heroes’ welcome. Lost in the crowd, of course, was Florentino Ariza, who recognized the traces of terror on Fermina Daza’s face. Nevertheless he saw her again that same afternoon in a cycling exhibition that was also sponsored by her husband, and she showed no sign of fatigue. She rode an uncommon velocipede that resembled something from a circus, with a very high front wheel, over which she was seated, and a very small back wheel that gave almost no support. She wore a pair of loose trousers trimmed in red, which scandalized the older ladies and disconcerted the gentlemen, but no one was indifferent to her skill.
That, along with so many other ephemeral images in the course of so many years, would suddenly appear to Florentino Ariza at the whim of fate, and disappear again in the same way, leaving behind a throb of longing in his heart. Taken together, they marked the passage of his life, for he experienced the cruelty of time not so much in his own flesh as in the imperceptible changes he discerned in Fermina Daza each time he saw her.
One night he went to Don Sancho’s Inn, an elegant colonial restaurant, and sat in the most remote corner, as was his custom when he ate his frugal meals alone. All at once, in the large mirror on the back wall, he caught a glimpse of Fermina Daza sitting at a table with her husband and two other couples, at an angle that allowed him to see her reflected in all her splendor. She was unguarded, she engaged in conversation with grace and laughter that exploded like fireworks, and her beauty was more radiant under the enormous teardrop chandeliers: once again, Alice had gone through the looking glass.
Holding his breath, Florentino Ariza observed her at his pleasure: he saw her eat, he saw her hardly touch her wine, he saw her joke with the fourth in the line of Don Sanchos; from his solitary table he shared a moment of her life, and for more than an hour he lingered, unseen, in the forbidden precincts of her intimacy. Then he drank four more cups of coffee to pass the time until he saw her leave with the rest of the group. They passed so close to him that he could distinguish her scent among the clouds of other perfumes worn by her companions.
From that night on, and for almost a year afterward, he laid unrelenting siege to the owner of the inn, offering him whatever he wanted, money or favors or whatever he desired most in life, if he would sell him the mirror. It was not easy, because old Don Sancho believed the legend that the beautiful frame, carved by Viennese cabinetmakers, was the twin of another, which had belonged to Marie Antoinette and had disappeared without a trace: a pair of unique jewels. When at last he surrendered, Florentino Ariza hung the mirror in his house, not for the exquisite frame but because of the place inside that for two hours had been occupied by her beloved reflection.
When he saw Fermina Daza she was almost always on her husband’s arm, the two of them in perfect harmony, moving through their own space with the astonishing fluidity of Siamese cats, which was broken only when they stopped to greet him. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, in fact, shook his hand with warm cordiality, and on occasion even permitted himself a pat on the shoulder. She, on the other hand, kept him relegated to an impersonal regime of formalities and never made the slightest gesture that might allow him to suspect that she remembered him from her unmarried days. They lived in two different worlds, but while he made every effort to reduce the distance between them, every step she took was in the opposite direction. It was a long time before he dared to think that her indifference was no more than a shield for her timidity. This occurred to him suddenly, at the christening of the first freshwater vessel built in the local shipyards, which was also the first official occasion at which Florentino Ariza, as First Vice President of the R.C.C., represented Uncle Leo XII. This coincidence imbued the ceremony with special solemnity, and everyone of any significance in the life of the city was present.
Florentino Ariza was looking after his guests in the main salon of the ship, still redolent of fresh paint and tar, when there was a burst of applause on the docks, and the band struck up a triumphal march. He had to repress the trembling that was almost as old as he was when he saw the beautiful woman of his dreams on her husband’s arm, splendid in her maturity, striding like a queen from another time past the honor guard in parade uniform, under the shower of paper streamers and flower petals tossed at them from the windows. Both responded to the ovation with a wave of the hand, but she was so dazzling, dressed in imperial gold from her high-heeled slippers and the foxtails at her throat to her bell-shaped hat, that she seemed to be alone in the midst of the crowd.
Florentino Ariza waited for them on the bridge with the provincial officials, surrounded by the crash of the music and the fireworks and the three heavy screams from the ship, which enveloped the dock in steam. Juvenal Urbino greeted the members of the reception line with that naturalness so typical of him, which made everyone think the Doctor bore him a special fondness: first the ship’s captain in his dress uniform, then the Archbishop, then the Governor with his wife and the Mayor with his, and then the military commander, who was a newcomer from the Andes. Beyond the officials stood Florentino Ariza, dressed in dark clothing and almost invisible among so many eminent people. After greeting the military commander, Fermina seemed to hesitate before Florentino Ariza’s outstretched hand. The military man, prepared to introduce them, asked her if they did not know each other. She did not say yes and she did not say no, but she held out her hand to Florentino Ariza with a salon smile. The same thing had occurred twice in the past, and would occur again, and Florentino Ariza always accepted these occasions with a strength of character worthy of Fermina Daza. But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.
The mere idea excited his youthful desires. Once again he haunted Fermina Daza’s villa, filled with the same longings he had felt when he was on duty in the little Park of the Evangels, but his calculated intention was not that she see him, but rather that he see her and know that she was still in the world. Now, however, it was difficult for him to escape notice. The District of La Manga was on a semi-deserted island, separated from the historic city by a canal of green water and covered by thickets of icaco plum, which had sheltered Sunday lovers in colonial times. In recent years, the old stone bridge built by the Spaniards had been torn down, and in its stead was one made of brick and lined with streetlamps for the new mule-drawn trolleys. At first the residents of La Manga had to endure a torture that had not been anticipated during construction, which was sleeping so close to the city’s first electrical plant whose vibration was a constant earthquake. Not even Dr. Juvenal Urbino, with all his prestige, could persuade them to move it where it would not disturb anyone, until his proven complicity with Divine Providence interceded on his behalf. One night the boiler in the plant blew up in a fearful explosion, flew over the new houses, sailed across half the city, and destroyed the largest gallery in the fo
rmer convent of St. Julian the Hospitaler. The old ruined building had been abandoned at the beginning of the year, but the boiler caused the deaths of four prisoners who had escaped from the local jail earlier that night and were hiding in the chapel.
The peaceful suburb with its beautiful tradition of love was, however, not the most propitious for unrequited love when it became a luxury neighborhood. The streets were dusty in summer, swamp-like in winter, and desolate all year round, and the scattered houses were hidden behind leafy gardens and had mosaic tile terraces instead of old-fashioned projecting balconies, as if they had been built for the purpose of discouraging furtive lovers. It was just as well that at this time it became fashionable to drive out in the afternoon in hired old Victorias that had been converted to one-horse carriages, and that the excursion ended on a hill where one could appreciate the heartbreaking twilights of October better than from the lighthouse, and observe the watchful sharks lurking at the seminarians’ beach, and see the Thursday ocean liner, huge and white, that could almost be touched with one’s hands as it passed through the harbor channel. Florentino Ariza would hire a Victoria after a hard day at the office, but instead of folding down the top, as was customary during the hot months, he would stay hidden in the depths of the seat, invisible in the darkness, always alone, and requesting unexpected routes so as not to arouse the evil thoughts of the driver. In reality, the only thing that interested him on the drive was the pink marble Parthenon half hidden among leafy banana and mango trees, a luckless replica of the idyllic mansions on Louisiana cotton plantations. Fermina Daza’s children returned home a little before five. Florentino Ariza would see them arrive in the family carriage, and then he would see Dr. Juvenal Urbino leave for his routine house calls, but in almost a year of vigilance he never even caught the glimpse he so desired.
Love in the Time of Cholera Page 28